‘It was not a quarrel,’ said the mother. ‘People often fade out, leaving you to guess the reason, and there’s always many.’
‘Anyway,’ said Thelma, ‘I shall go to the city. I’m a bit afraid, Ray. I shall have a season ticket, and travel by tram from Randwick every day. Mrs Gage knows people too, who will invite me. They have a small-goods business. They are quite rich. Mrs Gage is helping with a dress. It is a beige dress, with little tucks and a pleated skirt. There are little red buttons, three on each sleeve, and a row down the back.’
When the wood moved in the grate Thelma glowed. She was, after all, pretty, or feverish, holding her neck high, which was too thin certainly, as she sat gathering crumbs with correct fingers.
The mother listened to all these far-off things, eating her comfortable scone, and would have liked to feel comfortable. Do the children take over perhaps?
Ray looked out of the window. He was struggling with a sense of injustice and the cake in his throat. Long whips of vicious rain began to lash the gooseberry bushes, which had never done well in that district, though they continued to try them.
‘What’ll you do then?’ he asked, not yet decided what form his insult, or self-defence, should take. ‘In your beige dress?’
‘Why,’ she said, flushing, ‘I shall pass the necessary exams, in typing and shorthand, and take a job, with a stockbroker or solicitor, something like that. And make something of my life,’ she added smoothly, taking out her handkerchief, which she had not yet used, and which had been folded in a perfect oblong, to stay in her belt.
‘And marry some bloke,’ he said.
‘I’m not thinking of anything like that.’
‘And play the pianner’, he laughed, ‘while he brings the dough home.’
His rich, metallic laughter, that he had discovered all of a sudden how to make, rocked him regularly, and he liked the feeling of it. He had a strong throat and rather heavy eyelids. He sat looking out of the window at skeins of grey rain that were being flung across the paddocks, and black trees restrained so far by their roots.
‘What’s she done to deserve this?’ asked the mother.
‘Nothing,’ he said, quietening. ‘Only you get fed up.’
‘Because you get fed up, I am to pay for it,’ said the girl.
Self-pity made her mince with a new gentility, that was perhaps instinctive, or else she had listened to a stranger and learned. Her skin had the soapiness of righteousness.
‘Perhaps I should keep a diary, eh, Thel? And write it all down. Wonder what happened to that Greek?’
‘Why the Greek?’ asked the mother, remembering something she had forgotten.
‘He came into my mind,’ said the boy. ‘Not a bad cove, for a dago.’
Now the rain wrapped the trees and house with grey sheets, folding and falling. If you had not heard it, this rain would have appeared quite solid. But the sound of rain and wind and spitting fire dispersed the illusion of solid rain, of all solidity even.
The mother remembered that time of the floods when furniture was no longer rooted. She forgot her joy in standing on the riverbank with the muddy water swirling at her feet, and her solid husband in the little boat; she forgot for remembering the transitoriness of most things, and most of all her own life, it seemed, as the strong young Greek walked in the field and turned the withered corn stalks t smoke.
‘He was a good young man,’ she said, looking at her broad and still sensual hands, with the yellow wedding ring. ‘A good fellow,’ she said, as if by repeating no one could accuse her of concealing.
Nobody did, because each was his own globe, or world of thought.
The boy began to be afraid of this isolation, to which it all boiled down in the end. He longed to substitute movement for his fears, so he got up and went from the kitchen, running through the rain, past the shack in which he had wrestled with the Greek, down to the feed room, where his father used to lift him sleeping from the bins, and shake the sleep from him as if it had been chaff, and there his father, the daylight, would be standing. They would have a talk then about objects of interest.
There was his father now, he saw when it was too late. The father was bending over a bucket, mixing up some kind of mash. On the walls there were bottles and jars, of liniments and ointments, that rats sometimes knocked down. The father looked up. He also saw immediately that he was caught. He had across his shoulders an old bag he had been wearing in the rain, which did not seem to have been much of a protection, except a moral one.
