The Hanging Garden Page 10

  Something was happening. Someone had arrived. As you opened the screen door at the back, it hummed like a rusty hornet. From the stove a stink of spilt milk.

  Mrs Bulpit’s voice was rising. ‘Too much happens. A person can’t expect me to cope,’ she moaned, ‘not in my state of health.’

  There was the undertone of a second voice.

  ‘… nobody expects you to … my responsibility…’ ending in a smoky cough which partly veiled the speaker’s sex.

  Gil was standing in the scullery. He was holding his case, ready to catch the bus for school, to arrive at the point where he ceases to know you. He has grown too fat? The cloth is tight round his buttocks. The hair he has begun growing on his thighs prickles like a dog’s from whatever is happening. His face could have heard about a murder or a fire has broken out in one of these old wooden dry-rotten houses. His strong pimpling throat is again a little boy’s. The adam’s apple has been halted.

  Out of sight Essie Bulpit is slopping over.

  When Mrs Lockhart—you would like to see her as Aunt Alison—steps into view.

  ‘Irene, dear—Eirene,’ she makes this supreme concession, ‘… Mrs Bulpit and I think you’d better … Mr Harbord agrees to let you off school today.’

  It is the sign for Gil to uproot himself. His larger-sized shoes (shoes have to be bought as you grow, though garments can wait till the old become indecent) are kicking out, to shake off something holding him back, or excrement of some kind. Has he kicked that hole in the screen door, or was it already there in the old rusty mesh? Get away any way up to the bus. There is no reason why he should stay to contract a disease from someone who has to be quarantined.

  His leather is stamping on the cracked concrete path. Escaping. The bus is suddenly, all of it desirable, the pimply raucous street boys, Mr Burt’s hands twisting the wheel, wrestling. Viva’s fringe and smell, the smudgy faces and limp shopping bags of those who belong to a different life, in which the shortage or availability of things, together with their price, are both as important and out of date as weights and measures on the blackboard under Mr Manley’s hands.

  Anyway school is out for this morning, and you are looking at Aunt Ally’s throat or cleavage in her bosom, the blackhead in it throbbing.

  ‘Come into the lounge, Irene,’ she said, ‘there’s something we must have a talk about.’

  Do you smell? Or has somebody been reading your thoughts?

  Essie Bulpit has prudently retreated to her bedroom. She has heard what Aunt Ally has to tell and wouldn’t want to hear again, unless it was really interesting—or bad. Ally is looking so nervous, her glassy blue eyes avoiding her burnt skin hanging in more than usually pronounced rags, the thing she has to tell must be real bad. After she had hardly settled herself in a groaning of the Bulpit springs, and forced a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the carton corseting it, she can’t postpone any longer.

  So she started off. ‘You can’t expect only happiness, dear, out of life,’ as if you didn’t know, ‘the blows will come as well. And what I have to tell you will probably be the greatest blow.’

  Go on tell, tell, I can take it, because you have as good as told me.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to come and sit beside me, dear?’

  She holds out a hand, with its crummy rings, and the cigarette trembling between stained fingers. While you continue standing where you are. She will think you cold, but it’s okay by Ally if you don’t accept her invitation, her imitation of kindness, she doesn’t go in for touching, or not more than can be helped.

  ‘It’s about your mum, darling.’

  ‘I know.’

  She looks put out, if not frightened. ‘How did you know? Did somebody tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  How to tell Ally, who likes to live in her own car, driving round the bright Harbour bays, with her cigarettes and tissues, the boys’ sports gear, and the wilting vegetables she has bought cheap, keeping all else at arm’s length, unless the God she doesn’t believe in gives her a motor accident, how to tell this aunt you are half moth that knows by downy instincts, half Attic rock that can withstand the Turk’s scimitar.

  ‘Well, if you claim to know,’ she says rather angrily, aligning her big feet in their scuffed shoes in front of her on the Wilton carpet, ‘it makes it easier for both of us. Though it doesn’t seem natural. You aren’t natural, Ireen.’ The glassy eyes are back in true glaring form. ‘To know that your mother is dead—and to feel nothing, it appears—you’re just not an ordinary girl.’

