Riders in the Chariot (76 page)

"Jinny is a darling. But an idealist. Isn't that pure idealism, Mrs Wolf son?" the Crab-Shell asked, turning to the Bonbon, not because she wanted to, but because it was part of a technique.

Nor did she allow an answer, but went off into a studied neighing, which produced in her that infusion of redness peculiar to most hard women. The whole operation proved, moreover, that her neck was far too muscular.

The Volcano put her old, soft, white hand on the Crab-Shell's stronger, brownish one.

"Mrs Colquhoun and I have been friends so long, I doubt we could misunderstand each other," the Volcano said, addressing Mrs Wolfson.

Trying to bring the latter in, though only succeeding in keeping her out.

"Idealism again!" neighed Mrs Colquhoun, as if she would never rid her system of its mirth. She had been several years without a husband.

"I am an idealist," said Mrs Wolfson carefully, "like Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. That is why I think it is so important to help these little spastic children. Mr Wolfson--who is an idealist too--has promised us a nice fat cheque over and above the takings at the Ball."

"Splendid!" cried Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, paying for charity with charity.

"Oh, it is most important to do good," asserted Mrs Wolfson, slowly negotiating the fillets of her lobster Thermidor.

It was most laudable, but the more carefully Mrs Wolfson rounded out her words, the more Mrs Colquhoun was convinced she could detect the accents of that Dorothy Drury, from whom she, too, had taken a course in the beginning, and almost forgotten. Mrs Colquhoun felt less than ever prepared to endure her neighbour Mrs Wolfson.

"Take the Church," the latter continued, "Mr Wolfson--Louis," she corrected, catching sight of Mrs Colquhoun, "my husband is all for assisting the Church. At Saint Mark's Church of England, which we attend regularly, he has given the fluorescent lighting, and although a very busy man, he is about to organize a barbecue."

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had fixed her still handsome eyes on something distant and intangible.

"Lovely old church!" she intoned in traditional key.

She loved star sapphires, and powder-blue. The remnants of her beauty seemed to demand tranquillity.

"Then you will know Canon Ironside." Mrs Colquhoun dared Mrs Wolfson not to.

Under her inquisitor's wintry eye, the latter was glad of the protection of mutation mink, and settled deeper into it.

"Before my time." She coughed.

It was a gift to Mrs Colquhoun.

"But I am pretty certain," she calculated, "the canon did not leave for Home above, I should say, six, certainly no more than seven, months ago."

Mrs Wolfson contemplated her plateful of forbidden sauce. Food had made her melancholy.

"Yes, yes." The bon-bon bobbed. "We did not attend prior to that."

At the wretched little impersonal table, her two friends were waiting for something of a painful, but illuminating nature to occur.

"I was married in Saint Mark's Church of England," Mrs Wolfson ventured, and showed that gap which Mrs Colquhoun so deplored, between her upper centre teeth.

"And you were not done by Canon Ironside?" Mrs Colquhoun persisted.

"Sheila only recently married Louis Wolfson," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson explained. "He is her second."

"Yes," sighed Mrs Wolfson, trying chords on the cutlery that remained to her. "Haïm--Harry passed on."

But Mrs Colquhoun might have been unhappier than Mrs Wolfson.

In all that restaurant the hour seemed to have hushed the patrons. The eyes, glancing about through their slits, began to accuse the mask of being but a dry disguise. It was too early to repair a mouth that must be destroyed afresh. So the women sat. Even Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, of certain inner resources, it had been implied, though of a fragile nature, had ceased to vibrate. For the moment she mistrusted memory, because she might have remembered men. All the women in the room could have been visited by the same thought: that the men went first, that the intolerable, but necessary virtuosi died of their virtuosity, whereas the instruments they had played upon, and left, continued from habit to twang and murmur. Momentarily the instruments were still. Although they must begin again, since silence is the death of music.

So Mrs Chalmers-Robinson listened, and heard herself distantly vibrate. She had fastened on her face the fixed, blue, misty expression, which of all the disguises in her possession had won her most acclaim, and which she would have labelled Radiance.

She said, "I was confirmed at Saint Mark's. I can remember the veins on the backs of the bishop's hands. I knelt on the wrong step. I was so nervous, so intense. I think I expected some kind of miracle."

