Riders in the Chariot (12 page)

"Take doctors, for instance," Mrs Flack might say. "Doctors are only human beings."

"You are telling me!" it was Mrs Jolley's duty to interpose.

"But must be expected to act different."

"And do not always."

"Very often do not. Mrs Jolley, I am telling you that this doctor at the corner, in giving me a needle--which I have to get regular, for certain reasons--pulled me quite close. 'Is it necessary?' I asked--myself, of course--'and according to medical etiquette, to press against a lady's form in giving her a simple needle?' His breath was that hot, Mrs Jolley, and the odour, well, I am not one to insinuate, but if it had been
my
_ breath, I would of been ashamed to advertise the fact."

"Ttst, ttst! The doctors! And to think that a lady, on some occasions, must submit to an examination by such hands!"

"Ho, an examination! I have never had one, and do not intend to. No, never!"

"There are the lady doctors, of course."

"Ah, the lady doctors!"

"Do you suppose the lady doctors ever attend to gentlemen?"

"I do not know. But they would not attend to me, never. I have my own ideas about the lady doctors."

Mrs Jolley would have liked to hear, but etiquette did not permit.

"Ah, yes." Mrs Flack would sigh, and lapse.

Though each knew she must soon revive. It was but the pause between movements, when initiates clear their throats and frown at some innocent who gives expression to his pleasure. Mrs Jolley had quickly learnt.

"Thursday night"--Mrs Flack had, indeed, revived--"Mrs KhaliPs Lurleen was seen three times outside the Methodist church."

"In the open?"

"On the grass."

"Accompanied?"

"Ho! Mrs Khalil's Lurleen!"

"But with a gentleman?"

"With three. And all of them different. Between the pictures' going in and coming out."

Then Mrs Jolley had to laugh.

"Girls will be girls, eh?"

"I should hope not," said Mrs Flack, whose pale lips would become transformed at times into two strips of adhesive tape. "Such girls should be run out. But when the law--well, what can you expect at Sarsaparilla?"

"Did you say the law?"

"I will not go into that," Mrs Flack replied. "Except that the constable's own braces was found in the paddy's lucerne on the block below the pictures. There is no denying ownership when the name is put in marking-ink."

"He could have lost them."

"He could have lost them."

"Or thrown them away."

"Or thrown them away. With the price still visible on the brand-new leather. No, Mrs Jolley, Constable McFaggott is far too close to lose or discard his belongings in the paddy's lucerne, unless the duty that took him there had turned him lighter-headed than usual."

Then Mrs Jolley began to hiss like any goose. Her pink-and-blue was changed to purple.

"What do you know!" She sat and hissed, and would have known more.

But Mrs Flack had folded her arms. She was holding the blanched points of her yellow elbows.

"We have not kept to the subject," she said, or accused.

For Mrs Flack could sense with only half her instinct that her friend had something which she wished to tell.

The occasion was, in fact, the day after Mrs Jolley had approached her mistress on the terrace and been involved in something rather nasty. How nasty, the housekeeper scarcely dared remember. But would touch her wrists from time to time. Certainly, on setting out, so brisk and bright, on the visit to her friend, she had fully intended to confide, perhaps even make the great decision. Yet, could she, finally? Or would she?

"That poor soul at Xanadu," Mrs Flack had begun to lead, "I do feel sorry for the sick and simple."

"But in her case, has had her day."

"There are all kinds, I must admit."

"But has had her day, Mrs Flack. All that lot has had their day."

Mrs Jolley could not pass her tongue quick enough along her stripped lips, nor twist her nice openwork gloves into a tight enough knot.

Mrs Flack's eyes began to dart, so that her friend was unpleasantly reminded that somebody was behind the skin.

"We must think of ourselves as well, of course," Mrs Flack agreed.

"We must think of ourselves."

"Without killing
her
_!"

"Not likely!" Mrs Jolley laughed. "She must run the risk, though. Like any girl in a kennel beneath the roof. When the heat used to crack. Or shelling peas. Or pushing the pea-pods through the sieve. Or blacking the grates. Or blacking the grates."

"Are you bitter, Mrs Jolley?"

"Bitter, no. I am just remembering."

"One thing I never was, was bitter," Mrs Flack announced.

