The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘You are the only one to ask questions,’ laughed the little girl, pulling her hair down in a fresh game, and sucking in her cheeks till they looked hollow.

  ‘Hi, Pam,’ said some boys, coming in.

  Who sat on stools, their shoulderblades showing through their singlets, and their thighs through mauve pants.

  ‘Mint Crush’n Banana Sundae,’ said the boys.

  ‘Ach,’ Panayóta replied.

  But she went with some grace, handling the snakes of spoons, and the little cups that mould the ice cream.

  Then girls came, two sisters or friends, who blushed and giggled at the same things, and who wore the same caps with tassels hanging. These girls ordered a purple juice that stained their mouths. They rubbed their bottoms on the stools and giggled. All was lewdness now as the girls and youths spoke in secret languages or made signs. And Panayóta moved above, behind the counter, of all worlds. Those eyes, remembering the poem perhaps, of moonlight, looked at the man at his island table, and beyond.

  The Stan Parker, who was surrounded by space and lewdness, was growing desperate. The brown hands of saints, descending through the leaves, offered suggestive fruit. The girls and boys were singing some song that they alone knew. But he could learn perhaps. He would follow the eyes of Panayóta, who had already told much that night, but who was withheld now. As all things of importance are withheld or past.

  So the man was getting up in the end, stiff from sitting there all that time, or it was his bones, against the iron branches of the table.

  ‘I must go now,’ said Stan Parker.

  Everybody looked.

  But Panayóta had to rouse herself out of her rapt chalkiness.

  Then she screamed, ‘What about the soodzookákia that Mumma has cooked?’

  He saw the horror in her eyes. She was sucking a lolly too, and her mouth was wet.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Stan Parker politely. ‘I must go now. I must.’

  ‘It is not nice,’ said Panayóta.

  The girls in tassels giggled because there was no other contribution they could make, but to the boys it was unimportant, all this.

  At once Stan Parker left the milk bar of Con the Greek, which his thoughts had made intolerable. But these also followed him in the moist night, as if they would destroy such parts of him as were left. In this state, in which the sea also was taking part, folding over and over, and the remote, and now tragically irretrievable song that the girl had played on the old gramophone, he walked down to where the concrete was becoming sand, and found a woman lighting a cigarette from a stub.

  ‘Gawd,’ she said, ‘I would burn me flickin finger off to save the last draw.’

  Her lips did, indeed, look greedy, sucking fire from the little point of red ash.

  ‘I was sitting here’, said the woman, ‘because I felt sick. I’d been mixing them at the home of a friend, whose husband had gone to a lodge. I am not always like this. I don’t say I am not above a glass. Or two. Or don’t keep a bottle in the ice-chest. Of nice beer. Do you like cats?’ the woman asked. ‘I have cats. I have six, or seven, no six, Hairy died. There is Nona, and Phyllis, and Little Un. But you are not interested. And I don’t blame yer. I am sick of cats, bloody cats everywhere, in the bath. Only when you wake up, before you pull the blinds up, and there is that brown light, and doves, it is morning you know, then you have got the cats, they are all around, snuggled into your arms, and some cats like to get under the bedclothes.’

  Stan Parker, who had listened to this woman until he had grown tired, had got down beside her on the warm sand. Here her breath came over him in a metallic blast, but the smell of the woman was less fetid than his own condition. Disgust had died in him.

  So he put his head in the woman’s lap.

  ‘You feel like I do,’ she said, following the shape of his face with her hand.

  ‘You are hungry,’ she said.

  He began to caress old matted fur.

  ‘What is it you want, dear?’ she asked, swelling with hope out of that shrivelled state in which nature had dumped her.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said diabolically.

  He could have killed the old tart, making his necessity hers, and did put his hands on her throat, and press, a little, where there was a string of beads, and a medallion, or something.

  Ahhhhhh, made the woman’s mouth.

