The Watch Tower (20 page)

Wondering, the two were banked up against the stationary crowds. Often enough in the city streets at lunch-time or in the evening rush-hour, there was an impression that people had paused in a group to remark on some phenomenon just yards away. Almost as often the impression turned out to have been false. They had only stopped wistfully to look for something remarkable to look at. And in truth there was very little in the city’s buildings to excite the eyes of a connoisseur of the beautiful, supposing one such to have been amongst the hopeful groups of gazers, and even less to arouse those others who were not even aware of what they missed or wanted.

‘Oh, look! They’ve got him!’ a woman cried.

And there emerged through the crowd on the
opposite pavement two uniformed policemen holding a young man who seemed to be dead. With their arms deep under his, they were dragging his body across the street.

This half of the city block was silent as an openair theatre, the road cleared of all traffic, the crowds motionless and leaning in towards this quiet, sunlit, significant spectacle like trees on a windswept headland.

No, he was alive, not dead, the young man! For now, instead of allowing his feet to drag helpless behind him and being entirely borne along by the policemen, he was stumbling in an effort to support his own weight. He could not lift his head, however, and he had an air of being mortally ill that reverberated pleasantly and horribly through the silent witnesses.

No, he was well, after all, not ill, the young man! Only struck down in some more than mortal manner, as if by a supernatural hammer, to find himself a captive thief in the real air, under the sun, surrounded by breathing faces.

Reaching the parked police car, he was dragged and thrust into the back seat between the two officers. The crowd watched. Anything could still happen! Ah, but slowly the car moved off, and the banked-up traffic was waved on. Reluctantly the crowd scattered.

Oh, God! Clare thought.
Cowed
.
That’s what it means. What a dreadful thing! Her heart contracted.
Something no one should ever be.

Monica said, ‘Look! This is the jeweller’s shop I’ve been telling you about. Come and I’ll show you a clock like the one I’ve got on lay-by.’

They peered into the small window full of trumpery rings, necklaces, brooches and tiaras. Monica pointed out a chaste-looking gold clock, and then went on to admire the display of large and expensive china ornaments: cats eating rats, dogs holding birds, insipid maidens palely smirking—

‘Come on, kid, we’d better make tracks.’ Monica was off.

They started to walk at the pace permitted by the lunch-hour armies, keeping to the left, Monica forcing her way across the right-hand stream now and then to dart her eyes over a display of shoes or dresses, joining Clare again and taking up her complaints against the man whose secretary she was exactly where she had left off.

Clare attended sincerely enough and would have noticed any deviation from this set-piece, but her nature, in which there were no offices or bosses, was experiencing pang after pang of deepest dismay.

Nimbly she and Monica began to overtake the walking back-views of people and hurry past. The faces approaching were vapid and low-powered. She glanced up at the buildings of from two to twelve storeys on the opposite side of the road, ranging from nondescript
to hideous, with thousands of people filed away in them. She could have dropped in the street. But how exaggerated! What was there in the sight of a captive criminal, a china cat, faces and buildings, to cause such excessive horror?

(Where was the young man now? What had he done? Why?)

What was she looking for? What did she miss? And why did the world and the weirdness and significance of captives, cats, faces and buildings strike her with fresh surprise daily, as if she had arrived from another time and place, expecting the earth to be much different?

We could do anything, and we do this, what we do do. How lacking—How lacking in—

‘I think he might be very clever,’ Monica called over her shoulder in her quick voice, undeterred by all the wriggling in and out between bodies.

‘Who?’

‘Morris. The new man in Admin.’

‘Oh. Yes. He’s very bright.’ But the world, poor world, was as over-burdened with cleverness as with stupidity, and in a sense (lacking this) did they not amount to the very same thing? Oh, he’s clever, Clare thought, but who’s
good
?
Who’s good? Who’s good?

Like a lament the question sounded in her as she ran up the marble stairs with Monica, not waiting for the lift. Who’s good? Who’s good?

And it seemed that in finding the words for this
question she had found them for all longing, and every question. For this meant everything.

I want to be in the presence of someone good.

Felix was squatting on the footpath outside the house with his back to the road, a pot of white paint beside him, when a car pulled up and tooted.

‘Hullo there!’

Only very slowly, and in response to a second call from the lively, good-humoured voice, did Felix turn his head.

