The man, who was on the verge of closing his mouth on a half-spoken word, dropped to his knee then.
‘Give us a chance,’ he said. ‘You can at least give it a lookover. That is free for nothing.’
Although discouraged, he could not shed the brass with which he had been armoured.
The big white woman laughed softly at the brazen man as she sat looking down, and at his hands. He began to draw out lengths of material from one case.
‘This is just to show you,’ he said. ‘I got more back there in the car. French. This is a nice line,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of quiet. That appeals sometimes to ladies of quiet tastes. But mind you, distinguished. This is a nice one. Something to stand out. Bright but not flash. Or this. It’ll wear for years. But because it don’t hit you in the eye, you won’t hold that against it. Care for green? Some ladies are superstitious. I can show you a belt that would go with that. Very reasonable and tasteful. Something different. And a set of buttons. Hand-painted. Or pink? Lots of young girls go for this one. Of course that don’t mean it’s not available. If it’s pink you’re feeling like, then pink it is. But take your time, lady. Have a look. A comfortable look, I always say. We’ve got all day.’
Then when he had heaped them in a turmoil at her feet, these and other soft snakes, in and out of the cases, on the veranda, he turned and began to look at three hens which had come round the side of the house, and were chipping at the paths without regard for him, and stalking round the stiff rosemary with fixed eyes. The man was forced to light a cigarette, from a rather tinny inscribed case that had been given him years ago, on an occasion, by a mob of blokes. The man looked at a row of pumpkins standing on the roof of a shed. He drew hard on the cigarette. All that was in the garden, and what could be seen of the surrounding paddocks, submerged in their dead grass, was at that moment incredible to him. As he did not know the names of plants, he did not even have the comfort of thinking these over. He could only smoke his thin and bitter cigarette.
But the woman, who had been surrounded by such tribute of colour, and who had been fingering it in search of inspiration, finally said, ‘I am sorry. I have everything. There is nothing I want.’
‘Some people are lucky,’ said the man, not angrily, but almost.
He began to fold and smooth, till he was ready to snap the catches of the cases. All was hidden. All the time she had been watching his hands, which were stained on certain fingers. He was one of the reddish men, of skin and hair. He was repulsive to her, she thought. Turning to fat. Without brilliantine he would have bristled. But she continued to watch those acts of conjuring that he was performing. She was fascinated by the smooth cigarette that blew smoke.
Then the man pushed back the cases, as if, surprisingly, he despised the elaborate mechanics of his slick life.
‘Gee,’ he said, ‘it’s dry here.’
The hat pushed back, his head had begun to look naked and pitiable.
‘We’ve had just about everything in the years we have lived here,’ she said, looking around. ‘Floods, fire, drought. But we have never starved.’
‘How do you account for that?’ he asked, without interest.
When he put his hands on his hips, and stood that way, thickset and rather pursy, she might not have trusted him. Remembering her husband – in fact, she could never escape from him for long – she said, ‘My husband has a belief in God. At least I think he has. We have never spoken about it.’
‘Oh,’ said the man.
This woman was standing above him on the raised-up veranda, looking down. Because she was concentrating on her own thoughts, he suspected her of looking into his. Which he did not care about. So he moved the muscles in his jaws. She was a woman getting on, probably at that time of life, complicated but harmless.
‘Are you religious?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I believe. Not yet.’
‘I never thought about it much,’ he said.
He spat into the bushes, but wondered at once whether he should have done so. She gave no glimpse of her feelings, though. She was a still woman. There was no indication of censure, only a sound of insects congregated round a lump of dark comb underneath the eaves.
The woman heard it too. It was a throbbing.
‘You don’t happen to have a glass of water,’ said the man at last, when his eardrums were bursting. ‘I’m dry as a snake.’
‘Yes,’ she said, just raising her eyes from under the weight of some deliberation that was taking place, and smiling with straight lips.
A bit dotty, he said, but a good-looking woman, or has been.
He began to follow her through the house, through which she was leading him, through an intimacy of clocks and silence. His flash shoes trod heavily on the linoleum, on which the dust had gathered. There was a slight grit beneath his rubber feet. And everywhere the dimness of the inhabited house was opening to him, offering him the faint smells of life and furniture. He had never penetrated deeper into any house, he began to feel, least of all into his own shallow box, which he entered rarely, anyway, and then turned on the radio.
The woman could feel the stranger in his sumptuous suit behind her as she brought him on. He was rather a big man in the dimness of the passage, moving in masses of squelching rubber, coughing in a thick voice, and murmuring those commonplaces that people who talk are compelled to utter. It was exciting and disturbing for her to reveal the intimacies of her house, but all the time she was remembering that he was repellent to her, with his reddish skin and red hair. The obscenity of his fingers too, with those brown stains.
Then they were in the kitchen, which did have an amplitude, of a comparatively big old kitchen. The common but living furniture was pleasant to the hands. So the man rested his knuckles as a matter of course on the surface of the big worn table, waiting for the woman to fetch him the glass of water, which she did soon, from a canvas bag.
