The woman chafed the skin of her arms.
‘I got a picture I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘That’s her. It’s not took too good. But you can see. Of course, the French and the Belgiums are different, but you can see she’s a decent sort of girl.’
The woman, standing now in a chalky world of long perspectives, mercilessly exposed in the light of all human experience, examined the face of the charcootery bride. It was hopeful. With the confidence of love, it attempted to reveal any depths it had. The face had not yet received the fist.
‘What was her name?’ Amy Parker asked.
‘Whyvonne,’ said the Digger readily. ‘I could never get the rest.’
Amy Parker was very calm, though she shuddered for all crushed or mutilated birds. She continued to stare at the brownish photograph that the Digger held in his callused fingers, and at the man’s thick wrist with its hairs of dominant bronze.
‘One side of the shop,’ the Digger was saying, ‘they had a coupla little marble tables, where you could sit an have a drink. I used to go in. They have different drinks over there, all colours, and a kick in the pants. She was standin there. The boys had drawn on the tables, but she did not seem to notice these things. She came an sat down after a bit. She often sat with me, and it began to be taken for granted. It wasn’t exactly, I wouldn’t say, any fault of mine.’
But his eyes were less positive than his mouth. And Amy Parker, staring at the charcootery bride or the man’s wrist, could not help him. She asked for help herself. All that she had taken for granted trembled. Her miserable body waited for some touch of assurance.
‘You got a nice place here,’ he said, putting the picture in his pocket and buttoning it up, because the present is more important.
‘It is nothing much,’ she said, withdrawing a little into the shadow of the dahlias. ‘We made it. I have lived here most of my life.’
She could see the clear animal eyes of the inoffensive young man try perceptibly for a moment to look inside that life that she would not open for him.
‘Go on,’ he said, leaning more heavily on the fence and looking at the mysterious greenish flesh of her face, that the dahlias made, the big, heavy cushions of magenta dahlias rubbing and crowding her into their green gloom.
She could not breathe in the horrible stuffiness of fleshy green, so that she came out, and began to look up the road, and murmur about her children.
‘You got kids?’ he pondered between his lips.
When the shade was dragged away from her face he realized again that she was one of those women whom he passed in the street, or who sat opposite him in trams, with parcels, and whom he did not think about. They had reached an age of uniformity.
‘I have two,’ she said lightly. ‘They are growing bigger every day. Sometimes they are quite useful.’
The young man, she realized, would soon go. She was a strong figure in her white starched apron, except that, as she watched him with the detachment of a stranger releasing a stranger from further obligation of confidence, she saw the callousness of her son’s eyes, and something of his full mouth that she had frequently been driven to devour.
‘I gotta be goin,’ said the Digger. ‘Find those relatives of me mother’s.’
‘Good luck,’ she said in a clear voice, but it was obvious she was not used to those words.
When he had gone she went into the room in which her husband, ironic at being photographed, gave her an uneasy, proxy smile. She lay on the bed then, in her starched apron, and rubbed her arms against the crocheted quilt, and sank her neck in the pillow. Great unhappiness oppressed the wooden room, in which flies vibrated, and a big grey moth pressed itself like dead against a wall. Till she began to cry, whether it was for the charcootery bride, or her husband, or the aching afternoon. But that way she was emptied.
And when her children came in, and hovered, and began to ask what was the matter, she sat up, crumpled, and said that she had had a headache. They were convinced, and she saw then that the boy’s eyes were without that callousness which she had suspected, they were the eyes of her husband, so that she was filled with renewed gentleness and hope.
In time Stan Parker did come home. Through some postal delay he was unannounced, and walked down the road carrying his pack and the helmet he had brought for the boy, and came in about that same time of day the young Digger had passed, early afternoon, and said, ‘Well, I got here, Amy, at last.’