Gilbert Blaine leaned across from the wheel and wound down the window to let his face be seen, as though it were a gold pass entitling him to lifelong privileges from the community. Felix had seen it before, if not as often as he would have wished; it was still an even biscuit-coloured oval, with features so reassuringly regular, and smile from curving lips and perfect teeth to heavily-lashed brown eyes so frank, that it was no wonder he had always been extremely difficult to dislike. In some indefinable way, by instinct as it were, people knew that nothing disagreeable could ever be Gil’s fault.

‘I’m off on Wednesday, Felix. Just thought I’d say adios or what-have-you, since I was passing.’

‘Eh? Be with you in a minute.’ He turned to administer the last crucial brush-strokes to the gate-post.

In his red Cadillac Gilbert Blaine glanced along the
Sunday street, stared down at his wrist-watch, took a cigarette from his case and waited, smiling a small smile.

‘Well, that’s just about it,’ Felix grunted, slowly rising from his haunches and stooping again to dispose his paintbrush in a jam-jar half-full of turpentine. At last he remembered Gilbert Blaine.

Shirtless, shoeless, sweaty, and burned almost black with the sun, Felix was no sight for sore eyes, but aversion was an expression banned, in public, from Gil Blaine’s charming face: he regarded Felix with an amiable smile.

‘What about coming down for a bit of afternoon tea?’ Felix leaned against the car and stared in a bitter, pessimistic way down the street.

‘I’d really like to, Felix, but I should’ve been in Pymble an hour ago. You know what it’s like going away—everyone wants to throw a party.’

‘Yeah—’ Rasping his fingernails over his unshaven cheek, Felix stared narrowly into the distance. ‘Thought—’ he cleared his throat, ‘I thought I might’ve seen you one of these days to hear how it all worked out.’

‘I did ring a few weeks back, but you were up at the Barrier Reef or somewhere. Oh, they were on to me like a pack of sharks. Just what you said.’

The mantle of blood through which he seemed to have to look, the corrosive necessity to appear to smile, in some way withdrew very slightly from Felix. And he jerked round with a sort of fantastic simplicity, putting
both hands on the car door, to look at his ex-partner. ‘After you, were they? I thought they would be.’

Gil jerked his head emphatically. ‘I won’t forget what you’ve done for me. If I make the pile I’m going to in South Africa, you’re in on it. They say it’s really lying around over there.’ Still speaking, he slid back behind the wheel and fiddled with the ignition key.

‘Yeah—’ said Felix, noticing, speaking through his cup of gall. ‘Still got this old bomb, I see.’ He knocked his knuckles against the car’s red duco and tried to laugh.

‘No. Sold it to a fellow I knew at school. He’s got pots of money and three other cars. Only took it as a favour to me. He’s on the land. Gave me cash on the nail. I had to hand it all over to the legal mob. He’s letting me run round in it till we sail.’

Felix rubbed the clenched fist of his left hand back and forth across his nose. ‘And did you hear any more about Casey? Have they got on his track at all?’

‘No, he’s gone bush. They’ll never get him now. He was always a bad risk. It was my fault for keeping so much cash in the place. Tough on you, too,’ he added, as an afterthought, coming in strongly to say, ‘Well, I’ll have to push off, Felix. Say farewell to your—Mrs. Shaw—for me.’ He gave a final, winning smile and revved the engine up.

A ludicrous change of expression—from strained interest and failing hope to stark myopic indifference—
took place on Felix’s face. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and walked back to the fence.

The red car started to cruise slowly away, its horn giving a mellow bleep.

For an instant before he turned the corner, Gilbert Blaine focused Felix in his rear-vision mirror, painting like a man on piece-work. He had looked up from his hot seat on the hot white footpath like a beggar full of dangerous misery at a Raja. Now, quite alone in the burning sun-stricken street, he was gnawed at, consumed by an overpowering wretchedness. His throat hurt, and he dug a thumb and a forefinger into each side, believing the pain to come from his bad tonsils.

‘Afternoon tea’s ready, dear,’ Laura said quietly, appearing at his side. ‘The fence looks better.’

‘I can’t come down till I’ve finished. I’ll be about twenty minutes.’

He glanced up at her from his somehow deliberately cringing place on the ground, and she said gently, ‘All right,’ and went away.

