‘Thelma does then,’ she would say, dashing the water from her glistening arms and burnishing them with a rough towel.
But the little girl would continue to talk in a low voice to her doll, as if she had not heard.
The mother could not compel. Even though there were moments those evenings, when she gathered her children into her now placid arms, and held in her arms that conglomeration of love from which not one of them was separable, there were times also when she could not read their thoughts, when their faces became like little wooden boards, promising forever to remain flat and impregnable.
Then she would go and look along the road, along the dust and strands of rusty wire.
‘What’s up, Amy?’ her husband asked, intruding cautiously on one of these occasions.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Oh, nothing.’
Looking out through her frown into the glare of the white road.
‘You look long in the face,’ he said and laughed tentatively. ‘I thought it must be bad.’
Which made her tragedy at once seem thin and ridiculous.
‘I said it was nothing.’
Biting on her own laughter, which was still a bit sour.
‘Oh dear, it’s silly,’ she sighed. ‘Isn’t it, Blue?’
As the bitch came sidling towards her.
‘Poor thing,’ she said as she extended to the bitch the pity she had had for herself, and stroked it in the voluptuousness of shared pity.
The bitch’s teats were swollen and irregular and scratched by the claws of the litter. However devoured, she herself remained hungry for love. Her hot tongue tasted. Her jaws could have swallowed you down.
‘They don’t leave you alone, do they?’ said the woman, sitting on the veranda and soothing the torn teats with her hand.
The bitch curved and fawned. And the woman was pacified.
‘You’re my dog, eh?’ she said. ‘Good Blue. What a good thing it is sometimes not to have to expect answers.’
The blue bitch had replaced the red dog, which had died a few years back.
‘This is my dog,’ Amy Parker had said at once of the blue bitch. ‘And this one’s going to have a name. Not like that ugly red thing that never liked me a bit.’
Because they had never named the red dog, in spite of her intention. He had remained The Dog. But the blue bitch she had called, precipitately, Blue.
And the bitch had remained all attention and affection. Rather clumsy. Clawing with her paws for an audience. Knocking things over with her tail. Rolling on her back and shaking the dust from it when she rose, and the slobber from her pleased mouth. She had pups regularly, and lay on her side for them to suck, till she was exhausted and a skeleton. Still she would come and hungrily look for affection in other quarters. The woman’s eyes would be appeased as she soothed the coat of the dog.
‘She’s ugly,’ said Ray.
‘No, she’s not,’ said the mother, lazily dawdling with her hand. ‘What’s ugly to some is beautiful to others. Now your father had an old red dog, an ugly thing if ever there was, didn’t like me a bit either, but he meant something to your father. I remember the night I came. We lived in that shack then.’
But the child had turned from his mother’s thoughts. His eyes were for the present.
‘Ugly old tits,’ he said.
The woman did not hear her child. She stroked her warm thoughts.
So she could not help loving the clumsy, fruitful dog. She liked to hold in her hands the warm, blunt puppies, to change them round from teat to teat, and see that the runt was fed. She would go there often, and kneel beside them in the gloom of the barn. Like this too, alone with the dog, she was young again. Nobody saw her, and she would not particularly have wanted them to see. It was a private sensation that she was holding warm as a puppy to her cheek. Her hair straggled at the nape of her neck.
Then once she came quickly into the kitchen at dinnertime and said, ‘Stan, three of Blue’s puppies have gone.’
Everyone was standing there. Her mouth was moving with the horror of it.
‘Must have been the rats,’ said her husband.
‘Rats leave bits,’ said Fritz, the old German, who had just come in with his mug and plate. ‘Was there no bits?’
‘There was no sign,’ she said.
She felt cold and grey. She remembered her dog’s warm pups and for the moment she did not want to be with these people who were her family, and who were discussing what might have happened.
‘Perhaps she ate some,’ said Ray, starting to mess the stew with his fork.
