‘I am terribly grateful to Dudley,’ Thelma Forsdyke would say, her eyes moistening even.
Such humility was surprising, but she refreshed herself in it. She had grasped so much, materially, that she had exhausted most avenues for further gain, and so she turned her attention to spiritual aggrandizement. She would have liked to be a martyr to someone, particularly her husband, who failed to give her opportunity, except in a certain manner he had of clearing his throat, and in his cult of draughts. She was unlikely to have any children, for vaguely delicate reasons, and this at times was a sadness for her, some afternoons or evenings, when she was left alone with her hands, until she realized that she would not have known what to do with young children, knocking things over in her house, or the older ones, discovering about sex. She had her health, of course, or lack of it, she had her asthma, about which people remembered to inquire, and particularly those who were grateful.
Sometimes the rector called. Thelma Forsdyke gave to the church without encouraging the parson, who would not have fitted into her social scheme. She had become generous, deliberately so; she gave rare objects or presents of money far in excess of the occasion, her eyes reddening for her own acts. Afraid, or unable to give herself, the voluptuousness of generosity became necessary to her. It was a secret vice, her wardrobe gin or hypodermic. So far no one had discovered. Unless her mother.
She liked best to bring presents to her parents, exquisitely remorseful, thoughtfully expensive things. In a car of her own, that she had learned to drive, frowning, she slipped past the villas and the abattoirs into the surprising country, in which she played no part. Down that road, of loose barbed wire and dusty trees, which was only distinguished by her parents living in it, she drove at anxious speed, remembering an old man who had exposed himself once in some bushes. To live in a sealed room, she feared, would not exclude all the incidents that must be excluded.
Then she would arrive. These visits were absurd, she realized wryly, if touching, as she brushed the dust from her coat. The air was full of the sound of magpies.
Once she brought her mother a pineapple, and a fresh fish, and a set of table mats painted with a hunting scene, that she had bought at a charity bazaar. She opened them for her mother, she spread out because this was part of the game, to indulge herself in one voluptuous surge of kindness, she was so good.
‘Look,’ she said, laying the silvery fish on her bare hands. ‘Isn’t he a beauty?’
The fish was. He glittered. His being could not end in death.
The mother, whose eyes were playing about amongst her presents, said, ‘Ah, Thel, what am I to do with these?’
‘The mats? Aren’t they pretty? There will be some occasion perhaps. Keep them and see.’
‘You are very kind to me, Thel,’ said the mother, looking at her daughter, right into her.
And the daughter, who had grown into rather a thin woman of taste, took the fish and went out to put it in a cool place, in the house that she knew by heart but no longer belonged to. Her mother was inclined to be selfish, she decided, to take for granted. Whether this was so or not, the old woman continued to look ironically, not at the mats but at her daughter, although gone inside. She continued to look at the little girl pressing her mouth to the mirror until her mouth met her mouth.
However, when Mrs Forsdyke returned, testing her cleaned hands on a transparent handkerchief, the old woman was all gratitude and kindliness.
She said, ‘That is a beautiful fish, Thelly. I shall bake it in the oven. Dad likes it that way.’
It was an amiable game that they played, of mother and daughter. Mrs Forsdyke enjoyed its sequence, and overlooked the fact that she had been called ‘Thelly’, which reminded her of stones in the small of her back after school.
Sometimes Thelma Forsdyke walked round her drawing-room and, remembering the abyss of her origin, closed the windows tight. That is something which it is not possible to escape. It is with you always. So that her face was not convincing to her, even at its best. Her voice would falter discussing music. There is such nastiness in the evolution of a synthetic soul. She remembered the Bourkes, she remembered the feel of Genoa velvet, the taste of nougat as she sat buffing her nails.
Once the maid came in, an elderly woman with soft ways, who had been trained by somebody else.
‘There is a gentleman to see you, madam. He says it is on urgent private business. He would not give a name,’ said the elderly maid in a discreet cap.
