Between My Father and the King (18 page)

The silkworms had been thriving in the window of the pet shop, next to odorous guinea pigs and white mice with rosebud skin. Edgar bought twelve silkworms in a small cardboard box and, returning immediately to the ferry wharf, he boarded the next ferry across the harbour and was soon home, collecting on the way a bigger cardboard box from the dairy at the corner of his street.

It must be done, Edgar thought, exactly as it was when I was a child.

I am in my middle fifties, he said.

I am alone, he said.

I have loved and lost and won. I am not a biblical character; I have no issue.

Most of his friends were married and had borne children who in their turn had borne children, in historic continuity. He felt himself omitted from history, as if in taking up with the marching generations in the beginning of his life he had journeyed so far and then been trapped in a pothole, up to his neck. His head mattered, the bushfires in his head, his work of literature, his reading, and now the silkworms through which he could control history itself, birth, copulation, death.

He put the silkworms in their chocolate box and went thoughtfully out to the garden. He stroked the plump tomatoes, already striped with yellow. He lifted the leaves of the wandering Chinese gooseberry and considered the hairy ball shape. The real sign of age, he thought, is when you lean over and your balls hang down as far as the earth.

He crossed then to the two pawpaw trees. He had never grown pawpaws until now. He hoped that soon they would produce fruit. Meanwhile, they needed help. One was male, the other female; there was no communication between them apart from the haphazard dancing of bees who did not understand at all. Very carefully Edgar removed pollen from the stamen of the male tree and performed his daily task of fertilising the female pawpaw.

When it bears fruit, he said, I will eat the fruit for breakfast while I read
The Faerie Queene
or the
Critique of Pure Reason
or Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
.

Before I die, he said, I will get once more through Gibbon.

The pawpaw contracted a terrible disease. Its leaves withered from the edges towards the heart of the leaf; its young trunk was encrusted with silver scales; it was playing host to a species of death.

Edgar went up to the house and sat alone all day at his desk; he was so bewildered that he could write nothing.

But there were still the silkworms. They were flourishing now. Edgar had canvassed the neighbours for mulberry leaves.

‘Excuse me, I notice you have a mulberry tree in your garden. I wonder would you be so kind as to supply me with leaves?'

‘Have your children started keeping silkworms too?'

‘Yes, for silkworms.'

‘It's not as if they supply much silk.'

‘Would you then be so kind? I'll try not to disturb you when I call.'

The woman had looked hard at Edgar, trying to sum him up. He seemed a disreputable character, and one didn't want such people coming back and forth in one's garden with the excuse of gathering mulberry leaves for silkworms. On the other hand some folk who look disreputable often turn out to be quite distinguished, well known, with talks over the radio and invitations to cocktail parties in the university set. Oh, how was one to know?

The woman looked still harder at Edgar. She decided that he was disreputable. Yet with a feeling of being generous she said, ‘Of course you can have the mulberry leaves.'

She thought, The silkworms don't live all that long.

She sighed. Why isn't it planned for us?

So Edgar found his supply of leaves for the silkworms.

The female pawpaw tree died. Edgar dug it out, removed the tiny shrivelled fruit to show to friends (‘my pawpaws, my first ever') and burned the tree in the rubbish fire at the bottom of the garden.

The orange tree and the lemon tree bore their glowing lamps to the funeral. When night came the smoke still hung in the air and the crickets and grasshoppers continued their nether song, for strings.

I am in my middle fifties, Edgar said. I have no issue.

He put out the flames, for the world at night must be made safe from fire, and he went inside to bed. The silkworms were in their box on the table in the kitchen next to his bedroom. Even from where he lay he could hear them at their compulsive, continuous, desperate meal: a giant sound in the night as of crackling twigs and breaking boughs. Edgar dared to calculate the level of commotion, were the silkworms the size of men. He shuddered at the noise of the falling world. He got out of bed, went to the silkworms, and lifting one of them onto the table, he squashed it with the end of a spoon: a green stain oozed from it. Disgusted, he threw the dead worm in the tin under the sink where he kept the scraps and the used tea leaves. Then with the noise of the marathon meal echoing and swelling about him he returned to his bed, buttoned the top button of the old grey shirt that he wore at night, and lay on his back, stiffly, with the skin of his face damp, slowly relaxing into the erased mask of sleep where people who witness it like to impress a fancied innocence, not realising that for the night the years of experience have retired within, to rage their havoc among dreams.

