The Hanging Garden

by Patrick White

  He envied her all she had experienced and her professional use of terms. It was too unfair that he had so little to offer.

  ‘Were you afraid?’

  ‘Not really. I was taken care of. It didn’t seem to be happening to me. It would have been different if we had stayed for Greece. I planned to take Evthymia’s sharpest meat knife and kill a German on a dark night.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound to me as bad as the Blitz in London.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

  ‘Thousands killed every night the bombers came over. It was one big firework display. When you got used to it you didn’t stay in the shelters with a mob of people smelling and farting. Bombs tore through the shelters, anyway. You got used to walking through the streets through the shrapnel. And in the ruins by day. One night I was shot out of the corridor on my mattress—landed in the street—thought I was dead till I heard a warden ask, ‘Anyone know this boy’s name?’ Somebody did. They said, ‘It’s Nigel Horsfall from a block away.’

  ‘I thought your name was Gilbert.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’

  They continued sitting side by side on the steps overlooking the garden. Had she dropped to him? From her dreamy look he didn’t think so. And he wasn’t that much a liar. Though he had been evacuated with those other kids before the bombs began to fall you knew what it was like as though you had been there, from what you had been told. If you had imagination you knew. And some had died with poor old Nigel, his only friend. You knew through Nigel. Silly of you though to let the name slip.

  But she hadn’t cottoned on. He took another look. He might have taken her by the hand. They were wandering through the blacked-out streets. In the ruin of some great house they looked down at the marble face, like of some goddess broken out of a volcanic temple, only the lips began to breathe, very gently. Irene Sklavos did not seem surprised, it could have been her own face whitened. There was a man and woman pressed up against each other in a gateway. Nigel Brown who knew more about it said they were fucking. Irene Sklavos seemed unsurprised, when you—or was it Nigel?—led her farther into these desolated streets which belonged to you both by rights of the life you had begun to share, through imagination and dreams.

  He looked at her again to see what she was thinking, from her side-on face. If he had pulled her round and stared at her eye to eye, she would have had the round, gently breathing face of the yellow, bomber’s moon. Side-on, she was this sharp know-all. If he had touched her elbows or knee-caps they would have been as sharp, as cutting as the words of teachers in class or the Lockhart louts—Kevin and Bruce. He couldn’t tell which side she was on.

  * * *

  When they were seated one each side of her at the kitchen table their guardian told them, ‘You may wonder at us eating such a nice piece of steak in wartime. It’s because Mr Strutt did me a favour—a mate of Reg’s—another of us from the Old Country—always down at the Imperial when we was running it—all returned men—things was different in those days.’

  She had cut up her steak very fine. She was only messing with it, the chips were more to her taste. She gobbled at them in between what she had to tell. One of the big flabby chips fell out of her mouth and landed in the gravy, which shot up and spotted her dress.

  ‘You children,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t understand.’

  Then she realised she ought to clean up the gravy spots and began mopping at them with a hankie. Her red lip-stuff had worn off. Her mouth should have looked normal, except most grown-ups never look that.

  Gilbert Horsfall looked across at Irene Sklavos. They should have felt good for a giggle, but they weren’t. Like Ma Bulpit, the girl was only picking at her food. She had the sniffles. She looked darker than ever, if not positively green.

  In between observing the others and disapproving their wasted opportunities, Gilbert Horsfall polished off his own plateful. He still felt hungry. He might have helped out, he thought—urgh, no, not the mess Ma Bulpit’s shiny teeth had refused, now sitting in its own fat. But Irene had hardly touched her tea. He could imagine taking a mouthful of the untouched steak and converting the stringy old stuff into a delicious tenderness. He shivered as his teeth entered the soft, greasy chips. All his imagined acts were becoming so real, he wondered whether Irene would see that he was almost peeing himself. But she kept her eyelids lowered.

  Ma Bulpit had begun pulling out. ‘Expect you’re waiting on the pudding,’ she mumbled. ‘All young things have a sweet tooth,’ chair grating almost to toppling, ‘that’s why we lose them,’ as she stumbled in the direction of the kitchen which swallowed her signature tune. ‘In the old days I was famous for my Apple Betty.’

