The Hanging Garden Page 6

  She could feel her teeth grow very small as she smiled at the darkness.

  ‘It’s like the moon.’

  ‘The moon’s pagan, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not always.’ She was very happy to discover this.

  ‘I bet you’re not telling me anything of what you know.’ In his expostulation and feverish tossing, his wrist brushed against hers. She was surprised to find it covered with minute hooks.

  She would have liked her wrist to give into his but did not dare. Then again, she didn’t want to, did she?

  ‘Hadn’t we better go to sleep?’ she said, and turned her back on him.

  She got a surly grunt.

  Not long after she didn’t know what had happened to Gilbert Horsfall. She was sitting by herself at the small round table its top moulded out of pig’s brawn edged with a pie-crust in some kind of metal. Not by herself really there was the small white cup with its sludge of Turkish—no, Greek coffee, and the glass with the half-finished Café Liegeois (more than the solid glass and its half-drunk contents she was conscious of the voice which had ordered it.) Her own consommation was out of focus except as something sweet and sticky. Like your fingers. Mamma hated sticky fingers.

  Now it was the music stickily revolving inside the oval of this patisserie that Mamma should have condemned. This Cruel Tango. Like a sticky drum revolving and revolving. Leaning forward chin in hand brought you closer to the dancers, stamping a point into the floor (brawn again). The thick ankles in wartime shoes, Mamma says it is impossible to look elegant in wartime, Maltese, Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Hungarians and Romanians are different, because professional, or dishonest. As she revolves, with the axiomatikos who has brought them to the patisserie. She can’t resist the sticky dance any more than the old lady’s loulou beside her on the gold chain can resist the strawberry tartlet served by the Arab on the surface of the pig’s-brawn table.

  As the dancers revolve to the repetitive music of the Cruel Tango, bump and stamp, the Greek, the Maltese, the Armenian, the thick ankles, the short-legged Jewesses, and more professional Romanians and Hungarians. Stamp and swerve. The pistachio eyes of some dancers. Eyes beaded with Egyptian flies. O Cruel Tango.

  Mamma twists and turns in the arms of the Greek axiomatikos. His badly fitted uniform, particularly between the legs, Mamma is the one who cuts and thrusts. He is her dummy. Her lips wear something brittle in the cruel tango. For Papa who died? For the Greek cause? For herself? Never for you. The sticky tears rain down on the unfinished consommation in this cruel dream.

  She awoke crying. Gilbert, too, must have been asleep. He felt hot and moist as they lay against each other, tumbled into the same heap. Now he started lashing about, perhaps to show he had been awake all the while. It was only she who had been a prey to dreams.

  ‘What you were dreaming about. Was it bad?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’ She paused, wondering how far her conscience, according to Aunt Cleone, would condone a lie. ‘Actually,’ she said, in her best Miss Adams voice, ‘I was dreaming about the moon.’

  ‘That old pneuma again!’

  ‘No, the moon,’ she corrected him firmly, as though the pneuma were her private property.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she conceded, ‘if you pray hard enough—if you want badly—you can be drawn up inside it.’

  ‘Were you—in this dream?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lay listening to her dishonest heart.

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘Oh, you weren’t in it—in any way—in the dream. I don’t see why you should have been.’

  They had restored the distance between them.

  ‘Sometimes when the Blitz was on I used to draw the black-out curtains. I thought if I could see the bombs falling I’d know the best way to escape. But you never saw. Only the moon.’

  The moon’s blue, gelatinous face with the forms of those milky twins inside it.

  Before falling asleep, before the act of levitation took place, they drifted together again, their unprotesting skins, inside the steamy envelope of Bulpit sheets.

  * * *

  Mrs Lockhart has driven up in this old brown dislocated car, maltreated by the kicks, the shoving, the protests of too many boys’ feet and bodies. She has come to investigate the niece and take her to school. Perhaps a more difficult situation than any Mrs Lockhart has ever managed, though she is used to difficult situations, what with Harold and the boys. Harold doesn’t drive. He takes the ferry to the Department. He has always considered his not driving a superior accomplishment. He refers to ‘Alison’s car’, which would have made it hers even if she hadn’t wanted it. Actually she has always wanted it. It is more her home than the equally maltreated, ricketty, weatherboard house in which they live.

