So instead of praying he went into a café and ordered a plate of food.
It was a Chinese café. When the dish of chop suey was brought he sat looking at it, or more especially at the large joints in his inactive finger bones.
‘You feel crook,’ said the young Chinese, coming and moving the cutlery into a different pattern.
‘No,’ said Stan.
‘Someone died,’ said the Chinese, still making a statement rather than asking a question, in a high, flash, second-generation voice.
Then he went away and began doing a sum, adding on paper over and over again, his Chinese face clear and honest, in spite of his flash, high voice.
So Stan Parker sat there and began to see he must go home. There was nothing else he could do in that city.
After a couple of days he did go. His daughter, Thelma came with him to the station. It was early, and she was dressed for business in a grey costume and white blouse, her importance barely pent up as she shook her cuffs and looked at her clean nails. Her successful appearance made him rather shambly, but he was proud to be with her. He walked beside her, swinging an old Gladstone bag, that had been in his mother’s house at the time of her death, but to whom it had belonged he did not know, he had never seen anybody use it. The hag was hard and awkward, in spite of the fact that he had given it a coating of saddlesoap before leaving home.
‘That funny old bag,’ laughed Thelma, making it into something quaint, for otherwise it would have been awful. ‘Can you really pack your clothes in it without rolling them into a ball?’
‘It serves its purpose,’ he said.
She began to feel that she should talk to him of tender, intimate things, but the horror of that was too much for her, so she said in a determined voice, ‘We seem to be hours too early.’
He had taken her into a shop and, before she could laugh at him or protest, was buying her an ice-cream horn.
‘Have I got to eat this?’ she asked.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You used to like them.’
I used to, her memory echoed as she licked the child’s stuff perched on top of the wafer horn. She did not want to cry, but she was being compelled to. It was in her throat, cold on hot. On grey mornings she would wake and hear the lamps flower, and the unbearably white voices of the cocks predicting the future with sad conviction for the past.
‘When you were a kid’, he said, ‘you liked them.’
‘Are you harping on that!’ she said. ‘Listen, Dad, about Ray, it has been terrible for you, I can see, but he is no good.’
‘It is too early’, he said, ‘to say who is good.’
Then she had not exorcized her brother.
‘I cannot explain,’ she said.
She suspected simplicity, and would have liked to avoid it altogether, so she was glad when they had come to the trains, and it was time to kiss.
‘Good-bye, Thel,’ he said and flushed a bit for the young woman he was kissing, who was his daughter and not.
His children were let loose. Steam had began to blow through the station, like fine grey seed. The incredible had begun to seem more natural, or perhaps it was the homeward journey.
Thelma Parker watched her father go. She had resumed her life. It was cruel but necessary. She walked along the platform and down the steps. She had taken a room in the house of a doctor’s widow, and would begin to live there soon, next week in fact, it had been agreed, with use of kitchen and bath, of course. Thelma Parker caught the tram. If it seemed that her life had begun to crystallize, there was still no need to tell about it. It was peculiarly hers. To be drowsed over, in the doctor’s widow’s bath, in waves of sandalwood and lilac, in a good suburb.
Stan Parker continued to travel home, and was guiltily eased by the appearance of familiar features of geography. He knew the contours of the landscape more intimately than he did the faces of men, particularly his children. Children are learned by the mother, he said. He would have liked it that way. But his unhappiness was less obtrusive, the train disclosed. From Bangalay he took the bus which runs over the hills to Durilgai. There he got down and walked across the paddocks. He would sometimes choose that more solitary approach, slowing through the yellow grass and black trees, looking about as if he were a stranger there, looking at the scrolls of fallen bark, which is a perpetual mystery. Then the ignorance of the man was exchanged for knowledge. His rough skin was transparent in that light.
Chapter 17
AMY PARKER accepted the absence of her son; as time passed, it was not so very different really from his presence. If she thought about him, it was as a baby, or a little boy that could not run far, or would hide and she would find him, in a game. Then she would blind him with kisses and devour the angle of his neck. He could only struggle against her love. In this way the past was made more concrete than the present.
But Ray did once send a postcard, from Albany. That writing she had forgotten, if she had ever known. It was an emanation of a strange man, that she looked at respectfully through her reading glasses, as if it had been a flickering of lightning. He was in business, he said. She was proud in the end to have the card, though she did not love this man. She loved the little struggling boy, to whom her own full face was held on a summer’s day. She showed the card to people, after she had dried her hands, she showed it to people who had come, and received their congratulations with decent pride, and spoke of her absent son with natural affection. But she did not love this man.
She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad, and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity, or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.
Often, again, it was as if she had had no children, for it had not been given to her to love her daughter, except by intermittent gestures. Then she would think about the child they had picked up at Wullunya in the floods, and brought home in Peabody’s cart, and who had quickly gone. This boy, if she had tamed him, would have been her son, she felt. It was possible. All those things that did not quite occur during the floodtime of their lives had the nostalgia of possibility now that she was drying up.
