The Watch Tower (5 page)

‘In America.’ Light-headed, Laura lifted a batch of receipts from the desk. Reality was a child’s Meccano skyscraper, and the game was to surprise the toy inhabitants by pulling the floors from under them.

‘America! Well, how did that get into the act?
I
wasn’t sayin’ anything about America!’

Her young tutors forgave Laura much, however, the day she too was persuaded to buy a Purple Wine lipstick, after holding out against it so long that they had deemed themselves criticised.

Mrs. Vaizey smiled. ‘Good heavens, Laura! Blue lips! You look as if rigor mortis had set in. You look like a far-advanced heart case.’

There was a war on.

On Saturdays at the pictures, newsreels showed the bombed cities of Europe and later still the deserts of the Middle East and the northern jungles, streaming jungles where trees walked and killed. Callow, shallow, safe, ashamed, the Vaizey girls were part of an audience that witnessed the destruction of the light of the world from cushiony red seats in the lilac-scented disinfected dark. They were pressed back on themselves and their few square inches of knowledge and experience. They felt in themselves and each other the inadequacy, hollowness and frustration of one seeking
water at a dry spring.

Walking slowly home they talked with an empty excited despondency. Laura more easily wound herself up to judge, pronounce, and theorise, but Clare only ground the soles of her shoes harder into the footpath and, grated, said, ‘What’s the use? We don’t
know
.
We don’t
know
.
I mean—’ She only meant it felt something like blasphemous, something like licentious, for their ignorance to speak, improvise opinions, consider its emotions in this situation. ‘I mean—we don’t know anything.’

Laura stood in a thicket of people where the bare sunburned arms of strangers touched each other, to watch the soldiers marching down Elizabeth Street to the Quay and the waiting ships.

‘It’s a shame the kids are all at school. They should give the boys a proper send-off on a Saturday when—’

Trumpets came level suddenly, sopping up voices, eyes, attention, flashing, passing. Drums, boots, a mesmerising march tune that compelled the most blasé-seeming of pedestrians to fall in with the ‘
left
,
left
,
I
had a good job but I
left
’
of marching boots. Slouch hats, khaki, bayonets glittering, flags performing in the wind.

‘North. That’s what they say. That’s where they need ’em.’

Brown-faced soldiers, and more soldiers. (
Left
,
left
,
I
had a good job but I
left
.)
Another band playing
with pitiless gaiety.

‘They look pretty tough, eh? Look like fighters, don’t they? Good old Aussies—’

Again the crowd cried out, and again cheered, and soon another heart-wrenching band was heard in the distance approaching.

Laura watched, and was not the only one to glance up and away from the
left
,
left
,
of sparkling tan boots to the high brick walls of the insensible department stores and office buildings opposite.

Pausing over the ironing of a blue cotton dress, she said to her mother, ‘Even Clare’s doing something at school with these exhibitions the teachers fix to send bundles to Britain.’

‘Well, don’t tell
me
if you want to send someone a bundle.’ Brittle with boredom, Stella Vaizey looked up at Laura, then looked a moment longer than she had intended, and even made a suggestion. ‘Since you can’t knit, and I don’t quite see you entertaining a serviceman,’ she laughed a little, ‘you’d better join something.’

From an hour’s consideration of ‘Clubs’ in the telephone directory, Laura drew the names of three organisations. At the first one, the enamelled woman behind the desk looked her over with a single intimidating flicker of her eyelashes.

‘
What
was it you wanted?’ (She could not have
heard correctly.) ‘To join the club?—I see. Do you know any members? Three members must sponsor your application, of course.—Then I’m afraid—’

An American colonel pushed through the swing-doors and lamps were lighted behind this lady’s suddenly beautiful blue eyes. Someone was at home after all!

Laura took herself off, rocking uneasily on her high heels in the rubbery carpet. She had had no conception that the club would be so—rich. Exclusive. They wanted—they
said
they wanted people to help, but—There was a roaring fire of embarrassment in her chest; not only her face but the whole of her boiled and blazed as she staggered knee-deep (it felt) in the asphalt pavement back to the Quay. It was Saturday afternoon. She had hoped to announce to her mother and Clare—

At the next club, a week later, she turned out to be too young; at the next one, she was not a member of the Church; at the one after that, the entrance fee was three guineas.

