Careful, He Might Hear You

by Sumner Locke Elliott

  ‘Mrs Bult will lunch alone,’ she said to Ellen’s closed-up face, wondering at the same time if Mr Hood was altogether wise in calling Ellen as a witness; instantly forgetting this, forgetting everything, at the shock of Ettie flat on the carpet in the drawing room.

  ‘My God,’ she cried, dropping her purse and running to kneel, feel the heart, but Ettie immediately stirred and laughed.

  ‘Tripped.’

  ‘Ettie, my God, did you hurt yourself—careful now, put your arm around me—here, lie down on the sofa. Oh, my God, Ettie, really. I could slap you. After all your promises and you’ve been so good too, for weeks. Oh, God Almighty, it’s not even one o’clock yet.’

  Vanessa quietly closed the door upon a curiously busy Elsie, dusting a table to death in the hall.

  ‘Upset, Ness.’

  ‘I should jolly well say you are. Suppose this had been the day you had to be in court? What would we have done then? Have you thought about that? Have you thought what you’re doing to yourself anyway?’

  ‘Oh, Ness—’

  ‘It’s no use just being sorry again.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not sorry.’

  ‘Ettie.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Shouldn’t.’

  ‘Shouldn’t what? Drink? No, I should think not.’

  ‘Go to court.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go to court.’

  ‘Now what’s this all about, Ettie?’

  ‘Oh, Ness, Ness …’ Tears watering the old face, little once-pretty mouth all puckered up, withered as if sucking alum.

  ‘All right now, Ettie, let’s have it out. What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened—just I think we’re wrong.’

  ‘I’m wrong, you mean.’

  Nods, just like PS. Nods and gasping. Wet ball of handkerchief going up and down, strong smell of sweet sherry.

  ‘I’m wrong and Lila’s right, is that it?’

  ‘How do you know he wants to come back?’

  ‘Because he does.’

  ‘He said—’

  ‘Naturally she’s using every influence over him to—’

  ‘Let’s escape.’

  ‘All right, Ettie; I wish we could too but—’

  ‘No, that’s what he said to me, Ness.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The last time he was here. I was upset, homesick, and you’d been very cool, very cool to me and I was hurt—’

  ‘What did PS say?’

  ‘He came into my room and he said, “Oh, Ettie, let’s escape.” ’

  Escape! Ettie’s little stone word hit Vanessa between the eyes; momentarily she saw the judge hand down a decision in favour of Lila. It took several seconds before Mr Hood, with a gigantic effort, was able to restore her to her unalterable conviction.

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘He said it!’

  ‘Children will say anything when they’re upset.’

  ‘He wasn’t upset; I was.’

  ‘Well, you could have misinterpreted it. He certainly didn’t mean he wanted to escape from us.’

  Just the same, suppose in some roundabout way Lila got hold of this muddled tale? Suppose her lawyer—‘Ettie, put this out of your mind and don’t refer to it again. To anybody.’

  Ettie gave an unexpected laugh. ‘Don’t tell,’ she said, baring her little yellow teeth in a ludicrous imitation of Vanessa’s smile. ‘Don’t tell, Ettie. Don’t tell Mr Hood.’

  ‘Tell Mr Hood anything you like.’

  ‘P’raps I will.’

  ‘All right.’

  Vanessa, suddenly tall with annoyance, got up and went to the door. A sudden outbreak of mumbling followed her.

  ‘What, Ettie?’

  ‘Said how dare you treat me like this.’

  Ettie looked like an old rag doll, its wig in wisps, its kapok stuffing gone into lumps, but the blue glass eyes blazed as brightly as the little swinging diamond heart.

  The doll stood up, swaying just a little, took uncertain steps towards Vanessa, who caught hold of the absurd rubber hands, and they stood, holding hands, until Vanessa in her astonishment said, ‘How am I treating you?’

  ‘Had enough,’ Ettie said.

  ‘Of what, exactly?’

  Ettie, pulling away her hands, raising an imperious untidy head, gave the look of an angry duchess. Attaining a tipsy dignity and with slow articulation, she said:

  ‘I have had enough of second place.’

  ‘Ettie!’