Then they sat for a moment, to experience once again that delicious process of disembodiment and union.

But time was passing. Mrs Jolley got up, brisk, good body that she was, and slapped her dainty gloves together.

"Well," she said, "it has been lovely, Mrs Flack. And now I must get back to that poor lady of mine."

And sniffed, and smiled, and blinked at once.

At which her friend became her most dignified and formal. The classic gestures might have been detached from a frieze.

"If you was ever to decide, we would consider this as your chair," said Mrs Flack, laying two fingers and a ruby ring on an excessive bulge in the upholstery.

Mrs Jolley could not bring herself to look, let alone comment. But the implications were understood.

"It was the one He used to sit in, after an early tea," on this occasion Mrs Flack went
so
_ far as to confide. "He liked his comfort, and an early tea. No one else will never ever have the use of that chair, without it is a certain trusted friend."

Yet, Mrs Jolley had become far too agitated to decide. Her mouth, her gestures were unlike themselves. Two masters could have been contending for the strings.

She was forced to reply, "I am expecting a letter that will help me give a straight answer on the future. You know how it is."

"Only the person herself knows how it is," Mrs Flack said, and smiled.

In the hands of Fate, and exhausted by conflict, Mrs Jolley held her head humbly and acceptant. She allowed herself to be led along the hall, past "The Two Little Princesses with Their Dogs," and a bloodhound that Mrs Flack herself had worked in wool while waiting for her late husband to propose.

The two ladies seldom continued their conversation at parting, unless to consider briefly the prospects for rain or fine, and soon Mrs Jolley would be going down the street, still holding her head in a chastened way, like a communicant returning from the altar, conscious that all the ladies, in all the windows, of all the homes, were aware of her shriven state. For, there was no doubt, friendship did purify.

Although there was no more mention of Mrs Flack, she was always there at Xanadu. Miss Hare could feel her presence. In certain rather metallic light, behind clumps of ragged, droughty laurels, in corners of rooms where dry rot had encouraged the castors to burst through the boards, on landings where wallpaper hung in drunken, brown festoons, or departed from the wall in one long, limp sheet Mrs Flack obtruded worst, until Miss Hare began to fear, not only for her companion and housekeeper, at the best of times a doubtful asset, but, what was far more serious, for the safety of her property. So far had Mrs Flack, through the medium of Mrs Jolley, insinuated herself into the cracks in the actual stone. Sometimes the owner of Xanadu would wake in her lumpy bed, and listen for the crash. Or would there be a mere dull, tremendous flump, as quantities of passive dust subsided?

Either eventuality terrified Miss Hare.

One night she got the hiccups, and the marble halls of Xanadu reverberated with the same distress. Glass tinkled as she wandered here and there, grazing with an arm or elbow. Lustre crashed somewhere in the drawing-room.

"What are you up to, clumsy girl?" Mrs Jolley called. "Can't I leave you for two minutes?"

Already she was coming. Mrs Jolley would appear at crucial moments, now from above, it seemed, her detached soles smacking marble. She was carrying a lamp, which flew through the darkness like a small bouquet of flowers. Mrs Jolley stood at last in the drawing-room holding her bunch of yellow flowers.

"You are not to be trusted, you know," said the reliable housekeeper, catching sight of the glittery fragments of the silver-lustre jug.

"Aren't they my own things?" the owner dared.

"Oh, yes!" The housekeeper laughed. "They are your own things all right."

"And no one will take them from me?"

"Not till you have smashed them all to smithereens. Home, too, it looks like. What will you do then? Camp out under the bunya-bunya, and count the raindrops?"

"I have the hiccups," said Miss Hare. "Or had, rather. I believe they have been cured."

Mrs Jolley's little yellow bouquet shook.

"It was the fright you got. You could set up and make your fortune, throwing junk at all the hiccuppers in creation."

The darkness was reeling under the attacks of Mrs Jolley's mirth. Miss Hare, although cured of her hiccups, felt quite sick.

"Mrs Jolley," she began, "your
friend
_..."

The formidable word seemed to thunder.

But Mrs Jolley, wheezing inside her iron corset, had bent to retrieve the fragments of jug, and was making an icy music with them, as she swept them together over the floor. It was probable she had not heard the word. Nor did Miss Hare know how she would have continued if her housekeeper had.

