Riders in the Chariot (35 page)

Nor had it occurred to him to interrupt his worship. Never before, it seemed, as he stood exposed to the gentle morning, was he carried deeper into the bosom of his God.

Afterwards, when he went outside, he found a loaf of bread, recently risen, still warm and floury, that the woman must have baked, and wrapped in a cloth, and left lying on the edge of the veranda.

Mrs Godbold did not dare immediately to come again, but in the afternoon six girls appeared, of various sizes, some walking with a first appearance of grace, some struggling, one carried. There was a puppy, too, wearing a collar which could have been a piece of salvaged harness. As the children approached, they had been indulging in argument and giggles, Himmelfarb suspected, for some of the younger girls appeared mysteriously congested, and the eldest, who had reached the age where shame is easily roused, was rather primly disapproving.

It could have been the middle child who presented the Jew with a bunch of green.

"Silly thing!" hissed the eldest.

Then they all waited, silent, but explosive.

"For me?" asked the Jew. "That is kind. What is it?"

"Cow-itch," replied the child who had made the presentation.

Then, with the exception of the eldest, who began to blush and slap, all burst. The baby hid her face.

"T'is-urn't! It's cobblers'-pegs!" shrieked one.

"It's whatever you want it to be," shouted the official donor. "Lay off, Else! You kill me! Why do you always pick on me?"

"Silly old weeds!"

There were times when Else could hate her sisters.

"I am honoured and touched by your recognition," Himmelfarb replied truthfully.

"Next time we'll bring flowers," yelled a small and rather runny girl.

"Where from?" shouted another.

"We'll steal 'em over some fence."

"Grace-ie!" moaned the unhappy Else.

"We ain't got a garden at home," somebody explained.

"Mum's too busy."

"And Dad's too drunk."

"When he's there."

Else had begun to cry a little, but said, very quick and determined, "Me mother said if you have any things for the wash to give them to us she will do them early and return tomorrow afternoon if it don't rain and probably it won't."

She was a slender girl, whose hair could not be relied on to stay where it had been so recently put.

In the circumstances, Himmelfarb could only go to fetch his dirty linen, and while he rummaged, the Godbold children began a kind of ritual dance, forging chains of girls round the rotten veranda-posts, shoving one another by force into fresh extravagancies of position, shouting, of course, always, and laughing. Only Else stood apart, opening seed-pods, examining leaves and secrets. Once she threw up her head, on its long and slender neck, and looked between the bushes at a face she could almost visualize. Once Maudie, of the cow-itch, paused in the frenzy of the dance, and stuck out her tongue at the eldest sister.

"Soppy cow!" Maudie shrieked.

"Luv-a luv-a luv-a, Who's a lovesick plover?"

chanted Kate.

Which was so unjust, because untrue. Else Godbold bit her lips. She was not in love, but would have liked to be.

When, at last, Himmelfarb produced the bundle of clothes, and his visitors had departed, the air remained turbulent. Physical forms, when they have existed with any intensity, leave their imprint for a little on the surroundings they have relinquished. So the golden chains continued to unwind, the golden circles to revolve, the dust of secrecy to settle. Himmelfarb was glad even for his wilting bunch of lush, yellow-green weeds.

It did seem as though goodness had been sown around the brown house below the post-office, and might grow, provided the forces of evil did not stamp it flat. The Godbold children would come, in twos or threes,
en masse
_, but never singly; whether by instinct, upbringing, or agreement, was never made clear. Yet, the mother would allow herself the luxury of an unaccompanied visit to her neighbour, as if, perhaps, nothing worse could befall one of her experience. Or, it could have been, she enjoyed protection.

She had come on such a visit the evening Mrs Flack and her familiar, Mrs Jolley, were passing judgment from the blackberry bush. She had helped dress her neighbour's improving hand, very competently, binding it up with a rag she had washed so clean, it was positively stiff. She had conducted a consoling conversation on several small subjects, including that of laundry soap.

"During the war," she said, with that dreaminess for past events, "I would boil the soap up myself. In big tins. And cut it into bars."

How Himmelfarb immediately became convinced of the importance and virtues of yellow soap, really did not puzzle him.

