Riders in the Chariot (75 page)

Mrs Jolley did not look. She listened to hear the silence expostulate in pain.

Then Mrs Flack moved, her chair was bumping on the lino, her slippers had discovered grit. For a moment Mrs Jolley suspected her friend might have revived.

"I have often wondered," said Mrs Flack, "why you did not think to go, and your good home, let at a nominal rent, to a friend. And your three daughters so affectionate. And all the grand-kiddies. All the advantages. All sacrificed for poor me."

So that Mrs Jolley no longer suspected, she knew that Mrs Flack was escaping, was stronger than her fate.

So Mrs Jolley blew her nose.

"It is not the advantages," she said. "It is the memories."

It was the tune, she had remembered, on some old banjo, that made Mrs Jolley water.

Mrs Flack cut the crust off her toast, and freed her fingers of the crumbs.

"If you was to go, of course I would suffer," she admitted.

Mrs Jolley hung her head, in gratitude, or satisfaction. She might, perhaps, have been mistaken.

"I would suffer, wondering," said Mrs Flack, "how you was makin' out, down there, in that nice home, with all that family, and memories of your hubby who has passed on."

Then Mrs Jolley actually cried.

Remembering the hurdy-gurdy tunes of life made her more assiduous. Frequently she would jump up and scrub the scullery out at night. She wrote letters, and tore them up. She would walk to the post-office, and back. Or to the chemist's.

"If someone told me you had gone away," Mrs Flack remarked, "I would believe it."

"It is the weather," said Mrs Jolley. "It unsettles you."

"Bad news, perhaps. There is nothing so unsettling as a letter," suggested Mrs Flack.

Mrs Jolley did not answer, and Mrs Flack watched the little soft white down that moved very slightly on her friend's cheeks, with emotion, or a draught. The two women would listen to each other intolerably, but could not refrain from such a pleasure.

One day, when Mrs Jolley had gone to the chemist's, Mrs Flack entered her friend's room--only, of course, it was Mrs Flack's--and began to act as though she were drowning, but might just be saved. Her hands were, in fact, frenzied, but found, for her salvation, under the handkerchief sachet which some kiddy had embroidered, a letter, perhaps
the
_ letter.

Mrs Flack was foolish with achievement. She held the page so close, closer than she need have. How she drank it down, in gulps of visible words: Dear Mum [Mrs Flack read, or regurgitated], I received your letter last week. You will wonder why I have not answered quicker, but was giving the matter consideration--Dot and Elma as much as me. Fred also had to be told, as you will understand, it concerns him so very closely. He is sitting here in the lounge-room with me as I write, listening to some Light Music.

Well, Mum, to put it plain, none of us think it is a good idea. You know what people's nerves are when living on top of one another. Elma is particularly cramped for space, Dot and Arch are always paying something off, if not several articles at once--I wonder they ever keep track of the dockets. Well, that is how the others are placed.

As for Fred, he said he would have no part of any plan to bring you to live under the same roof. He just would not, you know how stubborn Fred can be. Well, Mum, it all sounds pretty hard. I will admit that, and perhaps it is. I will admit you are our mother. We are the ungrateful daughters, anyone would say, of the mother who made the sacrifices. Yes, Mum, and I think perhaps the biggest sacrifice you ever made was Dad. Not that any blood was let. It was all done clean and quiet. Nobody read about it in the papers. But I will never forget his face the night he died of married love, which is sometimes also called coronary occlusion.

There, I have said it--with my own hubby sitting in the room, waiting to read what I have wrote. I am not afraid. Because we expect the least, we have found something in each other to respect. I know that Fred would not tread on yours truly, even if he discovered I was just a slug. That is the great temptation, Mum, that you was never able to resist, you and other human beings.

There you have it, then. The kids are good. I am sorry if your friend is so very awful, but perhaps she will bear further looking into. Every mirror has its double.

With remembrances from Your daughter MERLE P. S. Who was driven to it, Mum.

Mrs Flack had only once witnessed an indecent act. This could have been the second. On which the drawer stuck. She had shot it back crooked, but straightened it at last.

