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Companion.
    She warmed to that idea but it was a little late perhaps for her to be redefining her bond to Robert.
    She nestled her breast against Robert, who moved his hand a little up the silk stocking of her leg. He was responding to her body, her perfume—now a little faded—to the smell of her hair, the feel of her body.
    She thought that would be the best way to go now, into the misty world of bodies.
    And despite everything, they were fine companions.
    â€˜We are fine companions,’ she whispered to him.
    â€˜Companions?’
    â€˜Yes, fine companions.’
    â€˜I suppose we are that. Odd way of putting it.’ He was silent and then said, ‘You should’ve told me about the Americans.’ But it wasn’t a grumpy voice.
    That was what she wanted for her marriage—fine companionship. She would work towards that.
    She could have a marriage of an artful and unique design.
    Robert had no design, he most likely thought that marriage was something already all set out by the conventions.
    She turned into him, putting her head on his shoulder, lightly kissing his neck. She laughed silently at having withheld the news from him, laughed with a mild devilry, a delicious petty devilry.
    Or was it more a petty cruelty?
    Laugh thy girlish laughter:
    Then, the moment after,
    Weep thy girlish tears!

The Secret Apartments of Marriage, Their Locks and Their Keys

    She nearly always left for the office before Robert because he didn’t begin his work until early afternoon or at best, late morning.
    It would be earlier today because of the Japanese crisis, but he was still in bed when she rose.
    She often had to fight her resentment at his sleeping in late, that she had to be the one who rose and faced the apartment alone, and then faced the world. She faced the newspapers alone.
    It was as if she’d expected marriage would at least mean that two people rose together and that, consequently, you never had to face the world alone.
    Perhaps what she wanted was for the Man to rise first and to inspect the boundaries of life and to see that the world was safe, as her brother and father had done in Jasper’s Brush.
    It was also somehow unnatural for her to see a man sleeping late. When she had been growing up, her father and brother had been the first to rise, although her mother had usually not been far behind them. Except for Those Days when her mother slept late and was not present at breakfast.
    She would then visit her mother before school, enteringinto that oh-so-determined-womanliness which her mother had created around her in the bedroom. The billowing tulle, the lace, the satin bed cover on the canopy bed. The abundance of freshly cut flowers always placed outside the bedroom at night and brought in first thing by her father so that her mother could rise surrounded by the fragrance and sight of flowers. The much loved volumes in the cedar bookcase, the gramophone in the corner.
    Her mother’s bedroom was a room such as no other in the house and Edith was always enfolded by it, was always reluctant to leave it, yet feared her urge to linger, because to linger so would suggest that she hide there. Forever.
    For her mother, the bedroom had been a refuge from and a resistance to the harshness of the country town and the hot bush, the torment of insects both of nature and those within the mind. Her mother was also setting a standard of intimacy, the grace of intimacy.
    And on some days, her mother could not leave the room.
    Edith, having kissed her mother goodbye there in the bedroom, would herself feel the urge to linger, to hang on there, to lie down with her mother and remain in the lavishness of the imported lingerie and rich scents, and the mirrors both normal and magnifying which seemed to invite the nervous delight of self-scrutiny, which gave out the permission to admire oneself, to lavish on oneself the attention which was deserved. Which those around perhaps did not give.
    But