The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  How do you like Mrs Bourke? You do not say, Thelma’s mother wrote.

  Mrs Bourke is all right, she is very kind, wrote Thelma to her mother.

  Mrs Bourke approached her powder to Thelma’s face and told her she must call her Aunt Lily. But Thelma decided she would not be trapped into calling her by a Christian name. She did not think she wanted a permanent cosiness of Bourkes, already feeling she was dedicated to some higher form of discomfort.

  So she did not commit herself, and went to her room to buff her nails.

  When Thelma Parker graduated from the business college she very quickly got a job as junior typist with a shipping firm. It was not what she wanted, but it would do for then. Soon it became apparent that she was most efficient. Special bits of work were given her, with the result that she was hated by those who did not want to do it. But she was undeterred. She had her hair cut off about this time, and the nape of her neck was unassailable as she passed through the offices between the rows of desks, carrying a sheaf of fresh papers, or returning from the washroom with her towel and soap.

  She did just think about her home sometimes, eating her anchovette sandwich, for instance, in the half-hour she took off for lunch. The discomfort of such thoughts distressed her but could not be avoided. Her mother persisted, who deserved really all affection and compassion, in spite of the ugliness of her clothes and clumsiness of most things that she did, continually knocking over buckets and pots, or cutting herself as she shredded a cabbage, her face bungling after thoughts she had forgotten, that she was afraid she would not retrieve though everything depended on it. Thelma Parker would become hot with an ashamed and irritating love for her mother. Her father was a man, therefore of less account, except economically. Her father was given to abstractions, so his face indicated, and in that wrestling was defeated, and for that reason could be despised. Besides, she did not understand what needs her father had. She despised and feared what she did not understand. Till she remembered that her father’s neck was shrivelling up. So she was pulled back. The cracks of his hands were catching in her dress. So she could not escape, not so much from the humiliation of her parents as from their humility, and would in the end perhaps not be brutal enough.

  She would sweep up the crumbs of her insipid sandwich, which was still adequate to her needs. She would make a little screw of paper, containing the miserable crust of the sandwich, because she did not like crusts.

  Thelma did not think at all about her brother. She closed a lid on him, and persuaded herself he was not just choosing his own time to burst out.

  Several nice people had found Thelma Parker nice. There were the Goughs, those friends, or, more likely, acquaintances, of the postmistress at Durilgai, whose business was small goods, though in a better way; they were no longer in aprons behind the counter, nothing of that sort. The Goughs lived in a better suburb, though not the best, with quantities of shining furniture, including a smokers’-table-cum-drink-cabinet, that you approached on all fours to fish out a bottle of banana cocktail. After washing her hands Thelma Parker fingered their towels, which were embroidered with Guest in a wreath of pansies, quite artistic. The Goughs gave evening parties, nothing formal, but bridge rolls and semi-evening dress. Thelma soon knew what to do. She had the gift of looking all ways, of assuming correct attitudes, as if her limbs were wax to the moment, of conjuring phrases, as if they had sprung from her own throat and not someone else’s. She was doing all this, exhilarated by so many discoveries, possibilities, and surprises.

  One Sunday at Bourkes’ an elderly but important grazier, after feeling his horse’s fetlocks and discussing prospects with the trainer, complimented Thelma Parker on her looks. It was, of course, silly. But she remembered how his boots shone, and that his suit, however carelessly worn, was of expensive stuff. She remembered that his name was Letourneur, although she did not see him again.

  Buffing her nails at the window at Bourkes’, Thelma had many things to think about, and watch, as the horses were led up and down, or pawed at their doors in the evening, and snuffled dustily. Some of the boys hung around in the evening, to fool or play at cards or toss coins. Boys in the yard held each other’s heads beneath their arms, practising forms of torture. They laughed in broken voices and smoked, they told jokes and made obscene gestures, for or in spite of the girl at the window, who was, anyway, oblivious. Nobody spoke to Horrie Bourke’s stuck-up sort of relative, except when it was necessary, and then calling her Miss. Never taking liberties. Except blowing a raspberry from a distance, which could, of course, have been an expression of joie de vivre.

