The Flying Goat (8 page)

They found the main door and went in, stepping into the under-sea coldness of a large entrance hall. Now think that out, now think that out, now think that out. Her mind bubbling with bitterness, she looked up the great staircase, and all of a sudden the foreignness of her conscious self as against the familiarity of the self that had been was asserted again, but now with the sharp contrast of shadow and light. She put her hand on the staircase, the iron cool and familiar, and then began to walk up it, slowly but lightly, her hand drawn up easily, as though from some invisible iron pulley, far above her. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, feeling, without effort of thought, that she did not like and never had liked its mournful collection of cherubim painted in the gold wheel about the chandelier. For the first time that day, as she mounted the staircase and then went on beyond into the upstairs corridor, and into the panelled music-room with its air of having been imported as a complete back-cloth from some pink-and-gold theatre of the seventies, her body moved with its natural quietness, accustomed, infinitely light, and with a sense of the
purest happiness. All this she could not explain and, as they went from music-room to other rooms, ceased to attempt to explain. Her bitterness evaporated in the confined coolness just as her security, out-outside on the hot headland, had evaporated in the blaze of afternoon. Now she seemed incontestably sure of herself, content in what she knew, without fuss, was an unrepeatable moment of time.

She did not like the music-room but, as she expected, Arthur did. This pre-awareness of hers saved her from fresh bitterness. As part of her contentment, making it complete, she thought of him with momentary tenderness, quietly regretting what she had said and done, ready now to make up for it.

‘Shall we go up higher,' she said, ‘or down to the ground-floor again?'

‘Let's do the climb first,' he said.

To her, it did not matter, and climbing a second staircase they came, eventually, to a small turret room, unfurnished, with two jalousied windows looking across to the two worlds of France and the Atlantic.

She stood at the window overlooking the sea and looked out, as from a lighthouse, down on to the intense expanse of sea-light. Her mind had the
profound placidity of the sea itself, a beautiful vacancy, milkily restful.

‘Funny,' Arthur said. ‘No ships. The Atlantic, and not a ship in sight.'

‘You wouldn't expect to see ships,' she said, and knew that she was right.

Looking down from the other window they saw the headland, the brown-lilac expanse of heather, the minute peasants scribbled on the yellow rectangle of corn, the estaminet, the one-eyed station. And suddenly also, there was the white pop of steam inland, and the small comic shriek, now more than ever toy-like, pricking the dead silence of afternoon.

‘Look,' he said, ‘there's the little train.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘there's the little train.'

Her mind had the pure loftiness of the tower itself, above all irritation. She felt, as not before in her life, that she was herself. The knowledge of this re-incarnation was something she could not communicate, and half afraid that time or a word would break it up, she suggested suddenly that they should go down.

Arthur remained at the window a moment longer, admiring points of distance. ‘You'd never think,' he said, ‘you could see so far.'

‘Yes you would,' she called back.

Now think that out, now think that out, now think that out. Her mind, as she went downstairs, sprang contrarily upwards, on a scale of otherwise inexpressible delight. Arthur engaged her in conversation as they went downstairs, she on one flight, he on one above, calling down: ‘It may be all right, but the rates must be colossal. Besides you'd burn a ton of coal a day in winter, trying to keep warm. A six-roomed house is bad enough, but think of this,' but nothing could break, suppress or even touch her mood.

Downstairs she went straight into the great reception hall, and stood dumb. At that moment she suddenly felt that she had come as far as she must. Time had brought her to this split second of itself simply in order to pin her down. She stood like an insect transfixed.

Arthur came in: ‘What are you looking at?'

‘The yellow cloth. Don't do anything. Just look at it. It's wonderful.'

‘I don't see anything very wonderful,' he said.

At the end of the room, thrown over a chair, a large length of brocade, the colour of a half-ripe lemon, was like spilled honey against the grey
French-coldness of walls and furniture. Instantaneously the girl saw it with eyes of familiarity, feeling it somehow to be the expression of herself, mood, past and future. She stood occupied with the entrancement of the moment, her eyes excluding the room, the day, Arthur and everything, her self drowned out of existence by the pure wash of watered fabric.

