Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd arrived at Triabunna in the early afternoon. They had been married exactly twenty-four hours. They unpacked their suitcases in a sunlit room on an upper floor of a hotel with every modern convenience. Then they strolled hand-in-hand along the beach-front.

The place was deserted. Sherd was glad there was no one around to overhear them when they stopped every few yards and he whispered, ‘I love you, Denise,’ and his wife answered, ‘I love you too, Adrian.’ He remembered a fellow at school named Cornthwaite who used to change his seat in a train to get a better view of a couple smoushing (as he called it) and to watch where the fellow put his hands.

On the way back to the hotel for tea, Sherd seriously considered waiting for another night to consummate the marriage. He could see his wife was in no hurry for it — she was quite content just to hold hands and hear her husband say he loved her.

Sherd felt the same way himself. He was experiencing the truth of something he had first discovered years before (when he lay awake at night thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform to save himself from a habit of sin) — that the joy of hearing a beautiful chaste woman say, ‘I love you’ was far more wonderful than rolling around naked with all the stars of Hollywood.

Later that night, when they were sitting together reading, Sherd reminded himself that his wife had grown up in the same pagan world as himself, that she must have learned from films and magazines what people expected newlyweds to get up to on their honeymoon, and that if he didn’t introduce her to the physical side of marriage soon, she might start brooding over it or even suspect that he was not quite normal in mind or body.

When she was ready to undress for bed, he decided after all that now was the time to reveal the mysteries of the marriage bed. But he was determined that what he was about to do should be as different as possible from the purely animal things he had once dreamed of doing to American women. Denise must not have the least suspicion that he had ever been attracted to her purely for the physical gratification he might get from her.

He knelt down and closed his eyes to pray while she got into her nightdress. When she had said her own prayers and climbed into bed, he turned out the light and undressed himself. He did not want her to glimpse his organ before he had prepared her for it by a long speech.

Sherd lay down beside his wife and spoke. ‘Denise, darling, no matter how carefully you were protected by your parents and the nuns at the Academy, you probably still stumbled on some of the secrets of human reproduction.

‘Perhaps you had to go into a public lavatory once, and your eyes strayed up to the wall and you saw a drawing of a huge, thick, hideous monster of a thing and lay awake for weeks afterwards wondering whether men really had organs like that on their bodies and whether, if ever you were married, your husband would threaten you with one on your wedding night.

‘Perhaps you borrowed a novel from a non-Catholic library without realising what it was about, and read a few pages about some American gangster with the morals of an alley-cat. You shut the book in disgust and returned it to the library, but you wondered for a long time afterwards how many men treated women as pretty playthings to be used for their pleasure.

‘Perhaps you innocently looked into the practical notebook of a schoolfellow who was doing biology and saw her drawings of a dissected rabbit and noticed the little lump with the label, ERECTILE PENIS AND SHEATH and went away alarmed to think that male rabbits and therefore men, and your own future husband too, had something on them that could actually stretch and grow bigger.

‘Perhaps you once spent a holiday on a farm and your parents were careless enough to let you see the bull running like a madman to climb on top of a cow. Or perhaps you were just shopping in Accrington one Saturday morning and there, right in front of your eyes, were two dogs in the gutter and one of them suddenly poked this long red sticky thing at the other one and forced it to submit.’

Adrian paused and sighed. He hoped Denise realised it was not his fault that she had had these rude shocks. If only it had been possible, he would have shielded her from all sight of male animals and broad-minded books and films. Then she could have learned the whole story from her husband.

He waited for her to speak. He was anxious to find out just how much she knew. Then she answered him, and he treasured for the rest of his life the words she said.

‘Adrian, I understand how concerned you are for me, and I don’t blame you for imagining that some of those dreadful things might have happened to me. But you needn’t have been all that anxious.

‘Oh, of course I was puzzled sometimes about things I read in the papers or heard non-Catholics whispering about. But don’t forget I was a Child of Mary. (Didn’t you ever go to eight o’clock mass on the third Sunday of the month and see the rows and rows of Children of Mary in our blue-and-white regalia and hope that your future wife was somewhere among them?) And whenever I did wonder a little about those things, I told myself they were none of my business. I knew if I ever got married I could learn all I had to know from the Pre-Cana Conferences for engaged couples. And if my vocation was to remain single, it was better for me to know as little as possible about that side of life anyway.’

When Sherd heard this he was so overjoyed that he kissed his wife and told her again and again what a rare treasure she was. He would almost have been content to lie there looking at her lovely face until he fell asleep. But he owed it to his wife to finish what he had begun explaining to her.

He said, ‘Denise, my innocent angel Denise, now that I know how carefully you’ve guarded yourself all these years, it makes my task tonight so much easier.

‘If you had in fact seen a dog or a bull chasing the female, or a foul drawing on a toilet wall, you probably would have thought people were no different from animals when they mated. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of men who do treat the whole thing as a kind of game for their own pleasure. But thank God you’ll never come into contact with them. God Himself saw to it that your beauty and virtue attracted the sort of Catholic husband who understands the true purpose of sexual relations in marriage.

‘I won’t beat about the bush, Denise darling. In one sense, what I’m going to do to you tonight may seem no different from what a bull does to his cows or a Hollywood film director does to one of his starlets. (Denise looked startled and puzzled. He would have to explain this point to her later.) It’s not a pretty thing to watch, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way our poor fallen human natures can reproduce themselves. If it seems dirty or even ridiculous to you, I can only ask you to pray that you’ll understand it better as time goes by.

‘The trouble is that a man is cursed with a very powerful instinct to reproduce himself. One day when we’ve been married long enough to trust each other with our deepest secrets, I’ll tell you a little about 1953. That was a year when I plumbed the depths of despair because (Sherd chose his words carefully) I could hardly find the strength to resist the male instinct to reproduce my species. And when you hear my story you’ll realise what a mighty urge it is and why you’ll have to excuse me for giving in to it about twice a week — at least until you find you’re expecting a child.’

Sherd wanted to say much more, but he was anxious not to confuse his bride with too much information all at once. The moment he had waited for all his life had arrived.

He switched on the bedlamp, kissed his wife to calm her fears and rolled back the bedclothes. She was still in her nightdress, but fortunately she had closed her eyes and gone limp. He removed the nightdress as gently as he could and admired her nude body.