"You know," he could even joke, "we Jews are suspicious of such crude soap since we were rendered down."

But Mrs Godbold did not seem to hear, or the matter to which he referred was too distant and improbable to grasp. It could have been, within her scheme, that evil was only evil when she bore the brunt of it herself; she alone must, and would deflect, receiving the fist, if necessary, between the eyes. He rather sensed this, but could not accuse her innocence. Besides, he suspected it of being a vice common to Christians.

They had come out by then onto the front veranda, and were suddenly faced with assault by the setting sun. Digging in their heels, so to speak, to resist, they frowned and laughed.

"Tonight," she mentioned, "we are having corned breast of mutton. It is what my husband likes best. He will be home tonight," she said.

And made a little noise as though to apologize for some untidiness of life.

"I cannot imagine your husband," he had to confess. "You do not speak about him."

"Oh," she laughed, after a pause. "He is dark. Tom was good-looking. He is jack-of-all-trades, I suppose you might say. He was an iceman when we met."

The two people, standing on the front steps, were helpless in the solid amber of the evening light. The woman had perhaps reached that point where the obsessed are wholly their obsession.

"Tom," she said, managing the thick words, "I must tell you, although I do not like to, sir--our business is not yours--well, Tom, I must admit, has never been saved."

So that the Jew remembered, in a cold gust, the several frontiers he had almost failed to cross.

"Of course," she said, wetting her lips against difficulties to come, "I will not let him down. I am myself only on sufferance." Then she added, more for her own consolation: "It could be that some are forgiven for something we ourselves have forgotten."

But continued to search with her inward eye for that most elusive needle of salvation.

Until the Jew, whose own future was still obscure, deliberately brought her back.

"At least, Mrs Godbold," he suggested, "you have possibly saved my left hand by your great kindness and attention."

She had to laugh. They both did. So complete was their momentary liberation, something of their simple joy shot up glistening out of them, to the complete bafflement of those who were watching from behind the blackberry bush.

Mrs Jolley saw her friend Mrs Flack, as they had expected, that Sunday after church, but such occasions are never for confidences, nor is it possible, desirable, after a service, to peel right down to the last and most revealing skin of that doubtful onion--truth. So the friends chose to wait.

It was not until several days later that Mrs Jolley had the opportunity for looking in. If to
look in
_ suggests a casualness that one does not associate with such a delicate operation as the tidying-up of truth, it must be remembered that ladies of refinement go scavenging rather in the manner of crabs--sideways. So Mrs Jolley was wearing her second-best. She was carrying, only carrying her gloves, because there was something accidental about her being there at all. Nor was she made up--not that Mrs Jolley ever made up to the extent of acquiring the patent-leather look--but she had at least licked the end of a lipstick, ice-cream-wise, before setting out.

There she was, then.

Mrs Flack professed to be surprised.

"I only looked in," Mrs Jolley apologized, but smiled.

Mrs Flack closed the kitchen door, and stood across it, in the hall. Mrs Jolley realized there was some reason for doing so.

"Well, now," said Mrs Flack, so dry.

Mrs Jolley smiled, some for friendship, but more for what she did not know was happening beyond the kitchen door.

"Did you have your tea, then?" she had to ask, in the name of conversation.

"You know I never take nothing substantial of an evening," replied the offended Mrs Flack. "My stomach would create on retiring. But I have, I must admit, just finished a weak cup."

"I am sorry if I have come inconvenient." Mrs Jolley smiled. "You have a visit. A relative, perhaps."

"That is nothing," protested Mrs Flack, walking her friend towards the lounge. "A young man has come, who sometimes looks in, and I will give him a bite of tea. Young people are casual about their insides."

"I dare say you have known him since he was a kiddy," Mrs Jolley assisted.

"That is correct. Since a kiddy," Mrs Flack replied. "As a matter of fact, he is my nephew."

By this time they were in the lounge, seated on the
petty point
_, beside the window. Today Mrs Jolley failed to notice the two plaster pixies, normally inescapable, and of which their owner was so very proud.

"Ah," said Mrs Jolley, climbing stairs, as it were, scuttling down the corridors of memory at such a pace, her words could only issue breathless. "A nephew," she said. "I understood, Mrs Flack, seeing how you told, that you was quite without encumbrances."

