Then Lilian Bourke came in. She had taken off her fox, and had a quick dash at her face in the bedroom, and they would open a couple of bottles of stout, she said, as a little celebration for Stan’s son, and what was Thelma thinking about, there was the round of beef and half a chicken on the bottom shelf of the ice-chest, staring at her, if she opened the door.
The Bourkes were very pleased with Ray. They looked at him devouringly; they were hungry for his youth as they tore the bones from off the cold chicken and chewed the shreds of brown skin. They pleaded for anecdotes.
Ray was embarrassed. He looked shyly into his full glass. He told them one or two. Obviously he had begun to like best to talk about horses with the old man. He asked Horrie about Eggcup’s chances for the Gold Plate. The old man, whose lips had grown greasy from a lovely forkful of yellow fat, tempered with a sliver of red beef and harshened by half a pickled onion, looked at the piece of bread he was trimming for use and admitted that Eggcup’s chances were fair.
When Ray went away the Bourkes longed for him to come again. Which he did. He came quite often. They were all three in the grip, it seemed, of a fresh and stimulating, almost a passionate relationship.
‘Your brother is not a bit the boy we expected,’ Lily Bourke said to Thelma. ‘Your father was always a slow one. Oh, we all liked Stan. But slow. It was your mother who married him, we all said.’
‘It is difficult to say what Ray is like,’ said Thelma. ‘I feel I know. I cannot say. I am prejudiced by being his sister, I suppose.’
‘You are a funny girl, Thelma,’ Lilian said.
While this was happening Thelma continued in her employment at the office of the shipping firm, where she was disliked, if also respected. No girl kept her pencils sharper. If Miss Halloran was engaged on some piece of work, as she frequently was, the boss would call Miss Parker in and dictate a letter, which she would run off, tear from her typewriter, and there was the cool paper in Mr Fulbright’s tray before he had put the telephone down. But she did not encourage jokes.
Then, suddenly, Thelma Parker left the shipping office, where she was getting on, and took a position with a solicitor at a lower salary. She could not have explained with any conviction why she had done this, only that it had to be. Soothed by the smell of discretion and timelessness perhaps. Many of the women clients wore fur coats and pearls, and were ushered out by the partners with signs of discreet intimacy and social connexion, and a touch of dry hands.
In the circumstances, her life at Bourkes’ became more and more distasteful. Ammoniac smells from the stables clashed with the lavender water with which she refreshed her long hands, and the hooded horses sidled monotonously out, led by the hairy older men, or with boys up, hunched into shapes of arrogant responsibility. None of this concerned Thelma Parker or was concerned about her, but it was there. And the uncouth shapes of the men, who spat through the gaps in their yellow teeth. And the wrestling boys, like the boy Curly, who had spoken that day when he became, briefly, the messenger.
Ray came sometimes to see Curly. He was his friend, it seemed. At the stables Ray removed his tie for ease, he hung over Curly’s shoulder and they studied form in the supplements of Sunday newspapers; they shared confidences that were sometimes serious and sometimes, from the pantomime of their participant bodies, lewd. Sometimes on a slow Sunday afternoon, of baked brick and sleeping cats, Ray would wrestle with Curly on an old stretcher covered with sacking in the saddle room, as he used to wrestle with the Greek, and the young man in his turn would imprison the boy, who would struggle and finally cry out, wanting to escape from the humiliation of his own weakness. Before this, though, the girl who had been engaged in mysterious rites at her window would have pulled down the blind. Her anger and superiority preferred to stifle in that brown-papery gloom, from which a blowfly could not get out.
Sometimes Thelma went by herself to concerts. Her music, which had not developed, both through apathy and from fear of the consequences, was a sadness to her, which she liked also to indulge. The surge of music sounded notes in her of exquisite sadness and self-pity. She was drenched by the violins.
Once in the street in the evening she met her friend Genevieve Johnstone, who was less respectable than formerly, but pleased and even grateful to find Thelma, who was at least surprised. Over brown stew and boiled pumpkin, Genevieve told Thelma she had had an abortion on account of a married man she knew at Wentworth Falls. Thelma did neat things with her fork in the gravy. Almost as if she had not heard. But Genevieve was telling.
