Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

The thought that saved him was a simple one, although it had never occurred to him in all the weeks since his Earth Angel had changed his life. It was this: the temptation that came to him on the prairies of Nebraska proved he could never do without romantic adventures in picturesque landscapes. The way to keep his adventures pure and sinless was to take his Earth Angel with him.

That night Adrian proposed marriage to the beautiful young woman who had been educated at the Academy of Mount Carmel. After they had set a date for the wedding they sat down over a huge map of Australia to decide which scenic spots they would visit on their honeymoon.

On the hottest night of January, Adrian lay in bed with only his pyjama trousers on. He fell asleep thinking of the cool valleys of Tasmania where he and his wife would probably spend the first weeks of their marriage.

Later that night he was struggling through a crowd of men and women. In the middle of the crowd someone was gloating over an indecent magazine. Somewhere else in the crowd the girl from Mount Carmel was pushing her way towards the magazine. Adrian had to get to it before she did. If she saw the filthy pictures he would die of shame. People started wrestling with Adrian. Their damp bathing costumes rubbed against his belly. The girl from Mount Carmel was laughing softly, but Adrian couldn’t see why. Everyone suddenly knelt down because a priest was saying mass near by. Adrian was the only one who couldn’t kneel. He was flapping like a fish in the aisle of a church while the girl he loved was tearing pictures out of her Argus and wafting them towards him. They were pictures of naked boys lying on their backs rubbing suntan oil all over their bellies. The girl put up her hand to tell the priest what Adrian had done on the floor of the church.

Adrian woke up and lay very still. It was daylight outside — a cloudless Sunday morning. He remembered vague bits of advice that Brother Cyprian had given the boys of Form Four, and something that Cornthwaite had once said about wet dreams. In those days he had been so busy doing the real thing that he never once had an impure dream. He mopped up the mess inside his pyjamas. He was ashamed to realise he hadn’t experienced all the facts of life in Form Four after all. But he went back to sleep pleased that nothing he had thought or done that night was sinful.

That same Sunday morning Adrian went to seven o’clock mass and walked boldly up to communion. He hoped his Earth Angel was somewhere in the church watching him. At the altar rails he knelt between two men — married men with their wives at their elbows. Adrian was proud to be with them. He belonged among them. He was a man at the peak of his sexual power whose seed burst out of him at night but whose soul was sinless because he was true to the woman he loved.

For days before he went back to school, Adrian wondered what he could say to his friends when they asked him his score in their competition. He couldn’t simply hand in a blank score-card. The others would never believe he had gone for seven weeks without doing it. They would pester him all day to tell them his true score. Even if he made up a low score they would still be suspicious and ask him what went wrong.

Adrian’s worst fear was that Cornthwaite or O’Mullane or Seskis would guess he had met a girl and fallen in love. They would think it a great joke to blackmail him. Either he paid some preposterous penalty or they would find out the girl’s name and address and send her a list of all the film stars he had had affairs with.

In the end he decided to fill in his card as though he had taken the competition seriously and tried his best to win. He marked crosses in the blank squares for all the days he might have sinned if he had never met his Earth Angel. He was scrupulously honest. He left blank spaces around Christmas Day, when he would have been to confession. But he added extra crosses for the days of the heat wave, when he would have found it hard to get to sleep at night.

On the first morning of the new school-year the cards were handed round. The scores were O’Mullane, 53; Seskis, 50; Cornthwaite, 48; Sherd, 37.

The others all wanted to know what had happened to Adrian to make him score so poorly. He made up a weak story about getting sunburnt and not being able to lie properly in bed for a fortnight. He promised himself he would find some new friends. But he could not do it too suddenly. He was still frightened of blackmail.

That night Adrian went on searching through the Coroke trains for his Earth Angel. Two nights later he walked into a second-class non-smoking compartment of the 4.22 p.m. from Swindon and saw her. The face he had worshipped for nearly two months was half-hidden under a dome-shaped beige hat — his Earth Angel was absorbed in a book. If she loved literature they had something in common already. And it fitted in perfectly with the plan he had worked out for making himself known to her.

He stood a few feet from her. (Luckily there were no empty seats in the compartment.) Then he took out of his bag an anthology called The Poet’s Highway. He had bought it only that morning. It was the set text for his English Literature course that year and it contained the most beautiful poem he had ever read— La Belle Dame Sans Merci , by John Keats.

When the train swung round a bend Adrian pretended to overbalance. With one hand on the luggage rack, he leaned over until the page with the poem was no more than a foot from his Earth Angel’s face. He saw her look up as he swung towards her. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes, but he hoped she read the title of the poem.

For the next few minutes he stared at the poem and moved his lips to show that he was learning it by heart. Each time he practised reciting a stanza he stared out of the window, past the backyards and clothes-lines, as though he really could see a lake where no birds sang. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her watching him with some interest.

At the last station before Accrington he put his anthology away. He knew it was unusual for a boy to like poetry and he dreaded her thinking he was queer or unmanly. He pulled the Sporting Globe out of his bag and studied the tables of averages for the visiting South African cricketers. He twisted himself around and leaned back a little so she could see what he was reading and know he was well balanced.

For two weeks Adrian travelled in the girl’s compartment. Every night he feasted his eyes on her. Sometimes she caught him at it, but usually he looked away just in time. His worst moment each night came when he opened the train door and looked for her in her usual corner. If she wasn’t there it would have meant she had rejected his advances and moved to another compartment.

Some nights he was so frightened of not finding her that his bowels filled up with air. Then he had to stand in the open doorway for a few miles and break wind into the train’s slipstream. His Earth Angel might have thought he was showing off — so many schoolboys hung out of doorways on moving trains to impress their girlfriends. But it was better than fouling the air that she breathed. In any case, she was still in the same compartment after two weeks, and he decided she must have been interested in him.

A wonderful change came over Adrian’s life. For years he had searched for some great project or scheme to beat the boredom that he felt all day at school. In Form Four his journeys across America had helped a little. But it hadn’t always been easy to keep the map of America in front of him — sometimes he had traced it with a wet finger on his desk-top or kept a small sketch of it hidden under his textbook. In Form Five his Earth Angel promised to do away with boredom forever. All day at school she watched him. Her pale, serene face stared down at him from a point two or three feet above his right shoulder.