Riders in the Chariot (52 page)

It was a limpid morning, in which smoke ascended, and Mrs Pask had discovered a reason for paying a call. As he followed the rector between the rows of bolting lettuces, Alf Dubbo was puzzled to feel that perhaps he was the one who led, for Mr Calderon had turned so very spongy and dependent. The boy walked noticeably well. Upright. He appeared to have grown, too. He was suddenly a young man in whom the scars had healed, of the wounds they had made in his flesh. His nostrils awaited experience.

At one point, at a bend in the path, the rector turned, and seemed in particular need of the youth's attention and understanding.

"One summer, before we came to this country," he said, "I made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon--the home of the Bard--with my brother-in-law, Arthur Pask. It was very delightful. We had both already decided to take orders, although Arthur had not yet been directed to follow a different path. We slept in a shed, in a tea-garden. We would come in after the plays, and talk," he said, "half the night. All that week it was moonlight, I remember. Poor Arthur, you know, was a god. That is, as well as being an extremely saintly man, he was most personable."

The young blackfellow trod warily, stiffly, through the narrative, and kicked aside the sickly stalks of one or two uprooted cabbages. He was not so much hearing as seeing, and was not altogether convinced by the figure of the second parson, whom moonlight made whiter. He remembered the wooden figure of the god in the chariot, in the French painting. Quite lifeless. Either he could not understand, or gods were perhaps dummies in men's imaginations.

When, somewhat to Alf Dubbo's surprise, Mr Calderon took him by the hand, the better to lead him, it seemed, along paths they already knew, under the clothesline, with its loops of heavy-hanging wet linen, and past the ungovernable bushes of lemon-scented geranium. Yet, although the two figures were joined together at the hand, and were crowding through the doorway abreast, bumping at the doorposts with their awkward formation, as if to widen the hole, each could only feel that the other was probably entering a different tunnel.

Mr Calderon had turned a bluish, milky white, and would have liked to appear pitiful, to justify his being led.

"I am leaning on you," he suggested, "when you are the one who must need support and guidance. If only on account of your age." Then he gave a kind of gasp. "Sometimes I wonder," he added, "what will become of me."

"What, are you sick?" asked the boy, in a tone of brutal indifference.

Because his teeth were almost chattering, he had to aim his words like stones.

"Not exactly," Mr Calderon replied, and added, "That is, there are some to whom I would not admit it. Their efforts to sympathize would be too painful to witness."

He continued to act rather sick, or old, because by now the boy was learning to guide him along the passages. It was becoming gently agreeable.

But the boy himself was behaving automatically. Guiding under guidance, he was no longer the initiated youth. There were pockets of puppy-fat concealed about his body, and his mind shivered behind the veil which still separated him from life. On normal occasions, delivering a message, or returning a pair of cleaned shoes, he would not have lingered in the rector's room; its personal mystery was too much for him. Now, on arrival at their destination, his movements were ticking painfully.

Halted on the carpet from which the pattern had disappeared, Mr Calderon said formally, and somehow differently, "Thank you, dear fellow. I am grateful to you in my infirmity."

In which neither of them believed. But Mr Calderon was pleased to have invented it.

Then, again surprisingly, he opened Alf Dubbo's shirt, and put in his hand.

"It is warmth for which one craves," he explained, older and more trembly than before.

The boy feared his heart, which was leaping like a river fish, might be scooped up and held by that cold hand.

But he did not resist physically.

At no time in his life was Alf Dubbo able to resist what must happen. He had, at least, to let it begin, for he was hypnotized by the many mysteries which his instinct sensed.

Mr Calderon was mopping his forehead.

"Are you charitable?" he asked. "Or just another human being?"

Alf did not know, so he only grunted.

As his guardian seemed to ordain it, they were pretty soon divesting themselves of anything that might possibly serve as a refuge for their personalities. The parson's pace became reckless, with the boy following suit, because it would have been worse to have got left behind. They were revolving in the slightly shabby room, their ridiculous shirt-tails flapping like wings. Their shoes were thunderous in coming off. Mr Calderon stubbed his toe on one of the castors of the bedstead, but it was not the moment at which to complain. Time was too short. The past, the future, the appearances of things, his faith, even his desire, could have been escaping from him. Certainly, after the whirlwind of preparation, he was left with his nakedness, always so foolish, and rather bent at the knee. But decided to embrace his intention.

