Dulcie was watching this comedy through the kitchen window and she came out into the yard. She was wearing a swimsuit too: pale blue and strapless, in some sort of elasticized satiny material.
“Come here, furry boy,” she said, and took the razor from his hand.
It was like a mild electric shock at first. As she scraped the razor up his shin and thigh to the edge of his swimsuit, his focus on the wavy roof mirages of Lavender Bay began fading fast.
“Relax, kiddo,” Dulcie said. “I used to be a nurse.”
This was evident in her proficiency: in her frowning attention to her task and the frequent pauses to rinse the razor in a pot of water to keep the blade keen.
Brian stared out across the bay. Dulcie kept on shaving his thighs while he fought the reaction of his body and mind: somewhere between excitement and fear, stimulation and embarrassment. This woman kneeling before him, her head abutting his groin, strands of her auburn hair brushing his skin, her tanned cleavage looming below his eyes, was his mother-in-law!
After she’d finished shaving his thighs, she rose to her feet, rubbed more shaving cream on his stomach, and, as a tremor ran down his whole body, she performed a professional depilatory operation on the furry track of his abdominal hair.
Brian was blinking rapidly by now and finding it difficult to regulate his breathing.
“Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before,” she said. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”
Nevertheless, in her competent hands he felt ridiculously young, a self-conscious adolescent. His heart was still hammering when she rinsed the razor again and attacked the curly hairs on his chest. As she worked, she hummed a sentimental song from the hit parade, “Oh! My Papa.”
In a greater effort to distance his mind and body from Dulcie’s busy razor work, Brian lifted his gaze to the sky where a pelican was hovering over the bay, higher than he imagined possible for such an ungainly-looking bird. Then, as his mother-in-law glided the blade carefully over his pectoral muscles, gently circumnavigating the nipples, the pelican became a tiny soaring white blotch.
The sun beat down. “Oh, my papa,” Dulcie hummed. In the fig trees on the cliff, a flock of black cockatoos clumsily rustled and fed. Brian closed his eyes on the sky, and orchestrated shapes like dew droplets or oil globules began to float in patterns behind his eyelids; he could feel the sun’s rays on his upturned face.
The chest-shaving continued. “Head up, tiger,” Dulcie said, standing on tiptoe. In four strokes she swept the razor from collarbones to chin. “Right arm up,” she ordered. Brian’s arm hung tentatively in the air, trembling slightly, until she held it steady and shaved his armpit. “Now the left one.”
Unhindered now by hair, a trickle of suds ran down his chest and stomach. Eyes still firmly shut, he heard the cockatoos continuing to squawk and eat, and half-gnawed figs plopping on the ground, and a train clattering across the Harbour Bridge toward the city.
By now the breeze felt overly intimate on his exposed skin. His whole body seemed disconcertingly sensitive and electrified and he was light-headed from the female smell of her olive skin and her satiny swimsuit, giddy with his intimate proximity to a semi-naked, mature woman on a summer’s day.
Dulcie took up his right wrist again, held it steady, and swept the razor up his forearm to his elbow, then along the triceps to the shoulder. She paused there and put her free hand on his right shoulder and clasped it for a few seconds, and closed her eyes as if considering its muscles and tendons, reflecting on the hard exercise that had gone into its formation: the hundreds of miles it had swum.
Time stopped. Then she shaved the other arm, and for a moment she closed her eyes and squeezed this shoulder too.
“All done, Johnny Weissmuller.” She dropped the razor in the pot of water and ran both hands over his chest. “Smooth as a baby’s bottom.”
When her second husband and Judy’s stepfather, Chief Petty Officer Eric Kruger, had shipped out for nine months’ duty on the destroyer HMAS Warramunga, a month before, Dulcie had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. The Australian navy, the Warramunga, and, by extension, CPO Kruger, were assisting the British navy in maintaining the security of the Federation of Malaya against Communist insurgents.
The arrangement suited both households. Dulcie gained company while Eric was away, and the young couple benefited from her help around the house, and especially from her assistance with Brian’s Olympic preparation.
Soon after their marriage, Brian and Judy were delighted
to find and rent the terrace house above Luna Park. A two-bedroom, nineteenth-century workman’s cottage, its sandstone walls and narrow back garden surrounded by oleanders and frangipanis, it suited the newlyweds’ romantic mood. Importantly, it was a mere hundred yards from Don Wilmott’s coaching headquarters at the North Sydney Olympic Pool, and only two train stations across the harbor from Judy’s nightshift copytaker job at the Daily Telegraph.
Brian, meanwhile, worked as a phys ed teacher at North Sydney Boys High, a welcome job for an amateur athlete. The pay wasn’t great, but the school was just a mile from their house, easy jogging distance, he had use of the gym, and the hours suited his early-morning and afternoon training sessions.
What he most welcomed about his mother-in-law’s presence was her cooking. His fuel requirements were huge; five miles twice a day in the pool, plus his weight training, burned up mountains of protein, carbohydrates, and calories. And frankly, Dulcie was a better cook than his twenty-one-year-old wife.
In any case, Judy’s new nighttime job absented her at dinnertime during the week, so Dulcie’s cooking had become crucial. Only on weekends did Brian and Judy get to eat meals together. Or, for that matter, retire to bed at the same time.
Their clashing personal schedules were the only impediment to marriage harmony. While Brian rose at four thirty for his five a.m. laps, and usually fell asleep by eight thirty at night, Judy’s shift at the Telegraph ran from four p.m. to midnight, the newspaper’s busiest hours. When Brian arrived home from school she was going to work, and he had to immediately leave for the pool. And after catching the last night train home from Town Hall station, Judy invariably fell exhausted into bed around one a.m. — her head ringing with domestic crimes and gang stabbings and gambling-den raids.
From Monday to Friday, Dulcie prepared Brian’s evening meal. After dinner, in deference to her excellent cooking, her role as Judy’s mother, and her status as an elder relative (she was forty-four), he’d chat politely with her over a cup of cocoa. Then, as his eyelids began to droop, he’d stretch his weary limbs, say good night, climb the stairs, and hit the sack.
On Sunday mornings, Judy hurried home from Mass so the young couple could make up for their love drought during the week. As Sunday was his only break from a four thirty rising, Brian was excused from church, allowed to linger in bed, catch up on sleep, and wake refreshed for her return to bed at eleven.
On this particular rest day when she returned home from church, Judy was puzzled to find Brian not in bed as usual but sitting in his bathrobe in the backyard, drinking coffe and reading the Sunday Telegraph. Recalling the shaving-down conversation of the night before, she peeled back his bathrobe to inspect the transformation. His hairless chest looked strangely pale and vulnerable, and his back was striated with scratches.
Shamefaced, he said, “My first try at shaving myself.”
“Idiot. I would’ve done that for you.” She stroked his wounded shoulder blades. “Poor baby.”