When Mrs Jolley returned she noticed that her friend appeared to have solved one of the many riddles, and was not altogether pleased with the answer. But she herself could not care. She volunteered, "I am going to lay down for a while. It is those sinuses."

"Yes, dear," answered Mrs Flack. "I will bring you a cup of tea."

"No!" Mrs Jolley discouraged. "I will lie and sniff something up, that Mr Broad has given me."

They did, in fact, from then on, bring each other endless cups of tea, for which each showed herself to be grateful. It did not, however, prevent Mrs Jolley more than once, emptying hers down the lavatory, or Mrs Flack from pouring hers, on several occasions, into the
monstera deliciosa
_, after giving the matter thought.

Thought was a knife they no longer hesitated to try upon themselves, whereas in the past it had almost invariably been used upon another.

"That handkerchief sachet which I have, with the pansies on it, and which you must have seen, dear," Mrs Jolley once remarked.

Mrs Flack coughed dry.

"Yes, dear, I seem to have noticed."

"That," said Mrs Jolley, "was embroidered for me by little Deedree, Elma's eldest."

"I never ever owned a handkerchief sachet," Mrs Flack considered, "but for many years retained a small bottle full of first teeth."

"Oh!" cried Mrs Jolley, almost in pain; she would have so loved to see. "And what became of that bottle?"

"I threw it out," said Mrs Flack, "at last. But sometimes wonder whether I ought to have done."

Night thoughts were cruellest, and often the two women, in their long, soft, trailing gowns, would bump against each other in the passages, or fingers encounter fingers, and they would lead each other gently back to the origins of darkness. They were desperately necessary to each other in threading the labyrinth. Without proper guidance, a soul in hell might lose itself.

Just before the house was completely razed, the bulldozers went into the scrub at Xanadu. The steel caterpillars mounted the rise, to say nothing of any sapling, or shrubby growth that stood in their way, and down went resistance. The wirier clumps might rise again, tremblingly, on their nerves, as it were, but would be fixed forever on a later run. Gashes appeared upon what had been the lawns. Gaps were grinning in the shrubberies. Most savage was the carnage in the rose garden, where the clay which Norbert Hare had had carted from somewhere else opened up in red wounds, and the screeching of metal as it ploughed and wheeled, competed with the agony of old rosewood, torn off at the roots, and dragged briefly in rough faggots. A mobile saw was introduced to deal with those of the larger trees which offered commercial possibilities. The sound of its teeth eating into timber made the silence spin, and they were sober individuals indeed, who were able to inhale the smell of destruction without experiencing a secret drunkenness. Many of those present were forced to steady themselves. Because most of the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla came down to watch the garden being cleared, just as they had felt the need to assist at the demolition of the house. In time even the indifferent, the timid, the indolent, the unaware, and the invalid had taken part.

Only Mrs Godbold appeared untouched by these historic local events, but remained more or less unnoticed, as a person of little substance and no importance. Only dimly was a woman seen to emerge from a shed, and hang out the washing. The thick arms were reaching repeatedly up, and there were the loops of limp, transparent linen, hanging at first so heavy, then twitching at a corner, lifting at last, blowing, in glad, white flags.

Mrs Godbold, when she was noticed at all, seemed to live for irrelevance. In the course of her life, she had developed a love and respect for common objects and trivial acts. Did they, perhaps, conceal a core, reveal a sequence? Whatever the explanation, she would go about planting a row of beans, not as though she were covering seed, rather as if she were learning a secret of immense importance, over and over. She would go amongst her pots of ferns, freeing the young crooks from the bonds of spiders. In her later years at least, she might sit for sometimes half an hour beside her ironing table, in the shed where it seemed by then she was ordained to live. Obviously, the scored surface of the yellow board, together with the various vessels and utensils of her office, could not have been housed anywhere else with due sacral dignity. So she and they remained enshrined. There she would sit, at the mercy of the sun, squinting, or it could have been smiling for such glimmers of truth as she had been allowed to glimpse.

