Careful, He Might Hear You
Page 35
It wasn’t right what they’d done to the house and they ought to know that Vanessa would be terribly cross if she could see the dining room table piled with cardboard boxes full of dishes and glasses; with the silver jugs, the butter dishes, gravy boats, cups and saucers that had been set before him so many times. He wandered from room to room, wondering why the house seemed so small and finding things in the wrong places—the umbrella stand in the pantry and Vanessa’s yellow silk chair in the den where the piano used to be.
In the kitchen a strange man was standing on the table and doing something to the light in the ceiling.
‘Hello,’ said the man.
‘Where’s Elsie?’ he asked.
‘Dunno,’ said the man, drinking out of a beer bottle.
Vanessa would have said, ‘Tables are not for standing on. Get down from that table. Standing on a table in your dirty boots!’
‘What are you doin’ here, eh?’ asked the man. ‘Come with the visitors?’
‘I live here,’ he said, and went through the green door into the hall where Ettie was standing with her arms around Lila and George.
When she saw him she gave a little choked-up sound and he ran to her and said, ‘Ettie, everything’s in the wrong place.’
Ettie hung on to him like a little girl and he felt the scratch of her diamond heart on his cheek. She smelled of lavender and the other thing and she had got smaller. She was only a little bigger than he.
‘Gone,’ said Ettie, moving her little hands in the air, as though she were waving an invisible wand and in a second the house and all of them would vanish in a puff of pink smoke. ‘Going home, petkin,’ and then, falling sideways against Lila, she said in a pouty little-girl voice, ‘But I don’t want to now.’
Lila said, like she always did to him, ‘Of course you do,’ and George gave him a wink and said, ‘Go upstairs and see Vere.’
What was Vere doing here?
He ran upstairs eagerly and stopped when he saw that Vanessa’s door was open and that Vere was standing in front of the mirror wearing Vanessa’s black hat with the gold ball on it.
Seeing him, Vere turned and let out a screech.
‘Oh! Oh! What a fright you gave me. Is that my child? Oh, is that my child or is it a wolf come to eat me up?’
But Vere’s joke seemed silly and babyish today. Perhaps it was because she was wearing that hat and she’d already got it out of shape. Vanessa never wore it pulled down on the side like that.
When he walked into the room he saw that Vere had made it as untidy as her own. Things were all over the place. On the bed was an old battered suitcase packed to the top with Vanessa’s things; her nightdresses, her pink satin quilted dressing gown, a green dress he remembered, shoes and bottles of scent. Her hats sat on the rolled-up mattress and her dresses, looking empty as air, were strewn around everywhere. More of her shoes stood on the dressing table, where Vere had spilled a box of powder.
He sidestepped Vere’s clutch and said:
‘These are her things.’
‘PS, somebody has to have them. Don’t be a thwart, pet. When somebody dies you have to do something with their things.’ Vere was looking at him through blue cigarette smoke, dropping ash on Vanessa’s pink carpet.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Did you know she left you a lot of pennies to have when you’re twenty-one?’
‘Did she say?’
‘Mr Hood said, darling.’
Mr Hood? What would he know? Vanessa kept her pennies in a little leather purse and besides, she was cross with him and had given him up.
‘She gave me up,’ he said, but Vere was already trying on a yellow straw hat, banging the brim around.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t put it on like that.’
‘Oh, you funny child; don’t you think she’d rather I had it than the bloody Salvation Army?’
Would she? He was thinking about the night Vanessa said mind your business, Vere, leave my house!
Well, perhaps Vanessa wouldn’t mind now. But it was still her room and he took the shoes off the dressing table and lined them up neatly on the floor where she would have put them. Vere had stubbed out a cigarette in Vanessa’s little blue hairpin dish. He emptied it into the wastebasket and wiped the dish with his sleeve.
‘My God’—Vere laughed—‘what a little tidy-er upper you’ve become.’
He was thinking about the day he threw everything out of the bathroom window and Vanessa had told him that she was a tortoise. His eyes filled up for a minute and he stamped his foot to stop it from happening and went out of her room, remembering that there was something she told him to keep.
He went into his own room, where he found Lila bent, red-faced and puffing, over a big cardboard carton. Packing his things into it and saying she didn’t know where on earth they would be able to put his train at home. While her back was turned he opened his shirt drawer quietly and felt in the back of it and the stone was still there where he had left it, but Lila, seeing him in the mirror, said, of course, ‘What’s that, PS?’
‘Just something.’
‘Let me see, darling.’
Why did they always have to see everything?
‘Oh, where did you get that?’ But he knew she knew. ‘Oh, you must take good care of that, pet. That’s gold.’
Poor Lila. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not real, it’s just pretend.’
