You knew you would die, and you did not know, it was like that. The smoke wreathed up against a star. You stopped breathing because it suddenly caught you, death. You knew what it meant in the yard, in the dark. You wanted to run away.
Rodney Halliday stood still. This moment when death assumes a personal bearing, no longer the Worthington girls in black, is a moment of significance. It was perhaps the first significant moment in Rodney Halliday’s life. Over against his fear, a sense of importance. Fixed upon this sheet of black, like a star, in his own distinct circumference, his life, till the intervention of death. He was himself. Oliver, Hilda, and George, the idea of corporate safety, were no longer this, were distinct too. The safety line is broken by the consciousness of death.
Growing up then was like this. You were ten. The moments crept, with a scent of apples at eleven o’clock, was always another eleven o’clock, or the afternoon asleep in the sun, incident loomed large in the sun detached from its shadow, there was no skirting round this forest of incident and its solid, waiting forms. This before you knew. Then time began to race down an avenue cold with stars. You wanted to put up your hands. He wanted to go and tell Margaret Quong, tell her what. Because this was something you could not tell. It happened. You knew it. That was all. Like a scent or sound, you could not tell. Or Mother crying in her room, you went in, you went away, knowing. And She said stay, waiting on the steps of the verandah with cool hands. Father stood in a corner of the dining-room, where is Mother, Rodney, he said. You looked away. Went to the window and knocked out his pipe upon the sill. You looked away. Mother closed her door when you went past, closing her door on what you knew was not changing her dress. He took it up to the post to send to Mrs Worthington, the parcel post, because Mrs Worthington is poor, she said, and an old dress, is dead. She was wearing mauve. A car came up the road out of the direction of Moorang, he could see its lights, with the unimportance of lights on a passing car. I shall grow up, I shall go to Sydney, he felt, I shall do things, I don’t know what, until. The night was very large and black. Father stooped in the dispensary, his shadow stooped, would have said, what are you doing, Rodney, if he knew, but you did not know what to say to Father, or words just came out. Father sometimes made you afraid. Father would die, the shadow on the window wiped out.
Rodney went inside. He did not know what he would do. He wanted to go to the dispensary and say, Father, I want to sit in here for a while. He felt his way along the passage to the door. He stood at the door and waited. He did not know what he would do.
Oliver opened the door and stood there looking out.
Is that you, Rodney? he said. I thought you were in bed.
No, he said. Not yet.
They stood there looking at each other, or not looking. Rodney wondered how he could say what after all you couldn’t say.
It’s late, said Father. You ought to be.
Yes, he said.
Standing there in the passage, could not stay, or stand, because Father would not understand.
Yes, he said. I thought I’d say good-night.
Father’s kiss was rough, like tweed, the suit you touched and wanted to stay, say you knew out there in the yard. But tweed was no longer protection after this. You went down the passage biting your lip, it was a long way from the lamplight and Father closing the door.
Oliver went into the middle of the room. He stood with his head bent, wondered, what was I doing before, he asked. The drawers were open on his activity, the papers scattered, and the diary with the pages torn, he held the pages of a diary in his hand. Then Rodney came to the door. Good night, Father, he said. Tearing pages from a diary, the lamp caught the leaves, grew brown, months, weeks, coiling into smoke, this was the past, as if contained in the pages of a diary and easily destroyed. Then Rodney came to the door. Rodney was also the past. This is all going, Oliver said. He tore up a bundle of papers. He slammed a drawer. It went to savagely, with half its contents hanging out. The way you clung on to papers for no reason, or old emotions, cluttered yourself up with these and had not the courage to clear them out. Well, he said, this is the clearance now, now I can start to breathe, now I am standing before the future, there is no reason for the past. Rodney is also the past. There is no reason, he said. There is no reason. His face halted in the glass. If you could see your conscience, he wondered, what form would it take? That smooth, stethoscopic Jesuit. He began to laugh. He found himself thinking of broad beans.
Round the walls the photographs, their expressions growing mat and yellow underneath the glass, stared with their customary stare, the always-with-you look of old family photographs. This was one evening in many, except for the litter on the floor and a certain emotional disorder perhaps. It might have happened any time, on any evening just as this, packing the bag before a case and going out. He would only take a bag. He didn’t want anything else, nothing connected with leaves lying brown against the fender, these belonged to somebody else. He was washing his hands at the basin. He saw hands fold round each other, unfold. It was like this. The hands. He saw the water, the soap, and the towel hanging on the rail. Then his hands fumbled in the towel, he must go, he felt, at once, quickly. The photographs stared down with a sort of faded surprise. He was moving in jerks, must go, must get outside before the mechanism broke. The spring strained that controlled the mechanical washing of hands.
In the hall he tore the tab of his overcoat. The house was quiet. Looked down stupidly at the coat, the torn tab, at Hilda saying, Oliver, you can’t go about with your clothes like that, would say that people would wonder how, would Hilda look a needle say. Because Hilda was conscience, that dark phrase in undertone when Rodney came to the door, recurred, till you wanted to put your head on your hand, lean forward with the weight and pray for the strings to lift up the head, it was by Sibelius, Birkett said, you waited for the strings, for some clarity of tone, not this phrase that ebbed, your whole being flowed backwards into the past, into the throats and the far baying of the horns. Then you saw the programme creak against the floorboards, escape in one flutter, when you had not the power, or the careless sweep of paper, even when the chairs moved, were still there, locked in a past moment that withstood hands and the flowers. But this was music, was ten years that the mind dragged back. This, he said, is dead. Heavy with his coat he opened the door, saw the stars, there was frost upon the step. It was more than opening the door. He did not think back. The frost was brittle underfoot.
Rodney, lying in bed, heard Oliver go. It was like any other night, a case, and Father going out, you heard the car start from the garage after the scrape of the garage door. Mother moved in her room and coughed. But he had to sit up in bed, he had to sit up in the dark, as if it would do any good, because sitting up was dark. Somewhere water dripped on zinc. It was no dream this, that Mother’s hand smoothed sitting on the bed when you woke up, whether Father took the car or not, was still a long way off. He had never felt like this. Slipping away, slipping away, the foot met more than darkness drawn from the sheets as it moved, the blur burr of a car, then breath.