‘Dear, listen,’ laughed his wife, putting up her hair nervously. ‘An it all began as conversation. But you are drunk, you bugger, if I know. It is too much good stuff. You a painter, then what am I?’
She began to laugh, and looked curiously at Amy Parker, who had got up to go.
‘Wait, dear,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, looking at her. ‘There is some-thun I want to ask yer. When I come back. Oh dear, pardon me.’
And she went off, and out to the back, looking carefully at the step of the veranda, which threatened to throw her, but just failed.
In this way Amy Parker was left with O’Dowd. She did not look at him, but waited. Their figures were huge on the veranda at this moment, and gave every indication that they would grow even larger.
‘She will not let a person speak,’ said O’Dowd, who had got up too, and was looking at his toe-caps, and steadying himself, and looking most carefully at the dry leather. ‘She will kill a man, if he does not kill her first. But I cannot succeed in this. She is a good woman, Mrs Parker, and that is what makes it so much the worse. Whether it is paintuns that is in me, an that is perhaps a manner of speakun, or ideas, the ideas I have are well worth lookun at, if they are not still-born, if they are not killed, or pinched like the cockerel-pluckun machine. I am a man that has been mucked up.’
‘If you will sit down, Mr O’Dowd, perhaps you will feel better,’ Amy Parker said.
Because this over-life-size group had become oppressive to her. She was tempted to ward off any further encroachment by raising her arm.
‘But I am tryun to tell yer somethun,’ said O’Dowd, striving for that something with the bones of his fingers. ‘An I feel good.’
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Amy Parker, looking in the direction from which her friend did not return.
While those little flowers with which the fuchsia bush was hung trembled feverishly; their scarlet notes had never been so shrill.
‘You see,’ said O’Dowd, leaning over, ‘I have never told onyone about meself. Not all of it. To onyone.’
As he leaned right over and looked inside Mrs Parker’s blouse. Then he came up and stood quite straight.
Then Amy Parker knew that all her life she had been expecting O’Dowd to do something of this nature, or not O’Dowd particularly. So she did not instantly resume her correct body. Big sticky lilies are too heavy to hold their heads up after rain, or with the dew even, but bask in their fresh flesh.
So she was moister at that instant, recovering some luxuriance. Until she was disgusted. Then the sound of disgust came in her throat.
‘We was speakun of somethun,’ said O’Dowd, confused now that he had wandered off the map.
‘There was somethun I was after rememberun to ask you, Mrs Parker,’ said his wife, returning just then.
Mrs O’Dowd had stuck her head in a bucket, it appeared. She was all smoothed down, even piteous, with the drips upon her face.
‘I was a little flushed,’ she said. ‘An I still do not remember that bloody thing.’
‘Then, if you cannot remember,’ said Amy Parker finally, ‘I think I will be going.’
‘All right,’ said her friend. ‘You will not be sayun things about us?’
‘What should I say?’ Amy Parker asked.
‘How should I know rightly?’ said Mrs O’Dowd, looking into Mrs Parker as far as she could. ‘You are a funny girl, Amy, an always has been.’
Mrs Parker went down the step.
‘I cannot answer that,’ laughed the rejuvenated woman, of smooth face and firm arms.
So that Mrs O’Dowd was struck with doubts, watching her friend glance back, the blood in her face, or light of fuchsias. Amy Parker was still warm. Light broke in her at times, and coruscated, under the brim of her large hat.
She drove away then, leaving O’Dowd, who had sunk back into a shapelessness, of lost opportunities and mistier desires, beside his wife, who had found the grievance she was looking for perhaps. O’Dowds omitted to wave. They were too preoccupied.
And Amy Parker drove on. The sleek horse belted the road, because it was the road back, and the trap rocked, bringing to the soul of the woman that drove an easy indifference to matter. She flowed, easily and smoothly as light and the streaming trees. All those anxieties which had possessed her on the way down were now cleared away. By instinct she could have grasped an abstruse problem if it had been put to her.
But of course it was not, and might not be. So that the power in her hands which held the reins did eventually begin to fret her. She looked recklessly through the smooth trunks of flashing trees. And she remembered again, with disgust, the shambling, hairy body of O’Dowd. In the end, all that proud freedom of motion and recovered youth was overlaid by the feeling of disgust, that became also fear. She had never tipped herself out of any vehicle, but it might happen, she realized, by ramming the hub against a gatepost, or from one wheel mounting even a small log.
When she drove into the back yard Amy Parker was perspiring and throbbing, and her husband, who was gathering together the buckets, looked out of a window and frowned.
‘It is late,’ he said. ‘I am ready to start.’
Coming outside with the shining buckets.
‘I shall not be a minute,’ she said, climbing down from the trap rather quickly for a woman of her age, rather ungainly in her precipitation.
She must have guessed this, for she blushed and looked down.
‘I was with O’Dowds,’ she said. ‘I have wasted a fine lot of time. They were drunk, dirty brutes, shickered in the middle of the afternoon.’
She went into her house, throwing back at her husband fragments of her experience, which seemed incredible as she crossed her orderly kitchen and into the bedroom to pull off the dress she had worn for that outing.
