So she trailed now. But frowning for her husband. She had no intention of announcing her return. But would let him come to her, out of the shadows, and kiss her on a dimple, or the nape of her neck.
But she could not stop frowning. It was for Marge now, who had kept on not exactly looking at her. Somehow sideways. Sort of peculiar. All through that lousy picture.
So Mrs Rosetree frowned her way into the bathroom. She had very little confidence, not even in her own breath, but would gargle every so often.
The bathroom was lighter, of course, than the other rooms, because it was full of glass, as well as the translucence of pastel plastic. But brittler, too. And constricted. With the window shut, the airlessness would sometimes make a person choke.
All of a sudden Mrs Rosetree could have felt a cord tighten round her throat. She began to scream, right down, it seemed, to the source of breath. Site was ballooning with it.
“Aacccchhhh!” she screamed.
Then held back what remained. To force out the words when she had mustered them.
She did moan a little, in between.
“Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ!”
For the forgotten tendernesses. But her shame hung too heavy. Its bulk bumped against her.
“Du! DU!” she was shouting at the tiles. “Du verwiester Marnser!”
Mrs Rosetree was running through the house, forgetful of the furniture she knew. One particularly brutal chair struck her in a private place. She kicked free once, hobbled by the soft shadows, or a fox cape.
And reached the garden, a place of malice, which she had always hated, she realized, for its twigs messing her hair, spiders tossed down her front, and the voices of the goyim laughing for no reason, at a distance, through redundant trees.
“Hilfe! Hilfe! Hören Sie!” Mrs Rosetree was imploring quite hysterically by the time she reached the photinia hedge. “Mein verrückter Mann hat sich. …”
Colonel Livermore’s emaciated face was shocked by such lack of control.
Mrs Rosetree remembered as quickly as she had forgotten.
“Colonel,” she said, “I am terribly distressed. You will forgive, Colonel Livermore. But my husband. If you will do me the favour, please, to come. My hubby has hung hisself. In the bathroom. With the robe cord.”
“Great Scott!” cried Colonel Livermore, and started to climb through the photinias. “In the bathroom!”
Fleetingly, Mrs Rosetree feared it might have been a lapse of taste.
“My husband was nervous, Colonel Livermore. He was sick. Yoÿ-yoÿ! Nobody is to blame. It was never ever anybody’s fault when the mind was sick. Eh?”
Unless the fault of that old Jew who came. Shulamith remembered. Before darkness slapped her in the face with a bunch of damp leaves.
“Nein!” she moaned, right from the depths, and continued protesting from some region her companion had never suspected, let alone entered. “There is also the power of evil, that they tell us about in the beginning – oh, long! long! – and we forget, because we are leading this modern life – until we are reminded.”
Colonel Livermore was relieved that his wife had gone for the day to cousins at Vaucluse, thus avoiding such a distasteful experience. He, who hated to be touched, could feel the rings of the hysterical Jewess eating into his dry skin. So he was borne along, detached, a splinter stuck in the scented flesh of darkness.
The night was whirling with insects and implications. His wooden soul might have practised indefinite acceptance, if the brick steps had not jarred him from the toes upward, back into his human form. The woman, too, was jolted back to reason. This return made them both, it seemed, top-heavy, and as they mounted the steps, they were jostling each other with their shoulders and elbows, almost knocking each other down.
“Excuse me, Colonel!” Mrs Rosetree laughed, but coughed it away.
Rejuvenated by some power unidentified, she was becoming obsessed by a need for tidiness.
“So many little details arise out of a sudden death in the family,” she had to explain. “I must ring Mr Theobalds. Must come over. Put me in the picture. It is only right. Only practical. With two young kids. To show where I stand.”
So the details accumulated, and the blood was distending their fingers, but finally there was no reason for delaying their entry into the house of the man who had hanged himself.