Not the girl to pass off these rejections with a self-protective and negligent wave of the hand, she stared at her mother for advice.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ Mrs. Vaizey said. ‘Remember Bruce and the spider.’

‘Just a jiff.’ The greengrocer was a middle-aged,
middle-sized man with thinning hair and brown eyes. like small stones.

Mrs. Vaizey had said, ‘Find out from one of the shopkeepers where we go to collect our new ration books. Ask anyone.’ So Clare asked him after he had served her with potatoes and onions and started to pick over, in the fashion of a browsing animal who has spent a lifetime in one bare paddock, his spotted apples.

‘Now, look,’ he said, brushing his hands over his canvas apron before using them to point with.

Clare stood with him in the doorway of his shop. He smelled like a fruit salad. Evidently he was thinking hard. He looked as single-minded as a commando. ‘See that hill up there? Well, you go
up
there. You turn
left
at the second lot of cross-roads. You keep
straight on
for a block. You go
over—
’

While looking at him more or less rationally, and trying to absorb his brain-bending instructions, Clare began to be aware of a current of charm and joy humming through her. The man kept talking. She wished he would never stop. She herself had become a pinpoint astronomically distant, silence, light.

Oh, man, she thought without words. Oh, man. I love you.

Life was hard. He was harmless. He had forgotten her. He was all concentration, and innocent, and vulnerable. Clare only knew he awed and thrilled her, that she at the same time knelt to him and protected him out of
an ocean of warmth she suddenly had at her disposal.

‘Well, ’ve you got that? Do you know where you’re going?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she lied ardently.

‘Well, you’re set like a jelly!’ In his trance again, in his enclosure where the earth was eaten bare, he glanced at the girl and ambled back to his work.

Clare reeled away down the street, not thinking at all. She could have hugged his knees. Oh, how wonderful! Wonderful! The man was beautiful! She could fly. She could electrify the air. She could create—cause—That wasn’t it. She knew—had witnessed—understood—felt—

She leapt along the footpath, a new Philippides, alight, alight. Glory!

Twice she lost her way to the ration book centre and finally had to ask for directions again, but she only turned down the volume of joy in order to hear, then swooned up the hill, her head ringing with it.

‘Mr. Shaw must be making a lot of money, Laura?’

Stella Vaizey and her daughter were sitting together on the small back balcony. Laura was drying her hair in the sun, and shelling peas into a pot.

‘He is. I think he must be.’

‘Aren’t there any restrictions on that stuff he uses?’

‘He has a friend who gets it for him. All the men who come in to see him say he should expand, but
I think he’d rather sell out to Mr. Roberts.’

When Laura saw the two men together the following day, however, she wondered if Mr. Shaw did not want more to please Mr. Roberts than to sell him the business. A long-faced morose-looking man with lank brown hair, and perhaps ten years younger than Felix Shaw, Jack Roberts appeared to have appropriated the vacant position of boon companion to her employer. They held muttered conversations in the corner of the room for hours on end. Mr. Roberts was an excellent listener, but occasionally he put in a dry-sounding remark that brought on one of Mr. Shaw’s spasms of laughing. Yet even when Jack Roberts was being (presumably) funny, Laura thought he had an almost dangerous, unamused look in his eyes. Mr. Shaw once remarked to her with heavy pride, ‘Mr. Roberts is pretty high up in the black market, you know.’

Ron Moffat, the bank manager, was walking past the factory on Monday morning when Laura and Felix Shaw emerged with armfuls of airy cartons to stack in the car.

‘If you sell this concern, Felix, I’ll pay for you to have your head examined. It’s the coming thing! The coming thing! After the war—plastics, all these new materials. You’re in on the ground floor. God knows where you get your stuff, and I’m not going to ask you. But hang on to it!’

Jack Roberts pulled a dog-eared contract of sale
from his pocket that very afternoon.

Mr. Shaw said, ‘Oh, a handshake on it’ll do me, Jack. A gentleman’s agreement. I trust you!’ He laughed very much saying this, and his eyes were moist.

Jack Roberts grinned. ‘No, you don’t! Strictly legal. You might try and back out. I’ve got my boy lined up for eleven tomorrow morning.’

