‘What is it?’ it was now her turn to ask, as they stood together afterwards in the shed they had built, on the wet floors they had just scoured down.
But it was nothing of course. Except a desire that had never been fulfilled, to express himself in substance or words.
When, in the night, after the cans were scalded, and the big pans of subtle milk were standing in a row, and she had laid the dishes on their sides to drain, and he had done some accounts on a scrap of paper and got the final answer, then he sat with the piece of pencil in his mouth, waiting to fill an emptiness. The wind had died by now, though the cool it had brought still eddied and lapped. On hot evenings the house was compressed and mean; now it opened. The house was not excluded from the largeness of the cool night. The roof of the house was opening, so that the feverish stars were reflected in the pans of milk, and many other harmonies were proved, of skin and feather, of chair and bough, of air and needle.
For the man’s wife had taken wool, and the cool needle was weaving in and out. He watched her hand, and the old sock that she held on the wooden acorn. And she drew the wool together, sitting at the centre of the night. He watched, and they were indeed the centre, but precariously, and he wanted to be certain. This made him chew the little stub of pencil, and would have undoubtedly resulted in something final, if it was to have been given to him to express himself in this life. But it was not. Except sometimes he had formed the lines of prayers.
Then the woman put down the sock, because this velvet night was not to be resisted. She went and took her husband’s head and held it against her, as if now she did possess something. She rubbed her lips on his eyelids, that were set rather deep, scored his face with her lips, till she could begin to feel his skin answering. Till they were melting together in the night, and were led by the hand, mysteriously, glidingly, into darker rooms, in which the flesh of the bed was opening to receive.
In the cool of the released world, amongst the dreaming furniture, at the heart of the staggy rosebush that pressed into the room and wrestled with them without thorns, the man and woman prayed into each other’s mouths that they might hold this goodness forever. But the greatness of the night was too vast. The woman fell back finally, almost crying. And the man withdrew into his own fleshy body. He lay on their bed and touched what was almost a cage of bones, that his soul was beginning already to accept.
There was then, in the end, sleep, and work, and a warm belief in some presence. And sleep.
But the woman got up. She was recovering her identity. The woman, Amy Parker, went and leaned against the window frame, which received the shape of her body. All shapes, sounds, seemed to fit together in the quiet night. It was no longer vast, but familiar, the darkness moving with the intimacy of old owls that have nested years in the same place, the air stroking her skin like her own relaxed hand. She stood there some time, holding her full body, and could have continued well into the night, obsessed by wonder and contentment. Wondering if she would conceive the child that she knew by heart. Holding the slow throb of her heart in her folded arms.
Chapter 9
WHEN Amy Parker did finally have her baby, the neighbours moved their faces into all the correct positions of congratulation and approval, but of course it was quite an ordinary act. Many fruitful women were lying down and having babies regularly, after the laundry, or the baking, or a hot morning in church, and no fuss at all. But Amy Parker exalted her own act on the quiet. She walked about on the shady borders of the house, and now indeed she was the centre of the universe. Light converged on the white cocoon she was holding in her arms; the course of birds invested it with mystical importance as they hovered above it, almost, in fussy flight; flowers and leaves inclined above the head of the woman with the child or gave blessings with long, benevolent wands when there was a breeze.
‘It’ll be nice for you to have,’ said the postmistress, pressing her yellow thumb on a dry sponge. ‘Company, like. Is he good?’
‘Of course he is good,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Only sometimes he has the wind. And Friday he was upset. It was the heat. You know, the diarrhoea.’
‘Ah,’ said the postmistress, beneath her straight hat, in the tone of voice for other people’s problems, ‘there is something that you give them.’
‘Oh,’ said Amy Parker, ‘I know what you give them. And now he is all right. Oh yes, Mrs Gage, he’s a very healthy boy.’
