Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot

Mrs Jolley did not know where to begin, and would stand kneading her bare arms, as if they might not have got their final shape. In that spring weather her milky arms were dapple-blue against the silk jumper-she had knitted it herself-oyster-toned, but sagging now. Mrs Jolley was a lady, as she never tired of pointing out. She would repeat the articles of her faith for anybody her instinct caught doubting. She would not touch an onion, she insisted; not for love. But was partial to a fluffy sponge, or butter sandwich, with nonpareils. A lady could never go wrong with pastel shades. Or Iceland poppies. Or chenille. She liked a good yarn, though, with another lady, at the bus stop, or over the fence. She liked a drive in a family car, to nowhere in particular, but looking out, in a nice hat, at faces on a lower level. Then the mechanism with which her superior station had fitted her would cause her head to move ever so slightly, to convey her disbelief. She preferred to believe, however, and so Mrs Jolley would go to the pictures. To sit at the pictures sucking a lolly-not a hard one-after dropping the paper, along with memories and intentions, under the seat, was to indulge in sheerest velvet. It was a pity, though, about the hard lollies; the smell of a hot, moist caramel almost drove her nuts. But she would sit, and the strangest situations would pass muster as life. That lean young fellow, in crow's-feet and leather pants, might just have reached down, and put his hand-it made her lolly stick; and Ava and Lana, despite proportions and circumstances, could have been a couple of her own girls. Best of all was a picture about a mother. She knew by heart the injustices to expect, not to mention the retribution, so that, at the end, the Wurlitzer rising from its well only completed her apotheosis. When she smelled the _vox humana__'s rose and violet breath, and felt the little hammers striking on her womb, then she was, indeed, fulfilled, and could forget her hubby, who had died in the lounge at ten p. m., as she was handing him his second cup of tea. Grave as that injustice was, she had survived, and, it appeared, might have experienced enough of life and dreams to parry any further blows. Miss Hare was afraid she might be afraid of her housekeeper. She said, "I hope you will get used to things." "I miss the trams," Mrs Jolley replied. The clang of them was in her voice, and in her eye, the melancholy plume of violet sparks. "Oh dear," said Miss Hare, "I cannot say I was ever attached to a tram." "I miss Saturday evening," Mrs Jolley said. "Dropping in at Merle's, or Dot's, or Elma's. Elma is the youngest-married a stoker, not that he is not a gentleman, because none of my girls would never ever have entertained the idea of anything else but a gentleman." "I am surprised you could bear to leave them," said Miss Hare, almost not loud enough. "Ah," said Mrs Jolley, and took the mop, "that is life, if you know what I mean." Then she screwed the mop in the bucket, and took it out, and looked at the head. "Or death, "she said. Miss Hare was terrified. "As if it was my fault," said Mrs Jolley. "Sitting in his own chair." "A chair makes it seem more natural," Miss Hare ventured to suggest. Remembering her mother, who had died in similar circumstances, thus she comforted herself. "I can just imagine you and your mum," Mrs Jolley said, and laughed. "Living here amongst the furniture. Like a couple of mice." "Oh, there was Peg, too, and William Hadkin." "Peg who?" "I can't remember her name. If we ever knew it. She always seemed old. And had always been here. When the maids left-after the troubles overtook us-Peg stayed, and became a friend. And died, too. But after Mother. I was quite alone then." "And who was the gentleman you was speaking of?" "William was a coachman. He was very deaf." Miss Hare paused. "He was what they call _rather simple__. Which means that what one knows is of a different kind. Actually, William knew an awful lot. And was not so deaf. I did not like him." "And this Mr Hadkin, did he die too?" "No. He simply went away." "Strike a light!" said Mrs Jolley. "No wonder! What did all you people live on?" "Things," said Miss Hare, and yawned. "Bread, for instance. Bread is lovely. I love to tear the ends off, and eat it just like that. Going along. And give it to the birds. It is so convenient. But, of course, we had the little allowance from my cousin, Eustace Cleugh, of which I wrote you. Certainly it was not very much, and that was discontinued in the war. Oh, I forgot. There was the goat. I had a goat, and would milk her. Yes, I missed her." "What happened to the goat?" "Please don't ask me!" cried Miss Hare. "I don't know!" "All _right__!" said Mrs Jolley, whose turn it was to be afraid. In that house. But Miss Hare was sad rather than afraid. She could not answer questions. Questions were screws that spiralled down into the brain. She looked at the bucket of grey water, from which the woman's mop was spreading ineffectual puddles. The woman whose three daughters' husbands had built with bricks, boxes in which to live. So childish. For the brick boxes of the daughters' husbands would tumble like the games of children. Only memories were indestructible. So Miss Hare snorted-she was bored, besides, with Mrs Jolley-and went off into the passages of Xanadu.

