The Watch Tower (21 page)

Laura laughed. ‘Grace said she didn’t know anyone else in the house, and she hasn’t got a phone or a wireless, so she ran across the street to the post office and rang the police. She said, “What are the sirens sounding for?” and the policeman, in a queer sort of voice, said he couldn’t hear any sirens. Then she said, “There are bells ringing, too!” And he said he couldn’t hear bells either.’

Mr. Robbins laughed, showing neat white false teeth, shaking his head and folding his arms. ‘It was the fog on the harbour.’ He kept laughing and saying, ‘Ah, yes!’ He felt wholly reassured, as if Mrs. Shaw’s story of the little machinist had dealt with and disposed of the East–West crisis once and for all.

That night she went to the door of Clare’s room to say, ‘I could fill this house with people, you know! I make friends easily. People quite like me when I have a chance to meet them. All sorts of people. The people in shops. And not only them, either. I’m often paid nice little compliments by total strangers.’

They wandered through the devastated rooms as
through a city abandoned after days and nights of bombing. From one room, from one chair, to another, they moved, not speaking, not noticing each other. Laura made a cup of tea and left it. Some hours later, Clare made one. They sat. They held their heads.

Felix stayed in bed and was invisible till late on Sunday afternoon when he strolled through the conquered countryside looking not dissatisfied, even sniggering a little, dressed formally in a suit as though in the uniform of a victorious general. A french door swinging lopsided, torn curtains, broken glass—a pretty satisfactory show one way and another!

Hearing him enter the room, and aware that Laura had shut herself away, sunk to the deepest level of silence, Clare roused herself to look up at Felix across the kitchen table.

‘Felix. Felix—I don’t know. Sit down and talk to me for a minute. No one can live like this. We’re all exhausted. But—if you could—
say
,
we might find out what we should do.’

She looked directly into his face as she spoke, and while she wondered at his nature, at the chaos he had so effortlessly and apparently without reason created, ill will was out of the question. She had no limitations left with which to feel the least animosity. Nothing so simple as that emotion was or ever had been called for in this situation. Felix himself could see that somehow his astonishing violence and roaring hatred had wiped
the slate clean. He smiled.

‘Talk? What’s there to talk about? Everything’s okay, isn’t it? Nothing to talk about.’

He wore a look of peculiar elation, and Clare understood again from his intensely uneasy, somehow slippery, smile, the impossibility of their ever being able to talk, and she did experience, even through the coldness of her general anaesthesia, a faint feeling of surprise.

‘Everything’s jake, isn’t it?’ he insisted, with the same bluff, bright, slippery smile.

Obviously it mattered so little what she said that for a few seconds no words offered themselves. Then she said, ‘But, anyway, I don’t think there’s much to be done about it.’

‘Eh?’ He gave her a smiling, deaf look. Then he pretended to think she was joking. Or perhaps he even did. Hearing him move, she glanced up and had the impression almost that he had slithered out of the room, so fundamental was his resistance to the very idea of reason.

Against all evidence to the contrary, Clare had once supposed that every person did carry about in some degree a knowledge of what was true and what was not, an awareness of the objective plane to which life-worn individuals could turn at last, casting off layer on layer of mistaken self-interest in bitter relief, crying, ‘All right! Enough! I will be myself. Let us have the truth. However I have been before, I pine for it
now.’

But Felix could never be startled or worn down to the point where any such decision presented itself to him. Some sort of bedrock that she had assumed to be present in all people was lacking then in Felix and, if in him, in the section of the community he resembled. For he could hardly be unique. She supposed.

The refrigerator began to throb. Clare glanced at it. Rising, she walked idly about the dreadful kitchen, touching its smooth surfaces that had received her eyes’ conversation for so many years. Perhaps this was the greatest difference of all between people? It did seem to be a very great difference. How odd—all to look like one and yet to be, in a sense, two species.

This permanent awareness of what was
so
,
regardless of her whims of the moment, regardless of what it would be pleasant to believe, or not pleasant, this solid bedrock was what she was, what she was about. What could there be in its place if you were differently constituted?

What use (the question came) had she ever made of this supposedly valuable possession? What use did she ever intend to make of it?

