The Hanging Garden Part 3

She might have been going to cry only the bread and dripping had stopped her mouth up. She was settling down. She was wiping her fingers on the stone wall. A stillness they were sharing made him feel more friendly towards her.

Again she was looking out, across the water, but not in the direction of the blazing city.

*Where I live,' she said very slowly, *there's an island with a volcano on it and a temple. You can see the island across the gulf.'

*What, a real volcano?'

*Of course, but dead for centuries though no volcano's ever extinct-it's only waiting,' she blubbed or shouted, *for the next time.'

He would have liked to get away from this dark snake of a girl.

They were leaving the water. They had begun mounting the path which wound upward through the garden. Antipathy could have died, as an ashy cloud was to obscure the fire in the west, and violence had been suppressed centuries before in the volcano only one of them had seen.

*Did you ever go to the island?' he asked.

*No,' she said dully. *There was always too much to do. My father and mother were political. There was no-one to take me. My father died in prison then the war came.'

*How did he die?' the boy asked.

*We don't know.'

She announced it with a flatness which sounded odd. The violence of that extinct volcano was still stirring and bubbling in him. There was something about this volcano which impressed him more deeply than bombs and war; the volcano was more private, secret.

Perhaps because she had seen it, if only at a distance, the girl was less impressed by it. Her father died in prison. Was the father someone the Colonel would disapprove of? As you disapproved of Irene Sklavos. He s.h.i.+vered as a pittosporum scratched him and recoiled on to her thin black arm.

She did not seem to notice he had touched her, perhaps thinking of the mother who was leaving her behind.

*What was this temple on the island?' he asked, quietly so as not to disturb a situation which had grown quite agreeable.

*People used to go there to pray to the G.o.ddess.'

They continued trudging up the broken path.

*Do you pray?' he asked more carefully than ever.

*Mm?' she sighed. *It depends.'

Remembering his experience of communal prayer with the Ballards, he said flat out *I don't-not any more than I have to.' His mother was such a vague figure he could barely remember what she would have thought. The Colonel was not a church goer while expecting his son to do his duty. *Do your parents pray?' he asked the girl.

*Papa was a Marxist. But I think he prayed when things got bad. Mamma says religion isn't rational.'

*If your parents were Marxist-rationalist-all that-what do you know about praying then?'

*Aunt Cleonaki taught me-about the Panayia and the Saints. Some of the saints are good,' she giggled, *but you mustn't believe all of it, Aunt Cleone says, that's pagan superst.i.tion.'

His breath was coming in short gasps. It wasn't just from the cliff they were climbing by stages. He wanted her to continue talking. *What's this Pana-year?'

*The Mother of G.o.d. She's lovely. When I pray at all I pray to her.'

They were drifting dreamily together, through a gathering dusk which the tangle of garden intensified.

*There's the pneuma too. I like to think about it.'

*What's the pneuma?' His breath was almost snorting, it had grown so heavy.

*I don't know.' She conceded to herself. *I can't tell you-not in English.'

He believed she was lying. She would always try to put one over him.

To show that he hadn't been led away he a.s.sumed the voice the Lockharts-Bruce and Kevin-might have used.

*Wonder what the old girl's got for tea.'

She said she wasn't hungry.

He told her, *I could put away twice the muck we'll get.'

He did not seem to have impressed her. They were on the lap before the last flight of stone steps. They were pa.s.sing the broken statue, under the largest, darkest fig with the flying air roots, where they had first met. Her silence made his skin creep as if ants were walking over it. Was she still thinking of the Panayear and the pneuma? A milky cloud was floating overhead in a gap between the branches of the great fig.

As they came out into the yard he began clattering his boots against the concrete as though to rid them of acc.u.mulated dirt blaring a non-tune from behind large bared teeth. She followed him meekly. Any conversation they might have had was buried inside them.

Inside the house you get away from Gilbert Horsfall as quickly as you can. You have said all you had to say to him. You wish he wasn't living here. From sounds in the kitchen the guardian probably won't cause immediate trouble. You make for the bedroom where in spite of Mamma, you had been most nearly private. Your few things must be there unpacked from the suitcase Mamma has taken back with her.

Your things are there, higgledy piggledy on a chair, and overflowing on to the floor. A stocking hanging from the chair arm, might never have belonged to anybody. The room has already changed back to what it must have been before strangers were admitted. You feel trapped beneath a great white canopy or mosquito net. Though the bed is not at the centre of the room, it and the invisible net will swim centre for sleep and dreams where there were a few stray hairpins and a sprinkling of face powder on the dressing table the night before, a photo of the husband has appeared, a smaller duplicate print of the one in the room where Gilbert sleeps. (What would you do with a husband, not a warrant officer but one say like Papa angrily poised above Mamma's wax figure? You could always keep your eyes shut.) Too many traps. During the day the carpet has sprouted a thick mossy pile. As you advance towards the dressing table your feet scarcely move. It might suck you under, to become a corpse along with other insects it has snared.

Apart from the upright photograph the most noticeable object on the dressing table you might never reach is the box from which the owner's powder must have spilled before she whisked it away. Printed, or you could say written on the lid of the box again in its rightful place, were the words Mon Desir. Inside the box, half open from recent slapdash use is the puff, the powder in its shabby swansdown clotted with moisture. Looking at it makes you sneeze. You could see the puff coating its owner's marzipan flesh with a tint deeper than was natural.