It was a warm-cold morning in autumn. It was a morning devoted to regret rather than fulfilment. They lay together on the honeycomb quilt. Pleasure was brief, fearful, and only grudgingly recognized. Very soon the boy was immersed in the surge of words with which his lover lamented his own downfall.

In between, Mr Calderon revived his trance of touch.

"A kind of dark metal," he pondered, and would have liked to remember poetry, even to have composed some of his own, to write with his finger. "But metal does not feel." So they returned perpetually to where they had left off. "That is what makes it desirable."

Metal submitted, however. They lay upon the lumpy bed of words. From under his eyelashes. the boy was fascinated for always by a mound of grey stomach.

Mr Calderon resumed quoting from the narrative of his life, and Alf Dubbo snoozed.

When he awoke, his guardian was sneezing, overtaken by catarrh, if not an honest-to-God cold.

"We should put our things on," he announced irritably, and then: "I wonder what you will think of me, Alf."

The boy, who had been dreaming happily, looked contented, all considered. But the man was too obsessed to notice. Groping for his trousers, for his handkerchief, from where he lay, keys, money fell in an ominous cascade.

"How I must appear to you," he persisted.

The boy began to laugh, showing his broad teeth.

"Well?" asked the man.

Suspicious.

"How you look?"

The boy was practically bound with laughter. Then, with an expression which was rather sheepish, but which might have turned to malice if he had been dealing with an equal, he reached out, and seized a handful of the grey belly, and twisted it round, tight, as if it had been stuff.

"Hhehhyyy?"

Mr Calderon whinged. He did not like the turn affairs had taken. But made himself laugh a little.

"You look to me"--the boy laughed--"like you was made out of old wichetty grubs."

And twisted the flesh tighter in support.

It was a situation which Mr Calderon might have handled badly, if the door had not opened and introduced his sister Mrs Pask.

Emily Pask was standing there. On two legs. That was the general impression. In a purple hat.

Everybody was looking. Nobody was in any way assisted. They had, in fact, stuck.

Until Mrs Pask's throat began to thaw. The blood was again moving in her, till it matched her hat. Her eyes were sewn to her face, otherwise they might have fallen, and even so, despite the stitches, almost did.

"You boy!" She began to try her tongue. "You! You devil! What have you done to my brother?"

She began to totter at a chair. And fell upon it without mercy.

"I never allowed myself to suspect," she rasped. "But knew. Something. Oh, you devil! Sooner or later."

The others remained fastened to that bed, the honeycomb pattern eating into their buttocks.

In spite of the shock, Alf Dubbo realized pretty soon that he must dress himself. It took a long time, but was eventually accomplished.

The Reverend Timothy Calderon had resorted to tears, and to calling on his sister's name.

In the blur of white and purple, Alf Dubbo left the room. "AlfwheraryouAlf," called Mrs Pask's cocky. The boy had thought to knot his shoelaces together, and to hang his shoes round his neck. A practical move, it enabled him to run more easily from the township of Numburra, which he never saw again.

As he wandered through paddocks and along roads, the fugitive did not reflect on the injustice of Mrs Pask's accusation, sensing with her that all which had happened had to happen, sooner or later. He was only glad to have endured it, and to be able to remember some little spasms of pleasure in a waste of words and bewilderment. Sensual pleasure, certainly, because his arms were strong, and his skin was smooth, and the appeal had been made just then. But he did also recall his protector in many harmless attitudes, and would slow up on his journey, and kick at a stone, or pull a leaf, as he estimated the extent and kind of loss. He felt the wind on him. The absence of his guardian was not unlike that caused by the theft of some old woolly, hitherto undervalued garment snatched from an unsuspecting back on a frosty morning. Less material, more subtly missed, because he would not have admitted, were those equally woolly precepts, of God in cloud and God in man, which the rector had attempted to wind round a mind that found them strange, suffocating, superfluous. Although he had adopted a few of these, in secret, for expediency's sake, and had got into the habit of protecting himself from terrors by wrapping his thoughts in them, beside some waterhole at night.