How safe, how established, even the elderly maids are.
The gentleman was Ray Parker, Mrs Forsdyke’s brother.
‘I bet you were surprised, Thel,’ laughed Ray, coming into the drawing room and pitching his hat that he had brought with him, an aggressive new brown hat, pitching it from him, somewhere. ‘I like to give people surprises,’ he laughed. ‘It takes them out of their rut. You’re in a pretty good rut, though,’ he said, looking round.
‘We chose this house for the view,’ she said, coming forward to receive a guest. ‘It has water on three sides. You can see right up the harbour, and on this side, out to the Heads.’
Then she looked at her brother, to discover what he might want. Her face had become all bones. She would be a stringy woman later on. She was tough too, in spite of an air of delicate health, that rattly cough with which she could frighten people. She would have had to be tough to get what she wanted, almost. What she did want, that is, the ultimate in desire, eluded her, so that she was more speculative, only superficially unpleasant, when she asked, ‘What is it you want, Ray?’
The man who had sat down heavily on her colourless brocade, he was by this time a heavy man, meant to play her for a bit. He composed his cheeks, which had a city tan, and in which two dimples came. Some people found these interesting.
He said, ‘I came to take a dekker at you, Thel. Here we are, related. But anyone would think we didn’t exist, anyone who didn’t know about the other.’
She laughed.
‘What good would it do these hypothetical people to know that we do exist?’
‘If it is a matter of good,’ he said, shrugging his noticeable suit, and hoping that she would offer him a drink.
He was a sensual man, she saw, and sensuality made her nervous, though he would not have noticed. He was probably also stupid in many, if not in all the ways. What she feared most was that he should be, as she suspected, an honest brother, as well as what she knew, a dishonest man.
‘Anyway,’ she said, giving a concise smile and sitting down, ‘you are here.’
‘That is more like it,’ he said in his thick, easy voice. ‘And this solicitor bloke that I never even met, when does he come in?’
‘That depends,’ she said. ‘Professional men don’t run by clockwork.’
‘I can wait, though,’ said Ray Parker.
If this pale room will not kill him. What do people, lacking the resources of flies, do in still rooms?
‘Because I have always wanted to meet him.’
‘I can think of no two things you would have in common,’ laughed Thelma Forsdyke, without weighing the possibilities.
‘You never can tell,’ said Ray Parker. ‘I have got to know coves in railway carriages, and on the backs of trucks at night. You would be surprised.’
‘Dudley’, said Thelma, ‘is not likely to go for any such dangerous rides.’
‘Is he breakable?’
She did not answer.
‘I could get to know you, Thel, sitting in this room.’
She did not answer.
‘You’re thin. Too bloody thin.’
When the perspiration had begun to come at her delicate temples, under the hair which had been set the day before yesterday, he continued. ‘I can’t stand thinness. I should have done something big, but as I never found out how, I had to content myself with doctoring a horse and busting open a safe. Oh, you need not get worried, Thel. I’m going straight enough now. That is, I am in business. I am selling cars. I have s
tood drinks to some of the best people. But it all costs. And I am out of dough. What I have come here for, to be honest, you will appreciate the word, is to touch you for twenty quid. I am being married on Tuesday to a girl called Elsie Tarbutt.’
‘Is she conscious of what she is doing?’ asked Mrs Forsdyke, going to a little bureau for which she had paid a lot of money under the impression that the adorable furniture was genuine antique.
‘Yes,’ said Ray Parker. ‘She is going to reform me. She is a Methodist.’
‘Ah,’ said the sister.
She wrote off a cheque, putting that graceful signature which it was no longer necessary to practise.
‘I wonder whether I would be interested to see her,’ she said, and smiled, as she paid her brother off.
Again she thought, Ray has failed to accomplish the grand manner. It is a miserable sum.
‘To meet Elsie?’ he said, looking to see what figure she had written. ‘No. It would not be the right thing. One crook in the family is enough.’
