The Hanging Garden (13 page)

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.

O my uncle—God save us!

Gil breaks in. ‘Why doesn’t this Stallybrass chap come?’ His voice has climbed back to his present physical height, out of its Australian slump and sludge, back to its pure Englishness, the tips of his teeth transparent behind his parted lips.

‘Search
me
. He’s held up.’

With no-one in the room to accuse, Gilbert Horsfall would like to hold me responsible. He flops down on one of Essie’s protesting chairs, his long thighs, his long hands, a face which doesn’t bear looking at, no part of him accommodated to the Australian light, air, his skin has only reached a compromise with the Australian sun. Or anyone.

Nobody thinks of whether there is anything to eat.

‘Going to lie down.’ You are soon entombed on the ottoman, amongst the junk furniture Essie has hoarded, and her own dummy, its bosom full of death murmurs.

From the sound of things, Gil must have thrown himself on the narrow bed under the slanting, blown-up portrait of the W/O.

The telephone rings, but peters out in a couple of idiotic tinkles.

I am the idiot born to die sitting upright on the edge of this tomb-bed my mouth open but paralysed.

I am running a great distance.

We bump into each other halfway there. I can feel the veins in his long arms as we hold each other in part of the immense darkness. Who is leading who in this
cruel tango
?

Who who who on the honeycomb of this narrow stretcher is holding who.

I am holding his head.

Is Gil crying or are our mouths watering together as he fingers only part of me a pimple to his finger,

‘Noooh…’

‘Go on, Reenee…’

‘Noh!’

His sharp nail is at odds with his dreamy mouth.

If I gave in and had a baby it would be less than this head I am holding protecting the soft jumping in a sleeping body the very first time I have held someone asleep.

All voices Mamma Cleonaki Essie Ally are united with the warning gong of daylight. And the unknown voice.

‘Anybody there?’ Rattling the rusty catch, the whole frame of the screen door:

Mr Stallybrass the accountant?

As we brush aside the untidiness of sleep, each dazed gummy face is taking possession of itself. Sleep has bruised us.

It is Gil who is being called on to exercise authority, which he does while buttoning up, thumping first across lino, then the splintery grey boards of the back veranda, ‘Coming, mister—sir … Mr Stallybrass?’

‘Couldn’t make it last night. Early morning’s the next best thing.’

Gil grunting.

‘Fetch your traps. I’ve got the vehicle waiting.’ Must want to get away quick as possible.

From the kitchen shadows you can watch Mr Stallybrass holding the screen door open for the quick exit of his new charge. Extracting this boy from a difficult situation and his own failure to do his duty is obviously child’s play to anyone of the accountant’s experience. His hands with the well-trimmed nails, the wristwatch and the signet ring, are firm, and fairly muscular. A bald head, gold-rimmed specs, and rather large spaced teeth, help increase the gloss and confidence of his smiles. There is no evidence that he has seen you, but he must have by now.