Oh dear, she said. She began to look along the road, along which she had been looking all her life, and there in the distance a woman rode, violets in her breast. Poetry is not words. It is the jingling of the spurs, or of chains, the curb, it could be, that she wore, which some say is cruel. This woman will not look down. She has found the distance. So other cruel poetry rode out of the past into the violet sky. I was too humble then, said the old woman, I did not know a thing, I could have been loved in any disguise.
Then Amy Parker, who was looking down from the circle, holding the rail of memory, began to be certain it was Madeleine. It was the violets that Madeleine had never worn, but should have, in the nest of leaves. So the old woman was peering through the darkness, to where the shoulders shone, and Madeleine put up her hand, to smooth a hair, or brush the wing of boredom from out of her head, at a play.
When the lights went up for the interval, there was the woman, made of soap.
‘I could swear that that woman with the violets is Madeleine,’ said Amy Parker, leaning down.
‘What Madeleine?’ asked her husband.
‘That was to marry Tom Armstrong. That you rescued from the burning house.’
The old woman could have bent down and gathered the violets, so fresh was her memory, and dewy.
Then her husband looked at her slowly and said with the brutality of husbands, ‘But Madeleine is by this time an old woman. She would be older than you, Amy. And you are old.’
And stupid, he saw. He could see this without unkindness. It is possible to love stupid old women, and hateful ones.
‘That may be,’ she said. ‘Yes. I did not think.’
Old women who have been subtle, at times terribly subtle, are stupider when they begin to be, as if their subtlety has worn them out.
Amy Parker was, in fact, tired. Slowly she ate a chocolate, and let that sweet comfort drift over her in the absence of others. Madeleine would probably be dead. It was unimportant anyway.
But she began to feel sad, or chocolatey. Chocolate has its own melancholy, at a height, in darkness. Because it was dark again by now. The perverse gallery of memory in which the old woman had been shoved to enjoy herself rustled with breathing and paper, as other people let their own puppets dance. Those in the gold frame of the stage were less convincing, because they were repeating the words of the book. And books are unpardonable. You cannot go by what is written.
So Amy Parker, who had developed a little nodding motion as she watched from high darkness, overflowed from those words or precepts. Just as she was overflowing from her bosom. She walked all satiny then, and would have been caught at by rosemary, or any other sharp plant in the garden, while talking with Hamlet. Hers was red, though. It was strange to think of this white-faced Hamlet the son of that queen, a big woman, stout even, the satin was conveying. Even queens are saddled and bewildered. Does Hamlet hate his mother? Ah Ray, Ray, she said, give me your mouth once, so that I can tell by kissing. But that room, the old kitchen, was as empty as a stage, as she remembered, as empty of true answers as Hamlet, he had gone off into the night, which was filled with lightning and the leaves of trees.
‘Huh,’ she said, she had a piece of hard filling, caramel or something, stuck to her teeth. ‘These are funny-looking people now. What are they dressed up like that for?’
‘They are the players,’ said Stan Parker, who was again reading the play, and who had always been puzzled himself by this bit. ‘They are going to act a play of the queen’s unfaithfulness to Hamlet’s father. The queen that married this present king, there.’
‘Ttttt,’ Amy Parker sucked her teeth.
The players were soon acting with stiff precision.
Stan Parker remembered how that little play, in which he himself had been poisoned, had hurt. Yet he was not hurt now. Seeing the actor sneak out and drive off in his blue car. Seeing the big arse of that commercial traveller push past the door into the car. Any pain will wear out. The old man began to rub the skin of his old hands in the darkness. His emptiness surprised him. Somewhere he had read: an empty vessel. That night when he had lain vomiting in the street, when he had stood in the street and spat out at God, everything, he had emptied. For many years his light and agreeable but empty life would have pleased, if it had not been that some pea of memory was rattling about inside. It began to irritate him now. Where is this play getting to? he asked, rubbing his old hands, which would remain carapaceous although he had given up work.