Suddenly Arthur moved into the room, and ten seconds later had the brocade in his hands. She saw him hold it up, measure it without knowing he measured it, feel its weight, thickness, value. She saw him suddenly as the eternal shopkeeper measuring out the eternal remnants of time: the small tape-measure of his mind like a white worm in the precious expanse of her own existence.

‘If you bought it to-day,' Arthur called, ‘it would cost you every penny of thirty-five bob a yard.'

‘Let's go,' she said.

Half a minute later she turned and walked out of the door, Arthur following, and then past the wind-stunted trees and on down the road, past the estaminet. It was now herself who walked, Louise Bowen, Standard V girls, certificated, deduct so much for superannuation scheme, tired as after a
long day in the crowded chalk-smelling class-room. As they passed the estaminet, the place looked more fly-blown and deserted than ever, and they decided to go on to the station, and get a drink there while waiting for the train. As they passed the fig trees her mind tried to grasp again at the thought of the Gadarene swine, her mood blasted into the same barrenness as the tree in the parable.

‘Well, you can have your château,' Arthur said. ‘But I've got my mind on one of those houses Sparkes is putting up on Park Avenue. Sixteen and fourpence a week, no desposit, over twenty years. That's in front of any château.'

She saw the houses as he spoke, red and white, white and red, millions of them, one like another, sixteen and fourpence a week, no desposit, stretching out to the ends of the earth. She saw herself in them, the constant and never-changing material of her life cut up by a pair of draper's scissors, the days ticketed, the years fretted by the counting up of farthings and all the endlessly incalculable moods of boredom.

‘Two coffees please.'

At the little station café they sat at one of the outside tables and waited for the train.

‘Well, we've been to the château and never found out its name,' he said.

‘It ought to be Château Bougainvillaea.'

‘That's silly,' he said. ‘You don't even know what a bougainvillaea is.'

She sat stirring the grey coffee. She could feel the sun burning the white iron table and her hands. She looked up at the château, seeing the windows of the turret above the trees.

‘Now we can see the château,' she said, ‘as we should have seen ourselves if we'd been sitting down here when – '

It was beyond her, and she broke off.

‘What?' he said.

‘I didn't mean that,' she said.

‘What did you mean?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, in future,' he said, ‘mind you say what you mean.'

The future? She sat silent. Inland the approaching train made its comic little whistle, cutting off another section of the afternoon.

And hearing it, she knew suddenly that the future was already a thing of the past.

My aunt Franklin, a long time ago, kept a small shop on the top of the high pavement. My uncle Franklin, who was dead, had been a taxidermist. But it is not about either of them that I want to tell you. They had a son, Ephraim Franklin, a sailor.

Whenever I went to see my aunt Franklin she was sitting in the room behind the shop. This room and the shop were filled with cases of stuffed animals and fish and butterflies and in this gloomy north facing little room, always so dull that even the colours of the butterflies seemed like dusty paint and the eyes of the animals as dull as shoe buttons, my aunt Franklin would sit talking or thinking about her son. His ship was called
The Mary Porter
and she was a sailing ship, a square rigger. Her port was Greenock and she made a fairly regular passage to Australia, taking a hundred days, even a hundred and fifty days; or she would be outward bound for Singapore, to await new orders there, going down afterwards to New Guinea, or Java, or Celebes, or
Sumatra, or Borneo. And so because of this, because it took
The Mary Porter
a hundred and fifty days out and perhaps a hundred and fifty days back, the most my Aunt Franklin could ever hope to see her son was once a year. And in the meantime, for two hundred and fifty or even three hundred days, all she thought of was Ephraim, anxiety for Ephraim, joy for Ephraim, Ephraim in the East Indies, Ephraim working hard to be second mate, Ephraim's photograph on the wall, until at last Ephraim himself came home, from the South Seas.

