by Hal Porter
Father and I and Uncle Martini-Henry sit in the orchestra stalls, the first mourning coach. They wear navy-blue suits, black arm-bands and black ties, Father wearing the ones Mother made him buy for Grandfather Porter’s death. Aunt Rosa Bona has brought from Williamstown my black suit, tissue paper and free coat-hanger and all, sin in a box. Mother, dying, has taken the trouble to say she forgives this sin which was manufactured to make appearances at Tennis Dances and the Cafe Latin. It was not made for funerals. I wear my grey Harris Tweed, no arm-band, and a green tie. I know I have shocked Father who does not care that he is shocked, just as he could be shocking me, who abhors being shocked, but is momentarily beyond all that, by holding my hand, brutally and desperately, hurting, holding with both his hands in a kind of golfing grip.
It is necessary for me to support this middle-aged, virile, athletic man from the car to the grave, and to keep my arm tightly around him.
When the first shovel of clay is slid down on to the coffin-lid, he emits guttural moans, and tries to step down into the grave. Hamlet, eh? I hold him tight, this human and wicked mortal who is moaning, and striving like a child against my heart, weeping perhaps in the awareness that, now, Mother gone, Mother disposed of like rubbish in a flowery rubbish-heap, he is free to begin destruction, to live on in a comfort of inferior sensuality, free to destroy some of his children with indifference.
The telegram saying that Mother’s ‘condition’ is ‘grave’ arrives, by chance, at the same time as a venomous but justifiable letter from Miss Hart who is transferred now to another school. The letter threatens ‘legal action’ if I do not pay back the money. I am in the train to Bairnsdale before I have time to read the letter. Uncaring, unmoved, I screw it up, and drop it into the twilight the train is imprinting with its own din and gold and gushes of spark-shot smoke. I travel mute, an animal waiting the rabbit-killer, frightened for the first time in my life, frightened by the thought of Mother’s unimaginable pain and more imaginable fear, frightened that I am to be punished for my own placidity and happy, happy little evils. At Stratford (on Avon), at ten o’clock, I am half-away with sleep and fears when a voice comes calling my name along the carriage-corridor. Aroused to defensive action, locking mind and heart, all my inner and outer doors, I go calm, and await the assault. It is not the assault I expect. It is someone to drive me the rest of the way by motor-car. As whoever drives and I roar through the bush—my first ride in a motor-car—the headlights call into being, and distort to something else, and discard in a gush, a tunnelled and nightmare treescape such as I have never seen. It pours by me, visible and terrible as wasteful time.
Row, brothers, row, my nerves sing, the
stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, and the daylight’s past.
In Bairnsdale, the car stops outside what is, to me, the Deaconess Miss Rodda’s Church of England Girls’ Hostel, now a private hospital. I descend, and thank, and comb my hair before I open the gate. As I walk, for the second time in my life, up the wide, terra-cotta-tiled path, and skirt the oval of conspicuously well-behaved plants in front of the ascent of slate steps, I perceive that everything is in apple-pie order. I am met at the door by a swift shadow smelling of ether.
This shadow, this nurse, takes me, as the Deaconess once did, into the front room.
On the white, white bed, in the place where I sat in the asthmatic arm-chair holding my Panama hat and the bruised and speckled apple, lies a woman.
This is she, this is Mother.
This fowl-like creature with the sharp nose and the diminished cheeks and the damp hair and the glittering eyes is Mother. On one side of her stands the Matron, her spectacles filled with electric light. On the other side, willowy and fresh, mildly agitating a Fijian fan, stands a shirt-collar advertisement handsome minister with lips too red and soft for peace. Where is Father?
Stirring weakly against the air as against great cobwebs, writhing like something in a chrysalis, the being on the bed calls out, ‘I waited, Laddie. I waited. I wouldn’t let them let me die until you came.’
Oh, God, the wreckage of bones on the bed is frightened! It is frightened, and in the arena fighting with itself. I stumble blindly towards the fight. Yes, this is Mother. She kisses me. That, that, is the last of her supply of kisses. It is a dry kiss, light as the touch of a passing flame. She, the woman smelling of too much eau-de-Cologne, of champagne, and some sly undercurrent of sourness, is my mother giving me her last kiss.
‘This is my eldest son,’ says Mother, momentarily calling up her social manner. The surfaces of her lips move strangely and slowly, never quite meeting, so that her teeth glint like dog’s between them. ‘From Melbourne. I waited for him. I waited.’
The social manner slips.
‘There was I,’ I sings Mother blurrily, ‘waiting at the church, waiting at the. . . .’
Her eyes close.
They open. She has closed them to think up another voice which she now uses, an abraded version of her ‘charming’ voice. She has controlled her eyes too, just. They look sly.
‘I should like to be left alone with my son for a while. Do you mind, Matron? Dear? It may be the last opportunity.’