  ‘Where did she die? Greece?’ It might after all become unbearable, you can feel your wiry legs bending, possibly giving.

  ‘No, in Egypt—in Alexandria.’

  ‘How?’

  Facts are more in Ally’s line. She lets out a raw, relieved cough, and a funnel of smoke.

  ‘In a bombing raid. She and her friend—I forget his name—and a number of others must have died instantly, when the house they were visiting,’ she coughed again, ‘suffered a direct hit.’

  She makes it sound as though it’s in the newspapers. Only unknown people die. It suits both of you this way.

  Oh no no it doesn’t. You know about the other. Not from Mamma lying under Alexandrian rubble. But father murdered in his cell. Now Mamma has ended something. Greece—my heart—is dead.

  Ally is extracting herself from a horrible situation and the groaning Bulpit sofa. ‘I like to think you feel more than you let me see. And now to be practical—not to brood over what’s happened and can’t be undone—why don’t we drive somewhere for the day. Do a little shopping in the city en route. I’ll buy you anything you have a fancy for—provided it’s not too extravagant—in war time.’

  Keep it light, bright, and inexpensive for poor old Ally.

  ‘No.’ It seems your voice will never learn to play along. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

  ‘What—with Mrs Bulpit? She’s—in no fit state…’

  ‘With nobody.’

  Ally hunches her shoulders. Unnaturalness in others makes her look deformed.

  When she has gone, after you hear her driving away, the room, this recent torture chamber, settles back into its normal dull shape. You go outside into the garden to regain your normal balance. But nothing will ever be the same.

  ‘Eirene’ is dead. I am Irene Ireen Reenie anything this Australian landscape dictates their voices expect. Not altogether. Little bits of ‘Eirene’ are still flapping torn and bloody where they have been ground into the broken concrete strewn along the sea wall amongst the gulls’ scribble little spurts of knowledge will always intrude on what others are babbling about and on what I have learned to learn from blackboard and textbook, memory will always be bloodier than pinpricks the cruel tango we can’t resist in any of its movements in the bilious Alexandrian patisserie in Attic dust in mountain snow my mouth is watery with what I must live and already know.

  When will Gil come and I tell him about Mamma? Or does he already know—perhaps more than I? It will be a comfort—to watch his face—to touch his hand—if I dare.

  * * *

  The bus has passed. He hasn’t come. Gone with Lockharts perhaps. Is he afraid of somebody who has been touched by death?

  The Bulpit calls ‘You two’ll have to get your own tonight. I feel too sick. There’s cold stuff in the flyproof.’

  He comes in, throws his case in the corner.

  ‘Walked back this evening. Exercise.’

  He puts on his ugliest voice, flexes his muscles to demonstrate the virtue in exercise. He has grown some more, it seems, since morning. He disappears somewhere he doesn’t want you to follow.

  Much later he shows up and we stand together shivering gnawing at a couple of pork bones (‘Mr Finlayson’s favour’) and swallowing a mess of cold bread pudding.

  The night is a naked electric bulb.

  ‘Did you hear about Mamma?’

  You both shiver worse than ever pressed up against the table, its American cloth strewn with
shavings of pork fat and grey gobbets of bread pudding.

  ‘Yes, it was bad luck.’ He has grown suddenly precise and English. ‘Anyone can cop a bomb. If your name’s on it. Nigel did.’

  Gil has his own store of knowledge.

  ‘She must have died instantly.’ It’s your newspaper voice, borrowed from old Ally Lockhart.

  ‘Reckon the lot of them did.’

  ‘Do you know who they were?’

  ‘Bruce Lockhart says they were a mob of allied staff officers, who’d gone along to this fancy Gyppy whorehouse, when the bomb fell.’ He began to laugh. ‘Pinpointed, I’d say. Sounds like a great spy story.’ His ugly laughter clattering against his man’s teeth in a boy’s mouth.

  You long to kiss and heal his hateful mouth, return the beauty you know is there.

  He has begun to see you. ‘Sorry, Irene. You must be cut up about your mother.’ Again the well-brought-up English boy. ‘Ought to go to bed, oughtn’t we?’

  We are tramping in opposite directions. The same if you dared admit.

  The same.

  * * *

  Event No 2

  It happened in the holidays which made it in some respects easier.