At our time of life, said the postmistress, who was withered in the beginning, but who did not seem to mind.
Amy Parker hated the postmistress, but because they had formed the habit of friendship she would stop to yarn a while those days when she went to the village. It was a pause, besides, on the hill.
She would say, ‘Are you there, Mrs Gage? There is nothing, I suppose?’
Then Mrs Gage would rush out.
‘I have not looked yet, dear,’ she would say. ‘It is the telephone. It would drive you dilly. Not that it is not an education. I am here all day listening to the wires. We had Lithgow this morning. You would be surprised. But of course I am an official, not a person.’
So that Mrs Gage was manipulating the lives of people with her yellow hands, and for that reason was doubly distasteful, if mysterious and impressive, to Mrs Parker.
But there was that day when Mrs Gage failed to manipulate the wires, or one was cut. She was in a muddle. She ran out. She had china balls for eyes, and her breath was bad.
‘Mrs Parker,’ she called, ‘I was waiting for you. Oh dear. It is terrible, as I would never ever have expected. It is Mr Gage.’
Amy Parker, who had forgotten the husband of the postmistress, as most people did, was holding back. But the postmistress took her by her hot hand and led her with her dry and fibrous one.
‘Took his life, dear,’ s
he announced, now piteously for her situation, ‘on a tree down the yard. By two belts. One was an old thing I had not seen before, that he must have picked up. He was hanging there. Oh dear, it was terrible to see. He was swinging. Very slow. But his face was quiet.’
So Amy Parker, who was not prepared for doom, was led on. She looked ridiculous and hot.
‘Mrs Adams came and helped me with the body,’ the postmistress said. ‘It is quite decent. It is all right to see. These ladies have just seen it, and have sat here sympathizing with me a while.’
In fact, there was Mrs Hobson, and a Mrs Mulvaney, and a woman in a veil.
‘At least you have company,’ said Amy Parker, who did not want to see the body just then.
Mrs Mulvaney sucked her teeth.
‘A nice way to leave a widow,’ Mrs Hobson said.
‘Yes,’ screamed Mrs Gage. ‘Yes.’
Everybody was surprised, because until then she had appeared comfortable and resigned.
But Mrs Gage was choked by the enormity of her life. Suddenly she had to tell. She was the daughter of an inspector of schools, domiciled in some coastal town. They had lived in a neat cottage almost buried beneath hydrangeas, of which her father had been proud, but which had made of them a pale family, from living beneath plants, looking out through the big leaves, and breathing the moist green air. She had met her husband while he was fishing from a breakwater with a rod. She saw the fish glisten as he landed it, masterfully, though his arms were thin. It was a lovely fish. Then they had looked at it together. She had been afraid to spoil his pleasure by any remark, for he was engrossed in the fish, or to accept, when he was forced against his inclination, by some dreadful impulse, to offer it. At home they had eaten the fish, boiled, with a white sauce, inviting the young man to share it, but he had declined, saying he was not interested in fish after they had been cooked. Not long after that he had married the recipient of the fish, for no reason beyond an awful inevitability. Then they began to know each other. They went from place to place. Mr Gage was a weak man, as everybody knew; he had no chin, he had weak, if refined, eyes, that would not look quite at you. They went from place to place, living in hot brown towns, in cottages that smelled of dry rot, in tents, or even under bark. While the husband took up work, and put it down. He was a fettler till his hands gave out. He had a talent for carpentry, but the sawdust affected his breathing. Sometimes he would sit for days without saying a word, to insult a woman. He would sit looking at an empty plate as if it were an object of importance, or on the old iron bedstead under the pepper tree, in his singlet, as everyone had known him, just sitting. It was many years, of course, since the woman had taken to postal work, from bravery, through necessity. She had been many years at Durilgai, and before that in another small town. She would have liked to tell of many more details of her life with the dead man, even physical details, and might still.
‘Just to show you,’ she said, ‘what a woman can endure.’
Her hair had begun to look abandoned.
But Amy Parker remembered the husband of the postmistress on his knees beside the spider bush, and hoped he would not be so mercilessly exposed.
‘He is dead now. Mrs Gage,’ she said.
‘And what am I?’ shrieked the postmistress. ‘I am alive. Or just about.’
She was making dry noises, like a palm.
‘I was never ever hit about, or split open, but I was led to understand 1 did not understand myself,’ she said, ‘nor anything.’
Mrs Mulvaney sucked her teeth.
‘Look,’ said the postmistress, unmatting her desperate hair above the forehead where it had grown wet, ‘I shall show you ladies something that will explain what I mean. Come this way, please,’ she said, shifting the waistband of her dark skirt. ‘It will illustrate,’ she laughed.
Everybody was afraid, but all followed, Mrs Mulvaney, Mrs Hobson, Mrs Parker, and the woman in the veil.
In face of the possibility that there might be a human soul somewhere in a box or pinned to paper, it was forgotten there was a dead man lying in the house. There was a breathing of women as the postmistress opened the door of a room. There were pieces of furniture in the room of a kind that everybody knew, and a dull clock swinging its measure of time. There was also perhaps the smell of a man brooding there. It had persisted after the man had gone out, after he had died even.