But then, Mrs Godbold was such a very simple person. Always there. Nobody could remember having seen her except in some such cotton dress, a cardigan in winter, or the perennial flared overcoat. Her massive form had never altered, except to grow more massive in its pregnancies.

If she indulged herself at all in her almost vegetable existence, it was to walk a little way down the hill, before the children returned, after the breeze had got up in the south, to walk and look, it seemed incuriously, at the ground, pursued by a galloping cat.

Then she might turn, and call.

"Tib! Tib! Tib!" she would call, and: "Poor Tibby! Nobody was going to leave you!"

And gather up her many-angled cat, into her bosom, and laugh for the joy of giving shelter, holding up her throat to the sun; it was as though a trumpet were being raised.

If she had been worthy of notice, Mrs Godbold's simplicity might have become proverbial.

The farthest tables were always the most coveted. There one was in a position to view the room from the slight eminence of a platform, and never be outstared. One of those desirable tables had been reserved for the three ladies advancing down the ash-infested carpet, clinging to the chromium handrail to prevent their heels pitching them head first at their goal. But the handrail, to say nothing of their appearance, lent them a certain crazy dignity. All the cutlery on all the tables seemed to applaud their arrival. If there had been an orchestra, it would have played them down the stairs, but there was never any music at lunch, beyond the sustained pizzicato of conversation; words might ping their way without deflection into the unprotected eardrum.

These were obviously three ladies of importance who had reached the safety of the floor after the dangers of the street stairs. They stood around, agreeably helpless, while waiters flew like homing swallows. From the tables, early patrons craned outrageously, which might have been disquieting to the objects of their interest if it had not been desired. For the three ladies were wearing rather amusing hats. The first, and perhaps least confident of the three, had chosen an enormous satin bon-bon, of screeching pink, swathed so excessively on one side that the head conveyed an impression of disproportion, of deformity, of bulbous growth. But the uncertain lady was palpitating with her own daring, and glanced at the closer of her two companions, fishing for a scrap of praise. Her friend would not concede it, however. For the second lady was secure in her own seasoned carapace, and would not have recognized her acquaintance except by compulsion. The second lady was wearing on her head a lacquered crab-shell. She was quite oblivious of it, of course. But there it sat, one real claw offering a diamond starfish, the other dangling a miniature conch in polished crystal. The unconscious wearer had divested herself conventionally of her gloves, and was restoring suppleness to her hands. As she tried her nails on the air, it was seen that those, by some chance, were exactly the same shade of audacious crab.

How the waiters adored the three insolent ladies, but it was at the third and obviously eldest that their most Italianate smiles were directed.

The third, or by now, the first lady, affected the most amusing hat of all. On her blue curls she had perched an innocent little conical felt, of a drab, an earth colour, so simple and unassuming that the owner might have been mistaken for some old, displaced clown, until it was noticed that fashion had tweaked the felt almost imperceptibly, and that smoke--yes, actual smoke--was issuing out of the ingenious cone. There she stood at the centre of the smart restaurant in her volcanic hat, her mouth crimped with pleasure, for she had reached an age of social innocence where she was again dependent on success. So she smiled, in the abstract, for the blinding bulbs of two photographers, and because she was trying to ignore the arthritis in her knees.

Soon the ladies were as comfortably arranged as their clothes and their ailments would allow. All three had accepted advice to order lobster Thermidor, in spite of a heretical
gaucherie
_ on the part of the Satin Bon-bon, who had to remark on the popularity of shellfish.

"Dare we?" she had sniggered. "Is it tactful?"

Too pleased for her provincial joke.

The Crab-Shell saw that the Bon-bon had a natural gap between her centre upper teeth, which gave her an expression both vulgar and predatory.

But the Volcano no longer had to notice more than she wanted, or needed to.

She leaned forward, and said with an irrelevance not without its kind of tired charm, "You are two people I have been longing to bring together, because I feel that you can become an influence for good on the Committees."

The Crab-Shell was incredulous, but polite. Even the speaker did not appear to believe entirely in what she had said, for she added vaguely, "What I mean to say is that friendship--the personal touch--is better able to achieve charitable objectives. And I do want the Harlequin Ball to be a great success."