Owen Marshall Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF

notes to use on the claim form, and then went uphill to the house. He didn’t hear the piano until he was inside the gate, for he was upwind and the sound was swept away towards the summit road. It was fluent and authoritative playing, and Tinsley thought it a record or cassette. He couldn’t imagine Mrs Witham playing the piano. Tinsley knew nothing of music; the only record he had ever bought was a collection of film themes, and he’d given that to his brother when he left home. But as he stood there by the pale pink and blue blocks of Witham’s house, seeing the waves surge up the beach, and the flat stones scuttle like crabs back to the sea, he felt the music sharp and fresh pass like a shiver through him.
    Tinsley’s knock at the door was answered by a call, and he went in, closing the door firmly against the pressure of the wind. There was no-one in the kitchen, but past the sliding doors to the living-roomhe could see a girl at the piano. She wore jeans and a yellow skivvy top, and her fair hair swung gently as she played. In the dulling conformity of that room, its two-tone tufted suite, nest of coffee-tables, and setter dogs in bas-relief on the fire-guard, she eclipsed her setting with natural individuality, and drove back banality to the corners of the room.
    She turned her head and told him to sit down. Tinsley didn’t go into the room, but took one of the kitchen chairs and sat by the sliding doors to listen. He was surprised how rapidly she played, and had the fancy that the girl was working quickly and skilfully like a juggler to keep it all in the air above them, dancing and colourful.
    â€˜Godowsky,’ she said when the piece was finished. ‘I told myself that I was going to play it right through. I didn’t mean to be rude.’
    â€˜It was great.’
    â€˜What did it make you feel?’ The girl had a round face, and her eyebrows were thin and arched. Tinsley thought the jeans she was wearing were probably boys’, for they were very tight at the hips, but too big at the waist. She watched him seriously as though she valued his opinion. It made him feel selfconscious, and he was annoyed with himself because of it.
    â€˜I’m not much on music I’m afraid,’ he said.
    â€˜What you mean is you’re shy about discussing it.’
    â€˜What I mean is what I said. I don’t know enough about music to discuss it. It’s not one of my interests.’ Tinsley found himself ruffled, not so much at her question and his ignorance, as the situation of arguing with the girl before he had met her. It unsettled him.
    â€˜I know quite a lot about music,’ she said. ‘I’m completing a music degree. Music’s so important to me, I expect everybody else to be just as interested. I think we’re all like that; each with our own obsession.
    Don’t you?’ Tinsley wasn’t going to answer that without returning to what should have been done first.
    â€˜My name’s Wade Tinsley. I’m your uncle’s insurance rep. George said to come up to the house for morning tea.’
    â€˜What’s your obsessive interest?’ she asked earnestly, and she leant forward on the swivel piano-stool to watch him.
    It was an odd and trivial stalemate, broken by George Witham’s arrival from the paddocks. George struggled on the doorstep for a time to get his boots off, then came through into the kitchen. ‘You’ve met Heather then,’ he said as a statement, and as the girl put on the jug for tea she smiled at Tinsley; nothing coquettish, but an open smile at the paradox of human relationships.
    As they drank the tea, and Tinsley prepared the claim form, George looked idly at the paper. ‘Another clothing firm gone phut,’ he said with mild satisfaction. ‘Three teenagers killed on the motorway. Nobody ever learns.’ Witham ran his finger around the inside of his mouth, as if suspecting that a last