But her husband laughed in all kindliness and went on, appeased, towards the bails. He liked sometimes to listen to the reported sins of other people, and to think about them, and laugh. As he was in no way vicious, tolerance was perhaps his vice.
Amy Parker, who was in her flat feet, got into that old woollen dress she wore for milking. How shapeless she was sometimes, she saw now, and blotched by haste or excitement. A coarse woman. And she began again to think about O’Dowds, and of that word which she had used in connexion with them.
Shickered, she said again, heavily, to herself.
It was not her word, but she had used it, and now was fascinated by the sound. Its brutal and contagious ugliness. She smoothed herself inside her old dress, still standing in her stockings. She was disturbing to herself.
It is milking time, she said, holding her hands flat to her face, so that it was framed in her hands and the mirror.
Then great sadness invaded the house, or it was just the silence that she was listening to, as she walked on flat feet over the carpet towards her shoes. If something were to happen – what, she did not dare to think – would she conduct herself with delicacy, or that brutality which sometimes threatened her? She looked out of the house. Or a letter would arrive – her trial could take this more merciful form – to say that Ray was coming, and she would make everything nice, and keep the excitement from bursting out of her veins, and run out, and take his head as he was standing there, it was hers to gather.
But she was pulling the shoes on to her heels.
Stan is waiting for me, said the heavy woman. He will be annoyed.
She went out then without any further thought or silliness, though looking about, in case somebody might come, asking for directions, or to tell some news.
Chapter 18
WHEN Stan Parker had reached this age of life he did sometimes wonder what was expected of him. He was respected. He was inseparable from the district, he had become a place name. His herd was small, but of good quality for the herd of a man in a small way, neither rich nor ambitious, but reliable, the cans would always reach the butter factory to the minute, without fail. He went to church too, singing the straight psalms and rounder hymns, in
praise of that God which obviously did exist. Stan Parker had been told for so long that he believed, of course he did believe. He sang that praise doggedly, in a voice you would have expected of him, approaching the music honestly, without embellishing it. Standing in the pew, singing, the back of his neck was by this time quite wrinkled, and the sinews were too obvious in the flesh. But he was a broad and upright man.
What then was wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. This is my life, he would have said if he had expressed himself other than by acts of the body. But there were seasons of stubble and dead grass, when doubts did press up. There were certain corners of his property that he could not bring himself to visit, almost as if he might have discovered something he did not wish to see. It is all right there, he said, and persuaded himself that nothing does alter that is established in the mind.
Once he had been looking at a crop of remarkably fine sorghum that was almost ready to bring in, when he remembered that same stretch of land after he had cleared it as a young man, and on it the white chips lying that his axe had carved out of the trees, and some trees and young saplings still standing and glistening there, waiting for the axe. So that he forgot his present crop and went away disturbed, and thinking.
At times he indulged in great physical exertion, excessive, in fact, for a man of his age, to atone perhaps for those weaknesses with which he was assailed. He prayed too, in prayers that he had learned, avoiding improvisation now, for he no longer trusted himself at this, and he tried to fit those stern and rather wooden prayers to his own troubled and elusive soul. He prayed hopefully, desperately at times, always woodenly, and wondered if his wife knew.
I should tell her something of this perhaps, he said, but how to mention, and what to mention, so he could not. He realized that it was some time since they had spoken together. Except to ask for things and recount incidents, they had not really entered into each other. She was closed, he saw. He was perpetually looking at her eyelids, as she walked or sat with these drawn down, in a dream.
If their life and love had not been so firmly founded on habit, he would have been troubled by this too. As it was, he was not. He accepted his wife’s face as further evidence of that uneasy dream-time to which they had come at last, and through which they floated restlessly towards whatever was in store.
One evening the woman, in looking for something, had begun to turn out a cupboardful of junk, pieces of old ornaments that she had put away, knowing that almost certainly those pieces would never be joined together again, a knot of insertion turning brown, old catalogues from big stores, the teeth of children in a bottle, many valueless and transient things which some tenacity or avarice in herself had tried secretly to elevate to permanence and value. Down on her knees, turning over her possessions with some irony and helplessness, she also came across a little notebook
As she was turning the pages, looking at them, or merely turning, the man her husband who had been watching her, waiting for some act or exposure that might illuminate the present and many other situations, sat forward and asked hopefully, ‘What is that that you have got, Amy?’
‘Ah,’ she sniffed, or grunted, that evening she was in her slippers and her hair was loose, ‘that is a little notebook that was given me by Mrs Erbey, I remember, the parson’s wife at Yuruga. I wanted to give it to Ray, to keep a diary in. I thought it would be nice. But he wasn’t taken with the idea.’
Then she added, ‘It was a silly one perhaps. To expect boys to write down what they do. I don’t think boys look back. They go on doing.’
‘Give it to me,’ said her husband, coming forward. ‘I can use it for something, to make notes or keep lists.’
She was glad to give him the silly book, putting it into his hand without rising from her absorption.
