Much as he disliked Bangalay, this was worse, and he would escape soon, walking up the road in long pants, to stand at a corner with other youths, or often at the signpost, waiting for the time to pass, or something come.
They had taken a room for him at Bangalay in the house of an old Mrs Northcott, whose husband, now dead, had been a railway official. It was a small, decent house, thickly pasted with brown paint. It had an elderbush on one side, and a smell of sink water. On that side, opening on to the blank wall of the next house, but with some light of shifting elder leaves, was Ray Parker’s room. It was very private, which suited him well enough, as he was at that time shy, and would not have entered windows if they had existed. As it was, the blank wall acted as a screen on which his dream life was played, and at the same time screened his naked acts. Sometimes he would lean at the window, smoking a slack cigarette that he had rolled himself, and consider on the blank, but in a way responsive wall, whether some girl, preferably of a class superior to his own, might not have the coolness, the directness, the experience that he desired but also feared. He would stand there, absorbed in the porous surface of the wall, half-closing his eyes to the upward smoke, and breathing rather greedily and uglily through one corner of his mouth, as he had seen smoking men do.
Life at Mrs Northcott’s was predominantly brown. It was the kind of furniture, and that wall, and Mum Northcott’s face, she had always been one of the brown-skinned women. But the boy did once wake from a dream of great beauty and tenderness, which he tried to remember, but could at first only sense. He had been sitting at a table, at least, he believed, a simple table of white deal. Faces were opening to him, though which faces he could not tell. And there was a clock face that he could accept, like all things, on trust. Awake, he lay and looked at the hard washstand with its set of involved china, and wondered whether he should condemn the beautiful and trustful simplicity of his dream.
Finally he got up angrily out of the sheets that were holding him back, and thrust off that vision of goodness that he had been contemplating. Putting on his clothes, he condemned his parents for those of their virtues that he had glimpsed. He must eventually bruise his parents, so he was furious with them as he brushed his stiff hair, remembering his mother looking through the window for a solution to some problem, and his father wrestling with words as if they had been tangled nets. He threw down the brush. He was still too young to have seen his parents’ vices. There was nothing that he could forgive.
He went out to a dark, brown, outer kitchen, or breakfast-room, where Mum Northcott had his breakfast for him, a dark, brown chop with some vegetable that had been warmed up.
‘Well, Mum,’ he said, throwing his arms and legs about coltishly, to convince himself of his independence, ‘did you sleep good?’
‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I had the stones again. They was with me all night, I slept terrible. I got up and warmed some plates to hold on me side.’
‘What you want is a hot-water bottle,’ he said.
But she did not answer that; she would want to think about it for some time.
Mum Northcott had the gallstones. She sighed a great deal. She was a rather lonely, if mean, old woman. To help out the savings of her husband the official, now dead, she took in a little washing as well as a boarder. But the arthritis in her hands would not allow her to do much.
She had grown fond of this boy, which he had allowed, for sentimental attachments are easier to maintain than relationships which demand love. His mother might have devoured him, if allowed, but the gallstones and the aches of her bones must predominate in the last years of this old woman’s life.
‘You want to take care of yourself,’ he said, ‘and not do too much, and have a lay down after dinner.’
Nobody was listening, and it did not cost anything to say. He sat picking his teeth after meat, and even began to believe in his own concern for Mum Northcott’s health. His callousness softened a little. He felt creeping over him that nostalgia for what he would destroy. There were times when he did almost cry for his mental destruction of his parents. If he had been rich he would have gone out and bought them things. As he was not, he patted the old woman’s back with the flat of his hand and smiled that affectionate smile which was only in the experimental stages of its evolution.
Mum Northcott sighed and grumbled. She enjoyed the touch of the young man, who might have been her son, and was not.
‘It is all very well laying down,’ she grumbled, through the startling hair of her otherwise unremarkable face, ‘but there’s the dust, the dust is accumulating all the time, and fluff too. I don’t know where the fluff comes from in a house.’
He did not care to inquire into the origin of this phenomenon. He did not, in fact, care much about the problems of other people, and fortunately nobody had thrust them on him yet. Still, he was generous that morning, and wondered what he could do, and took the towel to dry the dishes as the old woman drew them from the water.
He wondered what he could do further to advertise that generosity which at times he possessed in theory. Then he remembered the banknote he had seen in a cookery book in Mum Northcott’s drawer, laid between the pages and obviously forgotten. Presently, when the old woman had taken the additional problem of her constipation out to the lavatory at the back, Ray Parker had a look and found that the note was still there. It was quite cold and unlike money, like all money that has been let he too long away from contact with the human body. So he took the note and put it in his pocket, where it recovered its purpose with warmth, and became his.
That evening Ray Parker brought home a hot-water bottle in a pink flannel cover that he had bought for Mum Northcott.
‘There y’are, Mum,’ he said. ‘Slap it on the gallstones, and it will do them good. Leave the water loose, though.’