"I am told they can happen!" Mrs Colquhoun laughed, and looked over her shoulder at the emptying room.

"My little girl was interested in miracles when she was younger," Mrs Wolf son remarked.

Her companions waited for the worst.

"She had a nervous breakdown," the mother informed. "
Ach
_, yes, beginning and ending is difficult for women! But my Rosie is working for a florist now. Not because she has to, of course. (There is her own father's business, which the boy is managing very competently. And Louis--the soul of generosity.) But a florist is so clean. And Mr Wolf son--Louis--thought it might have some therapeutic value."

All three ladies had ordered ice cream, with fruit salad, and marshmallow sauce. They were pleased they were agreed on that.

"Then, you know Saint Mark's." Mrs Wolfson harked back, and smiled.

It was comforting to return to a subject. She would have liked to feel at home.

"I have not been for years. Except, of course, to weddings. You see, I became interested in Science," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson said.

"In Science!"

Now Mrs Wolfson could not believe.

"
Christian
_ Science, Jinny means," Mrs Colquhoun explained.

Everyone listened to the word drop. Mrs Wolfson might by this time have called out: All right, all right, it dogs you like your shadow, but you get used to it at last, and a shadow cannot harm.

Instead, she said, "You don't say!"

And noted down Science in her mind, to investigate at a future date.

"You should try it," suggested Mrs Colquhoun, and laughed, but it became a yawn, and she had to turn her head.

"I do not believe Science ever really took on with Europeans," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson earnestly remarked.

"I
adore
_ Europeans," said Mrs Colquhoun, looking at the almost empty room.

She did, too. She collected consuls, excepting those who were really black.

It bewildered Mrs Wolfson. First she had learnt not to be, and now she must learn what she had forgot. But she would remember. Life, for her too, had been a series of disguises, which she had whisked on, and off, whether Sheila Wolfson, or Shirl Rosetree, or Shulamith Rosenbaum, as circumstances demanded.

So the black, matted girl settled herself inside the perm, behind the powdered cleavage, under the mutation mink. She was reassured.

"Speaking of miracles," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson said, "Mrs Colquhoun lived for some years at Sarsaparilla."

The informant advanced her face over the table to the point at which confidences are afterwards exchanged.

"Sarsaparilla!" exclaimed Mrs Colquhoun with some disgust. "One could not continue living at Sarsaparilla. Nobody lives at Sarsaparilla now. "

"But the miracle?" Mrs Wolfson dared, in spite of her foreboding.

"There was no miracle." Mrs Colquhoun frowned.

She was most annoyed. Her mouth, her chin had almost disappeared.

"I understood," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson murmured, her smile conveying disbelief, "something of a supernatural kind."

She was too old, too charming, to allow that indiscretion on her part was indiscretion.

"No question of any miracle," Mrs Colquhoun was repeating.

A stream of melted ice cream threatened to spill from one corner of what had been her mouth.

"Certainly," she admitted, "there was an unpleasant incident, I am told, at Barranugli. Certain drunken thugs, and ignorant, not to say hysterical, women were involved. Both there, and later at Sarsaparilla. Only, there was no miracle. Definitely no miracle!"

Mrs Colquhoun was almost shouting.

"It is much too unpleasant to discuss."

"But the Jew they crucified," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson insisted in a voice she had divested deliberately of all charm; she might have been taking off her rings at night.

"_Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ__!" cried Mrs Wolf son.

The latter was frowning, or wrinkling up black, through all that beige powder. She was played upon again. She was rocked by those discords on bleeding catgut, which she did, did wish, and not wish, to hear.

"You know about it?" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson asked.

But Mrs Wolfson was racked and rocked. The cello in her groaned audibly.

"Oh, no!" she moaned. "That is," she said, "I did hear somethink. Oh, yes! There was somethink!"

Did she know! In herself, it seemed, she knew everything. Each of her several lives carried its burden of similar knowledge.

"I warned you!" shouted Mrs Colquhoun.

Although it was never established which, fortunately one of the three upset a cup of coffee into the powder-blue lap of Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. For the moment everyone was mopping and talking.

"Darling, darling Jinny! How absolutely
ghastly
_!"

