Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Mrs Jolley was in two minds. It could have been the cobwebs. She would drag them down. They could have been ropes. They could have been chains. Then she would pick, and flick, not to say dash, and bash, all thumbs and fingers, elbows too, as she struggled to divest herself. But would never be free. The grey skeins clung, like a sense of guilt. "Who isn't nuts!" she would cry at times. "But, of course, a person can always give notice-tomorrow, or the day after, any day of the week." Nobody would have thought to accuse Mrs Jolley of not being rational at every pore, even at moments when, netted in cobweb, clamped with bobby-pins, teeth upstairs in the tumbler, her answer might stumble. As she pursed her lips, and turned her head, to disengage the reluctant words, was she guarding a secret, or merely having trouble with her lolly? At least she would remain a lady, whatever else might come in doubt. For the mirrors had begun to follow her down the passages, and on one occasion, she had been compelled to finish a flight of stairs at the run. For no obvious reason. Her legs had simply taken over, and her calves, still strong, and firm, and glossy, had bulged rather frantically; her breasts were jumping under the corset by the time she reached the top. "Everybody has their off days," Mrs Jolley liked to say. When, for instance, one of her eyes-blue for mothers-would water from the corner. "I am so afraid you are not happy at Xanadu," remarked Miss Hare-it was at breakfast, over the crispies, in the kitchen. "It is not that I am not happy," answered Mrs Jolley. "I am always happy, of course, more or less. It is that a lady does expect something different." Miss Hare mashed her crispies. "What?" "Oh, you know," said Mrs Jolley, "a home, and a Hoover, and kiddies' voices." "I do not know," replied Miss Hare. "This is my life. This is my home." And she munched the crispies. "You are that hard at times," Mrs Jolley protested, "and unwilling to understand." Miss Hare munched her crispies. "When a loved one passes on, it is as if you was lost for a bit. See?" Miss Hare would not. She was familiar with the core of rock she must acquire to match Mrs Jolley. "As if a bit of you went with him. And if you don't follow, too, it is because of a sense of duty to others. I once read in a horoscope"-here Mrs Jolley picked the cloth-"that my sense of duty is very, very highly developed." "I am not preventing you from following whoever you wish to follow," Miss Hare replied. "If that is what you mean." "You know that I was referring to my late hubby," said Mrs Jolley, "and you will not hurt my feelings, however hard you try." That face! "Oh, dear, it is breakfast," sighed Miss Hare. Mrs Jolley went off into laughter. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed. "I will not ask what you find so amusing," announced Miss Hare. "People are that funny!" Mrs Jolley laughed. Her throat had knots in it, almost a goitre, and farther down was the cleft upon which the eyes of her late husband, presumably, had rested, whether in approval or disgust. Miss Hare, who had finished her crispies, turned the plate upside down as usual. Mrs Jolley had stopped laughing. Very, very patiently she said, "You are a dirty girl. That is what _you__ are!" And stood back to look. "A habit is a habit," said Miss Hare. "Dirty is dirty," replied her companion. "Mrs Jolley, two people cannot live together unless they respect each other's habits. That is something I have learnt by painful degrees in my relationships with birds and animals." "I am not a bird, or a animal," Mrs Jolley replied. "I am a-" "No. I know what you are. Please, do not tell me!" Miss Hare begged. "You do not know me," Mrs Jolley said, "any more than you don't know nothing at all." "No," Miss Hare agreed. "You are often right." "I know what I am," said Mrs Jolley, "and more's the pity. My late husband thought he knew, but didn't. He thought he knew. Oh, yes, he knew everything. He had taken night courses, and collected stamps. He was paying off a cyclopaedia, for years, in the oak cabinet, beside the settee." Quite suddenly Mrs Jolley began to cry. Miss Hare sat as still as she could, and watched. "All I did," Mrs Jolley cried, "was to make him a clean and comfortable home, and yet, that night when I handed him his cup of tea, you would of said I had committed a crime." Miss Hare watched. The kitchen at Xanadu was one of those big, old, black kitchens which swallow up, but Miss Hare was never swallowed. She was feeling very bright now. "Do you mean that your husband blamed you for his death?" Mrs Jolley almost choked. "You are that hard!" she protested. "And this house! You can hear your own thoughts ticking, along with the mouldy furniture. I will leave, of course. But, in the circumstances, not yet." Then she stopped. She seemed to have immediate control over her emotions, or almost anything, if she wished. Mrs Jolley was what Miss Hare supposed they called a practical woman. "There!" said Mrs Jolley. "Finished now!" And pursed her mouth up. But Miss Hare was not finished. Her train of thought, she feared, had only started. If she had not been so fascinated, she would have retreated from the presence of Mrs Jolley, who was responsible. "What you have just told, has made me remember something," she said. "Only one person ever blamed me for his death." "Who?" Mrs Jolley took possession of Miss Hare's disgusting, fascinating, down-turned plate. "My own father." "You have not spoken much about your dad," Mrs Jolley slowly realized. "There is so much to tell, and almost all of it painful," said Miss Hare. "But your own father." "A long time ago. He died most horribly. By drowning in a cistern." "Where?" "Out there. Across the yard. It collects the rain-water from the roof, and in those days was allowed to remain open. It was only closed later, on account of the mosquitoes." "And your father fell in?" "Oh, there are some people-I might as well say from the beginning-will tell you other things. My father was said to be unstable." "And you saw it?" "I sometimes wonder exactly what."