And while Edgar slept (how transparent his eyelids seemed, like gateways to alternate sight! And see, at the corner of his mouth, the tiny stream of saliva flowing from its source in the dark cavern!) the silkworms wide awake pursued their frenzied meal.

The noise of the tireless mandibles pierced Edgar's sleep,
entered like clashing swords into each dream — and Edgar had many dreams that night. He dreamed of his garden, the tomatoes, the Chinese gooseberries, the two pawpaw fruits and the diseased tree; he dreamed of his work of literature, of bushfires, goldmines; of postmen who cast a lichen over each letter in order to prevent him from opening it — it changed to an oyster growth, his fingers bled touching the sharp shells; he was under the sea, safe from fire; one side of his face was diseased; one side of his body was diseased, only his balls hung like pearls; there was a noise of machines; the sea dried, the salt stayed in heaps tall as mountains; the quick-motion trees sprang into growth; the machines commenced their meal, eating through driftwood houses and trees with their tops in the sky, swallowing shadows and the sun, but the sun stuck in their crops, they burned to death.

Lily Hogan has a dress of silk.

Some people save: I could never save. I kept silkworms.

Why do you choose green leaves to write your work of literature?

Do you not realise the danger to green leaves, with silkworms in the house?

He woke, sweating. The one hundred and seventy-two pages were in order, safe.

Edgar's friends came to visit him at night. He stood, separated from them by the table, and lectured to them: on the devouring evils of progress, on Russian tomatoes, Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
, misplaced power stations, the real distance between the head and the tail of a serpent or cycle; and silkworms.

One evening they noticed that he was winding sheets of his green writing paper into cone shapes.

‘The silkworms have shed their skins the required number of times,' he said. ‘I notice that one of them has begun to wave its head about and shed from its jaws a thin thread of gold silk. You see,' he said, continuing in his excited, important manner, ‘it is ready to weave. I shall drop the silkworms one by one into these cones of paper, attach each one to the wall by a pin — so — and let the silkworms complete their spinning. Soon they will disappear in a cloud of golden silk; and lie in hiding; I shall unwind their silk . . .'

He was yesterday; it was a lesson he had learned. He was repeating it.

Edgar's friends watched him in embarrassed dismay. He was a bow-tied courier who had learned the language although he no longer lived in the country. He was conducting them, as tourists, through the territory of his past without apparently realising that it had changed, that all things visible or invisible are only shadows attending shapes of Change under the Sun of Time; they shrivel like shadows of two pawpaws at noon.

But of course Edgar knew this: Edgar was wise. He continued his lecture, pinning the cone shapes to the wall beneath the Christmas card from Spain which said
PAX, PAX
.

Some days later when the silkworms had finished spinning and were settled in their cocoons with doors and windows shut, and had changed to pupae, Edgar unwound the silk from each one onto strips of cardboard, and each time as he reached the boudoir at the end of the maze he was confronted by the naked black-eyed unseemly monster who trembled and shrank from his touch. The sensitivity alarmed him. What was its purpose? A fly might brush his own cheek, rain fall upon his skin, he could walk in rooms,
bumping into furniture, enduring the hazards and encounters of the living and the dead, yet not flinch or shrink. By what right was the chrysalis so privileged in sensitivity? Why did it recoil from him?

Nevertheless, in spite of his envy, very gently he wrapped the cruelly exposed pupae in cotton wool, placed them once again in the chocolate box from which he had cleaned the waste, and left them in peace (was it peace?) until they should emerge as moths. He was relieved not to have to look upon the ugly sensitive creatures while they accomplished their metamorphosis.