Because it was unexpected, and she had been engaged on one or two jobs of urgency and importance, his wife gave him quite a small kiss, which was different from what she had imagined and rehearsed, and began almost at once to tell him about a hinge that had come loose on a door, and by which she had become obsessed in her unsuccessful efforts to screw it tight.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll see about it. But later. There’s plenty of time now. For everything.’
There was, it seemed, on that afternoon. The house stood open. Great carpets of golden light were spread on the floors. Bees passed through the windows and out the other side of the peaceful house, in which the man and woman had sat and begun to look at each other.
‘You’ll have to tell me all about it,’ she said shyly as he sat drinking the tea she had poured, and making noises because it was still too hot.
He pulled his mouth down in defence. ‘Give us a chance,’ he said.
But she did not intend to hold him to it.
She was not, in fact, interested. She believed only in the life they had lived together, and would now begin to live again, when she had got used to the different man, her husband, read the new lines in his face, and generally reassured herself by touch. Only at the moment his eyes were coming between them.
‘All those letters we wrote,’ he said, ‘we shall be rid of all that. It’s a waste of time. But what can you do?’
‘I have them,’ she said, picking at the cloth. ‘I like them.’
‘It doesn’t do to keep old letters,’ he said. ‘It’s morbid. You start reading back, and forget that you have moved on. Mother was a great one for that. She had a drawerful of old letters. They had changed colour.’
Because he had given this brown-skinned, opaque woman, who was also his wife, bits of himself that were secret, laying himself open in the night, he was now uneasy. Because he had revealed himself, he found her a stranger. She put up walls round her knowledge, and sat smiling at the tablecloth, and you could not tell. Her hair had begun to fade, but her face was still bright, whether beautiful or irritating he could not at that moment decide.
Then he stirred his tea again, and from the round red eddies of tea contentment began to radiate. She sat opposite him, smelling of scones and permanence. There would be every opportunity to learn her off by heart.
‘How are the kids?’ he asked, to break the silence.
‘They’re good,’ she said. ‘They’re leggy now. Thelma puts her hair up sometimes for fun. Then she looks real grown-up. But she’s too sorry for herself. She’s got that asthma. Oh, she’ll be all right, I suppose. She’ll have to go from here. And Ray. They’ll both go. Ray is a strong boy. Violent sometimes. He has a temper. Ray could do anything if he wanted to. Or burn the house down in a fit of temper. He doesn’t like to be messed about. He won’t let you touch him. I could love Ray, Stan, if he would let me. I could make him into something, but he is ashamed of gentleness.’
The father did not reveal that he no longer believed anything can be effected by human intervention. Instead, he listened with foreboding to the tale of the children he still had to meet. He burned his mouth with the tea, and looked across at his wife, animated by her love for their children, and realized she was the stronger for her knowledge of them. He would look to her to do something. She would stand between them. So he felt better.
So the afternoon was passing, towards the return of the children, and the procession of the cows. The man and woman began to look at each other with less strain and more compassion. He was glad now that he h
ad opened the secret cupboards of himself on all their contents. The woman was no longer ashamed to touch her husband’s hand, which she had wanted to do for some time. Now she took it and looked at it as it lay, and chafed it with her own burning one, and bound it to her again with the bones of her fingers. So they were reunited at last. Their mouths and their souls were open to each other. They could not press closer than they did, their closed eyes admitting no barrier of flesh to this complete mingling.
That night, after the shynesses and the standing about, they were all laughing in the lamplight of the kitchen, for no great reason but their happiness, and this laughter overflowed the house into the world of moonlight and sculpture, of white horses and solid trees, of water-tanks and headless birds, that a big moon had fixed there. The children, who were getting to know their father, laughed for silly things, and for the sake of laughter. By this time they were exhausted really, but a feverishness held them upright. The sturdy boy, his head almost lost in a German helmet, wondered whether he could clown some more and get away with it. The thin girl stood shaking back her annoying plaits and twisting a celluloid armlet that she had exchanged with another girl for a brooch in the shape of a dog’s head.
Stan Parker almost asked the ages of his children, before realizing he should not have forgotten. The little girl had moments of solemn maturity.
