Did Vanessa come home? he asked, and yes, yes, they said, she was OK, love. How about some nice porridge with them in the kitchen to save laying the table in the dining room? He sat and had his porridge and treacle while they whispered and spelled things and twice the telephone rang and they got in the way of each other trying to get to the telephone first. Then a doctor came in a car and hurried upstairs, and frightened now, he asked is Vanessa sick? No, love. Your cousin Ettie’s feeling a bit crook this morning. Just a bit crook, that’s all. How about some nice scrambled eggs, eh? What a treat. But his appetite was suddenly all gone. He knew something was very wrong because Ellen said he was not going to school that morning, he was going to have a real nice holiday-what-a-treat! Nobody seemed to know what to do with him. Go and play, they said. What a crime to be inside on a lovely morning like this, they said, wheeling his blue car into the garden, and when he lingered half in and half out of the doorway, trying to listen, trying to spell, they shooed him with, aprons and red hands and gaping big smiles to run and play, find something to do, and finally Ellen said quite sharply to for God’s sake get out from under their feet. Jocko was talking over the fence to the gardener next door and when they saw him coming they stopped talking very suddenly and made some very poor jokes about Santa coming pretty soon now, eh, almost November now so almost time to hang up your stocking. Poo, he said to them, Santa is George. I saw his boots once.
It was a funny lost feeling not going to school and he wondered what was going on at Miss Pile’s and if they were all whispering about him in class. He looked up a lot at the house towards Vanessa’s window but the blind stayed pulled down and so did the one at Ettie’s window.
Finally Ellen opened the kitchen door and called him.
‘Your aunty’s coming,’ she said.
‘Which one?’
‘The other one.’
‘Lila?’
‘Yes. She’s just phoned up to say she’s coming right after lunch for you.’
‘Am I going home?’
‘Yes, love. Now I’m going to pack your little bag so be a good boy and don’t go upstairs, see, there’s a love. Because Mrs Bult’s quite crook and the doctor’s given her a nice pill to make her sleep so we don’t want to wake her up now, do we?’
Ellen went off on tiptoe.
So it was true. Vanessa meant it. She had given him up and Lila was coming after lunch to take him home.
But—
Was Vanessa still cross with him? So cross that she wouldn’t come down just to shake hands and say goodbye? So he could say his piece now. He had it all ready and it was very nice really, the nicest thing he’d ever thought to say to anyone, even Vere. She hadn’t been a bit cross yesterday, only different, so why wouldn’t she open her door and come clicking downstairs the way she always did, asking, Where was this? What was that doing there? Had the post come? Or something. Well, she would come down for luncheon, as she called it.
But she didn’t.
While Ellen’s back was turned he slipped out of the kitchen and went upstairs, trying to avoid the places that creaked. He knocked on Vanessa’s door and waited for her to say who was it? When she didn’t, he turned the glass handle very softly and opened the door a crack. The room was very dim but he could see the bed neatly made up with the eiderdown quilt folded at the bottom and Vanessa’s satin slippers standing by it. On the dressing table were her silver hairbrushes and combs and the picture of Grandfather Scott all waiting for her. The only sound was the faint ticking of her little gold clock on the table by the bed.
Vanessa had escaped.
He was certain now. She had run off and left them all, without a goodbye or anything and that was what all the whispering was about and why Cousin Ettie had to have the doctor. There was something spooky and sad about all these things waiting for Vanessa, all these things that she had left behind without a word. Not even goodbye.
He closed the door and went downstairs as fast as he could away from them. Away from that silent, spooky room and into the sunlight, and seeing Lila coming in the gate, he tore down the driveway to her and cannoned into her, nearly knocking her down, asking anxiously:
‘Where is Vanessa? Where is Vanessa?’
Lila looked very old and tired and her face was a funny grey colour.
She said, ‘Darling, Vanessa’s gone away.’
‘Where?’
‘Well—’
It was a long while since he had seen Lila and perhaps she had grown old in that time. How very grey her hair was, under her prune-coloured hat.
‘Where?’ he asked again.
Lila didn’t seem to want to say. She took his hand and they started walking up the driveway towards the house in silence.
Finally Lila said in a choked up voice:
‘She’s gone to a nice place for a rest—sort of like a place in the country.’
‘But she didn’t take any of her things,’ he said. ‘Did she just escape?’
‘Yes,’ said Lila. ‘She escaped.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, she wanted to. She was going to give me back, you know.’
But Lila didn’t seem to hear. She was just standing there holding a handkerchief up to her face.
It wasn’t until much later at home, in his own bedroom, and after there had been a lot of arguing in the kitchen, that George came in and sat down on the bed, stroked his head and said:
‘PS, we’re not going to tell you fibs any more. Vanessa has died, PS.’
Funny that he couldn’t feel anything, not even very surprised. Only as if something had stopped and it was very, very quiet everywhere in the world.
‘Oh,’ he said. And then as the quietness grew and grew, ‘I see.’