  ‘All right,’ he said into her face. ‘I was still wondering if I could kill myself. But I couldn’t. Not even now.’

  The woman continued to scream.

  He got up and ran along the beach, stumbling across many furtive lusts, and strange driftwood, and soft sand.

  When he had gone some way, and the screaming woman had run down, and a whistle had pierced the darkness, and lights were gathering round the scene he had left, he began to feel sorry for the cat-woman, whose confidences he had broken, and throat bruised.

  Ah, he said, holding his head till it was not his, but a melon hanging in his hands, I am finished, I must go home.

  The sea did not contradict.

  By the time Stan Parker was driving over the bumps on the road from Durilgai towards his place, and particularly past those few panels of fence that he had put off straining because of an apathy in him, that cinematographic strip of life which had been flickering in front of him until now, was already most unreal. But only because he had lived it. Once he had been to the pictures, or twice, to be correct, and there his blood had collaborated to the last flicks of celluloid.

  Now, though, the shabby grass and scraggy trees censured things past. Only the present is real, returning to familiar places. Stan Parker, driving the rickety car, looked once more at the skin on his hands. Till that hollow in which the cypresses rose from the dust, and dust rose to choke, from under and in spite of the dew.

  He was again choking, but drove on quickly beyond reach of one thought, and negotiated the gateway with smoothness, almost polish, and eased up finally in the back yard.

  That big dog got up and came forward, lowering his neck and showing his yellow teeth for guilty gladness.

  Why has this dog always been guilty? he wondered.

  Amy Parker, who had looked out of the window and seen her husband, got the pan, because her responses had long been regulated, and threw in a dollop of fat, and broke open three eggs, which quickly curdled on the pan.

  ‘Have you finished down there?’ he asked. ‘With the cows?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I finished.’

  She brought him food and things to eat with.

  She brought a cup of milky tea, which she stood there drinking, and chewing at a crust of dry bread in rather ugly but usual fashion. This was her habit, while talking to him.

  ‘Last night I nearly forgot Bella’s calf,’ Amy said. ‘Bella was wild. She was running round the yard hollering. She was quite desperate, poor thing, when I let it out. It is a pretty little calf, Stan. It is growing stronger. It will be a fine calf. And from Bella.’

  So she spoke to him.

  When he looked at her, or without looking, he saw they had entered a fresh phase of life, that something was spent. Amy moved about the kitchen. Her hair was flat and quiet, that she had smoothed down. In the stove she put wood, for a moment allowing the fire to shoot out. But she quickly damped it down.

  ‘The wood is nearly done, Stan,’ she said.

  Yes, later he would chop some more.

  Then, do we know, he said, that this did happen? But he could not answer for any of his life. Let alone the lives of other people, in particular his wife’s.

  In this same spirit Amy Parker went about, taking things up and putting them down, waiting to be enlightened. What she did expect, in fact, was that some enlightenment would come from without. But it did not, and she continued to feel used up, and to remember with shame and wonder the way she had torn off her stockings, and they had lain on the floor in grey pockets.

  How thin her face was now if she touched it, but she did not look at it.

/>   In time the man and woman came to accept each other’s mystery, that the roof could not contain. Sometimes at night they would wake singly and listen to each other’s breathing, and wonder. Then they would fall asleep again, because they were tired, and would not dream. Habit comforted them, like warm drinks and slippers, and even went disguised as love.

  Chapter 19

  SOME time after the wedding, not at once, but after they had settled into the house, the Forsdykes went down to see her parents.

  ‘You will be bored, of course, but it is time you faced up to it,’ Thelma said, making her husband responsible for any delay there had been.

  The husband cleared his throat but otherwise did not contradict. He drove. He selected a gap between two cars and drove through with some dash, though not ordinarily possessing it. He was a prudent man. His car, which was of an English make, neither old nor new, neither elongated nor low, of a good, negative colour, did not reveal his economic status. It had been chosen for this reason.