  Gil is out boating with Bruce and Keith. You are sitting at your table ruling the notebook you think of keeping as a diary—if you dare.

  The boat heels as they jump from side to side indulging in that boring pastime sailing a boat. (Sails in the distance are a different matter). But hulking males. The hairy Lockharts. And GILBERT HORSFALL (you have already printed the name on a secret page of the diary you haven’t begun to keep) in his imitation of the Lockharts. His hands have not lost their original shape.

  The hand of Fatima on Arab houses to protect them against evil.

  Most Greeks are hairy. There’s no getting round that one ‘Eirene’.

  ‘Ireen?’

  The Bulpit is calling from her room. We are all living in separate rooms. (The only shared moments are in the single room of the tree-house, and Essie thank God can’t climb the ladder.)

  ‘Okay, Mrs Bulpit, I’m coming.’ Such a binding grind.

  Essie is lying in her awful bed, which she shared with the W/O, and you with Mamma that first night. Enough associations to disassociate anyone for ever.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mrs Bulpit?’ Your hypocritical mini-voice.

  ‘Re-fill the hotwater bottle, dear.’

  On one of the steamy summer mornings.

  It is so long since you looked out of yourself and saw Essie that doing so now is a shock. At the end of the arm dangles the slack hotwater bottle in its fluffy pink jacket. There is the smell of sick rubber. The thin arm suggests pelican bones. She is without her teeth, her yellow throat dangles and wobbles on the rumpled sheet, she has the pelican’s not quite bird and not quite human eye.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Bulpit. Don’t worry. I’ll fill the bottle.’ Speaking like an adult.

  You would have stayed boiling the kettle if the hotwater bottle in its pink jacket hadn’t looked and felt like something fetched up out of Essie’s insides.

  ‘Thank you, dear—it’s a comfort—to hold…’

  When she has rolled round a bit in the bed, the contours of her slack body gurgling and subsiding, Essie says from out of her gums, ‘I’ve always tried to do me duty, whatever it was. But there comes a time…’

  If only she won’t start slobbering. No slobber left perhaps, only those pelican bones and slack wobbly pouch.

  ‘People think you’re a fool today if you have your principles.’ No longer human.

  That black bead of the pelican’s eye. You are the one will start slobbering. Oh God, to die without finding a duty. But what? Mamma thought she had one and let it down. Cleonaki had her duty to the Panayia and the Saints, the same wooden face in a change of robes. The old wrinkled voice reading from the Gospels. The classics too. For what we may learn, though we may not approve, Eirinitsa, of the passions they illustrate. So we read Phèdre aloud, and it is thrilling, no less in Cleonaki’s crackling voice.… de l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs … What has she known of the furies of love, this dusty voice, the face like an old, white wrinkled glove? Did Cleonaki tremble when she kissed the Archimandrite’s hand. Or was it all ideas and tales?

  ‘You love them and they let you know, more or less, you’re a fool for doing so.’ Again the voice of the pelican. ‘Reg never understood duty—except to his men, the C.O., and the customers after we opened the pub in Sydney. Well, it was a duty—a man’s duty. I suppose you’d call it. A woman’s is different.’

  ‘Better not tire yourself Mrs Bulpit. You’re ill. I advise you to relax.’ In extremis, yes, extremis, you are copying Aunt Alison.

  Thank God a car is pulling up outside. A visitor—a tradesman—anybody.

  It is Aunt Alison’s trampling feet her voice pushing the way into the room, to Mrs Bulpit’s dreadful rumpled bedside. She doesn’t notice a mere niece, there is no good reason why she should.

  ‘The ambulance will be here any moment now, Mrs Bulpit. You have no need to worry.’ Mrs Lockhart even throws in a ‘dear’ for somebody who was never her friend. Aunt Alison’s idea of doing her duty.

  ‘I was always a worrier. That’s my trouble,’ Essie replies in a calm voice. ‘Has the gentleman been informed—who will act as Gilbert’s guardian? The Colonel would never forgive me…’

  ‘The Colonel—nobody need worry. Mr Stallybrass is an accountant—a correct and honourable man.’