XVI
From where he was lying the window contained nothing but sky, and he was content with that. Around the frame the bare walls, white once, and still presentable in spite of flies, did not detract from the abstraction which the faulty glass perpetuated. Details were added in certain lights: a burst of little colourless bubbles would emerge, to imprint their chain of craters on the landscape of hitherto unblemished blue, which was swelling, moreover, with rosy hillocks, and invested with depressions of mauve. Sometimes he was forced to set to work on what he saw someone else had failed to finish. His Adam’s-apple would move with unconscious arrogance as he surveyed the composition, and added from memory flat masses of the red earth, or a faint wash of the salad-coloured foliage that belonged along the river banks of Numburra. He passed his days in this way, and might have felt happy, if it had not been for his physical inertia, and the knowledge that he still had to commit himself. Then he would begin to torture the quilt. Mrs Noonan’s quilt was turned to lint anywhere within reach of his fingers.
Dubbo had not returned to Rosetree’s factory after the Easter closure. If it had not been for other, catastrophic events, someone might have come in search of him, but in the circumstances, he was left alone, forgotten. Which accorded well enough with his intentions. Often in the past he had left a job in order to work. To have discovered the reason would have made them laugh their heads off. If only for a moment or two. As soon as they had spat the phlegm out, they would have turned, of course, and continued tending the machinery of labour. But his cult of secrecy had always protected him from ridicule. And now, more than ever, even the walls of silence were suspect.
Already on the second day after he had taken to his bed – in preparation for the plunge, he persuaded himself, to avoid dwelling on his helplessness – there had been a knocking at the door, and he had scrambled up resentfully to open.
It was Mrs Noonan, the landlady herself. Which had never happened before.
He scowled at her through the crack.
“Ah,” she said, and smiled; she was one of the sandy things, and shy.
“I got it inter me head like, yer might be feelin’ bad. I got a potta tea goin’,” she explained. “If yer would care for a cuppa tea, it has not stood all that long.”
Her scaly eyelids were flickering, he saw, like those of sandy hens.
“No,” he answered, brutally.
“Ah, well,” said Mrs Noonan.
Flickering and smiling.
When she was once more received into the darkness of the hall, he ran to the edge of the landing, and called out over the banisters:
“I gave my job away. I’ve got other business now. For several days. I’ve gotta be left private.”
“Ah,” her voice floated up. “Business.”
And he knew from the sound that her mouth would be wavering on the sandy smile.
“Thank you,” he called, rather woody, as an afterthought.
But she must have gone away already.
That probability desolated the man stranded on the landing, and he soon went back into his room. He sat on the stretcher. He did not at once lie down, and for several days there recurred to his inward eye the shape of Mrs Noonan’s floating smile.
On the morning of the fifth day, his melancholy was so intense, his guts so shrivelled, his situation so unresolved, he got up with determination, and went out into the streets. He drank a pint of milk at the Sicilian’s, bought two pounds of tomatoes, and a packet of bacon. A bland, almost autumnal light had simplified the architecture of Barranugli to the extent that its purposes could no longer be avoided. All the faces in the streets were expectant d
own to the last pore.
So Dubbo saw, and knew that he had reached the point of compulsion. On returning to Mrs Noonan’s, his spirit was running ahead of him, while his cold hand slowly advanced over certain welts on the handrail, which had come to mark the stages in his progress up the stairs.
When he arrived, the empty room was full of the yellowest light. The tawny plane tree in the yard below tossed up bursts of green with the flat of its leaves. The wind-screen of a lorry flashed. So that his eyes became pacified by the assistance he was all at once receiving. He began to arrange things with the precision that was peculiar to him. He cleaned the already clean brushes. He ate into a tomato, and some of the golden juice trickled down as far as his chin. He ate a couple of the pink rashers, chewing with teeth that had remained strong and good, and swallowing the laces of rind.
Only then he brought out the first of the two canvases which he had bought months before, in anticipation. Of more commanding surface than the boards of ply or masonite which he normally used, the blank canvas no longer frightened him.
