Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  It was Mrs Jolley, finally, who had to ask:

  “Did you hear any more about, well, You-Know-Who?”

  Mrs Flack closed her eyes. Mrs Jolley shivered for fear she had broken an important rule. Mrs Flack began to move her head, from side to side, like a pendulum. Mrs Jolley was reassured. Inwardly, she crouched before the tripod.

  “Nothink that you could call Somethink,” the pythoness replied. “But the truth will always out.”

  “People must always pay,” chanted Mrs Jolley.

  She herself was, of course, an adept, though there were some who would not always recognize it.

  “People must pay,” repeated Mrs Flack.

  And knocked over a little ashtray, which probably no one had ever used, with a transfer of Windsor Castle on it. Windsor Castle broke in half. Mrs Flack would have liked to blame somebody, but was unable to.

  Mrs Jolley sucked her teeth, and helped with the pieces.

  “It always happens so quick,” she said, “and yet, you know it’s going to.”

  “That reminds me,” said Mrs Flack. “A dream. I had a dream, Mrs Jolley, and your late hubby featured in it.”

  Mrs Jolley was stunned by the roses on the wall-to-wall.

  “Fancy now! Why should you?” she said. “Whatever put it into your head?”

  “That is beside the point,” said Mrs Flack. “They were carrying out your late hubby on the stretcher. See? I was, it seems – if you will excuse me, Mrs Jolley – you.”

  Mrs Flack had turned pink, but Mrs Jolley grew quite pale.

  “What do you know!” the latter said. “What a lot of nonsense a person dreams!”

  “I said: ‘Goodbye, Mr Jolley,’ I said,” said Mrs Flack.

  Mrs Jolley pleated her lips.

  “He said to me: ‘Kiss me, won’t you – then he mentions some name which I forget; ‘Tiddles’, was it? – ‘kiss me before I set out on me last journey.’ I – or you – replied: ‘I will do it voluntary for the first and last time.’ He said: ‘Who killed with a kiss?’ Then they carried him out.”

  “He was dead before they put him on the stretcher! Died in his chair! Just as I handed him his cup of tea!”

  “But in the dream. See?”

  “What a lot of rot! Killing with a kiss!”

  Mrs Flack, who might have been enjoying a view from a mountain, it was so exhilarating, said:

  “Who will ever decide who has killed who? Men and women are hardly responsible for their actions. We had an example only last week in Montebello Avenue.”

  Mrs Jolley had grown emotional.

  “And did you kiss him?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Mrs Flack replied, and smoothed her skirt.

  Mrs Jolley’s nose sounded soggily through the room.

  “Fancy,” she said, “us talking like this, and that nephew of yours only in the kitchen.”

  Or not even.

  For just then the door opened, and no bones about it, there stood a young fellow. It appeared to Mrs Jolley that his exceptionally fine proportions were not concealed by sweatshirt and jeans; he was obviously not used to clothes. Nor was Mrs Jolley to sculpture. She began to sniff, and look at other things.

  “Oh,” exclaimed Mrs Flack, turning her head, supple now that she had strengthened her position. “How was the steak?”

  The young man opened his mouth. If his gums had run to teeth, he would have gone through the pantomime of sucking them to expel the shreds. Instead, he merely ejaculated: “Tough!” – from between two remaining fangs.

  Although classical of body, it had to be admitted the young man’s head was a disappointment: skin – dry and scabby, wherever it was not drawn too tight and shiny, giving an impression of postage stamps; eyelashes – might have been singed right off; hair – a red stubble, but red. Nor did words come out of his mouth except with ugly difficulty.

  “Ahlbeseeinyer!” the young fellow announced.

  “Whereyergoin?” asked Mrs Flack, who had apparently succeeded in mastering his language.

  “Muckinaround.”

  Then Mrs Flack’s brick residence shuddered as the nephew withdrew from it.

  Mrs Jolley appeared thoughtful.

  “A sister’s, or a brother’s child?” she asked.

  Mrs Flack was thoughtful, too, and might have wished to remain so.

  “Oh,” she murmured. “A sister’s child. A sister’s.”