For, although Mrs Flack pervaded, she was nothing tangible.

Then Mrs Jolley straightened up.

"You will not leave me?" Miss Hare asked.

The woman stood. It was as if she had discovered a swelling on her lip. It was most embarrassing.

"In the dark, I mean," Miss Hare explained.

"You was here before, wasn't you?" Now Mrs Jolley's voice quite clattered. "Having the hiccups. And before that. And before that."

She appeared annoyed.

"Oh, yes," said Miss Hare. "And shall be. If I am allowed. I shall throw back the shutter. I had forgotten the moon. I shall sit for a little. Quietly."

Soon there were a few planks of moonlight, in which she continued to rock long after Mrs Jolley had withdrawn. For much longer than she had anticipated, the wanderer kept afloat, and by extraordinary managment of the will always just avoided bumping against the shores of darkness. Other shapes threatened, though, some of them dissolving at the last moment into good, some she was able to identify unhesitatingly as evil. In the misty silence, the two women, her tormentors-in-chief, let down their hair and covered their faces with veils of it. Their words were hidden from her. On the whole, she realized, she was unable to distinguish motives unless allowed to read faces.

Towards morning Mrs Jolley appeared in the flesh and wrenched the little tiller from the cold hands. As she joggled the boat in anger, dewdrops fell distinctly from all its protuberances.

"You do hate me," said Miss Hare, observing evil in person.

The rescuer's face was quivering with exasperation. The mouth had aged without its teeth, and should have proclaimed innocence, but words flickered almost lividly from between the gums.

"I am only thinking of your health," Mrs Jolley hissed. "I am responsible in a way, though do not know what possessed me to take it on."

Then evil is also good, Miss Hare understood.

"But you have not yet enjoyed all the pleasure of tormenting me," she was moved to remark.

"I will not waste my breath arguing with loopy Louie," replied Mrs Jolley, leading her charge towards the stairs.

At breakfast each of them treated the incident as if it had not occurred. It was a brisk morning. It seemed to Miss Hare that the light illuminated. She herself was exuberant with knowledge. She radiated discoveries.

"I see," she said, over the crispies, "I am wrong about Xanadu. To be afraid. I shall not fear if it is taken away, because my experience will remain."

"Experience!" exploded Mrs Jolley. "What have
you
_ experienced?"

"For many years, when there were people here, I sat under the table, amongst the legs, and saw an awful lot happen."

"There's always plenty happens in a big house, but it's only the servants that sees that. You were sitting on the same cushions as your mum and dad."

"I was the servant of the servants. I was a very ugly little girl. The maids would read me their letters, because I hardly existed, and sometimes would allow me to fetch them things, especially before they were going out, in their big pink hats, to meet their friends."

Mrs Jolley breathed on nonsense.

"Better eat up your crispies," she advised.

"But that is not the experience of which I wish to speak. Take water, for instance. If you are alone with it enough, you become like water. You enter into it."

Mrs Jolley had got up and was throwing the crockery into the sink. The plates were falling dangerously hard, but somehow failed to break.

"Whether this can count as my contribution," Miss Hare continued, "I still have to discover. Perhaps somebody will tell me. And show me at the same time how to distinguish with certainty between good and evil."

Mrs Jolley's face, which was still eating, had become a series of lumps. Obviously she was not going to answer, and it was not only because her mouth was full.

"For all I know, Xanadu, which I still can't help love, is evil itself."

"It is that all right!" cried Mrs Jolley, gulping the rest of the crust that had been giving trouble.

"Like certain things made of plastic," Miss Hare added. "Plastic is bad, bad!"

Now she felt definitely stronger, and Mrs Jolley was resenting it.

Soon afterwards the seeker went outside, temporarily fortified by her knowledge. Of course, she realized, too, the sad extent of her shortcomings, which were tingling, as always, in her fingertips.

It was only natural, and soon became evident, that Mrs Jolley was preparing something, or a whole series of torments, as she ticked off the days. The housekeeper would stand for whole minutes in front of a calendar she had got from a grocer to rectify a deficiency, for Miss Hare herself had never stopped to think about time, let alone the days.