‘Not at that age,’ said the father.
Thelma had begun to cry. She did not particularly care for puppies, but other people did, and other people cried, so it was right.
‘The puppies are dead,’ she cried.
‘Perhaps some swaggie lifted them out of the nest because he liked them,’ said the boy.
He had built an island of potatoes, and a frail isthmus, past which he was persuading the brown juices, that he did not want today.
‘Eat your food,’ said his mother, who unfolded a napkin with great savagery.
‘She had too many, anyway,’ said the boy. ‘She still has five. Eight is too many, isn’t it, Dad?’
‘Eat your food, your mother said,’ said the father.
‘I won’t! I don’t want to,’ cried the boy.
He jumped up. He hated his parents and the kitchen table. The crockery was against him, and the plate of messed brown stew.
‘Old stew!’ he cried.
And ran away.
The father began to mumble, because for the moment he did not know what to do. To the mother it was obvious that at present nothing could be done. Her personal misery possessed her, and the clash of wills in the kitchen, the muddled table, and the thick white plates were not a part of this. Her sadness was for herself. The fate of the puppies had become an intimate part of her own life, and she turned her head sharply, in pain, as the thought crossed her that their necks could have been wrung.
‘Well, we’re not getting anywhere by dwelling on it,’ said Stan Parker, pushing back his plate after a bit.
But he thought about his son, how little he knew him, and wondered how soon it would be before both would have to admit this. He was still a little boy, and they kissed each other and pretended to closeness, even when they failed to reach each other. The boy tried to tell him things and failed, stood looking up at him, with words that trailed away and did not express. Once he had smashed a pane of glass with an iron bar nearly as big as himself, and had stood panting and shivering in the scattered fragments.
‘There’s the pudding, dear,’ said the wife.
But Stan Parker did not think he wanted pudding today. He was convinced there was some connexion between the boy and the disappearance of the pups.
His wife’s eyes had known already. In the heat of the day they shared this coldness between them, so it was better that they should remain apart.
Only in the evening, darkness and walls forced them together. They talked about flat, measured things. Or he read pieces from the newspaper, that he held upright beside the lamp. Or they listened to the frogs, that surrounded the house with an illusion of water. But it was dry just then.
Once the boy called to his mother from his sleep, and she went in to him.
‘What is it, Ray?’ she asked, bending over him.
In the lamplight her brown skin was golden. She had grown to proportions that were both magnificent and kindly.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I was dreaming about those pups.’
‘Dream about something else,’ she advised.
As if she had the secret of all things and could remain above acts and subterfuges.
So that he turned over.
If I could know for certain, she said, her eyes burning into his sleeping head, what should I do? And will this remain a matter of importance, although it is important now?
The episode of
the pups faded, and was probably forgotten at Parkers’ by most people, if not by everyone.
Once or twice Thelma said, ‘We never did know, did we, what became of those poor little pups?’
‘Why do you want to bring that up, Thelly?’ the mother said.
She frowned. She loved her daughter less than her son, though she had tried to make it otherwise, and did take immense pains to do all that was best for the girl. Thelma remained thin. Her soul was thin.
Once when the mother was standing with her little girl by the gate, in the white glare of summertime, the trees limp with exhaustion and shabby with dust, there came a figure on a horse, that the standing figure shaded her eyes to see. The horse was advancing with the loose indolence of an animal that is kept for pleasure, turning his head from side to side, flicking the fringe of forelock from his eyes, and blowing out his rather naked-looking nostrils in such a way that it was not quite timidity, not quite insolence, but lovely to see. He was a lovely horse. Glittering with jet and sweat, he continued to advance, till his rider also began to assume features, and became a woman in a habit, no less grand than her grand horse, as she sat with her leg cocked across the horn of the saddle, and swayed with that same indolence of the beast, and swayed, and thought.
