Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

‘She died early this morning…’

‘Oh dear!’ Though his smile lingers, the accountant’s hand falters as he unlocks the Daimler’s boot.

Too much is happening at once. Aunt Alison has gashed her hand on the rusty gate. She watches the blood trickle down over the stains of nicotine. Gil is raising his luggage, packing it inside the shining car. Mr Stallybrass fears the boy may have grazed its precious paint.

The football boots are bumping around foolishly on their string as this long, painfully breathing form fits itself into the passenger seat.

Ignoring the unexplained barefoot girl, Mr Stallybrass bows at Mrs Lockhart, who does not return the civility. She is winding a dirty handkerchief round her bleeding finger.

The accountant drives smoothly off. Seated beside him, re-arranging the football boots Gilbert Horsfall does not look back.

How are you to take all these people, this coming and going, and Essie’s death, when it is Gil who has died?

Perhaps he looked back once after your back was turned to exchange a secret smile, and because your face wasn’t there to receive it, would imagine you have given him up.

‘Come on, Ireen,’ Aunt Ally calls. ‘There’s a hell of a lot to get through.’

She has developed a limp, perhaps out of sympathy with the finger, or she may have really fallen down on her way here from the hospital.

It doesn’t stop her stamping through the house, slamming, locking windows (she has cracked a pane in one).

‘What are we supposed to do, Aunt Ally.’

‘Tidy up. Sort things out. Well, I couldn’t bear it — not today.’

It is Essie’s bedroom which has made her decide — the smell of sickness, stale powder, the big unmade bed — the lot.

‘Not today. I’d fetch up.’

You are following her out to the tune of keys, only remembering at the back door.

‘We’re forgetting my possessions, Aunt Ally.’ She can’t stop hooting! ‘Aren’t you old-fashioned! Your possessions! You poor dear!’

She helps you up the slope with what there is. She has lost her limp. But her breath is terrible, a long sweet smoky blast.

‘Your possessions!’ as she drives snorting away.

There is all the usual trash in the Chev, along with a new sound, of an empty gin bottle rolling around on the floor at the back.

‘You must wonder why I didn’t come for you last night. You’re too young. It’s something you wouldn’t understand. What that poor devil of a frightful female did to me. So I had a few drinks and drove around. You wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t creep into my house . People asleep. So I drove. Night’s perhaps the best part of life — if you’re on your own — and have a car.’

She almost runs off the road making the turn at this culvert, but it doesn’t seem to matter much.

‘Shall I be able to go back sometimes to the garden?’

‘If you want to — anyway till the house is sold. Don’t expect the new owner would want a stray girl nosing round his property,’ Aunt Ally beeps. ‘ Garden —I’d call it a wilderness.’

On every side — a country of lantana and feral cats.

‘Do you have the accountant’s address?’

‘His office address. She forced it on me on account of the boy. But there’s no reason why I should have any traffic with that person —in his bleeding Daimler — now that Gil-bert has been disposed of.’

We drive on towards the house in which my ‘aunt’ and my ‘cousins’ live. It’s listed under the name of ‘Harold Lockhart’ (in the telephone directory). Harold felt even less an uncle than the boys are cousins, or Ally except at odd moments, an aunt. If you could have your own way, you wouldn’t want to meet anyone else, related or unrelated, ever …

* * *

Event № 3

The move to Lockharts’ was perhaps an even greater event than Nos 1 and 2 though each a vicious and unexpected blow, Mamma’s death, which was also the death of Papa’s ideal, then on top of it Essie’s illness, the end of the garden, and Gil Horsfall’s back as he was driven off. The move to Lockharts’ was linked with education, which made it that much more formidable. All these boys talking about exams and what they would be doing in the future. Harold Lockhart (‘never call me “uncle”, Irene’) at work in the Department of Education. All of it meant that you were being formed , that any part of Eirene Sklavos which survived, must exist only in the secret poetic world of dream and memory. Well, it has been like this already, but without the same brutal onslaught from boys and a Public Service uncle all geared to what most adults refer to as life. At Lockharts’ you are formally Eirene Sklavos, in their eyes, if they ever take a look at you.

It must be said for Harold that he calls you ‘Irene’ not ‘Ireen’, in his soft, what passes for educated voice. Books and music have made him persuasive. He paints a little at the week-end — what he calls ‘mood painting’. There is nothing outwardly brutal about Harold. He is too soft-spoken, soft silvery hair. A gentle man. Except when he remembers to look at you, and something happens to the corners of his mouth, pleating, moistening, and his eyes of that lovely soft silvery blue, compared with Alison’s harsh glare, suddenly harden. Then you know that Harold is one of those people who know what they want. There’s nothing wrong with that of course. If only you did.

There is a great shuffle round at Lockharts’ following your unexpected, unwanted arrival. There is the question of rooms. Bruce and Keith, they are big, each has one of his own. Bob and Lex, the freckled, pig-rooting brumbies from back of the class, they already share. It is the little ones Col and Wal who suffer, they are banished to a sleep-out, and you will suffer accordingly in what was once their nice room, where their gear and toys continue to be stored. They are free to run in and fetch what they need, giggling as if they had found you naked. Throwdowns and stink bombs are what they see as the best jokes. And once an imitation dog turd.

Ignore. There is a drawer in which you can lock the diary you haven’t yet begun to write. A wonder the key has survived Col and Wal.

There is the Saturday arvo they are all going to the cricket match. You are planning to say you don’t feel well. Will Alison fall for it? Or will she tot up and find it’s too soon after last time.

What she says is, ‘It’ll do you good. Take you out of yourself, mix with others in the fresh air. You’re becoming morbid , Ireen.’

Actually she mustn’t believe any of this, driving round by herself in her smelly old car, getting sloshed on gin alone at night—‘the best part of life’. But because she is officially on the parents’ side she goes along with what is supposed to be.

‘You’re not sickening for something, are you?’ Your aunt looks genuinely anxious for a moment, as though she couldn’t bear it if somebody else is preparing to die.

‘NO.’

The truth was you were longing to indulge in the luxury of lying on the bed in full health, thinking and dreaming, then after their departure has stopped rocking the house, and it has subsided into its natural shape, to get up and take a look in the glass at this new person you are becoming, perhaps even write about it in the clean locked-up diary, all those threads of words and thoughts sprouting out of a pen.

Everything happens, as far as you can tell, according to plan. The silence is as soothing as lanoline on a sore place. A twig falls. Birds pick at an Australian silence without tearing it apart. Except the kookaburra, which is either in league with humans, or else laughing at them.

The kookaburra is the counterpart of this counterpane, as silence is to lanoline. You could lie here all afternoon rubbing your back your arms your whole body against this rough bedspread, surrounded by a silence through which twigs feathers can be heard falling. Except you are forced up by a shortening of time, it is never yours for long enough, to look in the mirror or unlock the drawers which contain secrets.