Riders in the Chariot (13 page)

"Who would ever have thought I had been here all that long," the housekeeper once remarked aloud.

"
I
_ should have thought!" Miss Hare laughed. "But it is none the less surprising."

"It is because I have a conscience, " Mrs Jolley hinted.

"I dare say it is," replied Miss Hare.

"And am waiting for guidance."

"I would guide you if I could," said Miss Hare, quite sincerely. "But you cannot tell other people."

Then Mrs Jolley stirred up the dust, as she did frequently--her conscience made her--while achieving nothing by the act.

"You know," said Miss Hare, "I think I am now strong enough if you decide to go to your friend."

Mrs Jolley was all murmurs.

Friendship, she said, sometimes involved a plunge.

"Friendship is two knives," said Miss Hare. "They will sharpen each other when rubbed together, but often one of them will slip, and slice off a thumb."

At that point Mrs Jolley flew into such a rage she tore down a curtain in the dining-room, and Miss Hare no longer minded. She sensed that for the moment she had the upper hand. Or was it that she, too, contained something evil which could take control at times? Some human element. Now she recalled, with nostalgia, occasions when she had lost her identity in those of trees, bushes, inanimate objects, or entered into the minds of animals, of which the desires were unequivocal, or honest.

Depressed, if also enlightened, she was not altogether surprised at the incident by which Mrs Jolley became reinstated in her own esteem.

One morning, rather fresh, because still early, the housekeeper had gone out into the yard, and was stamping about too much and too long to satisfy the listener. The latter was standing in a little scullery, in one corner of which she was able normally to feel at peace, in a scent of apples, sometimes a squeaking of mice, and always the broken light from an old, bulging cane blind. But on the present occasion her heart was dealing her blows as she listened to the dubious activities in the yard, and at last, clearly and unmistakably, the scrape of a spade over stone sent her rushing, tumbling, down short but sudden flights of steps, over interminable flags, past the smell of stale water, until she arrived ungainly and ashamed in the doorway which gave access to the yard.

"Ah," she cried at once, "you have killed it!"

What survived of her voice rasped her throat cruelly, and surprised the brash air of morning.

"I'll say!" Mrs Jolley blurted.

She was completely out of place in the yard, and knew it. Her hair had escaped into tails, her decent dress was disarranged, but the unusualness of the situation, together with her own inspired bravery, made her enjoy dislocation. Her smile, which should have appeared fiendish, was agreeable and innocent, as she stood looking down at the spade.

Or snake. Of which the halves were still twitching.

"You killed it!" Miss Hare protested and mourned. "I used to put out milk, and it would drink, and sometimes allow me to stand by, but I never quite succeeded in winning its confidence. There is something wrong with me," she said.

Panting.

"And so you killed the snake."

"That is not killing," said Mrs Jolley, propping the spade. "That is ridding the world of something bad."

"Who is to decide what is bad?" asked Miss Hare.

At least she had been given the strength to bear what had happened, and in the yard--where so much else had taken place: the sacrifice of her poor goat, to say nothing of her father's unmentionable end.

She stooped to pick up the limp pieces of snake.

Mrs Jolley began to shriek and hold her hair.

"It will bite you!" she cried. "They say their bite stays with them."

Miss Hare's freckled, horrible hands looked so tender and ludicrous.

Mrs Jolley fell to snickering, then to giggling.

"Brave me!" She tittered. "How did I do it?"

Nor did she watch to see how her employer disposed of the corpse. She was exhausted by her triumph.

But, almost at once, began sulking again.

Mrs Jolley would sulk for days, even forgetting she was a lady and a mother, until Miss Hare was tempted to ask, "Does Elma believe in plastic?"

Or she would beg, "Tell me about the time, Mrs Jolley, that Merle gave the buffy for the high-up officials from the Customs, and the white sauce got burnt."

She was truly interested, and would have loved also to see the officials sitting at their varnished desks during the hours of business, drinking milky tea.

Or she would ask, "You have never told me--does Mr Apps wear a moustache?"

Or: "I wonder whether I should be afraid to meet a stoker?"