‘Thel’ll be taking a boy before we have come to our senses,’ he said, half to himself.
‘Whatever will you come out with next?’ the mother said. ‘We haven’t finished school yet.’
‘I hate boys,’ said the girl, twisting her thin neck. ‘I shan’t marry never ever.’
‘Never ever,’ chanted the boy, who was astride a chair, so that he could rest his head on the back, and yet it would not appear evident. ‘I wouldn’t marry, I want to do something. I want to ride in a race or walk across Australia. Do you know there’s water in the roots of some trees, and you can pull up the roots and suck the water, if you know which trees? That’s what the blacks do. I could be an explorer perhaps. Or a boxer. I can fight with my hands. There’s a boy called Tom Quodling that I gave a bashing to, because he wouldn’t give up a marble that he said he would if I won, and I did. So I took the marble. It was a green taw.’
‘Now you are talking silly,’ said the mother. ‘It is time you went to bed.’
‘Oh, whhhyyy!’ grumbled the boy, rubbing his sleepy head on the chair.
‘I said why.’
‘Boys are all silly,’ said the girl.
She stood in a corner, holding an elbow behind her back, and the hour had left her pale skin greenish. She was frail, but possibly capable of great virulence. She liked secrets. She exchanged secrets with other girls. She even wrote them down in a book, which she kept locked in a trinket box, of which the key was hidden. She would have liked a piano on which to practise the pieces she had learned from the postmistress, but as there was no piano at home, the cracked and metallic themes that she brought home from the post office remained in her head, and she would hum them to herself sometimes with a thin and superior air of secrecy.
‘Boys are loopy,’ she said, swinging her body from side to side, and speaking as if she had to repeat this opinion before her father to leave it on record forever.
‘I’ll kick yon,’ said the scowling boy, placing the same emphasis on each word.
How could they hate enough? As this was not evident, they were frustrated by their hatred, except during moments of indifference or sleep.
‘Now we have had enough of this,’ said the father, who had to do something, they were his children, he told himself again with a qualm. ‘This is a day of peace, isn’t it?’
They looked at him incredulously, at the strange man who was also their father, and began to slide off towards their beds, disguised by masks of love. The peacefulness of the night did, in fact, begin to insinuate itself into the house, till they were bound by this more than by the father’s words. The boy yielded up his mouth to his mother, who drank his kiss with such ease that she began to wonder if what she had done was not shameful, and went out, shutting the door. The little girl looked out of the window for a time without noticing the beauty of the night, because she was obsessed by the problem of herself. She fetched a little bottle of French scent that her father had brought her and smelled it several times. Only then was she drenched with peace and beauty. The mystical flower of her face shone in the mirror as she said her prayers from behind the long, unopened bud of her hands. She prayed, arranging relationships, as she had been taught, into the categories of love. Then, when she had disposed of these, she got into bed and dreamed of herself walking down the long corridors of anxious music and sleep.
The days after war unfolded slowly but headily at Durilgai. Stan Parker went about his work again. Many people did not know yet that he had come, some did not care, some had forgotten who this man was. A few looked at him for the first time and resented his intrusion on the edges of their recently acquired property. But he was not disturbed by any of this. He went about. His head was sometimes sunk, as if peace were too heavy. He was older, of course. He began to put on weight. He was a heavy man, whose muscles would become gnarled soon. But he was still in his prime. He could toss a bag of feed on to his shoulder without much effort, and carry it against the grey stubble of his burned neck.
He was a grey man now, of strength, but also great mildness. His eyes were lost in hopefulness. He had already observed the behaviour of ants, the flight of hawks, calves moving in the belly, men calculating money and thinking about death, observed these in some detail and with the greatest accuracy, but from the dream state of the sleeper, in which he was slowly stirring and from which he would one day look out perhaps and see. So he went about, and for the moment was a bit lost. In the early mornings, when the cloth clung to his legs with dew, and the mists lay, and the spiders’ webs on the taller grasses raised their little targets by the paddockful, blurring things, fact and promise, dream and object, were fused in the same half-world. Even when the sun came up, a bit ragged at first, but red, then breaking through the cobweb of mist, slapping the light across the land by strong acres, standing the trees up solid in the blaring unequivocal light, it was difficult for Stan Parker to look altogether convinced. In that peacetime he was still diffident of accepting anything as solid, factual, or what is called permanent. Much had to be proved. Only he could prove it.
