Speed Dating Events

In this sad moment, the fate of the couple is sealed. We can see ahead for them vistas of a lifetime of nappies, bills and rows, first the overcrowded house and then the empty nest. But Vic can think only of himself, and Ingrid’s tears provoke him to another spasm of disgust:

She’s sobbing away like billy-ho now. The hanky’s out and the waterworks are turned on good and proper.

`I’ve always wanted to marry you, Vic,’ she says. ‘I’ve often imagined how you might propose to me. And now it has to be this way. Forcing you into it . . . You’ve no need to if you don’t want to,’ she says all at once. ‘I shan’t force you.’

This is a laugh. Even if she won’t force me, what about everybody else? I can just imagine them if I make so much as a sign that I don’t want to go through with it. I can just see them all putting the screws on. It’d take a better man than me to stand out against all that . . .

And as I’m standing there I wish to God, I wish more than I’ve ever wished for anything else, that Id never laid eyes on her.

Ingrid’s distress, however callously disregarded by Vic, is a moving reminder that the trap when sprung closes on two people, and not on the mighty male member alone. Shotgun or even • 22, weddings are in fact worse on the female, since she’s the one to be lumbered with all the work and worry of child-bearing, while being also denied the release of getting out of the house, having a job, seeing a few mates.

The wrong man at the wrong time ruins a woman’s life. But perhaps it takes one of the most powerful of modern women writers to drive home this point:

Like a satiated nursling, he let the nipple pop out of his mouth, formed a kiss of boundless love and gratitude against the side of her breast, and lay utterly still except for the heaves of his breathing. He could feel her mouth in his hair, her hand down inside his shirt, and suddenly he seemed to recollect himself, opened his eyes. Briskly he sat up, pulled her slip straps up her arms, then her dress, and fastened all the buttons deftly.

‘You’d better marry me, Meghann,’ he said, eyes soft and laughing. ‘I don’t think your brothers would approve one bit of what we just did.’

`Yes, I think Id better, too,’ she agreed, lids lowered, a delicate flush on her cheeks.

`Let’s tell them tomorrow morning.’

`Why not? The sooner the better.’

`Next Saturday I’ll drive you into Gilly. We’ll see Father Thomas — I suppose you’d like a church wedding — arrange for the banns, and buy an engagement ring.’

`Thank you, Luke.’

This is, of course, one of many climactic moments in Colleen McCullough’s world-sweeping epic, The Thorn Birds. A mega-experience is that McCullough never pulls back from the painful, tragic and disastrous elements of life. She doesn’t feel the usual compulsion to make it all come right in the last reel, and she tells it hard and strong from the woman’s point of view.

Here Meghann, a complete novice in life and sex, has dropped into the hands of Luke, whose obsessional selfishness and limited mentality only become fully clear to her over the years of their life together. The sexual act which compromises her Catholic conscience into marriage is no more than the nipple-nuzzling described above. But she is `convinced he had done to her that thing which made babies start’.

Yet green as Meggie is, she knows more of the flesh and the devil than anyone around her guesses. She has had her own baptism in the flames of love and desire, so intense that she never recovers from the burning. She loves the Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart to madness and distraction, and the story of their anguish is the main thread running through this opulent, Gone With The Wind saga. But this forbidden love is another goad driving her on to marry Luke, as she plainly sees:

Well, that was that. She had committed herself, there could be no turning back. In a few weeks, or however long it took to call banns, she would marry Luke O’Neill. She would be . . . Mrs Luke O’Neill! How strange! Why did she say yes? Because HE told me I must, HE said I was to do it. But why? To remove HIM from danger? To protect himself, or me? Ralph de Bricassart, sometimes I think I hate you . . .

Marry or burn, says the old proverb. It’s Meggie’s tragedy that she has to do both. Her marriage is ill-starred from the first, and she soon becomes yet another of the female victims sacrificed on the altar of matrimony.

For all these sufferers, women and men too, the experience of harsh reality is made even more bitter by the hopes and dreams that they have to put away. They have to live with their sadness in the knowledge that it does not have to be thus — that others have found in marriage not a trap, but a lifelong comfort and joy.

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