The first time I ever saw Ephraim I was about ten or eleven. I went to see my aunt on a cold mizzling November afternoon and there, in the back room, home from a voyage of a hundred and thirty-five days from Sydney, sat Ephraim. He was then the second mate of
The Mary Porter
, a big man with a thick ginger beard and ice-blue eyes and stiff ginger hair on the backs of his hands. He talked to me all that afternoon; or rather he talked to my aunt, telling her stories. ‘Mother, they was twice as long as this room, these codfish. They'll eat a man, I tell you,' or ‘Mother, I'd tell you about the Mokoru tribe in New Guinea only it'd turn your stomach before tea,' or ‘Yes, Mother,
next voyage it'll be first mate. First mate. Mister Franklin.' And I listened to him all that afternoon as he sat picking bits of tobacco out of his teeth with a bodkin, his voice conjuring up for me the sight and smell of foreign parts, strange islands,
The Mary Porter
sailing beyond tropical horizons. He ate six soft-boiled eggs for tea that day, I shall always remember it, and then after tea he went upstairs and came down with a black tin box, carrying it by the handle. ‘Mother,' he said, ‘I'll give you six guesses.' So she sat there with her chin on her knuckles, an ivory-faced plain frail-looking little woman who looked the last person in the world to be the mother of a hairy second mate as big as he was, and guessed what it was he had brought her from the South Seas. She guessed a parrot, a pair of slippers, a comb, a shawl and then she gave it up. ‘No,' he said, ‘wrong every time.' It was an ivory box, carved with figures of fish and ships, and in it was a necklace of white coral. She loved them both and her face went as white as the coral and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Ah! you wait,' he said, ‘one day I'll bring you summat worth bringing. I'll bring you a necklace of black pearls. Black pearls. How's that, eh?' And suddenly he
became aware of my standing there, listening and gaping at them both, and he said: ‘Here, son, you nip off now and come in to-morrow. You come in to-morrow and I'll show you the model I'm making of
The Mary Porter
.'

The next day was Sunday and I could not go, but I went on Monday and he showed me the model of
The Mary Porter
. He had been making it for three voyages. When would it be finished? I said. ‘When will it be finished?' he said. ‘Oh! in about two more. I'll finish it before I get my master's ticket.' I stayed looking at the model of
The Mary Porter
all that afternoon. It fascinated me. Already it was a lovely thing, built as though in a shipyard, from the keel up, faithful in every detail, even below decks, to the ship in which Ephraim sailed. ‘And next time I'm home,' he said, ‘you'll see her rigging up, and then the next time she'll be carrying all her canvas.' As he told me about her I could already see her, in my mind, as a lovely and complete thing. For the next five weeks I got a glimpse of her whenever I could, and then, the day before Ephraim sailed again, I looked at her for the last time. He caught me looking at her very longingly, and suddenly, as though thinking perhaps that I
were jealous of his having brought me nothing from that last voyage, he said:

‘Well, son, you be a good boy now and keep your nose tidy and you know what I'll do? Eh? You know what I'll do if you're a good boy? I'll bring you a nigger gal.'

‘Oh! Ephraim!' my aunt said, ‘saying bits like that to the boy.'

‘Ah, that's right, ain't it, son? You be a good boy and I'll bring you a black gal home. That's a promise, ain't it?'

He was so serious that I think, at the time, I half believed him and then, over the nine months' interval of that next voyage, I forgot about it. What I thought of was the ship. I would think of her assuming, in Ephraim's hands, her full shape, and of the beautiful light airy look that the rigging would give her. I would think of Ephraim knotting that rigging down in his cabin, under the hanging oil-lamp, on hot black tropical nights, moving the little ship gradually and patiently to its moment of completion.

Ephraim came home again in the October of the following year. I forget what he brought his mother that time, but I know that, as he had promised, the
rigging of
The Mary Porter
was finished and true in every detail. It gave the ship that wonderful, lofty air, quite magical, that sailing ships have when they carry no canvas. I marvelled at that ship and for five weeks looked at it whenever he would let me, until he must have known how I coveted it. I marvelled too at Ephraim's patience. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘it takes a longish stretch. But then I'm working for my master's ticket and that takes up a lot o' time too. But I'll soon be finished with that now, I hope.'