‘That is certainly a funny way to go on,’ said Amy Parker.
‘What, to commit adultery?’
‘No,’ she mumbled. She added after a bit, ‘To pour poison in the man’s ear.’
She could not bear glycerine, or hot oil, that they put sometimes for earache from a roaring spoon. She shuddered. The thoughts flowing through the passages of her skull.
It was the afternoons that had poisoned her. She could have knocked her head against the wall, waiting. That man, that bugger. And acting as if you did not want it. And acting.
She stirred for the closeness of her husband in the dark.
Well, you got over it. You did not want it. There is a time when you do not want anything. She thought. Or in a panic, it was coming over her in a draught of light and noise from the lit stage, a time when you want everything and do not know what this is. I want Stan, I want Ray, said the queen, and I am not sure that I have had anything, that I know enough to have.
There was a great rumpus on the stage as the queen and her shadows fled into darkness, away from the little stiff play. She was defeated, it appeared, by fear.
The old woman in the gallery sat on, very unhappy. She was trying to recapture her little boy. She was sitting on the iron bed, her knee touching that of her young husband.
But the play went on, the big play of Hamlet, madness and all.
Felia was less touching, because less personal. She does not frighten me like Bub did once, because I am used to things. While still learning. I shall learn about Stan perhaps in time. But all this madness. This play is a lot of nonsense. Loonies speak their own language, like educated people.
Still, death and burial, you have got to face it, are plain and sane enough. They are burying her. The earth is falling down.
The great accents of doom were filling the theatre, so that people were forgetting their cramp, and the creases in their clothes, and the intolerable pressure of poetry. The end was near. All were holding daggers to their hearts, or to their violets, whichever was the case.
The lithe actors were soon slashing and pricking at each other with swords and words. Hamlet himself, who had played the Second Ghost, the ghost of memory, until now, leaped radiantly into the presence of death, which is also the present, all else has been past and future, stories and anticipation, by comparison. At one moment the actors are silent, except for puffing or clashing, when words of respect fail them. There is a lamp shining in the wet shirt of the arisen Hamlet.
Many of those people who were watching from the darkness were sweating too, because the end of Hamlet is too complicated to follow, unless lived. Stan Parker, though, the old man in the gallery, was quite cold and stony as the dead piled up. After wandering about the stage over many acres of spilled words, exchanging breaths with the actors, and experiencing similar visions all the evening, he had withdrawn to a distance at the end of the play. There he sat. A grey light prevailed, by chance or intention, similar to that which is seen in bedrooms at morning. This is the light in which a man becomes aware that he will die.
Then I am going to die, he said. It did not seem possible.
After the dead bodies had got up from the ground, and bowed as though they had been responsible for their own levitation, and the red curtain had come down, Stan Parker continued to sit and consider himself.
‘Where is your coat, dear? You have not lost it?’asked his wife, who felt compelled to make some contribution to life.
‘It is under the seat, I suppose. Where I put it,’
said the old man.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it is all dust. Look! And creases. Your good coat!’
Then I am to die, he said. But because this was still too immense to grasp he got up, like an actor off the stage, and asked, ‘Did you like it?’
‘I would like a good cup of tea, but don’t expect we shall get that,’ Amy Parker said. ‘And your coat a ruin.’
She was forever brushing and patting. To restore something. But he let her.
And she was glad he did not ask her again as they wound down by a staircase to the ground, because there were things that she had seen and heard which disturbed her. What they had said about the queen. Why, her own flesh was naked. There were the things also that she did not understand but was sensing darkly in a remembered wood of words.
So the play was over, and they went back not long afterwards to their own place.