  ‘PS, PS, PS, PS, PS—’ Ettie curtseyed to an invisible PS, slipping sideways until Vanessa grabbed at an arm and manoeuvred the swaying figure safely into a chair.

  ‘Ettie, darling, that’s not fair. You have never taken second place to PS.’

  Thinking, clumsy of me. How clumsy of me not to take all the little hints. Jealous children. The very young and the very old. And so she’s made up this story about him wanting to escape. Even the word is artificial and just like her. Just like she was in Paris that time, when I met that rather nice Englishman. The hysterical scenes. All right then; nothing lost but a mild flirtation and dinner at Lapérouse but now … Dear God, what would happen if she turned against me now?

  ‘Ettie, PS is my ward. That doesn’t alter our relationship. You’ve always come first.’

  ‘Not lately.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you’ve thought that.’

  ‘All my friends have noticed it.’

  (What have you told the bridge ladies? The lace-tatting group?)

  ‘Ettie, darling, I want you to have your lunch and then lie down for a while—’

  ‘I don’t want lunch. I won’t lie down. Lie down! I’m not ill. Think I’m ill or something? I’m not a child!’

  ‘Ettie—’

  ‘Order PS around. Don’t order me.’

  ‘If you’ll let me finish … I was going to say I’d put off going to the lawyer today and we’d spend the afternoon together—perhaps go for a nice drive and have tea at Watson’s Bay—’

  ‘I don’t want to, thank you very much.’

  ‘What do you want then?’

  Sulky silence and Ettie’s mouth as forbidding as a rat trap.

  Vanessa reached out to take one of the doll hands but instantly Ettie snatched her hand away and gave Vanessa a blue glassy stare.

  ‘Just tell me what you want, Ettie.’

  (Exactly like PS. That awful weapon of silence.)

  ‘Shall we take a little trip up to the Blue Mountains for a few days? I’d rather like the change myself, darling. Do you remember the Ritz in Leura? The walks we took, years ago, and the motoring trips down into Megalong Valley to have scones and Devonshire cream? Lovely big log fires and that heavenly sharp air? Frankly, it sounds like paradise.’

  ‘You go.’

  ‘I don’t want to go alone, dearest.’

  ‘Then take Mr Hood.’

  (So, it’s Mr Hood too! Well, well! So Mr Hood’s your latest rival, is he? I could wish that were true, my dear, because if I have to put up with many more years of this childish nonsense, I could be very easily persuaded to go off and leave you to flounder alone.)

  ‘I’m afraid you are being childish, Ettie.’

  ‘All you ever talk about day and night.’

  ‘I’m sorry; I apologise.’

  ‘Sick of hearing about Mr damn Hood day and night, night and day. PS and Mr Hood. I say to hell with them.’

  With frightening suddenness, Ettie picked up and flung the Doulton figurine at the fireplace; the head lopped off, rolled across the tiles.

  For a second, Vanessa could not believe that it had happened. Then, hearing her heart beat loudly, confirming it, she stooped to pick up the fragments, heard behind her Ettie’s thickened voice say:

  ‘My housemaid will attend to that.’

  Vanessa said quietly, ‘Very well.’ She picked up her bag and gloves, a
nd opening the door, went out and stood in the silent hall. She waited, counting the moments, assessing the time that it usually took for contrition to begin; smiled when she heard on schedule the sounds of smothered weeping. Then, after counting slowly to ten, she re-entered the room as the figure in the chair arose, teetered towards her, flung itself on to her, embracing her tightly; a woolly white mop of hair that smelled faintly of old bureau drawers was in her face, muttered gaspings at the breast. The diamond heart scratched her.

  ‘What is it?’

  The contorted face peered up at her.

  ‘Oh, Ness, forgive me.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ettie.’

  ‘Hold me, Ness. Oh, how awful of me.’

  ‘I said it’s all right.’

  ‘Kiss. Please, Ness. Kiss, kiss.’

  (Oh, God, this part is always worse than the rows themselves.)

  ‘Ah, dearest. So ungrateful of me, wicked. How you must hate me.’

  ‘Nonsense, Ettie.’

  ‘Wish I were dead.’

  ‘Rubbish. You belong to me. You’re my own little mother.’

  (Sick-making, the utterly sick-making formula for peace; and yet it’s true. I do love you, old woman of the sea around my neck, my other child.)

