Bettany's Book Read Online Free

rounded than her sister’ as people had said throughout their adolescence, that even sloppiness looked like style on her. Only she and her sister knew that at a later age she would be seen as a charming but bedraggled old woman.
     
    The Bettany girls had what was known as a protected childhood. They had been sent by their doomed parents to an all-girl grammar school on the sedate north shore of Sydney, and their party-going had been strictly supervised by their frenetically anxious mother and by a calm, intractable father who arrived to collect them at eleven wearing a cardigan, grey pants, slippers, his brilliantined auburn hair looking as carefully combed as it had when he left for work that morning. Their father represented a combination of elements the girls thought of as subtly combined to bring down on them the maximum of social torment, as he appeared handsomely squinting in his neat – though in the girls’ eyes disreputable – clothes at the door, asking in a voice hardly to be heard above the party’s clamour, ‘Are Dimple and Primrose here?’
    Their mother sent him, since no boy was ever trusted to take them home, yet Prim thought that if boys grew up to be like her father there must be some genial ones capable of it. Dimp, who from fifteen went to winter rugby matches at the boys’ school, Knox Grammar, and was invited to a livelier range of parties than Prim, became an aficionado of the brief embrace, the open-mouthed kiss, and some more turbulent and unseemly mysteries still. Prim came along to parties in her sister’s lively and generous wake, but after a while she got a reputation for being ‘frigid’. The adolescent Dimp would advise Prim to cool it a bit, smile at the boys, relax. She was good-looking enough, bugger it! They all fancied her, for Christ’s sake.
    Dimp considered ‘frigid’ an insult, she didn’t understand the subtle pride it gave her sister.
    Dimp had got from somewhere a gift for earthiness, which had from childhood secretly amused Prim but alarmed herparents. She had the nature to study Australian coarseness. It had been reinforced by listening to some of the Knox boys, and even from studying patterns of speech in Australian soapies. To absorb an Australian rhythm, too, she had only to listen to snatches of talk from brickies working on their Bannockburn Street, Turramurra, neighbours’ house. Though she was vigilant with what she said at school, she had an ambition to be known as a calling-a-spade-a-spade Australian, and her parents did not know where that came from.
    Prim was in the meantime proud of her reputation as an ice-maiden, not least because at the Knox Grammar–Abbotsleigh School formal a particular type of boy would try to melt her down, and she liked to feel aloof from their hot breath, to feel the irrelevance of a kind of swelling in them, even more pervasive than the limited, boring rigidity in theirgroins. Seeming to be more innocent than she was, that was a great plan with these hulking, gasping boys. Showing them that she gave their dance floor erections no credit at all. That was better fun than acknowledging their heat, taking it with you out for some uncertain, unresolved fumble under an angophora by the rugby field. While Dimp was merciful and felt sorry for their urgent need, to Prim, icy virtue had joys that fingers-and-thumbs lust was incapable of supplying.
    This conviction ensured that Prim went to university a virgin, where Dimp had preceded her as a male-loving daughter of experience. Boys who met Prim as an undergraduate felt a distant but readily defeated hope, while boys who met Dimp could not believe they had blundered on a sensual presence whose very company, the mere chance to buy her a schooner of beer at the Union, was an experience of bountiful promise.
    Primrose was ultimately persuaded into two inconclusive and largely joyless couplings by a tall architecture student she met at the university Labor Club – led there by Dimp –