Their return was such a return to habit that Stan Parker was soon able to reject his presentiment of death. Not deliberately. Rather, the incident slipped from him. Habit supersedes thought, or extracts the sting from it. He went about smiling more often than not on those jobs which were necessary, or which he made in order to do, and although that smile was somewhat abstracted, everybody read it as a sign of contentment and amiability. He had acquired a reputation for being a good-natured old cove, and who is a neighbour to inquire beyond the mechanics of the face into the states of soul?
The old man was evidently very tranquil, though. He had taken up netting, and was making some nets to assist a pair of ferrets he had bought. Soon he was going about, down the gully at the back of the house, and round such country as was not yet built over, carrying his ferrets in a little box in the centre of his back, carrying also an old and rather heavy gun, and followed by a dusty black dog that had the canker in one ear.
That evening which Stan Parker would continue to remember for the incident that occurred was one of the still evenings of winter, when wind has dropped, yet a cold stream of air is flowing, like water almost, it is palpable, down the creek’s dry course. Twigs are snapping, and a cough is blatant under the sky of two metals, of lead and copper, beneath which the old man is walking with the old dog. It is possible to believe that one is alone in this world. The stiff, needly leaves of the bushes exude no sap of kindness. But one does not ask for kindness. Rocks and silence are sufficient in themselves.
Then the old man who was walking along stubbornly on slippery feet slipped suddenly. He was an old scarecrow with wooden arms and a gun waving at the end of one of them, and the ridiculous little box of ferrets with its airholes bumping and bouncing on his shoulder-blades. As the sky tilted he pulled the trigger of the gun. It all happened so quickly that it was searingly slow on his mind. The comet was still soaring slowly past him, hot and cold, material and fearful, as he lay on the ground, and realized he had just failed to shoot himself. The black dog was sniffing round and making sneezing noises.
Then the old man got up and walked on, with the safety-catch fixed. He was tough, of course. He had worked hard and could stand a bit of knocking about. But he walked brittly now, although erect. His eyes were smarting. Under them were red rims, like those which can be seen under the eyes of some old dogs.
The black dog which was running and limping ahead of his master began to whine at the mouth of a burrow.
‘Very well then,’ sighed the old man in agreement.
He began to walk round, looking on the ground, ostensibly to find other entrances to the same burrow over which to peg the nets. But he was searching rather too aimlessly. After a bit the old man sat on a lump of anthill. He just sat. While the black dog was swinging his tail and whining. The ferrets too were turning and rattling in the suspended darkness of their habitual box.
Soon enough, thought the old man.
He was sitting in the meantime. And ants came out across the ground.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ said Stan Parker.
He was suspended.
Then his agreeable life, which had been empty for many years, began to fill. It is not natural that emptiness shall prevail, it will fill eventually, whether with water, or children, or dust, or spirit. So the old man sat gulping in. His mouth was dry and caked, that had also vomited out his life that night, he remembered, in the street. He was thinking about it intolerably.
What is intended of me and for me? he wondered. I am ignorant.
He was not answered, though.
After a while the old man called to the old dog, that had continued to sit in front of the burrow, pointing his grey muzzle, and shaking his cankered ear, and the two went away. The man walked carefully, comforted by his continued existence beneath the evening sky.
That evening when he got in his daughter was there. She was standing in the kitchen, quizzically watching her mother prod a piece of beef in a saucepan of boiling soup, as if she had never seen such a wonderful thing happen before. All Thelma Forsdyke’s visits to her parents were touched with a humorous wonder, that had come with her own success, to replace a former sense of shame. Her visits were fairly frequent, though almost always in the early afternoon, so that she could get home and rest before dressing for dinner. She liked a bath too, and afterwards could endure most things. After putting on her rings she was immaculate. This time, though, Mrs Forsdyke was honouring her parents for the week-end, which was altogether unusual. Did she owe or expect something perhaps? It was not clear. But she had come ensured against any possible discomfort, with a ham, and a jar of bath salts, and an exquisite little pillow filled with down, in a pink slip, on which to nurse her insomnia, on top of the coarser pillows of the house.
