He was golden by lamplight, and had been also as a little boy, looking at the marble clock.
Am I turning into the kind of mug she expects? asked the young man.
‘I must go now, Mum,’ he said.
‘Let me look at you.’
Then they were turning in the gigantic room, which was stuck there in the darkness for no other purpose. She was kissing him. Where is Dad now, he wondered, that I have not asked about, did she notice? – the old bugger is reading the paper somewhere, holding on to it as if it was boards. The young man averted his eyes, as he did always when kissing, but submitted. He closed his eyes, for the shock of his childhood was too great, its empty saucepans and its kisses breathing on him with the warmth of summer. She had only taken his toys away as a game, it seemed.
‘Ray,’ she said, looking into his face, ‘I can’t believe that you will go.’
Looking into his eyes.
‘You won’t go.’
Looking into the pupils of his eyes, though she was unable to see herself in that light.
‘What it is you’re looking for I don’t know,’ she said.
Some days of summer she herself did believe that permanence had arrived in all its stillness.
So she kissed him again as she had not kissed yet, and trembled for an answer on the lips of this young man, who was only incidentally her son.
‘Look here,’ he said, laughing now for the joke, ‘I gotta be going, I said.’
Began to shake her off with his shoulders, as if he were some clumsy boy or dog. She made him that way. Dogs, when patted, curve round in pleased embarrassment and knock things over.
‘Yes,’ she said in that grey voice.
She was putting her hat right. She was older. It was the hat. It was the kind that women in buses wear, sitting in line on a long seat. It was piled with some kind of ornamentation that you do not notice without going into, and then not always.
‘Well, so long, Mum,’ he said.
Ray Parker gave people a hard slap on the elbow when saying good-bye.
‘Good-bye, Ray,’ she said.
Her voice was flatter. It needed a lozenge, to help it over an obstruction.
‘I’ll let you know how it all makes out,’ he said, laughing, as the night blew in at the door.
Now the room which had been put there for a purpose had clearly served it. Leaves were coming in.
‘I’ll always be interested’, she said, ‘to hear. Even if it’s only a postcard.’
He was laughing insanely for some joke as he went out, and looked back once.
Jesus, he said, for his hot, wet neck.
There was a house of similar proportions into which he had once got simply by breaking a window. In that house, which had been temporarily his, he had made animal noises at the portraits and stuffed his mouth with glacé fruits, till the sight of so many innocent and haphazard objects had given him a respect, almost an affection for their owners, and he went away, taking with him only a paperweight and a little filigree box.
So Ray Parker, looking back at his mother in her oblivious hat, in the room, amongst the crumbs, began to trail quietly through the darkness with sadness for something he would never achieve. He was heavier and older in his good but feckless body. He was older, but not old enough.
Then Amy Parker, who had been rolling her handkerchief into a ball, before realizing it was not something to throw away, took the basket up. There was a cloth too, with which she had hidden a chicken from sight, and which she would wash on Monday. She looked at the crumbs on the floor, wondering whether she should resume her life to the extent of sweeping them up. But a mouse came, or was blown through the flurried leaves, and at once made the boards his province. She watched this intensive activity from a great height, in the silence of the house, through which the damp pressed, through cracks, and upwards through whole masses of cold brick, and outwards from the woodwork in a slow growth of fungus.
Of course her son had gone away by this time, so Amy Parker went quickly out. Then what have I got? she asked, as the void hit her, and her lamp went jolting down the hill. Her throat was dry. She began to be afraid in the darkness, full of live, wet leaves. The night was rocking. Clouds were deaped up, and a few small stars were glittering with virulence. People had seen Bub Quigley wander from the grounds of Glastonbury at night, but that would have been when younger, before the fits got too bad. Now he would stroll in the sun on still mornings, a little way only when he was sick, one long hand locked in his sister’s, almost as if they had been lovers, anyway lost in each other.