So they stood there hating, without being able to put a finger on the reason.
Then in the silent room, in which they had exchanged souls, they began also to be moved by each other. There are moments when this thick and repulsive man starts to tremble, the woman noticed; would he be still if I kissed him, in spite of the smell of smoke and drink, his teeth are brown, but kissed him deeply, as I have been afraid to kiss someone, or would he add this secret to others that he has got by heart? So the woman continued to twist her rings. And the man pitied her, remembering how he had shivered on a goods train rattling north in the night, knowing there is nothing.
‘I’ll be going now,’ said Ray Parker, picking up his flash hat. ‘It’ll ease the situation.’
‘Good-bye, Ray,’ she said.
She let him find his own way, after giving it a second’s thought, and deciding it was simple enough, and there was nothing he might pick up.
When he was gone she sat in a chair.
Her body was still, but inwardly she rushed at herself, as if she had been a chest of drawers, to turn her virtues out, and find some thing that was good. Many grateful, good, humble people had told her she was good, so she must be. Such eyes see more clearly than one’s own, or one’s brother’s, or one’s own. It was something that jumped into his head, she said, and he spoke it, to be clever. But a metallic taste had come in her mouth. She could have spat out her tongue, of thin and bitter metal. So she got a headache. She felt quite feverish. She took an aspirin then. She took a book or two.
‘I have brought the tea, madam,’ said the elderly maid, who had put the tray on a little table.
The habits which Thelma Forsdyke had carefully selected were not of great assistance. There is some crime I have forgotten, she felt, searching between the lines, for she often glanced at a book with her tea, brushing from the pages the crumbs of expertly thin bread and butter. It is absurd to be upset, she said, by the ignorant and vulgar. She read, here a word or two. But she was busted open. And what is there inside? she asked. Her long fingers trembled. Gusts of doubt were shaking her as she read some poem, that she had picked up in a shop, pleased by her own discernment:
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high; …
It was a cold poem. These words had begun to blow through her soft dress, and to sweep her mind, leaving a numbness, if also a curious clarity. She read with a kind of grey fascination:
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
Perhaps, she felt, it will be knowledge, not aspirin or ephedrene, that will bring relief. So she read on, through her teeth:
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
When it was finished she sat on. There was nothing she could ring and ask for. Half-sensing the meaning of the poem, she blamed her parents bitterly for the situation to which she had been exposed. She also blamed God for deceiving her.
Eventually her husband came in with the evening paper and said, ‘You are very pale this evening, Thelma.’
Correcting the position of an etching on the wall.
‘Are you out of sorts?’ he asked.
Touching his etching. The Forsdykes had etchings because they would not have dared choose a painting.
‘It is the northeasterly,’ said Thelma.
There was, in fact, a nasty wind. Little leaden waves ornamented the waters of the bay. Grit was scratching at the windowpanes.
‘And Ray has been here,’ she said. ‘Ray, my brother.’
‘What did he want?’ asked the solicitor, raising his stomach nervously.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
It is too late to practise honesty, she decided, one would not know how.
‘We had a talk,’ she said. ‘He is getting married.’
‘What did you talk about?’ asked Dudley Forsdyke, who had forgotten the evening paper.
‘Oh, family matters,’ she said.
‘Then why are you upset, dear?’
‘Ray is always upsetting. He has some effect. He is the wrong colour for me. It is something like that,’ said Thelma Forsdyke.
The solicitor put down the evening paper still hot from his hand. He walked about chafing his hands. He had an inordinate desire to meet his brother-in-law. Whoever has not violated, or been violated, it is much the same thing, does at times entertain a curiosity. Dudley Forsdyke was a dry man, but a true man. So he shivered for the shreds of truth, to tear just once, or be torn.
‘I am sorry I missed him,’ he said.
Ray Parker will have a vein in his forehead.
‘He is a brute really.’ said Thelma.
‘Still, we are brothers-in-law.’
