The Tree of Man by Patrick White

Author:Patrick White
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781446434925
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

AMY PARKER accepted the absence of her son; as time passed, it was not so very different really from his presence. If she thought about him, it was as a baby, or a little boy that could not run far, or would hide and she would find him, in a game. Then she would blind him with kisses and devour the angle of his neck. He could only struggle against her love. In this way the past was made more concrete than the present.

But Ray did once send a postcard, from Albany. That writing she had forgotten, if she had ever known. It was an emanation of a strange man, that she looked at respectfully through her reading glasses, as if it had been a flickering of lightning. He was in business, he said. She was proud in the end to have the card, though she did not love this man. She loved the little struggling boy, to whom her own full face was held on a summer’s day. She showed the card to people, after she had dried her hands, she showed it to people who had come, and received their congratulations with decent pride, and spoke of her absent son with natural affection. But she did not love this man.

She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad, and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity, or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.

Often, again, it was as if she had had no children, for it had not been given to her to love her daughter, except by intermittent gestures. Then she would think about the child they had picked up at Wullunya in the floods, and brought home in Peabody’s cart, and who had quickly gone. This boy, if she had tamed him, would have been her son, she felt. It was possible. All those things that did not quite occur during the floodtime of their lives had the nostalgia of possibility now that she was drying up.

At our time of life, said the postmistress, who was withered in the beginning, but who did not seem to mind.

Amy Parker hated the postmistress, but because they had formed the habit of friendship she would stop to yarn a while those days when she went to the village. It was a pause, besides, on the hill.

She would say, ‘Are you there, Mrs Gage? There is nothing, I suppose?’

Then Mrs Gage would rush out.

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