  There was Curly, though.

  Thelma had begun to be impressed by the way she was arranging her life – they had given her a rise at the office and she had bought the half-coat in dyed lapin – when Curly spoke to her. Quite insolently, in fact. He came across the strip of buffalo grass that Mr Bourke kept mown himself. He walked quickly and straight in his sandshoes on the coarse grass, with that motion of his buttocks she had noticed, swinging his muscular, unconsciously insolent young man’s arms, and stuck his chin on the window sill, and said, ‘Got any thoughts for us tonight, Thel?’

  She looked at him with her hps open, less thin, as if they had been stung. She was at the same time shocked, stimulated, and a little frightened.

  She looked at him. He was younger than herself, which made it worse. But his face was well cut, rather blond. He might commit crimes, but in a good-humoured way.

  ‘Eh?’ he coaxed.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she said, wishing she could turn away. ‘Not for cheeky boys like you.’

  Wishing to destroy him, she was at her most prim, looking at his arms that were laid along the window sill.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m not all horse crap. Scratch me an see. I’ll allow yers to use a fork.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mr Bourke,’ she said.

  He began to laugh then. She could see his big teeth.

  ‘No jokin,’ he laughed. ‘I got a message for yer,’ he said. ‘How much will yer pay me for it?’

  ‘What sort of message?’ she asked.

  Her head, in spite of herself, had taken on a tick-tock motion of bandinage, as she struck her nails and carefully did not look at whatever else she might be aiming at. It had begun to be a game that she liked almost. The inexorable smells of liniment and hay made her reckless, and the squeals of the filly rolling in the sand behind the palings of the exercise yard.

  The young man had begun to pick the hard putty in a crack of the window frame.

  ‘What message?’ she asked.

  Against the hot wall he shifted his body into a fresh position of indifference, indolence, and self-possession.

  ‘From your brother,’ he said.

  ‘From my brother? How do you know my brother?’

  ‘Ar!’ he said. ‘I seen im Saturday at Warwick Farm.’

  ‘It can’t be my brother. My brother is up North.’

  ‘He come South, see, recently.’

  ‘I can’t believe you know my brother.’

  ‘Aren’t you the sister of Ray Parker?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But –’

  ‘Ray says, “Tell Thel I’ll be out one of these days to pay a social call.”’

  She sat thinking. She was a thin girl in a window, disturbed by the thought that something might intrude beyond the sill into the shadowy privacy of her room.

  ‘Well,’ said the boy, ‘I’d a thought you would a been pleased to see yer brother.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I shall be pleased.’

  But she pushed back her chair, and the boy began to go, sensing that she was older than himself. He was a boy, redly, at most times, big, and inclined to assume the attitudes that his body took. Now, of himself, he did not know how to continue, so he went away in his sandshoes, over the spongy buffalo grass.

  Thelma Parker was disturbed. She went into the lounge, and sat on her Cousin Lily Bourke’s Genoa velvet settee, and looked at a maga
zine, at the photographs of brides and furniture. Unattainable heights caused in her a breathlessness, and possible loss of foothold a first dry spasm. She coughed and flicked the pages of the magazine. Many bright vistas opened and closed. Waning light brought with it the sweet sadness of coconut ice and childhood. She got up, to change her position into one in which her breathing would be less constricted, sitting at Lily Bourke’s piano, in which the candlewax had run that last time there had been a singsong, on to the walnut veneer. Now Thelma touched the keys. Pieces of music returned to her, with feeling and even a little talent, out of the postmistress’s workroom. She should have been a musician perhaps. Distinguished music flowed from her hands when she was alone. She would have had, or would still have, a grand, with a bowl of mixed flowers and a photograph of herself in evening dress. Then some man, her husband, his face shadowy at that hour, is coming in and touching her on the shoulders with careful, dry hands to assure her of his admiration.

