She let down her eyelashes then, afraid she might have said too much.
Mrs Poulter, who had faith also in food, used to bring dishes to George Brown. It amused Mother.
“Here is a macaroni pudding, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter might say, lowering the basin for him to look inside. “Nice,” she coaxed. “Nutmeg on the top. You must eat, you know, to keep your strength up.”
It was more than advice. That, too, she tried to turn into a mystery.
“Making a sacrament of food. ‘Take eat’ is what she would like to say,” said Dad, laughing for his own joke at the expense of the Churches and Mrs Poulter.
Waldo frowned, not for any lack of taste or feebleness in his father’s joke, but for the flickering memory of some feebleness in himself the day of his meeting with Leonard Saporta and parting from Her. He still heard the slash of that lawn-mower running itself deliberately against the stones.
And Dad, darkening, began to cough. He could never forgive the Baptist Church. Its chocolate campanile “leaning a bit, but not far enough” stuck in his mind. He couldn’t let it rest.
“It’s a pity you weren’t born a Quaker,” Waldo said. “There would have been less architecture. And you could have left them just the same.”
But Dad didn’t care for other people’s jokes on serious matters.
“There’s too much you boys, reared in the light in an empty country, will never understand. There aren’t any shadows in Australia. Or discipline. Every man jack can do what he likes.”
Because he wanted to believe it, he did believe — if not of himself.
Towards the end he appeared to have repaired the deficiencies of his sons enough to refer to them in the abstract.
“Whatever else,” he once said to Mrs Poulter, “the children are our testament.”
Then, remembering from hints she had dropped, that their visitor might die intestate, he gave her an old raincoat.
“There’s still plenty of wear in it,” he gasped. “Your husband will find it useful.”
The effort tuned up his cough as he limped a little way along the path.
When their father died at last but suddenly, Waldo was determined that the shock would not prevent his enjoying their mother’s company and the secrets she had been waiting to tell. Family matters of an exalted nature had always been stirring in his mind. If he resisted toying with the possibility of his not being his father’s son, it was because a twin brother denied him that luxury. Though Waldo might have been better got, Arthur’s getting and fate could hardly be improved upon. Still, there were certain details of their mother’s breeding, which reserve — and possibly breeding — had prevented her telling, and for which Waldo intended some time in the future to ask. In fact, it didn’t turn out quite like that. His father — of all people Dad — hadn’t altogether let go. There were the paper bags filled with the seed he had left, and which nobody ever thought to take down. The paper bags continued hanging by their necks, rattling the husks and seed inside them whenever a wind blew, and sometimes disagreeably, after dark, coming into dry collision with a living face.
What is more, Mother changed, as though the moral responsibility of protecting a marriage with a man not her social equal had at last been lifted. So she lifted at last the grave structure of her face, roughened red over milky skin. She rearranged the straying grey of her hair, for whom it was difficult to tell.
Not for Waldo, he discovered almost at once.
“Tell me,” she said, “about the book you are writing.”
He could feel the flesh shrivel on his bones.
“What book?” he asked.
Her question, her look had been practically indecent.
“You needn’t tell me,” she said, “if you don’t want to.”
And continued smiling at him in the way of those who know through hearsay or intuition that something is being hushed up.
As he had to live with it, he decided to ignore her indiscretion, while hiding his private papers in another place. No book, certainly. His life was his book, until at some point in age and detachment it wrote itself logically into the words with which his mind and notebooks were encrusted.
In the meantime, his mother smiled at him, and worse still, forgot.
“I can never remember,” she complained, “whether I have paid the rates. At least they won’t cut us off, as I am told can happen to those who go in for telephones and electricity.”
It had been decided years before that neither of these advantages would enrich their lives. Lamplight emphasized the family circle, and they could go across the road to ring for a doctor in the event of sickness, as they had been forced to also in their one experience of death.
In the beginning Waldo had been tempted to remark: The progressive spirit surely doesn’t eschew the telephone. (He was fond of “eschew”.) But on thinking it over, he did not exactly dread, he had doubts about the inquisition the telephone might have subjected him to. So he kept quiet.
“To return to the rates,” Mother harped, “now that Dad is gone, you boys — you, Waldo,” she corrected herself, “ought to take them on as one of your responsibilities. You pay for the things, anyway.”
He liked that! And hoped she would forget about it along with other threats.
For so many years she had been saying: “You are men now,” as though she were in doubt.
On the other hand she would fly into passions if they brought her letters from the box.
“You boys must never collect my letters!” Her own commands made her tremble. “That is one small pleasure you must allow me to enjoy. Besides, you might drop a letter somewhere in the rosemary. That wretched, thick stuff! A letter might lie in it unnoticed for years, and disintegrate in the weather.”
But she loved the rosemary when it was not against her. She would crush it with her trembly fingers, and sigh.
“Next week — next week definitely, there will be a letter from Cousin Mollie.”
She was convinced she was psychic, and would have liked to see a ghost, though she did not believe in ghosts on principle. Premonitions were a different matter; they were scientifically acceptable.
When her science let her down, it was agreed that: “Mollie has always been an unreliable correspondent.”
In the absence of letters Mother got considerable pleasure out of prospectuses and catalogues. She collected election circulars, to fold into spills, after studying the photographs of those who had heard the call to office.
She would have liked to take out old family photographs, but misalliance had deterred her from keeping any.
“The faces on my side,” she mentioned, “were too cruel. On his, too mean.”
Waldo couldn’t remember faces. He recollected scents and sensations: of the flowering, steely, soft and prickly perfumes in the dark of wardrobes; of an old woman’s cushiony hands in their mail of rings; of geranium disinfecting with its pink a heraldic urn in which a cat had shat. The chocolate campanile, swooning earthwards from the too green, the too daringly transcendental touch of dusk, often recurred on the screen of his mind. Had he actually experienced, or had he selected out of hearsay, the icy vision of the blue woman about to descend the stairs? In blue, it could only have been his mother, though the diamonds must have choked her principles. For that reason she had “gone over”. But her conversion to sacrificial love and socialism had convinced neither side. The ice-blue ancestral stare, and the little black rats of eyes gnawing at holes in fogged lace, were at least united in chasing her away.