Careful, He Might Hear You

by Sumner Locke Elliott

  At three thirty, Vanessa stood in the drawing room, impatiently watching the road for Miss Pile’s car. It was close to four before it appeared. She saw him climb out and wave, delaying until the car had driven off before he turned in at the gate and came up the driveway very slowly, holding his wet bathing suit and gazing up at the house reluctantly. When she heard him coming in the front door she called out:

  ‘PS, would you come in here a minute, please.’

  Funny. She hadn’t even told him to first go and hang up his wet bathing suit. So he held on to it, not knowing what to do or what was coming. She looked different too. Not just her hair, which looked pretty, very pretty, today, but her face. Almost as if she were someone else. Someone he didn’t know.

  He had expected that right off she would deliver punishment for the naughty thing he’d done; one of those longwinded speeches of hers, all about friends and hurt and gratitude, finally telling him that there would be no going to the circus, no reading in bed for a long time, and he had been ready with his sorrys. Ready to tell her that he didn’t really know why he had done it, it just seemed a funny thing to do at the time.

  Instead of that, she asked him about swimming. Was he doing breast stroke or overarm? Which did he like best? It was as though nothing had happened at the party, maybe ever. Like having to talk to someone’s dull mother while your playmate has gone out of the room. This certainly wasn’t like Vanessa at all, and frightened, he felt that something terrible must be coming—it was always terrible when she was very still and polite.

  But suddenly she looked directly at him and said in a very quiet, distant voice:

  ‘Since this concerns you first and foremost, I’m telling you before anyone else. I’m giving you up.’

  He didn’t understand. Giving him up? To what? Who? Alarmed, he thought of the police. The judge.

  ‘For good,’ said Vanessa calmly. ‘Do you understand? Tomorrow I am going to the judge and shall explain to him that I wish to withdraw from my guardianship and that nothing will change my mind. It will be up to the judge then to decide what will be best for you under the circumstances, but I would think that he will have no other recourse but to give you to Lila.’

  He couldn’t move or speak so he just sat there, feeling his wet bathing suit against his bare knees. He knew now that what he’d done had been so bad that it had changed everything.

  Then Vanessa said, looking out of the window, ‘I’m going to talk to Lila about it this evening. I’m going over to see her. In the meantime I’d rather you didn’t mention it to anyone, even to Cousin Ettie.’

  All this time. Over and over he had dreamed of this and knew it would never happen. But she had said it. Said that he was going home for good. Why couldn’t he jump up and down and scream with joy?

  Vanessa didn’t want him any more, because of what he’d done. Yet she didn’t seem to be upset, not even angry. She was gazing out at the late-afternoon shadows on the lawn with her head a little to one side as though she were listening to music far away.

  After a while she said in the sort of polite voice she always used to a stranger who rather bored her:

  ‘I hope you’ll grow up to be something.’

  It seemed to be over because she got up suddenly and he thought she was going to walk quickly out of the room but instead she crossed to the fireplace and for a moment she looked up at the picture of his mother and said:

  ‘Everybody’s going to get exactly what they want and that now includes me.’

  She took a cigarette out of the box on the mantelpiece and looking for a match, pulled open the little drawer of the sewing table. The stone Logan had given him rolled out and fell on to the carpet, glittering in the red sunlight.

  Vanessa picked it up.

  She said, ‘This isn’t really gold, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ he whispered.

  ‘You’d better hang on to it,’ she said, handing him the stone. ‘When you’re older, it may remind you not to go scrambling around all your life for the wrong thing. There are certain things that one just can’t have and hankering after them can make you miss the right ones.’

  She found a matchbox and lit her cigarette, watched the flame burn down.

  Then she said, ‘Everybody looks for something that we call love. An awful lot of people never find it and they end up with something that isn’t any more real than the gold in that stone. Nobody can tell you which is real or fake—it’s a different thing to everybody. It isn’t what Lila thinks or what I think. It isn’t just being kissed and cuddled and tucked warm into bed either. One day you’ll be hurt and there won’t be anyone to say, “Oh, come here, pet, and I’ll kiss it and make it better.” There’ll only be yourself.’