  ‘You ought to go out and have a good time, Thel,’ said Lily Bourke. ‘At your age.’

  Mrs Bourke, who had been lying down with an aspirin, and who looked bright under her fresh rouge, and the brandy she had just knocked back, for her health, had heard or read somewhere that specific behaviour belongs to different ages, and so she prescribed accordingly. Looking at Thelma through her migraine and the gloom, she would have thought her a poor sort of thing if kindness had allowed. Lilian liked rollicking girls, engaged in the perpetual lancers of a good time. She would have taken a turn herself, if it had not been for her husband’s rupture, and her moral standards, which did not encourage other men. So she invited people round and played the accompaniments in royal blue.

  Lilian Bourke said, ‘When our dad had the shop at Yuruga, there was always such a coming and going, we three girls were never at a loss. It was a small town, but there was life in it. There were the dairy farmers. There were business associates of our dad’s always passing through, and your father coming down from his place. Yes, I remember the night he broke the washstand. Yes,’ she said.

  ‘But I am content,’ said Thelma, on the relentless bench which contained the ballads.

  She did not play much more, except in a last trickle of notes, because her music had lost its privacy.

  ‘If you are content,’ said Mrs Bourke, shaking out the beads of a lampshade that had become tangled at a party, ‘you are content. Though, mind you, there is no knowing without you have sampled the alternatives.’

  Then she went out to cook the tea. It was a nice piece of steak that she had that evening, with a little frill of fat, just enough to lubricate the lovely meat. Because, it was obvious, men must eat meat.

  Thelma Parker only picked that night, and for several days she was off her food. She wondered whether she should write and tell her mother that Ray was now in town. She did not write, though, for wondering what she should say, and then Ray came.

  ‘I am Ray Parker,’ he said on the step.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Mrs Bourke, ‘you are like your father, or is it your mother? I wonder. Your sister will be pleased, she is just in, and will no doubt invite you to stay for something to eat. As you see, I am going out.’

  She was fitting the kid, in fact, on to her rather small hands, of which she was very proud.

  ‘If it’s not convenient,’ he began.

  He was a broad, open-faced young man, with clear skin, that encouraged the faith people put in him. He was looking up with that expression of trust that he kept for those to whom he was not closely related.

  ‘If it’s not convenient,’ he said, ‘I can come back another time. You are Cousin Lil?’ he asked with a tentative smile, of a rough but somewhat practised charm.

  ‘I am a sort of cousin,’ admitted Mrs Bourke.

  ‘Dad often speaks about you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed, believing it because she had been told. ‘It is good to talk about the old times.’

  He might have insinuated himself still further into her graces, but she was fat and ugly.

  Thelma met her brother in the lounge. They sat together on the Bourkes’ furniture, feeling its pressure during the silences, the swelling of horsehair and the rustling patterns of the Genoa velvet. Thelma wished he would go quickly, that all her relations would leave her to meditation of her own higher good. But Ray had still to tell about himself. He would stay in Sydney it appeared. He had a job with a bookie, as his clerk. The money was not bad. Still, he was looking around.

  Thelma explored the piping on the lounge settee.

  ‘You have always hated me, Thel,’ he said, lighting a cigarette with accomplishment.

  Because she had never seen him do this before she experienced anger, as if he had stolen somebody else’s gesture.

  She shifted sharply, drawing up her knees and putting her neat feet together, and said, ‘I don’t hate you.’

  It is that diary perhaps.’

  Blowing long smoke.

  ‘Pffh,’she said. ‘I had forgotten about that. The silly things you put in a diary when you are a kid!’

  But he remembered, through the ramifications of smoke and memory, a queer thing, his own passion for the Greek.

  ‘Some people’, he said, ‘don’t like you to know too much about them.’

  ‘What do you know about me? You know nothing, nothing. We might not be related even, except that we are.’