  Now she sits in her more personal, mobile home at the Bulpit’s gate, pausing a moment in an inevitably active life, before making an actively distasteful move. If it were not for this she could have been enjoying her freedom, under a blue sky, in a blaze of winter sunshine. She has with her everything she most needs (her supply of cigarettes and tissues) and no appendages (of course she loves the boys, she is less sure of Harold—yes, she is very very uncertain that she should have fallen into such a trap as marriage with Harold). And now Gerry’s child, Ally sighs. She swivels her dented, sunburnt nose. She sweeps the ash out of her cleavage (one bitch of a friend suggests she ought to see a dermatologist about this blackhead) and starts clambering out of the Chev. Can you be starting an early arthritis? Give Harold additional grounds for playing the absentee husband.

  ‘Oh yes, Mrs Lockhart, the little lass is waiting for you.’

  The dreadful Bulpit has assembled her charge early, only too glad to unload her on other unwilling hands. She is standing in the lounge room, picking at the arm of one of Mrs Bulpit’s seedy chairs.

  ‘Here’s your auntie, love.’

  The Bulpit ducks out too willingly.

  The child does not look up. She continues picking. She is neater than anything Alison has ever envisaged. Alison experiences a spasm of revulsion from the contradictory details of Geraldine’s complex life. The fact that they are sisters has always amazed her. This dark child is the most amazing fact of all.

  ‘Well, Ireen…’

  Should they kiss? At least Gerry was never a kisser. Never even seen her kiss a man. And the child obviously doesn’t want to be mauled by a gratuitous aunt.

  Better sit down a moment or two for decency’s sake. Plunk on the Bulpit springs.

  ‘I expect you find it all very strange…’

  ‘esss.’

  Oh Lord the lighter’s given out. These bloody wartime flints. Lord—without my cigs. ‘Do you think you could ask Mrs Bulpit for a box of matches?’

  ‘esss.’

  She trots out. The neat, the pretty are usually cunning—the type Harold takes up with. At least he saw the red light, without even meeting Ireen, and refused to have her at the house. Blamed it on the boys.

  When it’s Gerry really. Always was. Harold hadn’t turned up by then. But always. At the dances. Whirling out in a waltz. Shoving away at a foxtrot, up against their crotches. They said your sister’s stuck up but it never reduced her market value. Geraldine Pascoe. Became a nurse. I ask you. Never believed in Gerry’s vocation for a moment. Lead them on and tie them down, erection and all, under a sheet that was it. No typing pool for Gerry. Touch typing—ha ha. Can’t think why Harold ever. Perhaps he married a typist. Those boring novels nobody will ever publish.

  I am plain, plain, plain. Mother said it. Father even called it ugly, the night of the great piss up, when he came, and went, and stayed away forever.

  Here she is. Back with the matches. Tripping pretty sweeting. Who ever said it?

  ‘Thank you, dear. It’s sweet of you.’ Hypocritical word, but what they use, ‘That’s better.’ Cough, cough. Smoke, if you could tell her, or any one of any of those damn parsons, is one of the few remaining mysteries.

  Instead cough. ‘Your mot
her must be proud of you.’

  The child turns on those eyes, not Gerry’s could be the Greek commo’s—or her own? God, yes, I hope they’re her own—if it wouldn’t make her lovelier.

  ‘Ireen, dear—we’re late enough—we ought to start for school—hope it won’t be too shocking—it won’t—the boys love it…’

  Oh God, she’s still looking at me.

  ‘If there’s ever anything you need, dear, or want to know—you’ll ask me, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Lockhart.’

  Oh God. Well I am, aren’t I?

  ‘Where’s Mrs Bulpit? We’re going! Mrs Bul-pit? On our wayhheh!’

  She comes running, the ghastly creature, head first, almost over the lounge.

  ‘The lunch,’ she gobbles. ‘A child needs a nourishing cut lunch—specially in wartime.’

  Not a bad old stick, she’s even produced a case.

  ‘Old, but it’ll serve, Mrs Lockhart, till we get something better.’