  She stopped again by the window and glanced out at Jocko hosing the rose beds.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she said, and for a minute he didn’t know whether she meant him or Jocko. ‘You haven’t had much of a chance up to now, being pushed and pulled around by all of us. Remember that grownups can be jolly well wrong about a lot of things. Remember that I told you that. Listen, PS, after I’m gone don’t let them try to turn you into something you don’t want to be. And don’t just be a PS to your mother. Find you. If you can find out who you are and what you are, my dear, then you’ll know how to love someone else. That’s all I have to say.’

  That is the last thing I will ever say to you, she seemed to be saying. He looked up at her face and saw that she was neither angry nor sad but gone away from him. In the room but no longer there, in a funny way. Something had been taken away from him and it frightened him. He didn’t understand all this stuff she had told him but he knew it was a goodbye.

  Now he wanted her to slap him and scream at him that he was wicked, the wickedest boy in the world, so that he could tell her that he was really sorry—so sorry now for what he did. Sorry for both of them in a way.

  He wasn’t happy with the wonderful news. Perhaps later on he’d be happy but not now, not until he’d been able to say something sweet to Vanessa.

  But he couldn’t think of anything and knew that this was his last chance because Vanessa had put out her cigarette, picked up a scarf and her bag and was going towards the front door.

  He ran after her, and hearing him, she stopped for a moment with her back towards him. He came up beside her and when she didn’t move he put out his hand and touched her gently on the arm, and finding nothing to say, waited there beside her until she gave a funny little laugh and said:

  ‘Well, well, PS. It seems that I have finally done something to please you.’

  Then she went out, banging the front door, leaving him alone in the suddenly dark hall.

  Vanessa took the tram to Circular Quay, sitting outside and not caring if the wind blew her hair about. She had come out hatless and had forgotten her gloves but it added to her feeling of informality. When the nice young tram conductor took her fare, she smiled at him like a young girl going to town for a pleasant outing. She looked forward to the twenty-minute boat trip to Neutral Bay. She had never before taken the ferry to Lila’s house, had always gone by cab or hired car over the Harbour Bridge, but for one thing it was not yet five o’clock and she wanted George to have left for his nightly job so that she and Lila could be alone, and for another it seemed part of her expiation. There must be no showing off to the neighbours, no driving up in a big black limousine. She wanted to arrive unannounced, ring the doorbell and say to the dumbfounded Lila, might she come in? Could she come in, as she had something important to say that could not be said over Miss Gulf’s, telephone. So might they just sit in the kitchen and have a cup of tea quietly together as in the old days at Waverly?

  My dear, Lila would say excitedly to George later, you could have knocked me over with a feather. There was Ness at the front door, come all the way by boat and tram, and just as nice as she could be, asking might she come in. Well, my dear, I don’t know what has happened but she’s a new person! Now, you know that even as girls we
were never close and then when she said, when she told me—

  No, stop, she cried elatedly to herself, laughing at her old trick of playing the scene ahead of time. It wouldn’t be like that. Lila wouldn’t have changed—would still be bitter about the court case, instantly suspicious of motives and very much on her guard over Vanessa’s sudden about-face. But in the end, Lila would understand. Perhaps even see that in giving up PS there was a healing up of the years.

  Giving up. That was it. Oh, what blessed relief there is in giving up something. The absolution of resignation. Oh, why fear? In resignation there is honesty and purity of the soul. At bedrock there is a peculiar peace.

  She looked around at the gradually crowding tram and at the tightly knotted worried faces around her reading the bad news in the evening papers, and she wanted to cry out, ‘Look at me, everybody. I’ve got the answer, kids.’

  The sun lowered. They swung towards town into the evening bustle. She climbed off and on to another tram, where she had to strap-hang all the way to Circular Quay. She walked on air through a turnstile and through the faintly silver light down the little wooden gangplank on to the ferry. Nothing bothered her. Not even the rude, shoving businessmen, leaping for the best seats outside so that there was no room for her.

  ‘Terrible,’ said someone behind her. ‘Terrible,’ agreed a weary woman shopper, ‘the way everyone pushes and barges. No respect any more. No manners today.’

