Darkness Visible (5 page)

“Ta.”

The empty shelf was under his elbow. He lowered the roses and they cocked up, hiding her from his view. His feet turned him and he went away. “Ta” spread, was more than a monosyllable, was at once soft and loud, explosive and of infinite duration. He came partly to himself near the smithy. Brilliantly he asked if there were more flowers to deliver but was not heard for he did not know how faint his voice had become.

Now he had a second preoccupation. The first, so unlike the second, was Mr Pedigree. When the Boy was sweeping clouds of dust in the loft and when his face had more anguish in its right, expressive side than the occasion would warrant, Mr Pedigree would be there in his mind. When his face contorted with sudden pain it was not the dust nor the splinters. It was the memory of the words screamed at him in the hall—“It’s all your fault!” In one very private experience, he had seized a spike and stuck it clumsily into the back of the hand that held the broom. He had watched, a little paler perhaps, the blood turn into a long streak with a drop at the end—and all this because the soundless voice had screamed at him again. Now it seemed to him that this glimpse of part of a face, this fragrance, this hair, filled with a similar compulsion all the parts of his mind that the memory of Mr
Pedigree did not inhabit as of right. The two compulsions seemed to twist him inside, to lift him up against his own wishes and leave him with no defences and no remedy but simply to endure.

That morning he drifted away from the yard and climbed the stairs into the lofts. Familiarly he picked his way among packing-cases bursting with shavings, past piled paint, through a room where there was nothing but a set of rusting saws and a heap of hip baths stacked one inside the other, down through rows of identical paraffin lamps and into the long room for cutlery and glass. Here in the centre there was a great skylight of ridged glass that was supposed to let daylight down into the main showroom from a second skylight above it. Looking down, he could see the irradiated glow of coloured lights, could see them move among the ridges as he moved. He could see also, his heart quickening, a vague mass of colour down there that was the flower counter. He knew at once that he would never come this way again without a sideways and downward look at that blurred mixture. He went forward and into yet another loft, empty this one, then a step or two down some stairs. These led down the wall at the farthest point from where the yard was. He put a hand on the guard rail, bent down and peered along under the ceiling.

He could see the mass of artificial flowers but the opening where the customers were dealt with was to one side of him. He could see flowers on this side, and the roses he had stacked all too quickly on the other. All that was visible in the middle was the very top of a light brown head with a white centre-parting down it. He saw that the only way to do better was to walk along the shop and glance sideways as he passed the bower. He did think for a moment to himself that if one were sufficiently knowing—like for example the blond Boy—one might stop and chat. His heart jumped at the thought and the impossibility of it. He went quickly therefore, but his feet seemed to get in his way as if he had too many of them. He passed a yard from the counter that was not stacked with flowers and looked sideways without moving his head as he passed. But Miss Aylen had bent down and the bower might have been empty for all he could see.

“Boy!”

He broke into a shambling trot.

“Where’ve you been, Boy?”

But they did not really want to know where he had been,
though they would have been amused and liked him better for it if they had known.

“The van’s been waiting for about half an hour. Load her up!”

So he hauled the bundles into the van, bundles of metal flung shatteringly into the corner, put down half a dozen folding chairs and finally swung his clumsy body into the seat by the driver.

“What a lot of flowers we’ve got!”

Mr Parrish, the arthritic driver, groaned. Matty went on.

“They’re just like real aren’t they?”

“I never seen ’em. If you had my knees—”

“They’re good, those flowers are.”

Mr Parrish ignored him and set himself to the craft of van-driving. Matty’s voice, practically of its own accord, went on speaking.

“They’re pretty. Artificials I mean. And that girl, that young lady—”

The noises that Mr Parrish made dated from the days of his youth when he had driven one of Frankley’s three horse-vans. He had been transferred to a motor van not many years after such an innovation became available and he took two things with him—his horse-van vocabulary and a belief that he had been promoted. There was no sign at first, therefore, that Mr Parrish had heard the Boy. He had heard everything the Boy said, however—was waiting for the right moment to wrap up his silence, roll it into a weapon and hit Matty over the head with it. He did so now.

“When you address me, my lad, you call me ‘Mr Parrish’.”

This may well have been the last time Matty ever tried to confide in anyone.

Later that day he was able to go once more through the lofts over the main shop. Once more he glanced sideways at the coloured blur in the ribbed skylight and once more he peered along under the ceiling. He saw nothing. When the shop closed he hurried to the empty pavement in front of it but saw no one. Next day at the same time he got there early, and was rewarded with an exhibition of light-brown hair with honey lights, the apparently naked crooks of knees and the gleam of two long, shining stockings as they disappeared from the platform of a bus to the interior. The next day was Saturday—a half-day—and he was kept busy all morning so that she had gone before he was free.

