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PART FOUR

9

MRS GODBOLD liked to sing as she ironed. She had a rich, but rather trembly, mezzo voice, which her daughter Else once said reminded her of melting chocolate. Certainly the girls would get that sad-and-dreamy look whenever their mother sang, and the kind of feeling that warm, soft chocolate will sometimes also give. Mrs Godbold would iron in long, sad, steamy sweeps, singing as she did. Sometimes her iron would thump the board to emphasize a phrase, just as it always nosed more gently, accompanied by tremolo, into the difficult corners of a shirt. Then the mouths of the older girls would grow loose with wonder for some ineluctable drama which was being prepared for them, and the younger ones stare hypnotized at the pores which had opened in their mother's creamy skin. But the singer sang, oblivious, transported by her own words. Mrs Godbold preferred to treat of death, and judgment, and the future life. Her favourite was: I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. Though she was also very partial to: See the Conqueror mounts in triumph, See the King in royal state Riding in the clouds His chariot To His heavenly palace gate. At such moments faith or light did convince many eyes. It was certainly most extraordinary the way the light in Godbolds' shed almost always assisted the singer's words. Great blades of fiery light would slash the clouds of cotton-wool, negotiate a rather bleak window, and threaten targets so personal and vulnerable that more than one conscience trembled. Or else the prophetic voice might coincide with the cold white reckoning of a winter afternoon. That was perhaps the sheerest wonder of all. Then the woman in the apron would become the angel of solid light. The colder fell the air, the steamier, the more compassionate the angel's judgment. Outside, but visible through the doorway, which Mr Godbold had fixed crooked in the beginning, was the big copper, which the girls kept stoked with wattle sticks, and which always seemed to be glowing with half-concealed coals. The hint of fire and the great brooding copper cup could appear most awful in the light of Mrs Godbold's hymns. There was only one person who remained sceptical, and that was Mr Godbold, if he happened to be present; if away from home, and that was often, he did not think about it much. Mr Godbold had no time for All That. What he had time for could be very quickly specified. It was beer, sex, and the trots, in that order. Not that he really enjoyed beer, except as a dissolver of the hard line. Not that sex was more than a mug's game, involving the hazards of kids and syph, though he did succeed in losing himself temporarily in the brief sexual act. Nor did a horse appeal to him as horse; it was simply that the material future-which, after all, was all that mattered of it-depended on those four bleeding legs. Any cold mind would soon have concluded that this was an individual to avoid, but for some tart he had been trailing, and who had still to taste Tom Godbold's relentlessness, or his wife, who liked to remember the past, and what she had believed her husband to be before she actually found out, he possessed a kind of eroded beauty, a bitter charm. Time's acid had eaten into the bronze, coarsening the texture, blurring the features. He was scraggy by now, and veined. But his eyes could still destroy the defences of logic and prudence, by seeming to ask for indulgence, and sometimes even love. They were very fine, dark eyes. Those who allowed themselves to be undone were willing to overlook the beery, bilious warnings of the whites. He had, besides, a habit of laying a finger, or two, never more, on the bare skin of somebody's arm, almost tremblingly, or applying pressure to an elbow, with a gentleness in which a command was disguised as an entreaty. Then his wife would waver, and yield, and some woman, from whom he had been peeling the skins of discretion in an upper room, would tear off the last layer herself with reckless hands. It was only later that everybody sat up in bed and realized that Tom Godbold's tragic eyes had merely been looking deeper into himself. Then his most recent conquest would hurry into her protective clothes, and ever after regret her impulsiveness. In his wife's case, her nature, of course, denied her the opportunity of flight. She had to suffer. Permanence enclosed her, like stone, with the difference that thought burst through its veins in little, agonizing spurts, and she would lie there wondering whether she had conceived again in lust. For one so strong, it must be admitted she was regrettably weak. Or else kind. She would lie there until a thinning light released the pressure from her eyelids. Then she would creak out of bed, and light the copper. Faith is not less persuasive for its fluctuations. Rather, it becomes a living thing, like a child fluttering in the womb. So Mrs Godbold's faith would stir and increase inside the grey, gelatinous envelope of morning, until, at last, it was delivered, new-born, with all the glory and confidence of fire. This almost biological aspect of his wife's faith was what the husband hated most. Nor was he the father of it. That, at least, he could honestly confess. "But Tom," she would say, in her gentle, serious, infuriating voice, "the Rebirth, I think it is lovely." Then he would answer from between his teeth, "You will not catch