Lower than the dust
,
she thought, as if Felix had transferred the words from his mind to hers.
Lower than the dust
.

‘Poor Felix,’ she whispered aloud, strangely anguished, and half-running through the empty house to her bedroom, shed sharp tears of pity for him.

‘Hullo. You should have come for a swim, Felix.
It wasn’t crowded.’ Clare trudged along the road towards him and called out from a distance of twenty yards or so.

‘How was the water?’ he asked, concentrating on the post, his head down.

‘Oh, fine!—Terrific!’ she said, oddly dismayed. Having approached Felix to reach the gate, which was propped open because of its wet paint, she went slowly, backwards, away from him down the path to the house.

‘How was it?’ In the cool sitting-room with the french doors open on to the verandah, lawns and harbour views, Laura was sewing buttons on a white shirt and listening to The Opera-Lovers’ Hour.

‘Fine. Mike’s gone home to get on with building his car.’ In her sun hat, blue sandals, shorts and shirt, Clare dawdled in the doorway swinging her canvas beach bag till the aria from
Manon
ended, pensive and shaken.

‘What’s wrong?’ Laura looked up then down to thread her needle with beautiful absorption.

‘Nothing.’ Pulling her hat off she scratched at her hot head and felt her damp hair. ‘Only—poor Felix!’ she burst out, almost crying. ‘What’s the matter with him? He looks dreadful! He looks as if he could howl.’

‘Clare!’

‘No. I mean it. He seems to be—howling like a wolf. It’s dreadful. You can feel it.’

Laura’s needle slowed over the shirt. ‘He’ll be down for some tea in a minute. If you want to have a shower—
Manon
’
s
lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Nasty news this morning,’ said Mr. Robbins, the chemist. He liked to talk to Mrs. Shaw. He liked her gentle, worried, creamy face with dimples in it.

‘Is there?’ Laura started half-indignantly, looked large-eyed into the tall man’s antiseptic chemist’s countenance. ‘I haven’t seen a paper yet.’

‘Only another crisis. It’s hard to keep track of them all.’ Mr. Robbins scooped the change from the till, checked the coins in the palm of his hand, then let them chink into Laura’s. With a leisurely movement he tore a sheet of blue paper from the roller and spread it on the counter.

Laura cast her eyes about the pretty scented shop, its rows of gold lipstick cases, its glossy cards advertising patent drinks to make you strong and beautiful. Inhaling a great breath of sweet disinfected air, she returned to looking at Mr. Robbins’s grey head, bent over his angular parcel.

‘I do agree with you,’ she said vehemently. (It was such a relief to think about world affairs! Like coming out of solitary confinement.) ‘We’ve just acquired a new business—a clothing factory—after some months of looking about. We used to manufacture artificial flowers, but my husband—Anyway, one of our young
machinists is an English girl, just out from London. She’s got a room here in Neutral Bay not far from us. And do you know what she was telling us?’

‘No,’ Mr. Robbins said soothingly, his hands slowly wrapping the parcel, his mind aware of his two young assistants contending with other customers.

‘Well, she was wakened up the other night by the sound of sirens—’

‘Oh, yes, I remember.’

‘—yes. She said the sound gave her a fright in her sleep, then she woke up and thought the noise must be ambulance sirens or fire engines, but it kept on for more than half an hour. Then she heard bells in the distance starting to ring an alarm.’ Laura paused dramatically. ‘Do you know what she thought it was?’

‘No,’ Mr. Robbins nobly assured her, following the shape of her blue eyes from inner to outer corner.

Laura leaned towards him. ‘Nuclear war. The end of the world.’

‘No!’ Mr. Robbins backed away slightly.

Giving a series of tiny confirmatory nods, Laura went on, ‘It was three in the morning. She thought the sirens and bells were trying to wake up the whole city. She thought we would all die any moment.’

Guardedly, the chemist rubbed his nose. ‘She sounds a rather hysterical young woman.’ His head turned automatically to the shelf where, in hygienically-sealed jars, the tonics for hysterical persons were
to be found.

‘No, she isn’t, that’s the thing! She said, “Mrs. Shaw, that awful din would’ve wakened any city in Europe.”’

Rather moodily, but none the less dexterously, Mr. Robbins tied a knot in the string round the parcel and snapped it off the reel. ‘What did she do then, if she thought the world was ending?’