Then Mrs Forsdyke, the daughter, drove down in her own car, they had two. Most people did not know Mrs Forsdyke, or had known and forgotten that this was Thelly Parker. Those who might have remembered, she did not encourage, narrowing her eyes until the skin almost obscured her conscience. Those who had never known, she was above, so slid past in her smooth black car, which quickly left behind all that was in any way mediocre or in bad taste.
The father was waiting for his daughter to come. His eyelids and his wrists had gone a bit scaly, but his teeth were still strong and good. He smiled at her.
‘What is it all about then, Thel?’
Because Mrs Forsdyke had suggested in a note that there was something she wished to talk about. She favoured that verb, which was discreet but firm.
‘Oh,’ she laughed, looking at him, enjoying this distant relationship with a simple old man, at the same time, secretly, her father, ‘it is a little plan. Which I hope will appeal to you. Not because it is mine, or that I want to force anything, but it is so reasonable. Dudley agrees.’
Mrs Forsdyke was one of those women who enlist their husbands when they expect to meet resistance.
‘You are looking a little tired, dear,’ she said, getting from her car and approaching her father.
She kissed him too. Cultivating exhaustion herself, she frequently wished it on to other people. But her father’s skin was alive, she noticed, and she flushed, as much as her blood was capable of. She was a frail woman, but gristly, carrying a crocodile bag.
‘I am not more tired than I ever was,’ said the old man.
‘No, Dad,’ said the daughter, picking snails off a bush and crushing them with her shoe, ‘if you are not tired, then you are not.’
She winced for the snails, but did glance back in curiosity.
‘You love those cows too much ever to be tired,’ Mrs Forsdyke said.
‘There is no question of loving the cows,’ said the old man. ‘The cows are all right. But I am not married to them, as they say.’
‘I had always thought’, said his daughter, ‘that a man was indis-solubly married to his cows.’
The old man made a noise.
‘But if he is not,’ said Thelma Forsdyke, ‘then it is easy.’
‘How, easy?’
‘To send them off in one of those things. What is it? A float. And stay in bed later the next morning, to see whether you like it, and then when you do, stay in bed late the following morning. Until you are used to doing nothing. Oh, when I say nothing, I mean you can have a hobby. There is this carpentry you have taken up. It must be great fun. Fresh wood does smell so pleasant. And you have never been anywhere. Well, you can go. With poor Mother. You can come to us sometimes on a Sunday. Normally we are very quiet. On Sundays everybody is at home. With their families. Wouldn’t you like that?’
Stan Parker did not say whether he would like. He would, certainly, have liked to sit a long time and watch the passage of a snail which had survived the foot. He would sit, and in his own time retrace his own path, thin and silver, through the mists. But he did not speak.
Old people are easily hurt, considered Thelma Forsdyke with impatience. If it had been a little child, of course she did not have one, she could have planted in it her own mind, and watched it grow, like the mango tree from sand. Forgetful of her own childhood since she had ceased to live, she had not failed to evolve theories. This old child might be difficult, though.
In fact, he was not. He would think, he was already thinking, about what his daughter had said. He could give up, if not for those reasons, to those ends. Thelma is silly, he said, I am not that imbecile, but she has got something. He could give up as she suggested, more even, land even, even his life, simply because it was not his to keep. It had become blindingly obvious.
He was looking pale, for him.
‘You will see’, said Thelma, patting his hand, ‘how much better you will feel for the rest.’
Because he did not resist, then or later, on that passive morning she went away filled with pity and complacency, pity because the poor old fellow was growing senile, and complacency as the mentor of simple people’s lives. She drove off joyfully, mistaking instrumentality for power.
After she had gone Stan Parker walked about his property, slowly, and with all the appearance of aimlessness, which is the impression that spiritual activity frequently gives, while all the time this communion of soul and scene was taking place, the landscape moving in on him with increased passion and intensity, trees surrounding him, clouds flocking above him with tenderness such as he had never experienced. He could have touched the clouds. Now, when he should have been detached, he was nervous, whipping his trouser leg with a little stick. For this scene which was his, and which was not, was too poignant. So he stooped to watch some ants dragging a butterfly’s wing through a desert of stones. A convinced activity of tingling ants. Then suddenly he twitched the wing away. He tossed it into the sunlight, where it fluttered and shimmered, rightly restored to air, but while it was still floating and falling he went away, shaken by the ruthlessness of divine logic.
And they began soon after this to sell off Parkers’ property by lots. It was easily accomplished, because it was desirable land, in a district that was being opened up. The old man did not take a direct hand in the business transactions, because his son-in-law was there, and, more actively, his daughter. He let other people work the necessary but insignificant machinery of this phase. It pleased those concerned, his respect and docility emphasizing their superior gifts, and soon they had developed a sentimental attitude towards what might otherwise have been his mediocrity. The poor old man, they smiled, has no business sense. So they went out of their way to see that he was not taken down by anyone, not even by themselves.
