Riders in the Chariot (33 page)

Harry Rosetree was very proud of his own setting. Sundays he would stand outside his apricot, texture-brick home, amongst all the advanced shrubs he had planted, the labels still round them so as you could read the fancy names if a neighbour should inquire. Who wouldn't feel satisfied? And with the Ford Customline, one of the first imported since the war? Then there were the kids. He was an indulgent father, but had every reason to be proud of Steve and Rosie, who learned so much so fast: they had learnt to speak worse Australian than any of the Australian kids, they had learnt to crave for ice cream, and potato chips and could shoot tomato sauce out of the bottle even when the old black sauce was blocking the hole. So the admiration oozed out of Harry Rosetree, and for Mrs Rosetree too, who had learnt more than anyone.

With greater authority, Mrs Rosetree could say: that is not Australian. She had a kind of gift for assimilation. Better than anyone she had learnt the language. She spoke it with a copper edge; the words fell out of her like old pennies. Of course it was really Shirl Rosetree who owned the texture-brick home, the streamlined glass car, the advanced shrubs, the grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes, the walnut-veneer radiogram, the washing-machine, and the Mixmaster. Everybody knew that, because when she asked the neighbours in to morning tea and scones, she would refer to:
my
_ home,
my
_ children,
my
_ Pord Customline. There was a fur coat, too, still only one, but she was out to get a second while the going was good.

Who could blame her? Shirl Rosetree had been forced to move on more than once. Put it into gold, she would have said, normally; you can hide that. And had bought the little gold Cross, before leaving, in the Rotenturmstrasse, which she wore still. Whenever she got excited it bumped about and hit her breasts, but it was comforting to wear a Cross. Except. Marge Pendlebury had said early on, "I would never ever of suspected you Rosetrees of being tykes. Only the civil servants are Roman Catholics here, and the politicians, if they are anything at all." Shirl's ears stood up straight for what she had still to assimilate. Marge said, "Arch and me are Methoes, except we don't go; life is too short."

Then the little Cross from the Rotenturmstrasse bumped less gaily on Shirl's breasts.

She said, "Do you know what, Harry? Arch and Marge are Methoes."

"So what?" asked her husband.

"That is what people are, it seems."

He patted her. She was a plumpy thing, but not always comfortable. Her frown would get black.

She could shout, "_Um Gottes Willen, du Trottel, du Wasserkopf! Muss ich immer Sechel für zwei haben__?"

But would grow complaisant, while refusing to let him mess her perm.

"There is all the rest," she insisted.

And at times Rosetrees would cling together with almost fearful passion. There in the dark of their texture-brick shell, surrounded by the mechanical objects of value, Shirl and Harry Rosetree were changed mercilessly back into Shulamith and Haïm Rosenbaum. _Oÿ-yoÿ__, how brutally the Westminster chimes resounded then in the hall. A mouse could have severed the lifeline with one Lilliputian snap. While the seekers continued to lunge together along the dunes of darkness, arriving nowhere, except into the past, and would excuse themselves in favour of sleep, that other deceiver. For Haïm would again be peddling
Eisenwaren
_, and as frequently compelled to take to his heels through the villages of sleep; and Shulamith, for all the dreamy validity of her little Cross, would suffer her grandmother, that gaunt, yellow woman, to call her home down the potholed street, announcing that the stars were out, and the Bride had already come.

If daylight had not licked quickly into shape, this kind of nighttime persecution might have become unbearable. But morning arrived in Paradise East with a clatter of Venetian blinds. And there stood the classy homes in their entirety of brick. There were the rotary clotheslines, and the galvanized garbage-bins.

By daylight Rosenbaums would sometimes even dare indulge a nostalgia for
Beinfleisch
_, say,
mit Krensosse
_. They would stuff it in, as though it might be taken from them. Their lips grew shiny from the fat meat, their cheeks tumid from an excess of
Nockerl
_.

Then Haïm Rosenbaum might ask, "Why you don't eat your meat, Steve?"

"Mum said it was gunna be chops."

"Shoot some of this tomato sauce onto the
Beinfleisch
_. Then you can pretend it is chops," advised the father.

But Steve Rosetree hated deviation.

"Who wants bloody foreign food!"

"I will not have you swear, Steve!" said the mother, with pride.

She loved to sit after
Beinfleisch
_, and pick out the last splinters, with a perfect, crimson fingernail. And dwell on past pleasures.

