Riders in the Chariot (71 page)

"Gee," she said, who had followed him, "you are not going to put the wind up me, are you?"

When he began to cry, she was at first too shocked to continue. Mrs Rosetree had a secret longing for hard, blond men, in sweatshirts that revealed their torsos. Now this soft sister, whom she had loved, however, by contract, and even, she could swear, by impulse.

Harry was blubbering, and rubbing his knee-caps.

"It is the same!" he was saying, she thought.

She stared.

"It is the same!" he kept on blubbering.

Then she did get angry.

"It is the same? It is the same?" she shouted back. "I am the same dill that always stuck around!"

She began to punch the cushions.

"But have had enough for now! At least," she said, "I am gunna ring Marge Pendleburry, and go to some nice picture. To forget. Oh," she called, "I have my sense of duty, too. I will not forget that."

Harry Rosetree continued sitting on the overupholstered grey chair until his wife had left the house. She had looked in once, but they were still far too naked to address each other. When she had gone, he went into the bathroom, where she had been powdering her body, and gargling. There was steam on the mirror, in which he began to write, or print, in big letters.

MORD..., he put.

But rubbed it out.

But began again to cry.

And stopped.

Quite suddenly he bared his teeth at the glass, and the least vein in his terrible eyeballs was fully revealed to him.

When Mrs Rosetree got home, the strings of the parcels were eating into her plump gloves. She was trailing the fox cape as if the bull had been too much for her.

"Hoo-oo!" she called. "Hiya?"

That was for Colonel Livermore, who made careful noises back. His wife would avert her eyes from the Rosetrees' side, but the colonel, a mild man, and just, had in the beginning offered cuttings of pussy willow, and imparted several Latin names.

"Home again!" replied the colonel with his usual exactitude.

But Mrs Rosetree seldom listened to the words her neighbour spoke. She was content to bathe in the desirable, if rather colourless distinction the colonel's dried-up person still managed to exude.

Now Mrs Rosetree chose to remark, with a special kind of tenderness, from her side of the photinias, "That, I always think, is such a pretty little thing."

Although she was in no mood for any bally plant.

"That," replied the colonel, "is oxalis."

And pulled it smartly up.

Mrs Rosetree could not care.

"Well," she said, "I am quite fagged out."

She had learnt it from Colonel Livermore himself.

"I am going to lay--lie down, I don't mind telling you, Colonel," she said, "and rest my poor, exhausted feet before the kids come in."

At that hour the shapes of the garden, in which she had never really felt at home, were beginning to dissolve, the bricks of the house were crumbling. If the interior resisted, it was because her instincts kept the rooms stretched tight, at least the essential part of them, or comforting primeval form, and she could have wandered endlessly at dusk through her version of the stuffy, felted tents, touching, when her spirit craved for reassurance, the material advantages with which she had filled a too heroic archetype.

So she trailed now. But frowning for her husband. She had no intention of announcing her return. But would let him come to her, out of the shadows, and kiss her on a dimple, or the nape of her neck.

But she could not stop frowning. It was for Marge now, who had kept on not exactly looking at her. Somehow sideways. Sort of peculiar. All through that lousy picture.

So Mrs Rosetree frowned her way into the bathroom. She had very little confidence, not even in her own breath, but would gargle every so often.

The bathroom was lighter, of course, than the other rooms, because it was full of glass, as well as the translucence of pastel plastic. But brittler, too. And constricted. With the window shut, the airlessness would sometimes make a person choke.

All of a sudden Mrs Rosetree could have felt a cord tighten round her throat. She began to scream, right down, it seemed, to the source of breath. She was ballooning with it.

"
Aacccchhhh
_!" she screamed.

Then held back what remained. To force out the words when she had mustered them.

She did moan a little, in between.

"_Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ__!"

For the forgotten tendernesses. But her shame hung too heavy. Its bulk bumped against her.

"
Du
_! DU!" she was shouting at the tiles. "
Du verwiester Mamser
_!"

Mrs Rosetree was running through the house, forgetful of the furniture she knew. One particularly brutal chair struck her in a private place. She kicked free once, hobbled by the soft shadows, or a fox cape.

And reached the garden, a place of malice, which she had always hated, she realized, for its twigs messing her hair, spiders tossed down her front, and the voices of the
goyim
_ laughing for no reason, at a distance, through redundant trees.