‘Look,’ said the postmistress, in a voice that was more detached, almost official. ‘These! I never let on to anyone, of course, that anything like this was going on. But now that he has passed on,’ she said, quite respectfully, because after all death must be respected, whatever the individual worm, ‘and seeing as we are friends, I am making it public for the first and, I should hope, last time.’
‘What are they?’ Mrs Hobson asked.
‘Those things are oil paintings,’ said the postmistress in the same even official voice.
She was pointing with her toe at the objects that stood against the furniture, stacked in layers or exposed singly. Then she ran at them like a young girl, very lightly, and began furiously to arrange the paintings in lines of shame. She would reveal the depths of her life to the women she had brought in. She was morbidly excited by the prospect of complete revelation.
‘There,’ she said, on her knees, looking back at her friends, giving them her yellow face, to be stoned or exonerated, by this time she was indifferent to which, either would have fulfilled her longing. ‘This is the story of our life.’
Mrs Mulvaney sucked her teeth.
‘He was mad then?’ said Mrs Hobson, who did not know what was going on.
‘I do not know,’ said the postmistress in an awful voice, which seemed to open right out, and which was addressed to herself more than to her audience.
The woman in the veil had come forward to look with greater ease. After moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue and encountering the veil, she lifted this, which was either a bit old-fashioned, or else it had gone on and become fashionable again.
She said, ‘Very interesting. But, of course, works of art really prove nothing. They must be judged for themselves.’
Mrs Hobson and Mrs Mulvaney looked with hate at the stranger, at what they did not understand. It was a dark face that had spoken, and what was worse, perhaps foreign.
‘It is all very well for you, Mrs Schreiber,’ said the postmistress, getting up from her uncomfortable knees. ‘You are in a position to judge what you have not suffered. I have sweated blood for every stroke of these,’ she cried, ‘these things!’
And she kicked a picture.
Mrs Mulvaney and Mrs Hobson gasped and recoiled for the audacity of her act. Because she had struck the blasphemous Christ that her late husband had painted, apparently on the side of a tea chest, which by this time had warped somewhat. And it had been in the beginning a poor sort of a scrawny fettler-Christ, a plucked fowl of a man that had not suffered to the last dregs of indignity, but would endure more, down to gashing with a broken bottle, the meanest of all weapons, till left to suppurate under the brown flies, beside the railway lines.
‘Ahhh,’ sighed Mrs Mulvaney and Mrs Hobson. ‘It is terrible.’
They were shocked and afraid. They wanted to turn their backs, and run out of that room of madness, and not think about it again.
But Amy Parker, who had been quiet all this time, because she was opening to an experience of great tenderness and beauty, had not suspected such jewels of blood as the husband of the postmistress had put on the Christ’s hands. Then the flesh began to move her, its wincing verdigris and sweating tallow. She knew this, as if her sleep had told her of it. Great truths are only half-grasped this side of sleep.
So she looked at the picture of Christ, and knew about it. Without moving much, she looked about at the other pictures that the husband of the postmistress had left. He seemed to have painted a great many trees, in various positions, their limbs folded in sleep or contemplation, or moving in torture. And the dead trees. The
white forms of these did not look a bit dry and sceptical, as bones do in a paddock. So also a bottle can express love. She had never before seen a bottle of adequate beauty. This one tempted her to love her neighbour.
Then the women who were looking were beginning to laugh.
‘What about this?’ laughed Mrs Mulvaney.
‘Oh, I say! Eh?’ laughed Mrs Hobson behind her wedding ring.
The women began to shriek, and to labour inside their stout stays, and to darken at the armpits.
‘Yes,’ said the postmistress, eagerly enduring it, ‘that one is the vilest.’
She would have welcomed a blow on the back. She was herself teetering on the brink of cruellest laughter, for the laborious woman almost carved out of paint, that Amy Parker saw.
This figure was just waking. There was a small kernel of knowledge in the almond or the eye, that was growing, and would soon put on leaves. Otherwise the figure of the waking woman was naked, except for the tendrils of hair that preserved those parts of the body in an innocent poetry. Her simplicity was that of silence and of stone. Her breasts were as final as two stones, and she was reaching up with her ponderous but touching hands towards that sun which would itself have been a stone, if it had not glowed with such a savage incandescence.
All this time Mrs Mulvaney and Mrs Hobson were rocking and mocking. ‘What next?’ they shouted as the tears gushed out of their leather faces.
The smell of their mirth had become oppressive.
Then Amy Parker, who had been standing inside the uproar, noticed in the corner, at the feet of the woman, what appeared to be the skeleton of an ant that the husband of the postmistress had scratched in the paint with some sharp instrument, and out of the cage of the ant’s body a flame flickered, of luminous paint, rivalling in intensity that sun which the woman was struggling after.
The Tree of Man Page 35