  She laughed, not caring a hoot about being pushed and jostled with the evening crowd or that some oaf had trodden on her tan-and-white shoes, leaving a big black smudge.

  She found a seat inside the ladies’ cabin, which smelled of old wet rope, tar and detergent. She had bought an evening paper but did not open it. She was too alive with thoughts.

  A toot, and they were off, pushing away from the wharf, and she watched the retreating city beginning to flicker with night signs against the dying sun. A huge bottle lit up, poured red lights into a white-light champagne glass, commanded that you drink ‘penfold’s wine’, erased itself, lit again and poured, erased and lit, vanishing as they chugged out over the darkening harbour.

  Soon there would be another boat, which would carry her down the harbour and out of the Heads towards Ceylon, Aden, Naples and so to London, never to come back.

  Breathes there a girl with soul so dead (asked Miss Mortimer in poetry class) who never to herself has said this is my own, my native land? Yes, ma’am, and it’s I!

  She closed her eyes and saw Harrods, saw Portobello Road. But not quite yet. There was an obligation to Ettie. If Ettie wished to remain transplanted in her new garden, spreading her roots, all right. On the other hand, if she wished to go ‘home’, they would return together and then, once safely back in London, gradually the bonds could be cut. There would be scenes, of course.

  You are deserting me!

  No, I am taking myself back. Mater gave me to you but I am now taking myself back. It has been long enough.

  If Ettie decided to stay, well and good; she would be able to sail sooner. Without a salary, second class or tourist might be all she could afford but it didn’t matter. It would be the Argo, sailing to new worlds where something waited for her. Something vast and incalculable that had waited for her through the years she had wasted, fussing and fuming about the importance of being nothing.

  There would be time to think of all this on the ship. There would be time after that, when she had a nice little cosy flat to herself. There was endless time. All the time in the world was hers, for she had just been born.

  But were they stopping? Were they already at the wharf? Bells and whistles sounded. The engines reversed. Were they going back? People were running to the windows, standing on the seats, all looking out.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re jumping over,’ someone screamed.

  ‘Who?’ she cried. ‘What is it?’

  She stood up and was pushed by the crowd. Astonished, she saw they were climbing through the windows.

  ‘The other side,’ a man yelled at her.

  ‘Is it a fire?’ But he had already pushed past her. They were all pushing past her out of the cabin; had gone suddenly mad. She rushed with them into the bottleneck at the door, heard the deafening blast of the huge whistle right above them and saw, in an instant, the immense shadow looming over them, scooping them up with the frightful noise of steam and steel, lifting her up with the others, then letting her fall with the others, sprawling into arms and legs so quickly that she felt no shock, only one flash of thought:

  Dear sweet Jesus, Agnes was right. It’s the end.

  But being hurled down as water struck her into blackness, then into dazzling, blinding light.

  No. The beginning.

  Lila said, ‘Who is it? We seem to have a bad connection.’

  The worried voice from Mars seemed to be screaming now ‘Ettie.’

  ‘Ettie! What is it? What’s—’

  Something about Ness.

  ‘Can you speak up?’

  ‘Is Ness with you?’

  ‘Ness? No. No; why? Is PS ill, is—’

  The gargling voice said something about PS. ‘What?’

  ‘PS says she went over to see you.’

  ‘To see me? What about? Is something wrong?’

  Something about four o’clock and being worried to death.

  ‘What about four o’clock? What happened?’ Lila screamed back into the phone, and Miss Gulf said from the bedroom, ‘Mrs Baines, my sister’s trying to sleep.’

  Lila said, ‘Speak slowly, Ettie.’

  ‘… and PS says she … to see you … hasn’t come home.’

  ‘No, she didn’t come here. I’ve been home all day.’

  Ettie said something about the accident. What? Hadn’t Lila heard about the terrible ferry accident? It had been on the wireless all evening. A P and O liner and a ferry collided… . Yes, yes, terrible but—

  ‘Ettie, she wouldn’t have come without phoning first. Anyway, Ness would never come all the way by tram and boat—and why on earth would she come here? This is the last place—’

  Poor souls. Some of them trapped inside. Went down in seconds.