  ‘You are in a draught,’ said Mr Forsdyke at last, and because, as a husband recently created, it was time that he thought of some tenderly considerate but practical thing.

  ‘Oh no,’ said his wife, who for some weeks had been taking time off from her health.

  But he reached across her, absently or knowing better, and wound up the glass of her window.

  Then she smiled, and breathed languidly, and touched the window with her glove. She was ever so content, in love, she would have said, if she did not suspect that such an admission would have been contrary to that good taste she had begun to learn about. But she was in love. She thought in amazement of her house, of which the paint shone between laurels in the afternoon, or she stood in the darkness, secretly, to look, and the house was a fixed framework of light, round which tossed an unruly suggestion of trees that other people had planted.

  The parents had been to the house on one occasion since the wedding. If they had not been to the wedding, it was because, obviously, it might have been embarrassing. But on an afternoon visit, alone, they were appreciative and hushed. They brought eggs and a few enormous oranges. Witnessing the decency of her parents, the daughter was for a moment sad that she had had to abandon them, but quickly put her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, and from behind its texture recovered a sense of reality.

  ‘They are sweet things, of course,’ she said now, inside her fur collar.

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Forsdyke, whose other name was Dudley.

  When he drove he did not care to have his attention diverted from the road. He was a painstaking man. This capacity for taking pains was, in fact, his greatest vanity, and although an innocent one, might become unbearable.

  ‘My mother and father,’ said Thelma Forsdyke.

  As if his attention were necessary to those of her thoughts which she was stating.

  She was fascinated by a cairngorm, surrounded by little pebbles, that her mother had worn on their visit. She had seen this as a little girl, but forgotten.

  ‘Mother is overemotional, I should say. That is half the trouble. But Father, you will have to admit, is a sterling character.’

  Mr Forsdyke drove on, frowning at the road, which should ordinarily have soothed.

  ‘What trouble is there?’ he asked.

  ‘No exact trouble,’ said his wife, examining her gloves and fitting them more tightly, perfectly, to her hands. ‘Just the business of two people discovering each other by degrees, and not discovering enough, as they live together.’

  In the short time that they had been married, Mr Forsdyke had grown surprised at his wife, and would also have been proud of intimations of intellect, if he had not suspected the slipperiness of human nature.

  Thelma Forsdyke sighed. She read a great deal when she was on her own. Sometimes her nostrils grew quite pinched scenting all that she had to accomplish. But she did have many afternoons.

  ‘They seem perfectly straightforward people to me,’ said the solicitor, to whom simplicity was a refuge.

  ‘You do not like them,’ said his wife, but lightly, so that it would exonerate the husband she had chosen, and with whom she was still pleased.

  ‘That is pure nonsense,’ laughed the husband with clear good nature. ‘But I did not marry them.’

  Their high laughter mingled in agreement. Their heads turned on their upright necks, and they looked into each other’s faces. At this moment Thelma Forsdyke could have committed any disloyalty towards her parents.

  Why did I marry Thelma? wondered Dudley Forsdyke.

  Everybody had wondered at first how Dudley Forsdyke came to get caught by that girl at the office. Efficient, of course, but a pale girl, skinny even, with noticeable elbows, and the upper vertebrae visible beneath her oblivious skin. The care of her shining hair was obviously a duty to which she adhered with passion. Its pale, disseminated gold was kept beautifully washed. It strayed just enough to suggest nature, while avoiding untidiness. So too her mouth was just touched by hand. People were surprised that she should favour such careful artifice in an age of deliberate art. Because she was almost imperceptibly careful. But she would finally insinuate herself, like air. She had an instinct for floating. There was her voice, for instance, on which she had worked, and spent quite a proportion of her salary for a time. People remembered her voice afterwards. It was really, on second thought, a remarkably agreeable one. Cultured, without strain. Well modulated, without discarding firmness. People in the darkness of the telephone would guess at its owner’s nature, or in her presence at those channels her life took on emerging in the evening from the office lift.