me getting reborn. Not on your bloody life!" He would look at all those girls, of whom the very latest always seemed just to have spilled out of the cornucopia. There was always the smell of warm napkins, there was the unmistakable smell of recent and accusatory wrinkled flesh. "Jesus, no! I've had enough of births!" he would confirm, and go away, or reach for the sporting page. There had been some such exchange of words and opinions the evening Mrs Godbold was observed visiting their neighbour. Tom Godbold had returned from work. He was at that time driving a truck for a firewood contractor, though he was thinking of giving it away, and starting a line in poultry manure. The father was seated with his paper, the mother stood at her ironing. Children came and went. Although they raised their eyes to their mother, it was at their father's work-boots that they habitually stared, at the stiff, trowel-shaped tongues, and blunt, brutal toes. Mrs Godbold, careful to use her rather trembly mezzo _mezza voce__ so as not to inflame feelings further, had just begun her favourite: "I woke, the dungeon flamed with light…" when little Gracie ran in. "Mu-ummm!" she shouted. "Guess what!" And pressed her face against her mother's side, which would smell, she knew, of scones and clean laundry. "What?" Mrs Godbold asked, and braced herself against disaster. "I am saved for Jesus!" Gracie cried. But rather pale, as if, to please her mother, she was taking on something that might be too much for her. Nobody was altogether glad. "You are saved for _what__?" the father asked. His paper rustled. Gracie could not find the word. A robust child, she stood trying to look delicate. "You are saved for Crap!" said the father. Then he took his newspaper. "Crap! Crap! Crap!" Tom Godbold shouted. And beat his wife about the head with the sheets of newspaper, so that it could have appeared funny, only it wasn't. Mrs Godbold bent her head. Her eyelids flickered. There was such a beating and fluttering of light, and white wings. She was, all in all, dazed. "That is what I think," bellowed the husband and father, "though nobody in this place gives a bugger!" The paper was scattered at this point, so that he was left with his hand, it suddenly occurred to him. After looking at it very briefly, he said, "This is what I think of all cater-waulin' Christians!" He caught his wife across the ear with the flat of his hand, with the result that the room and everyone in it rocked and shuddered for her, not least Tom Godbold himself. "And Jesus," he hurtled on, as much to deaden his own pain, "Jesus sticks in my guts! He sticks that _hard__!" In fact, he had to deal his wife a blow in the belly with his fist, and when she had subsided on the floor, against the table, a kick or two for value. Where there had been a white silence, there was now an uproar, as if someone had taken a stick and stirred up a nest-ful of birds. There was a crying and clustering of children. All were pressed against the mother, that is, except the baby, and Else the eldest, who had not yet come in. The father himself was ready to drown, but managed to swallow the waves of loathing, exhilaration, fright, and still rampant masterfulness that were threatening to overwhelm him. "Well?" he gasped. "Well?" But nobody answered. The children were whimpering, away from him. All was turned away, except his wife's face, which she still held exposed to whatever might come. Such was her nature, or faith, he saw again with horror. "I'm gunna get out of this!" he announced at last. "I'm gunna get shickered stiff!" When he had slammed the door, and gone stumbling up the hill, he heard her calling, but would neither stop nor listen, for fear she might use some unfair advantage to weaken him. Once, for instance, she had called after him what they would be having for tea, and he had almost vomited up on the spot his whole bellyful of hopelessness. Mrs Godbold was, indeed, humourless and true enough to employ any and every means, but for the moment she was feeling queasy. Her children were stifling her, too, as they clutched and touched, trying to revive what they knew as certainty, but which they feared was slipping from them, fast and sure. "It is all right," she said. "I must just get my breath. Leave go of me, though, all of yous. Oh, dear!" she exclaimed, holding her side. But it had all happened before, of course. Everything has always happened before. Except to children. So the Godbold children continued to cry. When their mother had got to her feet, it was better. She said, "We mustn't forget that corned breast. Come on, Kate. It's your turn tonight." Only then did they see that they might expect to resume life. And their mother dared sit a moment, though only close to the edge of the chair. She would have liked to talk to somebody about the past, even of those occasions which had racked her most, of emigration, and miscarriages, not to mention her own courtship; she longed to dawdle amongst what had by now become sculpture. For present and future are like a dreadful music, flowing, and flowing, without end, and even Mrs Godbold's courage would sometimes falter as she trudged along the bank of the one turbulent river, towards its junction with the second, always somewhere in the mists. Then she would look back over her shoulder at the garden of statuary, to walk amongst which, it seemed at that enviable distance, faith was no longer needed.