Now that Amy Parker was lost in the helter-skelter darkness she longed for some knowledge of which others were apparently possessors, I have nothing, I know nothing, she suspected. Her breath panted to learn, as her ankles turned on stones, but there was no indication where or how to begin. If you could ask, she said. People, however, put on that face of surprise and disgust when cornered by requests in any way peculiar. She knew, because she had adopted it herself
After straying some distance she returned to her own kitchenful of light, and there was her husband sitting in it.
‘I am going to put on the kettle’, she said, ‘and make us a cup of tea, Stan.’
He looked up from the paper he was reading. Because she was exuding night air and her cheeks had a desperate glow he should have been inquisitive, but he had decided not to be.
He said, ‘Thanks, Amy. I don’t think I’ll bother. Thanks all the same.’
‘But it will warm you.’
He laughed. He knew better.
‘I am warm enough,’ he said.
Stan knows a good deal probably, she sensed, but he will never tell.
‘Then I shall have a cup,’ she said. ‘By myself.’
And was moving her black kettle.
Stan returned to reading the newspaper, in which all incidents are electrically lit. It was not ordained just then that he should take strange paths. Two people do not lose themselves at the identical moment, or else they might find each other, and be saved. It is not as simple as that.
PART FOUR
Chapter 20
THE garden at Parkers’ had almost taken possession of the house. It was a haphazard sort of garden. Mrs Parker would plant a shrub with passion, something she had seen and desired intensely, would plant it, and forget about it. Then suddenly it had grown and was sawing at its neighbours. All flowers, all leaves, were interlocked in that garden. The shrubs were blooming in each other. Sometimes Mrs Parker would come out from the house, and push the branches aside impatiently, and look out. Her brown skin had wrinkled at the eyes from days beneath the sun. Her skin was rough. Branches of trees, twigs of shrubs, would catch at her hair and draw it out. It got in a mess sometimes, but what can you do? and she was all the time snatching at it, putting it back, with her brown hand, with its dull ring. Her hand was rather hard but pleasing. You would look at it.
And at her, as she peered through the branches of the oleanders, that were always dusty, every summer, or as she parted the tufts of the tea tree, looking for the grub that sews them up. Sometimes Mrs Parker would look at the people passing on the road, but she would not speak to them now, not so much. She would go back into her house, climbing the steps with precision, some old cardigan most likely caught around her broad figure, she had certainly broadened at the hips. Then she would go inside her house, rather a secret woman, into the brown house, inseparable from the garden, from the landscape in which it was.
That house had never had a name. At first it had not needed one. It had become known as Parkers’ and had stayed that way. There was no one at Durilgai, no one in the surrounding districts, who could remember when Parkers’ had not stood. Everybody took it for granted and no longer looked at it. Many people thought it was ugly. It was old and brown anyway, and less planned than purposeful.
Mr Parker kept it in pretty good order, though. He kept the gutters cleared and the woodwork painted, and replaced any boards that the white ant was gettin
g at. He was a conscientious sort of man. Slow. He was a big man, coming up the slope from his cows, or ploughing a furrow for corn. When he remembered, he was wearing glasses now, the little metal-rimmed kind, on account of some headaches he had been having. The glasses were a damn nuisance and got broke; he had mended them in one place with waxed string. But they began to suit his face. He came up the slope with buckets, and would jerk his head at people, even at strangers, to pass the time of day. People liked him. His skin was honest.
One winter, when activity about the place had slackened off, Stan Parker was going over to give Joe Peabody a hand with some fencing. Young Peabody had bought that block at Hungerford but was not yet settled, there was always something. One year he broke his leg, another he was gored by a bull. Then his mother-in-law got sick, it was her ticker, and they had to pay the specialist. Joe Peabody had married a kind of cousin, because there were not any other girls around at that time. But she was a good girl, healthy, and they were breeding the other side of the bag curtain which divided them from the mother-in-law. The kids also set Joe Peabody back, temporarily anyway, but he was very cheerful, so cheerful, in fact, that no one ever thought to pity him.
