Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

Mamma was heaving like any Bulpit porpoise. It was too giggly to resist. You were bumping, cannoning off each other, like a couple of older girls with the giggles.

Mamma’s sinuses were giving trouble. ‘Oh dear, aren’t we awful!’ She sniffed, bumped and giggled.

If you had a hankie, you could have offered a hankie. If you put your arms, would this other, older girl bump you off? It was worth the try.

But they were off again. ‘Those asbestos gloves…’ the two friends were bumping more than ever.

When a stiffening set in. It was Mamma saying, ‘People can’t help what they look like, you must remember that, Eirene, and never laugh at physical peculiarities.’

‘But the gloves…’ you might have pointed out, if you had been simple, and Mamma knew you weren’t that, unless when it suited her to see you as a child.

‘We must sleep,’ her sinuses ordered angrily.

And turned her back, and was soon sighing and resisting, trying to free herself, it seemed, of enormous, sticky spider webs.

‘Oh no…’ she moaned, opening and closing, opening and closing, like a knife, you were glad you were on the wrong side.

Welll ssleep. She has a very bad congestion, Great Aunt Cleone said. But you can’t cup a little child’s body, there is no flesh to fill the vacuum. It is Ayia Anastasia who has spells to dissolve sickness. We must pray to the Saint, her black robe, her dark face, but remember, Eirinitsa, religion is not superstition. When you are older, the spirit will guide you — the pneuma . You will realise the difference. Though Ayios Fanourios is useful — to find things we have lost — except we must bake him a pita . It was fascinating. Great Aunt Cleone could not have boiled a potato let alone baked a pita . So religion is easier than superstition for people like Cleonaki. She has the eyes of this great Italian actress and Saints. Your spiritual aunt, people say. Papa says, ‘ ah mba ’ he accepts the Panayia only when she becomes Greece and they torture her.

My pneumatic pneuma is a comfort floating through the seas and forests of dreams. Not Aunt Cleone, not Mamma, not even Papa will recognise this part of me if I float against them. What about him?

Gilbert Horsfall, asleep in that narrow bed, may understand, but spits out lumps of salmon loaf through the gaps in his large, boy’s teeth. Saw I knew too much, the dried-up wishbone, the maze of string in the handkerchief drawer. Stir up the handkerchiefs and the mouse squeaks for its little black secrets.

Or float together eye to eye seeing and knowing inside the bluish skin stretched across the moon.

* * *

The blue-grey light inside this room.

‘Ah no — it’s too early…’ The grey sheet rustling as you drag it closer.

‘But darling, I can’t sleep — on such an important day…’

Mamma almost never calls you ‘darling’. She has put on her dress. She sits down fitting her stockings to her legs. The suspender’s pimples snap as she fastens the stockings to her belt.

‘What important…?’ You can hear you are a little grizzling child tossing in the bed, you can’t help it.

Feet soft without shoes, she comes across and sits on the edge. The pale light from one window behind does not light her face. She is looking straight into your half-open eyes. You know your lids are gummy, lashes sticky with sleep. She is looking at everything ugly in her thick-skinned child.

The hand starts trying out what she has to say. ‘You must be sensible, darling, understand why I must go back. Be of use. I don’t think Papa would have married me if he had thought I was a useless woman . Now he would want me to do this. To go back and nurse the sick. The wounded — to go back to Egypt. It’s all I can offer.’ Her hand becoming hard. ‘Do you see?’

Yes. She had her nursing diploma.

‘Darling?’

Wouldn’t want Mamma to stick a needle into my bottom when she is angry.

‘Yes.’ It sounds like ‘esss’—silly little baby teeth falling out on the sheet, it is what she wants.

‘I knew darling, you would see.’

She gets up, and goes back towards the window, her stockinged feet thumping across the gritty carpet, offering her face to the light from the window, Mamma no longer has the advantage.

‘When are you going?’

She has these lines down her face. Like the ventriloquist’s doll at the Zappeion.

‘Well, soon — at once — because they have offered me return passage in this boat. I can’t lose the opportunity, can I? To go back to where I am needed.’ The way she swallows on what she is saying.

‘Aunt Alison will come to fetch me — Take me to the boat. Alison will always be here — and kind Mrs Bulpit. You will not be alone.’ She is staring at the light as it was on the window, or the curve of a branch knocking on the glass — or nothing. ‘And soon we shall be together again.’

* * *

For the time being everyone seemed to have forgotten about her though Mrs Bulpit offered a bowl of what she called ‘porridge.’ It was as convenient to forget as it was to be forgotten. The house was buzzing with the thoughts and actions of those separately in it. As she went outside leaving Mamma to tissues and the bathroom, Mrs Bulpit was attacking the kitchen. Her gloves had changed from asbestos to rubber, her curls hidden in a scarf, the ears of which trembled as she scrubbed, poked, and sang. She had just finished Two Sleepy People , and was starting on Red Sails in the Sunset .

Light lay heavy — it made the paths look substantial where the concrete had not crumbled, tree trunks and the branches of trees had knotted like the muscles in men’s bodies. Wherever rust had broken out it glowered like blood in the act of drying.

At a moment when they least expected each other the boy came down into the yard. Perhaps for this reason the half-rotten terrible steps ahead threw him and the things in the half-empty case he was carrying rattled round inside it.

He was forced by the situation to grunt something about ‘… school…’

‘Mmh…?’ she answered.

‘When you commin?’ There was menace in his voice, forced on him by school or the light or Australia or something.

‘I haven’t been told,’ she replied with as much precision as she could muster.

She took a sideways look at the blond legs but could not face the pale blue eyes.

Though it wasn’t called for, she informed him, ‘My aunt — Mrs Lockhart — is coming for my mother.’

He muttered again, something about ‘Bruce and Kevin…’ to convey contempt, before turning his back. As he mounted the slope to reach the street he was grinding his soles into the concrete. His socks were down around his ankles. She knew enough to sense he was wearing them that way deliberately.

He had scarcely gone when she ran back quickly inside. Mrs Bulpit had started on Yours . It seemed quite natural that Mrs Bulpit and Mamma should be so irrelevant, not in control of the house. What she most feared, that Gilbert Horsfall might dispute her ownership, no longer troubled her. Certainly he was temporarily absent; but his presence would not have mattered now that she felt mastery was within her reach.

Skipping, almost, inside the room where he had spent the night, and which still had the smell of what she supposed was a boy’s sleep, she did not even bother to glance at the warrant-officer’s blown-up portrait. That too was irrelevant. She only slightly hesitated before approaching the chest-of-drawers with the dried-out wishbone of some large bird, goose or turkey, lying where she had noticed it the night before. With a confidence she would have found odious in anyone else, she hummed a little of the tune the woman was singing in the kitchen. She gave her imitation a tinny edge reaching a crescendo as she dragged on the sticky knob of that same upper drawer. Again it shot out and hit her where women don’t like to be hit. There she had the advantage even over Mamma, even over boys, who might hit but can’t hurt if you are strong. And she felt strong. She felt her thoughts were leaner than Gilbert Horsfall’s. Inside the drawer the same tangle of used string, the roughed up dirty handkerchief lying on top of the laundered ones. She held her breath then slid her hand under the clean handkerchiefs, where women hide the valuables Turks and brigands are looking for, and precious secrets like love letters. Some of the letters had made her feel guilty. The jewels she had slipped on her fingers and round her neck, her flesh growing inside them. She had felt silly finally.