Riders in the Chariot (43 page)

Now, when she had banged the shed door, because that was the only way to shut it, and kicked off her shoes, because she always felt happier without, she went up close to her mother, and said, "Mum, I ought to tell you, I just seen Dad."

Her breath was burning, not to say dramatic.

"Ah," replied the mother, slowly, not altogether rousing herself.

For Mrs Godbold never tired of examining her eldest, and now that the lipstick was all but eaten off, and Else looking warm, yet dewy, the woman saw the hedges rise again in front of her, in which were all the small secret flowers, and bright berries, with over them the loads of blossom, or pretty fruit.

"Yes"--she cleared her throat to continue--"your dad went out not so very long ago."

"And is drunk as sin," hissed Else, "already!"

Because in Godbolds' shed, it would have been silly, everybody knew, to mince matters at all.

Mrs Godbold compressed her nostrils in a certain way she had.

"He was coming from Fixer Jensen's." The messenger refused to relent.

"He will likely be catching the bus," suggested Mrs Godbold. "Your father was not in the best of tempers. He will almost certain make for the city. Oh, dear! And in his work things, too!"

"Not him!" said Else, and now she did hesitate, for one who had learnt that time is not to waste. She did go red, and incline a little, as if she would have touched their mother. "Not him!" she repeated. "Dad," she said, "was making for Khalils'!"

Then Else began quite suddenly to cry.

So natural a noise, it sounded worse, and that such a secretarial young lady should act like any little girl.

Mrs Godbold had to get up, no longer so careful of her ribs.

"To Khalils'," she said. "From Fixer Jensen's."

The youngest of the children understood their father had fallen from a low level to perhaps the very depths of the pit.

And Else heaving and sobbing like that, hot and red, in her business dress. Several others saw fit to join her.

But they did not know how to share her shame.

"Let me see now," said the mother, really rather confused, when she could least afford to be. "You will attend to the mutton, Kate. And don't forget there's cabbage to warm. Else! Else! This house is too small for having the hysterics in. Grace, keep an eye on Baby. Whatever is she doing with that nasty-looking nail?"

Although it was warm, even sultry, Mrs Godbold put on her coat, for decency's sake, and for moral support, her black, better hat.

To everybody, her preparations appeared most awful.

"I am going out now," she announced, "and may be a little while. I want you girls to behave, as you can, I know. Else! Else! You will see to it, won't you, when you have pulled yourself together?"

Else made some sort of sound out of her blurry face.

Before their mother was gone.

Mrs Godbold went up the hill towards the road, along the track which all of them had helped to wear deep. A blunderer by nature, she was fair game for blackberry bushes, but would tear free, to blunder on, because she was meant to get there, by pushing the darkness down if necessary. And dark it was by now. Once she slithered, and the long, green smell told her of cowpats. Once she plunged her foot right up to the ankle in a rusty tin. Empty bottles cannoned off one another, while all the time that soft, yet prickly darkness was flicking in her face the names of Fixer Jensen and Mollie Khalil, with the result that the victim's knees were trembly as the stars.

If she had lived less retired, she might have been less alarmed, but here she had undertaken an expedition to the dark side of the moon. Fixer Jensen was a joke, of course, even amongst those inhabitants sure enough of their own virtue to enjoy a paddle in the shallows of vice. "Better see Fixer," they used to say, and laugh, anywhere around Sarsaparilla, if it was a matter of short-notice booze, or commodities that had disappeared, or some horse that had become a cert almost too late in the day. Fixer could fix anything, after picking his nose for a while, and denying his gifts. Who would not overlook a certain unloveliness of behaviour in one who served the community, and supported the crippled kiddies besides, and bred canaries for love? Yet there were a few humourless blobs and wowsers who failed to appreciate that obliging and, all in all, respectable cheat. Why, they asked, did the law not take steps to ensure that Jensen toed the line? Those persons could only have been ignorant or imbecile as well, for it was commonly known that two councillors, at least, accepted Fixer's services. Moreover, Mrs McFaggott, wife of the constable himself, was dependent on him for a ready bottle, and she, poor soul, without her grog, could not have turned a blind eye to the constable's activities. It was obvious, then, that Fixer Jensen's position was both necessary and legal, and that he would continue to oblige those who found themselves in a hole. Nuns had been seen arriving with ports, and little girls with dolls' prams, at Fixer Jensen's place, while almost any evening, after work, and before wives might claim their rights, the sound of manly voices, twined in jolly, extrovert song, could be heard blurting through the vines which helped to hold that bachelor establishment up.