A great excessive shrug of acquiescence was torn out of Mr. Shaw. He hardly knew what to do with himself. His smile was unhappy, his eyes searching. ‘Right! Right you are, then!’ He was asking for a ludicrously small sum which he had agreed, in effect, to lend Jack Roberts, on ludicrously easy terms.

The factory girls went with the stock, but Mr. Shaw said, ‘Reckon I might keep the typist. Got her trained to my methods.’ He was combing the city and suburbs for a broken-down business to build up.

‘Sure, sure. You’re welcome.’ Jack Roberts slid his cold gaze over the unsophisticated typist.

‘You’re a grown woman now, Laura, and you can please yourself whether you look for a new job or go with him,’ her mother said. ‘Mr. Shaw’s always been kind to you.’

‘How?’ Clare asked, turning aside from her homework, looking at them out of her light-grey eyes, and using the end of her long plait as a shaving-brush against her chin.

Laura grimaced uncertainly, meeting her eyes. (‘You can please yourself!’) Mr. Shaw—She didn’t know him. He never had much to say. He had never once called her Laura. ‘
You
,’ he said. She was considerably more surprised than flattered that he wanted her to remain with him, though she
was
flattered. (‘You can please yourself!’) And then, surely, if he had sold the box factory, it was to invest in some pleasanter, more inherently interesting business?

‘How?’ Clare asked again, lightly crunching the end of her plait between her front teeth.

‘Unless there’s anything about the man you haven’t mentioned to me, Laura?’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘He gave you stockings and chocolates last Christmas. Admittedly, he gave the factory girls a cash bonus, but you wouldn’t have wanted to be on the same footing with them.’

Mr. Shaw—Laura stood thinking inside herself. When he did speak it was only ever about work. Sometimes he disappeared for a few days without warning, but he never confided, when he came back, ‘I’ve been fishing,’ or ‘I’ve had a cold.’ He was a mystery to her.

‘A pound a week rise!’ Clare said, spreading the loose end of her plait like a fan. ‘Still, it’s not worth it if you don’t like him.’

‘Who said she didn’t?’ Stella Vaizey was cross. ‘Saying to talk it over with her family. He sounds a
very nice man.’

‘I’ll go with him.’

‘Please yourself, Laura. I’ve got no desire to influence you one way or the other.’ Mrs. Vaizey’s interest in bridge outstripped by light-years any other feeling ever to have moved her.

Clare went up another year at school.

Mr. Shaw bought an almost defunct home-made chocolate factory not far from the site of his former business. (‘Might be able to look in and give old Jack a hand.’) He expected strenuousness from Laura and she, with mental energy to spare and practice in providing older people with what they expected, buried herself in her job daily. At the very beginning she had found it difficult to think of boxes with the respect due to saleable products, and she had a slight struggle even now to take chocolates seriously; but habit, which had, after all, accustomed her to her life, was training her.
Money
,
she began to think, with some reverence.

‘Those Americans are chasing us,’ Clare laughed, looking over her shoulder as she and her sister ran for the ferry. ‘Should we let them catch us?’

‘No!’

In Sydney there were fifty uniformed Americans on leave to every woman, and the section of the population that felt inclined for exercise was able to indulge in a marathon game of chasings round the sunny streets
and beaches.

On the ferry, uniformed boys asked, ‘May we sit and talk with you?’ and then with great politeness began to collect facts about the girls’ lives. Looking out at the harbour’s islands and bays, at the fleets of camouflaged ships, the white-painted hospital ships, the submarine boom across the entry to the inner harbour, they amiably described their own homes and families, speaking in Hollywood accents that made them seem like characters rather than people. But Clare often whispered, the warm resonance of her breath like a bee in Laura’s ear, ‘This one’s really lonely, not just kidding. Couldn’t we take him home?’

Laura only had to look at her. They had never taken
anyone
home.

At Manly Wharf, when they left the ferry, more than once they drank chocolate malteds or orange juice with some thin tanned American boy, his face and uniform without a single crease. And more than once, not exactly by arrangement, but not quite accidentally either, Laura met the same boy two or three weeks in succession. Leaves were short, however, and boys disappeared. That they disappeared from
her
life was probably opportune. ‘No,’ was all she could say to every effort to entertain, for she could not endure the thought of her mother’s supercilious, ‘A-soldier-who-picked-you-up-Laura?’