The Living and the Dead

About the Book

Set in thirties London, The Living and the Dead portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer – until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

Patrick White

THE LIVING
AND THE DEAD

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title

Copyright

About the Author

Also by Patrick White

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781446435014

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 1996

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Patrick White 1941

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
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1941

Vintage
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London SW1V 2SA

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Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

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

ISBN 0 09 932431 8

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

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 He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.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

Je te mets sous la garde du plaisir et de la douleur; l’un et l’autre veilleront à tes pensées, à tes actions; engendreront tes passions, exciteront tes aversions, tes amitiés, tes tendresses, tes fureurs; allumeront tes désirs, tes craintes, tes espérances; te dévoileront des vérités, te plongeront dans des erreurs; et après t’avoir fait enfanter mille systèmes absurdes et différents de morale et de législation, te découvriront un jour les principes simples, au développement desquels sont attachés l’ordre et le bonheur du monde moral.

HELVÉTIUS

Part One

1

Outside the station, people settled down again to being emotionally commonplace. There was very little to distinguish the individual feature in the flow of faces. Certainly it was night, but even where a wave of neon washed across the human element, it uncovered no particular secret, just the uniform white, square or oblong, tinged for a moment with the feverish tones of red or violet. In the same way his ears took sound, but selected no predominant note out of the confused stream, taxis unsticking their tyres from the wet surface of the street, the rumbling of the buses. All this was so much prevalent, and yet irrelevant sound. Like the drifting faces, a dim, surrounding presence, almost dependent on his train of thought for its existence there in the darkness. It was better like this, he felt, escaped only a couple of minutes from the too intimate glimpses, the emotional sharps of the railway platform. It was better to swim in the confused sea that was anybody’s London. The personal was eclipsed by Eden’s face that last moment on the strip of receding train.

Elyot Standish bumped his way through the crowd outside Victoria. The light that touched him, the street lights that have no respect for the personal existence, shaved his face down to the bones, left it with the expression of the street faces. The sockets of his eyes were dark. Two empty saucers in the bone. He remembered the face of the German woman, moments earlier on the platform, resting on her husband’s shoulder in a last unseeing embrace. Or rather, you were drawn beyond the eyes of the little German Jewess into a region where the present dissolved, its forms and purpose, became a shapeless, directionless well of fear.

I expect Julia will have gone, Eden said hurriedly.

He heard the quick gathering of her voice, the determined planting of her feet on the platform as she drew him with her into the world of trivial incident, and the things you talked about before the train moved out.

But I told her to leave some bread and cheese, she said. You’ll find it in the kitchen. Some bread and cheese.

As if he didn’t know. But railway stations were like that. The trivial came into its own. It assumed importance in a white light.

You’ll send me a postcard from Paris, he said.

It was really his own voice, but flat and stupid, unbearably banal. From Paris they retreated. It was on the way to the reason for Eden’s going. The retreat was a move they both accepted. She began to talk about the weather, what kind of Channel to expect. She remembered the winter she crossed with Adelaide, and Adelaide was sick in her own hat. That made him laugh. Then he grew ashamed. For it corresponded so distantly with what he felt, that shapeless abyss between his lungs and his stomach. He wondered if he should take her hand, but, wondering, decided not. Even if they were not Eden’s hands, dressed up for the occasion in a pair of old black gloves. He supposed he would never understand the motive behind the wearing of the gloves, why Eden, with her hatred, her fear of convention, had dug up a pair of old black gloves to leave London in. His mouth moved towards a question. It took courage from a moment earlier that evening, when for the first time in his life he had approached his sister without explicit words. But even this, remembered, could not launch him in pursuit of the motive behind the gloves. He failed, deliberately. Because this was something he must not touch on. It was one of the secret places, of which Eden’s life was full.

And then it was time to get into the train. Then it was that quick succession of last moments, and the smell of apples and a magazine, and the voices calling through the yawning of a train, and the faces, and the faces, and the faces. She stood at the window and waved. A short, nervous, jerky wave. Because they had always been a bit ashamed of any gesture they spent upon each other. He noticed that one of her fingers was showing white through the black glove, before this became a speck on the lost hands, before her white face was withdrawing down an infinite tunnel of yellow fog. The little Jewess stood with a purposeless handkerchief. She held it crumpled against her cheek. With the train, the man turned back into Europe on what errand?

Elyot wandered in the street, homeward in fact, but in a sense directionless, on his own train of thought. He would never know the nature of this Jewish errand, the importance of which had dwindled with Eden’s face. He would never fit a motive to the black gloves. These were threads from the so many threads of the mystery you had to accept. And in the streets at night, with the interweaving of passionless faces, the passage of the stolid buses, the downward falling of a steady neon rain, it was easy enough to accept. The whole business was either a mystery, or else meaningless, and of the two, the meaningless is the more difficult to take.

