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.
Gil comes carrying the two overloaded ports. The weight and his attempt at haste make him less manly than he would like to appear. His shoulders are hunched, his ribs visible inside the summer shirt. Round his neck he has attached his football boots by joined strings. (‘Hate this bloody football, but if you don’t go along with it they’ll say you’re a poofter.’) The boots make an almost jeering sound as they thump his chest.
You are forced out at last from the building by wanting to do, or say something—but what?
‘A girl…’
The accountant’s murmur is too vague, little more than a sigh, to convey either censure or approval. His smile remains in position probably out of habit.
Gil only grunts as he starts the struggle up the hill to the gate. Mr Stallybrass makes a move to help with one of the ports, then thinks better of it.
You run out after them, on bare feet over the chunks of broken concrete. The others must have heard, but Gil makes no sign of knowing you are there, while every one of the few hairs left to Mr Stallybrass between his bald dome and his starched collar is bristling with hirsuteness. It makes you feel quite naked inside your cotton frock.
Confrontation is avoided by arrival of the Lockhart Chev. Aunt Alison is unfolding as she drags herself out. She looks older, thinner than the day before. The rags of her burnt face are almost purple over white. She must have run short of cigarettes.
‘Alison Lockhart,’ she explains briefly. ‘Mrs Bulpit will have mentioned…’
Faced with Mrs Lockhart, Mr Stallybrass has lost a good deal of his confidence.
‘Of course, yes.’
‘I went with her to the hospital—spent most of the night there in fact.’
‘I hope…?’
‘She died early this morning…’
‘Oh dear!’ Though his smile lingers, the accountant’s hand falters as he unlocks the Daimler’s boot.
Too much is happening at once. Aunt Alison has gashed her hand on the rusty gate. She watches the blood trickle down over the stains of nicotine. Gil is raising his luggage, packing it inside the shining car. Mr Stallybrass fears the boy may have grazed its precious paint.
The football boots are bumping around foolishly on their string as this long, painfully breathing form fits itself into the passenger seat.
Ignoring the unexplained barefoot girl, Mr Stallybrass bows at Mrs Lockhart, who does not return the civility. She is winding a dirty handkerchief round her bleeding finger.
The accountant drives smoothly off. Seated beside him, re-arranging the football boots Gilbert Horsfall does not look back.
How are you to take all these people, this coming and going, and Essie’s death, when it is Gil who has died?
Perhaps he looked back once after your back was turned to exchange a secret smile, and because your face wasn’t there to receive it, would imagine you have given him up.
‘Come on, Ireen,’ Aunt Ally calls. ‘There’s a hell of a lot to get through.’
She has developed a limp, perhaps out of sympathy with the finger, or she may have really fallen down on her way here from the hospital.
It doesn’t stop her stamping through the house, slamming, locking windows (she has cracked a pane in one).
‘What are we supposed to do, Aunt Ally.’
‘Tidy up. Sort things out. Well, I couldn’t bear it—not today.’
It is Essie’s bedroom which has made her decide—the smell of sickness, stale powder, the big unmade bed—the lot.
‘Not today. I’d fetch up.’
You are following her out to the tune of keys, only remembering at the back door.
‘We’re forgetting my possessions, Aunt Ally.’ She can’t stop hooting! ‘Aren’t you old-fashioned! Your possessions! You poor dear!’
She helps you up the slope with what there is. She has lost her limp. But her breath is terrible, a long sweet smoky blast.
‘Your possessions!’ as she drives snorting away.
There is all the usual trash in the Chev, along with a new sound, of an empty gin bottle rolling around on the floor at the back.
‘You must wonder why I didn’t come for you last night. You’re too young. It’s something you wouldn’t understand. What that poor devil of a frightful female did to me. So I had a few drinks and drove around. You wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t creep into my house. People asleep. So I drove. Night’s perhaps the best part of life—if you’re on your own—and have a car.’
She almost runs off the road making the turn at this culvert, but it doesn’t seem to matter much.
‘Shall I be able to go back sometimes to the garden?’
‘If you want to—anyway till the house is sold. Don’t expect the new owner would want a stray
girl nosing round his property,’ Aunt Ally beeps. ‘Garden—I’d call it a wilderness.’
On every side—a country of lantana and feral cats.
‘Do you have the accountant’s address?’
‘His office address. She forced it on me on account of the boy. But there’s no reason why I should have any traffic with that person—in his bleeding Daimler—now that Gil-bert has been disposed of.’