Lila thought that her flowers looked very nice. Yellow roses in a sheaf. Pondering dazedly at the florists, still unable to believe what had happened, the reason she was buying flowers, she had asked vaguely for something simple, not lilies—her sister had disliked lilies. While the young assistant had flustered around trying to sell her some vulgar wax everlastings under glass (a nice permanent reminder, madam) which would have outraged Vanessa, she had seen the roses and remembered something long forgotten, some mix-up at Pater’s funeral and poor Ness’s yellow roses quite accidentally left behind at the parlour. They were the most expensive things in the shop and Lila had had a shameful moment of indecision before saying she wished two dozen and just a simple ribbon, please. She had written on the card: ‘With love from PS.’
The coffin was banked with flowers. Most of them were extravagant wreaths with non-committal calling cards reading ‘Mrs Alexander G. Lawson’ and ‘Mrs John Boynton-Jones’. Vanessa might have thought them too obvious. Even Ettie’s enormous wreath of white carnations and pale-blue cornflowers seemed an overstatement of grief. Ettie, too ill to be present, was crying out for attention, for Ness please to look, please to understand that her grief was deeper than all the others’.
Certainly the yellow roses were the nicest and someone at the parlours must have thought so because only the roses lay on top of the mahogany casket.
So hot, thought Lila. And her black dress smelled so terribly new! Seven and ninepence for a black straw hat at Way’s and wouldn’t you know that right away something would go wrong with it. The brim would not stay down, kept flipping up, giving her a silly schoolgirlish appearance. She was fiddling with it now, worrying about her hat, the heat, and who should go to the cemetery with them in the limousine.
The young minister was saying that God in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to gather up the soul of their beloved sister Vanessa. Vanessa, a dutiful servant of the Lord, had been taken to glory because her life, though short, had been full of generosity and kindness to others.
How Vanessa would have hated this psalmsinging young hypocrite mouthing clichés, hurrying them through because very likely there was another service to follow.
I am the Resurrection and the Life; if any man come unto me …
And what h
ypocrites we are, thought Lila, looking across at Vere dabbing at her eyes, at the cook and house maid blowing red noses.
She wished that she could weep for Vanessa. Weep for her honestly and not out of a feeling of guilt and horror because she had died violently in a second when a ferryboat captain had misjudged his speed.
Let us pray.
But only one of them here in this pitifully small attendance knew nothing of the way she died. Vanessa’s heart just stopped, Lila had told him, and he had accepted it in the same curiously detached way he had accepted the whole thing. In years to come she would tell him what had happened, leaving out the things they had told George when he had had to go down to the wharf because, well, someone had to go.
She had repaid George’s kindness by getting angry with him, by yelling at him not to tell her things that would give her nightmares for years to come. Oh, God, poor Ness, poor Ness, she had cried out, and then excoriated her anguish by fiercely overriding George’s objections to PS’s attending the funeral. Vere and George had both said he should not go and she had screamed at them to mind their own business.
‘He will pay Vanessa some respect!’
But why didn’t he cry?
She looked down at him, sitting between her and George.
If there was anything at all that lingered on, could see them all sitting there, it might be comforting to know that one person cried honestly for it, even a child.
But PS was counting the brass studs on the seat.
They stood under the brazen sky while kookaburras laughed in the gum trees and a hot dry wind blew bits of old newspaper and dead leaves over their feet.
The minister rattled on while Lila held on to the brim of her hat, shielding her eyes from the blazing sun, feeling her new black dress sticking to her back, remembering the same heat, the same noise of flashing insects, the same sad smell of freesias when seven years ago they had stood here for Sinden. How strange it was. Seven years and a few days’ difference. Everything was the same, and yet so different. Then she had been so racked with grief that George had had to hold her up.
Now she felt only wretchedly hot and tired and was longing for it to be over. Well, it was nearing the end. They were slipping ropes around the coffin, ready to lower it into the opened earth.
‘“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …” ’ intoned the minister in the dry voice of one announcing yet another departure of a suburban train, and PS took a step forward. Lila glanced down at him, hoping that in this final moment of parting he might burst into a flood of reasonable tears, thus absolving them all and giving some meaning to the worn-out ritual. But she saw on his face only the brightness of curiosity.
He edged forward another step but this time she caught hold of him by the shoulder and said in an undertone, ‘Stay here.’
‘I want to see.’
‘There’s nothing to see,’ she whispered almost angrily.
‘But is it in there?’
‘What?’
‘The other box.’
Appalled, she wanted to slap his face. She wanted to shake him and to cry out that he was morbid and unnatural and how dare he ask such a question? But that would simply prove to George and Vere that they had been right. It was her own fault. She had wanted to make a gesture of atonement to Vanessa and had made the wrong one. Even at the very end she had made one of her usual mistakes and she heard Vanessa say, ‘You know I would have given strict orders that he was not to be here, Lila.’
I’m sorry, Ness.
‘Amen,’ she said aloud in response to the minister, closing his prayer book.
‘No, dear,’ she said to him quietly, turning him away. ‘There’s nothing else there.’
‘Vanessa said there was.’
Yes, fancy telling the child a thing like that! Nevertheless, no worse, perhaps, than bringing him today. Pots and kettles.
