Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  If Mrs Flack’s brick looked best of all, her tiles better, brighter-glazed, it was perhaps because of her late husband’s connections with the trade. There KARMA stood, the name done in baked enamel. Considering the delicate state of her health, the owner risked too much for neatness, though certainly she paid an elderly man a few shillings to mow the grass and had almost succeeded in encouraging an older one to do the same for less. On Thursdays, besides, a strong woman coped with any stooping or lifting, but that arrangement might possibly be discontinued. Depending on developments.

  Mrs Jolley loved the latch at Mrs Flack’s. She loved the rustic picket gate. She loved the hedge of Orange Triumph. To run her glove along the surface of Mrs Flack’s brick home gave her shivers. The sound of its convenience swept her head over heels into the caverns of envy.

  As for Mrs Flack herself, she would seldom greet her friend with more than:

  “Hmmmm!”

  Or:

  “Well I never!”

  Or at most:

  “I did not look at the calendar, but might have known.”

  Yet Mrs Jolley understood the significance of it all. She might have been a cat, except that she was rubbing on the air.

  Mrs Flack was sometimes described as having rather a yellow look, although more accurately speaking she was a medium shade of buff. For many years, she told, she had suffered from derangement of the bile. She was the victim of gallstones, too, and varicose veins, to say nothing of her Heart. She was wedded to her Heart, it might have seemed, if it had not been known she was a widow. Yet, in spite of such complications and allegiances, she would get about in a slow, definite way, and even when she had not been there, was remarkably well informed on everything that had happened. Indeed, it had been suggested by those few who were lacking in respect, that Mrs Flack was omnipresent – under the beds, even, along with the fluff and the chamber-pots. But most people had too much respect for her presence to question her authority. Her hats were too sober, her reports too factual. Where flippancy is absent, truth can only be inferred, and her teeth were broad and real enough to lend additional weight and awfulness to words.

  Remarks collapsed on Mrs Jolley’s lips in the presence of her friend. Her friend. The word was quite alarming, if also magical. Mrs Flack would look up from lashing the Orange Triumphs with the jet from her plastic hose, or, seated in her own lounge behind a prophetic steam of tea, would simply look, before pronouncing.

  “That poor soul,” she might begin, “who we both know – there is no need to mention names – how she has survived all these years on a slice of bread and dripping, and her relatives well-to-do, not to say downright wealthy. They did, for their own convenience, after the death of the mother, deliver her to an institution, but the person screamed and screamed, and clung to the railings with her two hands, so that they were forced to take her back. It only goes to show. I am always thankful that, in my case, there are no ties, no encumbrances, not even a mortgage on the home.”

  “Ah,” Mrs Jolley had to protest, “I am a mother!”

  Mrs Flack would pause, pick a burnt currant from a scone and appear to accuse it terribly.

  “I cannot claim any such experience,” she would declare.

  Then, after frowning, she would fall to laughing, but feebly – she was an invalid, it had to be remembered – through strips of pale lips.

  Like cheese-straws at a buffy, Mrs Jolley would be reminded, and immediately regret her disrespect.

  “I did not mean,” she would hasten, dashing at a few crumbs. “That is to say, I did not intend to suggest.” And then: “Are you truly quite alone?”

  “Yes, dear.” Mrs Flack would sigh.

  At that moment something would happen, of such peculiar subtlety that it must have eluded the perception of all but those involved in the experience. The catalyst of sympathy seemed to destroy the envelopes of personality, leaving the two essential beings free to merge and float. Thought must have played little part in any state so passive, so directionless, yet it was difficult not to associate a mental process with silence of such a ruthless and pervasive kind. As they continued sitting, the two women would drench the room with the moth-colours of their one mind. Little sighs would break, scintillating, on the Wilton wall-to-wall. The sound of stomachs, rumbling liquidly, would sluice the already impeccable veneer. Glances rejected one another as obsolete aids to communication. This could have been the perfect communion of souls, if, at the same time, it had not suggested perfect collusion.

