Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville Page A

just how eccentric all that seemed, here in the land of the Angles and Saxons with their pinks and mauves and polka dots, and Mother could not see me either, lost as she was in her dreams of somewhere else altogether.
    She smiled gold at me and drifted into soft-eyed memories. Forests, she said wistfully. Trees, with leaves, and mountains everywhere and water on black rocks. Mother’s mouth became thin, squeezed, lemony, suppressing longing for her native land. And the snow! she sighed, but Father had a short fuse when it came to waxing lyrical about snow. Fiddlesticks! he exclaimed. The English word set the ornaments rocking, and my mother’s mouth lost its lemony look as she remembered she was in a new country now, one in which bald men became wealthy and plain girls got educations.
    When Father did not appear at the university to whisk me away, I passed what he would have called the times of day with the people I was beginning to know. The place seemed full of gormless girls like those I had been to school with, who turned the pages of their books only by the corners, and sat down the front of the lecture halls in their practical cardigans. There were young men, too, just as flabby of spirit, who looked startled if you spoke to them, and frowned in the library at the way my bold soles sounded on the floor.
    But Lilian, for example, was not one of the gormless ones. Lil was a gigantic person of some boldness, who could be persuaded to laugh with me at the cardigans, and although she looked aghast at what she was doing, was only one step behind me when I took a short chilly stroll among the draped corpses of the medical building. Oh, what a pleasure to have a companion who was also a person of possibilities! Lilian was from some sort of nice home in a leafy suburb by the water, with a respectable father, a ladylike mother and a lifeless brother. But she was transcending such beginnings: she was a fit companion for a woman with a future.
    There was an old rowing boat at her house in which Lil and I pushed off towards Chile and to other adventures. With Lil onone oar and me on the other, so the boat was all lopsided in the water, we did not get very far towards the El Dorados of the Americas, but we indulged other kinds of exploration. That cold green water, into the depths of which I stared until I was dizzy, enticed me to some kind of madness: I felt myself drawn down into it in a kind of swoon. The dazzle of sun on the water and the rude cries of the gulls heated an excitement within me until I seemed about to burst. Oh Lil, I must plunge in! I cried, and while she stared, I stripped the garments from my body and in skinny fleshless nudity I dived in.
    I gasped at the cold and at the pulse that throbbed between my legs, and was confused into wanting to weep and shout at once, so powerful and strange was this feeling buried in the centre of myself. It was a kind of delirium, and even when I climbed back into the boat I was still filled with ecstasy like an itch. Lil stared and I was moved to crave the creamy vastness of her body: I fell on her soft mounds and bunches, stripping the clothes from her, consumed with a craving to feel my flesh against another’s, to join skin with skin. She struggled, the boat tipped and sloshed, she cried No! No! in a feeble unconvincing way, and even as I cried back Yes! and wrestled with buttons, I was impatient at her coyness. Where was the spirit to match my own, that could stand naked, shameless and throbbing under a yellow sun, and lust for more?
    Lil revealed at last was a pleasure. Ah Lil, I said, this is more like it, for, free of the ugly rucked-up straining-at-seams clothes into which she forced her flesh, she was a mountainous beauty, her flesh bunched in warm rolls around her person like another layer of clothing. Her body, when I lay beside it in the boat, moved me to tears and to touch its enormous warmth, and Lilwas silent beside me, her face turned away up at the