  Irene Sklavos raised her eyelids.

  ‘What is this Betty?’

  Her question promoted Gilbert Horsfall to the rank of friend. He was both grateful for the honour and reluctant to accept it.

  ‘Arr,’ he said, sticking out his lips remembering his Lockhart mentors, ‘it’s got these sort of pip-scales in it that make you wanter puke—right enough if you’ve still got to fill your belly.’

  She looked so unhappy he clenched his knuckles under the table. He hoped she wouldn’t take him for a Lockhart, but could think of no way of showing her he was otherwise.

  Aluminium began battering the silence which had gathered in the kitchen.

  Mrs Bulpit appeared leaning in the doorway. ‘Got a bit burnt,’ she explained, ‘on the top.’

  The accident didn’t prevent laughter spilling out from around her teeth. She could even have been feeling relieved, anyway for a moment, because in aiming at, and plummeting into her chair, she declaimed, ‘… you gotter forgive … me migraine’s coming on … a martyr to it.’

  She sat holding a hand above her eyes, like a vast white celluloid shade, while her audience wondered whether they were impressed or suspicious.

  Suddenly removing the shade from her afflicted eyes, she announced, ‘It’s the migraine that’s kept me from turning out the lovely room I have for our little lass. Too much happening at once,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll get round to it, but tonight she’ll have to camp somewhere else.’

  Eirene Sklavos sat very upright, her neck grown as thin as the stem of a flower. The lobes of her ears seemed to flicker like freshly opened peablossom, only that was impossible. It was more likely that her earlier suspicion would be confirmed, and that she would have to share Mrs Bulpit’s bed.

  ‘Aren’t we going to get the pud, Mrs Bulpit?’ Gilbert Horsfall thought it reasonable to ask.

  She was too preoccupied to answer.

  And Eirene thought him stupid not to recognise the direction from which serious threats can be expected. In spite of his male strength, he would remain an unreliable ally.

  The Bulpit was starting again. ‘What I think I’ll do,’ she mumbled as she unlocked her thighs gripping the chair arms with her great white squelchy hands, ‘I’ll make up the other bed in Reg’s—in Mr Bulpit’s room—till we get ourselves sorted out.’

  She sounded as though she was addressing herself—or the former W/O—rather than those more deeply concerned. Of these, Eirene might have felt relief, Gilbert Horsfall could have been stunned, but neither of them revealed a reaction, which in any case their guardian was prepared to ignore.

  As she rolled once again out of her constricting chair, she appeared more than anything relieved to have made what amounted to a decision. ‘… and I wouldn’t call it a bad one…’ She continued mumbling as she moved about in different dark recesses of the house ‘… the best I can manage to suit us all’ her voice additionally blurred and furry from the smells of damp and mothballs she was dragging out of cupboards.

  At one stage passing through the room in which the less important actors in the play had continued sitting, herself a blanketed monument with a train of sheet attached, she suggested, ‘If you two kids thought of getting on with the washing up, a person would be much obliged.’

  Gilbert Horsfall grimac
ed, winked, and went through a series of wriggly motions with his torso. In normal circumstances it might have amused his audience. Now Eirene Sklavos could only accept his leadership and follow him dully into the kitchen.

  There at least it was warm, not to say fuzzy from the charred ruin of the pudding in its aluminium dish, the remains of congealed steak and chips, and what must have been brandy fumes, judging from a half-emptied bottle standing beside the sink in important isolation.

  Gilbert grabbed it and reeled as he thrust it at Eirene. ‘’Ave a swig?’ he croaked.

  She ducked away. But some of the brandy splashed over her.

  Gilbert actually stuck the mouth of the bottle in his and she thought she heard a glug or two and saw his throat in motion. She couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything about this boy. But for the moment she depended on him. For that reason she even loved him, she thought.

  Removing the bottle from his lips, he gasped, ‘So much for the orgy. Now it’s down to business.’