  But only eventually.

  “I did not catch his name.”

  “Blue is what he answers to.”

  Mrs Jolley decided she would not penetrate any farther, and was soon startled enough from the distance at which she had chosen to halt.

  “I will tell you somethink of interest,” Mrs Flack suddenly said, and had drawn herself right together, into a needle-point.

  “Blue,” she said, “works – rather, I should say, he is in charge of the plating-shop – good money, too – at Rosetree’s factory at Barranugli.”

  “Rosetree’s factory?”

  “Don’t be silly!” said Mrs Flack. “Where the Jew works, that Mr Godbold’s wife is conducting herself so peculiar with.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “I do.”

  “What is more,” Mrs Flack added, “Blue has eyes which will see what I want to know. I will make no claims for his brains. He was never ever a clever boy, but always most biddable. Blue will act upon an idea, if you know what I mean, Mrs Jolley, and no harm done, of course, if it is the right idea, and the right person in control.”

  Mrs Jolley threw up her head, and laughed, but in such a way that Mrs Flack wondered whether her friend realized what a respectable hand her superior held.

  “I will tell you something too,” Mrs Jolley began. “My lady is in the habit of meeting the Jew. Under an old tree. In the orchard. There now!” she said.

  And trembled, not from fear.

  Principle prevented Mrs Flack receiving reports from others with anything but reserve. So, when she had wet her lips, she merely offered:

  “What is it that gets into people?”

  But, if her voice suggested old shammy, her mind was already trying out its steel.

  Mrs Jolley had purpled over.

  “Mrs Flack,” she gurgled in a thick stream, “it is not right the way some people carry on. And what is to be done?”

  “What is to be done?” Mrs Flack recoiled. “I am not the one, Mrs Jolley, to ask. Am I the constable? Am I the Government, or the Shire Council? Clergymen are in a position to act, but seldom do. We are no more than two ladies of decent feeling. I would not dream of dirtying my hands. Besides, a person might get burnt. No, Mrs Jolley. It does not pay to hurry cooking. You must let it simmer, and give it a stir, like, to keep it nice. Then, when it is ready, you can be sure someone will be only too glad to step in and eat it up.”

  But Mrs Jolley was sputtering.

  “But her! Her! Under a tree! The squintiest thing I ever laid eyes on! And cracked, into the bargain!”

  Mrs Flack could only respect the passion which inspired her friend’s hate.

  “I would of gone long ago, if I mightn’t of been doing her a service. Mrs Flack, have you ever laid in bed, and listened for a house to crumble, and if you was to crumble with it, what odds, let it crash?”

  “You would never catch me under any roof in such a poor state of repair.”

  “If circumstances had ordered it?” Mrs Jolley snapped.

  “Circumstances is not as cranky as some people like to think,” Mrs Flack replied. “You could be as snug as Jackie, under the blue eiderdown, in my second room, if you was not so stubborn.”

  Mrs Jolley was pricked. Her skin subsided.

  “I still sort of hesitate,” she simpered between looser teeth.

  “Xanadu will crumble without you ever give it a shove. Dust to dust, as they say.”

  “Oh, will it though? Will it though? Will I see the neat brick homes, with sewerage, gutters and own telephones?” Mrs Jolley was
entranced. “Will I see an end to all madness, and people talking as if it was stuff out of dreams? Nobody should ever be allowed to give way to madness, but of course they will never want to in the brick homes. It is in those big old houses that the thoughts of idle people still wander around loose. I remember when I would come downstairs to turn out the rooms. I can remember the loose thoughts and the fruit-peelings. And Them, laying upstairs, in Irish linen. Dreaming.”

  PART IV

  * * *

  IX

  Mrs Godbold liked to sing as she ironed. She had a rich, but rather trembly, mezzo voice, which her daughter Else once said reminded her of melting chocolate. Certainly the girls would get that sad-and-dreamy look whenever their mother sang, and the kind of feeling that warm, soft chocolate will sometimes also give. Mrs Godbold would iron in long, sad, steamy sweeps, singing as she did. Sometimes her iron would thump the board to emphasize a phrase, just as it always nosed more gently, accompanied by tremolo, into the difficult corners of a shirt. Then the mouths of the older girls would grow loose with wonder for some ineluctable drama which was being prepared for them, and the younger ones stare hypnotized at the pores which had opened in their mother’s creamy skin. But the singer sang, oblivious, transported by her own words.