The man returned to his chair on the edge of the room, and looked at the blank book, and tried to think what he would write in it. The blank pages were in themselves simple and complete. But there must be some simple words, within his reach, with which to throw further light. He would have liked to write some poem on prayer in the empty book, and did for some time consider that idea, remembering the plays of Shakespeare that he had read lying on his stomach as a boy, but any words that came to him were the stiff words of a half-forgotten literature that had no relationship with himself.
So the book remained empty. He went about, ploughing, chopping, milking, reaping, emptying buckets and filling them. All these acts were good in themselves, but none of them explained his dream life, as some word might, like lightning, out of his brain. Sometimes, though, he was appalled by his foolishness, and would look at his wife to see whether she suspected.
She did not.
‘Stan,’ she said, ‘do you think it will rain yet? There is a little cloud down there in the South.’
She moistened her lips and rose guiltily to the surface of her mind, because she realized he was looking at her.
These were years of drought, and they often made such remarks, going out from under the heat of the roof to the vaster heat of the sky. To look. They would moisten the dry skin of their lips and make prognostications, sometimes hopeful, to encourage each other. They stood, and were watched by their own lean cows, as if these expected a revelation from men similar to that which men expected from the sky.
Then everyone grew accustomed, more or less, to the yellow drought. They watched it and each other less. They even discovered moments of detached beauty.
Stan Parker found a dragonfly, as long as his finger, which he brought to show his wife, it was trembling on a yellow mulberry leaf.
‘Why, that is beautiful, Stan,’ she said.
She was pleased but detached, humouring him as if he were a little boy. She was kneading dough at the time.
‘Put it on the sill’, she said, ‘and perhaps it will fly.’
After delivering it from his hands, from which the skin had been knocked in one or two places, there were scabs on them, he went out, and afterwards remembered the incident as one that had been insufficient.
If they had been dependent on those frail wings to rise together, the woman would not have been able at that moment to infuse them with strength. Eventually I will speak to him, she felt. It was as if she could not bring herself to take the final vow of love and submission. She was incapable just then, because she was not yet ready. In the meantime she kneaded, she could only knead dough, or tear the pages from the calendar, or look out of windows at the spectacle of yellow leaves on dying twigs.
That autumn was no yellower than summer in which she walked, saving one or two shrubs with a drop of water that she had kept from the sink. Dust blew down the road from Durilgai, in hungry tongues or in eddies, playful until they acquired the force of madness. In the first stages of the drought, while resistance to it was still related to self-respect, the windows of the house had been kept shut, but as the months drew out, and it became obvious that there was no real barrier to what was happening, that dust would settle, and the brittle leaves and wisps of white grass appear subtly on the carpet, the windows began to stand open. Sometimes the arms of curtains waved hopelessly in the enveloping wind. Dust had entered the drawers, and was beginning to fill a little china shoe that the woman kept on the mantelpiece, which she used to fill with violets, or capricious bunches of any small flowers, but which now of course was empty.
Is this really my house? the woman thought, pausing with her empty can, looking through the dusty oleanders at the curtains waving from the shell of the house.
Sometimes the man her husband, who had his own preoccupations, would promise himself to tell her she was letting the house go, and that she must do something about it, but he postponed this, because it is something you do postpone, out of delicacy, even pity.
Now he was away, at a sale of farm mac
hinery that was taking place on a property at Wullunya. The woman remembered his kiss as she stood there in the arid garden. His affection, which was kind and habitual, made her feel fretful in retrospect. Then she began to whimper quietly, for no good reason, except at the touch of her own dry and drying skin, slightly gritty from the dust, which she had touched, and continued touching, stroking her own arms. The can, which she had knocked over, fell with a clatter of emptiness on the hard ground.
Finally she said dryly, This is ridiculous.
And began to brace herself, and to walk upright through the bushes of the garden. Nobody had seen her.
Later, when she had drunk some tea and felt stronger, she came out again and sat on the veranda. The afternoon was full of the clear light of autumn, but dry of course, with a hard, bright twittering of birds. The wind had turned cold, which made her shiver. It came ballooning down from out of the direction of Durilgai, making things rattle in it, twigs and loose tin.
There was a car coming down from Durilgai, a small blue car, rather new, she noticed, but without interest, perhaps from the city, but trailing the dust of these parts. She sat on her veranda, looking, because you do look. In the days of horses and her youth she would have gone down to the gate, but that was not now.
So the car continued, and drew near, as she was looking, and the man got out and came up the path, after having some trouble with the catch of the gate. All through this she had sat and watched, in lethargy or with irony, when she could and should have explained the peculiarities of the catch, and with that same irony she let him come up the path with the two heavy cases, that had given him a congested look and pulled his collar down, exposing his neck below the weather line.
The man was a commercial traveller, it appeared. He asked whether he could interest her in a few lines of dress materials he was carrying. He had stockings too, and lingerie, and fancy buttons.
But the woman smiled faintly, incredulously, shaking her head. She was white as well as silent, for she had rubbed some powder on her face while she had been in the house, absently and inexpertly, and this increased her expression of remoteness, giving her, in fact, the expression of some statuary in public places, almost fatally withdrawn and impersonal. She was big too, sitting sideways on a hard chair.
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