Forgive me, Ness.
They walked slowly back to the waiting limousine. Vere was already lighting a cigarette before the car had even reached the cemetery gates.
After Vere had left to catch the ten o’clock ferry, taking with her what was left of the cold salmon and a chipped teacup, Lila put on her felt slippers and sat down at the kitchen table to write the letter to Logan in care of Alice Clark, wondering whether he was in Bacchus Marsh or off on his everlasting restless search; wondering if her letter would ever reach him in some remote mining camp, whether he would even care.
It was difficult to write to Logan about Vanessa, to write to one stranger about another. For surely Logan and Vanessa had never really known each other well, had they? It had been in a moment of drunken aberration that Logan had signed PS away to Vanessa, and thinking of this, Lila wanted to scratch out her polite, stilted phrases and write, ‘If you had never consented, none of this would have happened and she wouldn’t be …’ Instead she wrote, ‘In spite of our misunderstandings, I know that her heart was in the right place, Logan, and that in her own way she tried to do the best for PS …’
Absorbed in composing her eulogy, she was only half aware of the beginning of rain on the tin roof of the laundry but when lightning flashed outside the window, brightening for an instant the whole yard, she rose and pulled down the blind, grateful that the suffocating night was being broken up and that they would sleep cool and restfully.
It was then that she heard the scream.
‘Lila!’
In the dimness of the light from the hall she saw that he was sitting bolt upright in bed.
‘What is it, pet?’
A nightmare? He’d never been scared of thunder and lightning.
‘She’s out there!’
The ghost outside the window?
‘No, pet, no one is—’
Thunder interrupted her directly overhead and she reached out her arms to him. He pushed at her with his fists.
‘She’s out there all alone.’
‘No, no, sweetheart. She’s in heaven with the angels and Dear One.’
‘No. No. No,’ he screamed. ‘She’s out there in the dark in that place.’
She struggled with him as he threw himself away from her down on to the bed, holding the pillow between them, frantically turned and tossed, screaming out again and again that Vanessa was out there all alone where they had left her; cried out that there was no one to hold her.
‘PS, listen, listen. She’s not frightened of the thunder any more. She can’t even hear it.’
But nothing she could think of to say or do would stop the screaming. He was like an animal run over. He fought off her caresses, hurling himself from one side of the bed to the other, as she tried to hold him still, tried over and over again to make him understand that dead people did not fear storms, did not fear anything, that they were safe from all harm and all unhappiness, but he grew wilder and more hysterical, beating his fists on the bed until, frantic, she ran to the bathroom for a glass of water and tried with impotent soothing words and sounds to get him to take a sip but he twisted aside, holding the pillow over his face and murmuring into it nothing that she could make into the slightest sense.
She sat helplessly beside him like an intruder while the thunder rattled and complained outside the windows, rumbled at longer intervals until it became only a distant sound in the heavy downpour of rain, and he finally lay still, seemingly spent, on his back and let her take the pillow from him; let her rearrange him in the tossed bed, smoothing and tucking sheets and making gentle shhing sounds.
When he said something that she could not hear, she leaned urgently down, asking:
‘What, precious?’
‘I made her cross.’
‘No, pet,’ she said, shaking up the pillow and lifting his head on to it. ‘Oh, goodness me no, dearest. You made her happy.’
He gave a whimper, and turning away from her, began to cry with long, deep, gasping sobs of inconsolable grief.
Thank God, thought Lila, feeling her breath coming more easily now, feeling that th
is crying was natural and good. But how strange children are. He had loved her after all.
Then, as she felt the sudden prick at her eyes and throat and the gush of her own warm, releasing tears:
Do you see, Ness? Somebody minds.
The grass was brown and had not been cut for a long time and the roses were dead. Those were the first things he noticed as he walked up the driveway with Lila and George. He hadn’t wanted to see the big house again but Lila had said he must come and help her pick out the things he wanted. Vanessa had given him so many lovely things. Far too many to take them all home, Lila had said, so the things he didn’t want would go to the orphans. They had brought suitcases with them and the big heavy things would come later in a van.
Cousin Ettie was going home to England to live with her cousin Esmé, that was why. The big house was being given up and Cousin Ettie was selling all the furniture. Why? Well, Lila had said, because the furniture makes her sad.
The garden certainly looked very sad. No one had hosed it and the brown dog from next door had got in and was scratching in the salvia bushes.
‘Shoooo,’ he said to the dog. ‘Go away.’
‘What a funny boy you are,’ said Lila. ‘I always thought you liked dogs. Oh, poor doggie. He’s only looking for a bone.’
The front door stood open and in the hallway there were big wooden boxes and trunks with labels on them. His blue car was there and somebody had packed a lot of his books in the seat, tied up with string. It was very wrong of them because Vanessa never allowed his car to be in the front hall. It belonged on the side porch. And why was Ellen standing there talking to Lila and George in a blue dress that wasn’t her uniform? And why had all the pictures been taken down from the walls, leaving big white squares where they had hung?
Careful, He Might Hear You Page 34