The Love of a Good Woman

she like, anywhere, and she said, ‘The Glorified Shack.’”
    Kent could not remember that happening. But he supposed it had. Anyway it was what Kath had told Sonje.
III
    C OTTAR and Sonje were having a farewell party, before Cottar went off to the Philippines or Indonesia or wherever he was going, and Sonje went to Oregon to stay with his mother. Everybody who lived along the beach was asked—since the party was going to be held out-of-doors, that was the only sensible policy. And some people Sonje and Cottar had lived with in a communal house, before they moved to the beach, were asked, and journalists Cottar knew, and people Sonje had worked with in the library.
    “Just everybody,” Kath said, and Kent said cheerfully, “More pinkos?” She said she didn’t know, just everybody.
    The real Monica had hired her regular baby-sitter, and all the children were to be brought to her house, the parents chipping in on the cost. Kath brought Noelle along in her carry-cot just as it was beginning to get dark. She told the sitter that she’d come back before midnight, when Noelle would probably wake up for a feed. She could have brought the supplemental bottle which was madeup at home, but she hadn’t. She was uncertain about the party and thought she might welcome a chance to get away.
    She and Sonje had never talked about the dinner at Sonje’s house when Kent got into the fight with everybody. It was the first time Sonje had met Kent and all she said afterwards was that he was really quite good-looking. Kath felt as if the good looks were being thought of as a banal consolation prize.
    She had sat that evening with her back against the wall and a cushion hugged against her stomach. She had got into the habit of holding a cushion against the spot where the baby kicked. The cushion was faded and dusty, like everything in Sonje’s house (she and Cottar had rented it ready-furnished). Its pattern of blue flowers and leaves had gone silvery. Kath fastened her eyes on these, while they tied Kent up in knots and he didn’t even realize it. The young man talked to him with the theatrical rage of a son talking to his father, and Cottar spoke with the worn patience of a teacher to a pupil. The older man was bitterly amused, and the woman was full of moral repugnance, as if she held Kent personally responsible for Hiroshima, Asian girls burned to death in locked factories, for all foul lies and trumpeted hypocrisy. And Kent was asking for most of this, as far as Kath could see. She had dreaded something of the sort, when she saw his shirt and tie and decided to put on jeans instead of her decent maternity skirt. And once she was there she had to sit through it, twisting the cushion this way and that to catch the silver gleam.
    Everybody in the room was so certain of everything. When they paused for breath it was just to draw on an everlasting stream of pure virtue, pure certainty.
    Except perhaps for Sonje. Sonje didn’t say anything. But Sonje drew on Cottar; he was her certainty. She got up to offer more curry, she spoke into one of the brief angry silences.
    “It looks as if nobody wanted any coconut.”
    “Oh, Sonje, are you going to be the tactful hostess?” the older woman said. “Like somebody in Virginia Woolf?”
    So it seemed Virginia Woolf was at a discount too. There was so much Kath didn’t understand. But at least she knew it was there; she wasn’t prepared to say it was nonsense.
    Nevertheless she wished her water would break. Anything to deliver her. If she scrambled up and puddled the floor in front of them, they would have to stop.
    Afterwards Kent did not seem perturbed about the way the evening had gone. For one thing, he thought he had won. “They’re all pinkos, they have to talk that way,” he said. “It’s the only thing they can do.”
    Kath was anxious not to talk anymore about politics so she changed the subject, telling him that the older couple had lived with Sonje and Cottar in the communal house. There was also another couple who had since moved away. And there had been an orderly exchange of sexual partners. The older man had an outside mistress and she was in on the exchange part of the time.
    Kent said, “You mean young guys would go to bed with that old woman? She’s got to be fifty.”
    Kath said, “Cottar’s thirty-eight.”
    “Even so,” said Kent. “It’s disgusting.”
    But Kath found the idea of those stipulated and obligatory copulations exciting as well as