"
Waj geschrien
_! The good dress! All quite spoiled! No, it is too much, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson!"

Mrs Wolfson decided to absolve herself of any possible guilt by sending some fine present, something that would last, some little trinket of a semi-precious nature. She had found that such gestures paid.

But a young Italian waiter had got down on his knees, and was sponging the lap of Mrs Chalmers-Robinson with fascinating hands. As she watched the movements of the hands, she knew the damage was as good as repaired. Only she could not reconcile the indestructible shape of the young waiter's perfect head with the life that was slipping from her in daily, almost hourly driblets.

"Thank you," she said at last, when he stood before her, and she was looking up into his face, with that radiance of which she had once been completely mistress, but which was growing flickery.

"So much for miracles!" She laughed.

"I told you!" said Mrs Colquhoun.

Even though Mrs Wolfson was still being tossed on her ugly wave, it was fast receding. All three began to feel guiltless, though empty.

The women no longer made any effort. They were sitting with their legs apart at their table in the darkened restaurant--for the waiters were turning out the lights, between lunch and dinner, and rolling the used napkins into balls.

"I used to have a maid, who married some man, and went, I believe, to live at Sarsaparilla," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson recollected.

The ingenious smoke-making contrivance concealed in the crow of the little hat produced a last, desperate feather.

"Not actually a maid!" Mrs Colquhoun had begun again to mutter and hate.

"An excellent girl, although she would breathe down the guest's neck while handing the vegetables at luncheon. I forget her name, but have often wondered what became of such a person. She was--how shall I put it?" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson asked herself, or more, she appeared to be reaching out through the dark plain in which they were sitting. "Yes," she said, at last convinced. "You will laugh, Esmé, I know. She was a kind of saint."

"A saint? My poor Jinny! A saint in the pantry! How perfectly
ghastly
_ for you!"

Mrs Colquhoun had gone off into uncontrollable giggles, not to say hysterics, to which the lolling claw of the crab-shell on her head beat a hollow time.

"How interesting my little girl would have found this conversation. Before the nervous breakdown," Mrs Wolf son said. "In what way, Mrs Robinson, did this maid of yours show she was a saint?"

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was groping in the darkness. Her face had developed a tic, but she was determined to reach a conclusion.

"It is difficult to explain--exactly," she began. "By
being
_, I suppose. She was so stupid, so trusting. But her trustfulness could have been her strength," the visionary pursued drunkenly. "She was a rock to which we clung."

Then she added, without any shame at all, perhaps sensing that ultimately she would come no closer to understanding, "She was the rock of love."

"On which we have all foundered!" cried Mrs Colquhoun, biting on her lipstick.

"Oh, I do wish I could see her," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson murmured, craning in hopes that saving grace might just become visible in the depths of the obscure purgatory in which they sat. "If only I could find that good woman, who knows, who knew even then, I am sure, what we may expect!"

The old thing had exhausted herself, Mrs Wolfson saw. At her age, it was unwise.

Indeed, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's crater was by now extinct. She continued to sit for a little, however, together with her companions, while each of the three tried to remember where she should go next.

When Xanadu had been shaved right down to a bald, red, rudimentary hill, they began to erect the fibro homes. Two or three days, or so it seemed, and there were the combs of homes clinging to the bare earth. The rotary clotheslines had risen, together with the Iceland poppies, and after them the glads. The privies were never so private that it was not possible to listen to the drone of someone else's blowflies. The wafer-walls of the new homes would rub together at night, and sleepers might have been encouraged to enter into one another's dreams, if these had not been similar. Some times the rats of anxiety could be heard gnawing already at Bakélite, or plastic, or recalcitrant maidenhead. So that, in the circumstances, it was not unusual for people to run outside and jump into their cars. All of Sunday they would visit, or be visited, though sometimes they would cross one another, midway, while remaining unaware of it. Then, on finding nothing at the end, they would drive around, or around. They would drive and look for something to look at. Until motion became an expression of truth, the only true permanence--certainly more convincing than the sugar-cubes of homes. If the latter were not melted down by the action of time or weather, then they could only be reserved for some more terrifying catalysis, by hate, or even love. So the owners of the homes drove. They drove around.