Careful, He Might Hear You

by Sumner Locke Elliott

  Nonsense, Agnes! They were incensed that she should have said this about Sinden, who was the only one of them who ever stuck up for Agnes against Mater and had done so right from the very first time when Mater had found Agnes’ notebook of ‘Conversations and Disagreements with St John the Divine’ and had read aloud from it amid whoops of laughter from everybody except Sinden who, seeing the red-faced young girl motionless as death watching Mater from the hallway, snatched the book from Mater’s hand and said, ‘Mother, don’t. Let her have God any way she wants Him.’ They all had expected an explosion but instead, Mater had handed the notebook to Sinden and gone rather red in the face herself.

  Once Sinden had said, ‘You should only listen to every nineteenth thing Agnes says, but then you should listen very carefully.’ Over the years they had stopped laughing occasionally and listened intently to Agnes in case she might be saying the nineteenth thing and Lila knew that this was why she was here today; this was why she had turned suddenly from the tram and toiled up the hot, treeless hill to the Temple.

  She watched the sad Lord Nelson face bent impassively over Vanessa’s small handwriting and waited until Agnes had read the last page.

  ‘Well, what do you think of that?’

  Agnes turned her head and stared away through the columns across the bay towards the open sea, narrowed her eyes as though she could already see someone coming—but not by ship.

  Agnes said, ‘You better not oppose her, Lila.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’ll make trouble if you try.’

  (Oh, Agnes, tell me something I don’t know.)

  ‘I know that, Agnes. Even Sam Hamilton says we’d have to apply for adoption, which means finding Logan and—’

  ‘You must let Ness have PS.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s a piece of cheek?’

  ‘There’s a reason, Lila.’

  ‘What reason, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘A reason.’ Agnes closed her eyes. ‘If you go against the current, you’ll be wrong!’

  ‘George and I should just let her walk all over us?’

  ‘I am speaking metaphysically.’ Agnes grew terse. ‘There are reasons for everything and we must abide by them. If you go against the reason there will be a terrible overturning.’ She handed back the letter and said calmly, ‘It won’t make much difference, anyway—the time is growing short.’

  (Oh, here we go again. Might as well have saved myself this walk.)

  Agnes said dreamily, ‘Dr Pollack has worked it out now to the very month, almost the day. The day when we will all be received into the joy of understanding will be in October.’

  (October! How funny!)

  ‘Well, Agnes, I thought you’d like to know—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Ness is coming.’

  Agnes stood up and walked away to the rotunda which they called the Circle of Revelation and Joy, saying what sounded for a second, on the still, evening air, like a nineteenth thing.

  ‘PS has to learn something.’

  A lion roared near by and Lila jumped up, not startled so much by the lion as by what it might be that PS had to learn.

  ‘The zoo,’ said Agnes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The zoo is within earshot. Often when I’m here alone on moonlight nights I hear them crying out for Africa.’

  ‘What does PS have to learn?’

  But Agnes had gone away now quietly on an expedition of her own so they stood together silently, looking down at the bay where, in the deepening blue, the currents ran dangerously against each other, secretly fighting so that the bay shuddered blackly and moved as a sleeper to toss and turn on the beach. Across at the Heads, a Manly ferry passed and the Watson’s Bay Lighthouse began its little winking in the first awareness of the twilight.

  The timelessness of it swept over Lila and she felt that they might stand here until they took root in the concrete and that in all that time she would never understand about anything, but that perhaps Agnes would.

  Then Agnes gave a little cry and said, ‘Oh, look,’ and pointed down to where a dead bird lay at their feet.

  A dead rainbird. And how they hated rainbirds, always the childhood announcers of trouble.

  Ridiculous. Of course, it didn’t mean anything …

  Just the same—how funny!

  Now they were going to Dear One’s Garden and he liked this, even though this Saturday morning he had had plans of his own to get married to Winnie Grindel in her pepper tree because it was his turn to be bride, but Lila said no, said don’t go through the fence in your good blazer because we’re going to Dear One’s Garden as soon as I’ve cut the sandwiches.

