The Watcher in the Garden (8 page)

Mrs. Nicholson swung the screen door open and stepped inside. “Wash in the laundry,” she said without looking round. “Hurry up. Dinner's ready.” Terry followed and the old man went in last, letting the door bang behind him.

When they had pulled their chairs up to the table she brought their plates from the stove. She brought her own last, sat down and said, “Well?”

“Nothing,” said Terry. “I didn't get his cigarettes. He never asked me.”

“I did. He reckons he never heard.” The old man's hands were shaking and he was having trouble cutting up his meat. Mrs. Nicholson leaned over and did it for him.

“You smoke too much. He'll get them for you next time.”

“When's next time? I'm out of smokes right now. Why don't you make him do what I tell him?”

“I told you I never heard.” Terry did not even bother to lift his head. Having justified himself he took no more interest.

“Eat your dinner now and we'll see.” Mrs. Nicholson watched her husband for a few minutes before starting her own meal. It was a look she might have given a child—irritated, resigned, faintly compassionate. Then she picked up her own knife and fork. She ate quickly, getting the job done in the least possible time. When she had finished she put her knife and fork tidily together and sat back. She looked at her son. Her face was expressionless as she said, “I'm missing a twenty dollar note from my bag.” He gave no sign of having heard and after a pause she said, “Why did you take it?”

He finished the last of his meal, pushed the plate from him and leaned back. Now he looked at his mother, his face as expressionless as her own. “I needed twenty dollars.”

“It's not everyone'd steal from his own mother.” She said it quite quietly, but her voice held the same metallic note as her son's.

He gave the smallest of shrugs. “You didn't need it the way I did.”

“It was mine. You should learn to leave other people's things alone.”

A kind of smile crossed his face very briefly. “Why? I take what I need. Never any more.”

“Everyone has to learn to be honest sometime.” She was still looking at him dispassionately, as if he were divided from her by the lens of a microscope. “Sooner or later you get caught.”

“Not me.” They looked at one another over the old man's head. “You don't have to worry about me.”

“I never worry about you. I'm just telling you. It's your father I worry about. Poor old man.”

As if it were his cue, the old man put down his knife and fork and leaned back. “I can't eat no more. I don't feel too good.”

“You don't have to. And you never feel too good. I'll get your sweets. You like them.” She swept up their plates and put them in the sink.

While her back was towards them Terry said, “Dad's honest and look where it's got him.”

A plate of stewed fruit and custard landed on the table in front of him and over his head his mother said, “You know quite well that has nothing to do with it. Your father has bad luck. Always has had.”

“Lazy, I call it.”

The old man's pride was pricked, and he said with sudden animation, “You think I get my war pension for nothing? You'd like me to work my guts out, wouldn't you? What's left of them.”

“It's smoking ruined your guts, not the war.”

Before the old man could reply Mrs. Nicholson said, “If we'd got that piece of land he offered for he'd be OK now. A couple of petrol pumps up on the road'd set us up nicely, without his having to work the way he does.”

“Work!” The tone was a worse insult than the word.

Mrs. Nicholson swung round to her son. “You talk like that when you know what the word means. Your father doesn't live on the dole. Sometimes I think something got left out of you when you was born.”

Terry looked at his mother for a long time, and when he looked at her he remained absolutely still. Then, as if he had not heard, he took a long breath and said, “We'll get your bit of land yet. You'll see.”

“Not until old Lovett dies we won't.” Mrs. Nicholson sat down and attacked her fruit and custard.

“That's what I meant.” He pushed his chair back and got up. The spoon fell with a clatter into the empty plate. At the door he said, “See you.” For a moment a curious, loaded look passed between him and his mother. Then the screen door banged and he was gone. Before the old man had finished his pudding the sound of the motorbike was fading up the road.

Autumn moved into winter. The weather turned wet and cold with now and then a crackle of sleet in the wind, and for several weeks Catherine did not go to the garden. But the tensions of home that had sent her there in the days of spring and summer continued. She knew that she caused them. She knew that as soon as she left the house and as long as she stayed away tension evaporated. The knowledge was a load she found hard, sometimes impossible, to carry. It also made her bad-tempered.

Why did she have to tell them at breakfast she'd heard a man coming out of the bank say that her father was the toughest bank manager the town had ever known? At the best of times it was a tactless remark. At breakfast it was a disaster.

“Why did you have to say that, for heaven's sake?” her mother had asked her after her father had left for work with a face like thunder and no glance in her direction.

“I thought he ought to know.”

Nevertheless, she faced the knowledge later as she walked away from the house that if her father had not spent most of breakfast talking to Diana, if he had once noticed that Catherine was sitting there too, she would not have said it. Always it was the same. Something boiled up inside her and before she could stop she had said or done something to anger everybody. There was the time she had asked to go with Diana to the Bachelor's and Spinster's Ball, and Diana, who was trying on her new dress for the occasion, had told her children were not eligible. Her mother interrupted too late with soothing words. She had already thrown the milk jug into the fireplace. Why did her father have to be present? The milk jug would not come back in one piece afterwards when she was sorry she had done it. And the many words she said on other occasions would not come back either. The momentary black rage was her despair. It had not occurred to her it was her family's despair, too.

Sometimes she looked at herself in the mirror. A pale, glum face, straight, gloomy hair, horrible clothes. No wonder Diana had all the friends. It would have been easier if Diana had sometimes been nasty to her—as nasty as she frequently was to Diana. But her sister was as placid in temperament as she was stormy. Besides, Diana loved people and Catherine hated them, or told herself she did, which was almost the same thing. Diana even loved her ‘little sister' and was never unkind. In some ways it was the most infuriating thing about her.

