LITMIR.BIZ

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two of them sat in silence watching the mosaic of light playing across the wall as the sun caught the diamond rosette of Elizabeth’s ring. And then Elizabeth stopped stroking and the splinters of colour disappeared and the moment was broken. Ginnie reached out and took the invitation; a smile appeared as she looked at it.

      ‘Was he always so sleazy?’

      ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite that way myself, but yes, always.’

      Twenty years ago he had been described as out-going, a ‘people person’, a fine addition to any party. The girls loved his naughty ways, and the boys considered him a mate – a good drinker, easygoing, and always ready to recount his sexual exploits with names and places intact. He met Elizabeth Bainbridge when she was nearly eighteen; three years later they were married. She was his opposite, people said – quiet to his rowdy, reserved to his affable, petite to his bulky – but, they were quick to add, opposites attract. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to investigate if the attraction of opposites could be correlated with long-term happiness, and no one would until much later, far too late to benefit the Dadswells.

      When they first met, Elizabeth Bainbridge was a likeable girl, artistic, and from a good family. At the time she was going out with Oliver Warby, the man both the Bainbridges and the Warbys hoped Elizabeth would marry; but Oliver was not an easy person to like despite Elizabeth’s best efforts. Later, when the supercilious air of the twenty-year-old became a mummified arrogance in the man of forty, Elizabeth felt exonerated. But in the mid-1960s it was different.

      That Elizabeth and Oliver would marry had been their parents’ wish ever since the Warbys had joined the Bainbridges for Sunday morning tennis and the two little Bainbridge girls and the three young Warbys were thrown together to entertain themselves for three sets of mixed doubles and midday drinks. With the passage of years, Sunday morning tennis became Sunday afternoon golf and still the children were left to entertain themselves, this time in a deficient little playground attached to the club house. When the parents had finished their game they would return to the children and remark how very well they all got along, particularly the pre-pubescent Oliver and Elizabeth, and they would mutter among themselves that only time would tell.

      As it did. Oliver at twenty and Elizabeth at nearly eighteen had been going steady for over a year. Oliver was happy with the arrangement: Elizabeth, so sweet and pretty, suited him well. The two sets of parents were also happy, only Elizabeth was not. And so she grew fat, petite Elizabeth started eating and grew very fat indeed. She ate alone, pounds and pounds of chocolate, plain dairy-milk chocolate and chocolate-covered peanuts; she ate pineapple doughnuts and coffee scrolls and cheese by the pound. She grew fatter and fatter and Oliver grew ever more alarmed. Elizabeth was letting herself go, he said; when she gained a few more pounds he said she was letting him down, a few more and he was reluctant to be seen with her. It was during this period that Adrian Dadswell appeared, Adrian who was a bit overweight himself. Oliver had said that if Elizabeth gained any more weight he would leave: she did and he went. The two sets of parents were distraught; we will speak firmly with Elizabeth, the Bainbridges said to the Warbys, and arrange for some professional help; and we’ll speak firmly to Oliver, the Warbys replied, advise him to be patient. The Bainbridges put aside the list of wedding guests, golf continued, bridge began and the parents waited.

      Adrian at this stage played only a minor role. He was not interested in Elizabeth as a girlfriend, she was far too fat for that, but he liked her parents’ swimming pool and swam there on three or four occasions. And he was very pleasant to Elizabeth, joking and gossiping and treating her like one of the boys. Then the university year commenced and swimming stopped.

      Elizabeth was enrolled to study at the Melbourne School of Fine Arts, Adrian was in the final year of a law degree. Six months passed before they met again – at the twenty-first birthday of a mutual friend – and by then everything had changed.

      What had happened was this: Oliver left and with him the threat of a Bainbridge-Warby union, and Elizabeth commenced her art studies. Her new friends at the college seemed not to notice she was fat and if they did they did not bother about it. She was very happy and very productive. Early in the year she was invited to join the master sculpture classes, an honour rarely extended to a first-year student; it was an exciting time. As for the fat, it was there and then it was not, her body seemed to shrink exponentially with the growth in her work. At the end of first term she had returned to her old weight, at the end of second term Adrian had reappeared, and by the end of third term she had slept with him.

      Then there was no going back, not in 1965, not even if you had a nascent nervousness about the man you now had to marry. More than a nervousness, Elizabeth had a curdling suspicion that Adrian was loud and lightweight and mightily self-centred. But it was too late, she had slept with him and she was scared: scared of pregnancy, scared he would not propose, scared he might leave. The first problem, the one of pregnancy, she solved with a strange doctor in a strange city who had no notion that asking for a prescription for the pill was the most nerve-racking experience of her young life. As for the other problems, they persisted until two years later when Adrian proposed.

      They were in bed together, a single bed at the Bainbridge beach house, the place Elizabeth and Adrian went for Saturday-night sex after dinner or the cinema. For unmarried couples in the 1960s Saturday night was always the night for sex, but at the time Elizabeth did not know this and feared she was the only one. Adrian rolled over, propped himself on an elbow and proposed.

      ‘Well, what do you think?’ he said.

      What did she think? The relief was enormous! Elizabeth threw herself on top of him, laughing and hugging and crying and squirming and kissing big, wet, grateful kisses, and Adrian interpreting her relief as passion, joined in her excitement, and there she was bouncing on top of him like a baby, aware of his penis inside her but much more excited that she would not have to be a lonely old maid or a tarnished younger one. And suddenly the guilt of two years of sleeping with him evaporated. She sighed with pleasure. Adrian was delighted: ‘If I’d known it would have that effect, I would have proposed ages ago.’ He called her hot and sexy and congratulated her on the orgasm she had failed to notice. He suggested they marry in March of the following year. Again she felt that bliss of relief, that shiver of escaping stress, and Adrian now at the ready, finally understanding, he said, that insecurity about the future had dammed the full rush of her sexuality, and Elizabeth in a cloud of happiness moved with him in joyous rhythm, her large breasts bobbing above his face.

      Relief and gratitude in 1967.

      ‘But you already knew what he was like!’ Ginnie, the voice of the 1980s would say, and Elizabeth would respond that to a girl with a Bainbridge background who was no longer a virgin, Ginnie’s comment was simply not relevant.

      One of the problems, Elizabeth was to realise much later, was her limited experience of men. Of course she knew Adrian was a shallow and egocentric person who seemed happier with his male friends than with her, but then her own father was much the same, as were all the other men she knew. The boys at college had been different, but so different she hardly thought of them as men, and she was sure they did not regard her as a woman; they were peers, colleagues, friends with whom she talked for hours, days, years; as for girlfriends they went elsewhere. So, within her experience of men who became husbands, Adrian was not unusual: a little more raucous, a little more flirtatious than most, but the basic ingredients were the same.

      The Bainbridges disagreed; Adrian’s background was very different to Elizabeth’s, indeed, in Bainbridge terms Adrian had no background. Adrian’s father had been born in the north of England – Manchester – which was almost as bad as being a southern European. He had worked for years as secretary to an obscure company, and there he would stay until he died or retired, whichever came first. Adrian’s mother had at least been born in London, but that was where the good fortune ended. As soon as her children were at school she started work at Myer department store and was still there, in the homewares section, ‘So useful for when the children are married,’ she had said in what Mrs Bainbridge considered to be extremely poor taste. In truth, Mrs Dadswell was a buyer for the homewares section, a respected employee who had done extremely well, but as far as the Bainbridges were concerned, once a shop assistant always a shop assistant.

      The

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