  Ettie, giggling and wiping her eyes, said, ‘Oh, aren’t we fools?’

  Vanessa, reaching at last for the urgently needed cigarette, said, ‘Yes, and it has to stop. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, Ness.’

  ‘No more drinking, Ettie.’

  ‘Never, never. On my solemn word of honour.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘On the Bible.’

  ‘Otherwise it means a hospital.’

  ‘I swear to you—’

  ‘I mean it, Ettie. I could lose the case over it.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘I could lose PS.’

  ‘I know.’

  Ettie’s remorseful face promised anything. Large cheques, jewellery, life insurance, lavish bequeathments. So Vanessa said, ‘PS never wanted to leave me.’

  ‘No, Ness.’

  ‘Remember that, if it should come up in court.’

  ‘Yes, Ness.’

  Vanessa picked up the headless figurine and said as punishment, ‘After I leave Mr Hood I’ll take this to Hardy Brothers and have them rivet it.’

  ‘Thank you, Ness.’

  Vanessa put the figurine into her handbag and with a loud snap closed both the bag and the conversation.

  Later, watching Vanessa go down the driveway, holding her hat against the blustering August day, Ettie pressed her face to the cold window, breathing mist on to it, and said dutifully:

  ‘He didn’t want to leave you.’

  ‘The court will rise.’

  They stood up, shuffling and coughing, in the vaulted, dingy yellow-walled courtroom that smelled of carbolic and old dismay as the tipstaff opened the door and stood aside, and in a quick black swirl of gown, the Honourable Mr Justice Hay-Piggott entered.

  The Hanging Judge, Lila thought, squinting at the six-foot-four figure gazing crossly down at them with the face of an aristocratic fish, thin steel spectacles jutting out between the absurd grey curls of his wig, long thin blades of hands shooting cuffs, moving papers impatiently, anxious to dispose of this trivial fight between two guardians and get back to the Spanish Inquisition. The granite cliff of face bobbed up and down as though irritated already at the clerk mumbling through the preliminaries of ‘Supreme Court of New South Wales in Equity, mutter mutter in the matter of mumble mumble Marriott, an infant under the age of twenty-one years and in the matter of the Testator’s Family Maintenance and Guardianship of Infants Act of nineteen sixteen.’

  At the same time, an already halfhearted shaft of winter sunshine through the high, dirt-encrusted windows died. Greyness filtered suddenly into the court, absorbed faces turned to grit, shadows formed in ugly pools around the lawyers’ desks, hid the spectators’ gallery in deep gloom so that Lila felt her heart twitch at this sudden ill omen and heard rainbirds mock and screech. She turned her head to look across the court at Vanessa, impervious to rainbirds and loss of sunlight, assured in black, assured with pearls, and listening raptly, happily, it seemed to Lila, as though she were in a cathedral and being married to Mr Hood, who was turning now and glancing back at Vanessa with the same assured secret look.

  Lila glanced away, needing suddenly the same calm reassurance from Mr Gentle, who appeared not to be listening to the preliminaries and was fastening paper clips into a chain.

  Lila, as they sat, squeezed George’s arm and whispered, ‘Never mind, right is on our side.’

  George said, ‘What?’ loud enough for heads to turn and make Mr Gentle glare at them and put a stubby baby finger to his lips.

  Lila, wheezing slightly, corrected already, touched her new white straw hat from Mark Foy’s end-of-winter sale, felt again that it was ill chosen, saw that by daylight her wool suit was not mauve but puce, and realised that she had been wrong in not going to the ladies’ room once more on the ferry.

  Now Mr Hood was on his feet.

