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Various Temptations
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stored but never before used, the intuitive mimicry of the female
seducer. She smiled now largely, as though her lips enjoyed the
touch of her teeth; lowered her eyelids, then sprang them suddenly
open; ended a laugh by tossing her head - only to shake the new
curls in the light; raised her hand to her throat, to show the throat
stretched back and soft, took a piece of butter-coloured marzipan
and its marble-white icing between the tips of two fingers and
laughing opened her mouth very wide, so that the tongue-tip came
out to meet the icing, so that teeth and lips and mouth were wide
and then suddenly shut in a coy gobble. And all this time, while
they ate and drank and talked and joked, Raikes sat watching her,
smiling his lips, but eyes heavily bright and fixed like pewter as the
trouble roasted his brain.
He knew now fully what he wanted to do. His hand, as if it were
some other hand not connected to his body, reached away to where
the parcel of ties lay open; and its fingers were playing with the
string. They played with it over-willingly, like the fingers guiding a
paintbrush to over-decorate a picture, like fingers that pour more
salt into a well-seasoned cook-pot. Against the knowledge of what
he wanted the mind still balanced its danger, calculated the result
and its difficult aftermath. Once again this was gluttonous, like
deciding to take more drink. Sense of the moment, imagination of
the result; the moment's desire, the mind's warning. Twice he leant
towards her, measuring the distance then drawing back. His mind
told him that he was playing, he was allowed such play, nothing
would come of it.
Then abruptly it happened. That playing, like a swing pushing
higher and then somersaulting the circle, mounted on its own mo-
mentum, grew huge and boundless, swelled like fired gas. Those
fingers tautened, snapped the string. He was up off the chair and
over Clara. The string, sharp and hempen, bit into her neck. Her
lips opened in a wide laugh, for she thought he was clowning up
suddenly to kiss her, and then stretched themselves wider, then
closed into a bluish cough and the last little sounds.
M A R Y LAVIN • 1 9 1 2 -
My Vocation
I'm not married yet, but I'm still in hopes. One thing is certain
though: I was never cut out to be a nun in the first place. Anyway,
I was only thirteen when I got the Call, and I think if we were living
out here in Crumlin at the time, in the new houses that the Govern-
ment gave us, I'd never have got it at all, because we hardly ever
see nuns out here, somehow, and a person wouldn't take so much
notice of them out here anyway. It's so airy you know, and they
blow along in their big white bonnets and a person wouldn't take
any more notice of them than the seagulls that blow in from the
sea. And then, too, you'd never get near enough to them out here
to get the smell of them.
It was the smell of them I used to love in the Dorset Street days,
when they'd stop us in the street to talk to us, when we'd be playing
hopscotch on the path. I used to push up as close to them as pos-
sible and take big sniffs of them. But that was nothing to when they
came up to the room to see Mother. You'd get it terribly strong
then.
'What smell are you talking about?' said my father one day when
I was going on about them after they went. 'That's no way to talk
about people in Religious Orders,' he said. 'There's no smell at all
off the like of them.'
That was right, of course, and I saw where I was wrong. It was
the no-smell that I used to get, but there were so many smells fight-
ing for place in Dorset Street, fried onions, and garbage, and the
smell of old rags, that a person with no smell at all stood out a mile
from everybody else. Anyone with an eye in their head could see
that I didn't mean any disrespect. It vexed me shockingly to have
my father think such a thing. I told him so, too, straight out.
'And if you want to know,' I finished up, 'I'm going to be a nun
myself when I get big.'
But my father only roared laughing.
'Do you hear that?' he said, turning to mother, isn't that a good
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