On Sunday he went automatically to morning service, ate the
large, plain dinner that was served in what Mr Arthur called the Refectory, then wandered out for the walk he was ordered to take for his health. The winged collars snoozed meanwhile on their beds. Matty went along, past
GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS
, past Sprawson’s and turned right up the High Street. He was in a curious state. It was as if there was a high, singing note in the air from which he could not detach himself and which was the direct result of some interior strain, some anxiety that could—if you remembered this thing or that thing—sharpen into anguish. This feeling became so strong that he turned back to Frankley’s as if sight of the place where one of his problems lay would help to solve it. But though he stood and looked it over, and the bookshop next to it and Sprawson’s next to that, he was given no help. He went round the corner of Sprawson’s to the Old Bridge over the canal and the iron loo at the root of the bridge flushed automatically as he passed. He stood, and looked down at the water of the canal in that age-old and unconscious belief that there is help and healing in the sight. He had a moment’s idea of walking along the towpath, but it was muddy. He turned back, round the corner of Sprawson’s, and there was the bookshop and Frankley’s again. He stopped walking and looked in the window of the bookshop. The titles did not help him. The books were full of words, physical reduplication of that endless cackle of men.

Now some of the problem was coming into focus. It might be possible to go down into silence, sink down through all noises and all words, down through the words, the knives and swords such as
it’s
all
your
fault
and
ta
with a piercing sweetness, down, down into silence—

On the left in the window, below the rows of books (
With
Rod
and
Gun
), was a small counter with a few items on it which were not in the strict canon of bookishness at all. Such was the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer in a hornbook. Such was the carefully mounted scrap of ancient music on parchment—music with square notes. Such was the glass ball that lay on a small stand of black wood just to the left of the old music. Matty looked at the glass ball with a touch of approval since it did not try to say anything and was not, like the huge books, a whole store of frozen speech. It contained nothing but the sun which shone in it, far away. He approved of the sun which said nothing but lay there, brighter and brighter and purer and purer. It began to blaze as when
clouds move aside. It moved as he moved but soon he did not move, could not move. It dominated without effort, a torch shone straight into his eyes, and he felt queer, not necessarily unpleasantly so but queer all the same—unusual. He was aware too of a sense of rightness and truth and silence. But this was what he later described to himself as a feeling of waters rising; and still later was described to him and for him by Edwin Bell as entering
a
still
dimension
of
otherness
in which things appeared or were shown to him.

He was shown the seamy side where the connections are. The whole cloth of what had seemed separate now appeared as the warp and woof from which events and people get their being. He saw Pedigree, his face contorted with accusation. He saw a fall of hair and a profile and he saw the balance in which they lay, the one the other. The face he had never fully seen of the girl among the artificials was there in front of him. He knew it familiarly but knew there was something wrong with the knowledge. Pedigree balanced it. There was everything right with this plain knowledge of Pedigree and his searing words.

Then all that was unspeakably hidden from him. Another dimension from low on his right to higher on his left became visible with huge letters written in gold. He saw that this was the bottom of the window of the bookshop and that it had
GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS
written in gold. He found that he himself was leaning to one side and, after all, the golden words were horizontal. The glass ball on its stand of black wood had retreated behind the condensation of his breath on the window. The sun no longer blazed in it. Confusedly he remembered that all that day there had been no sun but solid cloud from which rain pricked every now and then. He tried to remember what had happened, then found that as he remembered he changed what had happened. It was as if he laid colours and shapes over pictures and events; and this was not like crayoning in the spaces of a crayoning book where the lines are all set out but like wishing things and then seeing them happen; or even
having
to wish something and then seeing it happen.

After a while he turned away and began to walk aimlessly up the High Street. The rain prickled down and he hesitated then looked round him. His eye fell on the old church, half-way up the left-hand side of the street. He walked more quickly towards it,
first thinking of shelter, then suddenly understanding that it was what he had to do. He opened the door, went in and sat right at the back under the west window. He pulled up his trouser-legs carefully and knelt down without really thinking what he was doing. There he was, almost without his volition, in the right attitude and place. It was Greenfield Parish Church, a huge place with side aisles and transept and full of the long, undistinguished history of the town. There was hardly a slab in the floor without an epitaph on it and not much more unlettered space on the walls. The church was quite empty and not merely of people. It seemed to him empty of the qualities that lay in the glass ball and had found some kind of response inside him. He could not make any connection and there was a lump in his throat too big to swallow. He began to say the Lord’s Prayer then stopped, for the words seemed to mean nothing. He stayed there, kneeling, bewildered and sorrowful; and while he knelt the painful and extraordinary necessities of the artificials and the brown fall with the honey lights came flooding back.

