Read Online Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner - Free Book Online Page B

true to say. The gods had long ago been mocked and forgotten. Nobody prayed.
    And the house, Sweetpea Mansions ,with its foolishly fanciful name worked in bossets and bulges on an old brass plate beside the door: it jinxed her. Perhaps the communards, departing at the end of the seventies with armloads of collectively purchased kitchen-ware, had had a point after all; or perhaps it was not Janet’s ownership of property per se ,so much as the breezy, impatient confidence it gave her, her irritating refusal to adapt her bourgeois individualism ,that made her so unclubbable, and later, so unwifely.
    Unwifely women, even independent ones with property, do marry, as Janet did at forty; and her husband, a kind and comical man for whom, thoughshe was too distracted to express it, she felt real tenderness, real liking ,Janet’s husband did his best. He tried. But at last he became sad, and lost heart. Janet had no talent for intimacy. She did not know how it was done. Privately she thought of it as knuckling under .She had thrived, before, on drama, on being treated badly: it enlivened her. Her husband, who wanted to be good to her, could never seem to get her full attention. The chess set he gave her was flung into an upper room. The ukelele he brought home from Vanuatu lay forgotten and dust-choked under their bed; and in the end, after five years of wandering in the complicated moral landscape of such a marriage, when he tripped the landmine which buckled the horizon and hurled them cartwheeling across it, he picked himself up, half-stunned with sorrow and relief, and limped away to a girl whose hair and teeth gleamed behind the rolled up window of a waiting car, leaving Janet sprawled there on the sofa, holding her breath while the back gate slammed and the motor roared and the beetroot soup dribbled down the wall. She lay and stared up at the familiar cracks and mouldings of the ceiling, its chubby plaster garlands and upside-down cornucopias of ambrosial fruits and flowers. It was all still there, enclosing her. She had the house, and the house was all she had.
    Is it any wonder, then, that at such a juncture a woman like Janet should put on some lipstick anda clean pair of white socks, take the tram downtown, and outlay a small fortune for a haircut so savage that, walking home, she saw herself reflected in shop windows as a skull?
    Now consider Maxine, who lived in a shed and called herself a carpenter. Although she had little training and no worldly ambition, she was in the grip of such a powerful urge to make that she barely slept. Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude she lacked the detachment to challenge them; yet when pressed in company she never lost her temper but argued round and round with a serene unshakable courtesy. She expected good of everything, she thought the best of the world and against all evidence was full of trust. Auras, star charts, chakras, the directing of energy and rays, the power of crystals, the moral values of colours: these phenomena were her delight: they guided her.
    No one would buy her furniture. It was too outlandish for ordinary houses, being devised out of scavenged objects or pieces of native timber that she spotted deep in the scrub and crawled in after, with her little bowsaw, to cut and drag home. She carved uncouth figures on the heads of sticks ;she wandered by lakes, and out of fallen branches would fashion, to celebrate the spirit of the place, a strange and delicate bench which she would plant up to its knees in theshallow ripples; then she would tramp away in her boots, leaving it to contemplate quiet water.
    Open one of Maxine’s cupboards and its interior would be decorated with threatening runes, or motifs and insignias you could under no circumstances incorporate into your practical life. Her tables were carved with hollows which prescribed the exact spots where your plate and glass must stand, and her