Riders in the Chariot (77 page)

Mrs Godbold could not have counted how many years it was since the razing of Xanadu, when the fancy suddenly took her to put on her hat and go down. It was a Tuesday in June, the sky watering with cold, but fair. Mrs Godbold had not changed, not in appearance anyway, for life had dealt her an early blow, then forgotten her for other victims. All around her, change was creeping, though that side of the hill where she lived was still choked with blackberry bushes, still strewn with jagged bottles and rusty springs. It was, in fact, a crying shame, but people had stopped crying about it, since the ulterior motives of a speculator seemed in accord with some more obscure, possibly divine, plan. So, there Mrs Godbold continued to live, and had worn several tracks, to suit her habits and her needs, amongst the enamelled blackberry bushes.

Now she chose the appropriate track into Montebello Avenue, and was followed, as usual, a little of the way, by that same, or perhaps another cat.

"Shoo!" she cried. "Silly thing! It is too far. For once!" She laughed. "This will be a proper journey!"

So that her cat was persuaded to turn, and wove its way back, velvety amongst the thorns.

The cold rushed at Mrs Godbold, but her vision remained clear. She broke off a twig, and sucked it for company.

"Who are you?" she asked at one of the gates along the road. "Eh?" she asked. "Who are you?"

It was a joke, of course. It was her grandchild. Even better than her voice, he knew the drowsy smell of soap, and was now made silent, or reverent, by recollections of intimacy.

She touched the little boy's cheek once. He submitted, but without raising his eyes.

"And who is this?" Mrs Godbold asked of a second little boy, who came down the path munching, his face full of crumbs.

"Bob Tanner," the elder little boy answered straight.

She could have eaten him.

"And you are Ruth Joyner," he shouted.

"Ah," she laughed, "you are the same cheeky boy who never gets smacked by his mother!"

The little boy kicked the ground. His younger brother pushed him, and showed the liveliest approval of the joke.

"Well, " said the grandmother, her lips trembling, such was her own approval of all her children, "give my regards to your mum, then."

"Arr, Nan!" cried the elder boy. "Come on in! There's cornflour cakes!"

"Not today," said the grandmother. "I am going on a journey."

And almost laughed again, but coughed.

"Take me with you," begged the boy.

"It is too far," she answered.

"Arr, no!" he cried. "I can walk good!"

But she was already slowly on her way, making the little noises of deprecation and love, which disappointment would prevent the boy from interpreting at once.

Mrs Godbold continued along a road which progress had left rather neglected.

Two of her girls had been given by now, and two others were promised, and the youngest pair practically in shoes. The six Godbold girls would sometimes forgather still on the trodden ground outside the shed, together with the little, strange, toy children of the eldest sisters. The girls would weave garlands in the green light--any old common flowers, morning-glory, say, and sarsaparilla, and the crumpled wild freesias. They would wear their flowers, and clown amongst themselves, and sing as one: "I will slap Any chap Who's bold enough To cheek me.

The one that matters Never flatters, But hangs around When he's found.

He's the one I'll kiss, And kiss, and kiss, and kiss!"

Although Poppy Godbold would exclaim, "I am not gunna kiss any feller! Never, never, never!"

Then she might modify her vow, and swoop, and cry, "Without I kiss young Bob Tanner!"

And the little boy would shout, and protect himself from the onslaught by his silly, youngest, clumsy aunt, who was burning red above him.

So Mrs Godbold had her children. She had her girls. But for how long? With two already gone. Sometimes she would continue to sit in front of the shed after all those straight girls had slipped from her into the evening, leaving in her lap their necklaces of wilted flowers. Then it would seem as though she had shot her last arrow, and was used and empty. She would feel the touch of darkness. She would sit, and attempt to rub the rheumatism out of her knuckles. Often she would recall the night her friend the Jew died, in the shed behind her. Even the youngest children, who had been sleeping at the time, remembered that night, for sleep did not seem to have prevented them participating in the event. So their eyes saw farther than those of other girls. Tempered on that night, their metal was tougher. Finally the woman sitting alone in front of the deserted shed would sense how she had shot her six arrows at the face of darkness, and halted it. And wherever her arrows struck, she saw other arrows breed. And out of those arrows, others still would split off, from the straight white shafts.

So her arrows would continue to be aimed at the forms of darkness, and she herself was, in fact, the infinite quiver.

"Multiplication!" Mrs Godbold loudly declared, and blushed, for the nonsense it must have sounded, there on the road to Xanadu.

She looked back once more, however, at the two little boys, who were swinging the gate enough to break it.

Mrs Godbold meandered along past the raggedy wattles. She remembered the winter Miss Hare had been laid up, how she had gone down to nurse the poor thing, and how they had been together in the silent house, and spoken of the Chariot. Well, everybody saw things different. There was Miss Hare, who, they said, was mad. For that reason. Miss Hare had seen the chariot of fire. Mrs Godbold, who would never have contradicted her superior in any of her opinions, especially when the latter was sick, knew different too. She had her own vision of the Chariot. Even now, at the thought of it, her very centre was touched by the wings of love and charity. So that she closed her eyes for a moment as she walked, and put her arms around her own body, tight, for fear that the melting marrow might spill out of it.

When she opened her eyes again, there, already, was the new settlement of Xanadu, which they had built on the land Mr Cleugh, the relative, had sold. Mrs Godbold could not help admiring the houses for their signs of life: for the children coming home from school, for a row of young cauliflowers, for a convalescent woman, who had stepped outside in her dressing gown to gather a late rose.

"It is too cold, though! Too cold!" Mrs Godbold called, wrapping up her own throat, to illustrate.