The
daugh
ters
of
men
.

He cried out silently to nowhere. Silence reverberated in silence.

Then a voice spoke, quite clearly.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Now this was the voice of the curate who was clearing up certain things in the vestry. He had been submitting himself to an austerity of which his vicar knew nothing. He was surprised in this by the sound of a choir boy scrabbling at the vestry door and trying to get in to retrieve a comic he thought he had left. But the voice sounded right inside Matty’s head. He answered it in the same place. Before the balance with its two scales, the one with a man’s face, the other with a fire of anticipation and enticement, he had a time that was made of pure, whitehot anguish. It was the first exercise of his untried will. He knew, and it never occurred to him to doubt the knowledge, or worse, accept it and be proud of it, that he had chosen, not as a donkey between carrots of unequal size but rather as the awareness that suffered. The whitehot anguish continued to burn. In it was consumed a whole rising future that centred on the artificials and the hair, it had sunk away from the still-possible to the might-have-been. Because he had become aware he saw too how his unattractive appearance would
have made an approach to the girl into a farce and humiliation; and thought, as he saw, that it would be so with any woman. He began to weep adult tears, wounded right in the centre of his nature, wept for a vanished prospect as he might have wept for a dead friend. He wept until he could weep no more and never knew what things had drained away from him with the tears. When he had done he found he was in a strange position. He was kneeling but his backside was touching the edge of a bench. His hands were grasping the top of a pew in front of him and his forehead lay on the little shelf where the prayer and hymn books were. As he opened his eyes and focused them he found he was staring down into the wetness of his own tears where they had fallen on stone and lay in the grooves of an ancient epitaph. He was back, in dull, grey daylight with the faint whisper of rain above him on the west window. He saw the impossibility of healing Pedigree. As for the hair—he knew that he must go away.

It was typical of Matty’s jagged and passionate character that once he had decided to go away he should go as far as humanly possible. It was part of the strange way in which circumstances were apt to adjust themselves round him as he went—as if for all his jaggedness he was fitted for the journey with streamlined farings—that his way to Australia should be made easy. He met what seemed like compassionate officialdom where there might have been indifference; or perhaps it was that those who winced at the sight of his shrivelled ear speeded him out of their sight. It was no more than months before he found himself with a job, a church, a bed in the Y.M.C.A. in Melbourne. All three were waiting for him downtown in Fore Street by the London Hotel. The ironmonger’s was not as large as Frankley’s but there were storerooms overhead, packing-cases in the yard at the side and a machine shop to stand in for a forge. He might have stayed there for years—for a lifetime—if it had lived up to his innocent belief that by going far and fast he had outdistanced his troubles. But of course, Mr Pedigree’s curse came with him. Moreover, either time or Australia or the two together quickly sharpened his vague feelings of bewilderment into downright astonishment; and this at last found words somewhere in his head.

“Who am I?”

To this, the only answer from inside him was something like: you came out of nowhere and that is where you are going. You have injured your only friend; and you must offer up marriage, sex, love, because, because,
because
! On a cooler view of the situation, no one would have you, anyway. That is who you are.

He was also someone who lacked more skin than he knew. When he had come at last to realize just how great an effort even the kindest people had to make not to be visibly affected by his
appearance he ducked away from any intercourse he could. It was not just the unattainable creatures (and pausing for forty minutes at Singapore, that doll-like figure in its glittering clothes and standing submissively by the passenger lounge) but a minister and his kindly wife, and others. His Bible, on India paper and in squashy leather, gave him no help. Neither—though in his innocence he had thought it might—did his English voice and emergence from the Old Country. When they were assured that he did not think himself special and did not look down on Australia and did not expect preferential treatment, his workmates were unkinder than they might have been through sheer annoyance at being wrong and missing a treat. Also there was a quite gratuitous confusion.

“I don’t care what you’re bleeding called. When I say ‘Matey’ I mean ‘Matey’. My bleeding oath!”

—And turning to the Australian equivalent of Mr Parrish—

“Telling me how to speak the King’s bleeding English!”

