The Delinquents Read Online Free Page A

interests they’re always talking about. All she knew was that Brownie wanted her and loved her. He was, she decided, the only person who had ever wanted her exactly as she was, without qualification and condition, therefore he should have her.
    By many standards Lola was a fortunate child. True she had no settled home and her parents were separated, but against that it must be considered that she was given plenty of liberty, was never beaten nor bullied (except by the gentlest methods) and was given everything in the way of clothes and education that her mother could afford. There would have been a host of people in Bundaberg to declare that her mother was devoted to her. A hard and humiliating childhood and adolescence had left Mrs. Lovell with the conviction that to be accepted by the professional classes was the end and aim of every right-thinking woman’s existence. She distrusted love and disliked men—they reminded her of Tony Lovell and she looked back on her wild infatuation for him with deepest shame. Lola, she decided, would be well educated, would have a career, would marry, if she married at all, a doctor, a lawyer, a bank manager—a man who wore a public school tie. She would have been astounded to know that one woman could create from her own flesh another so unlike herself. Lola never argued with her mother. The nuns had taught her pretty manners and, at any rate, she knew that arguing would be useless; but while her mother talked to her of the day when she would be a nurse or private secretary or doctor’s receptionist, Lola dreamed of the day when she would be a ballroom-dancing instructress, or travel the country in a carnival caravan; above all, of the man who would worship her, love her, adore her. And now fate had sent along Brownie, the biggest, the handsomest, the gentlest and softest spoken boy in all the town.
    Coming home on that first night she sat in the bath a long while and tried to think out the situation. She knew that if her mother knew she would be ill with shock. She knew she might already be pregnant, and, worst of all, according to all she had been taught, the fires of hell were already roaring for her, though of this last she could not be afraid. She found it so hard to believe. She gave up all attempt at coherent thought. It is impossible to reason out anything with a voice inside you, half demented with joy, shouting, ‘I am loved, I am loved.’
    ‘If mother knew,’ she thought, ‘she would hate me. There are dozens of things about me that mother would hate if only she knew. But whatever I do Brownie loves me. Brownie loves me.’
    She was sound asleep with her cheek on her hand when her mother came home.
    Brownie had never dreamed of love as an escape at all. From his own observation he had decided that all physical love was dirty—a sort of disgraceful trap into which everybody fell despite their best endeavour. He had watched his mother’s lodgers come and go. Though the American had been unfailingly kind to him he had had the most traumatic effect upon the child, for on a Saturday afternoon the American would come home from camp early, and then he and Mrs. Hansen would lie on Brownie’s bed (presumably because Brownie’s room did not overlook the gossip-hungry street) and there make what, for want of a more appropriate word, must be called love. The Hansen children did not stay around to witness their embraces. The girls went out to tennis and made good Mrs. Hansen’s boast that her girls were wonderful sensible girls, never a day’s worry, mad on sports and their jobs, etc., not interested in boys and all that rubbish at all. The girls never discussed the situation, even with one another. Their humiliation was too great. They merely saved their money and left home as soon as they could. Brownie, by a triumph of
dementia praecox
, often managed to convince himself that it was not happening at all. He would ride away on his bike on a Saturday afternoon and behind him