He was the child of their bodies. She would unwrap him to look at his healthy nakedness. She called him Ray. It was a name that she had not thought of before, and had not heard used much, but it fitted itself to her mouth, and to the little, perfect boy, lying in the gold of the morning on the open bed. The sun glittered on his mouth and the first down of hair.
Now that the house was full of the warm, soft smell of the baby, the father of the child entered with greater diffidence. He performed quite a ceremony, humming to himself and stamping on the brick path to the kitchen, so that the clods of earth flew off his boots and made the fuchsias tremble. Then he went in arrogantly, or so it seemed, straight to where the baby lay, in a cot, or in his mother’s arms, and looked him straight in the face. To get it over. The baby returned the father’s stare but gave no glimpse of himself through his clear, shallow eyes. His glances and expressions were reserved for his mother. The cord between them had not been cut. He did not yet recognize and only tolerated his father, sensing perhaps the diffidence that shimmered between the man’s hard body and his own soft but also powerful one. He looked at his father with a grave arrogance of his own that was more convincing.
‘Seems to be doing all right,’ the father would say.
Then he would turn his back, glad of this release. Later on he would speak to him, he said, and teach him to make things. They would go off into the bush with axe or gun, and there would be many things to say. They would wipe the sweat from their faces, and drink cold water from their hands, returning at evening with the carcass of a fox that his boy had shot. Whether he would be able to convey to his son the quivering of his own soul on the brink of discovery remained to be seen. Or whether he would want to. He would perhaps suspect the flinty, inquisitive face of the sturdy boy.
‘You never touch him,’ said the mother. ‘I believe you don’t love him at all.’
Taking her baby that she alone could love enough.
‘What am I to do?’ he asked, offering his empty hands. ‘What can you do with a baby?’
A baby is an abstraction, still an idea, to which you have not yet had time to adjust your opinions and your habits.
‘What can you do?’ she said. ‘Why, you can eat him!’
She could have. She could not love him enough, not even by slow, devouring kisses. Sometimes her moist eyes longed almost to have him safe inside her again.
‘I’d put it down,’ said the father. ‘It can’t be healthy to maul it like that.’
‘What do you know?’ said the mother. ‘He’s safe enough with me.’
But ‘safe’ is an optimistic word. Her hands would withdraw from the child she had put to sleep, and already the future was growing in the house, making a tangle of the present. Already she was powerless.
The father and mother would sometimes watch the sleeping child, and in this way were united again, as they were not when he was awake. Released from this obsessive third life that they seemed to have created, the lives that they had lived and understood were plain as cardboard. Affection is less difficult than love. But the sleeping baby moved his head, and the parents were again obsessed by vague fear, the mother that she might not ride the storms of love, the father that he would remain a stranger to his son.
The clock ticked in the kitchen. It was an ugly clock, in dark marble, of which they had been proud in the beginning. As the little boy grew, firm and gilded, he would ask to be held up to the clock, to watch its progress. Then he would press his red mouth to the glass and drink the minutes, so that for a moment the ugliness was swallowed down, and the dim face of
the clock was outshone by the golden cheeks of the boy. One day, about the time when he had begun to run about with confidence and become a pest, the clock stopped for good, and it was about this time also that Amy Parker had her second child.
This time it was more difficult. What if I do not succeed? she had said, again remembering those children she had lost, and recoiling from her helpless and unreliable body. There were days when she had no strength. She grew yellow and repulsive, waiting for this baby, and she could feel the pity in her husband’s mouth pressed against the nape of her neck.
‘There’s no reason,’ he said, ‘why anything should go wrong. You had the boy.’
These were words that he had used before, so that she could only twist her lips into a stiff smile. She would take into her lap some preferably monotonous piece of work, or hold the boy’s cheek to her own, to burn some warmth into her skin. And she would wait for her husband to go away, because he was momentarily distasteful to her. She resented the veins in his strong arms.