  He was filling the sink, swizzling the water with soap imprisoned in a wire basket scraping plates into an already smelly bin.

  She would have liked to help, but didn’t know how. In their Marxist household there had been Vaso, with her arthritika, in Aunt Cleone’s vaguely democratic Republican establishment there was Evthymia to attend to duties beneath a lady. Without slaves, Eirene Sklavos pricked her finger on a fork before throwing that weapon into the sinkful of frothing water.

  She stood looking at the pinpoint of blood on the cushion of her finger. It provided some kind of focus point.

  ‘Here, dreamy. Take the towel, if you’re too grand to dirty your hands.’

  She obeyed him rather gratefully, and began rubbing at the cutlery and plates, but the towel only seemed to make them wetter. It did not matter. Nothing did. While Mamma was sitting in the saloon, listening to men express their ideas. Particularly those of Father’s friend Aleko. Mamma grew still watching the little black tufts of hair on the backs of Aleko’s fingers.

  Gilbert Horsfall’s hands were blond, shiny, hairless as he plunged and re-plunged them in the sink. They were scarcely human.

  ‘Do you like doing it?’ she murmured.

  ‘Do I like?’ as he flipped his hands he flicked back water into the sink. ‘You gotter do it here. Australians are supposed to be useful.’

  ‘We didn’t have to. So I never learned.’

  ‘Thought your people were supposed to be commos.’

  ‘They had their ideas. There was always someone, someone else to do the things like washing up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do any bloody washing up if you didn’t have to stay on the right side of the old girl.’

  Across the distance separating them they stood looking at the charred ruin of the Apple Betty. Nothing had ever looked so extinct.

  Gilbert Horsfall grabbed a fork and stabbed at it. ‘Bloody well burnt out!’ he cried.

  It made her giggle in spite of her deep melancholy.

  ‘Extinct—like that Greek volcano you were telling me about.’

  The charred pudding, the volcano, reminded them of more important matters, for they began drifting by common though silent consent towards the exercise. Mrs Bulpit was commanding in what had been, was still in fact, the warrant officer’s bedroom.

  ‘There!’ she exclaimed, staggering back from tucking in a stray end of sheet between the mattress and a narrow bed. ‘Nobody could find fault with that.’

  A veil of perspiration streamed over her suetty face as she stood admiring her handiwork. She looked quite religious.

  Till snapping out of her trance, ‘I think we’ll agree to call it a day. Thanks for the washing-up, Gilbert—Ireen,’ she leered as she lumbered out.

  But popped back to remind, ‘I hope you’re not mischievous children. No pillow-fights!’

  After that she could be heard in the kitchen extracting the pudding from its aluminium armour, and removing her mouth from a bottle, it sounded.

  The children were left to face the details of an oppressive present and a frightening, larger-than-life future.

  There was no tune to Gilbert’s whistling as he tore himself out of his clothes. Eirene did not know what to do, say, or where to look. She continued standing beside what Mrs Bulpit had ordained as her bed. She did in fact slightly glance in her ally’s direction. In his nakedness he had his back to her, buttocks tensed, ribs in each case visible. He was skinnier than she would have imagined. Then he began putting on these old pyjamas with stripes of washed-out blue on them, and tying a string round his middle.

  He asked, ‘Aren’t you going to undress?’ though still with his back to her.

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  He got into bed, pulling the sheet over his head.

  ‘We didn’t last night, Mamma and I.’

  ‘You’ll be smelly if you don’t, two nights running.’

  She took off her shoes and stood them together as neatly as Aunt Cleone would have demanded. She pulled off her stockings, rolling each into a ball before sticking them in her empty shoes. She too took off her dress, folded and hung it over the foot of the bed. After this there was nothing to prevent her getting between Mrs Bulpit’s damp grey sheets.

  She should have felt safely sandwiched, and the surrounding silence saved her from further depredations, if it had not been for a distant crash.

  ‘What is it—Gilbert?’ she asked.