  Aunt Alison is sweating in the untanned rims to her glassy eyes. Once the ambulance has come she may never forgive Essie for calling on her to do her duty.

  The ambulance men stumble a lot. They are old, one fat and puffing, one thin and suppressed. The strong and young are away at the war. But these do their duty. They call Essie ‘love’. She takes it all for granted. Aunt Alison drags on another cigarette as one of Essie’s sheets forms round her ankles.

  The pelican bones, the hotwater bottle, are more than you can bear. You run out, vomit beside the back steps, fall into the leaf mould, amongst the spiders, the ants, the centipedes, and many other mysteries crushing and crushed.

  Aunt Alison comes out presently and calls, ‘Irene? I’ve got to follow on to the hospital. Back later. Tell that Horsfall boy his guardian will be fetching him. He must pack his things. You, too.’

  Finally you are alone in the garden. As you raise your head, there is a long silver thread connecting your chin with the earth on which you have been lying.

  * * *

  Packing our things.

  They don’t amount to much more than what you came in with. Aunt Alison and Mrs Bulpit have used the war as an excuse for not buying ‘a lot of expensive clothes you’ll grow out of next month.’ It saved them the trouble. And was less to pack now thank God. Writing paper, droring paper. The diary you will begin to write when you have the time and courage, and Gil won’t be in the next room. This naked sixpenny exercise book. And books, heavy to carry, in a port, dirty old, inky old school texts. I love a sunburnt country—not today—or will you ever? No country where the memories are all burnt into you, together with the secret pockets you are exploring every day in the present, in the depths of your mind. Selected Poems of Lord Byron. Tell him found a thing or two yourself. You cannot carve poems about Greece in marble. Greece shifts as you watch, like weather, dust, water.

  Snaps. Nothing of Papa, Mamma, Cleonaki, Evthymia. We left in too much of a hurry and Mamma says, ‘Photographs become in time so much sentimental trash.’ Instead a lot of silly school groups. Kids alone or in couples. Ireen, Lily and Eva having it off with the camera. Only one of ‘Gilbert Horsfall’ (signed on the back). Essie Bulpit took it with her Kodak just as he moved. Gil is standing, a silver blur, against the sea wall. Like to have a good one—or three, or four.

  This snap is something, perhaps it is even more so than Gil. Because you persuaded Viva to take her father’s Brazilian jungle head from out of its inlaid box and hold it in a good
light to photo. Viva does not know whether to look sideways at the head, or squint into the sun and the camera. The head is cupped against her broad white hand and not quite recognisable. If you didn’t know. If it hadn’t become your talisman.

  Gil comes in.

  ‘Done your packing?’

  ‘Yes. Are you sure this accountant bloke will come tonight?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘It’s pretty sudden.’

  ‘Illness can be sudden.’ Sounds too prim, prissy. ‘Anyway she’s gone to hospital. She’s pretty crook.’

  ‘Might die.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think she’ll die.’ When this is exactly what you are expecting and fearing another chapter ending in death.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asks, taking up the snap of Viva holding the shrunken head.

  You tell, not all of it, now that this black object, sacred after its fashion, has become your talisman.

  ‘Could be a fake.’ He throws it back on the table where you have been going through the snaps.

  ‘Why does everything have to be a fake?’

  ‘A lot is.’ He is looking distracted from all that is happening. His nostrils are perfect, like one of the poems Lord Byron carved on marble.

  You could whimper, but instead ‘What did you do with that brooch?’

  ‘Oh…’ You might have hit him the way he jumps. ‘Threw it away. What would I do with a bloody brooch?

  ‘Could have given it to me. I could have worn it.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. See? Wouldn’t have wanted you to wear the brooch. They might think I was on with you.’

  You can both have a laugh at that.

  * * *

  Less laughter as the evening deepens. Neither of you knows whether you want to be apart or together, in the house, or the garden. You roam around and it is mostly, at last, apart.

  You would have to be the one passing by the phone when it rings.

  Ally’s voice, darker and furrier than normal. ‘… still at the hospital, Irene … very sick … she has no-one … Who has?… Two big children … learn to cope with a crisis…’ Ally must have sloshed down a couple of drinks. ‘… Keep you up to date. Bye dear.’ Crump.