Most of this Mrs Godbold knew, by hearsay, if not experience, and now visualized a mess of husband, songful and soulful, bitter and generous at once, as ready to lay his head on a bosom as bash it open on a stone. She would have endured all this, and more, if only she could have caught him by the shirt as he stumbled glassy from Fixer Jensen's, but after Else's recent report, Tom had gone frying further fish, of rather a different kind.

Mrs Godbold was almost tripped by her own thoughts at the corner of Alice Avenue, but kept her balance, and went on, turning her wedding-ring round and round, to achieve an assurance which hesitated to develop. She even whimpered a little to herself, something she would never have done by daylight, or in public. Only, in the streets of Sarsaparilla at night, she was less a wife and mother than a humour in a dark hat.

In which state she arrived at Khalils'.

And found, unexpectedly, discretion.

If a piece of the gate did fall off as she opened it, that is always liable to happen, and if the house itself had dissolved, the windows remained an inextinguishable yellow, only partially eclipsed by a variety of materials: crimson plush, check horserug, brown holland, even, it seemed, a pair of old cotton drawers, that the owners had stretched, for privacy like. All was quiet, though, at Khalils'. So that when the visitor knocked, the sound of her knuckles rang out, and she sank a little lower in her shoes.

Slippers approached, however, rather annoyed.

"Waddaya want there?" called a voice through a tear in the screen door.

"I am Mrs Godbold," the darkness answered. "And I have come for my husband. Who must be here."

"Oh," said the voice--it was a woman's. "Mrs Godbold."

Then there was a long pause, in which breathing and mosquitoes were heard, and someone was waiting for someone else to act.

"Mrs Godbold," said the woman at last, through the tear. "Waddaya wanta come 'ere for!"

"I came here for my husband," the visitor persisted.

It was so simple.

But the door was whining and creating.

"No one," said the woman, "never came for their husband. Never."

She was distressed, it seemed, by some infringement of etiquette. She did not know what to do, so the door creaked, and her slippers shifted grittily.

"You are Mrs Khalil?" Mrs Godbold asked.

"Yes," said the woman, after a pause.

The sticky scent of jasmine hung low, touching strangers. Loving cats pressed against the skirt.

"Aohh," protested Mrs Khalil, "whydya wanna go an' do this?"

She could have been a decent sort. She was swinging the door, and her cats were at least fed.

"You better come in," she said, "Mrs Godbold. I dunno watta do with yer. But come in. It's no faulta mine. Nobody never done this ter me before."

Mrs Godbold coughed, because she did not know what to answer, and followed the slippers of her new acquaintance, slit slat slit slat, down a passage, into a yellow light and some confusion.

"There we are, anyways," Mrs Khalil said, and smiled, showing a gold tooth.

Mollie Khalil was not a bad sort at all. If she was Irish, whose fault was that? And such a long way back. There were those at Sarsaparilla who called her a loose woman, and those could have been right. But an honest woman, too. Doing her job like anyone else. Lived
de facto
_ with a Syrian until the bugger shoved off, when she simply turned to, and set up whoring in a quiet way, in a small home behind the fire-station. She was no longer for the men herself, preferring comfort and a glass of gin. Besides, her girls, Lurleen and Janis, were both of an age, and there was a lady would come from Auburn, to help out when necessary.

"We might as well be comfortable," Mrs Khalil now said. "Us women!" She laughed. "Take off your hat, dear, if you feel like it."

But Mrs Godbold did not.

Mrs Khalil was wearing a loose, imaginative gown, in which her flesh swam free, as she moved about what was evidently her kitchen.

She said, "This is my youngest kid, Janis, Mrs Godbold."

She touched her child's rather frizzy hair as if it had been something else, growing on its own.

Janis was having a read of what her mother would have called a Book. She did not look up, but stuck out her jaw, and frowned. She was sitting in her shift. Her bare toes were still wriggly, like a little girl's.