What became of the rector and his sister, Alf Dubbo often wondered, without ever finding out. Their end could have been an awful one. Chained together in a hell of common knowledge, they might have lingered for a little, torturing each other with the dreadful secret and the brother's insufficient faith. Actually, what happened was this: When Mr Calderon had snivelled a while, as he was, on the bed, for even if he had clothed himself it could not have hidden his nakedness, and Mrs Pask had grieved, and brooded, and subsided, the rector, it must be said, did affirm, "As a Christian of a kind, Emily, and I expect even you will grant there are all kinds, I must protest that poor Alf Dubbo was not to blame."

Mrs Pask creaked, or the springs of the overgoaded chair.

"To blame?" she asked, dreamily.

"For what has happened," her brother replied. "You must understand, in all justice, that I was to blame." He began to snivel again.

"And will do penance for it ever after."

"To blame?" repeated Mrs Pask. "For what has happened?"--dreamier still.

Mr Calderon's mouth opened.

But Mrs Pask got up.

"I do not know, Timothy," she said, "what you are referring to."

And looked right at him, as though he had been clothed in one of his two flannel suits, gunmetal tones, or the blue serge, from Anthony Hordern's.

"I am going to warm up the Cornish pasty," she announced. "You must excuse me," she said, "if dinner is skimpy. I am feeling off colour. Oh, there will be the bottled plums, of course, for anyone who has the appetite."

If his sister had not been a good woman, he might have doubted her morality. As it was, he accepted the state of affairs, and counted his money, which had fallen on the floor.

They continued to live together. Mr Calderon was even humbler than before, lighting a candle, offering a text, holding a chalice at eye level. It might have been pitiful, if anyone had ever noticed, how his faith flickered on its bed of ashes in the painful process of rekindling. There was so much to accomplish in such a short time. He was suffering, his eyes suggested, from something secret and internal, as he placed the wafer, shielded the chalice, and wiped the rim with the linen napkin so beautifully laundered by his sister.

Mrs Pask was leading a seemingly tranquil life.

Only once, she had remarked, over her devilled toast, at tea, "I often wonder what that boy intended to convey through those horrible, horrible obscenities he painted on his birthday with poor Arthur's oils."

But quickly mastered her wind, while her brother composed a little mound out of some grains of scattered salt.

Mrs Pask no longer took her easel to dash off a sunset or a gumtree. She had thrown herself into works, and was respected by almost every member of the Mothers' Union and the Ladies' Guild.

After travelling several weeks, Alf Dubbo reached the town of Mungindribble. Privation and the fear of capture had made him thinner. But he grew confident by degrees. As the weeks passed, time and his last memories of Mr Calderon and Mrs Pask persuaded him that he would be better lost to them. Still, he tended to avoid towns, and to rely on farmers' sentimental wives for crusts. True to his policy, he skirted round Mungindribble. If he had entered it, he might have been shocked to find himself back at Numburra. Except that there were two additional banks. There was more money at Mungindribble.

And its streets were hotter, dustier, its river drier. Wandering along the bank of the river, which on the outskirts of most towns is the lifestream of all outcasts, goats, and aboriginals, Alf could not help feel moved as he remembered the generous waters of Numburra, and the clumps of orange bamboos in which the gins waited at dusk. But at Mungindribble he did come at last to the rubbish dump, filled with objects of use and wonder, including the insides of an old clock, which he thought he might like to keep. He picked about there for a bit. Until he noticed on the edge of the scrub a humpy made of tin, bark, bag, and anything else available, with a woman standing in the doorway, holding up the fringe of a curtain made from a fancier kind of hessian.

The woman appeared to be beckoning.

When he got closer, he called, "Waddaya want?"

"You!" she answered. "A woman could blow 'er head off yellin' at some silly-lookin' buggers. Come on over, and 'ave a yarn."

He went, although his instinct warned him.