  ‘Your honour, if it please the court …’

  The voice was deep and rich as greengage plums. It presented the affidavit of the Deponent, Vanessa Scott, spinster, now residing at 36 Wolsley Road, Point Piper, appointed guardian of said infant by deed of disposal of guardianship … All about Ernest Huxley, all about Sinden and Logan and Lila herself, hereinafter referred to as the Respondent. Every time Mr Hood pronounced the word ‘Respondent’, he hung on to it a moment in a pitying, deprecatory tone and the information, though correct legally, was subtly weighed in Vanessa’s favour (‘I then undertook, at severe personal sacrifice to myself and to Mrs Ethelreda Bult, to return to Australia and to take up my duties on behalf of my late sister …’) and against Lila (‘The Respondent was then and is now the wife of George Mason Baines, who I understand is at present employed as a night watchman at the Uneeda Packing and Boxing Company, Limited …’). The Respondent, it seemed, had resented the Deponent’s legal rights as Guardian under Deed of Disposal (respectfully offered as Exhibit A), and had placed every obstacle in the way of a harmonious working arrangement, even going so far as to encourage the said infant in evasions and deceptions and also to influence said infant’s loyalties and affections.

  And so on.

  Vanessa, in Mr Hood’s rococo voice, now described her house in the terms of Valhalla and her income from Mrs Bull in round golden figures. Lila’s house was maintained to be clean and modest but inadequate, especially since the recent addition of a lodger in the person of another sister and ‘member of a religious sect that predicts the end of the world’. Mr Hood paused here and carefully allowed a spectral Agnes to caper insanely through Lila’s house and a slight riffle of amusement to run through the court. Lila cast a quick glance at Mr Gentle, expecting to find him making furious notes of rebuttal about everything, but he was lost in contemplation of a long-disused gas chandelier.

  Mr Hood gravitated to Miss Pile’s élite academy and the joys of piano and riding lessons, of which said infant had now been deprived due to the unpardonable action of the Respondent, and came to the fatal Sunday when, contrary to the terms of the arrangement, the infant had not been returned home to Wolsley Road and, prompted by the Respondent, had been obliged to break this news to the heartbroken Deponent; presented then as Exhibit B, a letter to the Respondent drawn up by Mr Hood at request of the Deponent, requiring the immediate return of said infant; described the Respondent’s hysterical refusal to do so, and in closing respectfully asked his honour to award full custody of the said infant to the much-wronged Deponent.

  In the slight pause that followed, George yawned loudly and Lila nudged him, frowned at him fiercely and craned her neck to see if Mr Gentle would now leap up with thunder and lightning to destroy Mr Hood.

  But Mr Hood was now requesting the court’s permission to elucidate the affidavit further by questioning his c
lient, who was in court and Vanessa rising, slim and svelte, about to receive a citation, crossed to the witness box and agreed to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help her God.

  Mr Hood smiled at her encouragingly, and began to read in apocalyptic tones a letter from Sinden, garlanding her impulsive phrases until they became cries for help. ‘I yearn sometimes for your profound sense of organisation… . I’ve always said, “I’ll have the children and Ness will manage them.” ’ Lila pursed her lips, thinking of Sinden’s way of putting things in the superlative; of how she would have ridiculed this mealy-mouthed lawyer and Vanessa too, sitting there with that pious attitude and playing the role of a bereft mother, her head a little to one side and her face tinged with just the right amount of wounded dignity. It was dreadful, simply dreadful, what they were doing to Sinden’s memory with this vast hypocrisy.

  (‘Lila, I never meant Vanessa to take me literally!’ ‘Well, I know you didn’t, darling. But it’s that dreadful lawyer of hers.’ ‘Lila, stand up and tell them I was only joking.’ ‘Sweet angel, I can’t do that because we’re in court, but don’t you worry, darling; don’t fret, Sin, dear. Wait until Mr Gentle reads your last letter to me.’)

  Drifting off, over a grave banked with blue irises, Lila came back reluctantly to hear Mr Hood reading a letter from Ernest Huxley assuring Vanessa that she was the only right and proper person to take over his share of the guardianship.

  Having established Vanessa as Mother Machree, Mr Hood abruptly changed his tactics and leaped upon her ferociously.

  ‘Now, Miss Scott, were you on close terms with your late sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why, then, didn’t Mrs Marriott express a wish for you to be a guardian in her will?’

  Shaken by surprise, Lila thought, But that is our point. He’s taken our point.

  Vanessa answered calmly, ‘Because I was then living in England.’

  ‘I see. And were you content with the arrangement of the child being left entirely with Mrs Baines?’

  ‘At the time, yes.’

  ‘Then you had no personal wish to become a guardian?’

  ‘None. I felt that my first duty was to my employer, Mrs Bult.’