"Eh?" mumbled the woman, as she stood tearing at the stalk of the resistant rose.

"You will catch cold!" Mrs Godbold insisted.

She could have offered more love than was acceptable.

The woman in the dressing gown stood, apparently not wishing to hear, and went inside presently, after she had succeeded in twisting off the rose.

Children stared at the stranger in passing, and decided she was probably a loop.

"You will be glad to be home at last," she said.

"Nah," the boys answered.

Some of the girls snickered.

But Mrs Godbold was satisfied simply to stand and observe Xanadu. On subsequent occasions people got to know her, and would look for her again, not only those whom she had healed of some anxiety, but those who suspected her of possessing an enviable secret; they would watch for the unchanging woman in her black prototype of a hat.

There in particular, on the spot where she had sat with her sick friend in the old, disintegrating house, there where the new homes rocked and shouted with life, the edifice of memory would also rise in all its structural diversity, its whirling, involuted detail, and perhaps most moving, the unfinished archways, opening on to distances and mist. Mrs Godbold would build. Or restore. She would lay the stones methodically, in years, almost in days that she had lived. But sometimes the columns of trees would intervene. The black trunks of oak and elm, and ghostlier gums which Mr Norbert Hare had overlooked, would rise again out of the suburban lots, and obscure the present, as they struggled to meet at last in nave or chancel. Light would have its part, and music. The grey light from off the fens in winter would search the paving in shafts from opening doors, branches of the whitest light flower upon the Easter Table, smouldering jewels of evening pour through the tracery of twigs and stone. With such riches of the spirit, she could not resist the secular touch, but had to drag in the green, slippery urns, of reflective, worshipful magnificence, of which she had been shy at first, in the hall at Xanadu. There was some peculiar gentleman, too, who had talked to her about the music, she could not remember clearly, but recalled him as a truthful presence. The music itself she would remember frequently, and again allow its scaffolding to shine, as it climbed always higher inside the accommodating spire. Sometimes, though, the grey pipes blew blasts that made her shudder. And there was that intolerable, hovering note, which rounded out her brother's head, crushed by the wheel, and blood still in the sockets of the eyes.

Mrs Godbold grew cold at times for the Gothic profusion of her vision. The stone figures she had laid upon their tombs would struggle inside the armour of eternity. Then she would try to free, at least for a moment, as many of them as she could remember: Miss Hare in a fever of words, the earth still caking her freckled hands; that abo fellow, with whom she had celebrated a mystery the night she went to fetch Tom from Mrs Khalil's.

Time had broken into a mosaic much that had seemed complete, obsessive, actual, painful. Now she could approach her work of living, as an artist, after an interval, will approach and judge his work of art. So, at last, the figure of her Lord and Saviour would stand before her in the chancel, looking down at her from beneath the yellow eyelids, along the strong, but gentle beak of a nose. She was content to leave then, since all converged finally upon the Risen Christ, and her own eyes had confirmed that the wounds were healed.

On that first occasion of her revisiting the altered Xanadu, Mrs Godbold did not think she could bear to go there again, in spite of her pleasure in many present, lively matters. But did, of course. On that first occasion of her venturesome walk and momentous achievement, she was so jostled and shaken by the past she tore off a little sapling to lean on. She was holding her handkerchief to her mouth as she returned towards her home at Sarsaparilla. Even at the height of her experience, it was true there had been much that she had only darkly sensed. Even though it was her habit to tread straight, she would remain a plodding simpleton. From behind, her great beam, under the stretchy cardigan, might have appeared something of a joke, except to the few who happened to perceive that she also wore the crown.

That evening, as she walked along the road, it was the hour at which the other gold sank its furrows in the softer sky. The lids of her eyes, flickering beneath its glow, were gilded with an identical splendour. But for all its weight, it lay lightly, lifted her, in fact, to where she remained an instant in the company of the Living Creatures she had known, and many others she had not. All was ratified again by hands.

If, on further visits to Xanadu, she experienced nothing comparable, it was probably because Mrs Godbold's feet were still planted firmly on the earth. She would lower her eyes to avoid the dazzle, and walk on, breathing heavy, for it was a stiff pull up the hill, to the shed in which she continued to live.

The End

PATRICK WHITE (1912-1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary, precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station. Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in London, where he published his first two books. White joined the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. At war's end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels, including
The Tree of Man
_ (1955),
Voss
_ (1957), and
Riders in the Chariot
_ (1961). When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older writers who hadn't received their due: the first recipient was Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves, White responded: "Silence, the company of friends, unexpected honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals, whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes floating off at last."

DAVID MALOUF was born in Brisbane, Australia. His novels include
An Imaginary Life
_ (1978),
The Great World
_ (1990), and
Remembering Babylon
_ (1993), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest collection of stories,
Dream Stuff
_, was published in 2000. He lives in Sydney.

IN APRIL 1958, shortly after the appearance of
Voss
_, Patrick White published a nonfiction piece in a new journal,
Australian Letters
_. Ten years earlier, after more than two decades away--at school in England and then at Cambridge, in Spain, Germany, and the United States, as an air-force officer in Egypt and, with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, in Greece--White had returned to the world of his Australian childhood and "the stimulation," as he hoped, "of time remembered." He
had
_ been stimulated--wonderfully;
The Tree of Man
_ (1955) and
Voss
_ (1957) attest to that. But what "The Prodigal Son" attests to is his bitter disappointment at the country to which, like a latter-day convict, he felt he had been transported, and "for life": In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means steak and cake, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the "average" that made me panic...[footnote]