Then Thelma tore her superiority from the débâcle and said, ‘I am on my way to an orchestral concert, Genevieve. Why don’t you come along? It will do you good.’
‘Classical music isn’t in my line,’ said Genevieve in some doubt. ‘But it is a way of passing the evening, I suppose. If it is cheap.’
So the two girls listened to the music, or Genevieve sat and Thelma soared; she could rise to great heights on the apathy of her friend. Her own evolution seemed to depend on the brilliant passage of the violins. So she followed with headachy devotion. Her interminable but rapturous pathway led somewhere. Her own life, in trams and offices, filing her nails, reading the future in cups of tea, was not less inevitable. Only little glistening pearls of notes littered the way before the dark gulf. It is Ray, she admitted, I must not think of Ray. She trod carefully along the bridge of awkward, thin slats. In that slow field, toothed with awkward stumps and brackeny growth, it was the mother and father that became insistent. How very plain and boring they were, especially the father when explaining the working of a fence-strainer or the ailments of cows.
This is a part on which I must concentrate, said Thelma Parker, crossing her legs and leaning forward a little. She was sometimes horrified by the difficulties of music. But it was by concentration that she had made herself appreciated, and by superior men. No percussion could make her recant now. No triumph of her smudgy friend whose mouth gratefully extracted tunes where audible. Horns issued commands to willing women. She herself liked, in her reluctant way, the dictatorial manners of brass instruments, and of some men, if their hands were well kept and restrained. She brought cups of milky tea and left them anonymously for oboes to drain.
The architecture of the composition could not be destroyed, if its intention. Thelma Parker wandered beneath the dome of music in her best shoes. Get a room somewhere, she said, with her own foursquare walls, and perhaps use of kitchen. The clash of her own cymbals could not destroy her privacy. So she mounted farther, on firm steps now; it was possible to follow their winding, however intricate, even doubly spiral, in which were set the little mirrors reflecting the past, of roses, and of fowl manure, even the shattered one in which her silver face was splintered, but quickly shoved behind the flat boards of woodwind. Ah, she sucked the air between her teeth, putting the hot strands behind her ears, then it is in sight. A little farther, across a formal platform, and up, just a little, tremblingly, was the bell of victory. She reached up, so high that her breasts had disappeared, and placed the wreath with her own hands.
‘Is it over then?’ asked Genevieve, for whom there was no other reason to clap.
‘Yes,’said Thelma, resuming her outward person.
When they had pushed out and were in the damp street Genevieve said, ‘What do you think about all the time, all through that kind of music, when you’re listening to it, if you are?’
‘You don’t exactly think,’ said Thelma slowly. ‘You live with it.’
‘I don’t live that way. Not any way like it,’ said Genevieve. ‘Ah, you’re too deep.’
Thelma was pleased but also too embarrassed to answer. She had no experience of the tolerant ways of friendship, and words could turn her rigid, or a gesture. For Genevieve had taken her arm.
‘There was a bloke there playing a fiddle,’ said Genevieve, ‘you may have noticed, with the hair parted in the middle, that I think I met once on a ferry. He was from Manly. Gee, it was rough that day. And he was kee
n, this boy, if it was the one I think it was. But what could you do? It’s one thing on a rough sea. But going with a bloomin fiddle case.’
Possibilities are sown at night in damp streets and purple mist.
‘Is your boss nice, Thelma?’ asked Genevieve. ‘Is he old? I never ever knew a solicitor that wasn’t old. They must begin, though.’
‘They are all right,’ Thelma said. ‘One is old. He doesn’t come when he has lumbago. The other is younger, but not young. Mr Forsdyke. He’s a bit bald. But not bad.’
The trams were cutting in now.
‘Go on,’ said Genevieve.
‘Why,’ said Thelma, ‘really, Genevieve, there isn’t anything to tell.’
‘It would give me the willies working with a bunch of solicitors. They talk funny.’