Mrs Jolley would not answer, because she was sulking, and Miss Hare was half ashamed for her own powers of emulating the cruelty of human beings.

"It is I who am bad," she sighed half aloud.

All the time the house was full of reverberations. The wind would tear through it when the women forgot to close the shutters, which was almost always now, with the result that leaves had begun to litter the brocade, and once the lunch-wrap of a picnicker or commercial traveller was found in an épergne. If it had not been for her stereoscopic memories, Miss Hare would have felt surprised and pained.

Mrs Jolley said, "It is too much for me."

As for the blowing paper, it was possible to roll that into a ball, which Miss Hare did, and threw it where it would not be seen.

But all the time, it was obvious something must happen. Mrs Jolley was waiting for inspiration, Miss Hare for explanation, and to those who wait, it usually comes, in some form or another.

In the housekeeper's case, it could have been that continued absence of material symbols had shaken her religious faith, thus causing a delay. Was it possible that the piles of purple brick to which she had been used to cling were as liable to crumble as the stones of Xanadu? This was too large, too unbelievable a bomb to receive into the ordered mind, and she thrust the possibility away from her. But bombs
aie
_ unbelievable until they actually fall. Whether Mrs Jolley suspected this, or not, behind the trembling veil of her beliefs, she would open her prayer-book and search in vain for some efficacious prayer she might have overlooked. She would even invoke the image of her late husband, until remembering certain aspects of their leave-taking: an eyebrow which had stuck, the mouth biting on a last word, forever, as if it were a stone. Then she would stop. She developed heartburn, and sometimes her teeth would remain whole mornings in the tumbler.

But, of course, the real cause of Mrs Jolley's distress was her employer. Once this was realized, Miss Hare had to suffer.

The housekeeper walked about the house humming with intentions. Doors which she had never yet opened, she now tried, and, in the course of it all, climbed to the little dome in amethyst glass, under which she found airlessness and a quantity of old chicken bones. She was always ferreting into wardrobes, through forests of long, embroidered garments, in which the cold rain of metal beads would drizzle on the backs of her hands, and tendrils of feather and drifts of down, overlooked by nesting mice, revolt her nostrils. She had forced locks, when necessary, to interpret the letters stuffed inside a drawer, but never found more than words.

In the absence of a real weapon, loaded with infallible lead, or furnished with a knife which would finish cleanly, yet cruelly, she was becoming truly desperate. It was not possible that such tunnels of decayed magnificence should lead only to an innocent and empty arena. Faced with this ultimate suspicion, Mrs Jolley was standing one morning beside the buhl table, upon which she suddenly noticed--it might always have been there, but her preoccupation could have caused her to overlook it--the fan tipped with flamingo feather, a present from the Armenian merchant in the hotel at Aswan. Mrs Jolley had barely opened the fan, a poor thing of broken tortoiseshell and tattered parchment, the feathers themselves deadened by the years, no longer flaming. She was standing, the fan half open, like her mind.

When Miss Hare realized only too clearly.

The latter had appeared in the doorway in her eternal wicker hat. That Mrs Jolley had discovered Mrs Hare's fan was in itself insignificant; the mother's relationship with her child had been one of duty rather than love. But now the daughter saw that the fan could be a hinge on which something might depend, opening out immeasurably.

"I wish you would put it down," she suggested. "It is old and very fragile."

"It is a lovely fan," Mrs Jolley simpered.

Through her half-opened mind, she appeared half devilish, half girlish.

"To carry at a ball," she added.

Memories of occasions when she had offered trayfuls of ices to dancers spun garishly.

"I do ask you to put it down," Miss Hare begged, without hope.

"How they danced in their swansdown"--Mrs Jolley laughed--"till the moths got into it. All night, and into the morning."

Then a terrible thing happened. Mrs Jolley began to dance, slowly at first, tentatively, sliding her practical workshoes across the floor of the drawing-room at Xanadu. Her face was still only trying expressions, her arms and her body positions. But courage, or her daemon, prevailed. The muscles of her cheeks no longer twitched. Her mouth became fixed in the china smile of obsession, bluish-white. She was sliding and gliding, creaking, certainly--it could not have been otherwise in such a carapace--but borne along out of reach, or control, her own, or her employer's.