Stan Parker would go over sometimes, though, because young Peabody had been in the habit of asking favours of him, and advice. For this reason the older man liked the younger very much. He was flattered, but refreshed too, by unexpected friendship.
When Stan Parker was getting ready to assist with that fencing job, as he had promised, fetching and scraping his own crowbar, because he did not care to use other people’s tools, his wife came to him and said, ‘You are going over to Joe Peabody’s.’
It was a statement, not a question, as she stood with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, watching her husband scrape the tools. And Stan Parker made no answer, it was a noise rather, of confirmation, that she had learned by this time to interpret.
A year or two ago Amy Parker had resented this relationship. That young man cannot speak straight to a person but stands sideways, she complained. It was true. Young Peabody was shy of his friend’s wife. So Amy Parker began to dislike the shape of his nose, and to say things about his young wife. Well, she is a breeder anyway, she said.
‘You don’t like him. Why?’ asked Stan Parker. ‘He is inoffensive.’
‘I don’t dislike him,’ said his wife, surprised. ‘But I can’t take to him. If you know what I mean.’
The husband did not, altogether.
Then Amy Parker remembered the blue tie that Joe Peabody had been wearing on that day, and for which she had not forgiven him. It was a bright, accusing blue that men should not wear. Or she had not been ready for it at that moment. She was accused.
‘I have nothing against him,’ she said stoutly.
Anyway, her husband continued to frequent Joe Peabody, and in time Amy Parker accepted this situation, as most situations are eventually accepted.
‘I am not putting up any lunch,’ she said, watching her husband prepare his tools.
‘That is right,’ he answered. ‘They would not like that.’
She watched his head. Ah, she said, I am fond of him. It was pleasanter than love.
When he had straightened up, and it was evident he was going, a great warmth of affection pervaded her, for all his actions, and she rubbed her sleeve against him and said, ‘Won’t you kiss me then?’
He laughed, and kissed her, but awkwardly, with dry lips.
Because hers were moister she considered she was fonder. She loved him even. Of course she loved him. Going from the yard with the heavy tools.
Then Amy Parker watched her husband start the car, which was one in a succession of old cars, and drive out, upright. In the house in which she was glad now to be alone, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her affection, peace did seem attainable. So she polished wood with long methodical sweeps until it lit the winter with a glow of old red wood, and she looked out of the window at the sparkling grass and some first wattles on the shoulder of the hill. For the moment, at least, she demanded only what she knew.
Everyone sat easy in that peaceful morning, which is possible sometimes in the still winter days. Stan Parker, who had chugged along the stony road to Peabodys’, was glad also to be in it. He passed many places that he knew, and children who did not recognize him, and cows staring, and a brilliant cock that sprang upon a roof and stood there for splendour.
Eventually the car arrived at Peabodys’, where the young farmer himself ran out from the shed-house in which the family was living, came straight through the children, dogs, the screaming and the barking, and after wasting very little time the two men went down with clean strides through the dew to the place where part of the fence was already standing.
Soon they were at work, the men turning up the red soil for post holes, the dogs nosing in the tussocks for rabbits. Because he was receiving free assistance from a neighbour young Peabody felt bound to work twice as hard. He would have done all.
‘Give us the shovel, Stan,’ he said when he had flung the crowbar down.
But Stan Parker did not like this. He took the shovel and flung up earth in turn.
So they worked like this in maniacal deference to each other.
And as it grew hot and panting, and a hawk sailed slow and black across the empty sky, young Peabody tore off his shirt, and spat on his hands, and was working all the harder.
Stan Parker, who remained clothed in his shirt, watched the body of the young man, which had all the obliviousness and confidence of young naked bodies. So Stan Parker himself had moved the trees and boulders back in the dream time. So his mouth, as he watched, had to become a bit ironical. He could remember the time when it was just a matter of fencing in his land, and then it would be his. Such a belief was obvious in the clear eyes of the muscular young man, who was opening and closing like a knife in his fury of confidence.