  ‘Possums.’ His mouth made a big round O through the sheet.

  ‘They must be huge.’

  ‘Some of them are,’ the sheet veiling his face quivered with suppressed sniggers, before he snatched it off.

  ‘Gotter turn the light out!’

  He tore across the room in the washed-out pyjamas, the legs and sleeves of which were by now too short.

  Then darkness rushed at them. It swallowed the leaning warrant officer, the pieces of Bulpit furniture, and anything as personal as the hopes and fears of those temporarily living there.

  A violent plunk of springs told Eirene Sklavos that Gilbert Horsfall must have landed back on his bed. The distance separating them stretched even wider than before. The rough sheets were sawing at her. The bloodspot on the finger she had pricked with a fork swelled against the darkness and swelled, becoming—was it? The head of that old man a tank had crushed outside the Royal (or National) gardens. Swelling and spilling. The old man’s bloody brains.

  ‘Tell us something.’

  Gilbert’s voice had roughened in an attempt to become a man’s. She recognised the tone. It was that of the men Mamma enjoyed talking to. Holding her head on one side. You tried out your head in imitation against the rough, damp, Bulpit pillow.

  ‘I haven’t anything,’ she murmured back across the darkness lying between them.

  ‘You had plenty when we were talking before.’

  ‘That was then.’ She heard herself mewing into the pillow.

  ‘What’s up?’

  She couldn’t tell him. She hardly knew.

  The darkness was rocking, not so much the boat carrying her back to a war, but the motions of the dance she was dancing in the patisserie in Alexandria. Mamma hated this officer, but her body could not refuse to dance.

  ‘You’re a sooky sort of girl,’ Gilbert Horsfall was complaining.

  All the girls he had known were crowding in on her through the darkness, long-legged yellow-haired English girls, cold and perfect Miss Adams said she loved the daffies in spring time at Home. Some of Gilbert’s girls wore lipstick. They were women in front.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she mewed worse than ever.

  They entered the worst silence of all. Was any of it happening to them? The war, Australia, this vast Bulpit room with iron beds clamped to opposite walls.

  ‘Why don’t you come over?’ he twittered.

  Why should she? It made her raise her head against the pillow. Others always came to Mamma. This boy with the hoarse voice and shrunk pyjamas. Gilbert Horsfall’s wriggly t
orso. Who knew about bread and dripping. She snorted slightly, licked her lips. She had never felt so tall and slender. Her strength was returning.

  ‘Not if you’re afraid,’ he said, ‘but you needn’t worry about her. She’s as safe as a lead sinker once she’s under the brandy.’

  ‘I’m not afraid. It’s you. Otherwise you’d come over here.’

  To demonstrate the truth of her remark and her own superiority, she jumped out of bed before he could, only regretting her recklessness halfway across the gritty darkness, and set up a mewing again on stubbing her toe on a castor. At once the dark was full of threats. It was a comfort to find herself thrown forward, sprawling like a crab on Gilbert Horsfall’s bony chest.

  ‘Ahoo … it’s cold,’ she moaned.

  ‘Not where I come from,’ he whinged back.

  The temperature was at least an excuse for her to get into bed and pull up the clothes. She would have liked to snuggle, but lay as stiff and straight as he was lying. It seemed there was nothing either of them could do beyond go along with those private palpitations, fluctuating with rubbery persistence, and listen to each other’s breathing.

  In the distance there was the sound of a ship, the grumbling of a city’s traffic, farther still the explosions and guns, the cries of those who are wounded, which your blood and your dreams know everything about.

  After a while, when they slid into what felt like a shallow backwater, halfway between thoughts and sleep, he thumped his limbs against the mattress and started getting at her again, ‘Tell me about the pneuma.’

  ‘I told you, I can’t. Not in English.’

  ‘But you could if you wanted to.’

  ‘You can’t! You can’t! It’s the sort of thing you can’t talk about.’

  ‘If I was dying,’ he croaked, twisting his head from side to side, grinding a feverish body against the mattress, ‘you’d hold out on me?’