He took his time preparing the surface, soothed by the scent of shellac with which he was anointing the colourless waste, preoccupied by the proportions of the picture he intended to paint. These suddenly appeared so convincing, so unshakeably right, they might have existed many years in his mind. Behind the superficial doubts, and more recent physical listlessness, the structure had been growing. Now his fingers were reaching out, steely and surprising. Not to himself, of course. He was no longer in any way surprised. But knew. He had always known.
Dubbo was unaware how many days he had been at work. The act itself destroyed the artificial divisions created both by time and habit. All the emotional whirlpools were waiting to swallow him down, in whorls of blue and crimson, through the long funnel of his most corrosive green, but he clung tenaciously to the structure of his picture, and in that way was saved from disaster. Once on emerging from behind the barricade of planes, the curtain of textures, he ventured to retouch the wounds of the dead Christ with the love that he had never dared express in life, and at once the blood was gushing from his own mouth, the wounds in the canvas were shining and palpitating with his own conviction.
After that he rested for a bit. He could have allowed himself to be carried off on any one of the waves of exhaustion. But his prickly eyelids refused him such a suave release.
Towards the end of that day, he rose, dipped his face in the basin, and when he had shaken the water out of his eyes, was driven again to give expression to the love he had witnessed, and which, inwardly, he had always known must exist. He touched the cheek of the First Mary quite as she had wiped his mouth with the ball of her handkerchief as he lay on the lino the night at Mollie Khalil’s. Her arms, which conveyed the strength of stone, together with that slight and necessary roughness, wore the green badges of all bruised flesh. As he painted, his pinched nostrils were determined to reject the smell of milk that stole gently over him, for the breasts of the immemorial woman were running with a milk that had never, in fact, dried. If he had known opulence, he might have been able to reconcile it with compassion. As it was, such riches of the flesh were distasteful to him, and he began to slash. He hacked at the paint to humble it. He tried to recall the seams of her coat, the hem of her dress, the dust on her blunt shoes, the exact bulge below the armpit as she leaned forward from her chair to wipe his mouth. Perhaps he succeeded at one point, for he smiled at his vision of the Mother of God waiting to clothe the dead Christ in white, and almost at once went into another part of the room, where he stood trembling and sweating. He thought he might not be able to continue.
On and off he was bedevilled by that fear. He would go out into the streets. He bought food, and ate it, sometimes standing at a street corner, tearing at the carcase of one of the synthetic, delicatessen chickens, or picking distractedly at little grains of pink popcorn. While all the time men and women were lumbering past, pursuing their own, heavy lives.
Almost always he would leave his room when the light had gone. At night the streets of the model town were practically deserted, all its vices put away; only an emptiness remained, and a sputtering of neon. As he hurried along in his sandshoes, beneath the tubes of ectoplasm, the solitary blackfellow might have been escaping from some crime, the frenzy of which was still reflected in his eyeballs and the plate glass. It drove him past the courts of light, where the judges were about to take their places on the blazing furniture, and past the darkened caves, in which plastic fern lay wilting on grey, marble slabs. So he would arrive at outer darkness, crunching the last few hundred yards along a strip of clinker, which could have been the residue of all those night thoughts that had ever tortured dark minds.
