Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

Now, under Gilbert Horsfall’s handkerchiefs she came across the secret he had hidden. It was a jewel, rather a lumpy one, golden in colour, set in a brooch. Was it valuable? Had he stolen it? She shoved it back in its hiding place. She slammed the drawer. She might have reached the peak of power over this pale, threatening boy.

She did a few twirls in the centre of the room stretching out her plait as far as it would reach. Dropped the plait. Would it make her look foreign in Australia? It ought not to matter, now that she was strong — if she was. Mamma was leaving, the boy would return when school was out.

His used bed was still unmade. It looked very narrow against the wall. She shuffled towards and lay down on it raising her arms above her head in defiance of the bed’s rightful owner. The mattress was thin and hard. She whimpered slightly, before turning on her side, taking the shape Mamma had rejected the night before. She lay listening. Now that Mrs Bulpit had shut up, she could hear her own heart jumping round inside her like a caught fish. Otherwise silence. She had the day to fill. She did not fit in. She lay snuffling, whimpering, rubbing her cheek against the single cold pillow to warm them both.

* * *

Hid yourself most of the day. Mamma did not call or come to look. If Mrs Bulpit called she soon gave up, too intent on all she suffered: ‘… from morning to night — in Australia, madam.’ For the benefit of anyone interested, she announced, ‘We only ever serve a light lunch.’ She might have been talking to the air. Till Aunt Alison came.

‘Oh yes, Mrs Lockhart, Madame Sklavos is in the lounge room. The little lass. I-reenee? Your auntie! A little bit upset — and entitled to it — under the circs…’

* * *

No-one followed up this initial concern by coming in search of the ‘little lass.’ It left you free to investigate Mrs Lockhart — you could hardly think of her as aunt — by more satisfactory methods than those which adults use for children. Sisterly voices were already issuing by bursts and gusts out of the saloni window round the corner. Vines and a thicket of shrubs provided perfect cover for a listener if one of the sisters should look out the window.

Mrs Lockhart had an older, throatier, smokier voice than Mamma’s. ‘Good Lord … meeting after all these years makes you feel bloody idiotic.’

‘… unnatural…’ Mamma corrected in her more precise and foreign-sounding voice from years spent in making foreigners understand, whereas Aunt Alison swallowed her words or bit them off like thread after it had served its purpose. Miss Adams would have found it slovenly speech.

‘… always a bombshell artist, Gerry, but never let off one like this…’ trumpets of smoke accompanied the Lockhart voice through the window.

‘How a bombshell to want to bring my child to safety? I am letting off nothing. A situation forced on me by fate.’

‘… like marrying that Greek commo — if you did — Harold bets you didn’t — not that it matters — I’d never blame anybody for not — if it wasn’t for the poor bastards of children…’

A cigarette butt came flinging out the window to smoulder on a mattress of damp leaves.

Mamma’s voice had never sounded so cold and pure.

‘We married to baptise the child. Whatever a Greek believes or doesn’t believe in, birth and death are reasons for Orthodoxy.’

‘All very high-flown, the Orthodoxy bit. In between, the drudgery was left to you.’

‘Petros loved — he adored his child. But had to be away most of the time.’

Couldn’t help hating this aunt’s smoky voice. When Papa loved. Adored. Fingers spilling seed from these little pods which fringe the sill do not hurt what they sow. If you could only hurt this hurtful Lockhart voice, bite it out from where the words came hurtling.

‘… away when you changed the nappy and powdered the rash in her little crotch.’

‘Petros was dedicated to a cause…’

‘Handy enough.’

‘… which I married into. Something that you, Ally, could never understand, living in a country which has always been causeless.’

‘I like to think we have a sense of duty towards our children.’

‘Would I have brought her here if I hadn’t felt it my duty?’

‘And do you love her, too?’

‘What an inquisition! Of course I — love — her.’

Mamma’s fury is so fierce you can almost feel it burning from the other side of the sill. But do you, oh, Mamma, do you?

‘Do you, I wonder?’ Mrs Lockhart asks of anyone who has the answer. ‘No-one ever went off at such a bat after dumping her dumpling.’

‘The passage, I tell you — could I — in these days — refuse the offer?’

Mamma is really suffering. She is suffering, has always suffered from anything she suffers. The lies people tell make her suffer, but she suffers most when she tells her own.

‘That was up to you — and the cause, I expect.’ The Lockhart voice is sucking on another cigarette.

What you can’t see is hard to believe. To see is always better than to hear. If only to see them at it. There is this flowerpot lying collecting snails under the skirt of the sooty vine. Turned wrongside up you will have a footstool from which, if careful, you can see inside the room, from the back of the sill.

Mamma’s sister looks old, older it seems than Great Aunt Cleone Tipaldou, from being too much in the sun like the peasants. Her skin is rough as bark, scaly as a hen’s legs. Mamma’s brown eyes, capable of keeping her own secrets are not related to this blue, accusing Lockhart stare blazing out of the burnt face, skin shrivelled most noticeably where it forks below the throat and sweeps away inside any old kind of crumpled cotton frock. Mountain slopes crack open like this at the height of summer. Above the cleavage she is wearing a blackhead like a brooch. Would love to give Aunt Ally’s blackhead a squeeze.

She is stamping, and if smoke and drought had allowed her, would have been shouting at the top of her voice about what they had got on to ‘—expect there’s a man involved in it. You never ran out of men Gerry…’

Anger and argument have filled the room with movement. Mamma consoling her smooth arms avoids her stamping sister. Mamma moves very beautifully.

‘I can’t deny someone is taking an interest. It would be hypocritical wouldn’t it?’

(Would it?) Mamma’s eyes are as terrible in their own brown way as the accusing blue.

‘… and Aleko was Petros’ closest friend…’

‘… and the Cause plays at shuttle-cock…’

They are going on at a great rate about principles. Neither understands the other. Perhaps in the end, nobody understands .

The Lockhart is clutching her long carton of American cigarettes as though her life depends on them.

‘Well, Ireen can depend on me. Couldn’t have her in my own house … four boys — and Harold didn’t want to risk a girl — says he knows all about them. I reckon he must…’

Mrs Lockhart’s skin is every moment shabbier while Mamma’s arms and cheekbones, her beautiful neck look waxed. Why are you not in bed, Eirinitsa? Mamma is crying as you stand in the door like a wax figure, eyes closed, leaving anger and discipline to Papa. You could feel Papa hated you, for that moment, anyway. Will Aleko, his closest friend, hate too if he catches you staring at the wax figures? Or because you aren’t his, will he leave it to Mamma to command? Only it will not happen, you will not be there, you …

The old cracked flowerpot slanting lurching cracking crunching you are standing in the slush and smell the quivering of mashed snails mercifully below the sill. There is the garden. Doxa sto Theo , there will always be the garden to scuttle through like any of its insects who have learnt the hiding places.