The Watch Tower (22 page)

This ramshackle weatherboard dump hanging over the harbour was destined to be his El Dorado or his tomb. It had become a kind of symbol to English ships’ stewards everywhere. In Calcutta and Hong Kong and Southampton there was talk of the little mixed
business at that suburban wharf in Sydney, Australia, where if you could stick it for two years, seven days a week, early morning till early morning, you could make a fortune and set yourself up in something less strenuous. Every two years it passed from the enriched exhausted hands of one steward to another, usually without event. Last time, though, the owner committed suicide, by drowning, in the harbour. If populations were more settled he might have been a local legend now, but hardly anyone remembered already—

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clare Vaizey come in. Roy ran nimbly round his three counters, serving out a
Herald
,
a packet of cigarettes, an early-morning malted, smiling largely all the while above his blue bow tie, bowing, chatting, slicking back his long hair when the bending and stretching disarranged it.

He kept Clare waiting since she seemed disinclined to come forward into the crowd of her fellow ferry-travellers. If she waited, they might talk. He would like that.

‘The general public—’ he sometimes said to her, close to tears. ‘They come in here, throw their dry-cleaning at you: “See it’s ready tonight!” Never a smile or the time of day! You’re not a human being!’ These days his hands were always shaking. He often felt thoroughly broken-up.

‘I know,’ she sometimes answered, and he felt she really did. He realised that he was not, after all, upset by these people. ‘But they’ve all got their worries,’ he
jumped in eagerly. ‘It’s not deliberate, really. You don’t ignore anyone on purpose.’

‘Of course not.’

Outside, the ferry bell rang and the crowds pressed out of the shop’s corner doorway, clutching newspapers, and raced along the old wooden jetty, yapped at by stray dogs, looked at mechanically by seated passengers still more than half asleep, hoarsely exhorted and chivvied by the weatherbeaten admiral whose job it was to yank the gangplanks on and off the boats. Down they clattered. Pandemonium!

Clare looked after the stampeding legs and caught the routine clamour of the seven-fifty-five’s departure. She had turned to follow and was stopped, all her weight on the toes and ball of one foot, by Roy’s unctuous, ‘And now what can I do for you? I didn’t serve you before. I knew you were early. I knew you wouldn’t be wanting to get this one like the others.’

Did he? Didn’t she? Early? Oh!

From staring at him through her dark glasses, over her shoulder, behind his counter, Clare relaxed suddenly and went to the glass-topped case, giving Roy and his near-visible stewards’ paraphernalia of bottles and siphons a sudden smile. She even saw what she wanted, and indicated the tube of toothpaste to Roy, not speaking, but continuing to lean and smile in a way that gave the impression of speech. Raking in her old coach-hide handbag she produced some money, took
the packet into her fist, and sauntered from the empty shop, not having spoken. Roy watched the peacock-blue back, fair hair, tanned legs. Then the eight-ten types started surging in.

She was alone for the moment on the floating pontoon wharf. The piles creaked under the stress of the tide. The harbour glittered all about in the sun with an eye-straining brilliance. She leaned against one of the new wooden piles that still looked like a tree, and had bark on it, and was splintered. Her mouth curved as she stared out over the harbour’s white fiery surface, examining and greeting the day. It looked portentous. The very air seemed to shine, and the leaves on the trees, and the inside of the old jetty ceiling did, too.

Downstairs on the ferry and outside, just feet from the water, she sat jammed between two heavy men, each generously extending half a page of newspaper in front of her face. She remembered Gerald Harding, out from London for six months with the Department. At lunchtime, over sandwiches and a carton of coffee, they used to talk: they shared an office.

‘Your newspapers,’ he said. He was bored. He was not pleased about this temporary transfer away from his real life. His salary troubled him deeply. So he told Clare Vaizey what was wrong with the daily news as it was available to her in Australia, in detail, and even went to the bother of bringing her over a period of weeks his airmail editions of the best English papers.
She studied them.

When he was leaving he asked, ‘What’s the verdict?’

She said, ‘Oh, you won.’

And he told himself that hers no longer gave her the innocent distraction, the innocent illusion of feeling well-informed, that they had done before. ‘Alas!’ he said, in his affected way. ‘I have sophisticated a native.’ He promised, ‘I’ll send you some of ours when I get back.’

‘Thank you. But don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. It makes no difference.’

He said uncomfortably, ‘You have virtues of your own out here, you know.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You get a bad press in London.’

‘Do we? Never mind.’

Abruptly she extricated herself from the company of the human bolsters on either side and edging past the rows of knees and polished shoes went to stand in the open doorway of the ferry while blocks of flimsy home-units, and swimming-pools and anchored yachts, and rubbish dumps all rusted tin, and lawns and gardens slowly passed. The light was so dazzling on this sunny side of the boat that everyone without dark glasses sheltered under hat brims or else lifted forearms and blinked wet eyes at the mesmeric scene.

