Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

‘I knew it! You’re turning out to be a dreary Philistine like all the others — and your Greek skin offers enormous tonal difficulties beside the blue cat I visualise.’

Outside, the kookaburra is tearing the garden apart. A cloud of finches and wrens are shedding their breast feathers as they beat against the glass.

‘Let me see your nipples at least.’

Harold’s hands which I had thought soft and pink are as hard and dry as turpentine has made them, with soot in the cracks.

I might have lost, knotting with those hard hands, if a worse clatter had not set up, competing with the kookaburra. I realised it was Alison, those scuffed brogues marching through her house.

Harold breathed, Oh Lord, and slithered quietly in the opposite direction, into the garden, only upsetting a garbage bin.

‘Ireen?’ Alison calls. ‘Where are you?’ and on charging through the doorway of my room, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Thinking.’

She was looking like a thin hen somebody with evil intentions had been chasing through the heat.

‘Not very healthy, lying on your bed, on a fine afternoon.’

It was Alison who was looking unhealthy.

‘Who won the match?’

‘It isn’t over. I left because I have a migraine coming on. The Parmores will bring the little ones back. The men can look after themselves.’

Apparently satisfied nobody else was in ill health, she went stamping out to the bathroom. ‘Cricket!’ she moaned, tablets rattling like dice in a tumbler, till a slosh of water silenced them.

‘I don’t expect somebody kind would like to make me a cup of tea,’ she called back.

‘That’s just what I’m doing. Or at any rate I’ve put the kettle on.’ It was Harold in the kitchen.

Ally could not have known what to answer. So I left them to their shared silence, or the argument they were brewing for when the kettle blew its whistle. I went into the garden.

This sad, sandy patch, all clothesline and failed vegetables, lacy cabbages, scribbley peas, rambling pumpkins. In Australia it is virtuous to grow your own vegetables while conning the greengrocer into selling you his wilting varieties cheap. The Lockhart garden is full of Ally’s failures — and Harold’s avoidances. And birds which nobody notices as they knock off the grubs Ally’s vegetable ventures encourage. And cats — here for the birds, and more particularly, the overturned garbage bins — toms with swollen cheeks growling over chop-bones. Harold does not recognise cats, unless the aesthetic ones with tonal values. Ally sees them only when she drives past in her old car through a loneliness of lantana scrub.

Does Ally’s car correspond to the tree-house Gil and I built and left behind. No, we didn’t. We were only forced.

One of the predatory cats stalked across the scuffed sandy ‘lawn’ flicking an angry tail. She sat for a moment preening herself with a licked paw. I should not have dismissed cats in my conversation with Harold, saying they made me sneeze and itch. A handy lie — I have never known a cat. But would like to. I feel very close to them. I would love to stroke a cat’s fur, from its bat’s ears down to the tip of its snake’s tail. Cleonaki would not have permitted an animal.

After she had done her face, (this slinky tortoiseshell could only have been a female — no swollen-cheeked, moth-eaten tom) she loped swiftly across the lawn into the lacy cabbages, and re-appeared in exit over the grey paling fence.

Almost at once the back door whammed. Harold, too, was making an exit. Where the lovely tortoiseshell loped, Harold stalked while hoping any observer might see it as a normal walk. Harold was taking the shortcut through a gap in the fence to the track which leads to the ferry. As he crossed the lawn I might not have existed. He looked through me, dismissing an experience which had not turned out the way he would have had it go. Only for an instant the eyes turned on, and you felt he might be saving you up for the future. Squeezing sideways through the gap in the grey palings (the stomach would only just make it) a shred of the exquisitely tonal gear was left behind on a rusty nail. The last of Harold drifted back as a muttered, ‘Fuck.’

There was nothing to keep me, so I went back inside.

Ally called, ‘Who’s that?’ and at once more hopefully, ‘Is it Ireen?’

She was stretched out on her bed in her slip, a strip of wetted lint covering her eyes. Her temporary blindness should have made it easier to face her. But I felt guilty. It wasn’t only for Harold’s behaviour, and her relationship with my mother, it was for the whole undisguised shambles of Ally Lockhart in an old beige slip: the bruises on her shins, the thin strips of what had been breasts, the flaking lips in a face the weather had roughed and reddened. I have never stroked a cat. I should have been able to stroke my aunt if I hadn’t felt so paralysed. At least she would have hated it (or so I think), and that let me off a little of my guilt.

Perhaps it was from not being able to see me that she became more confidential than ever in the past. What she resented most was callousness in human beings, by which she meant men — husbands. She went so far as to name him. Men’s bodies last better than women’s and husbands take advantage of it.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘A child. But children, specially you, Ireen — know more today — too much — and at the same time not enough. You can’t — the experience of life. I wish I had had a girl child…’ After letting you see everything to put you off womanhood. But wanted you to share her suffering. ‘Those boys of mine will grow into men and despise me for being old, ugly, and their slave. Sometimes I think I’d rather have a poof. Might too. Good God, no. I can’t possibly .’

Presently we hear the little ones clattering in from the street. Ally’s back arches on the bed and she tears the bandage off her eyes. ‘What if the Parmores? That would be the last straw! No, Col and Wal will have given them enough. And they wouldn’t want to face the boring mother…’ So she sinks back. ‘Be a darling, Ireen, and feed them. You’re so capable…’ she sighs.

Fortunately Col and Wal are still munching popcorn and sucking lollies. They want nothing. Hardly notice you are there. Run into what was once their room, to fetch a few toys. You hear the door slam in the writing table. As you go in to protect your secrets, the key tinkles on the floorboards.

Col asks, clutching his Donald Duck, ‘What are you always writing, Reenee? Is it a story?’

‘Yes, a story.’

Wal asks ‘What about, Reen?’

‘The lot of us.’

They have a giggle.

‘Will you read it to us?’

‘No need.’

More giggles as they run out to the veranda, Wal scattering bits of his meccano set.

Tonight I am the meccano set no-one will ever put together, even if all the bits are there.

* * *

Whatever got into you to keep a diary. Safer to share your secrets with a mirror. Shan’t write any more. Ought to destroy it but think of all those little white moths taking wing, spreading the news. Burn it? Under the wad of tinkling carbon the core of the matter will lie waiting to be read. Steamy emotions are difficult to kindle. You have strung the key to the drawer on a chain, and wear it round your neck. Even this is dangerous.

‘Ah, keepsakes,’ Harold says at breakfast in the toneless voice with which he clothes his most feeling censure. ‘I wonder whose snap has pride of place in Irene’s locket.’

Bruce sniggers, ‘Lionel Manley perhaps!’

Keith comes in with ‘Lionel Manley? You don’t say! There’s a fair few of the girls have crushes on Lionel the Lily. You’d be surprised. Hot or frigid, it don’t make no difference!’