  Ireen takes the battered case. She holds it at the end of a stiff arm. It might have contained a bomb instead of this other jumping object—a cut lunch.

  * * *

  You didn’t want any sort of lunch, least of all a cut one. They cut Vasieolis’ throat. If you stopped eating, you would die quietly, painlessly. They will pick you up like a bunch of wilted spinach, from which the green will have drained away. No blood, either green or red.

  Anyway, for this moment, you would have liked to live in such a way, following the Australian aunt up the path through the garden to which you no longer have or want to have a right. Belonging nowhere. The cat tripping across ahead her tail in the air belongs somewhere here, in this garden which you believed was becoming yours.

  The aunt has wrinkles in her skirt below her behind. Wrinkles in her stockings. She is what Aunt Cleone calls basse classe. Mamma sees poverty as a virtue. Class is a different matter. Here Mamma would agree with Aunt Cleone even when her own sister is at stake. But Alison Lockhart is scarcely Mamma’s sister. As you have seen and heard yesterday standing on the flowerpot at the window sill.

  Scurrying up the concrete path she is wondering what she can say to me. I answer it trying to get it. I can’t help her.

  ‘Well, here’s the vehicle, Ireen. Throw your case in the back. As you can see, the boys have left it in the hell of a mess.’

  There are several pairs of scarred, muddy boots with knobbed soles, and these wads of newspapers with coloured drawings, stirred together, torn and trampled into the dust on the floor of Mrs Lockhart’s car. The case thumps and bounces where you throw it, as she told you to. Glad to be rid of the hateful ‘lunch’.

  Now she is trying to start the car. It will not go.

  ‘Asthmatic. But in the end it doesn’t let you down.’

  She is pressing and prodding and pulling at things. This is how she gets the wrinkles on her bottom. Wheezing and coughing out the smell of smoke. A bit asthmatic herself, it seems.

  ‘There—you see—reliable!’

  For the car has started to jerk and jump—to go. She is glad to show off its virtues.

  But such an old rattling dirty car—is Mamma’s sister poor perhaps? Then Mamma should see her as virtuous. But doesn’t. More people hate than love one another.

  * * *

  If I had one of those lustrous, winged machines—Bentley, Lancia—would I have the courage to step on it and escape from the web of duties in which I am caught? Mornings like this demand winged cars and freedom, to match glistening water, gulls’ wings, a ship breasting the swell at the Heads.

  But I doubt my habits would be altered by a glamorous car.

  Anyone observing me still following my beaten track in the winged Bentley delivering children to school, bullying greengrocers and butchers into letting me have their wartime produce cheap would interpret my behaviour as devotion to duty. Because I am outwardly an active, positive character (‘bossy’ to those who dislike me) not even enemies guess at my lack of will power and dread of being trodden on. Better say something to Ireen. ‘Mr Harbord—the headmaster—is a man I can respect—and hope you will too.’ She’s probably not listening to you, foreigners are like that, they back away into their own language. ‘Some parents—children too—find him too strict—but in such a mixed school—you’ll see.’

  Oh Lord children can make you feel idiotic. They know too much in some cases. Where the hell they get it from …

  ‘I gather you haven’t had much schooling.’

  ‘There was Miss Adams when I was little.’

  ‘Governesses were all very well in the past.’

  ‘She didn’t stay long. Mamma said they couldn’t afford her.’

  ‘I thought it was your father’s aunt who paid.’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Trust Geraldine.

  ‘Mamma says it depends on the parents—to civilise.’

  ‘Civilisation—it’s exams that count in real life. And anyway if your parents weren’t there…’

  ‘There was Aunt Cleone. She speaks five languages.’

  ‘A very gifted old lady, I understand. Let’s hope some of it has rubbed off on you Ireen. You’ll need it.’ I am talking the most utter cock, the sort of thing adults tell children—and one another, for that matter. ‘One more bend, and I’ll be able to show you your school.’

  Poor kid’s stiffening like a little cat.

  ‘You know what I’m going to do. I’m going to stop a second and light up.’ Grapple with the cellophane. Terrible how you can become dependent on a puff of smoke.