Her
employer
_! It had always made her laugh. More than ever now.

Sliding and gliding, out of the drawing-room, into the dining-room. Even whirling.

Mrs Jolley threw back her head. Her throat was taut. The laughter rose up through it, to be expelled in solid lumps.

"At the ball! At the ball!" Mrs Jolley sang.

And cracked. Whirling, and coughing. It was the dust.

"However much you intend to hurt me, I shall not be hurt," Miss Hare called. "I shall not watch."

But followed after--or could she have been leading?--in her wicker hat. She was trundling and stumbling, on her short, blunt legs.

"All the young men were forever persisting," Mrs Jolley chanted, "to dance with the daughter of Xanadu."

At the same time, she made a play, with her fan, with her eyes, which had grown too young for mercy: the blue eyes of future mothers.

"All the young men with moustaches, and the smooth ones, too." How she shrieked. "And the limp cousins!"

"Oh, dear!" panted Mrs Jolley.

A tuft of flamingo flew out of the fan.

Miss Hare followed. Or was she leading? In either case, she trundled. And whimpered.

The figures of the dance, though developed deviously, through room and anteroom, along passages, across landings, and up the dangerous flights of stairs, led directly into the past, and this had never seemed more grotesque, draped with calico, and dry with rouge. As Miss Hare followed--or led--and Mrs Jolley danced, sometimes obscenely moulded to a partner's chest, sometimes compelling a gilded chair to execute a teetering step, all the dancers of all the waltzes returned to Xanadu: the grave bosoms and the little pippins, the veins of coral and of watered ink, the chalk cheeks and the tortured mops, and the gentlemen, the gentlemen. Never had the ache of patent leather been admitted to such an extent as on the occasion of Mrs Jolley's lethal performance. Never had the music from Sydney broken more brilliantly under the chandelier. Never had the conversation opened deeper wounds.

Shuffling, trundling, blundering, the dancers frequently threatened to tumble over the balusters. Miss Hare held her heart, and Mrs Jolley her breath. In spite of the fascination of the arabesques it was possible to spin out of air and music, at the risk of death, the mistress preferred to see the one-step. It was so much kinder to the long beauties, working so hard and sad, as they pushed against the tum-ti-tum.

It was terribly sad, in the great, tatty, brilliant rooms, in mirror and memory.

Miss Hare really had to protest at last.

"Stop! Please, stop!" she called, and the strings which controlled her actions mercifully held up her hand.

Then the dancers stopped. Mrs Jolley stopped.

"Thank you," gasped Miss Hare. "I cannot be expected to experience too much in one day."

She was almost extinguished beneath the snuffer of her heavy hat.

Mrs Jolley was surprised, and might have sounded more reproving if breathlessness had not prevented it.

"You have led me such a dance," she said. "You could have broken both our necks, but I hardly like to offer criticism, not in my position, and because we know there are times when you are not in full possession of yourself. Even so."

"Full possession?" asked Miss Hare.

So softly.

The housekeeper wondered whether she had gone too far, then decided to go farther. It was her opportunity.

"You will not remember an evening on the terrace"--Mrs Jolley was in a hurry--"or what you said, or what you did, or how you passed out cold."

"Which evening on the terrace?" asked Miss Hare.

Softly.

"I cannot be expected to trot out dates." Mrs Jolley's teeth snapped. "Or quote exact words. But I had the marks on my wrists for several days."

"I hurt you?"

"I'll say! And might have done real damage if you hadn't passed right out."

"And I can remember nothing."

"It was like a kind of fit."

An undulating dread threatened to drown Miss Hare.

"I told you nothing?" she had to ask. "Nothing of importance?"

"That depends on what is important."

"Tell me," Miss Hare ordered.

Mrs Jolley wondered whether she would.

"Tell me, Mrs Jolley," the mistress was insisting.

Then Mrs Jolley changed her tactics, partly because she sensed an impending _coup de grâce__, partly since she was a little bit afraid.

"It was about the Chariot."

She inserted the remark, nor would fear prevent her watching the result.

"I will not be told lies!" Miss Hare shouted.