Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

‘I mean, what did they teach you over in Greece.’

‘Miss Adams taught me to read and write — always in English. She taught me the names of the English kings. I learned French and German from my father’s aunt. We read together Racine and Goethe. A little Shakespeare.’

‘What you’d call a practical start in life.’ Aunt Alison’s teeth have grown brown and jagged again behind the cracks in her purple lips.

‘What about Maths? Did they teach you your sums?’ Mr Harbord persists.

‘No-one was much good at mathematics. Mamma says she shed her materialistic Australian nature when she married with a Greek.’

I can feel my English growing worse as these people provoke me. Again I know my neck is blushing.

‘Oho, I like that !’ Aunt Alison cannot hold back a shriek. Mr Harbord’s laughter sounds rubbery, sticky, like a tyre on a bumpy road.

When they compose themselves, Mr Harbord says, ‘I hope we can put it back in you — some of the Australian character, I mean.’

He pushes back his chair and you all get up. You can tell this is the point at which something dreadful must happen.

We begin moving out of the headmaster’s room, the lunch in Mrs Bulpit’s case hardly thumping worse than your heart as Mr Harbord tells Aunt Alison ‘… start her at the beginning…’ he nods for your benefit.

‘I hope it won’t be bad for you, Reenie, by giving you the opportunity to shine, we don’t encourage that sort of thing.’

You want nothing more than to crawl away through the dark undergrowth of the garden over the warm moist leaf-mould, and perhaps re-join your fellow insects.

Where in all this zooming hive of horrible children is Gilbert Horsfall? Will he come in to defend you? Or will his acceptable blond nature be disgraced by association with the glistening black centipede admitted to this full classroom between the threatening bodies of Mr Harbord and Mrs Lockhart.

There is a tall thin additional threat in Miss Enderby standing in front of a blackboard on which a map has been drawn in coloured chalks. Mr Harbord, Mrs Lockhart, and Miss Enderby are all smiling too much for the child I no longer am.

Miss Enderby says, ‘Move over, Viva. Make room for Ireen.’

Viva doesn’t want to move, but does. She is dark, but not what you would call black, her white skin shows up what could be the beginnings of a moustache. She is frowning, perhaps afraid the others will blame her for having a foreigner next to her.

Miss Enderby has darted forward and takes hold of Mrs Bulpit’s case, which you have begun to love, it is something you know. She stands the case as though it is in some way a thing of shame under the table on the platform. Bending down, or standing straight, Miss Enderby reminds you of a hairpin. Her skin is a pale, shabby brown. Though her face is fairly young, it is raked with lines, her hair of no particular colour looks dusty from the grey in it. Blue eyes might look pretty if she wasn’t so worried.

Mr Harbord’s large teeth are on display. ‘Easy does it, Miss Enderby. We’ve got to get to know one another. Then it’ll be fine.’

‘That’s correct, Mr Harbord.’ Miss Enderby’s smaller teeth snicker back uneasily at her superior, and she rearranges the unused hankie stuck through a bangle on her thin brown forearm.

Standing to attention in front of the blackboard on which she has drawn the map of Australia festooned with signs of various kinds, the teacher could have been caught out at something. Mrs Lockhart, too, looks caught, and is glad to fade away with her embarrassment, piloted by the headmaster after flicking his head at Ireen Sklavos. It is meant to encourage you.

Classmates jab their elbows into the ribs of two boys at the back. From the look of them they could be middle Lockharts embarrassed by their mother’s showing up at school. Avoid these Lockharts.

Will Gilbert Horsfall’s voice never break through the partition separating you from other cells in this thundering hive?

Miss Enderby stands a moment, head bowed, above her table, collecting her scattered thoughts, then flicks back her dusty hair, the not quite pretty blue eyes stare or glare at the distance.

‘As Captain Cook sailed up what we know today as the coast of Queensland, he sighted a group of mountains singular in shape. He called them…’ as the eyes withdraw from the distance of history they focus on a present target ‘… What did he call them — Viva Jenkins? Tell us, please, in case Ireen Sklavos hasn’t heard.’

Viva Jenkins looks livid. You can feel yourself turning green on being singled out in front of all these children. Viva will blame you for this moment forever.

‘The Glasshouse Mountains,’ Viva Jenkins answers coldly quickly through thinned lips.

Miss Enderby’s glass stare looks appeased. She sails on up the coast to wherever the blue arrows will take her, past Aegean rocks in a tropical sea. Yellow tracks leading into the interior widen into human footprints. The sun hangs heavier than August on Aiyina. The classroom is rocking by now with the swell of the sea. Hidden in the mangroves blacks are waiting to spear the landing parties of explorers. [Find out about these mangroves].

You look at Viva, this black moustache against the white skin. It is you who are the black. Her lips, her eyelashes, her fringe all hate you. She takes this pin and sticks it into your foreign arm. You both sit staring at the pinprick of blood which swells which overflows. Black speared by white amongst the treacherous mangroves.

You cannot prevent your eyes overflowing. Viva is a glassy blur. The black mangrove fringe. Something of Viva herself is ebbing away with your blood. Her white forehead is swelling. Her thin lips begin to glow as though from the wound she has opened in your flesh.

Miss Enderby’s lesson is foundering somewhere in the islands to the north. Nobody here, Miss Enderby included, knows about islands.

She arranges her chalks, her pencils, and a squelchy yellow rubber on the table. A chalk-saturated duster makes her cough.

Since the lesson is over everyone comes spilling out from behind the desks, bumping, slamming, feet grating. Screams and babbles break from mouths as they jostle anybody in their way. The two freckly Lockharts jump and kick sideways like frisky horses. There is no question of their knowing a cousin even though they may know about her. All to the good.

Miss Enderby remembers, and picks up the offending case from beneath her table. ‘Viva, look after Ireen — show her the ropes — where to leave her case. Cases, Ireen, are not brought into class.’

She has done her duty. In the purple brown mash of her face, perspiring white circles of skin make the eyes look more remote than ever.

Viva, it seems, is more the outcast than Ireen as all the children tear past.

‘Take your case,’ Viva mumps through a heavy disgust as thick as phlegm. ‘This is when we eat lunch.’

‘Already?’

‘Yair. You arrived late, didn’t you?’

In the circumstances Viva even seems to think that what should be a virtue amounts to a sin.

Under the fronds of this tree with its little pink berries you look at each other munching lunches. Viva may have forgotten the blood that flowed in class. Munching helps. Mrs Bulpit has provided something pale that tastes of sawdust between slices of soggy bread. There is a wizened apple. Viva has much the same. Her teeth bulge with doughy bread. She rejects crusts.

‘Wossat?’

‘Chocolate.’

‘Got chocolate for school lunch?’

You can’t care.

Viva is soon chocolate-lipped. ‘You see these two girls coming over? They’re reffoes. They’ll try anything on. Got all the cheek in the world.’

The girls are sort of smiling. Their blenched nostrils are scenting chocolate. One girl’s ears are pierced for little golden rings. But the second girl’s lobes have real earrings suspended from them, little coral stones trembling like the berries of the shade tree under which we have been eating our lunch. This girl wears an actual ring on her plump finger, with a stone in it.