  Ireen sits. I can feel gratitude for a reprieve seeping out of her. Stay here in this hot old car. It’s what each of you would prefer. Don’t think I ever grew up. On the other hand Ireen was born old. It could provide a meeting ground of sorts.

  ‘That’s better.’ As the smoke tendrils grow upward against the windscreen like grey plants against the glass wall of a conservatory.

  Say something. ‘Out there amongst the rocks, that’s lantana. It’s a curse. I used to think it pretty, till I was told it wasn’t. A great haunt for cats. Know it?’

  ‘No-oh.’

  * * *

  It is neither pretty nor ugly—like so much so far. Mrs Lockhart is picking at a shred of tobacco stuck to her chapped, lower lip. Her teeth are stained and irregular. But this about the cats begins to make her Aunt Alison—Ally—I wish we could sit here forever amongst the invisible cats, disappear into the sun, the light, as it was in Greece before the war began. Mamma would not sit long enough, Ally might if you persuaded her.

  As I can’t talk to her in any language, she starts grunting, getting into gear, and we are driving round the last bend before the school. We are re-entering the streets of little purple and blood-red houses.

  ‘There,’ she says, ‘see?’ trying to make it sound exciting and important, though she is not the least bit excited. ‘There’s the school in the far block—set back a bit above the houses—out of alignment. D’you know what “alignment” is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. We think the old building has its architectural points. The rest is more or less temporary.’

  The old building doesn’t look all that old, the whole school looks like a barracks at home, or sheds they have built for refugees, after a disaster. Aunt Cleone says we must be kind to all refugees, particularly those from Asia Minor.

  She is pulling up in front of the school.

  ‘Bring your case, Ireen.’

  She has two lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She sits a few moments behind the wheel after you have brought out the case with the lunch lurching round inside it. Then she takes out a lipstick from her bag and bloodies her mouth. She looks at herself in the little driver’s mirror, mumbling on her lips, working the stuff into the cracks. Aunt Cleone says only common women paint their mouths. I don’t think Mrs Lockhart—Aunt Ally—is common. Won’t she get out? We’ve got to go in.

  It has become ve
ry hot inside the cold wind. The asphalt is blistering my feet as we cross it. Aunt Ally trips as her left foot loses contact with its platform. Cleonaki says the actors are wearing these high soles because that’s how it was in enacting the ancient tragedies.

  As we approach, the building is humming with the voices of children at their lessons. Faces looking out here and there from windows are a fleshy grey like the leaves of plants grown behind glass.

  Now we are clattering through this passage in the old building which has its architectural points. Aunt Ally seems to know without guidance how to find the headmaster’s door. Her boys go to school here of course.

  We are asked to come in.

  Mr Harbord has been awaiting us. Wasn’t I expected? He is a bald man with a stomach. He is wearing glasses which magnify his pale blue eyes. His smile magnifies his large teeth.

  ‘How are we, Mrs Lockhart?’ he asks, and laughs as though his question is a joke.

  ‘Not bad, thank you, Mr Harbord.’ Aunt Alison laughs, she has switched to another language, and sounds unlike what you came to think of as herself. ‘This is my niece, Ireen Sklavos.’ She stands smiling, working the lipstick into those cracks in her lips.

  You are apparently the greater part of the joke Mr Harbord and Aunt Alison share.

  Mr Harbord places a hand for a moment on the crown of your head, then removes it as though it has done its duty.

  ‘How’s Mr Lockhart?’ Mr Harbord asks.

  ‘The same,’ Aunt Alison replies. ‘I’m afraid it may be a duodenal ulcer.’ Both look as grave as you have to.

  We all sit down, behind and in front of the headmaster’s desk, on which he places the broad tips of his white fingers. Against the smooth white flesh the wedding ring glistens more gold than gold.

  ‘And Mrs Harbord?’ Aunt Alison asks.

  ‘Wellish,’ he grumbles, and coughs, ‘But still with her sister at Kiama.’

  Aunt Alison begins scuffling her behind around in her chair, as preparatory to business.

  ‘Ireen, I’m afraid,’ she says, ‘has had very little formal education.’

  ‘No worry,’ says Mr Harbord. ‘Backward children often make the big jump forward.’