  ‘Why are we going today?’

  ‘Because it’s her birthday.’

  He laughed. How funny they were. How could you have a birthday when you weren’t there? Would they have a cake with candles and ice cream? Birthdays were Treats, like going to the beach or the zoo or the pictures with Vere. He never quite thought of going to Dear One’s Garden as a Treat because really it was rather dull, although the trip there was a Treat. You took the ferryboat across the harbour to Circular Quay and then the tram to Central Station and then the electric train, which you stayed on a long time, stopping at a great many stations, passing through tunnels and stone cuttings and best of all you crossed over a high iron bridge across a river and if you stuck your nose right against the train window and looked down you could see the green river thick with yellow jellyfish. If you happened to fall from the train through the girders into the river the jellyfish would sting you to death in a minute; so Winnie Grindel had told him when she had once come along with them for a Treat. From the train window the jellyfish had looked about as big as upturned saucers, but Winnie said they were really bigger than breadboards and they had feelers as long as your arm. She knew of a little boy his age who had fallen out of a rowing boat and when they’d fished him out of the river he’d already turned black all over with stings. It had been in the paper, Winnie said, and told him to be very careful because that railway bridge was very old and ready to give way any minute; probably today!

  He was thinking about this now and about the little boy stung black to death. They were rattling across the old unsafe bridge and he had his nose squashed to the window, looking down at the great jellyfish trailing their feelers in the water, when Lila put her face to the glass next to his and said:

  ‘Look over there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there, see? Right down the river. Quick, watch where I’m pointing, see? A great big white house with verandas running all around it and a red roof with towers? See it?’

  Where? Oh. He saw it just as it disappeared.

  Lila said, ‘That’s the hotel where Dear One spent her—where she went away to stay with your father.’

  They stayed together?

  But that meant she stayed with Logan! Stayed with a gold digger in that big house which looked so lonely and damp in the middle of all those sad-looking trees bending over the river and the river so dark green and awful and too dangerous even to put your toe in the water.

  How strange it all was and embarrassing too for Lila to mention Logan, which she never did if she could help it, and right out loud like that in the train where anyone could hear. And surely it was wrong of Dear One to go off like that and stay away with Logan. Dear One never did a wrong thing in her life. They were always telling him that. She was a saint and an angel and too good to live and so God had called her away.

  He wanted to ask why she had gone away with Logan, but Lila had already hidden behind a newspaper and George was asleep.

  Why?

  The train stopped at Sutherland Station and they got out (George forgetting his Good Raincoat and having to run back for it) and walked up the steps and across a bridge with a lot of other people who were all carrying flowers, then down a dusty white road and through tall iron gates.

  Just inside the gates a
fat lady sat on a canvas stool beside tin buckets holding flowers, and they stopped while Lila spoke to the fat lady and asked how much were the carnations, how much were the asters? How much were the pink hydrangeas? To each reply from the fat lady, Lila said, ‘Tch, tch, that’s much too dear. Don’t you have anything for about one and sixpence or two shillings a bunch?’ and finally she bought daisies which had brown spots on them and two bunches of violets and said, ‘Put some fairy fern with them and some gum leaves and a sprig of forget-me-not,’ and George paid the fat lady and they went on down the road under the gum trees and everywhere there were people putting flowers in vases on the little gardens.

  Dear One’s Garden was just off the road a short distance, and as Lila always said, ‘so handy to the tap, thank goodness’, because her feet hurt.

  The little garden was raised slightly from the dry red earth by a stone step. It had a white marble cross, taller than he, which had lettering on it and read, according to Lila:

  SINDEN.

  BELOVED DAUGHTER OF WILLIAM AND ANNIE SCOTT.

  ‘TO THE PURE IN HEART, ALL THINGS ARE PURE.’

  at the top, and at the bottom (but not unless you cut away the grass and weeds):

  BELOVED WIFE OF LOGAN.

