Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

When eternity is Gil’s, Bruce and his mob have no part in it. Boring pseudo-men. And this float, with its pseudo-strawberry stickiness.

A greater raucousness in the brown mists of the cave across the road. A couple of indistinct figures are detaching themselves from the frieze strung out against the counter. Arrogance and self-importance give the giants a drunken look. They lurch out pulling up their belts, feeling their crotches.

‘Hi, whataboutit?’ one of them calls. All masculine confidence. The two stand there swaying and braying, thumbs hooked into the corners of pockets tighten the stuff round hips and crotches.

The second gallant has widely spaced pointed teeth, rather large, anaemic gums, and a fine fuzz on his bony chin. ‘Don’t tell me you’re so uptight, a bloke wouldn’t stand a chance of getting it in.’

They chortle for their own wit. Stumble against each other for support as they prepare to cross the road. What is both possible and impossible hangs like a pale globe above the three of us. The scrub the dusk are toppling over in a rush towards sea and the light that still skirts the bay. Bones and sticks are for breaking. Didn’t the Souliot women throw themselves off the precipice?

Till Bruce elbows his way between his mate, ‘Comoffut — waddaya thinken — she’s me sister.’

‘Go on! didn’t know you had a sister.’

‘… the relative — me cousin …’

‘On with your cousin, eh?’

Their sniggers are feathered with relief. ‘Cousins’s allowed, aren’t they?’

‘Well, good luck, Brucie.’

Bruce has become a gangling amateur of a man. He has let the side down. He kicks the stand from under the bike.

‘Come on,’ he orders sulkily.

Doesn’t sound as though he will ever forgive you for his offence against mateship.

You settle yourself as he kicks free of the stationary earth. After the first explosions, the wheels splatter some obstruction flat — the battered old aluminium float? We are toiling uphill in a cloud of fumes. Bruce’s ribs have contracted inside the cold shirt. The face you cannot see has not become the skull of the outward journey human eyes will be glooming in the sockets, eyebrows ground into each other.

You would like to say something consoling to Bruce. ‘Do you think she’ll make the hill?’ Which makes it worse.

Ally asks, ‘Where have you two been?’ If she condemns, there is a flicker of unwilling pride inside her condemnation — and gravy stains on what was once a pretty, floral apron. ‘Your tea’s in the oven — drying up fast.’ She has no time to waste on kids.

Harold comes in this other evening. He is carrying an evening paper. He is out of breath from that uphill short cut he takes from the ferry, or something could have excited or frightened him out of his normal composure. He is almost at the point of telling what makes his lips tremble, but it is against his nature to give anything away if he can help it. Perhaps he has been caught out soliciting girls or he’s been promoted at the Department.

He says in this funny voice, ‘The Germans have had it. The war in Europe is over.’

‘What — only in Europe ?’ Bruce shouts. As though Europe hadn’t even been their affair. ‘The war won’t be over till we’ve socked the Japs.’

You are less than ever one of them though Alison the aunt lets out a little whimper. ‘Poor Gerry!’

‘Gerry?’

‘My sister — your aunt…’

Bruce sticks out his lower lip. Above it the eyes look blank. Heard of her of course, but forgotten. No more than a name and the face in a snap. What can a dead aunt mean to the living?

Harold who is not a soak, or at any rate not in the family circle, where he makes a parade of his ginger ale, says with careful solemnity, ‘This is an occasion where I propose to wet my whistle.’

Ally whose eyes have been straying towards the cupboard where she keeps her gin behind the Fowler preserving jars, throws back her head and screams through veined stringy throat. ‘Never heard you use such an old-fashioned expression!’

‘It’s what my father used to say.’

‘Your father! When you’re so keen on sounding up to date.’

Harold isn’t going to be deterred. He fetches out the stashed bottle of Scotch and wets his whistle. Harold who has always been bored by fatherhood except as a means of keeping Alison quiet, borrows his father’s virtue, old Dr Lockhart, to help celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

Ally cries, ‘Oh God!’ in what is between joy and despair, and makes no secret of the gin behind the preserving jars.

When the middle boys come in they say oughtn’t we go somewhere to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

They’ve forgotten about you. It’s your fault of course — if you don’t tag on. It’s the best way to be forgotten. Outside this lopsided moon is hung above the empty clothesline and the fretted vegetable leaves. Anonymous cats are taking over. The boys’ laughter is swallowed up in the run towards the ferry. The little kids are breaking their toys and grizzling for their supper. A cold dew is settling on your hair.

‘Ireen?’ Ally calls from habit through the screen, but soon gives up to cut slices of stale sponge for her Col and Wal, and resume her whistle wetting session with her unusually considerate Harold.

Now that the war is over — the real war— your war — Cleonaki will surely write, and you will return to what belongs to you. And Gil to London? To the bomb craters and his mother’s coffin, and his friend Nigel Brown’s ghost. Gil himself a ghost haunting the garden on the precipice in Cameron Street, as you are haunting this mouldy back yard. Twin ghosts in the one haunting.

Is this where we belong then?

When you go in the two little boys are growing drowsy in the last stages of a squabble over the open pages of the atlas.

Gin-drowsy Ally murmurs, ‘This is the kind of night when children are got. Thank God I’m past it!’

Harold of the wet-whistle and careful enunciation, ‘No-one was ever cruder than Alison Pascoe when she sets out to be!’ His laughter implies neither approval nor censure, as he passes plump fingers and meticulously clipped nails through the silvery hair-do.

They look only vaguely at you — at the ghost who has been haunting them.

Patrick White took one last look at Flaws in the Glass on the Australia Day holiday in January 1981 and posted the ‘self portrait’ to his publishers in London the next day. Hours later he began work on The Hanging Garden . As he had so often before, White would cope with the agony of waiting for his publisher’s verdict by plunging into the next book.

‘I have another novel coming along hot and strong in my head,’ he told the critic James Stern after Christmas. Friends who heard the news in those weeks worried White was working to the point of exhaustion. He had been so ill in December he feared he would die, and there had then been terrible storms in the house on Centennial Park when his partner, Manoly Lascaris, read the scathing portrait of his family in Flaws in the Glass . But White told the stage designer Desmond Digby he had no time to holiday. ‘He’s got to get this other novel off his chest straightaway.’

White wrote steadily through February. By happy accident, Flaws in the Glass was taking a long time to reach Jonathan Cape. On 20 February, Digby noted White was ‘pleased with start of new novel’. There is no sign White was ever anything but pleased with his work on the book. When his writing was going badly, he would moan about it freely to friends and publishers. He had abandoned two novels in the 1960s after tearing them to shreds in his letters. There was none of that with The Hanging Garden . Trouble lay elsewhere.