  Mrs Godbold preferred to treat of death, and judgment, and the future life. Her favourite was:

  “I woke, the dungeon flamed with light,

  My chains fell off, my heart was free,

  I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.”

  Though she was also very partial to:

  “See the Conqueror mounts in triumph,

  See the King in royal state

  Riding in the clouds His chariot

  To His heavenly palace gate.”

  At such moments faith or light did convince many eyes. It was certainly most extraordinary the way the light in Godbolds’ shed almost always assisted the singer’s words. Great blades of fiery light would slash the clouds of cotton-wool, negotiate a rather bleak window, and threaten targets so personal and vulnerable that more than one conscience trembled. Or else the prophetic voice might coincide with the cold white reckoning of a winter afternoon. That was perhaps the sheerest wonder of all. Then the woman in the apron would become the angel of solid light. The colder fell the air, the steamier, the more compassionate the angel’s judgment. Outside, but visible through the doorway, which Mr Godbold had fixed crooked in the beginning, was the big copper, which the girls kept stoked with wattle sticks, and which always seemed to be glowing with half-concealed coals. The hint of fire and the great brooding copper cup could appear most awful in the light of Mrs Godbold’s hymns.

  There was only one person who remained sceptical, and that was Mr Godbold, if he happened to be present; if away from home, and that was often, he did not think about it much. Mr Godbold had no time for All That. What he had time for could be very quickly specified. It was beer, sex, and the trots, in that order. Not that he really enjoyed beer, except as a dissolver of the hard line. Not that sex was more than a mug’s game, involving the hazards of kids and syph, though he did succeed in losing himself temporarily in the brief sexual act. Nor did a horse appeal to him as horse; it was simply that the material future – which, after all, was all that mattered of it – depended on those four bleeding legs.

  Any cold mind would soon have concluded that this was an individual to avoid, but for some tart he had been trailing, and who had still to taste Tom Godbold’s relentlessness, or his wife, who liked to remember the past, and what she had believed her husband to be before she actually found out, he possessed a kind of eroded beauty, a bitter charm. Time’s acid had eaten into the bronze, coarsening the texture, blurring the features. He was scraggy by now, and veined. But his eyes could still destroy the defences of logic and prudence, by seeming to ask for indulgence, and sometimes even love. They were very fine, dark eyes. Those who allowed themselves to be undone were willing to overlook the beery, bilious warnings of the whites. He had, besides, a habit of laying a finger, or two, never more, on the bare skin of somebody’s arm, almost tremblingly, or applying pressure to an elbow, with a gentleness in which a command was disguised as an entreaty. Then his wife would waver, and yield, and some woman, from whom he had been peeling the skins of discretion in an upper room, would tear off the last layer herself with reckless hands. It was only later that everybody sat up in bed and realized that Tom Godbold’s tragic eyes had merely been looking deeper into himself. Then his most recent conquest would hurry into her protective clothes and ever after regret her impulsiveness. In his wife’s case, her nature, of course, denied her the opportunity of flight. She had to suffer. Permanence enclosed her like stone, with the difference that thought burst through its veins in little, agonizing spurts, and she would lie there wondering whether she had conceived again in lust. For one so strong, it must be admitted she was regrettably weak. Or else kind. She would lie there until a thinning light released the pressure from her eyelids. Then she would creak out of bed and light the copper.

  Faith is not less persuasive for its fluctuations. Rather, it becomes a living thing, like a child fluttering in the womb. So Mrs Godbold’s faith would stir and increase inside the grey, gelatinous envelope of morning, until, at last, it was delivered, new-born, with all the glory and confidence of fire.

  This almost biological aspect of his wife’s faith was what the husband hated most. Nor was he the father of it. That, at least, he could honestly confess.