‘Ah,’ said the man, jerking back his head and wriggling his neck, because he was preparing to be funny. ‘That’s the stuff to shake the navy.’
It disguised the trembling of the water.
Because it was strange there. We are advancing towards something, he knew, looking at the woman’s transparent eyes. Her smooth flesh trembled and receded like pale water.
He drank down the rest of the glassful, and it was very cool. A great innocence of object and purpose prevailed in the kitchen.
‘I’d like to have a spring, like the people down the road,’ said Amy Parker, stepping out of the state of entrancement in which she had been shut, it seemed, for many years, and the words ran out of her quickly and glitteringly, like water. ‘You can see it coming out of the ground. You can hold it up, and it is quite clear, no weed in it or anything. You should always look for a spring before you build a house. Tank water isn’t the same.’
She came forward breathlessly after that, to take the glass. Her courage had grown with words, and overcome an awkwardness of movement.
‘Yes,’ said the man unsteadily. ‘There’s nothing like cold spring water.’
She was almost but not quite his height, he saw.
She noticed the pores in his red skin, which would remain her torment.
Then they were grappling with each other. Teeth were striking on teeth. Their arms were knotting.
Ahhh, cried the breath of the woman Amy Parker as she remembered a name that she could not tear up. She could have righted herself perhaps, but only momentarily, before swirling farther to destruction.
‘What’s come over us?’ panted the pursy man, but did not wish to be answered.
Buried in the flesh of the woman, he had returned to boyhood, from which poetry had escaped, and would again ultimately.
Presently Amy Parker took the man by the hand. Their fingers were surprising to each other’s fingers. Now that their wills had withdrawn, they were trembling together in cold rooms. But after they had taken the clothes from their nakedness, fire leaped ou
t of them, and in that blaze they would have to burn out, to whatever end.
They had gone in to that straight bed on which Amy Parker had slept out the sum of her life. She saw intermittently those possessions that she had given up to the holocaust. She closed her eyes. The man drew from out of her lovely ribbons of appeased flesh. But when she took his skull, and tried to enter it, she could not, but bruised her mouth against the sockets. It was her husband’s head. Then she put her tongue, crying, against the mouth. It was as if she had spat into the face of her husband, or still further, into the mystery of her husband’s God, that she saw by glimpses but could not reach deeper to. So that she was fighting her disgust, and crying for her own destruction before she had destroyed, as she must destroy. Long waves of exquisite pleasure were carrying her condemned body towards that point.
‘Steady on now,’ breathed the man’s hot breath into her burning ear.
On putting aside surprise and fear, he had quickly risen to the moderate heights of which he was capable, of rather trite and panting sensuality, of stale words and physical cosiness. Now he tried to calm this woman, whose passion overflowed the bounds that he knew.
‘Take a hold of yourself,’ he laughed, touching her with heavy superior hands. ‘I’m not gonna run off and leave yer.’
If he was her inferior in passion, he was her superior in quickly appeased lust. So he could afford to laugh, and light another cigarette, and watch the soul writhe mysteriously in her body.
Finally she was still. She was innocent in that stillness. He touched her dreamy thighs, and remembered standing on the white banks of a large but almost dry river, catching eels, when a little boy. That innocence of light which came beneath the blind lit his fleshy face, and the struggle of eels lifted from the mud, he was himself lithe and golden. That morning, it seemed, was the one solid morning of his life. The banks of the river were sculptured. All else, all experience, slithered through his hands in confusion.
‘What is it?’ said the woman, opening her eyes.
‘Nothing,’ said the thick man. ‘I was just thinking.’
He began to think about his wife, who was thin. She had a smoker’s cough. She knitted jumpers, one after the other; it was a kind of vice with her, to preserve a continuity of wool, and especially when night came.
But he broke off there.
He had remembered something. He bent forward, examining the woman’s skin, through smoke.
‘They call me Leo,’ he said.
‘Leo,’ she said dully.
She neither accepted nor rejected. In that drowsiness even her own name was not stuck on.
She rubbed her cheek against the sheet, which smelled of recent washing, and was uncorrupted by smoke. Lust leaves no immediate trace. Instead many little pictures of contentment and tenderness flickered in her. Some of these were barely stated, but she could interpret them, like the expression on the face of the postmistress’s husband, or those paintings he had left as an apology for his life. She was given access also to other souls, to that of her neighbour O’Dowd, with whom she sat again on a veranda, bandying hairy words, bridging the gap between them by obscenity and drunkenness, till she could have loved that one too, embracing her own guilt. Sometimes the dreams her children had dreamed on other beds in the house, and which had never really dispersed, mingled with her own vision, and she thought that in time she might have understood even her children.
Opening her eyes again, she saw that the man called Leo was occupying the room as he put on his clothes with great masterliness. How his braces hung down, she saw through the slits of her eyes.
‘Open the window, Leo,’ she said. ‘It is stuffy in here.’
He was only too willing to do this, hurriedly, to oblige; he had a long way to go, and even longer to catch up with himself after the detour he had made.
‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ he commanded rather than asked, but because his strength was not great enough, he pulled the knot of his tie so tight the colour came deeper in his face, she saw, like a congestion, and the veins in his eyes.
‘In a little while,’ she just said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to be on my way.’
It was not the moment for two people who had looked so intimately into each other to kiss. So they touched each other somehow, and she heard him going too quickly through the house, and did not think about him much more for that moment, as if he had ceased to be of importance to her. She lay there smiling and dreaming. If she was destroyed, she had not yet woken to her ghost.
Then, as the wind was lifting the curtain up and letting it fall, the cat got in, a pied tom that she had grown fond of as a kitten, and kept, and sometimes regretted after his cheeks had swelled out. This cat now eased himself through the slit of the window, jumped down on felt feet, and was all for rubbing himself against her.
‘Down, Tom,’ she murmured, without other attempt at remonstrance.
Feeling fur, as the condoning cat rubbed and cherished her. As she lay powerless. The big cat grovelling, and bathing his cool fu in her warm flesh. Then the tail trailed, she felt, between her breasts. It was giving her the gooseflesh. It was revolting her.
‘Ahhh,’ she cried. ‘You brute!’
As she recoiled, flinging the cat, which struck the dressing table. How it squawked, and rebounded, so that she was left with the silence and her own face.
This had crumbled further since morning, it seemed. It was all loathing for the glass, and the hair had slipped out of control, was hanging in switches, and masses, and grey tails. She was sagging. Now she did really begin to shiver.
‘It is cold,’ she shivered, covering her shoulders and her breasts with her arms, as if she might stop her shivering in that way.
She began to feel her way through her clothes.
‘It is late,’ she shivered. ‘It is milking time. And I am on my own.’
She walked through the house in a wind of resumed activity, flinging doors behind her as she passed, gathering things, buckets, and the clean rags with which to dry the teats of the cows. Temporarily this honest and steadfast activity swallowed her up, so that she was not able to reconnoitre her position, except when she was approaching the sheds and found them square and ominous, as she had not suspected, in their white bleached wood. Slow cows stood watching her, and afterwards, in the bails, turned their heads at some difference in her hands, or uneasiness, or haste, ruminating above their blue tongues.
When Stan Parker got home he saw that his wife had probably had a headache. She had parted her hair very carefully, and the bones of her face were distinct. Sometimes after headaches, or some secret activity of thought, the flesh of her face had a grey tinge, which it had now. It looked flatter. Immediately he turned his eyes away from this, and began to tell her about the sale at Wullunya and people he had seen, about illnesses, and deaths, and marriages. She bent her head and received all this information with gratitude, even humility.
She wanted to do something for him.
‘Here’s a nice piece, Stan,’ she said, ‘with the fat on that you like.’
She sliced, or rather hacked, for she was not very good at carving, at the solid roast of beef, and brought off a ruddy sliver with an edge of yellow fat. Although he was already full, and on the verge of pushing back his plate, he was forced to accept this, because he thought it might give her pleasure.
‘You are not eating,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, turning down her mouth, as if he had mentioned something nauseating to her. ‘It has blown all day. I have no appetite,’ she said.
And began to go about.
‘It has blown all right,’ he said. ‘It will dry the last drop.’
So that she saw the yellow grass lying down, in that brassy light of afternoon, in which travellers appear out of a distance.
‘There was a man here this afternoon,’ she said, in a louder voice than was hers. ‘With things to sell.’
‘What sort of things?’ he asked, b
ecause their lives were made of question and answer.
‘Dress materials, and oh, fancy things.’
‘What did you buy?’ he asked.
‘What should I buy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why, some frill!’
He laughed for that word which he had not pulled out of his mouth till then.
‘At my time of life!’ She laughed.
Holding up her throat for the laughter to escape with passion, it seemed.
He was content, though. He took yesterday’s paper, more as an occupation than to cast fresh light on that little which he already knew, because he no longer expected to learn more, except by the blinding force of some illumination. So he read solidly through the deeds of statesmen, soldiers, scientists, while keeping himself in reserve for something of greater importance that would occur. And his wife sat and sewed.
Presently he said, ‘I met a man called Organ at Wullunya. He was nephew of a woman we rescued in the floods. I can remember her. She was a small woman, with a sewing machine that she had to leave behind. This boy’s grandfather was drowned in the floods. They found him caught in a tree.’
‘Well, what of it?’ said his wife rather irritably. ‘Everyone in the district was in the floods. Some of their folks were drowned. Did this man tell you something of interest perhaps?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ said Stan Parker.
His wife squinted at the eye of a needle. She could have been terribly irritated at that moment in the loud, pervasive electric light.
‘What of him?’ she murmured thickly.
‘I saw his grandfather, Amy,’ said Stan Parker. ‘He was an old man with a beard, hanging upside down in a tree. And we rowed past. Nobody else saw. He was almost certainly dead. I would’uv liked to think it was a ram. I persuaded myself perhaps, while there was still time to tell. But we rowed. And soon it was too late.’
The Tree of Man Page 38