Oh, some. Some use, she promised. Because she could not die till that was done. And she sighed and frowned in abstraction, understanding what did not seem very understandable: that she was not yet good enough to die, could not afford it yet on any account. She walked through to her bedroom. Years ago she
would have bitten her fingernails till the blood streamed, and all but cracked the bones of her face with grief. She would have banged her head against the wall. She sat on the bed, slipped her shoes off, let herself fall back flat on the pillows with a little thump. Stony and wordless and without feeling she stared at the white ceiling. Her recent promises of action sank away. Nothing would ever change now. All to be wasted. What a pity, she thought mildly. Her life was excessive. Really it was. It was inartistic.

The fingers of her left hand rested on her collarbone. She breathed evenly and thought with a dangerous evenness and evenly felt the curious balance of her emotions—exactly poised between surprise and a dead lack of surprise. Oh, outside in the world there were people suffering tragedies she could barely imagine. There were people in prisons at this very instant, people in hospitals, streets and houses, enduring every searing degree of pain, anguish of spirit.

She noticed the direction of her thoughts and her lips half-smiled. Laura’s influence. ‘Think of the poor souls in concentration camps!’ she would say with pious heat. ‘How lucky we were in the war not to have been thrown into the gas ovens!’ There were answers to be made to that, of course, and over the months and years they had been made.

Some suffering must be clean compared with this, she thought. There was collusion here. There was nothing not depraved, perverted. There was no feeling
of sufficient grace to earn the august name of suffering.

And yet, she thought, I think we are probably very unhappy.

Luckily, though, the unhappiness, the thing, whatever it was, that was painlessly torturing her, had taken itself out of earshot, out of sight. She was aware of it, its dimensions and gravity, but as though it were a chronic disease, an idiot child, a physical handicap of most severe proportions, that she had learned to deal with objectively.

Her arm went out horizontally and switched on the small wireless set on the bedside table. Edith Piaf.
La Vie en Rose
.
Clare listened attentively for a few seconds and sang a few words under her breath, then her arm reached out again and cut the sound abruptly.

‘I caused a slight furore next door while you were away,’ Blanche Parkes remarked to her husband while they relaxed over a pre-party drink.

‘What did you get up to?’ Dick Parkes watched her with loving indulgence. He was a pleasant, easy-going, ordinary-looking man of forty-five with more than half a million pounds distributed about the world.

‘We had this Heart Week thing just after you went to New York and at the last minute, on the Saturday, two of the local church helpers had to back out. I rang Laura Shaw and asked her if she’d have a shot at it. It only meant doing a bit of catering in the church
hall. What happened then—so I’ve deduced from the few things I’ve heard, you know me—was that she asked old lover-boy for permission and actually got it. Nice as pie. So she came along and did a good job. But meantime our hero was not as thrilled to see her acting off her own bat as he kidded. He climbed down off the wagon—where he’d been for a while—drank a bottle of Scotch, rang an estate agent, sold the house and its contents on the spot and sat and waited for her to come home to the good news.’

Blanche paused to drink, and Dick grimaced his incredulity. ‘Rotten old bugger. Then what?’

‘Cigarette, darling—’ Blanche ate an olive, had her cigarette lighted and resumed. ‘You know how I always put two and two together in my inimitable way? Well, I gather there was a shocking set-to and the next day when Clare was climbing into a taxi with her luggage and he was still on a bender, Laura came down with a large attack of rheumatic fever.’

Dick pulled another face. But he was very interested. He was a soft-hearted man, even squeamish, but he did love to gossip with Blanche about all the weird characters who were not Blanche and Dick Parkes. ‘Thank God we’re normal!’ He smiled at his fair wife, who was dressed, made-up and bejewelled with the excruciating moderation of the astute new rich.

‘The doctor said it was psychosomatic after he
caught sight of Felix skulking about. I don’t know about psychosomatic. She looks a helluva sick woman to me. Anyway, Felix sobered up long enough to try to cancel the sale. Not for her sake, but he’d given the place away. Naturally, the agent wouldn’t hear of parting with it, but he offered them the Robertsons’ place further along the street and he more or less had to take it. Clare helped him get enough furniture in for the time being, and now they’re settling in.’

