And that is why Margaret had acquired the habit of looking down and closing her ears to unpleasantness. She did not hear what Emily and Gladys sang. She would go back to dinner at home, and she did not care, and Father would come in from the garage wearing overalls and make a lot of pleasant jokes. She found it difficult to connect Father in overalls with the things you did not think about and which made Mother bitter, because she had married a Chinaman, Walter Quong. It was too much to unravel, all this. And on the whole she was happy, helping Aunt Amy at the store, or going for a music lesson at Miss Browne’s. Only sometimes, walking home, she felt unhappy. There was a lot inside her that got churned up.
There was a dull, mysterious moan in the telephone wires.
Rodney Halliday no longer ran. He had passed the road that led to Andy Everett’s and Willy Schmidt’s. He felt larger now. He began to whistle. Stooping down, he pulled up his socks and glanced back down the road to see the others straggle along in little groups, preceded by Margaret Quong. He liked being alone. Only sometimes he didn’t, and then he thought about it a bit, and then he preferred to be alone.
He looked from side to side of the road. The air was very sharp. In one of the paddocks a bull was serving a cow. He looked, and he looked away. He remembered the time— he was a good bit younger — when the dogs came into the yard, and his mother went red and shooed them away, and he had cried because she would not let them play. Mother said, later you’ll understand. And later he did. And it made you look sideways at the bull out of the corner of your eye. But of course you understood. A bull and a cow. He stopped at the side of the road and had a proper look. He would have liked to stay there by the fence and see it happen again. He jingled some pennies in his trouser pocket, and a shell he always carried about. But somebody was coming and perhaps they had seen him look. It was Margaret Quong, walking along the side of the road. If Margaret Quong had seen, as she must, then he felt ashamed. But she looked down at the ground.
They both continued to walk along.
He took a look at Margaret, at that funny black hair like a doll’s, and the eyes. He saw that she was almost crying, and that made him embarrassed too, because he didn’t know what to do, or say, or if he should do nothing, or what. But Margaret did not speak. It made him uncomfortable to see her cry.
Margaret, he said.
Yes?
She did not look over from her side of the road.
Look, he said.
What?
She turned her head, biting her cheek inside. She was like that picture in the encyclopaedia.
I’ll give you that, he said.
What is it?
It’s a shell.
They began to walk in the centre of the road. He held the shell in the palm of his hand. It was pink, of curious shape, folding like the bud of a flower with brown spots on the underneath. Margaret put out her finger and touched the shell.
It’s pretty, she said.
When we lived in Sydney, he said, there was a French woman used to come to teach me French. She gave me the shell. She said it came from the bottom of the sea.
Really? said Margaret. How did she know?
I don’t know. That’s what she said.
It’s pretty all the same.
Rodney put it into her hand. Then they walked along a bit. The mud splashed up on Margaret’s stockings. She began to wipe her nose.
Her name was Madame Jacquet, Rodney said.
Margaret looked down at Madame Jacquet’s shell.
When I’m twelve I’m going to go to a proper school, said Rodney. Father says I shall be a boarder. I’ll only come home for the holidays. But now I’m only nine. I’ll have to learn Latin as well as French. Because I’m going to be a doctor. You have to know Latin for the prescriptions, I suppose.
It was good to talk to Margaret Quong, and there was a lot he wanted to tell her, about what he liked and what he didn’t. He wanted her to know. But now they had come to the turn, and she stood waiting to say good-bye.
Thank you for the shell, said Margaret Quong.
That’s all right, he said. It wasn’t much use to me.
She began to walk on, uncertainly, up in the direction of her father’s garage, where a truck had stopped for a fill at the pump. Her black woollen stockings were dotted with yellow mud. He would have to go in to lunch.
Rodney! called Margaret Quong. You can come one evening and see our litter of pups. Only if you want to, she said.
Then she went on up the hill clutching Madame Jacquet’s shell.
7
Somebody leaves you alone in a strange room, in a house you have scarcely been in before, and this is the surest way of feeling detached from all possible sequence of events. You are no longer part of the whole, to which in your saner moments you like to think you belong. You wait in the strange room and this is another life. You try to reconstruct this other life from the objects you see in the room, and it is all on another plane, a little monstrous, and you even think in an undertone in case it should be heard.
Well, Alys Browne was feeling something like this as she waited alone in the doctor’s room. There was no fire, and this intensified the feeling of detachment, making the objects sharper in outline, distinctly part of a life that was not her own. She sat for a bit in a leather chair holding her cut hand in her lap, feeling cold and forgotten, especially the hand, and the chair, there is nothing so calculated to make you feel forgotten as somebody else’s leather chair in a fireless room. Then she got tired of sitting. She walked about. The woman who helped was sorting out linen in the wash-house across the yard. Alys could see her from the window, and a toy cart filled with stones lying in the middle of the yard. But there was not much to see from the window other than this.
So she went and sat in the chair again. It was still a little warm from her body the time before. The air perhaps was a little bit warmer too. And on the mantelpiece there were photographs of two little boys, one of them sitting on the floor with some bricks, looking very absorbed, and the other a few years older, standing with his ears sticking out. The elder boy was Rodney; she knew him by sight, they said good morning or good afternoon whenever they passed in the street, and she liked the way his ears stuck out. Only he was rather pale out of a photograph. And there was Mrs Halliday too, sitting on the doctor’s desk with an air of having only a moment to spare, she must jump up, the photographer mustn’t mind.
She remembered when the Hallidays came, about a year ago. She supposed that she ought to call, but she didn’t call, and she said she would call later on, and then the intention lapsed. Mrs Belper called. She said that the scones were stale, and Mrs Halliday — well, there was no atmosphere in the Hallidays’ home, and Mrs Halliday such a stick, though you could see the poor woman was ill, but you must have atmosphere in a home. By atmosphere Mrs Belper meant dogs, and pokerwork candlesticks, and people dropping in and out.
Mrs Halliday sat nervously in her frame. Alys felt sorry for the doctor’s wife. She began to be more at home crossing her legs in the leather chair, for even a railway waiting-room will slowly fit itself into your scheme if you are forced to stay in it long enough. She looked at the black rug with the hole that something had burnt, falling out of the fire, or a cigarette. There were pipes on the mantelpiece. There were books, medical books, Urn Burial, a volume of poems by Donne, and a book on Kant. She had read about Kant. She was rather impressed. And perhaps the doctor would have read Turgeniev, or Anna Karenina. But you did not talk about things like that, you came for something out of the dispensary, and then you went away again, because Dr Halliday did not encourage you to talk. He said good morning in the street. Otherwise you did not exist. His eyes were very cold. They were blue, she thought, or grey, she could not be sure. He was going grey. And now they were starting to have lunch, she could hear the plates, but the doctor had not come, or had come, and Mrs Halliday…