  Whether either knew anything of the other was both possible and doubtful, as they looked at each other sideways in the lounge, or waiting-room, that preserved only an uneasy sort of collusion. Or whether even, inside the clothes they had adopted, they knew about themselves, which way they might strike or drift. Uncertainty began to make the young man restless. He got up and moved about, handling ornaments and looking into boxes. But the girl only clasped her hands together tighter on her knees, holding the hot ball of her handkerchief.

  ‘You think you’ll stick it out down here?’ asked the brother, without much interest in an answer.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  She could still feel indignant if it was suggested she would not accomplish what she had intended to.

  But the brother wanted to talk about the place in which they had lived together.

  ‘You remember those Quigleys?’ he asked.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about them,’ she said dryly. ‘But I haven’t forgotten.’

  She did not want to be drawn back.

  ‘She was an ugly old bitch,’ he said. ‘That goitre.’

  He was disgusted but melancholy.

  ‘But clean,’ he said. ‘You could see how she’d scrubbed the table half away. I remember they had a lyre-bird’s tail in a vase on the mantelpiece. I said I’d give the loopy brother six red maggy’s eggs if he’d let me have the tail. And he did. But I didn’t bring the eggs. He was cry in’ mad.’

  ‘Why did you cheat him?’ asked the girl listlessly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wanted the tail. And I didn’t have the eggs.’

  In that light, and in his rather pleasant voice, it seemed logical. So that the girl turned her head aside afresh. She did not want to see Doll Quigley’s plain table, because in its presence she too became suspect. Her past dishonesties, and those she had still to commit, were turning in her.

  ‘I don’t think there’s going to be enough for everyone to eat,’ she said, to make him go away.

  But the young man, now that he had made his sister share in the crime of his childhood, craved her company. He sensed that some kind of reality had been established between them at last. So he did not want to relinquish it and said, ‘That’s all right. I didn’t come for that.’

  Quite forgetting that he had.

  Presently, too, Horrie Bourke came in, and had to meet the young man, his relative.

  ‘You are a fine feller,’ said Horrie, putting his arm in its shirtsleeve, with the elastic-metal armband, along the shoulder of this young man. ‘A fine feller. And one that your dad can be proud
of

  Whenever he was convinced, a little drop of saliva appeared in the corner of Home’s mouth and began to follow a furrow down. He was an unsavoury old man in some respects, but good. He would cry if his horses strained themselves, and give directions to the stable-hands between onrushes of saliva, and finally seize the liniment bottle, identifying himself with the injured limb and experiencing great pain as his hand trembled on ligament or joint.

  Now, as a sign of appreciation, he wanted to expose the tenderest, the most vulnerable part of him, and tell Ray Parker about horses. He continued to stand with his arm along the boy’s shoulder, otherwise in rather a formal position, which his rupture forced him to adopt. When he knew Ray just a little better he would also tell him about his rupture. Horrie would have liked to have had children. Now he was treating Ray as he thought he would have treated his own, to the sentimental intimacies of confession, and to unbroken narrative. Naturally it put the young man who was not his son in an awkward position. Forced into acceptance, he acted as a son should but does not act, which gave him a passing expression of malevolence, that he should have had but normally did not. The trainer, however, was too pleased to notice anything but what he wanted to.

  Oh Lord, said Thelma.

  For Cousin Horrie had begun to tell Ray about a race.

  ‘When Don Antonio had gone a couple of furlongs,’ he said, ‘or perhaps it was not so fur, an Harcourt was comin up, an Cantaloup – or no, it was the Witch – Georgie Abbott the a funny thing. I did not say much at the time, but I seen it, and I made a mental note, see. I seen Georgie look round over ‘is shoulder, like, and drop ‘is nearside elbow. I said this is some funny business. I said to Cec Docker, Cec was standing there – poor old beggar died of a growth the year after. I said, I remember, to Cec, “Did you see what I seen, Cec?” “Well, Horrie,” he says, “it depends what you seen.” Because Cec was awful careful. He was what you call a real nice bloke. Well, Harcourt was comin up an up, an Cantaloup – or no, it was the Witch – ’