Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

‘Walked back this evening. Exercise.’

He puts on his ugliest voice, flexes his muscles to demonstrate the virtue in exercise. He has grown some more, it seems, since morning. He disappears somewhere he doesn’t want you to follow.

Much later he shows up and we stand together shivering gnawing at a couple of pork bones (‘Mr Finlayson’s favour’) and swallowing a mess of cold bread pudding.

The night is a naked electric bulb.

‘Did you hear about Mamma?’

You both shiver worse than ever pressed up against the table, its American cloth strewn with shavings of pork fat and grey gobbets of bread pudding.

‘Yes, it was bad luck.’ He has grown suddenly precise and English. ‘Anyone can cop a bomb. If your name’s on it. Nigel did.’

Gil has his own store of knowledge.

‘She must have died instantly.’ It’s your newspaper voice, borrowed from old Ally Lockhart.

‘Reckon the lot of them did.’

‘Do you know who they were?’

‘Bruce Lockhart says they were a mob of allied staff officers, who’d gone along to this fancy Gyppy whorehouse , when the bomb fell.’ He began to laugh. ‘Pinpointed, I’d say. Sounds like a great spy story.’ His ugly laughter clattering against his man’s teeth in a boy’s mouth.

You long to kiss and heal his hateful mouth, return the beauty you know is there.

He has begun to see you. ‘Sorry, Irene. You must be cut up about your mother.’ Again the well-brought-up English boy. ‘Ought to go to bed, oughtn’t we?’

We are tramping in opposite directions. The same if you dared admit.

The same.

* * *

Event № 2

It happened in the holidays which made it in some respects easier.

Gil is out boating with Bruce and Keith. You are sitting at your table ruling the notebook you think of keeping as a diary — if you dare.

The boat heels as they jump from side to side indulging in that boring pastime sailing a boat. (Sails in the distance are a different matter). But hulking males. The hairy Lockharts. And GILBERT HORSFALL (you have already printed the name on a secret page of the diary you haven’t begun to keep) in his imitation of the Lockharts. His hands have not lost their original shape.

The hand of Fatima on Arab houses to protect them against evil.

Most Greeks are hairy. There’s no getting round that one ‘Eirene’.

‘Ireen?’

The Bulpit is calling from her room. We are all living in separate rooms. (The only shared moments are in the single room of the tree-house, and Essie thank God can’t climb the ladder.)

‘Okay, Mrs Bulpit, I’m coming .’ Such a binding grind.

Essie is lying in her awful bed, which she shared with the W/O, and you with Mamma that first night. Enough associations to disassociate anyone for ever.

‘What can I do for you, Mrs Bulpit?’ Your hypocritical mini-voice.

‘Re-fill the hotwater bottle, dear.’

On one of the steamy summer mornings.

It is so long since you looked out of yourself and saw Essie that doing so now is a shock. At the end of the arm dangles the slack hotwater bottle in its fluffy pink jacket. There is the smell of sick rubber. The thin arm suggests pelican bones. She is without her teeth, her yellow throat dangles and wobbles on the rumpled sheet, she has the pelican’s not quite bird and not quite human eye.

‘Yes, Mrs Bulpit. Don’t worry. I’ll fill the bottle.’ Speaking like an adult.

You would have stayed boiling the kettle if the hotwater bottle in its pink jacket hadn’t looked and felt like something fetched up out of Essie’s insides.

‘Thank you, dear — it’s a comfort — to hold…’

When she has rolled round a bit in the bed, the contours of her slack body gurgling and subsiding, Essie says from out of her gums, ‘I’ve always tried to do me duty, whatever it was. But there comes a time…’

If only she won’t start slobbering. No slobber left perhaps, only those pelican bones and slack wobbly pouch.

‘People think you’re a fool today if you have your principles.’ No longer human.

That black bead of the pelican’s eye. You are the one will start slobbering. Oh God, to die without finding a duty. But what? Mamma thought she had one and let it down. Cleonaki had her duty to the Panayia and the Saints, the same wooden face in a change of robes. The old wrinkled voice reading from the Gospels. The classics too. For what we may learn, though we may not approve, Eirinitsa, of the passions they illustrate . So we read Phèdre aloud, and it is thrilling, no less in Cleonaki’s crackling voice.… de l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs … What has she known of the furies of love, this dusty voice, the face like an old, white wrinkled glove? Did Cleonaki tremble when she kissed the Archimandrite’s hand. Or was it all ideas and tales?

‘You love them and they let you know, more or less, you’re a fool for doing so.’ Again the voice of the pelican. ‘Reg never understood duty — except to his men, the C.O., and the customers after we opened the pub in Sydney. Well, it was a duty — a man’s duty. I suppose you’d call it. A woman’s is different.’

‘Better not tire yourself Mrs Bulpit. You’re ill. I advise you to relax.’ In extremis, yes, extremis, you are copying Aunt Alison.

Thank God a car is pulling up outside. A visitor — a tradesman— anybody .

It is Aunt Alison’s trampling feet her voice pushing the way into the room, to Mrs Bulpit’s dreadful rumpled bedside. She doesn’t notice a mere niece, there is no good reason why she should.

‘The ambulance will be here any moment now, Mrs Bulpit. You have no need to worry.’ Mrs Lockhart even throws in a ‘dear’ for somebody who was never her friend. Aunt Alison’s idea of doing her duty.

‘I was always a worrier. That’s my trouble,’ Essie replies in a calm voice. ‘Has the gentleman been informed — who will act as Gilbert’s guardian? The Colonel would never forgive me…’

‘The Colonel — nobody need worry. Mr Stallybrass is an accountant — a correct and honourable man.’

Aunt Alison is sweating in the untanned rims to her glassy eyes. Once the ambulance has come she may never forgive Essie for calling on her to do her duty.

The ambulance men stumble a lot. They are old, one fat and puffing, one thin and suppressed. The strong and young are away at the war. But these do their duty. They call Essie ‘love’. She takes it all for granted. Aunt Alison drags on another cigarette as one of Essie’s sheets forms round her ankles.

The pelican bones, the hotwater bottle, are more than you can bear. You run out, vomit beside the back steps, fall into the leaf mould, amongst the spiders, the ants, the centipedes, and many other mysteries crushing and crushed.

Aunt Alison comes out presently and calls, ‘Irene? I’ve got to follow on to the hospital. Back later. Tell that Horsfall boy his guardian will be fetching him. He must pack his things. You, too.’

Finally you are alone in the garden. As you raise your head, there is a long silver thread connecting your chin with the earth on which you have been lying.

* * *

Packing our things.

They don’t amount to much more than what you came in with. Aunt Alison and Mrs Bulpit have used the war as an excuse for not buying ‘a lot of expensive clothes you’ll grow out of next month.’ It saved them the trouble. And was less to pack now thank God. Writing paper, droring paper. The diary you will begin to write when you have the time and courage, and Gil won’t be in the next room. This naked sixpenny exercise book. And books, heavy to carry, in a port, dirty old, inky old school texts. I love a sunburnt country —not today — or will you ever? No country where the memories are all burnt into you, together with the secret pockets you are exploring every day in the present, in the depths of your mind. Selected Poems of Lord Byron . Tell him found a thing or two yourself. You cannot carve poems about Greece in marble. Greece shifts as you watch, like weather, dust, water.