Doll Quigley came soon after he returned. Miss Quigley, as she was called now by all but those who had known her as a scrawny girl, without her shoes for greater ease. Doll had not changed much. She had been born old-young, or had grown young-old. Her dignity was as simple as her grey dress. It was a long, straight dress, of what material or ornamentation you did not notice, only that it covered her and was a decent garment. She wore a brooch too, of enamel perhaps, of some small design that people would never look into. But it was there under her long throat, of which the sandy skin had grown somewhat goitrous. Still, they would not notice that, except the fascinated children. It was the face of Doll that mattered.
‘I brought these,’ she said, shading herself with her long, sandy hand.
There were some little yellow rock-cakes in a box.
‘They are a change,’ she said, or hoped.
Grains of sugar glittered on Doll’s crude cakes. She offered these with her second long hand, on which the pollards had dried, and of which one finger had gone in a chaff-cutting machine.
‘Thanks, Doll. They look all right,’ he said, taking the awkward yellow cakes.
The man and the woman were all awkwardness as they stood in the light of. exchange and inquiry. She continued to shade her eyes with her hand. Her slow, sandy words slid through the waters of time, till he was standing on the edge of the river at Wullunya, and many smooth, miraculous, quite complete events of his youth flowed by. That is what Doll Quigley put into his hands on the morning of the cakes. She put completeness.
‘Well,’ he said after a whil
e, ‘why are we standing? Won’t you come in?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to tell from here.’
She would not ask about his wounds and his medal as other people did.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The fowls is layin. I have turkeys now, you know. Fine young poults.’
And smiled. She had clear pale eyes that had not yet recognized evil.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m glad you come back, Stan. I knew you would. I prayed for it.’
What was the secret which, he sensed, he might share with this woman? Their souls almost mingled, as well as their lives.
But the cakes were jostling in his hands, in the frail box in which she had put them. So that awkwardness returned, and he thanked her for her prayers; there was not much else he could have done.
After that Amy Parker came out with some signs of amusement. She was looking very handsome that morning, so that he should have admired her. But at this moment he was disturbed. There was something he had to protect.
Soon afterwards Doll Quigley said good-bye and returned to her brother, her turkeys, and her fowls.
‘What is that?’ Amy Parker asked and peered.
‘She brought these,’ he said, because he was forced to show the dedicated cakes.
‘Well, I never,’ said his wife. ‘Doll’s old rock-cakes. A lump of raised-up pollard, I bet.’
She had seen the cakes, but she had not seen his hurt, or she might have been pleased. He was a boy on the back doorstep, awaiting further developments.
Amy Parker took the cakes, it was natural that she should, and he heard them landing in a tin, too quickly and too hard.
‘Poor old Doll,’ his wife said. ‘She’s a good old thing. Fancy baking those cakes. She wouldn’t have dared tell me. I expect she’s sweet on you, Stan, like these old maids get on some man.’
He heard her rubbing her hands together to get the crude sugar off, that clung.
But Stan Parker continued to think of Doll Quigley, her still, limpid presence that ignored the stronger, muddier currents of time. It was through ignorance perhaps. Or else the purposes of God are made clear to some old women, and nuns, and idiots. At times Stan Parker was quite wooden in his thick bewilderment. Then for a moment he would be laid open, as he was by Doll Quigley’s glance. He would begin then, watching his own hands as they did things, or he would remember the face of an old woman in a shattered church, or a tree that had been blasted, putting on its first, piercing leaves.
The Tree of Man Page 26