Mum Northcott, who was sitting with a Mrs Pendlebury, her friend who had come in, was touched to the extent that her brown and crinkled face began to nod foolishly.
Mrs Pendlebury said, of course, that it was the act of a son.
Then Ray went into his room to luxuriate for a little in his simple act, which was not reprehensible really, and gave pleasure. That he had kept the change and would go to the pictures later on in his best clothes detracted only a little from the virtue of his original generosity. Virtue is, anyway, frequently in the nature of an iceberg, the others parts of it submerged.
So he went out, still virtuous, into the street in which the lights had formed, disguising with their blaze the dearth of life. He stood around for a bit, sucking a lolly, then collected with other people at the picture show. It delivered them. Horses’ feet were beating on the face of boredom, and the patent-leather lips sucked them down. Ray Parker adopted several of the positions of oblivion in his cooperative chair, but when he went out the loneliness came on, and that desire to exchange his identity with something tangible.
Later that night, underneath some pepper trees, at the back of a livery stable, he touched the jumper of a girl wearing her first high-heeled shoes, who smelled like a slut, and was, who breathed and trembled a good deal, but who was willing for the darkness to accomplish most things. When it was accomplished she ran off, crying for her loss. So that he too trembled. He shrank for a moment into a boy and went away, treading through the soft dung of horses.
When he got in, changed, half-exalted, half-afraid, the old woman called to him from her broken sleep, ‘Is that you, Ray?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ he said, swaggering at himself a bit in the hall, in front of a bamboo hatstand, on which a hat of the late official still hung.
‘Be a good boy,’ she said, ‘and put out the billy for the milk.’
Her voice trailed off into relief and sleep. Her belief in his goodness was confirmed by his presence.
But later in his room, after he had hung the billy on the hook and heard it settle, clinking in the starlight, he was displeased with his youth’s face, that did not seem to proclaim his recent act with any conviction bu
t had gone soft and vulnerable.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and began nervously to nick at the leg of the little bedside table with a knife he had, and to wonder whether he would ever shake off that part of himself which was rooted in memories, of sunlight in the cracks of boards, of quinces rotting in the long grass, of rising from the chaff bin and scattering the sleep from his eyes in golden showers with his fists. At such moments it seemed that the best had happened, and he could not retreat towards his mother’s apron. He was involved in progressive guilt.
To hide some of this he quickly turned the little bedside table so that the mutilated outside leg was facing the wall. Then he got into bed. Usually he fell asleep at once; the whole house approved of him. But tonight there was a smell of fresh horse dung that persisted and persisted, the horses pawing and whinnying and raising their long shining necks, to strike.
That Sunday, Ray Parker wanted to go home and see the faces of his family. So he got the bus early. He walked down the road from the post office at Durilgai, where the whole landscape led down to Parkers’, in jubilation and hopefulness, to the rather ordinary but real house.
His sister, who was combing her hair at the window, looked up, and made it obvious she no longer believed in his existence.
‘This is a surprise for you,’ he said, so as not to appear deterred.
‘I hope it is a pleasant one,’ she said, and threw from her the pale hair that she took from the comb, the hair drifting and soon dissolving into light.
Thelma Parker was an older girl now, who could remove her secret life into protective corners, and for this reason was more irritated than upset by her brother’s visit. She wore a ring now, too small to proclaim itself as cheap, and would bathe herself frequently, and powder her skin, and press her best blouses, till such neatness and cleanliness became oppressive, even insulting. But she carried her eyes downcast, and so was unaware of any effect she might have on other people, not that she wanted to know. She was too cold, except for her own mysteries, then she warmed. Her parents had decided that Thelma should start next term at a College for Business Girls in the city. They were impressed by, rather than fond of her. They went on doing whatever they happened to be doing, but with one eye on Thel, frightened by her aloofness and immaculacy.
‘Ray is here,’ Thelma said now, passing through the kitchen with a towel.
She did not express her disgust with more than one petal. Her camellia graces were not of the generous, blowing order, but tight and small, greenish-white, and not for picking.
The whole family was a bit aghast that something unforeseen should happen on that day. The mother, who had abandoned system on Sunday morning, was dawdling in her felt slippers. The father was reading Saturday’s paper, but would go very soon to solder a can that he had saved for Sunday; he liked to see the glittering metal flow beneath the iron.
But they said, Ah, Ray is here.
Of course they loved their son, only they were off their guard. The mother was even caught at the throat by the love she had for him, its quick spasm surprising her by its strength. She would show him this time, she decided.
The father cleared his throat, and rattled the newspaper, and looked desperately from column to column, hoping to find in a moment and few words the secret of life, which he was long overdue in offering to his son.
But by this time the youth was cocking his leg over the window sill, and was coming in through the congested canes of a white rose, which his parents had once planted, and which had practically taken possession of the house. He was extricating himself in a shower of papery petals. An old bird’s nest fell. Then he emerged, looking red but rational.
