Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

Once Miss Hammersley wondered aloud what I wore on the chain. I did not enlighten her and she did not pursue the subject. The great slogan of the parents and anyone who knows about the school, is: The girls all adore Miss Hammersley , when she is hated by many of those outside the cricketing set.

I find her excessively — aggressively kind. The other evening when I was kept back by Miss Charteris over an essay she found ‘original, but verging on the impertinent’ Miss Hammersley called me as I was going down the steps. She put an arm around me as we walked down the gravel towards the gate. The day had been oppressive. The evening smelled of Pittosporum. Our figures cast heavy shadows in a brassy light.

‘Are you happy, my dear,’ she asked as though hoping the answer might be no.

‘Oh yes, happy enough…’ I must have sounded a breathy idiot.

‘I wish you the greatest happiness’ she sighed, stroking the nape of my neck.

Then she turned. I went on towards the road. I did not look back, but my antennae told me Miss Hammersley did.

What happiness is, I can’t find out. Silences? Being left alone? That can become loneliness. Nearest with Gil in the arms of the great tree, in the garden which hangs above the water in Cameron Street.

Ally was right when she said people would take me up when I went to this school and she would lose contact with me. I have no intention of casting off Ally, but it’s easy to drift with the current. Everything is put down to the war. War is boredom to those who are not being killed in it. Anyway, says Ally, if you’re taken up by nice people — how she spits it out — you’re not taking up with the GIs.

No, I’m not. Though you can’t help brushing against them. Those sandy, freckled shallow-eyed boys from the Middle West. The cheeky muscular negroes. And pale molluscs of whisky-soaked officers, bulging out of their shirts and pants. You can’t say the nice people up the line, parents of ‘Ambleside’ girls who invite you to their homes, don’t see the Yanks as universal providers. You can come across a bulging officer or two delivering their cigarettes and tissues. Or some shy boy from the ranks they’ve got through an approved club and do their duty by giving him tea. But a girl, a shy schoolgirl, is less trouble, while satisfying their sense of duty.

From being a black reffo Greek, I am told I have something exotic about me, an olive complexion, classic features. The mirror won’t let me accept these honours. I am never more than a dark blur with spots breaking out during my most difficult periods.

* * *

Trish says her parents are mad about me. It doesn’t worry Trish because she isn’t mad about her parents, she sees them as an accident. She can make a dimple come in a blonde cheek, the right one, and usually does it when she laughs. When I began at ‘Ambleside’ Trish Fermor-Jones became my friend, the counterpart of Viva Jenkins at the old public. Different however. Poor Viva, whatever happened to her? We were going to keep up, but drifted apart, the way things happen—‘nowadays,’ Mrs Fermor-Jones would say.

Trish told me, you know Mummy would like to adopt you. I wouldn’t give a hoot, well I mean I wouldn’t mind having you around as a sister, you’re so odd — different I mean. What about your father? She said it would be quite alright by him if it is what Phoebe wants. Daddy is only interested in money and success, he would only want you to do him credit, by being a stunning dresser and listening to his boring business friends, in Maxwell’s world a good listener is everything.

I said I am good at listening, or rather, I can close up in my own thoughts. Trish laughed and made the dimple come. She said that isn’t the same thing, they would find out, think it queer that you have thoughts of your own, and have held it against you. I asked Trish what she is interested in. Money and success. Then you are your father’s daughter. Ah, she said I’d do different things with my money, I’d be a different kind of success. I asked her what, but she couldn’t say, or didn’t want to tell. Perhaps she didn’t know. She looked rather angry.

I’d have thought Phoebe Fermor-Jones was interested enough in money and success. Trish said yes but Mummy has her principles, and committees and things, and comforts for the troops — and culture of course she’s a culture fiend, that’s where you come in.

Just when I thought I was becoming uncultured enough to please my cousins and almost everyone I come across.

Trish was looking at me very hard. I didn’t realise she was preparing to let off a bomb. She has this lovely sleek corn-coloured hair and clear skin which the sun only faintly touches, and grey rather than blue eyes. The eyes seem to make her more trustworthy in the midst of so much blazing British blue. Perhaps I am influenced by grey-eyed Athena . Or Gil — were Gil’s eyes grey or blue?

I am trying to remember when Trish throws her bomb. What are you interested in Ireen? An ordinary enough question if it wasn’t so difficult to answer. I feel my black skin turning dark red as she continues looking at me and expecting a definite answer.

She caught me out well and truly. I didn’t know what to answer but did. I was so nervous I let off a bomb equal to hers. ‘Well’ I said ‘ love I think is what I’m most interested in.’ Trish shrieked ‘That’s not very ambitious Ireen you can have it any night of the week.’ ‘That’s different’ I said ‘surely that’s sex isn’t it?’ I could have killed myself.

For a moment Trish looked as though she could really kill me . Her face never looked more like a sweet apple, but one I realised that had bones in it you’d find if you tried biting into the flesh. And teeth. Trish has perfect, even teeth, with transparent tips except that one, on the same side as the flashing dimple, an eye-tooth has been jostled out of place. I saw it as a fang. Phoebe is always saying we must do something about that tooth but all the good dentists are away at the war, we’ll have to wait. A solution which suited everybody. Except me, as I saw this fang taunting me.

‘How old fashioned you are, Ireen. Have you ever been in love ?’ I didn’t know what to say, but mumbled yes and hoped she would leave it at that. Instead she kept mauling the idea — don’t know what you mean, I love boys what they do to you of course I never let them go too far, and people marry, but your kind of love is only what you see at the movies and old frumpy relatives go on about boring everyone at Sunday supper.

It was Sunday and we were strolling at the bottom of the Fermor-Jones’s garden in our best clothes, Trish when out of uniform already the stunning dresser, and me in a present from Phoebe, that aunt of yours hasn’t a clue. All the Fermor-Jones shrubs are responding to autumn. Although it is wartime, their garden is perfectly kept, because they pay some elderly bloke to keep it in order, they always get what they want because they pay better than anyone. If the conditions had been different, not all those perfectly groomed shrubs and trees, there might have been a transcendence of light and air. Transcendence is something I am never sure about in Australia. It is a word I keep looking up in the dictionary while knowing about it from experience almost in my cradle, anyway from stubbing my toes on Greek stones, from my face whipped by pine branches, from the smell of drying wax candles in old mouldy hill-side chapels. Cleonaki’s saints — their wooden faces worm-eaten with what I see looking back as acne of a spiritual kind. Mountain snow stained with Greek blood. And the pneuma floating above, like a blue cloud in a blue sky.

Trish and I have linked arms. ‘Go on, tell!’ She hits me in the ribs. I could be some gipsy fortune teller who has come down from the mountains with her tribe and a herd of brown goats.