Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

Aluminium began battering the silence which had gathered in the kitchen.

Mrs Bulpit appeared leaning in the doorway. ‘Got a bit burnt,’ she explained, ‘on the top.’

The accident didn’t prevent laughter spilling out from around her teeth. She could even have been feeling relieved, anyway for a moment, because in aiming at, and plummeting into her chair, she declaimed, ‘… you gotter forgive … me migraine’s coming on … a martyr to it.’

She sat holding a hand above her eyes, like a vast white celluloid shade, while her audience wondered whether they were impressed or suspicious.

Suddenly removing the shade from her afflicted eyes, she announced, ‘It’s the migraine that’s kept me from turning out the lovely room I have for our little lass. Too much happening at once,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll get round to it, but tonight she’ll have to camp somewhere else.’

Eirene Sklavos sat very upright, her neck grown as thin as the stem of a flower. The lobes of her ears seemed to flicker like freshly opened peablossom, only that was impossible. It was more likely that her earlier suspicion would be confirmed, and that she would have to share Mrs Bulpit’s bed.

‘Aren’t we going to get the pud, Mrs Bulpit?’ Gilbert Horsfall thought it reasonable to ask.

She was too preoccupied to answer.

And Eirene thought him stupid not to recognise the direction from which serious threats can be expected. In spite of his male strength, he would remain an unreliable ally.

The Bulpit was starting again. ‘What I think I’ll do,’ she mumbled as she unlocked her thighs gripping the chair arms with her great white squelchy hands, ‘I’ll make up the other bed in Reg’s — in Mr Bulpit’s room — till we get ourselves sorted out.’

She sounded as though she was addressing herself — or the former W/O — rather than those more deeply concerned. Of these, Eirene might have felt relief, Gilbert Horsfall could have been stunned, but neither of them revealed a reaction, which in any case their guardian was prepared to ignore.

As she rolled once again out of her constricting chair, she appeared more than anything relieved to have made what amounted to a decision. ‘… and I wouldn’t call it a bad one…’ She continued mumbling as she moved about in different dark recesses of the house ‘… the best I can manage to suit us all’ her voice additionally blurred and furry from the smells of damp and mothballs she was dragging out of cupboards.

At one stage passing through the room in which the less important actors in the play had continued sitting, herself a blanketed monument with a train of sheet attached, she suggested, ‘If you two kids thought of getting on with the washing up, a person would be much obliged.’

Gilbert Horsfall grimaced, winked, and went through a series of wriggly motions with his torso. In normal circumstances it might have amused his audience. Now Eirene Sklavos could only accept his leadership and follow him dully into the kitchen.

There at least it was warm, not to say fuzzy from the charred ruin of the pudding in its aluminium dish, the remains of congealed steak and chips, and what must have been brandy fumes, judging from a half-emptied bottle standing beside the sink in important isolation.

Gilbert grabbed it and reeled as he thrust it at Eirene. ‘’Ave a swig?’ he croaked.

She ducked away. But some of the brandy splashed over her.

Gilbert actually stuck the mouth of the bottle in his and she thought she heard a glug or two and saw his throat in motion. She couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything about this boy. But for the moment she depended on him. For that reason she even loved him, she thought.

Removing the bottle from his lips, he gasped, ‘So much for the orgy. Now it’s down to business.’

He was filling the sink, swizzling the water with soap imprisoned in a wire basket scraping plates into an already smelly bin.

She would have liked to help, but didn’t know how. In their Marxist household there had been Vaso, with her arthritika , in Aunt Cleone’s vaguely democratic Republican establishment there was Evthymia to attend to duties beneath a lady. Without slaves, Eirene Sklavos pricked her finger on a fork before throwing that weapon into the sinkful of frothing water.

She stood looking at the pinpoint of blood on the cushion of her finger. It provided some kind of focus point.

‘Here, dreamy. Take the towel, if you’re too grand to dirty your hands.’

She obeyed him rather gratefully, and began rubbing at the cutlery and plates, but the towel only seemed to make them wetter. It did not matter. Nothing did. While Mamma was sitting in the saloon, listening to men express their ideas. Particularly those of Father’s friend Aleko. Mamma grew still watching the little black tufts of hair on the backs of Aleko’s fingers.

Gilbert Horsfall’s hands were blond, shiny, hairless as he plunged and re-plunged them in the sink. They were scarcely human.

‘Do you like doing it?’ she murmured.

‘Do I like ?’ as he flipped his hands he flicked back water into the sink. ‘You gotter do it here. Australians are supposed to be useful.’

‘We didn’t have to. So I never learned.’

‘Thought your people were supposed to be commos.’

‘They had their ideas. There was always someone, someone else to do the things like washing up.’

‘I wouldn’t do any bloody washing up if you didn’t have to stay on the right side of the old girl.’

Across the distance separating them they stood looking at the charred ruin of the Apple Betty. Nothing had ever looked so extinct.

Gilbert Horsfall grabbed a fork and stabbed at it. ‘Bloody well burnt out!’ he cried.

It made her giggle in spite of her deep melancholy.

‘ Extinct —like that Greek volcano you were telling me about.’

The charred pudding, the volcano, reminded them of more important matters, for they began drifting by common though silent consent towards the exercise. Mrs Bulpit was commanding in what had been, was still in fact, the warrant officer’s bedroom.

‘There!’ she exclaimed, staggering back from tucking in a stray end of sheet between the mattress and a narrow bed. ‘Nobody could find fault with that.’

A veil of perspiration streamed over her suetty face as she stood admiring her handiwork. She looked quite religious.

Till snapping out of her trance, ‘I think we’ll agree to call it a day. Thanks for the washing-up, Gilbert — Ireen,’ she leered as she lumbered out.

But popped back to remind, ‘I hope you’re not mischievous children. No pillow-fights !’

After that she could be heard in the kitchen extracting the pudding from its aluminium armour, and removing her mouth from a bottle, it sounded.

The children were left to face the details of an oppressive present and a frightening, larger-than-life future.

There was no tune to Gilbert’s whistling as he tore himself out of his clothes. Eirene did not know what to do, say, or where to look. She continued standing beside what Mrs Bulpit had ordained as her bed. She did in fact slightly glance in her ally’s direction. In his nakedness he had his back to her, buttocks tensed, ribs in each case visible. He was skinnier than she would have imagined. Then he began putting on these old pyjamas with stripes of washed-out blue on them, and tying a string round his middle.

He asked, ‘Aren’t you going to undress?’ though still with his back to her.

‘No,’ she replied.

He got into bed, pulling the sheet over his head.

‘We didn’t last night, Mamma and I.’

‘You’ll be smelly if you don’t, two nights running.’

She took off her shoes and stood them together as neatly as Aunt Cleone would have demanded. She pulled off her stockings, rolling each into a ball before sticking them in her empty shoes. She too took off her dress, folded and hung it over the foot of the bed. After this there was nothing to prevent her getting between Mrs Bulpit’s damp grey sheets.