The incident that had sent her storming into the garden to fling herself on the grass by the pool still clung about her memory, sending small electric shocks of anguish along her nerves whenever it surfaced.

 

It was a day of winds and scudding clouds, when the sky looked huge and pale blue and very far away. It was an exhilarating day and she went happily enough to meet the man who was coming by bus to see her father.

“At four-thirty sharp,” said her mother. “And don't be late. He's the son of an old friend of your father's and he wants to talk about borrowing some money—”

“
Borrowing
money? From
Father
?” It was a futile exercise in her experience.

“From the bank, I expect. He wants to make a documentary film and his father wants Father to talk to him about it.”

“Father doesn't know anything about films.”

“Your father is trained to know when enterprises seem sound and when they don't. I dare say if he thinks this idea is sound and if he takes to the young man he may arrange something.”

It seemed to her a forlorn hope, but she was pleased, in a way, that she had been entrusted with the job of collecting the man off the bus. She had never met a film person before, and she thought he must be different from most of the people she knew.

He wasn't. She failed to recognize him as he stepped off the bus. She was the only person to meet the bus so he had no trouble recognizing her. She got quite a shock when he detached himself from the stream of people climbing out and walked up to her.

“Would you be a daughter of Mr. Hartley, by any chance?” He was quite ordinary after all. He even wore a suit, though she noticed, and was somewhat reassured by the fact, that he carried a bulging rucksack and not a suitcase. He was quite thin, fairly pale and not very tall. She wondered why she had been so keen to come.

“Yes. Hullo. Is your name—um—Rupert Iliff?” Now she came to think about it, Rupert was a fairly silly name.

“That's me. And you must be Kitty.”

“My name's Catherine,” she mumbled. “Mum said I was to bring you straight home. Shall I carry your bag?”

“Don't be silly.” Suddenly his face dissolved into a smile and before she could stop herself she smiled too.

“Oh well. Thought I should offer.”

“Right. Now we've got the formalities over shall we go? Are you—” His eyes ran quickly over her. “No, you wouldn't be driving. Shall we walk?”

From the beginning she had found him easy to talk to. She even felt brave enough to ask him what sort of a film he wanted to make.

“I'm interested in birds. I have an idea there'd be a market for a sort of detailed thing about the life of some, perhaps unusual, kind of bird. Egg to dead sort of thing. I expect your father will think it pretty unproductive.”

“Probably,” she said. It sounded just the sort of nice idea he would call “dreamland stuff”. But she was surprised when Rupert's face fell into lines of great despondency.

“I was afraid so,” he said, and heaved such a sigh that she felt he must be cheered up at all costs.

“I can show you a bower bird's playground.” She looked up into his face to see if it had brightened at all. She was quite astounded at the instant change.

“Can you? Can you really? I should like that. I've never seen one, though I know they're fairly common.”

“Not all that common,” and suddenly there were icicles in her voice. He sensed them at once and was apologetic.

“Oh no. I realize that. It was just that—I always seem to miss things other people see quite easily.”

She took him home via the bower bird's playground. It meant going quite a distance out of their way, climbing through dense scrub and scrambling up and down hills not at all suited to city suits. It also took them rather a long time. It was Catherine who remembered first. She disentangled herself from the bush that concealed them and pulled impatiently at his sleeve.

“Get up. Come on, quick. We'll get into an awful row.”

“Oh gosh, I quite forgot. It's all my fault, of course.” Suddenly the concern on his face was wiped away. “But I don't care. It was worth it. Don't worry. I'll say I forced you to take me.” The smiling, conspiratorial look he gave her swept away her last reservations about him. She had never met anyone so easy to get on with. When they finally reached home she introduced him almost as if he were her own private property.

Her father, naturally, had been waiting impatiently, but the row she anticipated never came. Rupert with great skill explained how inevitable it was they should have been delayed and as they went in to dinner at last her father, seeing the sulky expression for once absent from her face, even put his hand on her shoulder.

As it happened, Diana was later than anyone, but nothing was said as she slipped into her place half-way through the first course. Catherine had already opened her mouth to introduce Rupert, but her mother somehow got in before her. Then what always happened, happened again. Now that Diana was there the conversation, which had been progressing in fits and starts and mainly involved questions about Rupert's family and his brief answers, became animated. As usual, Diana only waited for a gap in the conversation to launch into a detailed account of her day. She always did this, and her day always sounded so much more interesting than Catherine's. This time she made a point of telling it all to Rupert. And Rupert, who had up to now looked a good deal more restrained than he had previously been with Catherine, began to expand again.

The end of dinner came, and Catherine had not said a word. Her father swept Rupert off to have his talk, and that was the last she saw of him that day. She thought he was leaving the next morning and went off to bed in a strange state of fiery resentment mixed with plain sadness—a combination of emotions she had not experienced before.

The next day was Saturday, and she stayed in bed, doggedly determined to remain there until Rupert had gone. It was hunger that finally drove her out not long before lunchtime. To her surprise Rupert was still there.

There was nobody in the house. Mrs. Hartley was doing her Saturday shopping and Diana had gone off to work, furiously announcing that she intended to give up a job that required her to work on Saturdays, which all her friends had quite free. Catherine was surprised to see Rupert walking about the garden, his hands deep in his trouser pockets. He did not look as if he were admiring her mother's roses. He seemed more bent on exercise. But he stopped when he heard her steps on the veranda. She stood looking at him, her mouth slightly open, as he swung around and came marching up to her.

“I've been waiting for you,” were his first flattering words. But they were spoken like an accusation.

She found them nonetheless pleasing, and said, “Yes?”

“Your mother said she thought you might take me round the district—show me things I want to see. I thought you'd never get up.” He did not even ask if she had had breakfast, but wanted to bustle her off immediately.