  Mrs Jolley was usually the first to return. Certain images would refurnish the swept chamber of her mind. There was, for instance – she loved it best of all – the pastel-blue plastic dressing-table set in Mrs Flack’s second bedroom.

  Mrs Jolley’s face would grow quite hard and lined then, as if a pink-and-blue eiderdown had suffered petrifaction.

  “Alone perhaps, but in a lovely home,” she would be heard to murmur.

  “Alone is not the same,” Mrs Flack would usually reply.

  And smile.

  It was not all that sad. They both knew it was not sad. They understood that a dénouement might be reached in the drama of their wishes – if they so wished.

  As tea and contentment increased understanding of each other, as well as confidence in their own powers, it was only to be expected that two ladies of discretion and taste should produce their knives and try them for sharpness on weaker mortals. Seated above the world on springs and petty point, they could lift the lids and look right into the boxes in which moiled other men, crack open craniums as if they had been boiled eggs, read letters before they had been written, scent secrets that would become a source of fear to those concerned. Eventually the ladies would begin. Their methods would be steel, though their antiphon was always bronze.

  “Take doctors, for instance,” Mrs Flack might say. “Doctors are only human beings.”

  “You are telling me!” it was Mrs Jolley’s duty to interpose.

  “But must be expected to act different.”

  “And do not always.”

  “Very often do not. Mrs Jolley, I am telling you that this doctor at the corner, in giving me a needle – which I have to get regular for certain reasons – pulled me quite close. ‘Is it necessary?’ I asked – myself, of course – ‘and according to medical etiquette, to press against a lady’s form in giving her a simple needle?’ His breath was that hot, Mrs Jolley, and the odour, well, I am not one to insinuate, but if it had been my breath, I would of been ashamed to advertise the fact.”

  “Ttst, ttst! The doctors! And to think that a lady, on some occasions, must submit to an examination by such hands!”

  “Ho, an examination! I have never had one, and do not intend to. No, never!”

  “There are the lady doctors, of course.”

  “Ah, the lady doctors!”

  “Do you suppose the lady doctors ever attend to gentlemen?”

  “I do not know. But they would not attend to me, never. I have my own ideas about the lady doctors.”

  Mrs Jolley would have liked to hear, but etiquette did not permit.

  “Ah, yes.” Mrs Flack would sigh, and lapse.

  Though each knew she must soon revive. It was but the pause between movements, when initiates clear their throats, and frown at some innocent who gives expression to his pleasure. Mrs Jolley had quickly learnt.

  “Thursday night,” Mrs Flack had indeed revived, “Mrs Khalil’s Lurleen was seen three times outside the Methodist church.”

  “In the open?”

  “On the grass.”

  “Accompanied?”

  “Ho! Mrs Khalil’s Lurleen!”

  “But with a gentleman?”

  “With three. And all of them different. Between the pictures going in and coming out.”

  Then Mrs Jolley had to laugh.

  “Girls will be girls, eh?”

  “I should hope not,” said Mrs Flack, whose pale lips would become transformed at times into two strips of adhesive t
ape. “Such girls should be run out. But when the Law – well, what can you expect at Sarsaparilla?”

  “Did you say the Law?”

  “I will not go into that,” Mrs Flack replied. “Except that the constable’s own braces was found in the paddy’s lucerne on the block below the pictures. There is no denying ownership when the name is put in marking-ink.”

  “He could have lost them.”

  “He could have lost them.”

  “Or thrown them away.”

  “Or thrown them away. With the price still visible on the brand-new leather. No, Mrs Jolley, Constable McFaggott is far too close to lose or discard his belongings in the paddy’s lucerne, unless the duty that took him there had turned him lighter-headed than usual.”

  Then Mrs Jolley began to hiss like any goose. Her pink-and-blue was changed to purple.

  “What do you know!” She sat and hissed, and would have known more.

