The Hanging Garden Part 13

Mrs Lockhart quails. *Ireen is a very biddable girl' she offers her superior out of another country.

But the princ.i.p.al has no time for the guardian aunt. Again elbowing the desk her spectacles are focused on what could at last be the ideal pupil inside the unpromising material.

Never were you subjected, all at the same instant, to battery by cricket b.a.l.l.s, blinding by the flicker of leafed dictionaries, soothed by the scent of slightly scorched Australian sponge helped from hot baking tins. You can only lower your eyes against Miss Hammersley's dreamy inspection, and hope for the best.

We are shown out by the snooty maid, while the princ.i.p.al remains behind, arranging paper-knives and blotters on her desk. Eating into a little finger is a ring with a dark green stone blotched as though with blood.

Several days later, Ally says with a mixture of relief and contempt, *Waddaya know. The old girl's accepted you, Ireen. You must have something.'

Harold didn't say anything.

Date?

Don't know why I have started keeping this rotten old diary again. Always too dangerous on any count. Perhaps *Ambleside' has given me courage-or wearing the key on a chain round my neck. Anyone interested enough could probably fiddle at the lock with a hairpin. But the older boys are so obsessed with turning themselves into super males their imagination is leaving them. Apart from eyeing me once or twice, Harold seems to have lost interest.

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 bra.s.sy 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rts 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, cla.s.sic 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 s.e.x 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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.

Just then, Phoebe started calling from the house, *Where have you girls got to? There are young men here waiting to be entertained.'

We went up to the chicken a la king and fruit salad with ice cream for the shy GI's on leave who had been hand-picked for her by the club. Trish kept looking at me as though wanting to share a secret we didn't have. I must have looked as blank as any of the hand-picked GI's. Phoebe noticed it at last. *Go on Ireen,' she sounded rather angry. *You've got a card trick or something up your sleeve.'

I heard her discussing me one evening with Maxwell, who was grumbling back through his cigar. *She's no responsibility of mine. She's Trish's friend and your performing monkey. It's too bad if you didn't pick a winner.' He was slos.h.i.+ng the ice around at the bottom of his gin sling and I couldn't hear too distinctly after that. I only knew Maxwell had dismissed me from a life which revolved round a protected job which he shares with similar men. He had handed me over to women who wear attractive clothes, take lessons in French and Italian, and read library books ...

Your families-your would-be adoptive one at Wahroonga, and your real Lockhart one at ramshackle old Neutral Bay. If anything is real in these years when we are shooting in all directions-or wrinkling and drying up. Phoebe asks, while putting on the moisturiser, *What is that aunt of yours doing down there?' Ally at the ironing board only refers to *Those people...' voice tilted upwards, expecting information. At least the Fermor-Joneses haven't access to the diary. If the Lockharts haven't either, they know about it, their eyes bore through locked drawers, it is a family joke.

Shan't write any more diary. My memory is more vivid and safer. Trish says she doesn't remember much of what happened before the age of eight. I can't believe it. Sometimes I think I remember Mamma throwing me out of her womb. Much of what sticks in my mind is trivial, some of it beautiful-that kingfisher clinging to the giant sunflower, weighing it down, that will stay with me for ever like some enamelled plaque. But nastiness clings to the mind more easily than beauty-those corpses of little grey mice a cat spewed on the veranda board. Bruce's hairy arm brus.h.i.+ng mine. At least I can honestly say Bruce's arm reminds me of Gil's. Then my shudder needn't be one of disgust. Or is that dishonest? Do I wait for it to happen again? All these trivial memories are in a way more real than for instance the night the j.a.p submarine came inside the Harbour. Like a not too bad dream. The greatest part of it old Mrs Hetherington down the street woken by the noise falling off her bed and breaking her hip.

Phoebe sometimes puts on her religious voice to talk about historic occasions like *... the j.a.p submarines inside the Harbour, and the Battle of the Coral Sea. I hope you girls will remember what you've lived through!' After the Battle of the Coral Sea she gives us corals to make sure. Mine is a necklet of little dark red jagged teeth, but Trish got a string of smooth beads almost white. I heard Trish complaining to her mother that they hardly looked like coral at all and Phoebe said, *You shouldn't complain white corals are more distinguished-more valuable.' Then she added, *I don't advise you to tell Irene. She's perfectly happy with that little necklet.' Trish has never exactly told though she did once let out that dark corals are considered somewhat common-something for tourists. Perhaps that is what I am. I don't feel I shall ever belong anywhere.

No more diary, even when my fingers itch. Thinking is bad enough without perving on what you've written down.

