The Burnt Ones

About the Book

In this superlative collection of short stories, Patrick White explores the gulf – by turns funny and unbearably sad – between life’s expectations and its realities. With immense understanding and compassion, he captures the longings that underly the relationships of men and women, and the tender pathos of the heart’s secrets.

Patrick White

THE BURNT ONES

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Epub ISBN 9781446435076

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 1995

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Patrick White 1964

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964

Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 09 932411 3

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

By Patrick White

Aknowledgements

Dead Roses

Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight

A Glass of Tea

Clay

The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s

A Cheery Soul

Being Kind to Titina

Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover

The Letters

The Woman who wasn’t Allowed to Keep Cats

Down at the Dump

For Nin and Geoffrey Dutton

THE BURNT ONES

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.

He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet ‘visionary’ can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.

BY PATRICK WHITE

Fiction

Happy Valley

The Living And The Dead

The Aunt’s Story

The Tree Of Man

Voss

Riders In The Chariot

The Burnt Ones

The Solid Mandala

The Vivisector

The Eye Of The Storm

The Cockatoos

A Fringe Of Leaves

The Twyborn Affair

Three Uneasy Pieces

Memoirs Of Many In One

(Editor)

Autobiography

Flaws In The Glass

OI KAYMENOI . . .
the burnt ones (the poor unfortunates)

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the following magazines in which stories have appeared: Australian Letters for ‘Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight’, ‘Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover’, and ‘The Woman who wasn’t Allowed to Keep Cats’; Overland for ‘Clay’; Quadrant for ‘The Letters’; Meanjin for ‘Being Kind to Titina’ and ‘Down at the Dump’; the London Magazine for ‘A Cheery Soul’, ‘Clay’, ‘The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s’, and ‘Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover’.

P.W.

Dead Roses

1

Val Tulloch liked to look at her husband while he was reading, and not exactly chat – a word dangerously close to chatter – she liked to think of it, rather, as speaking her thoughts. She spoke them, too, with appropriate softness. Sometimes she wondered whether she irritated Gil by doing so, but she had never asked, because she did not want to find out for certain.

Now she was going over the house-party she had arranged for the Island that Christmas, speculating again on the desirability of those she had invited, and Gil Tulloch was frowning slightly as he read. His wife was of the opinion that a frown suited his otherwise flawless face, giving it authority.

Val was saying: ‘The Furfields are always good value. Helen doesn’t jib at the washing-up, and Doug is so handy in the boat. We’re so used to them, darling, don’t you think? It’s restful. Though I can’t say I’ll ever take to Marcus. Bashing up poor little Jeremy. But after all, that’s life, and Jeremy had better find out.’

Gil Tulloch, who was giving Tristram Shandy another go, increased his slightly authoritative frown.

‘And Mollie Aspinall – certainly one has to take some trouble with Mollie, one has to listen to her – but she does love children.’

If she had been all like this, all the time, Gil Tulloch could not have put up with his wife, but here and now Val’s social speculations were hardly more boring than the battle with Sterne.

‘And Barry Flegg.’

‘Why did you invite Barry?’ Gil Tulloch asked, reading.

‘To balance Mollie Aspinal.’

‘Isn’t Mollie a bit leathery, a bit long in the tooth for Barry?’

‘But she’s grateful just for the smell of a man.’

Val Tulloch was so pleased, she laughed. Shortly before their discussion she had begun to accept the presence of their fifth and unexpected child. She was still dazed, but very happy.

Her husband turned the page, and waited. He could skim books professionally. And really did enjoy his wife.

‘No,’ said Val, sitting forward, her face growing dark with purpose. ‘I’ll tell you why I asked Barry. I’ve invited Anthea Scudamore.’

‘But isn’t she pretty awful?’

‘How?’

‘Nothing you could put your finger on.’

‘Exactly! And it isn’t all her fault. She’s just a bit brought-up and not brought-out.’

‘Barry’ll do his best by her. But I’ve always had the impression Anthea knows exactly where she’s going.’

‘I don’t think she does. She knows what she ought to know, and where she ought to go,’ said Val. Then she added: ‘That won’t stop me giving her a push in what her mother will consider the wrong direction.’

Turning in what was for her the obvious and only possible direction early in life, Val Tulloch was a woman who believed that all others must accept the one way to happiness.

2

Mrs Scudamore was an arranger too, but in her case she had never allowed herself to consider whether she was un happy. There was no reason why anyone should be, no one in Australia at least, if they were well provided for, and of a happy social level. After that, if a person started complaining, she was morbid, or neurotic. Or something. So Mrs Scudamore never allowed herself to complain – unless she had good reason to.

Though she managed to conceal it to a decent extent, her happiness was immense on hearing of Anthea’s invitation for Christmas on the Island. Certainly the Tullochs were lax, intellectual, and in appearance often downright shabby, but they wore the aura which only inherited wealth and station can give. The afternoon the invitation was issued Mrs Scudamore made four telephone calls, one of them to that woman on the Clarion.

‘Of course it will mean I shall have to take a great deal extra on my own shoulders, here, at Christmas,’ Mrs Scudamore did not complain to her daughter. ‘But I am so pleased for you, dear. I am sure you will have lots of fun. The Tullochs belong to such a jolly set. I wonder whether Gilbert Tulloch is as red as they make out. Probably is. Like all those university men. Atheists too. His mother was a Briscoe – property in her own right. I do wonder which of their friends you’ll meet. Minnie Briscoe didn’t always remember hers, but one had to make allowances; she led a very busy life, and her mind gave out before the end. It just occurred to me, Anthea dear – put in your blue. I know summer on the Island is what people call informal now, but one should go prepared for all eventualities. I mean – it is so much more agreeable – don’t you think? – not to get caught out.’