  ‘Not Ness, Ettie. Never on a ferry. Probably with friends and hasn’t noticed the time. But is PS all right? Is he up so late? Can I speak to him, please?’

  Hello? But Ettie had hung up.

  A bright full moon hung over the back yard and one of Mater’s old wives’ tales stirred in Lila’s mind. If you slept with the full moon shining on your face you would go insane. That was the genesis of the word lunacy. People became disturbed during the full-moon cycle and Ettie had responded to it and had probably taken a little too much wine with dinner.

  She leaned over the damp veranda rail and stared down into the motionless garden. The black moon shadow of the pepper tree reached across the straggly uncut grass towards George’s dead vegetable patch. Nothing stirred. Even the night crickets were still. Everything lay in a dead bleached light. Her washing on the line dangled with spectral arms and legs.

  But why would Vanessa be coming to see me?

  She looked across the harbour and saw a distant Manly ferry twinkling serenely towards the Heads, carrying home late sleepy theatregoers.

  It’s lunatic to think that anything might have happened. Ness is home by now and probably furious with Ettie for phoning me.

  The thought of Vanessa, tall and angry, soothed her for a moment. She could see her very clearly. She was standing now in the pink-lit safe drawing room at Point Piper, watching a match burn down, her eyes half closed and saying something very cutting.

  But away in the distance where the dark headland jutted out between Neutral Bay and Cremorne, a little circlet of lights bobbed on the dark water.

  Would that be the place? A fairy ring of little lanterns on buoys to safeguard the harbour traffic from—How deep would it be there?

  She shivered.

  Ugh. A goose walked over my gra
ve.

  She went quickly inside to the silent kitchen. The thought that had struck her was so shocking that she felt her face go hot with shame.

  If Vanessa were dead …

  ‘God forgive me,’ she said aloud, and pulled down the blind to shut out the oppressive moonlight.

  God forgive me, she said to herself again, feeling the beginning of a terrible prescience.

  ‘He is nigh unto us,’ bellowed Dr Pollack, sweating with disappointment. ‘He comes. Glory in the highest.’

  ‘ “Praise Him all ye lands”,’ sang Agnes, leading the reluctant few disciples who still remained. ‘ “He is come”,’ she sang as the moon sank and darkness swept over the Temple.

  They sat again in murmuring silence and Dr Pollack said, ‘Friends, He comes to us in many ways. Don’t forget that we can’t always see Him with our blinded eyes but I tell you He is here among us. We have not come in vain.’

  ‘Not in vain,’ repeated Agnes, seeing several others leaving.

  ‘ “I am going, I am going to the Land. I am going with His lantern in my hand. Amen”.’ They sang again as a slight wind stirred the lantana bushes.

  ‘He is in the wind,’ Dr Pollack assured them. ‘He is in the stars. He is all around us. He comes.’

  They sat again and waited, coat collars turned up against the chilly wind, bottoms numb on the hard concrete. Below them the surf slapped and sucked at the beach, retreated beaten to try again tomorrow. Lights bobbed on the distant harbour, the last tram from Balmoral whined its way up the hill and a nocturnal animal in the zoo gave a despairing cry for Africa.

  No one came.

  The telephone awakened the sleeping big house very early in the morning and he heard Elsie answer it. After that there was a lot of coming and going up and down the stairs. Boards creaked everywhere. Doors opened and shut and once he heard Cousin Ettie say angrily, ‘This is my house and I will do as I wish.’

  He dressed himself quickly, finding last night’s clothes surprisingly not put away but lying untidily on the floor where he had sleepily left them for Vanessa to tidy up.

  Vanessa’s bedroom door was shut so she must still be asleep, having come home so late last night; goodness, it must have been late. He had never been up after eleven before in his life. But what had happened? All Cousin Ettie had said, after the telephone call, was that he was a good precious lamb to stay up so late but Ness was all right, perfectly all right, and goodness, she could see the sandman right now so off to bed, petkin. He went downstairs, where Elsie gave him a frightened look. Her face was as red as a prawn and so was Ellen’s.