  Once there, things always got busy. George would spread last Sunday’s paper on the garden so as not to dirty his trousers, and unwrap the garden shears; then he would take off his jacket and fold it neatly on the stone step. One time he had asked George why he didn’t hang his coat on the cross, which would be a good coat hanger, but they had said, ‘Oh no, oh no, darling, you mustn’t hang anything on that, ever; it’s not supposed to be for that.’

  What was the use of it then?

  While George cut the dry long grass and complained that the shears were so blunt they wouldn’t cut hot blood, he and Lila would gather up the glass jam jars and vases from around the bottom of the cross, pouring out the muddy rainwater and the dead flowers. Then they would go to the tap and fill the jars with fresh water and arrange the new flowers nicely in them. There wasn’t much talking while all this went on and he was always glad when it was over and they could all sit down on the stone step and open the nice, damp packets of sandwiches and uncork the thermos of tea. There would be butterfly cakes, plums and little green pears, and they would sit, enjoying the nice picnic, while the locusts squawked in the trees and little bright insects buzzed around them and no one said much more than ‘More tea?’ or ‘How about another ham sandwich?’ or perhaps how pretty the poplar trees were over there around the new crematorium. After lunch they would all turn and stare for quite a long while at the garden in silence until Lila would say to him, ‘Say goodbye to Dear One.’ It was silly really to say goodbye to no one, but he always obeyed politely, feeling foolish.

  Dear One wasn’t there. She was in an aeroplane in the sky. He’d found out that much, anyway. He’d been under the table in the kitchen when his Aunt Agnes had come for tea, and heard her say, ‘Lila, why do you take him there?’

  ‘For his mother’s sake, Agnes.’

  ‘Sinden isn’t there. She’s on the Seventh Plane of Understanding.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but it’s all we’ve got of her.’

  Agnes had laughed at Lila. ‘You and your old theology. You’re as bad as Pater.’

  ‘Well, all right, but I think Sinden would like it.’

  ‘She doesn’t have any memory of this Plane.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt you to put a flower there sometimes.’

  ‘I will have nothing to do with oldfashioned death and burial.’

  ‘Do you mean you want to be cremated?’ Lila had sounded shocked.

  ‘There will be no need, Lila.’

  Since that time he had watched the sky whenever he heard the drone of an aeroplane coming across the house from Mascot, where they took off. But how to tell the seventh plane from all the others?

  When he had asked Lila, she had laughed and said, ‘Oh, pet, never listen to what Agnes says.’

  Suddenly today, as they were doing the first things, he heard Lila say in one of her quiet voices, ‘George, someone’s been here.’

  George stopped cutting the grass.

  Lila said, ‘Look, someone’s put some blue irises in this jar and it looks to me as if they’ve only been here a few days.’

  George said, ‘Vere.’

  ‘Oh, no. I asked her if she wanted to come with us today and she said she didn’t even have the train fare at the moment.’

  George said that perhaps it could be one of Sin’s pals from the Pen and Ink Club. Pony whatsername.

  ‘I doubt that they’d remember her birthday now. They remember the other date, but not the birthday. And these look—oh, I don’t know, perhaps it’s silly, but—it’s not the way a woman puts flowers in a vase, all bunched up like this. More like a man.’

  They looked at each other for a minute in silence and he looked at them and then George said:

  ‘Well, whoever he was, I wish he’d cut the bloody grass for us.

  ‘George. Don’t swear here.’

  ‘These shears wouldn’t cut hot blood.’

  Lila said, ‘But I don’t like the idea of some stranger poking around.’

  After a minute, George said, ‘It might not be a stranger to her,’ and he went on cutting.

  Lila moved the intruding irises away from the cross and placed her own squat jug of daisies in front of it. She felt suddenly hotter and not from the sun; from an old resentment.

  Strangers.