With the withdrawal of his wife into her preoccupations, Stan Parker grew closer to the little boy. Quite often he dared to touch him, and once or twice looked deeply into the child’s eyes, as if in search of some country he could recognize. But the child laughed out of his clear face, and felt the stubble on his father’s chin, and screamed and wriggled with pleasure. By degrees the father got used to the boy, even forgot the child’s presence as he squatted to play with tins or stones or the black cakes of cow manure. The child grew dirtier away from his mother. If people had come to the farm, the kind of people who make such remarks, they might have said, He has a neglected look. But he was content and strong. And when he grew tired he slept. Once the father found him in a chaff bin and lifted him out like a warm and drooping cat, still sleeping, in a rain of golden chaff.
Not long after this the ugly clock in the kitchen stopped, and Amy Parker had her second child. They got a doctor from Bangalay. She was sick this time. But eventually she began to notice that everything was still in its place, and she got up, and was walking in her strange clothes with the new child, a rather fretful girl baby, wrapped in a shawl that her neighbour Doll Quigley had knitted for the little boy.
Again people came on the occasion of a birth, and drank tea, and exclaimed, and talked about themselves, and went. But Doll Quigley and her brother Bub would come and stand. They were like the furniture, or doorposts rather, their long wooden frames. Sometimes Doll nursed the baby, and the folds of the shawl hung from her long arms in long folds of carved wood, as if she were holding the child not according to her own instinct, but after some honest sculptor’s plan.
Then Amy Parker would take her baby and cry, ‘Doll, you are so awkward!’ And quickly mould the shawl along the lines of her own facile love.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Doll Quigley. ‘I was awkward. Mum always said.’ Rubbing together her empty hands, that made a rough sound of wood.
Quigleys seemed the antithesis of that fullness of love and summer which Amy Parker now sensed, herself all roundness and warmth as she held the baby in her arms, and the head of the little boy against her skirt. She was at last continuous. She flowed. Her large, full breasts had become insolent in fulfilment. She could not raise her eyes without an effort towards the forms of Doll and Bub.
Yet Doll Quigley was full of love. She would have suffered willingly if she had been asked. But she was not.
So she took a broom and swept crumbs and dust with long strokes from round the feet of Amy Parker, who frowned because the act was humble.
‘It’s all right, Doll,’ she said. ‘Leave it. I’m behind with everything, I know. But we’ll catch up.’
She frowned and looked out through the door at a shade of pepper trees, where Bub Quigley had run with her little boy. Now the simplicity of Bub was terrible, his bluish face on which the hair had not properly come, his mouth wandering after words. Now Amy Parker did not see what she had escaped, but knew there was something, and hated it.
‘Look,’ said Bub, ‘that is a leaf. See? But a skeleton leaf. You can look right through it. It’s like a sheep’s skeleton, or a cow, only this is a leaf. My sister says it is made of lace. Fancy, a lace leaf. From a lace tree.’
The little boy held the leaf to his eyes. He was beautiful.
Bub Quigley laughed to see.
‘I want it,’ said the little boy.
‘No,’ said Bub. ‘It’s my leaf. It’s my favourite thing.’
‘Ray,’ called the mother, ‘give the leaf, and come inside.’
‘I want it,’ said the little boy, who had begun to cry and jump. ‘I want. I want.’
His storm was violent.
‘We shall find another leaf, Bub,’ the sister said.
She had learned that things do not matter.
‘But this is the best leaf,’ said her brother.
It was of most curious, mysterious workmanship, which he kept in a book that had belonged to his grandfather, and which nobody read. He could not part with the leaf. Circles of mystery, beauty, and injustice expanded inside him, distorting his face. He began to whimper.
‘Oh dear,’ cried Amy Parker.
She went and struck her child, not to punish, but out of repugnance for Quigleys, and the little boy began to bellow and dropped the leaf on the ground.
‘There, Bub,’ said Doll.
‘It’s torn,’ he whimpered. ‘It’s all crumpled. It’s not any use now, not any more.’
He began to trail away, like an umbrella that somebody had crushed.
