Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

But the glamour of Evelyn Keyes could not match the simple beauty of the young Queen, and the Moonlings on their floating beds were not half so graceful and dignified as the lords and ladies of England in Westminster Abbey.

For a few days after the coronation, Adrian was restless and agitated. Picking his way through the puddles in his street or carving railway sidings and points into his wooden ruler in school, he thought how little pageantry there was in his life. At night he stared at the coloured souvenir pictures and wondered how to bring the splendour of the coronation to Accrington.

One night when he arrived with Lauren and Rita and Linda in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky, the women started to whisper and smile together. He realised they were planning a little surprise for him.

They told him to wait while they went behind some bushes. Lauren and Linda came back first. They wore brief twopiece bathing suits that dazzled him. The fabric was cloth-of-gold studded with semi-precious copies of all the emeralds and rubies and diamonds in the crown jewels.

Behind them came Rita, draped in a replica of the coronation robe itself. And when the other two lifted her train he saw just enough to tell him that under the extravagant ermine-tipped robe she was stark naked.

Some mornings when Adrian Sherd stood in the bathroom waiting for the hot water to come through the pipes and fingering the latest pimples on his face, he remembered his American journey of the previous night and wondered if he was going mad.

Each night his adventures became a little more outrageous. On his first trips to America he had walked for hours hand in hand with film stars through scenic landscapes. He had undressed them and gone the whole way with them afterwards but always politely and considerately. But as the American countryside became more familiar he found he needed more than one woman to excite him. Instead of admiring the scenery he had begun to spend his time talking coarsely to the women and encouraging them to join in all kinds of obscene games.

Some of these games seemed so absurd afterwards that Adrian decided only a lunatic could have invented them. He could not imagine any men or women in real life doing such things together.

He thought of his own parents. Every night they left their bedroom door ajar to prove they had nothing to hide. And Mrs Sherd always bolted the bathroom door when she went to have a bath so that not even her husband could look in at her.

In all the backyards around Riviera Grove there was no place where a couple could even sunbathe together unobserved. And in most of the houses there were young children running round all day. Perhaps the parents waited for the children to go to sleep and then frolicked together late at night. But from what Adrian heard of their conversations in the local bus, it seemed they had no time for fun.

The men worked on their houses and gardens. ‘I stayed up till all hours last night trying to put up an extra cupboard in the laundry,’ a man would say.

The women were often sick. ‘Bev’s still in hospital. Her mother’s stopping with us to mind the nippers.’

Even their annual holidays were innocent. ‘Our in-laws lent us their caravan at Safety Beach. It’s a bit of a madhouse with the two of us and the three littlies all in bunks, but it’s worth it for their sakes.’

Adrian divided Melbourne into three regions — slums, garden suburbs and outer suburbs. The slums were all the inner suburbs where the houses were joined together and had no front gardens. East Melbourne, Richmond, Carlton — Adrian was not at all curious about the people who lived in these slums. They were criminals or dirty and poor, and he couldn’t bear to think of their pale grubby skin naked or sticking out of bathing suits.

The garden suburbs formed a great arc around the east and southeast of Melbourne. Swindon, where Adrian went to school, was in the heart of them, and most of the boys at his school lived in leafy streets. The people of the garden suburbs had full-grown trees brushing against their windows. They spread a tablecloth before every meal and poured their tomato sauce from little glass jugs. The women always wore stockings when they went shopping.

Most of the houses and gardens in these suburbs were ideal for sexual games, but Adrian doubted if they were ever used for that purpose. The people of the garden suburbs were too dignified and serious. The men sat with suits on all day in offices or banks and brought home important papers to work on after tea. The women looked so sternly at schoolboys and schoolgirls giggling together on the Swindon Road trams that Adrian thought they would have slapped their husbands’ faces at the very mention of lewd games.

The outer suburbs were the ones that Adrian knew best. Whenever he tried to imagine the city of Melbourne as a whole, he saw it shaped like a great star with the outer suburbs its distinctive arms. Their miles of pinkish-brown tiled roofs reached far out into the farmlands and market gardens and bush or scrub as a sign that the modern age had come to Australia.

When Adrian read in the newspaper about a typical Melbourne family, he saw their white or cream weatherboard house in a treeless yard surrounded by fences of neatly sawn palings. From articles and cartoons in the Argus he had learned a lot about these people, but nothing to suggest they did the things he was interested in.

The women of the outer suburbs were not beautiful (although occasionally one was described as attractive or vivacious). They wore dressing gowns all morning, and frilly aprons over their clothes for the rest of the day. They wore their hair in curlers under scarves knotted above the forehead. When they talked over their back fences it was mostly about their husbands’ stupid habits.

The husbands still had sexual thoughts occasionally. They liked to stare at pictures of film stars or beauty contestants. But the wives apparently were sick of sex (perhaps because they had too many children or because they had run out of ideas to make it interesting). They were always snatching the pictures from their husbands’ hands. On the beach in summer a wife would bury her husband’s head in the sand or chain his feet to an umbrella to keep him from following some beautiful young woman.

Adrian was reassured to learn that some husbands dreamed (like himself) of doing things with film stars and bathing beauties. But he would have liked to know that someone in Melbourne was actually making his dreams come true.

The little that Adrian learned from the radio was more confusing than helpful. Sometimes he heard in a radio play a conversation like this.

YOUNG WIFE: I saw the doctor today.

HUSBAND (only half-listening): Oh?

YOUNG WIFE: He told me…(a pause)…I’m going to have a baby.

HUSBAND (amazed): What? You’re joking! It can’t be!

Adrian had even watched a scene like this in an American film. He could only conclude that many husbands fathered their children while they were dozing off late at night, or even in their sleep. Or perhaps what they did with their wives was so dull and perfunctory that they forgot about it soon afterwards. Either way it was more evidence that the kind of sexual activity Adrian preferred was not common in real life.

Even after watching an American film, Adrian still thought he might have been a very rare kind of sex maniac. The men and women in films seemed to want nothing more than to fall in love. They struggled against misfortunes and risked their lives only for the joy of holding each other and declaring their love. At the end of each film Adrian stared at the heroine. She closed her eyes and leaned back in a kind of swoon. All that her lover could do was to support her in his arms and kiss her tenderly. She was in no condition to play American sex games.