Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

He chafed an arm in the still fierce light of late afternoon, and scratched at the white writing on the wall.

The people who shared his reluctance to speak about death, often for a different reason told him: now that you are in the States, you are safe, all will be well, you will learn the language and become American. On the other hand other Americans said: ‘Too many privileged British children, arrogant little bastards, the other fool sons of bitches are left to the bombs.’ They didn’t want him, any more than he wanted to be American. He liked doughnuts and popcorn, but hated hominy grits.

What he wanted he didn’t know. To be left alone, to be himself.

He and the others, seven of them, were in the charge of Mr and Mrs Ballard. The friendly Americans who thought he was there to become American would not have believed they were only in transit to a place like Australia, any more than Mr Ballard could believe in anything American. He wore a permanent squinted smile of disbelief. He shrugged off the airconditioning and squinted more than ever for the heat, running a handkerchief round inside the rim of his dogcollar.

‘Thank God for Australia,’ Mr Ballard said to his wife, when all the boys were out of earshot, only one wasn’t. ‘At least it is ours, Emily — home soil. They speak the same language.’

‘More or less,’ Mrs Ballard said, who had been there already, as a governess, and moistened her long, glistening teeth.

Throughout their enforced stay in the United States, as their papers were tidied up and then during their journey across that continent, Mrs Ballard seemed to wear the same dress, long and straight — knitted out of string, you would have said with a white collar, sometimes with points, sometimes rounded, held together at the throat by a cairngorm. The dress must have been one of a series, Gil Horsfall supposed, of similar dresses, for Mrs Ballard either did not smell, or was too thin and dried up to generate much more than an occasional whiff.

She wasn’t such a bad old stick, in spite of the long slippery teeth. She was inclined to go for walks by herself. He had come across her on a cliff’s edge, perhaps looking at the view, he could not be sure, and once stock still in a pine forest, as though listening to the nearest, equally rooted trunk, a chipmunk unafraid of her long brown English shoes. On each occasion when she saw him her slow-breaking smile indicated that she might have been preparing to say something. But she didn’t. She folded her colourless lips over the glistening teeth. Mrs Ballard agreed with him, as it were, that they should part company, neither having anything against the other. Gil thought how he would have liked to unpin the cairngorm and keep it for a secret. Any secrets he possessed had been left behind in London in the hurry of evacuation, since when he had acquired no more than a turkey’s wishbone during an overnight stay in Kansas City.

Mr Ballard ensured that there was grace before meals and communal prayers night and morning. Like a good clergyman’s wife Mrs Ballard went along with it, but you could not tell whether she was praying behind her dry breathing. Gil wondered what the other boys prayed. They were a crummy lot. Some of them mumbled as they squirmed on their knees, and there was one thoughtful nose-picker. Gil did not pray. At night he hugged the darkness to him and hoped for protection from the bombs he had neither seen nor heard, but which sometimes exploded in his sleep. Once he had become a corpse until the warden told fellow rescuers this was the body of Nigel Brown.

As the train was slowly pulling out of Tucson Arizona, Mrs Ballard back turned, standing on the platform watching the houses sidle past, the kids farther down the car filling Dixie cups with ice water they didn’t need or fooling with the negro attendant. Mr Ballard sat without his hat telling a Rotary member from Chicago, ‘All these boys are from wealthy or in some way important families, and my wife and I are doing our bit seeing them through to relatives or friends in Australia.’

‘Is that so?’ said the Rotary member, not with undue emphasis, but because he had just regurgitated some of the cornbread he had eaten for breakfast. ‘They seem a spunky lot,’ he said, to do his duty, after glancing back down the car at the gaggle of grey-flannelled young Britishers.

‘The father of Horsfall, this little fellow over here,’ the clergyman said, ‘has a staff job at New Delhi. Gilbert is a bit on the quiet side. Which way he goes remains to be seen.’

‘Which way — how…?’ mused the gentleman from Chicago, flatulence getting the better of him.

‘Impossible to say how he’d turn out.’

‘So long as he isn’t one of these nuts who take the ice-pick to decent folks.’

‘I’m not suggesting…’ Mr Ballard blushed for his indiscretion in giving a stranger, an American at that, such an opportunity.

He was about to join his wife on the platform when the stranger saved him the trouble by announcing,

‘I gotta leave you, sir. I got the gas awful bad.’

Gil, too, was glad when the Rotary gent had gone to seek relief from his gas. He wondered about the ice-pick, he had never seen one. He was in no way the nut that most other people seemed to be. But which way to go? Would anyone ever tell him? His father was more ‘Colonel Horsfall’ than his father, his mother a respectful memory in a Kensington flat and a varnished box at St Mary Abbots.

If he didn’t feel miserable it was because so much was happening around him. In San Francisco benefactors waylaid them in the street and in spite of the embarrassed protests from the Ballards, carried off the whole party to a seafood restaurant where Gil Horsfall ordered soft-shell crabs, and the others settled for fried fish.

Snotty Thirkell, the thoughtful nose-picker of prayer-time, said out loud that soft-shell crabs were the most expensive item on the menu.

But his benefactress expressed approval. ‘Quite right too. You’ve got to pay the price for adventure.’

Of all this the Ballards were less than appreciative, but you could not gainsay a patroness whose lizard handbag was stuffed with dollar bills. If it had been England and peacetime, none of it would have happened, the Ballards would have hurried the boys away from anyone so vulgar.

They were always hurrying, chivvying their charges when in motion. Gil in particular was inclined to dawdle because he liked to look at things and plodding back to their modest hotel on their last night in San Francisco with Gil the endmost vertebra of the crocodile tail, a black man waved his cock at him from the dark entrance to a Gothic Tower. So there was all this, and finally the flying boat carrying them to Australia which touched down flipflapping across the flat waters of the bay, at Sydney.

The end of acquaintanceship with his temporary guardians made no great demands on him, there were too many boys for the Ballards to become personal and emotional about any single one of them. In any case, he was not emotional, unless in those secret compartments where he never allowed anyone to enter. True, he might have been preparing on those two occasions when he had come across Mrs Ballard, once on a cliff’s edge, and again in a pine forest where each had decided against what could have become a terrifying intimacy. And now at the end, on the pier at Sydney, in a turmoil of luggage, relatives and friends, Mrs Ballard seemed to be avoiding him, as he avoided her. Her string dress looked more than usually unattractive, ruched, shrunken, hairy from prolonged wear, the white collar, grubby from the flight, and harassed by arrival, held together at the throat, not by the familiar cairngorm brooch, but an outsize safety pin.

It was not difficult to avoid her because the person to whom he was consigned had made herself known to Mr Ballard, who was handing over his boys with relief, as though they were parcels, unregistered ones at that.