Mrs Scudamore would have been deeply hurt if anyone had suggested she had never paused to consider what her daughter might think. Why, it was too obvious. They were more like two sisters. So, as nobody had ever drawn her attention to the reality of the relationship, Mrs Scudamore continued to think, for Anthea, and everyone. The tempo of life today being what it is, and she married to a leader-writer who kept such odd hours, she was forced to take so much on her own shoulders. As it were.

‘Anthea,’ she would call, ‘do see whether there is an egg for Daddy, and run down to the corner for a dozen if there isn’t. I have my appointment at ten.’

Slight acquaintances might have wondered whether Bill Scudamore existed at all, though they heard about him, and read the headings of those unreadable leaders in the Clarion, and his hats were on the pegs in the passage outside the downstairs lavatory. Mrs Scudamore’s close friends, who knew that everything was above board, remembered him as a wry, skinny, silent man, who rose late, and breakfasted principally off newspapers. Late in the afternoon he would dawdle down to the Clarion office, and return to a refrigerator phase of life after others had gone to bed. Mentally he appeared to exist on political abstractions and a convincedly pessimistic attitude to all human endeavour. This, together with his ‘hours,’ meant that he was not missed by his wife’s friends, who knew that life is what you make it, and whose paths lay between its brightly-enamelled, concrete details.

Mrs Scudamore, who was puzzled, not to say distressed by nonconformity of any description, dismissed it from her mind whenever it affected her closely. So she assured herself: Bill cannot be unhappy. Temporarily, perhaps, she was right. Her husband suffered more from foreboding and irritations, the kind begotten by President Soekarno and ingrown toe-nails, or the egg he spilled on his dressing-gown. Anthea would boil him his egg before going off to one of her courses, and as Bill Scudamore took the knife, and scraped off the spot of offending egg, it would sometimes sadly occur to him: There goes Anthea, and again I haven’t thought what to say. Regret would ripen into guilt, until he remembered her mother, who took so much upon herself. Anthea would be taken care of.

‘Anything more, Dad, before I go?’ his daughter – his daughter – might call from the end of the veranda.

She was so bright, so thoughtful, so damn pleasant. She had learnt it all. Squinting through the glare of the veranda Bill Scudamore thought to see Betsy, or at least the wax which still had to be worked up into the replica. Some men, he understood, allowed themselves to experience twinges of renewal or desire on recognizing the past in the present, but his was a disbelieving nature, and this, surprisingly, his child. The white wax which sense of duty was moulding into a smile. This greenish, girlish flesh under a large summer hat. It made him examine his own hands.

Mrs Scudamore once said to Mrs Vesey who was known as her great friend: ‘It is thrilling to watch the blossoming of a young girl, particularly when she happens to be one’s daughter. One’s very own act of creation.’

There were moments when Mrs Scudamore suspected she was verging on the intellectual. That sort of thing was permissible provided one took care not to become involved with intellectuals. Seeing so little of her husband, she forgot to count him, and as for the Tullochs, now that they had hove in sight property reconciled her to their aberrations of the mind.

Mrs Scudamore was downright thrilled by Anthea’s invitation to the Island. She could not help going over and over all its satisfying implications, while remembering the afternoon at Government House Minnie Briscoe, Gil Tulloch’s potty old mother, failed to recognize her. For that reason Mrs Scudamore moistened her lips at the airport and hesitated before kissing her daughter good-bye.

Then she said: ‘Always remember who you are, darling. Both sides are in the Book.’

As there was nobody close enough to hear, Anthea need not have blushed for her mother. But she did. And felt frightfully disloyal as she lowered her head and crossed the tarmac. At least the equally regrettable frown which had come to her with the warmth of shame helped to keep her hat on in the wind.

3

The day was almost upon them when Val Tulloch remembered they must expect Anthea Scudamore.

‘Oh, God!’ Gil complained.

Everyone else had arrived, and settled down into one of those temporary communities far closer knit than most of the lifelong relationships.

‘I know,’ Val decided. ‘I’ll get Ossie Ryan to fetch her out on the mail run. Then nobody need be disturbed.’

By nobody she meant her husband, who had always been her first preoccupation.

So Anthea was met at the plane by Ossie Ryan, a sandy man who knew what was happening anywhere on the Island, and who ran one of those loosely-connected bombs which rattle between fixed points in the remoter parts of Australia.

‘All set?’ Ossie asked of this spotless girl from the city who dusted the seat before sitting down.

‘Yes. Lovely, thank you.’ She was so composed, agreeable.

Ossie had never been seen without a kind of straight scar of a grin. Now he grinned at the vaccination mark which glared white from the girl’s passive arm.

They began to drive across the island, through the gold blur of barley crops, past mobs of turkeys blown sideways by the impetus of Ossie Ryan’s car. Wherever they occurred, the little runty island trees appeared to have accepted a permanent deformity forced upon them by the wind.

The girl sat holding her summer hat. She was very lush, white, imported, beside her red, skinny, indigenous companion. In her mind she composed a letter to her mother, which would in fact never be written because they had promised each other to ring through every evening after dinner. But in the girl’s mind the letter began: It is all rather an adventure ...

She sat offering a smile in place of the words she did not find for the mail-man, while the adventure continued in bursts of sun, and a bashing of wind, and the blaze of ripe barley. Sometimes Ossie Ryan would widen her experience by telling what was happening in the stone cottages they passed:

‘That’s Mrs Crane. ’Er old man got took over to the mainland Thursday. Operation for hernia. That house up there – the woman runs a baby-farm, they say. They, mind you. I don’t say nothun about no one, but mind me own business. That place is Mr Isbister’s. From Glenelg. Looks like ’e brought a different wife with ’im this year.’