When the land was sold Parkers did have three or four acres left. They had the gully at the back and one paddock at the side. They had a house cow with asymmetrical horns, and Mr Parker grew a few cabbages in winter, between the rows of which his wife strolled, in an old cardigan, on warm days, and stooped to pull a blade of grass that had come up out of place.
One day as Amy Parker was walking between the cabbages, as was her custom now, she was trying to remember something. Some restlessness had begun to possess her, of association. Then it was her youth that began to come back in the world of cabbages. She heard the dray come up with the mound of blue cabbages, and the snap of straps in the frost, as putting her shoulders through the window she spoke to her husband. She was remembering all mornings. And the little ears of cabbage seedlings that he stuck into the earth, into the holes that he had made with a shovel handle. She remembered the arms of her husband as they worked in the sunlight, the little hairs on the forearms and the veins at the wrists. It seemed to her suddenly as if she would not see him again.
So she hurried along the rows of cabbages, they were big, green, bursting ones, unlike those evanescent plants that shimmer in the field of memory, she hurried to be with her husband, who was never far from her, they could not have escaped from each other had they wished.
‘Why don’t we sell some of these cabbages?’ she asked irritably when she had come to where he was digging a few potatoes for their tea. ‘There are more than we can use. We shall be sick of blessed cabbage.’
‘It will not be worth the trouble,’ said Stan Parker. ‘For a few bob. And the business of carting them to market.’
‘Then what are we to do with them?’ she asked, kicking one of these bright and rubbery vegetables.
She was standing lost amongst the cabbages, and intended perhaps that he should become lost too.
‘We shall eat some,’ he said, looking down, because she had at least deterred him. ‘And give some. The cow could eat a fair few. We shall think of other ways,’ he said.
Then they were standing there, and what had been bright jewels in the field of past and present were ludicrous lumps of cynical rubber.
‘You get worked up over nothing,’ he said tautly.
To explain it that way.
‘I like to know the reason for things,’ she said, looking at and unravelling a frayed bit of the old cardigan that she wore.
But he could not explain their continued existence in that same plot of cabbages, and magpies came over, and jolly peewits, and little anonymous birds, descending and picking in the moist earth, as if the man and woman had not been there.
Other people, Thelma, for instance, say that when you are at a loss you must do things, you must take up carpentry, or knit a jumper, or go on a trip somewhere. Amy Parker, who was ignorant, did not in herself believe that there is any exit from confusion, except by living it out, though she did once try the other, making joke of it, laughing at themselves, while hoping, she said, ‘Why don’t we go somewhere for once? Go to the city at least, I mean on a proper visit, before we die. Do something, I mean. Even if we are disappointed we shall know.’
Her husband wondered what it would cost, probably a good deal. Though he was not mean. He was cautious. And the wife laughed, ashamed that she had suggested such foolishness, and was glad that they would not go. Many horrors were visualized. Even a day’s journey made her constipated. They were upset by meat that was not boiled. They ate junket from the milk of their own cow. So they would not go.
Then quite suddenly they were going to the city. It was decided one evening. It was intended that they should spend a week, in a reasonable hotel, and that Jack Finlayson should come in to milk the cow and throw a bit of pollard to the fowls. Stan Parker’s hands were shaking with this decision. His wife was red. She had grown rather full-blooded, and now the fine perspiration was at her temples and above her mouth.
‘I will go to the sea,’ she said, laughing greedily. ‘And sit beneath those pine trees and watch the water coming in.’
‘What good will that do you?’ asked the husband, spilling the tobacco he was manipulating.
‘You would not know,’ she said, as if she did.
Because she had never succeeded in loving him in full measure, there were times when she must hurt. Only he was no longer hurt.
Anyway, the two old people did go. They spent a week in a modest hotel; they could have afforded better but were afraid that people might look at their clothes. So they chose one in which the linoleum was a bit worn. They apologized to the young lady in depositing their key. It was not their words exactly, it was their attitudes.
But they were pleased.
They were pleased they had survived, and were surviving. The decent couple walking in the streets did not go down before those anonymous waves. They discovered that they were strong. Their solitary lives had perhaps built them buttresses.
Once the couple walking in the street at night listened to a radio, of which the red-gold voice was singing of sunsets and renunciation.
‘What is she singing about, Stan?’ Amy Parker asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It is all Chinese to me.’
Then they laughed. They were superior. A mystery is no mystery that the mind refuses, it is better than unravelled. So they went on.
The city was never stationary for long, nor they, it was like dreams, only less personal. The glass caves into which the old people looked, and especially in the purple night, were opening for others. It was the dream of someone else’s dream that they were dreaming. When shall we be put down again? their faces asked. Their own dreams in monochrome, although at times suffocating by hate or strangling with love, did exact less.
One night Stan said they would go to a play.
‘It is the play of Hamlet,’ he said. ‘It is by Shakespeare.’