Suddenly bells rang and the ferry shook to a stop. A white ship, one of the big passenger liners, loomed
ahead.
Arcadia—
The ferry travellers rolled their eyes up, and a few ship’s passengers looked down at the small red-and-yellow boat, then over beyond its tiny funnel to the bridge, the cloud-reflecting buildings of glass at the Quay, the curving green of the Botanic Gardens.

The ship completed its turn and the ferry’s engine quivered shakily again, agitating dozing hearts with its noise. Soon the two vessels berthed. The well-dressed, prosperous crowds pushed off the ferry, slipped coins in the ancient turnstiles and clanged through, out into the concourse of the Quay.

Even as early as this, the small shops were busy—the bread kiosks, milk-bars, dry-cleaners and delicatessens. And
he
was at his usual post. He recognised her as she went towards him. Every week he looked smaller in his loose navy-blue uniform, and frailer and dustier; every week she thought he would be missing.

The morning breeze that lifted her hair and flapped the old man’s uniform was seaweedy and salty. Traffic rumbled. People ran. Clare stood before the old man and let some shillings fall into his box. The small Salvation Army soldier watched her and she watched his lips and weak blue eyes, waiting, determined. (Yet she might be rebuffed.)

‘God bless you,’ he said simply, looking at her like a child.

Oh!—Clare relaxed. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. She was blessed, who was most in need of blessing.
Blessed.

Having received what she had paid for, she moved on.

Felix cursed when he saw that there was no parking space vacant near the factory. ‘Who do they all belong to, anyway? Silly damn stupid women shoppers, I suppose. Look out! Was that a place there?’

‘Where?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘It’s too late now.’ He speeded up a little. ‘I’m past it now. You’ve got to look out for a space if it’s not too much trouble. I can’t take my eyes off the road.’

‘I am looking, Felix, but the thing is—’ Laura swivelled about in her seat, striving as she perpetually was impelled to for omniscience. ‘We’re not usually looking for anywhere in town at this time in the afternoon.’

‘I am aware of that,’ he enunciated with awful distinctness. ‘But thank you for telling me.’

Returning to Sydney after a week in Melbourne, they had collected the car from Bill Willis’s factory near the airport, and Felix and Bill (whose factory supplied the labour for the Shaws’ excess orders) had stood swaying on the edge of the gutter, smoking, reflectively uttering great truths about the state of the rag trade.

Laura was fidgety, and wanted to push on to the factory and home. Felix knew. But she had been too useful in Melbourne. People had complimented him on his wife! He stood and stood, then pretended to lose his way in the streets behind Bill’s factory, and
only after he had silenced her completely, sped towards the city.

Now, alternately gliding and darting along the road in search of a parking place, he began to feel resentful again: he wanted to drop Laura off at the factory so that she could surprise the staff, but he wanted to keep her in the car so that if he should be forced to tramp miles back from whatever spot he eventually found, she would have to tramp, too.

‘Look, Felix, there’s a place just ahead where that man’s pulling out.’

‘Where?’

‘On this side. Look! The blue Ford.’

Accelerating slightly, he passed the vacant stretch. ‘Where do you mean? I can’t see it.’

Laura tried to sound sympathetic and cheerful. ‘Oh, what a shame! You just missed it.’

‘What?
That
?’
Felix turned to stare at her despite the convoys of dusty, multi-coloured cars menacing the road from end to end.

‘Why?’ Laura contracted under his eyes.

‘Blue Ford! Blue Ford! That, my dear woman, was a Chevrolet. Had I known that that was the car you meant, I could easily have got in. As it is, we’re so close to Elizabeth Street we might just as well go down to the parking lot and get a bus back up.’

Laura stared at the veined hands folded loosely on her lap.

The news went through from the cutting- and finishing-room to the factory proper: ‘Old Shaw’s back!’ Twenty heads were lowered. Twenty machines roared.

Felix stood in the doorway, smiling a closed smile. He loved this about the factory. Even when no one looked at him, not daring to, everyone noticed him. The machines were thundering. He smiled, tolerating the bent backs of girls over whom he had power, who joked with him sometimes in hoarse voices, admitting that he was indeed their lord and master.

‘He’s got another new suit and hat on,’ Marj Curtis advised her sister Doreen in a cracked whisper. ‘God, you wouldn’t read about it!’

Felix was conscious of his new clothes, too. His suit had been tailored by a man from Savile Row. (Imagine!) And Laura had described its colour as ‘a subtle muted brown’, tickling him with the words as if they were so many feathers. And the hat! Laura had trudged the city to find one that matched; but it had to tone perfectly, of course, or the whole thing would have been pointless.

