The Hanging Garden (17 page)

No, I’m not. Though you can’t help brushing 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 shirts 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, classic 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 sex 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 flashing 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 fashioned 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 à 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 sloshing 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 brushing 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 Jap 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 Jap 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, bashing 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 God, 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, bashing the shrubs with her old case all the way to the gate.

Trish laughs, and you see her fury. ‘Bitches will be bitches. She smells too. Come on, let’s go.’

‘What about homework?’

‘You can do that with us if you’re feeling so bloody 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 appetite. 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 brassy light of this golden afternoon, Trish is hypnotised by her own voice and the rushing 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…’