What intimate experience would the brothers-in-law exchange on a flight of stone steps going downward? The solicitor had gathered from some remark of his wife’s that Ray Parker was a fleshy man. He felt a hand in the small of his back.
‘Anyway, I am glad you did not meet,’ said the wife.
She felt too weak.
‘I am going to bed now.’ she said. ‘I shall not bother about dinner.’
He kissed her, as they did at recognized intervals, and went in to eat some fish. In the silence of the elderly maid, whose name was Dorothy, he became less obsessed by self-destruction. Discretion returned, rose towards that of the starched woman who bent and breathed above him, till their twin discretions met and mingled in a mutual admiration. In this way the solicitor was restored to the surface on which it was his custom to float.
Soon after that Mrs Forsdyke felt the necessity for visiting her mother again. Although there were times when she would blame her mother for her birth, she did also experience a desire to return to the womb. So she drove down, and soon they were speaking together on the veranda, which was their habitual meeting place.
‘I am sorry you were not at the wedding,’ said the mother, beginning to enjoy a good talk, with its weft of relationships, in which even flaws would be of interest.
‘I was not asked,’ said the daughter, and wondered whether she was slightly hurt.
‘I would have thought that for a wedding all differences are made up,’ said the old woman. ‘Still, everyone has their own ideas. Ray has turned over a new leaf.’
The mother had decided this. She did not yet know herself well enough to doubt. Or she lowered her eyelids on doubt, over her own life, so that she had a slatted look. As she peered out she was determined to see all hopeful things.
‘It was a nice wedding,’ she said. ‘Mr Tarbutt is a grocer, at Leichardt. There were beautiful presents. Someone gave a whole canteen of silver. Ray was in his element, of course. People like him. He sang too. Did you know that Ray could sing? He is prosperous now, it seems.’
Thelma Forsdyke, who had sat down on the edge of the
veranda, she was sufficiently assured to do ungraceful things, wore that incredulousness which warm sunlight brings on winter afternoons. Sunlight, she realized with gratitude, is one treasure that is not debased by time.
‘There was a whole big ham,’ said the mother, ‘laid open in slices for people to help themselves.’
‘And what about Elsie?’ Thelma asked.
‘Elsie is not pretty,’ said Mrs Parker. ‘But she is what Ray wants. She will make an excellent wife.’
‘She is a Methodist,’ said Thelma.
‘Did you know then?’
‘And you do not like her.’
‘That you do not know, because it is not true,’ said Amy Parker, moving in her chair, which squeaked, and examining the cane for clues. ‘Or if it was true I would soon make it not. Elsie is an excellent girl.’
Other people in the end prevail. Amy Parker sat at weddings, at her son’s, and of other young ones. She watched the dancers. She ate pink cake and heard it rumble. Some such cake had sand. She went to weddings but did not like them much, in spite of their loveliness. These occasions, the elaborate movements of the dancers and of the conversations, diverged too far from her now still mosaic. That she had put together. She did not believe in what she had not made, whether cake or habits.
So she watched Elsie. Under the orange blossom, at the temples, in her thick, creamy skin, the pores were rather large. Elsie had a flat face, but kind. She was expecting something as she came up to speak. She laughed at jokes, because it was the thing. Then closed up, because it was finished. She had a closed face waiting to be opened. All the time her creamy, porous skin was craving for affection.
So Amy Parker realized that Elsie was unprotected. She looked right into Elsie’s glasses, through the thick lenses she was compelled to wear, and saw the girl had nothing to hide. This was disconcerting to the older woman. She could not believe it.
Thelma Forsdyke was sitting on the edge of the veranda. She was wearing long crocodile shoes that had been made especially for her, by Tennysons. Shielding her face because of the sun, she too was obsessed by Elsie, and the whole ceremony of common people. How she would have whirled, herself, with gestures of slow ice, protecting herself from the groom! That silver is probably plated, she considered, with embossed handles, and will tarnish quickly.
The Tree of Man Page 47