"_Hilfe! Hilfe! Hören Sie__!" Mrs Rosetree was imploring quite hysterically by the time she reached the photinia hedge. "_Mein verrückter Mann hat sich__..."

Colonel Livermore's emaciated face was shocked by such lack of control.

Mrs Rosetree remembered as quickly as she had forgotten.

"Colonel," she said, "I am terribly distressed. You will forgive, Colonel Livermore. But my husband. If you will do me the favour, please, to come. My hubby has hung hisself. In the bathroom. With the robe cord."

"Great Scott!" cried Colonel Livermore, and started to climb through the photinias. "In the bathroom!"

Fleetingly, Mrs Rosetree feared it might have been a lapse of taste.

"My husband was nervous, Colonel Livermore. He was sick. Yoÿ-yoÿ! Nobody is to blame. It was never ever anybody's fault when the mind was sick. Eh?"

Unless the fault of that old Jew who came. Shulamith remembered. Before darkness slapped her in the face with a bunch of damp leaves.

"
Nein
_!" she moaned, right from the depths, and continued protesting from some region her companion had never suspected, let alone entered. "There is also the power of evil, that they tell us about in the beginning--oh, long! long!--and we forget, because we are leading this modern life--until we are reminded."

Colonel Livermore was relieved that his wife had gone for the day to cousins at Vaucluse, thus avoiding such a distasteful experience. He, who hated to be touched, could feel the rings of the hysterical Jewess eating into his dry skin. So he was borne along, detached, a splinter stuck in the scented flesh of darkness.

The night was whirling with insects and implications. His wooden soul might have practised indefinite acceptance, if the brick steps had not jarred him from the toes upward, back into his human form. The woman, too, was jolted back to reason. This return made them both, it seemed, top-heavy, and as they mounted the steps, they were jostling each other with their shoulders and elbows, almost knocking each other down.

"Excuse me, Colonel!" Mrs Rosetree laughed, but coughed it away.

Rejuvenated by some power unidentified, she was becoming obsessed by a need for tidiness.

"So many little details arise out of a sudden death in the family," she had to explain. "I must ring Mr Theobalds. Must come over. Put me in the picture. It is only right. Only practical. With two young kids. To show where I stand."

So the details accumulated, and the blood was distending their fingers, but finally there was no reason for delaying their entry into the house of the man who had hanged himself.

16

FROM WHERE he was lying the window contained nothing but sky, and he was content with that. Around the frame the bare walls, white once, and still presentable in spite of flies, did not detract from the abstraction which the faulty glass perpetuated. Details were added in certain lights: a burst of little colourless bubbles would emerge, to imprint their chain of craters on the landscape of hitherto unblemished blue, which was swelling, moreover, with rosy hillocks, and invested with depressions of mauve. Sometimes he was forced to set to work on what he saw someone else had failed to finish. His Adam's apple would move with unconscious arrogance as he surveyed the composition, and added from memory flat masses of the red earth, or a faint wash of the salad-coloured foliage that belonged along the river banks at Numburra. He passed his days in this way, and might have felt happy, if it had not been for his physical inertia, and the knowledge that he still had to commit himself. Then he would begin to torture the quilt. Mrs Noonan's quilt was turned to lint anywhere within reach of his fingers.

Dubbo had not returned to Rosetree's factory after the Easter closure. If it had not been for other, catastrophic events, someone might have come in search of him, but in the circumstances, he was left alone, forgotten. Which accorded well enough with his intentions. Often in the past he had left a job in order to work. To have discovered the reason would have made them laugh their heads off. If only for a moment or two. As soon as they had spat the phlegm out, they would have turned, of course, and continued tending the machinery of labour. But his cult of secrecy had always protected him from ridicule. And now, more than ever, even the walls of silence were suspect.

Already on the second day after he had taken to his bed--in preparation for the plunge, he persuaded himself, to avoid dwelling on his helplessness--there had been a knocking at the door, and he had scrambled up resentfully to open.

It was Mrs Noonan, the landlady herself. Which had never happened before.

He scowled at her through the crack.

"Ah," she said, and smiled; she was one of the sandy things, and shy.

"I got it inter me head like, yer might be feelin' bad. I got a potta tea goin'," she explained. "If yer would care for a cuppa tea, it has not stood all that long."