So the dark-figured woman on the black horse advanced beneath the white trees. Although the dust of the road was unfurling beneath the horse’s feet, it scarcely reached the woman’s spur, she sat so high, and in the sea of dust in which she floated was god-like and remote.
‘Isn’t the lady lovely, Mum?’ said the little girl with a prim, mincing mouth.
She hoped she was saying the sort of thing her mother herself would say. She attempted at times almost slavishly to do the right things.
But Amy Parker did not speak. She stood shading her eyes, and it was as if she were opening in the silence to receive and unite with the rider and the horse, as if her life craved to be set in the same slow and stately motion, free above the dust. So she held her breath. Her strong throat was quite swollen with the effort. She felt rather than saw the passage of the horse and rider. The chink of their metal was vibrant in her.
So the creamy woman rode by. She was smiling for some situation of which undoubtedly she had been the central figure, and this had pleased her, and in it certainly she had known success. But the smile just drifted on her creamy face. As she flowed by. While the rusty strands of the wire fence were paid out, and out. While the hairy trunks of trees jerked past.
The little girl wondered whether the strange and beautiful woman would speak, but the mother did not expect this. The woman’s smile drifted over the head of the puny child, and on, without glancing at the mother, magnificent though she was too, in her own rooted way. But the woman was passing. She obviously did not intend to form unnecessary relationships even of the most transient kind. She was drifting by. Drawing arabesques on the air with the ivory handle of her raised crop. Her perilously brittle stem was carried past. Already the bronzy sheen of her hair was breaking in a distant light.
‘Well, she’s gone, Mum. What are we standing for?’ complained the little girl. ‘I wonder what she is called.’
In time they knew, for Mrs O’Dowd had found out.
Mrs O’Dowd said she was a girl, or woman was closer, she was not a chicken by any means, woman then, if you liked, and her name was Madeleine. Whatever else of a name she could not tell. No matter, said Mrs O’Dowd, for neither you nor me will be any the wiser. Anyway, this Madeleine was a famous beauty like you read of, going to places, and the races, and the picnic races, always in demand, it seemed, and above all at picnic races. This Madeleine had also been Home, and to various foreign countries, hawking her looks around; she should have married a lord, it wasn’t for want of trying, only she was out of luck. So they said. But still courted. Now, it seemed, and this was the important part, according to that Mrs Frisby, cook at Armstrongs’, whose husband had been a sailor that never come back – now it seemed that young Armstrong was shook on this Madeleine, was moving heaven and earth to have his way, with presents and horses, and she sometimes cold, sometimes warm, but mostly cold, for she was no fool. Many a wealthy man would have taken this Madeleine, it seemed. She had only to say the word, and had perhaps, the diamonds were there to see in a black velvet case, and ivory brushes with monograms. But that was on the side, like. She was playing a cool game. It is the ring and the establishment that counts with most, and with this Madeleine, and why not.
After this the neighbour woman, who was passing in her customary fashion, clapped her reins and went. And Amy Parker remained where she was.
All her acts after this became secret silk. She thought of Madeleine. She drew from her hands the gloves of soapsuds. Her body had grown indolent.
Till her children, asking for permission, would cry in exasperation, ‘Can we, Mum? Oh, Mu-uummm!’
Her eyes wore the glaze of self-indulgence as she answered, ‘Yes. Of course. Why not?’
They were surprised at her remote complaisance and went out quietly and thoughtful, no longer anxious to do whatever they had been allowed, while the mother continued to stare at her inner self in a glare of diamonds.
One day after rain she said they would walk across the paddocks. It would be a change, from what, she could not have answered. But she put on an old hat, that was brown and rather ugly. And her children came, sulking at the injustice of a walk. They followed her through the dead, wet grass. All through the paddocks where they walked there was the smell of wet grass and of turpentines. There was a breeze too, that turned the leaves of the trees back to front, till they were silver and more festive. There was a restless moodiness in this gentle weather, that was only a lull in the more positive blaze of summer. Damp breezes and the passing touch of cool leaves invited to retrospect and fantasy. Till Amy Parker floated, and her children, conscious of this levitation, became eager and melancholy.
