Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

He would have liked to get away from this dark snake of a girl.

They were leaving the water. They had begun mounting the path which wound upward through the garden. Antipathy could have died, as an ashy cloud was to obscure the fire in the west, and violence had been suppressed centuries before in the volcano only one of them had seen.

‘Did you ever go to the island?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said dully. ‘There was always too much to do. My father and mother were political. There was no-one to take me. My father died in prison then the war came.’

‘How did he die?’ the boy asked.

‘We don’t know.’

She announced it with a flatness which sounded odd. The violence of that extinct volcano was still stirring and bubbling in him. There was something about this volcano which impressed him more deeply than bombs and war; the volcano was more private, secret.

Perhaps because she had seen it, if only at a distance, the girl was less impressed by it. Her father died in prison. Was the father someone the Colonel would disapprove of? As you disapproved of Irene Sklavos. He shivered as a pittosporum scratched him and recoiled on to her thin black arm.

She did not seem to notice he had touched her, perhaps thinking of the mother who was leaving her behind.

‘What was this temple on the island?’ he asked, quietly so as not to disturb a situation which had grown quite agreeable.

‘People used to go there to pray to the goddess.’

They continued trudging up the broken path.

‘Do you pray?’ he asked more carefully than ever.

‘Mm?’ she sighed. ‘It depends.’

Remembering his experience of communal prayer with the Ballards, he said flat out ‘I don’t — not any more than I have to.’ His mother was such a vague figure he could barely remember what she would have thought. The Colonel was not a church goer while expecting his son to do his duty. ‘Do your parents pray?’ he asked the girl.

‘Papa was a Marxist. But I think he prayed when things got bad. Mamma says religion isn’t rational.’

‘If your parents were Marxist — rationalist — all that — what do you know about praying then?’

‘Aunt Cleonaki taught me — about the Panayia and the Saints. Some of the saints are good,’ she giggled, ‘but you mustn’t believe all of it, Aunt Cleone says, that’s pagan superstition.’

His breath was coming in short gasps. It wasn’t just from the cliff they were climbing by stages. He wanted her to continue talking. ‘What’s this Pana-year?’

‘The Mother of God. She’s lovely. When I pray at all I pray to her.’

They were drifting dreamily together, through a gathering dusk which the tangle of garden intensified.

‘There’s the pneuma too. I like to think about it.’

‘What’s the pneuma ?’ His breath was almost snorting, it had grown so heavy.

‘I don’t know.’ She conceded to herself. ‘I can’t tell you — not in English.’

He believed she was lying. She would always try to put one over him.

To show that he hadn’t been led away he assumed the voice the Lockharts — Bruce and Kevin — might have used.

‘Wonder what the old girl’s got for tea.’

She said she wasn’t hungry.

He told her, ‘I could put away twice the muck we’ll get.’

He did not seem to have impressed her. They were on the lap before the last flight of stone steps. They were passing the broken statue, under the largest, darkest fig with the flying air roots, where they had first met. Her silence made his skin creep as if ants were walking over it. Was she still thinking of the Panayear and the pneuma ? A milky cloud was floating overhead in a gap between the branches of the great fig.

As they came out into the yard he began clattering his boots against the concrete as though to rid them of accumulated dirt blaring a non-tune from behind large bared teeth. She followed him meekly. Any conversation they might have had was buried inside them.

Inside the house you get away from Gilbert Horsfall as quickly as you can. You have said all you had to say to him. You wish he wasn’t living here. From sounds in the kitchen the guardian probably won’t cause immediate trouble. You make for the bedroom where in spite of Mamma, you had been most nearly private. Your few things must be there unpacked from the suitcase Mamma has taken back with her.

Your things are there, higgledy piggledy on a chair, and overflowing on to the floor. A stocking hanging from the chair arm, might never have belonged to anybody. The room has already changed back to what it must have been before strangers were admitted. You feel trapped beneath a great white canopy or mosquito net. Though the bed is not at the centre of the room, it and the invisible net will swim centre for sleep and dreams where there were a few stray hairpins and a sprinkling of face powder on the dressing table the night before, a photo of the husband has appeared, a smaller duplicate print of the one in the room where Gilbert sleeps. (What would you do with a husband, not a warrant officer but one say like Papa angrily poised above Mamma’s wax figure? You could always keep your eyes shut.) Too many traps. During the day the carpet has sprouted a thick mossy pile. As you advance towards the dressing table your feet scarcely move. It might suck you under, to become a corpse along with other insects it has snared.

Apart from the upright photograph the most noticeable object on the dressing table you might never reach is the box from which the owner’s powder must have spilled before she whisked it away. Printed, or you could say written on the lid of the box again in its rightful place, were the words Mon Desir . Inside the box, half open from recent slapdash use is the puff, the powder in its shabby swansdown clotted with moisture. Looking at it makes you sneeze. You could see the puff coating its owner’s marzipan flesh with a tint deeper than was natural.

The worst trap of all is the thought of sharing the bed with Mrs Bulpit as you had to some extent shared it with Mamma. Mrs B’s suspender belt snapping must sound like the crack of a whip. In her dreams of the warrant officer she might roll over and flatten even a sleepless partner.

Escape immediately if the net, if the moss in which you stand rooted amongst insect corpses, allowed. There is this sound of metal rings. Are they those of the net canopy, rustling into action? Extraordinarily the moss is withering, parting like the Egyptian sea. I may fall as I shoot towards the door on a floor as glassy as one on which they scatter powder for those who have learnt to dance.

* * *

It is the woman’s voice rustling out of the kitchen deeper in the house, from out of cutlery and pans, and the smell of onion, no longer the sickly scent of Mon Desir . ‘… Show her, Gilbert, now that you’ve found her, where to wash her hands, I don’t want to see either of you till I have your tea ready. There’s no room for moping or muttering children. Other people have their troubles, you know. One of my migraines is coming on. So if it isn’t too much to ask … I’ll be obliged if you behave reasonably…’

The voice sounded slurred, whether from the migraine or something she had taken for it. She was obviously under the weather, which was not surprising, Eirene felt. If it had not been for the positive smell of frying onion you might have broken down and cried in this dark passage on the way from the bedroom to nowhere.

Suddenly the boy appeared, whom she had dismissed a short while before. She was glad to see his face glimmer at her, still formless as it approached.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to wash if you don’t feel like it. Turn the tap on, rattle round in the sink a bit, and she’ll calm down.’