But Doll Quigley smiled, because there was nothing else she could do.
‘I’m sorry, Doll,’ whispered Amy Parker, though it seemed silly to whisper, and such a pandemonium, and what could she say. ‘He’s tired and cranky. And I must feed Baby, if you don’t mind.’
As she bundled Quigleys out of the yard she knew that very quickly it would all be over, and she the mistress.
Soon she was alone with her children, and not even her husband could have denied her sovereignty. Giving her breast to the little girl, she had forgotten her husband, who was out and about somewhere, doing the things that had to be done. His functions were remote as the baby sucked and the boy grew drowsy on the bed. If the father had come in at just this point, which fortunately he did not, the mother would have raised her shoulder to ward him off, to shield those acts of peacefulness and intimacy which were hers alone to watch, or bird trembling on a hollyhock. Nobody, of course, ever admitted any of this. The mother would often go and laughingly put the children in the father’s arms, making him accept that fatherhood of which he appeared diffident. These were gestures she could afford, because at such moments she realized she was strong. Sometimes, though, more particularly in the evening, when the children were sleeping and their empty clothes hung from lines in the kitchen, the wife rose from where the mother had sat and began turning in the room, wondering whether the father, who was also her husband, would still recognize her. Then it was his turn to laugh at diffidence. Often he ignored her nervous closeness, because he was tired or because of the sleeping children, who were his achievement, and now he was content to rest on this thought.
But the preponderance of strength was almost always hers. It flowed confidently from her breasts, and the frail body of the baby received something of this bland strength, and the little boy, calling to her from a dream, was comforted by a hand.
Once when the baby was fed, and Amy Parker was buttoning her blouse, and the little boy had taken his rest and was rubbing the sleep from his swollen eyes as he wriggled on the bed, there was the grating of somebody’s cart, someone that had come, and before long it was evident that this was Mrs O’Dowd.
‘Ah well, you are with your family, I perceive,’ said the neighbour woman with a kind of primness, turning her head even, and speaking east when it should have been north.
‘I am with them most hours of the day, and why not?’ said Amy Parker, who had by this time arranged her blouse.
‘No, an why not,’ said her friend. ‘If it’s breedun a person is up to, it takes their time, and no mistake, as I know meself, if only from the little pigs and calves.’
Amy Parker brought her friend right in, whom she had not seen for some time, though why, she did not know.
‘It is from one thing and another,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, herself guilty and anxious to explain. ‘He has been on it, for one. And then the house fell down, that we have been puttun up again these few month, with improvements, and paper on the best room. It is pretty enough for a honeymoon, but for that drunken bastard that I got. You will see. An roses on the paper. Then, you will observe, I have had the teeth taken from me. There was a travellun gentleman come round, with whom I took the opportunity to remove the stomps. All but one. I would not part with that bugger, not if me whole life depended on it. Not one more. My dear, you should’uv seen the blood, and the poor man with his boot against the wall, strainun like a bullock. Ah yes, it is terrible,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘So this is the little boy. He is growun fit to beat the corn. An the baby.’
Now Mrs O’Dowd, who had seen the boy when he was scarcely dry, was inclined to keep quiet for the girl, who had slipped past her, so to speak, for no reason that anybody could explain, though it may have been the teeth.
‘She is smaller than the boy,’ she said. ‘Though a little girl would perhaps be small.’
‘She is doing nicely,’ said the mother, again exploring the baby’s face.
‘An not of such a good colour. But that could well be the heat. We all take on a better colour when the autumn comes.’
So that Amy Parker began to resent the presence of a friend who could turn her child into a delicate one before her eyes.
‘Would you care for a piece of cake, Mrs O’Dowd, with your tea?’ she asked, still polite. ‘It’s a little stale, but this was a surprise. After all this time. You have caught me out.’
‘I want cake too,’ cried the little rosy boy.
‘An so you will have a piece,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘An a kiss from your auntie.’
The Tree of Man Page 14