But Matty left the ironmonger’s for a very simple reason. The first time he had to take some boxes of china to the Wedding Gifts Department he found it presided over and rendered unspeakably dangerous by a girl both pretty and painted. He saw at once that travel had not solved all his problems and he would have gone back to England there and then except that it was impossible. He did the best he could, which was to change jobs as soon as there was one to be had. He got work in a bookshop. Mr Sweet who ran it was too short-sighted and vague to grasp what a handicap Matty’s face would be. When Mrs Sweet, who was not short-sighted or vague, saw Matty she knew why nobody browsed in the shop as they used. The Sweets, who were much richer than English booksellers would be, lived in a country house outside the city and soon Matty was established there, in a minute cottage that leaned against the main building. He was odd-job man; and when Mr Sweet had had him taught to drive, chauffeur between the house and the shop. Mrs Sweet, her face averted, pointed out that his hair would keep in place better if he wore a hat. Some deep awareness of self rather than awareness of identity made him choose a black one with a broad brim. It suited both the mournful, good side of his face, and the lighter, but contracted and more formidable left side where the mouth and eye were both pulled down. It lay so close to the purple knob of his ear that people
seldom noticed his ear was anything out of the ordinary. Piece by piece—jacket, trousers, shoes, socks, roll-neck sweater, pullover—he became the man in black, silent, distant, with the unsolved question waiting on him.

“Who am I?”

One day after he had taken Mrs Sweet to the shop and was waiting to bring her back, he stood by the tray of battered books that were displayed outside the shop and all at fifty cents or less. One seemed curious. It had wooden covers on either side and the back was so worn the title was illegible. Idly he picked it out and found it was an old Bible, heavier in wood than squashy leather, though the paper was much the same. He leafed through the familiar pages, stopped suddenly, turned back, then forwards, then back again. He bent his face nearer the page and began to mutter under his breath, a mutter that died away.

One of Matty’s characteristics was a capacity for absolute inattention. Speech would wash over him without leaving a trace in his mind. It is likely that in the Australian churches he attended less and less—and in the English churches, and far back in class, at Foundlings—there was talk of the difficulty of moving from one language to another; but explanations must have failed before the present fact of black print on a white page. In the very middle of the twentieth century there was a kind of primitive grating between Matty and the easy world of his fellows that sorted out, it seemed, filtered out, ninety-nine per cent of what a man is supposed to absorb and gave the remaining one per cent the shiny hardness of stone. Now, therefore, he stood, the book in his hands, lifted his head from it and stared aghast through the bookshop.

It’s
different!

That night he sat at his table with both books before him and began to compare them, word by word. It was after one o’clock in the morning when he stood up and went out. He walked the straight and endless road up and down until the morning when it was time to drive Mr Sweet into the city. When he got back and put the car away it seemed to him that he had never heard before how the quality of bird-noise in the countryside was a kind of mad laughter. It disturbed him so much that he cut a lawn quite unnecessarily, to hide in the noise of the machine. When they heard the first whirr! the flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos that
haunted the tall trees round the low house took off, crying and circling, then fled away across the sunburnt grass where the horses grazed—fled to and filled a solitary tree a mile off with their whiteness and movement and clamour.

That evening after high tea in the kitchen he took out his two books and opened them both at the title-page. He read each title-page several times. At last he sat back and shut his book of squashy leather. He took it, went out, across the nearer lawn and along through the vegetable garden. He came to the fence that lay between the garden and the way down to the pool where the yabbies swam. He looked at the miles of moonlit grass that swept away to where there were dim hills on the horizon.

He took out his Bible and began to tear the pages out, one by one. As he tore each, he let the breeze take it, fluttering from his hand to blow away turning over and over into the distance where it was hidden at last among the long grass. Then he went back to his cottage, read in the other Bible between wooden covers for a time, said his mechanical prayers, went to bed and to sleep.

That was the beginning of what was mostly a happy year for Matty. He had a time of conflict with himself when the new girl who served in the village store proved to be pretty; but she was so pretty that she quickly moved on to be replaced by one to whom he could be peacefully indifferent. Happily he moved round the grounds or through the house, his lips moving, the good side of his face as cheerful as one side of a face can be. He never took his hat off where other people could see him and this led to rumours in the village that he slept in it, which was not true. It was not the kind of hat he could sleep in, being broad-brimmed, as everyone knew very well; but the story suited him, matched his withdrawal. The early sun, and always the moon, would find him in his bed, the long smear of black hair lying all ways to one over the pillow, the white skin of his skull and left face disappearing and reappearing as he moved in his sleep. Then the first birds would jeer and he would jerk upright, to sink back for a few moments before he got out of bed. After the bog and the basin he would sit and read, in the book with the wooden covers, his mouth following the words, his good side frowning.