We drive on towards the house in which my ‘aunt’ and my ‘cousins’ live. It’s listed under the name of ‘Harold Lockhart’ (in the telephone directory). Harold felt even less an uncle than the boys are cousins, or Ally except at odd moments, an aunt. If you could have your own way, you wouldn’t want to meet anyone else, related or unrelated, ever …
* * *
Event No 3
The move to Lockharts’ was perhaps an even greater event than Nos 1 and 2 though each a vicious and unexpected blow, Mamma’s death, which was also the death of Papa’s ideal, then on top of it Essie’s illness, the end of the garden, and Gil Horsfall’s back as he was driven off. The move to Lockharts’ was linked with education, which made it that much more formidable. All these boys talking about exams and what they would be doing in the future. Harold Lockhart (‘never call me “uncle”, Irene’) at work in the Department of Education. All of it meant that you were being formed, that any part of Eirene Sklavos which survived, must exist only in the secret poetic world of dream and memory. Well, it has been like this already, but without the same brutal onslaught from boys and a Public Service uncle all geared to what most adults refer to as life. At Lockharts’ you are formally Eirene Sklavos, in their eyes, if they ever take a look at you.
It must be said for Harold that he calls you ‘Irene’ not ‘Ireen’, in his soft, what passes for educated voice. Books and music have made him persuasive. He paints a little at the week-end—what he calls ‘mood painting’. There is nothing outwardly brutal about Harold. He is too soft-spoken, soft silvery hair. A gentle man. Except when he remembers to look at you, and something happens to the corners of his mouth, pleating, moistening, and his eyes of that lovely soft silvery blue, compared with Alison’s harsh glare, suddenly harden. Then you know that Harold is one of those people who know what they want. There’s nothing wrong with that of course. If only you did.
There is a great shuffle round at Lockharts’ following your unexpected, unwanted arrival. There is the question of rooms. Bruce and Keith, they are big, each has one of his own. Bob and Lex, the freckled, pig-rooting brumbies from back of the class, they already share. It is the little ones Col and Wal who suffer, they are banished to a sleep-out, and you will suffer accordingly in what was once their nice room, where their gear and toys continue to be stored. They are free to run in and fetch what they need, giggling as if they had found you naked. Throwdowns and stink bombs are what they see as the best jokes. And once an imitation dog turd.
Ignore. There is a drawer in which you can lock the diary you haven’t yet begun to write. A wonder the key has survived Col and Wal.
There is the Saturday arvo they are all going to the cricket match. You are planning to say you don’t feel well. Will Alison fall for it? Or will she tot up and find it’s too soon after last time.
What she says is, ‘It’ll do you good. Take you out of yourself, mix with others in the fresh air. You’re becoming morbid, Ireen.’
Actually she mustn’t believe any of this, driving round by herself in her smelly old car, getting sloshed on gin alone at night—‘the best part of life’. But because she is officially on the parents’ side she goes along with what is supposed to be.
‘You’re not sickening for something, are you?’ Your aunt looks genuinely anxious for a moment, as though she couldn’t bear it if somebody else is preparing to die.
‘NO.’
The truth was you were longing to indulge in the luxury of lying on the bed in full health, thinking and dreaming, then after their departure has stopped rocking the house, and it has subsided into its natural shape, to get up and take a look in the glass at this new person you are becoming, perhaps even write about it in the clean locked-up diary, all those threads of words and thoughts sprouting out of a pen.
Everything happens, as far as you can tell, according to plan. The silence is as soothing as lanoline on a sore place. A twig falls. Birds pick at an Australian silence without tearing it apart. Except the kookaburra, which is either in league with humans, or else laughing at them.
The kookaburra is the counterpart of this counterpane, as silence is to lanoline. You could lie here all afternoon rubbing your back your arms your whole body against this rough bedspread, surrounded by a silence through which twigs feathers can be heard falling. Except you are forced up by a shortening of time, it is never yours for long enough, to look in the mirror or unlock the drawers which contain secrets.
The mirror makes you look a guilty thief. In this seersucker bolero, it is called, and matching skirt, the white blouse. If it wasn’t for your Greek skin and a spot you have rubbed too hard at on your chin, you might compete in the Australian Pretty Girl Stakes. But you will always look too black—and too guilty—nobody wins who has these fatal flaws. The plait is gone. ‘… advise you to cut off, long hair today makes a girl look frowsy, the “Ambleside” hat is frumpish enough without a lot of hot, heavy hair, hanging down or shoved up … have them cut it off … cut … CUT…’
Ally would never know what it is to have your plait cut off. She knows what goes. However, up the line at Ambleside three more weeks till term. Miss Hammersley is head.