After such a night, and a delayed dawn, he got up to wrestle with the figure of the second woman, whose skeleton huddled, or curled, rather, at the foot of the tree. Once he might have attempted to portray a human desperation in the hands preparing to steady the feet of their dead Lord. But since he had ruffled the coat of darkness, his mind was shooting with little, illuminating sparks. Now he began to paint the madwoman of Xanadu, not as he had seen her in her covert of leaves beside the road, but as he knew her from their brief communion, when he had entered that brindled soul subtly and suddenly as light. So he painted her hands like the curled, hairy crooks of ferns. He painted the Second Mary curled, like a ring-tail possum, in a dreamtime womb of transparent skin, or at centre of a whorl of faintly perceptible wind. As he worked, his memory re-enacted the trustful attitudes of many oblivious animals: drinking, scratching or biting at their own fur, abandoning themselves to grass and sun. But he painted the rather strange smile on the mouth of the fox-coloured woman from remembering a flower that had opened under his eyes with a rush, when he had not been expecting it. His vanity was flattered by his version of this Second Servant of their Lord. The risk of spoiling did not prevent him touching and touching, as he wrapped the bristled creature closer in the almost too skilful paint, or visual rendering of wind. There she was, harsh to the eye, but for all her snouted substance, illuminated by the light of instinct inside the transparent weft of whirling, procreative wind.
Dubbo added many other details to his painting, both for his own pleasure, and from the exigencies of composition. He painted flowers, a fierce regiment, the spears and swords of flowers, together with those cooler kinds which were good to lay against the burning skin. He painted the Godbold children, as he had sensed them, some upright with horror for the nightmare into which they had been introduced, others heaped, and dreaming of a different state. There were the workers, too, armed with their rights, together with doubts and oranges. There was the trampled blue of fallen jacaranda. There was the blue showing between the branches of the living tree, and on those same branches, a bird or two, of silent commentary.
The Christ, of course, was the tattered Jew from Sarsaparilla and Rosetree’s factory. Who had, it was seen, experienced other lives, together with those diseases of body and mind to which men are subject. If Dubbo portrayed the Christ darker than convention would have approved, it was because he could not resist the impulse. Much was omitted, which, in its absence, conveyed. It could have been that the observer himself contributed the hieroglyphs of his own fears to the flat, almost skimped figure, with elliptical mouth, and divided, canvas face, of the Jew-Christ.
Although the painter could not feel that he would ever add the last stroke, a moment came when he threw his brush into a corner of the room. He groped his way towards the bed, and got beneath the blanket as he was. There he remained, shut in a solid slab of sleep, except when he emerged for a little to walk along the river bank, beside the Reverend Timothy Calderon. But drew away from the rector, who continued mumbling of eels, and sins too slippery to hold. So that, in the end, the figures were waving at each other from a distance. They continued waving, to and back, separated, it seemed, by the great, transparent sinlessness of morning. Joyful parrots celebrated, and only that Alfwheraryou could no
t have borne their playful beaks, would have entered, and sat picking, inside his cage of ribs.
He woke then, with mixed fears and smiles. It was night, and he could not feel the grass, but worked his body deeper in the bed, to widen the hole if possible, for protection. Comfort did not come, and he lay there shivering and whinging, frightened to discover he had remained practically unchanged since boyhood. Only his visions had increased in size, and he had overcome a number of the technical problems connected with them.
The painting of his Deposition left Dubbo as flat as bore water. Water might have been trickling through his veins, if a brief haemorrhage experienced at this stage had not reminded him of the truth. He had very little desire for food, but continued to make himself eat, to be prepared for possible events. In the meantime, he would lie and suck his finger-joints. Or hold his elbows, tight. His strength was reduced by now, except when his imagination rose to meet some conjunction of light and colour in the window, in that always changing, but unfinished, abstraction of sky.
Then, on a yellow morning of returning summer, when the black lines between tile floor-boards were pointing towards him, and the window-panes were temporarily unable to contain the blaze, he found himself again regretting that large drawing they had stolen while he was at Hannah’s. Because he had grown physically incapable of hating, his capacity for wonder led him to embrace objects he had refused to contemplate until now. So he would examine the face of Humphrey Mortimer, for instance, with the same interest that he might have brought to bear on a flock of pastured maggots, or block of virgin lard. Everything, finally, was a source of wonder, not to say love. Most wonderful was the Jew’s voice heard again above the sound of the cistern and the wash-room tap:
Riders In the Chariot Page 57