  Yes, how peculiar it was. Always strangers, Lila thought, coming again out of a shop years ago and finding Sinden deep in conversation with someone on the street corner. (‘Who was that?’ ‘I don’t know, but a most interesting chap.’) How many times had they waited, sick with worry, when Sinden was so late coming home from high school that it was almost evening; peering anxiously from the front windows expecting the police with terrible news and then her casual, ‘Oh, I met a boy and don’t worry, his sister was there too.’ Mater scolding to no avail, talking to a brick wall, and Lila, in her role of eldest sister, dropping hints like hairpins behind the closed bedroom door only to get an amused, ‘Oh, Lila, tell me something I don’t know.’

  Total strangers knew Sinden infinitely better than her family and traces of them appeared everywhere. ‘Oh, what a pretty jade brooch, Sin. Who gave you that?’ ‘Oh, someone I know.’ Sorry they asked.

  Then after Mater died and Lila assumed responsibility, the periods when she went off into limbo, came back without a word, disappeared again. (‘Where’s Sin?’ ‘Oh, we never know. Off somewhere writing, no doubt.’) Getting ‘copy’, more likely, for that was what she called it. After a long while they had learned the uselessness of asking questions. (‘But it sounds awful. How could you write in a place like that?’ ‘You can write sitting on the edge of a bath if you want to write.’)

  All those peculiar people, really peculiar people in her book Marmon, supposedly drawn from life.

  And then—and then—

  A telephone rang suddenly in Lila’s mind:

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Lila?’

  ‘Sinden! Where are you? I’ve been trying for days to—’

  ‘I’m in a telephone box at the Carlton Hotel. I’ve just got married.’

  ‘Why haven’t you rung me up? I’ve been—What did you say?’

  ‘I just got married to Logan Marriott. Lila?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come on in at once and bring George. We’ve got champagne and Vere’s just arrived. I’m in heaven, dearest, absolutely in the blue sky and, Lila, I made a wedding dress out of that lace you gave me and some creamy silk Ness sent from Paris—’

  ‘Sinden, who is Logan Marriott?’

  It still hurt.

  Bending over the grave, arranging fern around her wretched-looking daisies, it hurt still and she said to George:

  ‘If it hadn’t been for a stranger we wouldn’t be here today, bringing flowers t
o her.’

  George said, ‘If it weren’t for strangers none of us would be here.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way in front of you-know.’

  PS was looking curiously at her and so Lila rearranged her face into a false smile and said, ‘There now, isn’t that nice? Haven’t we made Dear One’s Garden look neat and pretty for her?’

  ‘Yes, but can we have lunch now?’

  Now it was all over, the lunch scraps carefully wrapped and put in the wire basket, the shears in a paper bag, and they were walking back down the red dust road towards the gates and hurrying a little because the sun had gone suddenly behind black clouds, shaped like whales, that were storming towards them, wrapping everything in grey light, and Lila was saying, ‘I knew the day would spoil. I heard the rainbirds this morning. We’ll be caught in that before we get to the train, you watch!’ and was waving her umbrella, pleased that she was right.

  But he was watching a group of people standing around one of the gardens. There was a big gaping hole in the ground and some men were lowering a box into the hole with ropes while the others stood around watching. The men all had their hats off and two of them were holding on to a lady all dressed in black with a veil covering her face and holding white flowers. Lila was jabbing him, saying, ‘Oh, look over there, pet, the other way—I think I see a bunny rabbit,’ but at that moment the lady in black gave a scream, pulling away from the two men, and rushed towards the hole as though she was going to throw herself into it, but the others reached out for her and held her back while she went on and on screaming so that people at other gardens turned to see and Lila said, ‘Quickly now, PS, or we’ll miss the train,’ and started to run, pulling him by the hand away from the screaming.

  ‘What’s the matter with that lady?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why is she calling out?’

  ‘She’s sad.’

  ‘Because they’re taking that box away from her?’

  ‘Perhaps. Oh, look at that funny dog!’

  ‘What’s in the box?’

  ‘Just some old things she doesn’t want any more like we give to the ragman.’

  ‘Then why is she upset?’