‘That’s no way to come into the room, Ray,’ said the father.
‘But it’s the quickest,’ said the son logically.
The boy would have defended himself mathematically, if necessary, out of pigheadedness.
‘Nice if we all came in that way,’ called the pure young girl his sister, who had flounced into the bathroom and was scrubbing her clean nails.
But the mother, picking up the bird’s nest from the floor, stopped frowning and said, ‘Anyway, you are here.’
She would make it obvious she was his mother, proclaiming her love by tolerance. It was most important that he should return that love and treat her with kindness.
Instead, he wondered what she would try to sell him.
All that day he was on the defensive, though in the morning, as he came down the road with the wind behind him, things had been clear; it was that deceptive morning light. Then the landscape had begun to change. It was not so much in himself. He had genuinely wanted to see his family and feel himself part of it. But the sadder lights of afternoon prevailed, the trees darkening, and the dead colours of grass. In the afternoon a wind got up, and handfuls of brown grass were blown aimlessly by the gusts of wind, eddying in the sour back yard amongst the clumps of ruffled hens.
For a while he roamed in the paddock. Thistles had sprung up since he was there last, and there were places in which he had to walk carefully. But even so his hand, he saw, was striking against a thistle, which, while seeing what must happen in the next second, he could not avoid. He accepted the sharp and melancholy pain as something that his flesh must in the end suffer.
Returning to the house, he saw that his sister, whose prettiness and pale hair, as she stood at the window that morning, combing and dreaming, should never have been destroyed, had now grown thin and ugly. She was seated at the same window, sorting some of her possessions, girls’ things, and had pinned paper round her sleeves, as she had seen the postmistress do. This is not for me, felt the boy. The paper sleeves alone told him that. So he continued to tread clumsily round the house, and Thelma frowned and did not see him.
‘Look, Ray,’ said his mother, coming up against him unexpectedly, which made her breathless, for she was not quite ready, ‘I found this little notebook the other day. It was given to me years ago by a parson’s wife, I think. I never wrote in it, because I don’t write easily. Did you ever keep a diary? Some people do. I thought you might like to try. Then you could send it to me at the end of the year, and I could read what you have done.’
It was a silly idea, and not quite fair. She had thought of it on the spur of the moment, as a means of approach. Now she regretted it as they stood there beside some strands of inactive honeysuckle. The boy looked as if he was going to be sick.
‘Pffh,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to keep a diary. What am I going to put? What I had for breakfast!’
He continued round the side of the house, and she followed him patiently.
‘I only thought,’ she said.
The more stupidly she behaved, the more desperate she was to retrieve the situation. And it did seem to her that she could only behave stupidly towards her children. She remembered how, as a young woman, she had looked inside their minds and seen their desires, or they had brought her their thoughts without disguises.
‘Are you happy, Ray?’ she asked when they had stumbled inside the kitchen, for it seemed there was nowhere else they could go, there was no real escaping from each other, except in the end by the boy’s actual, and what she feared would be his natural, flight. ‘Are you happy?’ she asked.
He was too young and callow to realize that this was a means of telling him she was not.
‘What do you mean, happy?’ he asked lumpishly.
He did not like this kind of catechism. It bordered on air. It was like opening a door and finding that the floor had gone.
‘I would like to think’, she said, ‘you were getting the most out of life. It’s only natural, as you are my son. I have been very happy,’ she said.
She did tell herself with conviction.
‘I only want to be left alone,’ he said.
The dark shapes of trees were altering all the time, combed into long tresses by wind. It would rain soon probably.
‘But Ray,’ she said, leaning on the table.
&nb
sp; Thelma came in, throwing back the leaf of the door with ease. She could afford to. She had been reading the ridiculous things she had written in a notebook when younger. She was tingling with her present superiority to all that was childish and laughable.
‘Aren’t we going to have some tea?’ she asked loudly.
She looked in the mirror to watch herself speak, and was pleased with what she saw, for that moment anyway.
‘Yes,’ said the mother, as if wondering why she had not thought of this solution. ‘Shall we bake a few scones?’
‘We?’ asked Thelma, wrinkling up her face in a way that was both pretty and amusing. ‘My scones are always sods.’
While her mother took flour, she brought the more agreeable things, and particularly the cake, which she had iced herself in pink sugar, and decorated with a laborious and runny white flower.
‘Did you hear about the College, Ray?’ she asked, beginning to set the more important crockery that they used on Sundays.
‘No,’ he said thickly. ‘Oh, I heard something.’
He would go from here to that alternative, Mum Northcott’s, from which he must go in turn. At night the streets are filled with the desperate echoes of departing footsteps.
‘Next term’, she was saying, ‘I am going to board in Randwick with the Bourkes. Mrs Bourke is a relative of Dad’s. They had a quarrel or something, but it is made up.’
The Tree of Man Page 30