‘Now, now, now, deah,’ says Matron. ‘Theah’ll be plenty of taime, deah. Many yeahs. But we’ll pop out. . . She looks at the mir ister. ‘. . . and hev a cup of tea whaile you hev a little chat.’
They go, the minister handing me the fan with a deep, weak gaze nothing to do with dying women or fans. His fingers which touch and press mine (sympathetically?) are damp; the handle of the fan is tepid and damp.
‘Shahmpeen, whenever she wants it,’ says Matron, touching the bottle as she goes.
‘She’s the cat’s mother,’ says Mother. ‘Give me some champagne. From that thing with the spout.’
I pour. I feed the unsteady mouth, as though feeding a pot-plant, from the white spouted vessel.
‘Shahmpeen Chawlie is m’ name,
Shahmpeen-drinkirC is m’ game
sings Mother.
I make little noises. I begin to cry. I am forced by myself to bend to kiss this silly frightened face.
‘Don’t kiss me,’ the face says sharply, twisting itself aside from my face which is dripping like a hung-out sock. ‘And stop that crying. Don’t cry, Laddie. Don’t cry. I’ll be home to cook your next Christmas dinner.’
Her eyes, however, must leave us. The woman and her fear argue with each other.
‘Next Christmas. Of course I will.’
‘No, I won’t. I said good-bye to the children this afternoon.’
‘I’ll be there cooking the mince pies.’
‘Johnny’s only six. I’ll never see him again.’
‘Next Christmas. . . .’
That is enough. It is not too painful to tell. Nothing is. It is too boring, too hopelessly silly. It is unrehearsed. It contains no message. It proves nothing. It goes on and on for hours. The frightened mind struggling with its poisoned cells, strives now to present this, now that, of its suffering and defiance and confusion and imprisonment. Its past with all its love and absurdity, all its nobility and frailty, splashes over into the untrappable present with its fears and uselessnesses. ‘Don’t worry about the black suit,’ she says. ‘I forgive you.’ ‘Look after your father,’ she says.
‘Be a good boy always,’ she says.
‘Comb your hair,’ she says.
‘I owe Mr. Dahlensberg twenty-five pounds. Pay him,’ she says. ‘Don’t tell your father.’
‘Don’t worry about the black suit.’
‘Be a good boy, a good boy.’
‘Sell the Renardi. . . .’
‘Your hair. . . .’
Soon enough after long enough, she leaves the littered and dirty shore, she is off and away, adrift in her rudderless skiff on the weedy shallows of delirium, singing, speaking of and to people I have not heard of, tacking here and there in other years and a dimension I know nothing of. Obediently, in a torment of obedience, I
clamp down on my tears. am not the only watcher. The minister performs his last duties, and departs. There are Father, the Matron, a nurse, shadows that stand or come and go. I am not the only watcher until, out of the whisperings, I hear my mother say:
‘Tit-tat-toe, my first go!
Three jolly butcher-boys all in a row. . .’
Now, I am the only watcher. I am alone. Mother and I are alone, alone, alone, alone, alone. Her bedtime plait hangs over her shoulder; its end, tied with tape, lies on the furry tablecloth. The Kensington lamp breathes like a warm golden animal. It purrs and stutters. The fire is crumbling apart like incandescent cake, like a world in dissolution.
Stick one up! Stick one down!
Stick one in the dead man’s ground!
Alone.
I have been punished at last, at long long last.
As my defences of happiness crack within me, they and I begin to make sounds I did not think I could, hard and harsh, bestial and elemental sounds. When I have pillaged my reservoir of tears, when I have finished my first bout of agony at the marble chimney-piece, when I have done what all humans must do, Matron is saying, ‘Ai’m afreed she’s gone,’ and is wiping with a piece of cotton-wool a disgusting and pathetic occurrence of foam from Mother’s lips so that Father and I may kiss what no longer needs kisses.
It is from this thing on the bed I must now flee.
Oh, God, the watcher on the cast-iron balcony screams out within me, Oh, God, put me back on the balcony! One scream within, and one only. There is no one to hear.
God is dead.
Father, undaunted, takes the rings from the fingers, and puts them in his wallet. It is his turn now for agony. I wait until his gruntings and sobbings subside, meantime straightening my tie, combing my hair, and setting my face at nix-nought-nothing.
At that moment I am sure that God is dead, that any love I must have for the world I must make for myself—beginning, at last, after years of happy nothing, at nothing. It has become simple. Mother is dead, God is dead, love is dead, all that I was is dead. So, I think, waiting for Father to make himself publicly possible, waiting to begin watching again those who are watching what they think is me, the dead one.
I do not know that, not only have I not started to die, I have not started to live.
I have not even helped Father across the road to the rectory.
Hedley, Victoria, Australia.
22 Hogarth Road, Earl’s Court, London.
March-September, 1962.
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