But memories also tormented. They flapped like old rags of curtains, the priceless ones with gold thread, and moths flew out, always grey, or night-coloured, scattering their suffocating down. "We must wrap up our furs, Mary," Mrs Hare had said, "very carefully, now that summer is here, in sheets of the _Heiald__. And put them in strong canvas bags, with draw-necks. I shall feel uneasy otherwise." Mrs Hare had remained mostly happy, right to the end, in the ritual of a past life. And Peg would run, on her sticks of legs, and say from between her naked gums, which her mistress permitted, because, well, of everything, "Yes, m'mm. No one likes to have moths on their mind. But leave it to me. No, miss, I will see to it." And the servant would show the canvas bags, their necks well and truly drawn. Yes, those geese were dead, the daughter saw, and stuffed with the balls of paper Peg had put, to simulate. But the mother was pacified. Mrs Hare, gentle in her youth, distinguished in maturity, had become a horse of polished ivory in her old age. She would sit quite still for half an hour, then suddenly toss her head, at a thought, or fly. It was her long, refined face that gave the impression, and long, ivory teeth, which she loved to exercise on the fingers of cinnamon toast brought to her by Peg. Afterwards she would continue to sit, while her elderly, refined stomach rumbled with tea and toast, and the waning light worked still further, with uncanny Chinese skill, at the polished portrait of an ivory horse. Sometimes she would walk through what remained of the gardens, leaning on her stumpy daughter's arm, but she did not notice very much. She preferred to remember social triumphs and the Borromean Isles. Once she asked the daughter, "Where is the grotto, Mary? The grotto that your father had them build out of shells. Or was it lumps of rock crystal?" The daughter grunted, for, after all, nothing more was expected of her. Once Mrs Hare started to complain. "I used to hope my daughter would become an ambassador's wife. She would have long, beautiful legs, and carry a fan, and manage other people's conversation. In the end there is nothing one has managed. Not even of one's own. "Still," she continued more cheerfully, "you would not have been walking with me in the garden, in those circumstances, and I might have fallen over on my own, and broken something." Again the daughter grunted, because what else could she have done? Then the mother began to hit the grass. "Horrid, horrid tufts!" she cried, beating the tussocks of paspalum with her stick, so that the tassels of the grass trembled. "Don't!" begged the daughter. "Please!" Such impotent caprice was, at least, quickly diverted. "But do not think I am not devoted to you, Mary," insisted the mother. "I can truly, honestly say I do love everybody now. Even your father." For Mrs Hare, whose passions had always been watery, it was perhaps easier. "Even one's disappointments seem, at the end, to have a kind of meaning," she said towards sunset. And would have squeezed her daughter's arm if she had had the strength. Instead, they went inside, the disappointing daughter, and the mother who was, in the end, supported by her disappointments. Months later, looking at the figure of the dead woman seated so naturally in her chair, the daughter cried because she could not mourn in an approved manner. With passion, perhaps, but that the mother would hardly have appreciated or understood. So she mourned life, instead, such as she herself suspected it of being, from sudden rages of the sky, and brown gentleness of young ferns. It was fortunate that Peg had been there, because it was Peg who knew what to do. She sent William to Sarsaparilla, and the postmistress telephoned, and some men arrived to take the body. It was a day of rain, and the hall had smelt of wet raincoat quite a while afterwards. Those were the last dealings Mary Hare had with her mother. For Peg had said, "Don't you bother to go to the funeral, Miss Mary, if you feel it will upset you. Who will hold you if you take a turn? We'll sit here together, you and me, and eat a piece of bread and dripping in front of the stove. And let the parson look after things; that's what he is there for." Peg, although an elderly woman, had preserved some link with childhood, which allowed her to recognize the forms of reality through the rough sheath of appearance. She remained an admirable companion. Mary loved Peg. She would sit and rub her own wrinkles, and watch her maid's