Thelma had begun to laugh. ‘He has a way of drawing up his stomach,’ Thelma said, ‘of drawing it up as be talks. And letting it go again.’
Thelma laughed.
‘He has a stomach then?’ laughed Genevieve.
‘Well, yes,’ laughed Thelma, ‘but not much. He lifts what he’s got, I mean. Oh dear.’
‘The stomachy solicitor,’ shrieked Genevieve.
The two girls rocking at the tram stop could not stand upright. They rubbed against each other in the purple light. One or two men paused, put their hands in their pockets, and watched, spat, and walked on. The two girls laughed.
Is this perhaps life? asked Thelma, under the influence of words and friction. But at once she was annoyed, drew herself away from the heaving Genevieve, and stopped laughing.
‘I’m going to look for a room somewhere, she said quite brutally, ‘or a flat or something. I can’t go on any longer living where I am.’
‘I wouldn’t like living in a room,’ said Genevieve. ‘You might get bashed. Or even murdered. By some man.’
‘If you have got to have a man,’said Thelma.
‘But you have got to.’
‘I shall be content with a room, with a door,’ said Thelma. Knowing she was not always so cool, but would have lied again, because it was necessary.
‘Here is my tram,’sne said.
And was glad.
‘Better get yourself tied up with that solicitor,’ shrieked Genevieve. ‘In red tape. The one with the stomach that lifts up.’
Thelma was by that time high in the tram. She could look down with white indifference on the purple face of Genevieve. The sluggish purple waves sucked her down, while Thelma rode on, without pity for her friend, and wondering why she had attempted friendship. Offering the cold pennies to the tram conductor, she might have been buying freedom. She craved for this, like most men, before anything, while remaining uncertain of its nature. She would have liked to ask someone – but whom? Not her parents. You don’t ask parents. Ray had perhaps bought it, but at what price she did not know.
Once he bought her a pair of silk stockings. He opened the door and threw them across the carpet, so that they lay there contorted, inseparable from the feelings she had for Ray.
‘There y’are,’ he said, looking through the half-open door, ‘A present for you.’
He waited for a moment to see whether she would accept. She still showed no sign when he went away, but his face was pretty sure that she would. And she did, guiltily, pick up the stockings from the carpet and fold them over her hand. She put them in a drawer and did at last wear them, trying to forget, and finally forgetting, that they were a present from a brother.
It was not clear what Ray intended by the pair of stockings. It was certainly that debt laid up against the future, in which spirit most of his presents were offered, but whether there was also some impulse of love in giving he was not sure. He would have liked to enter into a blameless kind of relationship with some human being. He would have liked to sit down and talk with someone about the flat things, as blameless as paper, about which it is necessary to talk. It is not possible with parents, any more than with corkscrews. His mother would bore right in, hoping to draw something out. Nor with the Bourkes, they were the old children of life. Nor with any mob of friends or business associates, who expected you to act in certain preconceived ways. So there was Thelma. If they could have resisted for a moment those separate currents which were carrying them on, they might have entered into that negative kind of relationship for which he felt the need.
At that time Ray was still associated with Bernie Abrahams, the bookie, whom nobody had met yet, because Bourkes did not go for bookies. None of Ray’s mob found their way to Bourkes’. Lily drew the line. She was afraid for her jewellery too, of which she had several real pieces in amongst the paste. There was Curly, though, who they knew was Ray’s pal, and who was from Bundaberg, they knew, but what else. Ray lived somewhere above a fruit shop. There was talk of some Italians, and two Italian girls, sisters, it appeared. Ray brought the Bourkes paper bags filled with big pale apples, or the purple foaming ones, or the head of a pineapple sticking out at the top.
Horrie was pleased, like a child, but Lily was less pleased, who had had time to recover a little from her love.
‘That boy is too good to us,’ said Lily, screwing up her eyes. ‘Why should a boy be so good?’
‘Well, what is wrong?’ said Horrie, peeling an apple. ‘The boy is away from home, he misses his dad and mum.’
Thelma had come into the room to look for some belonging, and went out again with the quietness of discretion she used in that house. She was passing through their lives.