  “But Tom,” she would say, in her gentle, serious, infuriating voice, “the Re-Birth, I think it is lovely.”

  Then he would answer from between his teeth:

  “You will not catch me getting re-born. Not on your bloody life!”

  He would look at all those girls, of whom the very latest always seemed just to have spilled out of the cornucopia. There was always the smell of warm napkins, there was the unmistakable smell of recent and accusatory, wrinkled flesh.

  “Jesus, no! I’ve had enough of births!” he would confirm, and go away, or reach for the sporting page.

  There had been some exchange of words and opinions the evening Mrs Godbold was observed visiting their neighbour. Tom Godbold had returned from work. He was at that time driving a truck for a firewood contractor, though he was thinking of giving it away and starting a line in poultry manure. The father was seated with his paper, the mother stood at her ironing. Children came and went. Although they raised their eyes to their mother, it was at their father’s work-boots that they habitually stared, at the stiff, trowel-shaped tongues and blunt, brutal toes.

  Mrs Godbold, careful to use her rather trembly mezzo mezza voce so as not to inflame feelings further, had just begun her favourite: “I woke, the dungeon flamed with light …” when little Gracie ran in.

  “Mu-umm!” she shouted. “Guess what!”

  And pressed her face against her mother’s side, which would smell, she knew, of scones and clean laundry.

  “What?” Mrs Godbold asked, and braced herself against disaster.

  “I am saved for Jesus!” Gracie cried.

  But rather pale, as if, to please her mother, she was taking on something that might be too much for her.

  Nobody was altogether glad.

  “You are saved for what?” the father asked.

  His paper rustled.

  Gracie could not find the word. A robust child, she stood trying to look delicate.

  “You are saved for Crap!” said the father.

  Then he took his newspaper.

  “Crap! Crap! Crap!” Tom Godbold shouted.

  And beat his wife about the head with the sheets of newspaper, so that it could have appeared funny, only it wasn’t.

  Mrs Godbold bent her head. Her eyelids flickered. There was such a beating and fluttering of light, and white wings. She was, all in all, dazed.

  “That is what I think,” bellowed the husband and father, “though nobody in this place gives a bugger!”

  The p
aper was scattered at this point, so that he was left with his hand, it suddenly occurred to him. After looking at it very briefly, he said:

  “This is what I think of all caterwaulin’ Christians!”

  He caught his wife across the ear with the flat of his hand, with the result that the room and everyone in it rocked and shuddered for her, not least Tom Godbold himself.

  “And Jesus,” he hurtled on, as much to deaden his own pain, “Jesus sticks in my guts! He sticks that hard!”

  In fact, he had to deal his wife a blow in the belly with his fist, and when she had subsided on the floor, against the table, a kick or two for value.

  Where there had been a white silence, there was now an uproar, as if someone had taken a stick and stirred up a nestful of birds. There was a crying and clustering of children. All were pressed against the mother, that is, except the baby, and Else the eldest, who had not yet come in.

  The father himself was ready to drown, but managed to swallow the waves of loathing, exhilaration, fright, and still rampant masterfulness that were threatening to overwhelm him.

  “Well?” he gasped. “Well?”

  But nobody answered. The children were whimpering, away from him. All was turned away, except his wife’s face, which she still held exposed to whatever might come.

  Such was her nature, or faith, he saw again with horror.

  “I’m gunna get out of this!” he announced at last. “I’m gunna get shickered stiff!”

  When he had slammed the door, and gone stumbling up the hill, he heard her calling, but would neither stop, nor listen, for fear she might use some unfair advantage to weaken him. Once, for instance, she had called after him what they would be having for tea, and he had almost vomitted up on the spot his whole bellyfull of hopelessness.

  Mrs Godbold was, indeed, humourless and true enough to employ any and every means, but for the moment she was feeling queasy. Her children were stifling her, too, as they clutched and touched, trying to revive what they knew as certainty, but which they feared was slipping from them, fast and sure.

  “It is all right,” she said. “I must just get my breath. Leave go of me, though, all of yous. Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, holding her side.