She came up to him now and touched his beautiful sleeve, enormous-eyed. ‘Something’s happened.’

‘Guess what?’ Felix greeted Clare that night.

‘What?’

‘We’ve got a visitor.’

‘Have we?—Where?’

Felix grinned, tipping himself backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. Clare looked at Laura. Laura looked at Felix and they spoke to each other across Clare, as they often did, with faces slightly uptilted, in a public way, the better to catch double meanings.

‘Oh, tell her, Felix. Don’t tease.’

He was suddenly serious and confiding, taking his hands out of his pockets. ‘It’s young Bernard, then.’

‘Bernard?’

Laura nodded, coaxing and prompting further revelations from Felix.

‘Which Bernard?’

‘There’s only one. Young Bernard, the presser. The second presser. The kid we got to replace that English Tom What’s-’is-name, the thieving hound. The one with the Dutch father we had out to dinner the other month.’

‘Oh, that one.’ An unlikely addition to Felix’s merry band. Still, by the law of averages, Clare had to concede, Felix was bound to strike someone not actually an aspiring criminal once every twenty years.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the spare room,’ Felix said, tantalising, enjoying himself.

‘Well, tell me!’ Clare protested, smiling. ‘Don’t make me drag out every word.’

‘You tell her,’ Felix capitulated to Laura all at once. ‘I’ll go and have a squizz at him.’

‘How did you get on in Melbourne?’ Clare called after him.

‘I think we did very well.’ Drawing her red silk scarf from her throat, Laura glanced at Felix, who had returned to the doorway.

‘So-so,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Don’t forget the week’s expenses.’

‘What about Heath’s order?’

It was Felix’s way, however, to regard financial good news as extremely relative, and bad news as quite absolute, so he could not be cheered or reassured by the pointing out of any ostensibly heartening facts. Genuinely alarmed in case it should strike them that he was making money, Felix gave a knowing laugh and moved off across the hall, still laughing.

Listening, Clare took off her coat. Listening, Laura had a drink of water. When it was safe to speak, her look signalled to Clare, who felt obliged to ask, ‘How’s everything?’ (She did not want to know.)

‘Oh, Felix had some trouble parking the car in town tonight.’

‘Really?’

‘He was good in Melbourne, though, almost all the time.’

Clare lifted the lid of the casserole and looked in. After a pause she managed to say, ‘Was he?’

‘But you know what he’s like in the car.’

Clare dug her teeth into the flesh of her closed lips
and nodded again, her back to Laura.

‘Once he—’

‘Is this all right? I fixed it last night.’

‘It’s delicious, Clare. I meant to say. I’ve tasted it.—Once he—’

‘I still haven’t heard about the visitor.’ Clare spun round. ‘What’s he doing in the spare room? Is he sick or something?’

‘As a matter of fact he is.’ Laura was solemn. ‘Oh, Clare. The poor boy. I was sitting in the office just thinking about coming home and I heard a commotion out in the pressing room, and when I ran through there was Bernard on the floor with all the girls around him.’

‘What happened to him?’ Clare yawned and added in parenthesis, ‘My holiday starts on Monday.’ She caught Laura’s eye and repeated, ‘What was wrong?’

‘Malnutrition for one thing.’ Laura was deliberately stark.

‘Goodness! How can that be? He’s quite well paid, isn’t he?’

‘Of course. But he’s been sending it all to his family. And Joy spoke to his landlady on the phone tonight and, Clare, he’s had a terrible time.’

‘Oh?’ Clare looked at her watch ‘Shouldn’t we put the casserole in the oven?’

‘I was letting it heat up. Yes, it can go in now.’

‘I remember he said that night,’ Clare slid the dish
on to the wire oven rack, ‘something optimistic about saving up so that he can take ten degrees in biology. Or botany.’

‘Yes, he wants to study. (Although he’s doing very well with us and I think Felix would let him train to do the accounts and office work, if—) But he came out here six months ago with his father, and his father, Clare, used to be a pianist before the war but he couldn’t go back to it afterwards, and he came out here as a builder. And they left Bernard’s mother and sister and grandmother back in Holland till they had a place for them. Bernard took this job with us the first week he arrived, and Joy just heard today that he worked five nights a week cleaning offices. He and his father were sending money back and trying to save. Then just a week or so after Bernard came here for dinner his father was killed in an accident. A fall, the landlady said. Imagine, and we didn’t know a thing about it. And since then this boy’s been supporting his family back in Holland and trying to save for this whatever he wants to do, and starving himself to death.’

None of this seemed very real to Clare. While she did not disbelieve the story, she did feel sceptical. It was rather pathetic, of course. If it was true. But why had he come here in the first place? Why had his father allowed himself to be killed? Why did his family need to depend on the earnings of an eighteen-year-old boy? And why had he chosen to want a career
that was clearly not open to him? It was unrealistic. All so hopeless. That night when he had come to dinner she had thought even then, hearing a fraction of all this, that he was unrealistic and that it was hopeless.