Once Shirl Rosetree thought to inquire, "What about that old Jew, Harry, you told us about, down at the factory?"

"What about this old Jew?"

"What is he up to?"

"For Chrisake! Who am I to know what is up to every no-hope Jew that comes to the country?"

"But this one seemed, well, sort of educated, from what you said."

"He talks good. He talks so good nobody can understand."

Harry Rosetree had to belch.

"You can smell the Orthodox," he said, "on some Jews."

It made his wife laugh.

"Times change, eh? When you have to
smell
_ the Orthodox!"

But she would have loved still to watch the hands lighting the Chanukah candles. The Scrolls themselves were not more closely written than the faces of some old waxen Jews.

"Times change all right," her husband agreed. "But I do not understand why am I to keep a day-book of the doings of every Jew that comes!"

"Let it pass!" his wife said. She manipulated her jaws to release a noise, half yawn, half laughter, punctuated by a gold tooth. But came out with a remark she immediately regretted: "You can't get away from it, Harry, the blood draws you."

"The blood draws, the blood will run!" her husband said, through ugly mouth. "Have we seen, and not learnt?"

"What blood?" asked the little girl.

There were often things in her parents' conversation that made her tingle with suspicion.

"Nothing, dear," said the mother. "Mum and Dad were having a discussion."

"At the convent," Rosie Rosetree said, "there is a statue of our Saviour, and the blood looks like it's still wet." She made her mouth into the little funnel through which she would allow commendable sentiments to escape. "It was that real, it made me cry at Easter, and the nuns had to comfort me. Gee, the nuns are lovely. I'm gunna be a nun, Mum. I'm gunna be a saint, and have visions of roses and things."

"There, you see, Shirl, Rosie has the right ideas." The father smiled. "And as she is her old dad's sensible girl, her visions will become more realistic. No one ever got far on the smell of roses."

Shirl Rosetree sighed. She frowned. It was true, of course. But the truth was always only half the truth. It was that that made her act sort of _nervös__. And all these family situations, as breakable as Bakelite. Sometimes she was afraid she might be starting a heart, and would have liked to consult a good European doctor, only they all rooked you so. Or priest. Only you always came away knowing you had not quite told. And, in any case, what could a priest know to tell? Nothing. She never came away from the confessional without she had the heartburn. Some old smelly man in a box.

Now she had got the heartburn real bad. It was after all that
Beinfleisch
_, with the good
Krensosse
_. She knew it must be turning her yellow.

So Shirl Rosetree breathed rather hard, and fiddled with the little gold Cross in the shadow between her breasts, and said, "I think we had enough of this silly conversation. It's the kind that don't lead anywhere. I'm gunna lay down, and have a read of some nice magazine."

The voice of the Rosetrees proclaimed that a stranger was in their midst. If it hesitated to deride, it was for those peculiarly personal, not to say mystical reasons, and because derision was a luxury Rosetrees were only so very recently qualified to enjoy. The voice of Sarsaparilla, developing the same theme, laboured under no such inhibitions, but took for granted its right to pass judgment on the human soul, and indulge in a fretfulness of condemnation.

"I would not of thought it would of come to this," Mrs Flack repeated, "a stream of foreign migrants pouring into the country, and our Boys many of them not yet returned, to say nothing of those with permanent headstones still to be erected overseas. So much for promises and prime ministers. Who will feed us, I would like to know, when we are so many mouths over, and foreign mouths, how many of them I did read, but forget the figure."

Then Mrs Flack's friend, Mrs Jolley, would clear her throat and add her voice.

"Yes indeed, it makes you think, it makes you wonder. Who counts? It is not you. It is the one that greases the palm of a civil servant or a politician. It is never you, but the one that comes."

"Not that many a civil servant is not a highly respectable person," Mrs Flack had to grant.

"That is correct, and I should know, seeing as my own son-in-law is one. Mr Apps, who took Merle."

"I would not doubt that even a politician has high principles in the home."

"Ah, in the home! Oh, a politician is a family man besides. It is the kiddies that makes all the difference."

Abstraction would elevate the two ladies to a state so rarefied they dared not look at each other, but each would stare dreamily into her own bottomless mind, watching the cottonwool unfurl.

Once Mrs Flack's eyes seemed to focus on some point. It was in actual fact a plaster pixy, of which she had a pair, out on the front lawn, beside the golden cypresses, amongst the lachenalia.

