Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

The mirror makes you look a guilty thief. In this seersucker bolero , it is called, and matching skirt, the white blouse. If it wasn’t for your Greek skin and a spot you have rubbed too hard at on your chin, you might compete in the Australian Pretty Girl Stakes. But you will always look too black — and too guilty — nobody wins who has these fatal flaws. The plait is gone. ‘… advise you to cut off, long hair today makes a girl look frowsy, the “Ambleside” hat is frumpish enough without a lot of hot, heavy hair, hanging down or shoved up … have them cut it off … cut … CUT…’

Ally would never know what it is to have your plait cut off. She knows what goes. However, up the line at Ambleside three more weeks till term. Miss Hammersley is head.

Will Col and Wal find out this one drawer is locked, and force it? Better not keep a diary after all, have foreign eyes dirty its pages with sniggers. This guilty mirror is against all such foolishness.

Jan 1943

Well, I’ve got down to it — scribble — scribble. The relief. So much I’ve always wanted to say in any language new or old whichever that is.

Most since Gil was driven off in the accountant’s car.

Asked Aunt Ally, ‘Where is Gil living now?’ She pursed up and answered, ‘With his guardian, I presume.’

‘But where?’

‘Oh somewhere — in Vaucluse.’ Her lips could barely speak the word.

‘Where is that?’ as though you didn’t know.

‘Somewhere out — the other side of the Bridge.’ Her teeth have had enough of whereabouts.

In Sydney, it seems, a bridge does not bridge, it separates.

‘What will happen to him now? Where will he be going to school?’

‘At some so-called public school, SAGS I’m told. I couldn’t care. He’s no responsibility of mine.’

She closes the matter with a snap.

Gil will become a product of the Sydney Anglican Grammar School while I am to be ironed out up the line by Miss Hammersley of ‘Ambleside’. Worlds between us, as Aunt Ally, I suspect, wishes.

What do they want to do with us? Do they really care? Responsibilities. I think Ally hates me at times because I am Mamma’s child. Gerry escaped, married a commo, and had affairs with men. I hate men! Those kind army officers, the Greek Axiomatic dancing with Mamma in the patisserie , his badly fitting trousers, Mr Harbord exchanging looks with Mrs Lockhart, Harold ‘never call me uncle’, Bruce and Keith behaving like the men they haven’t yet become.

Gilbert Horsfall is another pretender.

At his best he is something else, almost part of myself, the one I have shared secrets with, the pneuma I could not explain, but which he must understand, from what I know of his best moments, not the braying jackass in him.

If I could choose I would shut myself with Gil in the tree-house above the precipice in Cameron Street, floating, and the world could explode around us …

It nearly did day before yesterday. While I am writing I hear footsteps approaching through the house I thought mine for at least one afternoon. Put away your diary. I couldn’t. I was paralysed. Anyway what did it matter? If it was one of the murderers you hear about? Or some GI. Those who murder or rape don’t take any interest in a diary.

Then when the figure appears in the doorway it is my non-uncle, Harold Lockhart. ‘Did I give you a fright?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I lied, ‘only I thought everyone had gone to the cricket match.’ He said he had stayed behind to do a bit of painting. Sport is for morons, except you’ve got to play it to get on.

He pulled up a chair and sat down beside me at the desk, asked me what I was writing. I told him I was making notes for a school essay we had been asked to write. On what theme? How I see myself. That should be interesting, when you show us nothing of yourself, Irene, how you think or feel, anyone would postulate that you don’t care for us. His voice dried up. He hummed a bit. He must have washed his hair. It had never looked so silvery, it sent out little waves of brilliantine. How is it, he asked, you’re writing this essay when you’re leaving the local school and starting next term at Ambleside? I was dripping by now, choking, what with Harold’s hair and my own stupidity. When I thought to say, with my last gasp, that’s right, but it will come in useful sooner or later, it’s the sort of thing they ask you to write.

Luckily Harold did not seem all that interested in the ‘notes for an essay’. His mouth was pleating and moistening at the corners as I had seen it before. ‘Perhaps you have a literary talent,’ he said, his eyes vague if they hadn’t been concentrated on some intention which made him both sad and, yes, cruel. As concentration increased I was able to slip the diary into the drawer. He did not notice. He was drawing me between his knees. I have never fainted, almost once when Evthymia took me to Kapnikarea on Holy Friday and we kissed the face of the Panayia, now again I was on the point of fainting, what with the floating hair, the pressure of his thighs, and a thrumming sound from inside his shirt. Till I noticed the red lobes to his ears, and a razor nick he had made shaving the cleft in his chin. I despised myself more than I hated Harold.

While taking my head in his hands he is mumbling, ‘Always so clean and neat, Irene, there’s nothing like sluttishness to put a man off, when he has spent his life aspiring after perfection.’ The hands were tightening on my head, the thighs drawing me close to him, the mouth opening, glistening, like a sleepy monster roused by a lone sprat behind the glass of an aquarium. I might have succumbed to this dangerously luscious anenome if it hadn’t been for the smell of turps which had begun to drown the beautiful silvery perfume drifting out of recently shampooed hair. Behind the helmet in which his hands were encasing my head, a harsh halo of turps had almost completely taken over.

It gave me the opportunity to gasp, what were you painting — Harold?

He postponed his meal. Perhaps wondering whether the sprat was a bigger fish than he had bargained for, the silvery blue of the eyes became dazzling underwater spotlights.

‘The movement of forms,’ he told me ‘through space by natural reaction, I mean nothing can resist nature’s will though it may not be immediately visible to the obtuse human eye.’

Harold’s inhuman eye was obviously daring me to resist.

‘I always fail in what I set out to do,’ his chest twangled despairingly ‘and cannot persuade myself, like some artists, that truth lies in failure and the unknowable.’

He suddenly bends, and sticks the thin tip of a tongue which a moment before had been broad and furry, into my right ear, almost as deep as the drum it sounded at the moment of penetration.

‘Do you understand, darling?’ he laughs, ‘I bet you do.’

‘I would like to draw you Irene, on your bed — without your clothes — charming though they are.’

Without waiting for an answer, he picked me up and dumped me on the bed, and started arranging pillows, and arranging, and from there might have begun tearing at my clothes as though they were the wrapping of a parcel which prevented him getting at its contents quick enough.

When I’ve got to know you. Got your form and texture by heart I mean — I think we’ll have a cat to elongate beside you, a big blue Persian with angry eyes and pink tongue.

It gave me my opportunity.

‘I don’t think Aunt Alison likes them. I don’t think I do either. They make me itch and sneeze.’