He went out and downstairs, meeting Agnes halfway down, and she had Vanessa’s umbrella in her hand.
‘Hello, Aunt Agnes,’ he said ‘Are you going to keep that?’ and then felt sorry because they had said he must be nice to poor Agnes because the world didn’t come to an end after all and she had lost her temple. They had gone past it the other day on the way to the beach and George had said, ‘Look, PS, we can go to the pictures there now. Do you want to see King Kong?’
Agnes closed her eyes a minute and said, ‘Don’t be sad, PS,’ and he went on downstairs wondering why she was the only one who knew that he was.
They were tying Vanessa up in brown paper parcels and he could hear their voices from all over the house calling, Do you want this? Shall we throw this out? Is this your size?
He went and sat alone in the greenish-lighted drawing room, all pulled to bits, and listened to them going up and downstairs and from room to room and knew that there was something he had to remember.
But what was it?
He looked at the painting of his mother, which was propped up against a chair. She stared back at him, cross with him for being late, but it didn’t seem to matter any more because they didn’t know each other. Only Vanessa knew him, knew all about him, and he knew that he must remember what she said. He must remember it quickly now before they had wrapped her up in parcels and suitcases and carried her away in different directions and in so many little pieces that none of her was left and even he would forget her.
Already he couldn’t remember her face and he shut his eyes, trying to see her that last day when they sat here in the late afternoon, when she was no longer cross, only already far away, beginning her journey.
Keep the gold, she said, so you’ll know what’s real and what’s fake.
But that wasn’t the important thing.
Over there by the window she said, I hope you’ll grow up to be something.
Leaning out of the window and hearing Jocko mowing the lawn: Don’t be a PS.
That was it. You’d better find out who you are, my dear, she said again now, quite clearly, and there was no more, he could remember no more, but it didn’t matter if he could remember this much and do something to please her.
PS.
‘PS,’ they called from the kitchen. ‘PS, come and have tea. Come, pet. Where are you?’
So he slipped the piece of stone into his pocket to keep forever and walked into the kitchen and said to all their backs fussing with teapots, with scones and jam, ‘Who am I?’
They all laughed, even Ettie laughed. He was playing a game, they t
hought, and Vere said, ‘Let me guess! Are you Captain Hook?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Who am I?’
They guessed and guessed again, like kids. Was he Don Bradman the cricketer? Kingsford Smith the airman? Ronald Colman?
Finally, tired of it, they said, ‘You’re PS.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not any more.’
Lila put down her cup in the little silence.
‘What do you mean, pet?’
‘What’s my name?’ he said.
‘Goodness me. You know what your name is, darling. You can even write it. Why do I have to tell you?’
George said, ‘That’s his business, Lila.’
Lila wiped crumbs from her mouth and said in her once-upon-a-time voice:
‘Well, you’re William after your grandfather and Scott for your mother. You’re William Scott Marriott.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s who I am.’
Vere, reaching for him, laughed and said, ‘But you’ll always be PS to us.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m Bill.’
They all laughed and he could see that they didn’t like the idea of his being Bill at all and would go on calling him PS until he was very old, maybe thirty.
‘I’m Bill,’ he said again.
Lila said, ‘Oh, but PS, Dear One called you that because you’re all we have left of her.’
To be parcelled up and handed around like Vanessa’s things?
‘No,’ he said, and meant it so much that suddenly they were all very still, all looking at him as if he were some strange thing from the North Pole. He looked back at Lila until she finally shifted her glance to the window, looking sad and troubled as she did when she heard rainbirds long before anyone else.
Then George said, ‘Have a piece of cake, Bill.’
‘No, thank you,’ he said politely, and went out through the hall and down the front steps into the deserted garden, walking backward down the drive, step behind step, and scuffing the gravel the way he liked to do. He felt important and mysterious because now, like Vanessa had said, there was really only him. Bill.
‘I’m Bill,’ he shouted back to the big sad house, to the next-door dog, who looked at him, surprised.
He climbed on the front fence to be taller and shouted it again.
‘I’m Bill!’
Shouted it again and again as loud as he could so that wherever she was she might hear him and say something back and then he listened, staring up at the house, where the sun, going down, had caught at the windows and set them all on fire, especially Vanessa’s, which was blazing with real gold.
He heard their distant voices coming from the house. Nothing but their voices and the tooting of ferries—the dry movement of the trees answering him. Yet, listening very carefully now, he thought that he might have heard something else, just for a moment and a long way off, much farther than the garden, farther than where, by craning his neck, he could just see the Watson’s Bay Lighthouse beginning to wink at the harbour going out to sea.
He couldn’t hear what Vanessa said now but he would hear it some day in some other place.
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