tranquil face: that of an elder sister in steel-rimmed spectacles, a sister who knew approximately the plan of an outside world, but who had not forgotten all the games. Because she was of that district, Peg used to go about a lot. She would ride her bicycle at the hills, and it was surprising how she got to the top. Such a frail thing. Not much more than the sawing sound of her own washed-out, starched dress. Peg laundered and cleaned to perfection, but cooked badly. She liked to make jam, and render down beeswax, and usually smelled of one or the other. She would suddenly appear from under beds, holding a pad of waxy cloth, when a person least expected. In her steel-rimmed spectacles. In a dress that had once been pale blue, now almost white. "Read to me, Peg," her mistress Mary Hare would command. "Read yourself!" Peg advised, and laughed. "What shall I read, ever?" "I can see it better if you read it out. Do, Peg!" begged Mary Hare. "Let us read Anthony Hordern's catalogue." "Dear, you are a caution!" Peg had to laugh. She was rather pale around the eyes. Peg liked best to read the Bible, but not aloud, as her mistress did not care for it. The maid was always busy with the Gospels. She found the Epistles too dry, and did not go much on the Revelations-in fact, she showed no inclination to discuss that end of her battered book. "You ought to be having a study of this," Peg used to say, glancing up from her Bible. She had always worn an exposed look on account of her pale eyelids, but her innocence had protected her. "Oh dear, no!" protested her mistress, almost in fear. "I know that that is nothing for me." "It is for everybody," Peg would insist earnestly. "Not quite. It is not for me." "But you won't try it. How have you ever found out?" "I will find out what I am to find out, in my own way, and in my own time. I am different," maintained Mary Hare. "Yes," sighed Peg. "Different and the same." She could not marvel at it enough. Although the two women were in many ways not unlike, Peg was without that arrogance which snared her mistress frequently. Mary Hare loved Peg, but she loved her own arrogance. It was her great pride, and if nobody else recognized her jewel, then, she would still deck herself. That way she achieved distinction, perhaps even beauty, she was vain enough to hope. But Peg was not taken in. She would say in her slightly gritty voice, "You are not flying into one of your tantrums, Miss Mary?" And Peg was always right, the way glass is, and water-all that is blameless. Which made it the more desperate when Mary Hare went into Peg's room, and saw that her friend had died, fust after dressing. On a dry morning. Peg had lain down again on the bed, in her dress that had once been a brighter colour. There she lay, very brittle, like a branch of one of the good-smelling herbs, rosemary, or thyme, or the lemon-scented verbena, that people used to break off to put away. After a while the mistress dared to touch her maid. Then, she knew, at last, she was, indeed, alone. She stayed a long time in a corner of the room, looking, and it was only in the course of the morning that she remembered William Hadkin. William was somebody Mary Hare had never taken to, perhaps because, on the night of her father's shooting match, when all the other servants were still away at the picnic, he had remained in the grooms' quarters, together with his deafness. That deafness of William's was something Mary had never been able to believe in, because of the thundering of her own emotions on the night in question. Yet, he had remained faithful, and in the days of her mother would take them for little drives in an old buggy that had survived. And on a pittance. Though, of course, he was old, nor ate, nor needed very much. By the time Mrs Hare died, he had practically given up shaving, because of a tender skin, yet was always seen in the same length of stubble, with the same rivulet of spittle in the same white ravine. He had the same smell, too, of most old men. Which again could have been a reason why Miss Hare had not taken to him. Old men, on the whole, are smellier than old women. It was William, of course, that his mistress told of Peg's death. "Well, yes," he said. "I was reckoning she would die. There was nothing to her." He was greasing a strap of harness, for which there was no longer any use, but it helped to keep him in practice. "I would not have let myself think," began Mary Hare. "That was what all you people was such artists at," said William