The street he walked stood in anachronistic silence. He was going home. Near in space, it still wore the distant expression, presented the vague purpose of familiar places that have been jerked out of their setting by an emotional upheaval. Even if here stood the pub on the corner with one queasy drunk swaying at the kerb, even if your legs had turned this corner many times, the eyes rested on a series of identical queasy drunks, it was unconvincing, the present version with the past, something that your mind could only take for granted. Detail was soluble in rain. He might have been merged with the drunk, fumbling now in his pocket for the bus fare or else the price of another drink, wondering feebly at the back of those yellow eyeballs if he was really going to vomit, or fall, just fall, into a receptive gutter.

Elyot stood on the kerb. He had time, all time in a dissolved world to watch many deliberating drunks. But absorbed, he was still no closer to the grease-spotted macintosh and sagging hat. The night dissolved without bringing you closer. Either to Eden, in spite of a chance moment of illumination, or to the excess humanity spewed out of pub doors. It was a remoteness once alarming, then inevitably accepted. He closed himself to sentimental regret, and felt with satisfaction the drizzle on his face, because with it a sense of still being there, the bones and flesh, heading homeward to bricks and mortar, and bread and cheese in the kitchen.

The drunk had ventured out from the corner, following the line of some imaginary tightrope. He moaned a little, and looked at Elyot, conscious perhaps in the way of the drunk or mad, that some transient thought was resting on him. But there was no contact. He meandered into the street, not so much man as the clown upon his tightrope, a flapping of empty sleeve and hollow leg. And then just at this moment, the moment before, Elyot realized it would happen, he must move from this fixed spot, at once, quickly, associate himself with the anonymous figure, that it was for this purpose they had lingered close to each other on the pavement. Because he could see it, the bus, ballooning down by lamplight, very red and ominous. The whole side of the street came careening over into his close vicinity. I must do this, his mind shouted, tossed out into the screaming of the bus. The lights spun. The whole neighbourhood moved. Except his feet. He was anchored where he stood. He was the audience to a piece of distant pantomime.

They put the macintosh on the pavement. The legs protruded stupidly, the turned-up soles, round them a sudden flowering of pale, uneasy faces. First and foremost this was an accident, an additional throb to be felt over the fish and chips or the last glass of stout.

What do you know! the driver said.

He was shaken. Down on the pavement he began to bluster. Because he was afraid.

Walkin’ with his eyes shut, said the driver. And soused, into the bargain.

His hands shook.

Walking with his eyes shut. This has some connexion, Elyot felt vaguely, I am responsible for this. His feet were still lead, fixed to the same spot. He must drag himself into the circle of faces, associate with just such another face, flat on the pavement, that circumstance had lifted up and given a temporary distinction. He must advance and say – what?

Would you ever! said the woman with the newspaper twist. It was three months, come Easter, she had seen the milkman killed in Pimlico Road.

But ’e ain’t dead. Or is ’e? she wondered.

Her head twitched in an ague of excited surmise.

They began to babble. A mingling of sympathy and pity, of ashamed exaltation, of practical advice. Elyot, advancing to the fence, saw, between craning necks, the thin trickle of blood from the corner of a mouth. It trickled out thin and private. No one had any business looking at this stream of blood. But there it was. And the man moaned in a disjointed way, as he had in drink, it might have been this still, the same obliviousness, detachment.

Out of the commanding of official voices, the blue police, rang an ambulance bell. The lips of the man blew in and out. On the blood a glitter of whitish froth. And I am standing here for what, you asked, for the buried moment, for that second of connexion on the kerb that broke too easily. You stood there, half attentive to the far-off voices, hushed now that the man was tucked on the stretcher, about to be carried away. It would soon be over. A keen spasm to be added to the sum total of everybody’s individual sensation.

It was truly over, in the clanging of a bell.

Elyot Standish continued homeward, through the landscape of his own mind, through the remoter geography of Ebury Street. He had failed, in one of those moments of arrested initiative, to step off the pavement and rescue a drunk from a bus. He felt exhausted, sick. Intermittently he tried to seize on the significance of this incident, while coming to the conclusion, in defeat, that it was unimportant. The whole business was unimportant. It would join the regiment of unimportant events, the anonymous face fading on the wet pavement, Eden closing the compartment door, Elyot walking homeward up Ebury Street. Try as his conscience might to raise the dead, the dead continued to lie with folded hands. It was quite remote. But he continued to feel sick. Something had lodged itself in his stomach, forced downwards by the mind. And it was a struggle to keep it there.

Coming to the house he let himself in. There was no change in the ritual of this, the glance at the doorpost to see what damage dogs had done, as he skirted the milk-bottles left by Julia for the morning. This was going home. The drunk putting his hand in his pocket, searching under a handkerchief for his fare, was also going home. But your mind rejected this. The man perhaps was already dead. On the first floor Elyot turned on the light. It helped him retrieve himself from an avenue of too obtrusive images. But there still remained the house, in a white and honest light, in the corrosive silence of deserted houses.