She had brought, too, more than the usual ration of quizzical good humour towards these comical old people, who were really rather sweet and quaint.
When her father came into the kitchen she went towards him and offered her face, and after he had kissed her said, ‘Why, Father, how deliciously cold your skin is. Where have you been?’
‘Poking around in the gully,’ said Stan Parker.
The daughter, however, did not listen to his reply, which she had not expected to be of any importance. She was thinking how she preferred and even liked kissing with her father now that he was a cold old man.
‘He has two blessed ferrets,’ said the mother.
Which once she would have resented.
I shall not tell them that I nearly killed myself, said Stan Parker.
It was too personal an incident to explain convincingly. It was already part of his submerged half. So he sat cutting his meat, at a great distance, and listening vaguely to his wife tell their daughter the story of other lives.
‘I never told you, Thelma,’ Amy Parker said, ‘but Ray has left Elsie. Some time ago. Or did you perhaps know?’
‘How should I?’ said Thelma, looking down.
The beef was horrid.
‘Well, anyway, he has,’ said the mother, ‘and has been living in Darlinghurst for some time, with some other woman, it seems. Not by any means a desirable woman at all.’
‘The undesirable woman is the loser,’ Thelma said.
She was examining with curiosity the grain of the meat and a strap of grey gristle.
‘That is a way to speak,’ the mother said. ‘And poor Elsie.’
‘Ah yes, poor Elsie,’ Mrs Forsdyke sighed. ‘Poor Elsie is delivered, I should have said.’
‘Thelma, you are not kind,’ said Amy Parker.
She was forgetful of herself.
‘I am not,’ said Thelma. ‘It is my great sin. I have prayed against it, but unsuccessfully.’
She had, too, and could well look moist, as now. Knowing oneself is the saddest luxury. And she had achieved this through experience and study, along with the French tongue and the fur coats.
‘But Ray is not all to blame,’ said the mother now.
‘Nobody is all to blame. How simple if some were. They could be got rid of.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Amy Parker said. ‘I am to b
lame.’
‘Oh, Mother,’ said Thelma.
She wished she had not come.
‘But I loved him,’ said the mother.
Then Thelma Forsdyke did recoil. From the terms of love. Reading lust for love, she had preferred habitually to paddle in the tepid waters of affection. The red-faced, pursy men, the bilious-eyed, of which her brother Ray was one, looked at her from most corners.
‘It is a pity’, she said now, ‘that a second butcher has never set up at Durilgai. Competition would make all the difference.’
‘This is a fair bit of meat,’ the father said.
Because it was time he did say.
He had been thinking of his grandson, and had got some comfort from it, and was guilty.
‘This is as fair a bit of meat as you would find,’ he said with some hostility, tapping the meat.
‘In meat, as in anything, it depends on what standards you adopt, and, having adopted, accept,’ Thelma said with pleasure.
‘He has left his job too,’ said the old woman, ‘and is working at goodness knows what. He is under the thumb of this woman, who had been consorting with men, it appears, in her youth, she is not young, and is up to no good.’
‘Mother, I shall scream,’ said Mrs Forsdyke, holding her ears.
But she could not close her eyes.
‘Are we not having any pudding, Mother?’ Stan Parker asked.
Then Amy Parker went and produced a spotted dog, at which she fancied herself. And Thelma ate it in a silence.
Later in the evening, when some kindness had been restored, and stomachs had rumbled, and there was a smell of tobacco, Stan Parker said, ‘I am thinking of going to the service in the morning.’
‘That will be good,’ his wife answered. ‘And Thelma can go too. While I get the dinner for you and have it nice and hot.’
‘It is the early service, the Communion service, that I want to go to,’ said the old man.
‘Oh, that,’ said Amy Parker. ‘It is a long time since you went to Communion. I did not know that you meant. I don’t ever like the Communion service. There are no hymns.’
The Tree of Man Page 51