  But Mrs Flack had folded her arms. She was holding the blanched points of her yellow elbows.

  “We have not kept to the subject,” she said, or accused.

  For Mrs Flack could sense with only half her instinct that her friend had something which she wished to tell.

  The occasion was, in fact, the day after Mrs Jolley had approached her mistress on the terrace, and been involved in something rather nasty. How nasty, the housekeeper scarcely dared remember. But would touch her wrists from time to time. Certainly on setting out, so brisk and bright, on the visit to her friend, she had fully intended to confide, perhaps even make the great decision. Yet could she, finally? Or would she?

  “That poor soul at Xanadu,” Mrs Flack had begun to lead, “I do feel sorry for the sick and simple.”

  “But in her case has had her day.”

  “There are all kinds I must admit.”

  “But has had her day, Mrs Flack. All that lot has had their day.”

  Mrs Jolley could not pass her tongue quick enough along her stripped lips, nor twist her nice openwork gloves into a tight enough knot.

  Mrs Flack’s eyes began to dart, so that her friend was unpleasantly reminded that somebody was behind the skin.

  “We must think of ourselves as well, of course,” Mrs Flack agreed.

  “We must think of ourselves.”

  “Without killing Her!”

  “Not likely!” Mrs Jolley laughed. “She must run the risk though. Like any girl in a kennel beneath the roof. When the heat used to crack. Or shelling peas. Or pushing the pea-pods through the sieve. Or blacking the grates. Or blacking the grates.”

  “Are you bitter, Mrs Jolley?”

  “Bitter, no. I am just remembering.”

  “One thing I never was, was bitter,” Mrs Flack announced.

  Then they sat for a moment to experience once again that delicious process of disembodiment and union.

  But time was passing. Mrs Jolley got up, brisk, good body that she was, and slapped her dainty gloves together.

  “Well,” she said, “it has been lovely, Mrs Flack. And now I must get back to that poor lady of mine.”

  And sniffed and smiled and blinked at once.

  At which her friend became her most dignified and formal. The classic gestures might have been detached from a frieze.

  “If you was ever to decide, we would consider this as your chair,” said Mrs Flack, laying two fingers and a ruby ring on an excessive bulge in the upholstery.

  Mrs Jolley could not bring herself to look, let alone comment. But the implications were understood.

  “It was the one He used to sit in after an early tea,” on this occasion Mrs Flack went so far as to confide. “He liked his comfort and an early tea. No one else will never ever have the use of that chair, without it is a certain trusted friend.”

  Yet Mrs Jolley had become far too agitated to decide. Her mouth, her gestures were unlike themselves. Two masters could have been contending for the strings. She was forced to reply:

  “I am expecting a letter that will help me give a straight answer on the future. You know how it is.”

  “Only the person herself knows how it is,” Mrs Flack said, and smiled.

  In the hands of Fate, and exhausted by conflict, Mrs Jolley held her head humbly and acceptant. She allowed herself to be led along the hall, past The Two Little Princesses with their Dogs, and a bloodhound that Mrs Flack herself had worked in wool while waiting for her late husband to propose.

  The two ladies seldom continued their conversation at parting, unless to consider briefly the prospects for rain or fine, and soon Mrs Jolley would be going down the street, still holding her head in a chastened way, like a communicant returning from the altar, conscious that all the ladies, in all the windows of all the homes, were aware of her shriven state. For there was no doubt friendship did purify.

  Although there was no more mention of Mrs Flack she was always there at Xanadu. Miss Hare could feel her presence. In certain rather metallic light, behind clumps of ragged, droughty laurels, in corners of rooms where dry rot had encouraged the castors to burst through the boards, on landings where wallpaper hung in drunken brown festoons, or departed from the wall in one long limp sheet, Mrs Flack obtruded worst, until Miss Hare began to fear, not only for her companion and housekeeper, at the best of times a doubtful asset, but, what was far more serious, for the safety of her property. So far had Mrs Flack, through the medium of Mrs Jolley, insinuated herself into the cracks in the actual stone. Sometimes the owner of Xanadu would wake in her lumpy bed and listen for the crash. Or would there be a mere dull tremendous flump as quantities of passive dust subsided?