  Thelma Parker’s evolved voice had hung between Dudley Forsdyke and endless irritations, even unpleasantness. It was expert in sympathy for minor ailments, the deaths of elderly, superfluous relations, and all the personal aspects of the weather. It ignored the passionate and angry, for passion and anger do regrettably occur, and would reduce by incredulity those clients who knew better than the law. So that not everyone was pleased when that Miss Parker passed through the room again, aloof but present, carrying in her cool hands some awful deed or contract. Or placing on her employer’s desk a letter that she dared him not to sign.

  Some were sorry for Forsdyke, who had risked so much on confidence. But he himself began to like it. Sometimes she leaned upon his desk, but correctly, at arm’s length, to explain a point with a pencil. And he could smell her hair. He was fascinated by her wrist-watch. As she went out, very quietly, the baize door just breathing, the solicitor undid a button of his waistcoat and lifted up his stomach in that way which Thelma Parker had described formerly, and flicked over a paper, and flicked over another.

  Where is Miss Parker? he asked.

  Miss Parker, they said, has got the flu.

  Then he knew the panic of uncertainty. His desk was covered with heaps of unrelated things. Charming women in fur coats and pearls made irreverent suggestions on wording. So that he knew Thelma Parker was indispensable to him. So he married her.

  If his motives for doing it were sensed rather than reasoned, which was extraordinary in one so rational, it was natural that he should forget sometimes, and wonder why he had committed that act. As now. In the detached world of the car, on the road from which suburbs were falling away, in the wet landscape of a rude spring, he was trying to remember what it was that pricked his sense of satisfaction. But he could not. He was conscious of barbed-wire fences defining the road along which he drove, and his wife’s coat, of some dark, expensive fur, what was it? but he had put it on her, and that little runnel of water where rain dashed itself against the glass, coming in however frequently he screwed the window up, coming in to spatter on his face. The dry rest of his body was insignificant beside that wet patch. This communed with depths of unplumbed, colder water and unpredictable events. He grimaced rather as he drove. The rain was good for the land, though, he said.

  The two people drove on. They looked very delicate, also rather silly, from outside the ca
r. They had a purpose, no doubt, but this was not apparent, without taking into account other forces, other mechanisms. Like those little, delicate, trembling springs in the guts of a watch. The people trembled and functioned inside the glass car, and were sometimes on the verge of becoming upset, but recovered themselves for invisible technical reasons.

  Presently Thelma Forsdyke opened her crocodile handbag, which she had bought after noticing quietly that such a handbag was carried by those women who frightened her, she opened her bag and said, ‘Would you like a sweet, Dudley?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he replied and frowned.

  He quite definitely would not.

  But she did produce a little paper bag, and would suck a sweet. It was a habit that she had acquired. For comfort’s sake. She did it still.

  It was barley sugar now, it seemed. But her husband, frowning, remembered those little sweets, or cachous, scented with something like violet, a synthetic smell, that had drifted on the more irritating afternoons above the smells of sealing wax and ink.

  Thelma herself heard the bell at the end of the line, though the bland flavour of the barley sugar did absolve her to a certain extent of past guilt. She remembered those little violet cachous and the way he had turned his head, some afternoons. Then many points of etiquette she had not yet mastered, but towards which she was feeling her way, holding on to expensive objects, stirred unhappily inside her. The eyes of certain women looked beyond her clothes. She blushed.

  ‘Why do some people always have to suck things?’ asked her husband.

  Thelma Forsdyke shrugged, and looked away, and was obviously intending not to answer.

  Rain was beating at the windows out of a large grey sky.

  She wrenched the glass down and threw out the miserable little bag of hot white paper. It fell innocently.

  ‘You should not have taken it like that,’ laughed her magnanimous husband, looking at her, taking a pleasure in his own power.

  If his dry hands had been free he would have patted her on the back where the pearls cut across the vertebrae.