Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

He led her out to a scullery or laundry which overlooked part of the back yard. Here he began behaving as he had advised. But Eirene chose to fill the sink and cool her hands. These looked surprisingly helpless for one who normally recognised her own powers. As she wrapped them together and round a piece of yellow soap, and allowed them to escape from her, the hands became a pair of fish too small to send to the market. Which did not remove the probability that somebody would eat them, and in the scullery the smells of sick linoleum and the yellow soap now stranded shiny on the drying board took over from the comforting stench of frying onion.

‘There’s a towel,’ he told her, ‘but too wet to use. Seeing you were silly enough to wash, you’d better dry your hands on yourself.’

She was glad to come across this practical strain in her companion. She might make use of it later on. In the morning it filled some of the emptiness left by her mother’s going away.

After the washing ceremony they went outside for no definite purpose beyond passing the time till their tea was ready. They sat on the steps leading to the yard. The dark trees and browned-out lights of the city beyond encouraged a melancholy which she suspected the boy did not share. His body was harder. It helped him not to mind things so much.

He sat scratching a scab on his knee, and from the goo he felt under his fingers must have got it off finally. He smeared the blood about on the skin but it gave him no idea how he might impress this girl, who had seen a volcano, whose father had died in prison and who had come from where a war was taking place.

‘Did you see anybody killed?’ he asked, ‘in the war, I mean.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘The war was in the mountains. It was at this time still … heroic.’ She spoke with such slow and special emphasis he could see it rounding in the dark in front of them, like a drop of suspended blood transformed into a jewel. ‘Oh, I did see something,’ she remembered. ‘An old man hit by a tank outside the gardens. His head was squashed. His brains were mashed into the paving. They said it was done by a British tank. Because the British were in retreat, you see. Then the Germans marched in — and that was different. British MTV took us off because we were friends.’

He envied her all she had experienced and her professional use of terms. It was too unfair that he had so little to offer.

‘Were you afraid?’

‘Not really. I was taken care of. It didn’t seem to be happening to me. It would have been different if we had stayed for Greece. I planned to take Evthymia’s sharpest meat knife and kill a German on a dark night.’

‘Doesn’t sound to me as bad as the Blitz in London.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

‘Thousands killed every night the bombers came over. It was one big firework display. When you got used to it you didn’t stay in the shelters with a mob of people smelling and farting. Bombs tore through the shelters, anyway. You got used to walking through the streets through the shrapnel. And in the ruins by day. One night I was shot out of the corridor on my mattress — landed in the street — thought I was dead till I heard a warden ask, ‘Anyone know this boy’s name?’ Somebody did. They said, ‘It’s Nigel Horsfall from a block away.’

‘I thought your name was Gilbert.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’

They continued sitting side by side on the steps overlooking the garden. Had she dropped to him? From her dreamy look he didn’t think so. And he wasn’t that much a liar. Though he had been evacuated with those other kids before the bombs began to fall you knew what it was like as though you had been there, from what you had been told. If you had imagination you knew. And some had died with poor old Nigel, his only friend. You knew through Nigel. Silly of you though to let the name slip.

But she hadn’t cottoned on. He took another look. He might have taken her by the hand. They were wandering through the blacked-out streets. In the ruin of some great house they looked down at the marble face, like of some goddess broken out of a volcanic temple, only the lips began to breathe, very gently. Irene Sklavos did not seem surprised, it could have been her own face whitened. There was a man and woman pressed up against each other in a gateway. Nigel Brown who knew more about it said they were fucking. Irene Sklavos seemed unsurprised, when you — or was it Nigel? — led her farther into these desolated streets which belonged to you both by rights of the life you had begun to share, through imagination and dreams.

He looked at her again to see what she was thinking, from her side-on face. If he had pulled her round and stared at her eye to eye, she would have had the round, gently breathing face of the yellow, bomber’s moon. Side-on, she was this sharp know-all. If he had touched her elbows or knee-caps they would have been as sharp, as cutting as the words of teachers in class or the Lockhart louts — Kevin and Bruce. He couldn’t tell which side she was on.

* * *

When they were seated one each side of her at the kitchen table their guardian told them, ‘You may wonder at us eating such a nice piece of steak in wartime. It’s because Mr Strutt did me a favour — a mate of Reg’s — another of us from the Old Country — always down at the Imperial when we was running it — all returned men — things was different in those days.’

She had cut up her steak very fine. She was only messing with it, the chips were more to her taste. She gobbled at them in between what she had to tell. One of the big flabby chips fell out of her mouth and landed in the gravy, which shot up and spotted her dress.

‘You children,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t understand.’

Then she realised she ought to clean up the gravy spots and began mopping at them with a hankie. Her red lip-stuff had worn off. Her mouth should have looked normal, except most grown-ups never look that.

Gilbert Horsfall looked across at Irene Sklavos. They should have felt good for a giggle, but they weren’t. Like Ma Bulpit, the girl was only picking at her food. She had the sniffles. She looked darker than ever, if not positively green.

In between observing the others and disapproving their wasted opportunities, Gilbert Horsfall polished off his own plateful. He still felt hungry. He might have helped out, he thought — urgh, no, not the mess Ma Bulpit’s shiny teeth had refused, now sitting in its own fat. But Irene had hardly touched her tea. He could imagine taking a mouthful of the untouched steak and converting the stringy old stuff into a delicious tenderness. He shivered as his teeth entered the soft, greasy chips. All his imagined acts were becoming so real, he wondered whether Irene would see that he was almost peeing himself. But she kept her eyelids lowered.

Ma Bulpit had begun pulling out. ‘Expect you’re waiting on the pudding,’ she mumbled. ‘All young things have a sweet tooth,’ chair grating almost to toppling, ‘that’s why we lose them,’ as she stumbled in the direction of the kitchen which swallowed her signature tune. ‘In the old days I was famous for my Apple Betty.’

Irene Sklavos raised her eyelids.

‘What is this Betty?’

Her question promoted Gilbert Horsfall to the rank of friend. He was both grateful for the honour and reluctant to accept it.

‘Arr,’ he said, sticking out his lips remembering his Lockhart mentors, ‘it’s got these sort of pip-scales in it that make you wanter puke — right enough if you’ve still got to fill your belly.’

She looked so unhappy he clenched his knuckles under the table. He hoped she wouldn’t take him for a Lockhart, but could think of no way of showing her he was otherwise.