Then Mrs Flack sat and looked, calmly enough, out of her yellow face, only for rather a long time.

"It must have escaped my mind," she said at last, with equanimity. "It is liable to happen to anyone. Although a nephew," she said, "who is no closer than a nice piece of steak makes him, cannot strickly be called an encumbrance. As I see it, anyway."

Mrs Jolley sympathized.

"It is only a kindness that I sometimes do." Mrs Flack set the seal.

"Of course, you are very kind," Mrs Jolley admitted.

Then they sat, and waited for the furniture to give the cue.

It was Mrs Jolley, finally, who had to ask, "Did you hear any more about, well, You-Know-Who?"

Mrs Flack closed her eyes. Mrs Jolley shivered for fear she had broken an important rule. Mrs Flack began to move her head, from side to side, like a pendulum. Mrs Jolley was reassured. Inwardly, she crouched before the tripod.

"Nothing that you could call Somethink," the pythoness replied. "But the truth will always out."

"People must always pay," chanted Mrs Jolley.

She herself was, of course, an adept, though there were some who would not always recognize it.

"People must pay," repeated Mrs Flack.

And knocked over a little ashtray, which probably no one had ever used, with a transfer of Windsor Castle on it. Windsor Castle broke in half. Mrs Flack would have liked to blame somebody, but was unable to.

Mrs Jolley sucked her teeth, and helped with the pieces.

"It always happens so quick," she said, "and yet, you know it's going to."

"That reminds me," said Mrs Flack. "A dream. I had a dream, Mrs lolley, and your late hubby featured in it."

Mrs Jolley was stunned by the roses on the wall-to-wall.

"Fancy now! Why should you?" she said. "Whatever put it into your head?"

"That is beside the point," said Mrs Flack. "They were carrying out your late hubby on the stretcher. See? I was, it seems--if you will excuse me, Mrs Jolley--you."

Mrs Flack had turned pink, but Mrs Jolley grew quite pale.

"What do you know!" the latter said. "What a lot of nonsense a person dreams!"

"I said: 'Good-bye, Mr Jolley,' I said," said Mrs Flack.

Mrs Jolley pleated her lips.

"He said to me: 'Kiss me, won't you'--then he mentions some name which I forget; 'Tiddles,' was it?--'kiss me before I set out on me Last Journey.' I--or you--replied: 'I will do it voluntary for the first and last time.' He said: 'Who killed with a kiss?' Then they carried him out."

"He was dead before they put him on the stretcher! Died in his chair! Just as I handed him his cup of tea."

"But in the dream. See?"

"What a lot of rot! Killing with a kiss!"

Mrs Flack, who might have been enjoying a view from a mountain, it was so exhilarating, said, "Who will ever decide who has killed who? Men and women are hardly responsible for their actions. We had an example only last week in Montebello Avenue."

Mrs Jolley had grown emotional.

"And did you kiss him?" she asked.

"I don't remember," Mrs Flack replied, and smoothed her skirt.

Mrs Jolley's nose sounded soggily through the room.

"Fancy," she said, "us talking like this, and that nephew of yours only in the kitchen."

Or not even.

For just then the door opened, and no bones about it, there stood a young fellow. It appeared to Mrs Jolley that his exceptionally fine proportions were not concealed by sweatshirt and jeans; he was obviously not used to clothes. Nor was Mrs Jolley to sculpture. She began to sniff, and look at other things.

"Oh," exclaimed Mrs Flack, turning her head, supple now that she had strengthened her position. "How was the steak?"

The young man opened his mouth. If his gums had run to teeth, he would have gone through the pantomime of sucking them to expel the shreds. Instead, he merely ejaculated: "Tough!"--from between two remaining fangs.

Although classical of body, it had to be admitted the young man's head was a disappointment: skin--dry and scabby, wherever it was not drawn too tight and shiny, giving an impression of postage stamps; eyelashes--might have been singed right off; hair--a red stubble, but red. Nor did words come out of his mouth except with ugly difficulty.

"Ahlbeseeinyer!" the young fellow announced.

"Whereyergoin?" asked Mrs Flack, who had apparently succeeded in mastering his language.