Now he looked up and shook the wet mash from his hands back into the bucket. ‘This is from the right quarter,’ said the father, to investigate what was uppermost in his mind, hence safer. ‘If we don’t get three days of it, we shall get three weeks. The dam is low,’ he said. ‘It will bring the sorghum on.’
To the boy, weather, like fruit and vegetables, was unimportant, even hateful, but he supposed, grudgingly, he was glad his father had chosen to talk about this now. Each of them was afraid that some explanation of the boy’s sudden presence in the shed might be called for.
The wind continued to blow the bending rain in the grey paddock. In the uproar of wind and rain a black tree fell, at a distance, without being heard.
Now that things had begun to suffer for their existence, it seemed more than ever likely that explanations must be dragged out. Souls unite in the face of violence, if only on the common ground of frailty.
The boy pressed his face against a pane of the cobwebby window, that did let some light, slow and pearly, into the obscure shed.
‘Perhaps there will be more of those floods that we had,’ he said, ‘that you and Mum talk about. I would like to see them,’ he said, his voice grown hollow on the glass, ‘and things floating, and houses carried away. I would like to see a tree torn out by the roots. Or struck by lightning. They say you can smell a struck tree, and it smells of gunpowder.’
The father paused with a pang, for normally he could have taken refuge in the virtue of his own activity, in warm, moist bran.
‘What good would that do you?’ he asked.
‘It would be something happening,’ said the boy.
Acts of terror had exhilarated Stan Parker too, before he had built his house. After that they had confused him, made him feel he had been taken in. Then when he had accepted his confusion, and lived longer, much later, not till now perhaps, in the shed with the confused and rebellious boy, who was his son, those acts of terror did begin to illuminate the opposite goodness and serenity of the many faces of God.
If he had been able to come closer to his boy and tell him this, he would have done so now, but he was a slow and awkward man with bran on his hands.
The boy looked round, suspecting his father of being too close. He did not want to be touched. The humble, familiar shapes of the shed were looming round him. He could have kicked the walls down, and with them the face of the humble man his father, whom he would have loved, if disgust had allowed.
‘We’ll have to get you out of that hole in Bangalay,’ said the father as an alternative. ‘I did wrong perhaps to put you there.’
‘I’m not asking for that,’ said the boy raucously. ‘I can fit in there as well as any place.’
The truth of this had still to be proved.
As a lull had come in the rain, or it blew more than it ran, and above all the sounds were less disturbing, Ray Parker made his getaway from the place that had been his home. He went up the road with his head down and his hands in his pockets. The emotions that had been knotting in him actively all that afternoon had settled down, at least temporarily, into a passive coil.
The parents took it for granted that something like this must happen, and were grateful that it was not more bewildering. Until they were asked for information, first from old Mrs Northcott, then from Mr Jarman the saddler, on the whereabouts and intentions of their son.
It appeared that Ray had gone.
He wrote soon, a letter from Brisbane, in which
he said:
Dear Mum,
I come up here on the spur of the moment, and think I have done right to make the move, whether it was the right move, but I had to make one, as Dad said, only it was me that had to make it.
I am working on a steamer on this coast. I am working in the galley. The cook is a Chinaman, but clean. He gave me a piece of pearl shell with some carving on it, that I will keep for you, it is what you will like.
Well, cheer up, Mum. Nothing is for always, though there is life enough on the coastal run. I wake up at night and see the cranes loading up, or else it is horses driven up the race. I could go to the Territory if I like with a gentleman who made me an offer as a hand on a station, but I don’t think that I will. I will look around. I could go anywhere. Last night I dreamed I was swimming to the islands, the sea was like oil and full of phosphorous, and I was swimming and swimming without a stitch, the water full of light, but I did not get there before I woke up.…
When the father was handed this letter to read he said, ‘It is natural, Amy.’