‘Oh,’ said his wife, to whom such audacity was dubious.
It also seemed to cast some light upon her hidden husband. It is this sort of thing in Stan that I do not like, she said, I do not like secrets. Because although he would take her to his play she could not feel that she would share it.
Anyway, they went. Pausing for breath, they climbed high up, to where they would be less noticeable, and from there they looked down, through knobs and angels, into the golden bowl that was already steaming with anticipation. All scents and dust, all laughter and hot air, rose from the depths of the bowl to bemuse the old woman at its rim. She could not see well, which made it more aggravating, or else mystical. She could see a naked woman, was it? with a bunch of violets in her breasts. Grey mists rose from the woman’s flesh, before reverting to the material. They were moored. As time passed and music began to come out of the little slot in which the musicians sat, there was a great deal that had grown too solid to soar. The seats were hard too. There was a smell of hot caramels and disinfectant.
‘Do the women dress like that and feel clothed?’ Amy Parker asked.
‘If they do not feel clothed, that was more than likely their intention,’ her husband said. ‘But it is going to begin now.’
The curtain was on fire, and when it had burned up, there was his boyhood, only the words had taken on a form, and were walking and running, in silk stockings. His mother was there, with a ring upon her arthritis, pointing an explanation. But the play eluded explanations, then and now. It went on its own way, like life, or dreams. He could smell the smell of damp in that old book with the brown patches, from some deluge that she had told him about but he had forgotten. He remembered Horatio, a friend. A friend of similar understanding and manliness, older than himself, was what he had wished for, but he had gone through childhood almost friendless, walking through long grass and lying along the branches of trees, waiting to grow older.
He did, and was also faced with ghostliness at some stages, though no one had ever caught him out. They had not seen him moving his lips exactly. Speaking to the green Very light. For one instance. Which passed across the sky as slowly and as fatefully as the more corporeal ghost for Horatio and his friends. And quietly. That was what made men shout, if they were the shouting kind, the Horatios, good men he had known later and who were killed in battle, shouting at their own clamminess.
‘Fancy, a ghost. That is a bit farfetched,’ Amy Parker said.
She laughed, but liked it.
The only ghost she had seen was her conscience in mirrors. It had a grey face, and was quickly got rid of, by not looking at it. But this green ghost, in a crown. Fancy being actors. It is not men’s work, it is all talking and talking. And life is not talking, it is living. Then this old woman, who was gripping the brass rail across which she hung, wondered what she had lived. She sat upon a chair on the veranda and listened to the fuchsia canes. She would have liked to see, to think of, there and then, some solid instance of living. That man. Leo. But fading. It was the theatre rising up around her, and to which she was unaccustomed. It was the words that meant nothing.
‘I have never heard so much talk,’ she said irritably, almost abusively.
He hushed her, and she turned her head away.
Was this Hamlet, he asked, coming and going throughout the play, a white, a rather thin man in black? That we have been waiting for. Is this our Hamlet? With poor knees. The words that he had read, and was remembering, tried to convince the old man. Once he had known an old horse called Hamlet, a bay, no, an old brown gelding, a light draught, that belonged to an old cove, Furneval was it, or Furness? who would drive into the village for groceries, flicking at the flies on Hamlet with the whip. That was one Hamlet. Or standing in the feed shed, in that trench coat that he had hung on to after the war, for years, till it became green, the buttons had dropped off, and it was separated from its origin, but that morning, or in fact many mornings, as he mixed the good bran and chaff, the real Hamlet floated towards an explanation, or was it fresh bewilderment? These grey mornings the air is all cobwebs, the sun rising through the greater nets of clouds, the white seeds of weeds falling and clinging. Hamlet is confused, after the bombardment, to witness acts of thistle-down.
As the old man in the gallery continued to be bombarded by words he almost lost consciousness, but this was also refres
hing. Nothing, after all, is so complicated as this play, he said. He raised his head from where it was leaning on the brass. He would hold fast to this talisman of simplicity. But we too are simple people, he said in horror, Amy is simple, I am simple, and do not know myself. So that he was swallowed again by the surf of words, and was wandering about the stage, looking into the eyes of the actors.
Because that was what they were. Hamlet was an actor. Women read about him in the papers and thought about him in their beds. They shivered when the draught swirled out from beneath the curtain and settled on their naked shoulders. Some had stuck flowers in the clefts of their bosoms. But it was Stan Parker talking to the gentle girl in riddles, which were no different from what is spoken. If he could remember what he had said as they stood at the top of the stairs, but he could not remember one word. The poetry of the burning house was not of words. He could remember, rather, how her red hair burned, how their singed hair had curled together, each head grappling the other with hooks. But never speaking. People do not speak in an exchange of souls.
‘Who is mad then?’asked Amy Parker.
But he hushed her.
It is not me, she said. Buzz, buzz! It is a lot of nonsense. Though it makes sense at times.
The Tree of Man Page 50