‘She didn’t leave, then?’

‘I suppose someone’s got to look after Laura.’

‘Has he gone off the grog again?’

‘Uh-uh. I had to call in to get her receipt book from Heart Week and when I passed the window I saw him haranguing her from the foot of the bed about the medical expenses and what he’d lost on the house, and how it was all her fault. She ought to be in hospital, but she knows he’d go through the roof if he had to pay any more out, so—’

‘He must have a couple of pennies to rub together. What is it with them? He’s a century older than her, but what is it, do you think? Incompatibility?’

Artlessly they eyed each other, breathing and sipping their whiskies. Blanche did not laugh or even think to. Her powers of analysis had always fascinated Dick. He liked to snuffle about amongst the bones of strangers’ lives, but he was uncertain of his judgements:
it was not
nothing
,
however, to have carried off a sybil and married her.

Laura leaned over a card-table in the sitting-room, working out the factory wages. Felix was shut up in the office at the back of the house with Tom Mason, a good-looking English boy who had been a waiter and was now one of the Shaws’ two pressers.

In this new place, Laura had risen from her long illness like someone who had undergone major surgery. She had been cut down. Home was only a word now. In many ways this house had charms and advantages the other one had lacked; the only thing was, she did not care so much about anything any more. She had been intimidated far beyond the place where she had imagined the limit to be. There was nothing to be relied on anywhere now except the presence of violence in Felix and his power to inflict punishments. Yet she was obliged to feel that he had been hurt into this shape and not created in it. Otherwise—

‘Hullo!’ Clare looked into the room. She had been to dinner with Alec Stevenson, an architect from Brisbane, who took her out when he came to Sydney. He was married and deeply wrapped in racing cars and high-spirited.

She sat now on the arm of Laura’s chair. ‘How did you get on with your visitor?’

‘Oh, we had a lovely evening. It’s such a long time since we had anyone to dinner. Tom’s out with Felix
in the office. Coming home tonight,’ Laura confided with shy delight, ‘Tom was telling us how he misses his mother and father in Nottingham, and he asked us if we’d mind if he called us Mum and Dad. Not in the factory! They’d think we were favouring him and it might cause trouble—but privately.’

Clare said nothing. She stood up. Then she said, ‘Oh.’

‘Wasn’t that quite sweet? He’s only young.’

‘That’s good.’

Laura began to pack her books and papers together and folded the card-table away. ‘It’s time for coffee. They’ll probably want theirs out in the office.’

Clare dumped her coat and bag in her bedroom, and read a letter that had arrived that afternoon from a friend travelling in Canada. In the sitting-room Laura was setting cups on a low teak table. ‘People are funny,’ she said, not turning. ‘Tom—that boy—was quite cheeky to me just now. I won’t put up with that kind of thing. It’s an imposition. He was really nasty. Felix only smiled. I don’t think rudeness is funny.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, nothing. But I won’t put up with it.’ She handed Clare a cup. ‘Tomorrow I’ll say—I’ll tell that boy—and Felix—’ Pressing her small chin nervously into her throat she stammered out preposterous threats that no one but Clare would ever hear.

In the background an A.B.C. announcer was
reading the world news. Clare tried to listen to it for the sake of her sanity. A guerilla band exterminated. Warships ready to move in. Laura kept talking. Clare said, ‘Never mind. Never mind. Forget about them. Maybe there’s a programme you’d like to listen to.’

‘Felix’s even given him a rise! We pay above award wages as it is.’ She simmered. ‘Sometimes I think he should have
married
one of his dear boys. He seems to worry much more about their feelings and opinions than he ever does—’

Clare was combing her hair with her fingers, eyelids lowered. She said, ‘You’ve spilled some coffee in your saucer, Laura. Don’t let it drip on your dress.’

‘Oh, so I have.’ Rapidly, she padded off to the kitchen. When she returned Clare was listening to some programme so fixedly that Laura did not like to interrupt her.

At the wharf, in the shop that sold everything, the little English soul whose past occupation—drink-waiter aboard various passenger liners on the Australia run—had fired him permanently in its mould, leapt about, his expression gay, nervous, sycophantic.