You are feeling virtuous this afternoon. Miss Babington has given you an Alpha for the History essay. The only other Alpha is Jinny Forster. In the beginning she wanted to be your friend. But Trish appealed, with her blonde hair and clear skin. Jinny is thin and dark, bites her nails, has spots. Angela Fallon said you were both so clever, did you use the same crib? Jinny thinks we are twin minds. You shouldn't shudder but do. At least you don't bite your nails. Trish is up against it today. She hasn't produced a history essay. Old Babs is cutting up rough, asks what her excuse is this time. Her parents insisted she go to visit friends across the Bridge. Babs's moustache has never looked spikier. Telling Trish she isn't interested in the social life of spoilt young women. She is here to educate them. Patricia will report to the head when school is out. Patricia looks more beautiful than ever, but the bones are visible inside the apple. She sits beside you slightly smiling, lids lowered. She has the confidence in her own worth you will always lack. On your other side, Jinny is muttering and fuming biting farther into her nails from hate and disapproval. You are caught between two opposite climates.

When school is out you hang around in front on the tessellated veranda waiting for Trish to be finished with Miss Hammersley. Jinny hangs around too, bas.h.i.+ng her leg with her battered old case. Jinny says why don't we catch the same train. Like Lockharts the Forsters live down the wrong end of the line. You try to sound pardonable explaining that Mrs Fermor-Jones is expecting you to spend the night with them. Jinny is muttering something about everybody crawling to the rich. Then without warning, *Are you in love with Trish, Ireen?' You can feel the spots multiplying under your burning skin. You say you don't know what she means. If she had gone off there and then, she might have started you biting your nails. Oh G.o.d, life isn't easy. You hate Trish as much as Jinny.

Trish appears at the same moment as the sun bursts through the sycamores to touch her up. Her hair has never looked a heavier gold above her forehead. Her lips are smiling contemptuously-for us? for Miss Hammersley? for what?

*What did she say?'

*She said that in a serious world the triviality of my mind ought to be punishment enough.'

Jinny spits. *Perhaps Hammersley's palm can be greased like any other!'

She stamps off, bas.h.i.+ng the shrubs with her old case all the way to the gate.

Trish laughs, and you see her fury. *b.i.t.c.hes will be b.i.t.c.hes. She smells too. Come on, let's go.'

*What about homework?'

*You can do that with us if you're feeling so b.l.o.o.d.y virtuous.'

Walking back to their place she tells what happened the evening before.

*They're not exactly friends of the parents, more sort of acquaintances. Phoebe warned me they're awful bores and I'd be silly to go. They wouldn't dream of driving all that way for a pot of tea and a few dry biscuits-and she's practically mental. But I had this idea. And after all, Fiona's my friend.'

*Fiona?'

*Yes, Fiona Cutlack. She's the niece.'

Trish's voice is growing dreamier.

*There was this dreamy boy. I'd heard enough to whet my appet.i.te. So I put on the white corals and borrowed the Rolls-not the sacred one, but the one for the beach, that the rust's got into. Gil Horsfall was better than I could have imagined-English-his father a high ranking staff officer in India-Gil evacuated out from Home when war began. He has grey eyes.'

No blue, nothing so honest as grey.

*Actually I think they're what you call hazel. And a body. I don't know why Fiona hasn't got him under lock and key. When it was time to leave he asked if he couldn't drive the Rolls round a block or two. We started off, careering round the whole of Vaucluse, Fiona wouldn't come, said she wasn't well. I never ever was so thankful for the bloods. To have him to myself...'

On and on the voice till we reach Thrussell Street where you plunge down towards *Mornington'. You remain rooted to this spot in the asphalt as everything else moves around you, Trish's voice, the over-fertilised Wahroonga shrubs, Gil taking the Vaucluse corners at a giddy speed.

If you are stunned by the bra.s.sy light of this golden afternoon, Trish is hypnotised by her own voice and the rus.h.i.+ng of the midnight air *... pretty well delicious, but afraid he might crash Maxie's car ... persuaded him to pull up beside the Gap. What if we'd driven over. There could never have been a more perfect suicide-thoughtless and perfect-better than waiting to find out somebody's bad and boring points. Instead we sat inside the car-and that was perfect too-a gale blowing outside-when Gil...'

You must have begun to s.h.i.+ver.

*What's wrong, Ireen? Are you sick or something?'

Could be. The sweat is running down your skin.

*Nothing. Could have the flu coming on. Better go home. Tell your mother I...'

*But come down to us. I'll ring Dr Keep.'

*No. I'm going home.'

*We'll run you there.'

*Walk a bit. Sweat it out.'

Trish obviously thinks you're quite crazy, or could she know? Not possible Gil didn't mention Eirene Sklavos, this black Greek and oddball character. As you fade away alongside this long ribbon of undulating bitumen, out of reach of Trish's eyes, if not her laughter, you will not trust anybody again.

At Turramurra where this little pocket of leftover bush fringes the road a middle-aged man unb.u.t.tons himself with his left hand. He has an iron hook where the right should be.

You hurry past. In the dwindling glare a car pulls up. An elderly clergyman offers you a lift. Says he noticed the *Ambleside' uniform. So much respect for your Miss Hammersley, a really exceptional lady. You accept his lift, from despair as much as anything. In spite of the respect Miss Hammersley has roused in him, why should an elderly clergyman be any more reliable than a middle-aged bloke with a hook for a hand unb.u.t.toning himself and beckoning from a pocket of bush? Anything can happen. But nothing does. He puts you down at Lockharts' gate.