‘You are right, Horrie,’ Lily said. ‘We didn’t ought to talk about the boy like that. And in front of his sister. What will Stan say?’
But Thelma made no comment.
All this was so much regrettable cardboard of other people’s lives. She must find the room, with use of kitchen. Until that time she would ignore.
So the horses continued to sidle out. In the early morning as she did her hair, and on Sundays as she sat, their monastic figures clopped out across the asphalt and through the wooden gates. The men and boys were talking of some big meeting for which the horses were being prepared. It was esoteric talk, of weights and anatomy and odds and paces, to which the girl did not listen, except as fragments fell and unavoidably were picked up. That Malabar had been scratched. Eggcup was a cert, they said, for Horrie Bourke, his big chance. As she combed her hair and thought how disparate other issues were from her own desires.
Eating soft eggs at breakfast, the old trainer trembled over the importance of this race. Then for a moment the girl did see not so much the pathos of men’s fragile lives as the pathos of her own in similar isolation and unimportance. The old man’s skull was frail as an eggshell waiting to break under some blow, that somebody, not now, but sometime, must deal. And her own blouse did not protect her shoulders. She scalded herself with the bitter red tea that she was pouring from high up, and bit her mouth, and asked, ‘When is this race then?’
‘What?’ he said incredulously. ‘The race! Why, Saturdee.’
Shocked by the discovery that he might not exist, he scraped up raspberry jam and opened and closed his mouth once or twice.
‘Where is your brother?’ he asked this girl, about whom he began to think now, about what kind of life she must live, shut in her room, in the same house certainly. ‘We ain’t seen him since I don’t know when.’
‘I don’t know where Ray is,’ she said. ‘He has never told me much about his business.’
She also had not seen him, she realized, with satisfaction or mistrust, not even in the yard with Curly. Curly was there, but she was noticing him less. He went on softer feet. He was grave at times. He had come out in spots, and was just a boy about the place. He whistled, but more often he would stay silent. Really she would not have noticed Curly if Ray for a time had not breathed life into his limbs.
So she wondered why Ray did not come, and there it was Saturday, it was the day of that race for which Horrie Bourke lived.
On the day Thelma did not go to the races. S
he never went, because when the house was dead, then she lived. She would take off her dress, and improvise on the walnut piano, or write in her diary and make cups of tea. That day she was extended on the lounge room settee in a position of luxury and abandonment, foreign to her rather precise nature, but instinctive now as she practised that life of discernment and privacy, which she would lead later, by choice and, she was convinced, inevitability.
When Mrs Bourke came in.
Lily Bourke could scarcely force the latchkey in. Or find breath to wrench out. She was a victim of her corsets and whatever had happened.
‘I will tell you, Thelma,’ she said, ‘but first I must lay down.’
So Thelma waited, by now in her dressing-gown, full of misgiving, for she avoided all passionate events, and this must be one, as Lily Bourke was puce. Her fox was staring from a chair.
‘It was a cruel day,’ said Lilian Bourke at last, flat, in her slip and her stockings. ‘I will tell you, Thelma, what happened.’
So Thelma listened, and later that evening, after thinking it over, wrote a letter to her mother.
Dear Mum,
I am writing to tell you what has happened here. It is in the papers, so you will have to know, and better from me than some kind friend. Mum, it is about Ray. He had been mixed up in a racing scandal. He has been, and he has not, that is, for they cannot pin it on him. But it is pretty obvious from what they say. You know how you can only feel about Ray, there is not always proof.
Anyway, you may have heard of the big race, the Gold Plate, that was run today, and which Mr Bourke’s horse Eggcup was supposed to win. Well, it did not. It appears that the horse was somehow interfered with. There has been talk of dope even, and an inquiry is being held. A strapper from the stable, a raw sort of boy, who was a friend of Ray’s (I have often seen them here together, when they could, as one sees it now, have been hatching some plan), has more or less confessed to giving something to the horse, but under the influence of Ray. The boy is in a great state, but will just not say enough. It appears that the winner of the race, an outsider called Sir Murgatroyd, was backed by Ray for a lot of money.…
The Tree of Man Page 33