Will Col and Wal find out this one drawer is locked, and force it? Better not keep a diary after all, have foreign eyes dirty its pages with sniggers. This guilty mirror is against all such foolishness.
Jan 1943
Well, I’ve got down to it—scribble—scribble. The relief. So much I’ve always wanted to say in any language new or old whichever that is.
Most since Gil was driven off in the accountant’s car.
Asked Aunt Ally, ‘Where is Gil living now?’ She pursed up and answered, ‘With his guardian, I presume.’
‘But where?’
‘Oh somewhere—in Vaucluse.’ Her lips could barely speak the word.
‘Where is that?’ as though you didn’t know.
‘Somewhere out—the other side of the Bridge.’ Her teeth have had enough of whereabouts.
In Sydney, it seems, a bridge does not bridge, it separates.
‘What will happen to him now? Where will he be going to school?’
‘At some so-called public school, SAGS I’m told. I couldn’t care. He’s no responsibility of mine.’
She closes the matter with a snap.
Gil will become a product of the Sydney Anglican Grammar School while I am to be ironed out up the line by Miss Hammersley of ‘Ambleside’. Worlds between us, as Aunt Ally, I suspect, wishes.
What do they want to do with us? Do they really care? Responsibilities. I think Ally hates me at times because I am Mamma’s child. Gerry escaped, married a commo, and had affairs with men. I hate men! Those kind army officers, the Greek Axiomatic dancing with Mamma in the patisserie, his badly fitting trousers, Mr Harbord exchanging looks with Mrs Lockhart, Harold ‘never call me uncle’, Bruce and Keith behaving like the men they haven’t yet become.
Gilbert Horsfall is another pretender.
At his best he is something else, almost part of myself, the one I have shared secrets with, the pneuma I could not explain, but which he must understand, from what I know of his best moments, not the braying jackass in him.
If I could choose I would shut myself with Gil in the tree-house above the precipice in Cameron Street, floating, and the world could explode around us …
It nearly did day before yesterday. While I am writing I hear footsteps approaching through the house I thought mine for at least one afternoon. Put away your diary. I couldn’t. I was paralysed. Anyway what did it matter? If it was one of the murderers
you hear about? Or some GI. Those who murder or rape don’t take any interest in a diary.
Then when the figure appears in the doorway it is my non-uncle, Harold Lockhart. ‘Did I give you a fright?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I lied, ‘only I thought everyone had gone to the cricket match.’ He said he had stayed behind to do a bit of painting. Sport is for morons, except you’ve got to play it to get on.
He pulled up a chair and sat down beside me at the desk, asked me what I was writing. I told him I was making notes for a school essay we had been asked to write. On what theme? How I see myself. That should be interesting, when you show us nothing of yourself, Irene, how you think or feel, anyone would postulate that you don’t care for us. His voice dried up. He hummed a bit. He must have washed his hair. It had never looked so silvery, it sent out little waves of brilliantine. How is it, he asked, you’re writing this essay when you’re leaving the local school and starting next term at Ambleside? I was dripping by now, choking, what with Harold’s hair and my own stupidity. When I thought to say, with my last gasp, that’s right, but it will come in useful sooner or later, it’s the sort of thing they ask you to write.
Luckily Harold did not seem all that interested in the ‘notes for an essay’. His mouth was pleating and moistening at the corners as I had seen it before. ‘Perhaps you have a literary talent,’ he said, his eyes vague if they hadn’t been concentrated on some intention which made him both sad and, yes, cruel. As concentration increased I was able to slip the diary into the drawer. He did not notice. He was drawing me between his knees. I have never fainted, almost once when Evthymia took me to Kapnikarea on Holy Friday and we kissed the face of the Panayia, now again I was on the point of fainting, what with the floating hair, the pressure of his thighs, and a thrumming sound from inside his shirt. Till I noticed the red lobes to his ears, and a razor nick he had made shaving the cleft in his chin. I despised myself more than I hated Harold.
While taking my head in his hands he is mumbling, ‘Always so clean and neat, Irene, there’s nothing like sluttishness to put a man off, when he has spent his life aspiring after perfection.’ The hands were tightening on my head, the thighs drawing me close to him, the mouth opening, glistening, like a sleepy monster roused by a lone sprat behind the glass of an aquarium. I might have succumbed to this dangerously luscious anenome if it hadn’t been for the smell of turps which had begun to drown the beautiful silvery perfume drifting out of recently shampooed hair. Behind the helmet in which his hands were encasing my head, a harsh halo of turps had almost completely taken over.
The Hanging Garden Page 11