‘But what’s he doing here? I mean here, tonight?’

‘I know.’ Laura could hardly account for it herself. ‘You see—’ she extended her hands, palms upward, ‘we had to revive him. And it was closing time. So Felix and I thought we’d at least have to take him home in the car. And when we saw the place, Clare! We couldn’t leave him. An awful little alley off Taylor Square.’

She looked at Clare for understanding: Clare raised her eyebrows. She felt a perverse inclination to distrust the boy, his story, awful little alley, and Laura’s impression of him. After all, Laura’s judgement had never proved so sound in the past! Any greedy, small-minded fraud, so long as he was smooth and smiling, had won sympathy and similar recommendations from her gullible sister.

‘But what are you going to do with him? Are you going to keep him here?’

‘For a little while, I think. He’s a nice boy, Clare. Felix likes him. He’s a good worker, Dr. Bell came round and we explained the situation, and he said Bernard would have to go to hospital if we couldn’t keep him, but that he felt to be looked after in an ordinary household would be much more satisfactory.’

‘Well, it might be more satisfactory for him, but what about you? It’s all very well for Dr. Bell to say keep him. He’s a total stranger. Why should you?’ Clare’s indignation was as spurious as her suspicion had been. She said, ‘I wonder why they came here in the first place?’

Laura noticed Clare’s tendency to want to blame Bernard for his misfortunes and it strengthened her own desire to flutter about him, tending him. She had touched his forehead, taken his pulse. She loved it when people were sick and she could look after them strictly. ‘Well, Clare,’ she said a trifle reproachfully, ‘they were there all through the war. And one of his sisters was killed—’

‘Oh, no! You’re making this up. And, anyway, everyone in Europe today over the age of six must have a war story of sorts. And none of them would be gay.’

‘I’m only telling you that Bernard’s twin sister was killed queuing for food in the snow. Machine-gunned. His father was taken prisoner. Afterwards, I suppose they wanted a new life away from their terrible memories. If they did, it’s no wonder.’

After a slight pause, Clare said, ‘Speaking of wonder, I wonder how our dinner’s getting on? Since I made it, I can’t help taking a deeper interest in it than usual. But, really, Laura,’ she said, on a less disagreeable note, ‘how will you manage? He’ll be left alone all day while you go to work, and that won’t be very stimulating for him, or quite what Dr. Bell had in mind.
And I don’t see Felix agreeing to let you stay home from the office.’

‘No.’ Laura lowered hostile eyes from her sister’s face. How Clare had ever got to be such a hard-hearted girl—

‘What then?’

Laura touched her face nervously, thinking. ‘But what I thought was—if we could manage—Felix would love his company in the evenings. He gets bored. Bernard would divert him.’

Fee
,
fie
,
fo
,
fum—
Clare repressed an urge to mention that Bernard might have some other, more vital, function in life than dispelling Felix’s ennui, but the thought went out from her savagely and Laura gave a little false exclamation. ‘I haven’t changed out of my good suit yet. I’ll just do that, and then serve dinner.’

Clare picked up her coat and went to her room, passing Felix on his way back to the kitchen. Having heard his approach, Laura waited where she was, and Felix looked at her significantly, letting his head somehow rear up on his neck as if he were making a very special point of meeting her eyes. He was teasing. He had a secret. It might or might not be a pleasant one.

Laura hovered. ‘Is everything all right, dear?’

‘As far as I know,’ he said grandly. ‘I am going to squeeze some orange juice for Bernard.’

‘Oh!—Of course. Did he say he would like some?’ In an instant Laura had assembled on the formica
work-bench oranges, sharp knife, squeezer and glass.

‘It occurred to me that he might, conceivably.’ Felix eyed the equipment for the operation. Laura eyed him and it anxiously. Felix had never so much as put a kettle on to boil.

‘Would you like me to do it? I’m more used to it.’

Ignoring her, Felix ponderously selected a small wooden tray from the rack in the corner and laid it on the table. He left the room, looking neither right nor left, and returned with a white laundered cloth delicately embroidered by some Indian hand. He brought the tray and the cloth together—a scientist combining two hitherto unknown elements. He approached the bench and lifted the knife. Laura was bemused by his ability to do these difficult things, by his purposefulness, the terrible importance of it all.

‘By the way,’ he drawled, not turning, ‘you’d better give me that five pounds I paid the quack for his visit and the injections out of your housekeeping. I want to keep my account square for the interest.’

‘Oh? Yes. Of course.’ Distracted, Laura went to her handbag and counted the money from her wallet. She counted the balance. She put a hand to her forehead, though in fact the headache that was beginning to burgeon was at the base of her skull.