He gave it back to his wife to keep, because they were not accustomed to receive mail, excepting bills and catalogues. He remembered his own youth, and how easily his clothes had sat upon his body, making him forget his nakedness. Whichever steps he had taken were hardly determined by himself. But this was not what his wife would have wanted to hear.
She found him, as often at moments of crisis, disappointing.
She said, ‘That is all very well for you. You have not had the trouble.’ Her voice swelled up for the injustice of it, and because she was taken unawares.
For he had gone, slipping from her as easily and naturally as the seed from the pod, to become lost in the long grass. If she suffered a great spasm at the moment of realization, with lesser ones recurring over many days, it was more perhaps for her vanity, though she did remember the little stubbly-headed boy in short trousers, and the baby gorging itself with placid confidence on her breast. So she cried at times, mostly at dusk, standing at a window, when shapes have grown tender, and she herself was disintegrating, and sucked onward, the years streaming behind her like skirts in the wind, or hair. It was frightening then. Her face abandoned the mealiness of personal sorrow and became a brooding skull, or essential face.
I have paid too much attention to Ray and not enough to Thelma, said Amy Parker, rousing herself. After all, a girl is more reliable than a boy, a girl needs to be.
When Thelma left for Sydney and the College for Business Girls, the mother packed her daughter’s case. She put in a sachet that she had made for the occasion, and some packets of chocolate in case her girl felt hungry at night; she would eat with gratitude, rustling the silver paper, and think of her mother.
The last night Amy Parker went into her girl’s room, and put her mouth in the long pale hair, and held her, and said, ‘Who’d have thought, Thel, all by yourself in the city, but you must not worry.’
‘I’ll be all right, Mum,’ said the cool girl, taken by surprise and anxious to extricate herself. ‘Besides, there will be Mrs Bourke. Dad says she was a good sort, in spite of the misunderstanding there was at that time about some things.’
‘Oh yes, there’ll be Mrs Bourke,’ said Amy Parker. ‘But it won’t be the same as home.’
Through the nightdress she felt her daughter’s thin, secretive body, and wondered if this had ever belonged to her. Anxiety transferred itself to the body of the girl, who coughed a good deal during the night, and had to burn a little powder that she kept against such an attack. When it was dawn she got up, groping through the bitter fumes of the powder. The steely knives of morning cut deeply into the feverish girl. As she prepared to wash, baring herself for the operation, she shivered and winced. But she was glad. All unpleasantness and pain were necessary to achieve her final, perfect shape.
Thelma caught the train in Bangalay, in a grey suit and neat hat. She never showed any nervousness in public. Her parents, who had brought her to town in the Ford, stood beside the window of the compartment, and wondered about things. The father did not struggle, because the situation was being taken out of his hands. For a long time, though, the mother put up a show of authority and advice, till it was time to bow her head, under the large dark hat. Then the children do take over, she was forced to admit. She received on her mouth with gratitude, even humility, the last kiss, wondering if it signified love; she would have liked to believe this.
The girl watched the last of the handkerchief, feeling a pang for her departing childhood, that was made more poignant by the flatness of the country streaming by. Finally she settled down to her own reflection in other people’s faces. It was a new and voluptuous sensation, to try to solve its mystery in such mirrors.
So Thelma Parker came to the city, and went to the College for Business Girls, and became efficient. She was as cool as the bell on the typewriter that rang at the end of the line. She would fling the roller back, just not angrily, but disdainfully, looking at nonexistent objects at the far end of the room. Her paper was always spotless. She was, indeed, very clean. Her long, slightly oval nails were pink, and she smelled of lavender water, which she kept in a drawer of her desk and sprinkled discreetly on her clean hands. On her thin white wrist she wore a small gold watch, cheap but in good taste. Her skin was very white, almost unhealthy, and always ready to react to worldliness in other people, so that when her friend Genevieve Johnstone made some joke, she was bathed in the pink of pleasure or shame, it was difficult to tell which.