*Your mother is a lucky woman.'

Oh G.o.d, can't recite family history. Thank the old boy for his kindness. You are mincing your words, simpering through these silly little baby teeth.

n.o.body at home. Only the silence inside it keeps this house from falling apart, it is so fragile. The familiar objects, even in your own more or less private room, so unnecessary. Keep your hands off that diary. Better to explode in a shower of pus than to wallow in what I expect the secure, the *adults', would see as a stream of self pity.

An extra spurt of week-end energy gardening for neighbours, running old ladies' messages, shopping for the sick, has got Bruce his motorbike. Alison and Harold helped towards the end.

The tarnished monster stands propped on the broken concrete to the right of Alison's garage.

*It's a second-hand BSA. Can't be choosy in wartime, Reenie.'

Hardly remember what wasn't wartime, but we all act and talk as though we did. A cloud of happiness envelops what we think of as before the war.

Bruce has been working on his bike. Chrome is beginning to gleam again through the veils of baked oil and patches of rust. The rigid grid above the rear wheel is what he refers to as a pillion.

*When I've had a few practices around the place, I'll take you for a ride, Reen.'

Ought to feel grateful for Bruce's promise. He is inviting you to a celebration of power and fame. Sitting at the rear of Bruce Lockhart's bike you will act as the equivalent of the flowing figure on the bonnet of Maxwell Fermor-Jones's Rolls. What if Trish, swirled by Gil Horsfall in the Rolls, ever caught sight of you b.u.mping along dislocated on Bruce Lockhart's pillion. But Vaucluse and Cremorne are worlds apart.

The invite is issued on one of those evenings of early winter when a razor is running its edge over the skins exposed to it, and every bay round this almost landlocked harbour is roughed into leaden waves. Regardless of a difference in hemisphere and climate, you see the same razor skinning the prisoners of war across the straits up north, when not lending a hand in cutting throats. In Greece Greeks will be dying of this wind, gunfire, and the starvation which comes from a diet of weeds.

Greeks are fated to die, when here a pseudo-Greek is only numb from the south-easter and the very remote prospect of death. Unless a crash is thrown in your way, as you cling to Cousin Bruce's ribs from the pillion of the second-hand BSA. We are on the ride to celebrate speed and status. B. has opened his mouth and is screaming into the face of the wind. You can feel his lungs expanded inside the cage of ribs. You can visualise Bruce's skeleton, from the taut ribs, and the mouth and the eye sockets, which you cannot see but know.

*Okay, Reenie?' He calls back over his shoulder.

*Okay! Okay!' We are all okay since the Yanks came.

I can feel my forehead drained white below the roots of lifted hair. Eyes staring like Bruce's in their sockets. Teeth not grinning, but clenched. Because this pseudo Australian is the crypto-Greek expecting the death which is aiming at her. But Brucie doesn't envisage death for a moment. Australians are only born to live. To end in a cemetery or crematorium doesn't bear thinking about. So you don't think. When here is this morbid Greek thinking about the death which will release her. Whamm! You are floating back rejoining the bloodstains on the Pindus snow the brains mashed into the paving outside the National Gardens the choirs of worm-eaten saints all that you have ever known and felt and cried about and prayed for, on your knees, and in cold beds.

Let Gil Horsfall stay alive in Australia, it is what he deserves.

You cling even closer to Brucie's ribs when there is no need, he is slowing down, coasting in the approach to some sort of destination.

We have arrived at this suburban mixed business with jerry-built milk bar added on. Bikes similar to Brucie's are propped in the dust and devil's pitchforks outside. The browned out light in the interior has turned the milk bar or soda fountain into a devil's cave. Brucie's mates are gathered at the bar gulping the stuff out of the metal floats, spooning up the ice cream, those of them who have scrounged or snitched cigs dragging on their loot, jerking out unintelligible information in their new, men's voices. You would like to hear and understand, but you aren't invited to come inside. No girl has been added to the circle of relaxed males stretching their thighs and their adam's apples. Only the proprietor's wife, more a priestess than a woman, sets the drinks whizzing, or drizzles from on high green or crimson synthetic flavours.

You walk about the other side of the road. It is no longer cold, but you warm your hands one in the other. They have absorbed the journey's dust and some of the grease from the BSA. Down through the lantana scrub, the jungle of gums, pittosporum and looped vines, the harbour sets up a mauve glitter.

What are you here for? Will n.o.body tell you what to do? You are almost mewing like one of the unwanted cats their owners dump in the suburban bush, when Bruce comes out from his magic cave, carrying one of the battered floats.

He crosses the road. *Strawberry,' he says, and turns back.

Strawberry must be for girls, whether they like it or not. Sipping the sickly stuff is at least an occupation, even though you feel you may fetch it up. Pour the contents into the dust, but what to do with the empty float in the next half hour, or eternity.

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, whatabout.i.t?' 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 s.p.a.ced 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.'