During the day his lips would continue to move, whether he was driving the rotavator through the dust of the vegetable patch,
or laying out the hoses, or waiting at traffic lights, the engine idling, or carrying parcels or sweeping, dusting, polishing—

Sometimes Mrs Sweet was near enough to hear.

“—one silver charger of the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 56 One golden spoon of ten shekels full of incense: 57 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year for a burnt offering: 58 One kid of the goats—”

Sometimes she would hear him in the house as his voice got louder and louder, stuck like a scratched gramophone record.

“21 And he said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—”

Then she would hear a few quick steps and know that he had gone into his own place to look at the book lying open on the table. He would come back after a few moments; and through the rub and squeak of the window being polished she would hear him once more.

“said unto them Is a candle bought to be put under a bushel or under a bed? And not to be set on a candlestick? 22 For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23 If any man—”

A happy year, all things considered! Only there were things—as he said to himself once in a moment of quite brilliant and articulate explanation—there were things moving about under the surface. If things moved about
on
the surface there was something to be done. For example, there were explicit instructions as to conduct if a man should defile himself. But how if the thing that moves beneath the surface is not to be defined but stays there, a
must
without any instructions?
Must
drove him to things he could not explain but only accept as a bit of easing when to do nothing was intolerable. Such was the placing of stones in a pattern, the making of gestures over them. Such was the slow trickling of dust from the hand and the pouring of good water into a hole.

It was during this year that Matty ceased to go to a church which had made only perfunctory efforts to retain him. Ceasing to go to church was as much a
must
as the other gestures, and positive. Yet the change from that year to the next, which might have slipped
by in the usual well-oiled manner leaving no trace anywhere but on the calendar, came to creak for Matty like a rusty hinge. Mrs Sweet’s widowed sister came from Perth to spend the Christmas break and the New Year and brought her daughter. Sight of the girl with her fair hair and a skin to match sent Matty walking the road again until the small hours and it turned his eyes to the sky as if he might find some help there. Then lo! high in the sky he saw a familiar constellation. It was Orion the hunter, glittering, but with his dagger bursting fiery up. Matty’s cry stirred the birds awake like a false dawn; and in the silence after they had settled again he understood the roundness of the earth and the terror of things hung in emptiness, the sun moving the witchway, the moon on its head; and when he added in the ease with which people lived in the midst of majesty and terror then the rusty hinge creaked round and the question which went with him always, changed and came clearer.

Not—who am I?

“
What
am I.”

There on the open road in the small hours at New Year a few miles from the city of Melbourne he asked it aloud and stayed for an answer. It was silly, of course, like so much that he did. There was no one awake and up for miles; and when at last he turned away from the spot where he had cried out and then asked his question, though the sun was already lightening the hills on the horizon he still had no answer.

So the winter and the summer and the spring and the autumn were the second year only there wasn’t any winter, not really, and not much spring. It was the time when the question seemed to get warmer and warmer under the surface of his mind and his feelings, and then hotter and hotter until he dreamed it night after night. Three nights running he dreamed that Mr Pedigree repeated his awful words and then asked for help. Only Matty was dumb three nights running, struggling under the bedsheet and in his mouth trying to explain—
How
can
I
help
until
I
know
what
I am?

After that, when he woke up he found that saying his portion aloud was not the thing to do. It was bad enough having to talk or listen to talk when you had the question there all the time; and because he could not answer the question or know what it meant or how to ask it, certain consequences began to come clear in much
the way that the question itself had creaked into a new form. He saw that he must move; and he even had a time of wondering if this might not be the real reason why people moved, or wandered the way Abraham did. Certainly there was desert enough to hand if you drove a few miles, but whether consciously or not, no sooner did Matty understand that he must move, than he saw the necessity of moving
north
to where the fiery jet of Orion’s dagger might lie at least more level. A man who moves because he cannot stand still needs a very small impulse to settle his direction. All the same he spent so much time hung up in the sheer impossibility of understanding anything that he had broken into his fourth Australian year before he did what he thought of as shaking the dust of Melbourne from his feet. Because he could not tell, really, why he went, nor what he hoped to find, he spent much time making small arrangements for simplifying life. With some of the wages he so seldom spent he bought a very small, very cheap and hence very old car. He had his Bible between its wooden covers, spare pants, spare shirt, shaving gear for the right-hand side of his face, a sleeping-bag and a spare sock. This was his most brilliant rationalization and he proposed to change one sock a day. Mr Sweet gave him some extra money and what used to be called a “character” which said he was hard-working, scrupulously honest and absolutely truthful. It is some indication of how unattractive these characteristics are when unsupported by anything else, that after Mrs Sweet had said goodbye to him she went into the kitchen and danced a few steps in sheer relief.