"Siddown, dear," said Mrs Khalil to her visitor, and moved something private from a chair.

In a far corner there was a gentleman still to be explained, "This is Mr Hoggett," she said. "He is waiting."

Mr Hoggett did not know what to say, but made a noise in the region of the singlet which contained his upper part.

Mrs Godbold sat down upon an upright chair. Her errand of love remained somehow imperative, though by now she knew it could not be explained.

Janis was turning the pages of her Book with a thumb which she licked scornfully. She was black, but not so black as not to know what she was worth.

"Ackcherly," said Mrs Khalil, staring dreamy at the vision which represented her younger child, "we was having a sorta discussion when you come around and knocked. I said death is like anythin' else. It is wotcha care to make it, like. It is howya go orff. But Mr Hoggett and Janis still had to voice an opinion."

Mr Hoggett had not bargained for anything of this. He turned his head sideways. He scratched his navel through the singlet.

"Mr Hoggett's wife died," Mrs Khalil said, and smiled a kind of dreamy smile.

" 'Ere! Cut it out!" Mr Hoggett had to protect his rights. "I didn't come 'ere for this. A man can stay at 'ome and listen to the wireless."

He looked around, accusing, and what was most unfair, at Mrs Godbold, who was innocent.

Then the bawd began to turn nasty. She struck several matches, but they broke.

"I toldya, didn't I? I couldn'ta made it plainer. Janis is bespoke. Some men make me wanta reach!"

But she got the cigarette alight at last. She began to breathe up smoke and to move about inside her clothes. Mr Hoggett, who was pretty big, simply sat, in his singlet, expressing himself with his belly. He might have expanded further if Mrs Khalil's kitchen had not filled up already, with dishes, and baskets, and piles of women's underclothes, and cats, and an old gas stove with a glass face and mutton fat inside.

"Excuse us, dear, if business will raise its head," Mrs Khalil apologized to Mrs Godbold.

The latter smiled, because she felt she ought. But the expression did not fit her face. It drifted there, out of someone else's situation. The chair on which she sat was so upright, the flesh itself could not upholster it. Or, at least, she must see to that.

At the same time, there was a great deal she did not understand. It left her looking rather sad.

"I could wait outside," presently she said.

For her intentions, if they had ever formed, had finally grown paralysed.

"Oh dear, no!" protested Mrs Khalil. "The night air does no one any good."

So Mrs Godbold's statue was not moved from off its chair, and just as she was puzzled by her own position, the sculptor's purpose remained obscure to the beholder.

In the kitchen's fearful fug, forms had swelled. For one thing, Mr Hoggett had expended a good deal of emotion. Now, when he suddenly laughed, right the way up his gums, it was perhaps entitlement. He slapped his opulent thigh, and looked across at Janis, and asked, "Havin' a nice read, love?"

"Nao," said Jam's.

She had done her nails some time ago, and the stuff was flaking off. What she read, following it with a finger, was obviously of grave substance.

"There!" she cried. "Mumma, I toldya! Thursday is no good. We are under the influence of Saturn. See?"

She slammed the Book together then.

"Oh, gee!" she said.

She went and threw the window up, so that she let in the moon and a scent of jasmine. A white, sticky stream of night came pouring in, together with a grey cat of great persistence.

"Gee," said Janis, "I wish I could make somethink happen!"

"That is somethink I would never dare wish for, " asserted her mother.

And blew a trumpet of smoke from her nostrils.

In the house behind, voices were laid together in the wooden boxes. They would rasp like sandpaper at times, or lie against one another like kid gloves.

Mrs Godbold listened to the minutes. She held up her chin. In spite of the aggressively electric light, the side of her face closest to the window had been very faintly moon-washed. It was only just visible, one paler splash.

Suddenly she bent down, for something to do, it could have been, and got possession of the smoky cat. She laid it along her cheek, and asked, "What are you after, eh?"

So softly. But it was heard.

Mrs Khalil nearly bust herself. She answered, "Love, I expect. Like anybody else."

And Mrs Godbold had to see that this was true. That was perhaps the dreadful part. Now she really did understand, she thought, almost everything, and only prayed she would not be corrupted by her own knowledge.