Hadkin, stroking his leather. "What do you mean?" asked Miss Hare. She began to tremble, but not with rage. "As far as I can see, lookin' back and all," William said, "you was the race of pretenders." "Some of us had imagination, if that is what you mean." "To set the house on fire without the matches!" "That is enough, William," said Mary Hare, as she had heard parents. "You must go about Peg." "All right! All right!" he said. "Don't agitate me!" He stood looking at the holes in the strap. "I wonder you stayed if you could not bear us," his mistress said. "I stayed," he said, "because I got used to it. There's a lot of that sort of thing going on, you know." Because his mistress was always the first to recognize the truth, there was really nothing for her to say. The last and worst encounter with William Hadkin occurred a few weeks after her maid's death. She came across him just after he had killed a cock. There was the bird's head, shamefully detached and dead, while William watched and laughed as the body danced out the last steps of life in a shambles of its own blood. Mary Hare stood very still. She could not find the strength to move even when her boots were sprinkled with the cock's blood. William observed. "Well," he said, laughing, "you've gotta eat, if it's only an old stringy rooster." And continued to laugh. "See," he said, "what I meant the other day? The rooster got so used to it he can dance without his bally head." "The way I see it, you are a murderer," accused Mary Hare. "What! To kill a cock for you to eat?" "There are ways and ways of killing." "That is something you should know." "How? I?" "Ask your dad." Mary Hare turned so pale. She remained standing by the woodshed long after the groom had gone about other business. She was left looking at the wattles of the dead cock. Soon after that William Hadkin, without a word, sorted his thoughts apparently, and disappeared from Xanadu. Now, at last, I shall be free, and all to the good, murmured Mary Hare, afraid. But remembered the goat, and at once her spirits were restored. The goat had appeared already before Peg's death. From where it had come was never discovered. A white doe heavy in kid, it would follow the women for company, choosing its leaves and grass with a certain finical air. After the doe had been delivered of a dead buck, Peg said they should milk their goat, which Mary Hare proceeded to do. She lived for it. In time her mind grew equal to the tranquil wisdom of the goat-mind, and as she squatted in the evening to milk her doe, after they alone were left, their united shadow would seem positively substantial. So much so, the woman's love began to conflict with her reasoning, and she grew quite frantic that something might happen to the animal: some disaster to follow those which she herself had been permitted to outlive, or, simply, that it might decide to leave. So, when night began to fall, the mistress would run to shut her creature in a little tipsy shed, within sight of the kitchen, on the edge of the yard. Heaping boughs and pouring endearments, she would padlock her goat every night, and return, and return, to see whether her love might not have vanished in the course of some devilish conjuring act. But there the goat would be. As she shielded her lamp, the white mask glimmered at her through the dark. The amber eyes pacified her fears, and the long lip would move in what she knew was sympathy. Even on the morning of the mistress's severest trial, the abstraction of a goat's mask continued to communicate. Even though the goat itself had become a skull and shred of hide in the ruins of the black and smoking shed. How she herself survived the holocaust of her discovery, Mary Hare could never be sure. But the morning was kind. Leaves were laid upon her face. The earth was soft to her trembling knees. For she went off into the scrub almost immediately, and remained there how long nobody was able to tell her, because nobody knew that she had gone. She remained there probably two or three days, for she returned stiff and scratched, hungry, at least for one who was almost never visited by hunger, and anxious to recall even the painful reason for her absence. As she sat chewing a crust of stale bread, for which she had immediately rummaged in the crock, she had to suppose: Eventually I shall discover what is at the centre, if enough of me is peeled away. Never in her life, she felt, had she reasoned so lucidly, with the result that she swallowed a whole lump of softened bread.