Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Her eyes were still closed. He wondered if she had swooned. But he said in any case the words he had memorised years before for just this occasion. (They came from a book that his mother had borrowed from the sixpenny lending library in Accrington. When his parents were out of the house he used to look through their library books. Most were respectable detective stories, but in one historical novel he had found a scene where a man surprised a young woman bathing nude in the village stream. Young Sherd had been so impressed by the man’s words that he learned them to use on his honeymoon.)

Sherd said over his wife’s body, ‘Denise, it’s almost a crime that such charms should ever be concealed beneath the garments that our society decrees as conventional. Let me feast on your treasures and praise them as they deserve.’

Before Sherd could praise his wife’s charms separately, she opened her eyes briefly and looked shyly up at him and said, ‘Please, darling, don’t keep me in suspense too long.’

As gently and considerately as he could, Sherd lowered his body into position and engaged in sexual congress with her.

Afterwards he lay beside her with the blankets covering them both. He was ready to say, ‘I’m sorry, Denise, but I did my best to warn you beforehand,’ when she looked at him and said, ‘Why, Adrian, I think it was somehow rather beautiful. Not that I don’t appreciate all you said to prepare me for the worst, but really, I can’t help being amazed at the wonderful way God designed our bodies so they complement each other in the act of generation.’

While she pulled on her nightdress in the darkness she said, ‘And Adrian, if you feel a need for my body again in the next few days, please don’t hesitate to ask me. After all, I did promise to honour and obey you. So if this act gives you all the pleasure I think it does, you’re welcome to do it whenever you wish — within reason of course.’

The Tasmanian honeymoon of Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd lasted for twelve days of a year in the early 1960s, but the thought of it sustained Adrian Sherd all through the autumn months of 1954. In all that time he never once confessed a sin of impurity in thought or deed.

Sometimes, while he knelt outside the confessional, Adrian arranged a debate between two of the many voices that started arguing whenever he tried to hear what his conscience had to say.

FIRST VOICE: Sherd is about to tell the priest that the worst sins he has committed in the past month are disobeying his parents and losing his temper with his young brothers. But in fact he lies awake every night dreaming of coition with a naked woman in a hotel room in Tasmania. I submit that these thoughts are mortal sins against the Ninth Commandment.

SECOND VOICE: In denying the claims of the previous speaker, I rest my case on three points.

1. When Sherd thinks about his marriage to Mrs Denise Sherd, née McNamara, he does not enjoy any sexual pleasure. True, he experiences a sort of exalted joy, but this is purely the result of his finding himself married at last to the young woman he has loved since his schooldays. We can see the truth of this, my first point, if we examine Sherd’s penis while he contemplates the happiness of his honeymoon. At no time does it seem aware of what is going on in his mind.

2. When, some time ago now, Sherd was unfortunately in the habit of thinking at night about the American outdoors and of lewd orgies with film personalities, he was enjoying something he knew to be quite imaginary. On the other hand, his thoughts of his marriage to Miss McNamara are thoughts of a future that he has every intention of bringing to pass. Far from indulging in idle dreams, when he thinks of his honeymoon in Tasmania he is making a serious effort to plan his life for the good of his immortal soul.

3. It goes without saying that in all his visits to America, Sherd never once married or proposed marriage to the women he consorted with. Mrs Sherd, however, is his wife. All the endearments he offers her are proper expressions of his conjugal love and, as such, are perfectly lawful.

Adrian Sherd as adjudicator awarded the debate to the Second Voice and was sure that any reasonable theologian would have done the same.

So long as Adrian was in love with a Catholic girl and in the state of grace, he wasn’t ashamed to visit his Aunt Kathleen and talk about Catholic devotions.

One day when she said she had enrolled him as a Spiritual Associate of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, he was genuinely interested to know what benefits this would bring him. In the days of his lust, the things his aunt did for him had been wasted, but now they earned valuable additions to his store of sanctifying grace.

Aunt Kathleen said, ‘The names of all Associates are kept permanently in a casket beside the altar in the Mother House of the Sisters at Wollongong. Each day after their Divine Office, the Sisters recite a special prayer for all Associates. And best of all, they keep a lamp burning perpetually in their chapel for the intentions of you and me and all the other names in the casket.’

While his aunt was out of the room, Adrian leafed through her stacks of Catholic magazines, looking for other leagues or confraternities with special privileges for members. He puzzled over a magazine he had never seen before— St Gerard’s Monthly , published by the Divine Zeal Fathers at their monastery in Bendigo.

The centre pages were full of photos with brief captions: The Hosking Family of Birchip, Vic.; The McInerney Family of Elmore, Vic.; The Mullaly Family of Taree, N.S.W . Each family consisted of husband and wife and at least four children. Four was the bare minimum. In some of the magazines Adrian found plenty of eights and nines and tens. The record seemed to belong to the Farrelly family of Texas, Queensland. There were sixteen people in the photo. Five or six were adults, but Adrian assumed that these were the oldest children. One of the women was holding a baby — she was probably the mother of the fourteen.

Adrian thought at first that the families were entrants in some kind of competition. But there was no mention of prizes. Apparently the only reward for a family was the pleasure of seeing themselves in the pages of St Gerard’s Monthly and feeling superior to the Catholic families with less than four children.

The mothers were all what Adrian’s father would have called well preserved. Some were even quite pretty. There were none with fat legs or large sagging breasts like Mrs De Kloover who led nine children into mass every Sunday at Our Lady of Good Counsel’s.

It was this that interested Adrian most. He was planning to become the father of a Catholic family himself, and there were still a few things he wasn’t sure about. One thing that worried him was whether he would still be attracted to his wife after she had borne him several children. The pictures in St Gerard’s Monthly reassured him. Men like Mr McInerney and Mr Farrelly were apparently drawn to their wives long after the romantic excitement of the honeymoon had died away.

It would be possible for Denise to have at least ten children and still keep her youthful figure and complexion. Over the years she would probably develop a Catholic mother’s face like some of those in the photos. This was very different from the face of a non-Catholic mother of two or three children. The Catholic mother wore very little make-up — the non-Catholic plastered herself with powder and lipstick and sometimes even a little rouge. The Catholic’s face was open, frank, quick to smile, but still as modest as a girl’s in the presence of any man other than her husband. The non-Catholic’s looked as though it concealed many a guilty secret.

The difference between the faces was probably the result of Catholic husbands’ copulating with their wives quietly in the dark while their children were asleep in the surrounding rooms, whereas non-Catholics often did it in broad daylight in their lounge-rooms while their children were packed off to their aunts or grandparents for the weekend. Also, the Catholic men would have done it fairly quickly and without any antics that might have over-emphasised its place in the marriage, while the non-Catholics probably talked and joked about it and thought of ways to make it last longer.