Genevieve Johnstone, whom Thelma Parker first met at the same business college, lived at Bondi, whereas Thelma was with the Bourkes at Randwick. Sometimes the two girls went for rides together on a tram, because it was cheap and passed time. These rides were of great importance to Thelma, because they emphasized her freedom. The loose tram clanked and swung. People laughed electrically on those nights. The two girls sat together, friends, but not particularly fond of each other, feeling their hair grow dank in the salt air. They swung and laughed at their own motion, and the bony knees of men sitting opposite, or passing, pressed their knees. Genevieve Johnstone liked to look at men. She was a dark, smudgy girl with a bust. She was anxious to give generously to some man, whereas Thelma looked away, holding her handbag in suddenly hot hands. It was doubtful whether generosity was in Thelma’s line; either she valued herself too highly, or else she was afraid.
In the end it was these differences of temperament that caused the friendship between Thelma and Genevieve to lapse. Thelma grew afraid of the company of the dark, smudgy, big-busted, laughing girl, on whom the glances of men hung, on her dank, salty hair, and the swing of her breasts in the tram. The night was too powerful in her company. So Thelma broke with her for weak reasons. She continued to go on tram rides by herself, for the air, but looking away from people, into the flashing night. This way she could still enjoy her freedom. She loved the city, she said, translating its garishness into a personal poetry. Were not its asphalt and metal a mark of her own progress? So she rode the trams at night, looking down from her compartment into the windows of people’s lives, noticing them at table, having differences, easing their clothes, picking their teeth. If she had not yet made definite plans for the conduct of her own life, she was pretty confident she would succeed in whatever she chose, and would not be surprised in awkward attitudes.
This confidence was occasionally shaken if she heard laughter as she closed a door. Particularly the laughter of men. For this reason she hated the stablehands at Bourkes’.
Horrie Bourke, who had married Stan Parker’s relative, with whom Thelma boarded, was a trainer of racehorses. He was an honest man and consequently had not succeeded as he might have. Even so, he had known some good wins, and had bought diamonds for his wife, and a fox fur, that had got its head squashed in a taxidoor during the Easter meeting some years back. Horrie Bourke himself was never dolled up, though he approved of it in his wife, and in the rich, his patrons. He preferred his slippers. He would wear a c
ollar but no tie. Just the brass stud that held together his slightly yellow starched collar. This way he went about his stable yard and gave directions to the lads, and to the one or two older men who were experienced and supercilious in horse matters, though obedient to Horrie, who was a decent cove.
This was what Thelma Parker saw when she looked from her window of the Bourkes’ brick home, for her room was, humiliatingly on the stables side. There were the lads in their singlets, swinging buckets of shining water, and the older men, bandy-legged, and the glistening, muscular, trembling horses.
Horrie Bourke said that Thelma must make herself at home. He gave her a box of chocolates the second day, with a big pink satin bow, and said she could pick out an occasional soft one specially for him. He was the kind of man who likes to practise an elaborate ritual of courtliness with girls. He liked to see young girls with bows in their hair and bangles on their wrists, and to make the kind of jokes they giggled at, eating chocolates in the afternoon. But nothing nasty in his relationship with these girls. His innocent vanity was appeased by giggles and the acceptance of his simple presents. He was of that school which seems to think women are a different breed, which does suit some women.
Thelma Parker soon sensed that Horrie Bourke was amiable but not of much account. She learned to accept the ritual of his courtliness and to laugh at his jokes without conveying any deception.
‘Poor Dad,’ said Mrs Bourke, ‘he is so good.’
As if he were suffering from an illness.
Mrs Bourke had been a Bott. She was Lilian, one of those three girls to whom Stan Parker did not propose, and for that reason she developed a habit of screwing up her eyes at Thelma, to look a little closer, it seemed, with ever so much quizzical tolerance. But you could not say that Lily Bourke was not a good sort. She rouged a bit but it meant nothing. She liked to have a few friends in for the evening, and a glass of something, preferably stout, when she would sing all the old songs at an upright piano, after she had removed her rings.
The Tree of Man Page 31