Norbert Hare had experienced his moments of illumination. Doors had opened once or twice in music, or he had turned a corner on an Italian street, or descended dizzily, breathlessly, his vision grown milky and unreliable, from a too reckless encounter in the stone branches of some Gothic forest. On occasions release had even come simply by watching the line of hills beyond his property of Xanadu, although he was inclined to suspect deliverance by inexpensive means. Whatever the source of his experience, he was, however, aware of a splendour that he himself would never achieve except by instants, and rightly or wrongly, came to interpret this as failure. He would sometimes laugh, unpleasantly, and what seemed irrelevantly, to those who heard, with the result that many of his acquaintances and neighbours became convinced that Norbert was mad. Only his daughter, Mary, obviously more than a little dotty herself, sensed his dilemmas. She might even have understood them if she had been allowed. But the mere idea was preposterous. One steamy morning in summer, at the time of year when the whole world was living palpably under grass, in a crushing scent of crushed grass, in a mercilessly gentle murmuring of doves, Mary Hare rose up, actually, visibly, out of her father's thoughts. At one of those moments when two people would give their souls to escape each other, neither could begin. There she was, rooted in his path, where it led beneath the camphor laurels, and meandered on into the yard. "You, Mary!" exclaimed Norbert Hare, the sharp corners of his mouth outlined in dry, white salt. There was no need for him to give further expression to his feelings. Of course, she could not answer. She stood and twisted a stalk of grass. A trick of light had endowed her with what could have been a shadow of beauty under the old goffered bonnet she was wearing: a country beauty, botched and brown, and quickly gone. But her father would not allow. He might have been denying the possibility for years, for now he said, from a long way off, but very distinctly, as some sounds will convey themselves in a stillness and from a distance, "Ugly as a foetus. Ripped out too soon." Then their emotions were whirling, the spokes of whitest light smashing, the hooks grappling together, hatefully. The sweat was running down her body, she could feel, in molten streams. She caught sight of his tightening mouth, and his throat strung with gristle. "If you think we cannot put an end to it! But I am the one to choose!" Whether she had heard this as she was walking away, she had never been quite certain; perhaps she would have liked to hear it. But a stench was rising from the flesh of bruised grass. She was being surely suffocated under a pall of leaves. Till his great voice began to call through a megaphone of stone. She went back then, and realizing that it came from the cistern, looked in to see him treading water. The hair hung above his eyes in a straight, black, wet fringe. His eyes were awful-very pale, and far-seeing-as his voice, under the influence of cold and fear, continued to reproduce a desperate glug-glug of water. How cold the water was she could remember from once dipping her hand, in time of drought, into a bucketful a gardener had drawn up. And now her father. "Get some-thing, Mar-y!" Her dream seemed to be giving tongue. "Some-one!" At the same time it sounded silly. He was like some spaniel thrown in against its will, and whose genuine dog-tragedy appeared to be drowning in comical acts. She ran, though. She got a pole; it was an old, bleached clothesprop. She stood above him, away up, in the light, on the rim of the cistern. Then he appeared more afraid than before, as if she were looking truly monstrous from that height and angle, as she held the pole towards him. He was crying now, like a little boy, out of pale, wet mouth. "Some-one!" he was crying. "Mary! Don't! Have some pity! For God's sake! Run!" Although rigid, her pole was merciful, but he warded it off with his hands, which were blue, she observed, and he would bob under, and return, each time his deathly fringe falling into place again on his forehead. So she gathered up her dress at last, holding it bundled over her stomach, and ran, by whatever made her. She was two beings. She ran through the deserted morning. It laid clammy hands upon her. She fell once, bumping along gravel. The house could have been a shell from which even the echo of distance had withdrawn. The little frail parasols, which protected the complexions of the roses, were on that morning untended by the second gardener. By the time Mary Hare fetched William Hadkin and a boy, it was plain her father's folly had caught up with him; regret was of no assistance. He was gone by then. A frog plopped. A leaf fluttered, floated. When they finally dredged him up from under the black water, his pale eyes looked fearfully at those who had failed to rescue him, and for the first time the daughter realized how very similar his expression was to one of her own. After that, Sarsaparilla learned how Norbert Hare had fallen into the tank at Xanadu. Although those who pulled him out said they would have taken a bet he had jumped, and others had even begun to consider whether-but that would have been uncharitable, not to say unthinkable. So there the matter rested, or was hushed up, rather, for the sake of a proper funeral. At first the widow was not expected to recover from her grief. Or was it shock?