Her scaly eyelids were flickering, he saw, like those of sandy hens.

"No," he answered, brutally.

"Ah, well," said Mrs Noonan.

Flickering and smiling.

When she was once more received into the darkness of the hall, he ran to the edge of the landing, and called out over the banisters, "I gave my job away. I've got other business now. For several days. I've gotta be left private."

"Ah," her voice floated up. "Business."

And he knew from the sound that her mouth would be wavering on the sandy smile.

"Thank you," he called, rather woody, as an afterthought.

But she must have gone away already.

That probability desolated the man stranded on the landing, and he soon went back into his room. He sat on the stretcher. He did not at once lie down, and for several days there recurred to his inward eye the shape of Mrs Noonan's floating smile.

On the morning of the fifth day, his melancholy was so intense, his guts so shrivelled, his situation so unresolved, he got up with determination, and went out into the streets. He drank a pint of milk at the Sicilian's, bought two pounds of tomatoes, and a packet of bacon. A bland, almost autumnal light had simplified the architecture of Barranugli to the extent that its purposes could no longer be avoided. All the faces in the streets were expectant down to the last pore.

So Dubbo saw, and knew that he had reached the point of compulsion. On returning to Mrs Noonan's, his spirit was running ahead of him, while his cold hand slowly advanced over certain welts on the handrail, which had come to mark the stages in his progress up the stairs.

When he arrived, the empty room was full of the yellowest light. The tawny plane tree in the yard below tossed up bursts of green with the flat of its leaves. The wind-screen of a lorry flashed. So that his eyes became pacified by the assistance he was all at once receiving. He began to arrange things with the precision that was peculiar to him. He cleaned the already clean brushes. He ate into a tomato, and some of the golden juice trickled down as far as his chin. He ate a couple of the pink rashers, chewing with teeth that had remained strong and good, and swallowing the laces of rind.

Only then he brought out the first of the two canvases which he had bought months before, in anticipation. Of more commanding surface than the boards of ply or masonite which he normally used, the blank canvas no longer frightened him.

He took his time preparing the surface, soothed by the scent of shellac with which he was anointing the colourless waste, preoccupied by the proportions of the picture he intended to paint. These suddenly appeared so convincing, so unshakably right, they might have existed many years in his mind. Behind the superficial doubts, and more recent physical listlessness, the structure had been growing. Now his fingers were reaching out, steely and surprising. Not to himself, of course. He was no longer in any way surprised. But knew. He had always known.

Dubbo was unaware how many days he had been at work. The act itself destroyed the artificial divisions created both by time and habit. All the emotional whirlpools were waiting to swallow him down, in whorls of blue and crimson, through the long funnel of his most corrosive green, but he clung tenaciously to the structure of his picture, and in that way was saved from disaster. Once on emerging from behind the barricade of planes, the curtain of textures, he ventured to retouch the wounds of the dead Christ with the love that he had never dared express in life, and at once the blood was gushing from his own mouth, the wounds in the canvas were shining and palpitating with his own conviction.

After that he rested for a bit. He could have allowed himself to be carried off on any one of the waves of exhaustion. But his prickly eyelids refused him such a suave release.

Towards the end of that day, he rose, dipped his face in the basin, and when he had shaken the water out of his eyes, was driven again to give expression to the love he had witnessed, and which, inwardly, he had always known must exist. He touched the cheek of the First Mary quite as she had wiped his mouth with the ball of her handkerchief as he lay on the lino the night at Mollie Khalil's. Her arms, which conveyed the strength of stone, together with that slight and necessary roughness, wore the green badges of all bruised flesh. As he painted, his pinched nostrils were determined to reject the smell of milk that stole gently over him, for the breasts of the immemorial woman were running with a milk that had never, in fact, dried. If he had known opulence, he might have been able to reconcile it with compassion. As it was, such riches of the flesh were distasteful to him, and he began to slash. He hacked at the paint to humble it. He tried to recall the seams of her coat, the hem of her dress, the dust on her blunt shoes, the exact bulge below the armpit as she leaned forward from her chair to wipe his mouth. Perhaps he succeeded at one point, for he smiled at his vision of the Mother of God waiting to clothe the dead Christ in white, and almost at once went into another part of the room, where he stood trembling and sweating. He thought he might not be able to continue.