Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

Harold speculates with dead indifference, ‘To which category I wonder, does our Irene belong?’

Bruce says you are a dark horse, no-one has found out yet, unless it’s …

Just then her aunt appears with another dish of snags to appease her men.

‘Oh Ireen’s the passionate type like me. Aren’t you, darl?’ Ally gushes.

Everybody joins in the laugh then the boys settle down to wrapping their teeth round food, their lips soon as greasy as sausage skins, bloodied with tomato sauce.

But whose face would Bruce consider you might be wearing in the ‘locket’?

Bruce and Keith are growing at the same rate as Gilbert Horsfall — or as Gil was when you last saw him. The Lockhart brothers are growing hairier every day. If ever at table Bruce lays his arm alongside yours it prickles like horsehair in some old burst mattress. On these occasions his breathing grows more noticeable. He says he’ll take you for a drive riding pillion when he gets that motorbike—‘if you’re not afraid.’ You aren’t because it’s likely to be some way off. He is saving money from the jobs he does at week-ends and in the holidays when the climate doesn’t damp his enthusiasm. Yes I think I’m safe from Bruce (or ‘Bruise’ as they pronounce it.)

It is Bruce who is bringing you this letter on the last Tuesday before term starts at ‘Ambleside’. Know it as Tuesday. You will always remember it as Tuesday because this is the first letter you ever received with an Australian stamp on it, and Ally has finally bought you the uniform for the next terrifying phase of life in an Australian school.

The letter itself is frightening enough—‘Bruise’ has been up to the box. He advances into the back yard holding the envelope by a corner. You turn to face him.

‘A formal letter for Miss Irene Sklavos.’

He minces towards me. His attempt at a refined accent, and the hairy wrist with its metal watchband as he jiggles the letter under my nose is meant to make the situation humiliating. The key on its chain lies cold between your painful breasts. Yes, you are humiliated.

If he leaves you to the letter it doesn’t mean he isn’t watching from inside the house. They are all watching, Alison and Harold for once united in boring into the contents of the envelope.

Kyrie eleison amongst the fretted cabbage leaves and silver snail tracks. Dragging at the corner of the envelope you make this prayer of joy and fear, crumbling into the Greek reffo you will always be.

The last must be first

Just a line from your fellow reffo

Gil

Doxa to Theo for these palpitations, this elevation, under the empty clothesline tingling with its droplets of moisture.

Dear Eirene (dear Gil)

I wonder how you are getting on since I left Neutral Bay. Isn’t that Neutral the biggest laugh in war or peace? I would love to see you but our ways lie apart in life and schools. I am starting term at this Churchy Grammar School for boys, and you I hear are bound for ‘Ambleside’ and Miss Hammersley. I can only say good luck to us, mate.

I often think about us Reen — and the tree-house, the bloody cubby — you sitting on the upright Arnotts biscuit tin like it was your inherited throne. Perhaps it was. From all this we can only meet again.

Sorry my typing isn’t all it ought to be. Fiona is letting me use her machine — so as Lockharts won’t swoop in and recognise my writing. Fiona (Cutlack) is Mrs Stally’s niece who lives here too. Vaucluse isn’t all that bad — if not our sort of country Reen. What is, I’d like to know, outside the big fig tree in Cameron Street. Old Stally is the silliest bugger you ever had to put up with. You wonder anyone’s accounts come right. Mrs S. is an invalid. Sundays we eat lunch at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. A lot of congealed custard and Stallybrasses galore. Fiona is the best of them. She’s learning touchtyping, so as she can take a job till she marries — if the war doesn’t last forever, if it does she’ll go into the WRANS, she reckons the hats will suit her best.

Oh Jesus, the fucking war. Perhaps I should skip the school bit and join up. My dad ought to approve, if they ever approve of anything. Get killed like poor old Nigel. Don’t think anything will kill Horsfall or if it does I’ll come back to haunt the places we’ve been together.

Fiona says that most of what I say is pure bullsh. Hope you don’t think the same, Reen, of what I sincerely feel

This FIONA is probably right …

Just a line from your fellow reffo

Gil

What to do with the letter? Stick it down your front with the key, if they won’t hear the key beating against the envelope, if their long distance eyes haven’t already read the message?

By the time you go in they have decided on their line of attack. Bruce gazing at the fly-specks on the ceiling, Keith his lids lowered, thick lips still greasy from breakfast trembling with amusement and the comb-and-paper tune he is humming. Ally has chosen a fit of busyness, scraping plates and jostling cups on saucers, to disguise her thoughts and intentions.

Only Harold expresses his disapproval in words. ‘Hope it was good news, Irene. Or perhaps it was only a business letter.’

The secret we share gives his interest a sting which the others cannot feel.

‘No. It’s a letter from a friend.’ My reply as flat as his enquiry.

‘Glad you have friends around.’ His low voice vibrates in a way which might reach deep inside someone who meets him for the first time at the Quay or on the ferry.

The ears of the others are pricking of course. To know who Reen’s friend could possibly be. Your nostrils are pinched as you enjoy a twinge of evil in yourself. You could have stuck a pin in any of them as Viva stuck the pin in your arm that first day at school and seemed to grow hypnotised by the pinprick of blood.

Unable to solve a mystery, they go their different ways, and you are left with the ballooning melancholy which comes with the prospect of this new important school. Even the ‘Ambleside’ uniform has a smell of importance which warns off a black reffo Greek.

Would like to have another read of the letter, only Alison Lockhart reappears. Her face tells that she would like to have an intimate talk now that you are alone in the house. She accepts you as a woman, no longer the unwanted child-niece, because she wants to unload some of her own unhappiness.

‘You will always be frank with me, dear — I hope — how can we trust each other if you aren’t?’

Poor old Alison makes you feel happy by comparison — not to say dishonest. Has she guessed perhaps, and only wants it confirmed. She ought to know. It takes a very short time to find out all there is to know about Harold. If you could tell her that you are her ally, that Gil is your friend, as pure a secret as Harold is a dirty one. But secrets, whether pure or dirty, are for some people difficult to share.

Her aunt is off at a tangent. ‘What I am afraid of,’ she tears out a tissue, a box of which she keeps handy in every room, ‘is that when you go to this school — up the line — other girls — their parents — will take you up, and from beginning to accept you as my own daughter, I shall — well, I shall never see you.’

It could be genuine, except that the sniffles and the Kleenex seemed to create a drama, an incestuous one at that, if Ally is my mother and Harold my would-be seducer.

You are trying not to laugh.

‘What is it?’

‘I was thinking of the Greek Tragedies.’

‘I can’t see any connection,’ she says rolling the Kleenex into a ball, and throwing it in the waste paper basket. ‘This is Australia and although you are a Greek, we thought — wrong or right — you had started seeing yourself as an Australian.’