At last they came to something which did shake the ribs of Joe Peabody. He stood there palpitating. He could have been oiled all over.
‘That’s sunk us for this one,’ he said, temporarily dubious. ‘Might blast it, I suppose.’
It was an apparently endless boulder that the two men had been picking round.
‘That?’ said Stan Parker, smiling at the hole in a rather tight way. ‘There has been worse than that. I wouldn’t let that beat us, a little bit of a stone.’
So he took the crowbar.
Joe Peabody stood with his hands on his heaving hips, secretly hoping that the older man would assume control.
Stan Parker worked. The iron trembled as it struck the ground, whether with contempt or hope. The man worked. Was it hatred flowing out of his arms? But he laughed once or twice. Once or twice sparks flew out of the rock, and grey wounds appeared. The dry, fragile body of the man was fighting with the dull stone. At the bottom of the gully, he remembered, there was that stream of brown water, cool days flowed out of the molten, and the little sarsaparilla vines twined purple through the grey thorns. Suddenly he bent over the crowbar, pressing his belly into it, weighing it down with his body, with the whole of his strength.
The stone did move in the hole.
He withdrew the bar and stabbed again and again into the corners of the earth, having observed a weakness. The rock heaved, its shape was evident now.
‘Good-oh,’ shouted young Peabody, who liked to admire his friend. ‘What do you know about that!’
Stan Parker smiled.
He was rather grey. He dropped the iron bar, which fell tingling. But there was a suspicion that the man himself, though still upright had been similarly rejected. Grey mists floated in the bright morning. He felt sick. His breath was short. His back or something.
‘What’s up, Stan?’ asked the young man, coming and touching the older one. ‘Go easy on it. Are you feeling crook?’
He was full of concern.
Stan Parker wiped his eyes, putting the whole of his confused face behind his hands. The whole of his body was sha
king. But when he had emerged from behind his hands, as he had to, he smiled again and said, ‘I’m okay, Joe. I’m not what I was, that’s all.’
The young man looked at the old man. ‘You gotta take it easy,’ he said.
He was pleased now to take control, and when the boulder was fully prised from the ground ordered Stan Parker to sit upon it, which he did.
Stan Parker sat there in the lovely morning feeling his neck, which was gristly, and his sides, of which the ribs were weak. If he could have put his hand on his own soul and judged its shape, age, toughness, and durability, he would have done so. As he could not, he was inwardly very shaken, he felt nonexistent, although he continued to smile through the haze of exhaustion, watching the young man work at a normal rate now that there was no competition, and listening to him give advice on fencing, which, to the recipient, had begun to seem inevitable rather than presumptuous.
Soon a little boy came running over the broken ground, too fast for himself, but he was propelled by the morning. His bare feet thumping, his scabby legs flashing, he came on. He was carrying a crust of bread that he had left off chewing, and of which a moist crumb was clinging to his red cheeks.
He arrived and gabbled something.
‘What’s he say?’ asked Stan Parker, who was an old man, and out of it now.
‘He says the missus has the dinner ready,’ said the father, bringing out a few more shovelfuls of earth, on principle.
The child stood looking at Stan Parker, thoughtful on his crust.
‘What is wrong with Mr Parker, Dad?’ asked the boy. ‘Why isn’t he working?’
‘That is none of your business,’ said Joe Peabody. ‘Mr Parker is havin a rest.’
The young father clothed his nakedness. He had a fine line of dark hair dividing his body from the breasts to the navel. He did not pay much attention to this child which had sprung from him in the dark shed. He took him for granted rather, putting his hand on his friend’s back and saying, ‘Come on, Stan. We’ll get something inside of us.’
So Stan Parker was led, he was glad to be, and the little boy, hopping in front with his chewed crust, hopping and turning round, skipping backwards to get a better look, cried, ‘Is Mr Parker sick then?’
The Tree of Man Page 45