"They say," she said, "there is a foreign Jew, living," she said, and appeared to swallow something down, "below the post-office, in Montebello Avenue, in a weatherboard home"--here she drew back her strips of palest lips--"a home so riddled with the white ant, you can hear them operatin' from where the curb ought to be."

"In Montebello Avenue," Mrs Jolley confirmed. "I did see. Yes, a funny-looking gentleman. Or man. They say, a foreign Jew. And for quite some time."

"Mind you the home is rotten," Mrs Flack pursued, "but you cannot tell me, Mrs Jolley, that a home is not a home, with so many going roofless, and so many returned men."

"Preferential treatment is to be desired," said Mrs Jolley, "for everyone entitled to it."

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs Flack.

Which was terrible, because Mrs Jolley was not at all sure.

"Well, " she said, "you know what I mean. Well, I mean to say," she said, "a returned man is a returned man."

"That is so."

Mrs Flack was mollified.

But Mrs Jolley had decided she must go. She was perspiring uncomfortably behind the knees.

Then Mrs Flack flung a bomb.

"What do you say, Mrs Jolley, if I walk a little of the way? There's nothing like the fresh air."

This was revolutionary, considering that Mrs Flack never, never walked, except when strictly necessary, on account of her heart, her blood pressure, her varicose veins, and generally delicate state of health. The fresh air, besides, was as foreign to her yellow skin as Jews to Sarsaparilla.

"Why, dear, if you think you ought." Mrs Jolley had to speak at last. "But I must hurry along," she said. "My lady"--and here she had to laugh--"will be expecting me at Xanadu."

"Only a little of the way," Mrs Flack insisted. "I was never a drag on anyone. But as far as Montebello Avenue."

"Ah!" Mrs Jolley giggled.

It was certainly entrancing to walk together past homes which failed any longer to conceal, from Mrs Jolley in her mauve eye-veil, from Mrs Flack in her flat black hat with its cockade of dust.

"Here," said Mrs Flack, adjusting herself so that she became as much edge as possible, "are people who should not be allowed to live in any decent neighbourhood."

Mrs Jolley almost dislocated her neck.

"I could not tell you in detail--it would make your flesh creep," said the disappointing Mrs Flack, "only that a father and a young girl, well, I will put it bluntly--his daughter. There is a little motor-car in which you could not squeeze a third. She in slippery blouses that might be wet for all they hide."

"What do you know!" Mrs Jolley clucked.

She could not help but feel she had suddenly got possession of all knowledge, thanks to the generosity of Mrs Flack. Mrs Jolley walked, red, but brave.

"There is the post-office," Mrs Flack continued. "There is that Mrs Sugden."

"Oo-hoo! Mrs Sugden!" she had to call. "How are we today?"

Mrs Sugden was good, thanks.

Mrs Flack hated Mrs Sugden, because the postmistress would never be persuaded to tell.

Then the two ladies began to tread more cautiously, for they had entered Montebello Avenue. Their ankles had begun to twist on stones. Where the pavement should have been, the grass, unpleasant in itself, oozing black juices when it did not cut the stockings, threatened to reveal the rarer forms of nastiness at some future step.

"If you are not loopy to go on living at Xanadu!" Mrs Flack called from her wading.

Mrs Jolley usually replied: A person must retain her principles; but today, it had to be admitted, Mrs Flack's grip on life was so much stronger, her friend had been reduced. So, instead, she answered, "Beggars cannot be choosers."

"Beggar me!" shrieked Mrs Flack, somewhat surprisingly.

Foreign parts and paspalum had made her reckless. Her waxen skin had begun to appear deliquescent.

"There!" she suddenly hissed, and restrained her friend's skirt.

It was as though an experienced huntsman had at last delivered a disbelieving novice into the presence of promised game. Not that the game itself was in evidence yet, only its habitat.

The two ladies stood in the shelter of a blackberry bush to observe the house in which the foreign Jew was living. The small brown house was suitably, obscenely poor. The other side of the fence, from which previous owners had pulled pickets at random to stoke winter fires, mops of weed were threatening to shake their cotton heads. Of course there were the willows. Nobody could have denied the existence of those, only their value was doubtful because they had cost nothing. The willows poured round the shabby little house, serene cascades of green, or lapped peacefully at its wooden edges. Many a passer-by might have chosen to plunge in, and drown, in those consoling depths, but the two observers were longing for something that would rend their souls--a foetus, say, or a mutilated corpse. Instead, they had to make do with the sight of guttering that promised to fall off soon, and windows which, if glitteringly clean, ignored the common decencies of lace or net.