‘Mum,’ said the boy, ‘can I climb some trees?’
Because he loved to shin up and clamber from branch to branch, until he was almost the bending crest, and now this sensation was most imperative. To touch the thick wood. To struggle with and finally overcome it.
‘Do you really think it’ll do you any good?’ the mother asked with an effort, as if she had been ascending a hill, though the slope they were on was still gentle. ‘Last time you tore your pants. And your knees are all scabs.’
‘Ah, please, yes,’ he sighed, clasping her hand and pressing against her like an animal. ‘Let me.’
‘I don’t want to climb old trees,’ said the girl.
She shook her straight pale hair.
‘You couldn’t,’ he said. ‘You’re soft. You’re a girl.’
‘I’m not,’ she cried, twisting her thin mouth.
‘What else are you?’ he said. ‘A heifer perhaps?’
‘If I’m a heifer you’re a bull,’ she cried. ‘They keep heifers. But they kill bulls.’
‘Not all of them,’ he said. ‘Not the best.’
‘There. Run and climb,’ said the mother.
She walked on slowly, and sat on a log on the edge of a wattle grove, leaning her back against the black bark of wattle, and playing with the stalks of dead grass, while the little girl looked into rabbit burrows, and gathered a bunch of flowers, and threw it down, and picked up an interesting stone, and fretted, and wanted to go.
‘Why do we have to stay in this old place?’ she asked.
Amy Parker did not know, except that she was lulled, except that here she could indulge her fancy with a lesser sense of guilt than in her solid home.
‘Can’t we go?’ Thelma said.
‘Soon,’ said her mother.
She began to wonder whether she could have resisted the advances of a lord, if he had driven up, and she wearing a mauve dress such as she had never owned. What words she would have spoken she had not yet formed, but felt, but knew. As the lord, in shining boots, descended on the grass and smiled at her with the thick lip
s that had breathed upon her that day, as she mounted the steps of the store. She would have had children perhaps, as well as diamonds from the lord, whose features were permanently and irresistibly those of young Armstrong. She recognized with a shudder the same dark hair at his wrist. But his eyes had a tenderness, a kindness, remote from the sensuality of the body, that was also her husband’s.
So that she straightened her back against the hard tree.
‘Why don’t we go?’ asked Thelma.
She came and stood there. She was their child.
‘Yes. We’ll go,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Where’s Ray? Tell him it’s time.’
Because there was the house, and the trees that had grown round it, and the sheds it had accumulated, and the paths they had worn with their feet, all suggesting reality and permanence. And at the core of this reality, her husband, who would not even raise his eyes as she walked up one of the paths that radiated from their house because he knew she would come. She was his wife. Or he would look up, and she could not always tell what he saw. He would not let her in behind his eyes, even at the moments of his greatest kindness and intimacy, even when she held him in her arms and he was printed on her body.
‘Ray!’ called Thelma, running fretfully between the trees. ‘We’re go-ing! Ray! Wherever are you?’
He was above by this, grappling the branches. Any wounds to his flesh drove him on. He looked contemptuously into an old nest, that he would have robbed if it had been full, but as it was not he tore it from its fork and flung it to the ground. He climbed on, round and under and up. He looked coldly at a sleek young magpie, that he would have killed if he had had the means. Then, feeling the sweat behind his knees, he had reached the top, and was dipping and swaying, sheathed in a cold wind that brought the blood to his face. He was a beautiful little boy in his exaltation. His exposed position gave him an innocence. He looked dreamily out across the waves of trees and was momentarily content.
‘Ray!’ called Thelma, who had found the nest of musty grass and rather repulsive old feathers, and who had looked up, and seen. ‘I’ll tell on you! You had no right to go up so high. Come on down. We’re going.’
The Tree of Man Page 16