  Either eventuality terrified Miss Hare.

  One night she got the hiccups, and the marble halls of Xanadu reverberated with the same distress. Glass tinkled as she wandered here and there, grazing with an arm or elbow. Lustre crashed somewhere in the drawing-room.

  “What are you up to, clumsy girl?” Mrs Jolley called. “Can’t I leave you for two minutes?”

  Already she was coming. Mrs Jolley would appear at crucial moments, now from above, it seemed, her detached soles smacking marble. She was carrying a lamp which flew through the darkness like a small bouquet of flowers. Mrs Jolley stood at last in the drawing-room holding her bunch of yellow flowers.

  “You are not to be trusted, you know,” said the reliable housekeeper, catching sight of the glittery fragments of the silver-lustre jug.

  “Aren’t they my own things?” the owner dared.

  “Oh, yes!” the housekeeper laughed. “They are your own things all right.”

  “And no one will take them from me?”

  “Not till you have smashed them all to smithereens. Home, too, it looks like. What will you do then? Camp out under the bunya bunya and count the raindrops?”

  “I have the hiccups,” said Miss Hare. “Or had, rather. I believe they have been cured.”

  Mrs Jolley’s little yellow bouquet shook.

  “It was the fright you got. You could set up and make your fortune throwing junk at all the hiccupers in creation.”

  The darkness was reeling under the attacks of Mrs Jolley’s mirth. Miss Hare, although cured of her hiccups, felt quite sick.

  “Mrs Jolley,” she began, “your FRIEND…”

  The formidable word seemed to thunder.

  But Mrs Jolley, wheezing inside her iron corset, had bent to retrieve the fragments of jug, and was making an icy music with them, as she swept them together over the floor. It was probable she had not heard the word. Nor did Miss Hare know how she would have continued if her housekeeper had.

  For, although Mrs Flack pervaded, she was nothing tangible.

  Then Mrs Jolley straightened up.

  “You will not leave me?” Miss Hare asked.

  The woman stood. It was as if she had discovered a swelling on her lip. It was most embarrassing.

  “In the dark I mean,” Miss Hare explained.

  “You was here before, wasn’t you?” Now Mrs Jolley’s voice quite clattered. “
Having the hiccups. And before that. And before that.”

  She appeared annoyed.

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Hare. “And shall be. If I am allowed. I shall throw back the shutter. I had forgotten the moon. I shall sit for a little. Quietly.”

  Soon there were a few planks of moonlight, in which she continued to rock long after Mrs Jolley had withdrawn. For much longer than she had anticipated the wanderer kept afloat, and by extraordinary management of the will always just avoided bumping against the shores of darkness. Other shapes threatened though, some of them dissolving at the last moment into good, some she was able to identify unhesitatingly as evil. In the misty silence, the two women, her tormentors-in-chief, let down their hair and covered their faces with veils of it. Their words were hidden from her. On the whole, she realized, she was unable to distinguish motives unless allowed to read faces.

  Towards morning Mrs Jolley appeared in the flesh, and wrenched the little tiller from the cold hands. As she joggled the boat in anger, dewdrops fell distinctly from all its protuberances.

  “You do hate me,” said Miss Hare, observing evil in person.

  The rescuer’s face was quivering with exasperation. The mouth had aged without its teeth, and should have proclaimed innocence, but words flickered almost lividly from between the gums.

  “I am only thinking of your health,” Mrs Jolley hissed. “I am responsible in a way, though do not know what possessed me to take it on.”

  Then evil is also good, Miss Hare understood.

  “But you have not yet enjoyed all the pleasure of tormenting me,” she was moved to remark.