The worst trap of all is the thought of sharing the bed with Mrs Bulpit as you had to some extent shared it with Mamma. Mrs B's suspender belt snapping must sound like the crack of a whip. In her dreams of the warrant officer she might roll over and flatten even a sleepless partner.

Escape immediately if the net, if the moss in which you stand rooted amongst insect corpses, allowed. There is this sound of metal rings. Are they those of the net canopy, rustling into action? Extraordinarily the moss is withering, parting like the Egyptian sea. I may fall as I shoot towards the door on a floor as gla.s.sy as one on which they scatter powder for those who have learnt to dance.

It is the woman's voice rustling out of the kitchen deeper in the house, from out of cutlery and pans, and the smell of onion, no longer the sickly scent of Mon Desir. *... Show her, Gilbert, now that you've found her, where to wash her hands, I don't want to see either of you till I have your tea ready. There's no room for moping or muttering children. Other people have their troubles, you know. One of my migraines is coming on. So if it isn't too much to ask ... I'll be obliged if you behave reasonably...'

The voice sounded slurred, whether from the migraine or something she had taken for it. She was obviously under the weather, which was not surprising, Eirene felt. If it had not been for the positive smell of frying onion you might have broken down and cried in this dark pa.s.sage on the way from the bedroom to nowhere.

Suddenly the boy appeared, whom she had dismissed a short while before. She was glad to see his face glimmer at her, still formless as it approached.

*Come on,' he said, *you don't have to wash if you don't feel like it. Turn the tap on, rattle round in the sink a bit, and she'll calm down.'

He led her out to a scullery or laundry which overlooked part of the back yard. Here he began behaving as he had advised. But Eirene chose to fill the sink and cool her hands. These looked surprisingly helpless for one who normally recognised her own powers. As she wrapped them together and round a piece of yellow soap, and allowed them to escape from her, the hands became a pair of fish too small to send to the market. Which did not remove the probability that somebody would eat them, and in the scullery the smells of sick linoleum and the yellow soap now stranded s.h.i.+ny on the drying board took over from the comforting stench of frying onion.

*There's a towel,' he told her, *but too wet to use. Seeing you were silly enough to wash, you'd better dry your hands on yourself.'

She was glad to come across this practical strain in her companion. She might make use of it later on. In the morning it filled some of the emptiness left by her mother's going away.

After the was.h.i.+ng ceremony they went outside for no definite purpose beyond pa.s.sing the time till their tea was ready. They sat on the steps leading to the yard. The dark trees and browned-out lights of the city beyond encouraged a melancholy which she suspected the boy did not share. His body was harder. It helped him not to mind things so much.

He sat scratching a scab on his knee, and from the goo he felt under his fingers must have got it off finally. He smeared the blood about on the skin but it gave him no idea how he might impress this girl, who had seen a volcano, whose father had died in prison and who had come from where a war was taking place.

*Did you see anybody killed?' he asked, *in the war, I mean.'

*No,' she said. *The war was in the mountains. It was at this time still ... heroic.' She spoke with such slow and special emphasis he could see it rounding in the dark in front of them, like a drop of suspended blood transformed into a jewel. *Oh, I did see something,' she remembered. *An old man hit by a tank outside the gardens. His head was squashed. His brains were mashed into the paving. They said it was done by a British tank. Because the British were in retreat, you see. Then the Germans marched in-and that was different. British MTV took us off because we were friends.'

He envied her all she had experienced and her professional use of terms. It was too unfair that he had so little to offer.

*Were you afraid?'

*Not really. I was taken care of. It didn't seem to be happening to me. It would have been different if we had stayed for Greece. I planned to take Evthymia's sharpest meat knife and kill a German on a dark night.'

*Doesn't sound to me as bad as the Blitz in London.'

*I don't know about that,' she said.

*Thousands killed every night the bombers came over. It was one big firework display. When you got used to it you didn't stay in the shelters with a mob of people smelling and farting. Bombs tore through the shelters, anyway. You got used to walking through the streets through the shrapnel. And in the ruins by day. One night I was shot out of the corridor on my mattress-landed in the street-thought I was dead till I heard a warden ask, *Anyone know this boy's name?' Somebody did. They said, *It's Nigel Horsfall from a block away.'

*I thought your name was Gilbert.'

*Yes,' he said, *it is.'

They continued sitting side by side on the steps overlooking the garden. Had she dropped to him? From her dreamy look he didn't think so. And he wasn't that much a liar. Though he had been evacuated with those other kids before the bombs began to fall you knew what it was like as though you had been there, from what you had been told. If you had imagination you knew. And some had died with poor old Nigel, his only friend. You knew through Nigel. Silly of you though to let the name slip.

But she hadn't cottoned on. He took another look. He might have taken her by the hand. They were wandering through the blacked-out streets. In the ruin of some great house they looked down at the marble face, like of some G.o.ddess broken out of a volcanic temple, only the lips began to breathe, very gently. Irene Sklavos did not seem surprised, it could have been her own face whitened. There was a man and woman pressed up against each other in a gateway. Nigel Brown who knew more about it said they were f.u.c.king. Irene Sklavos seemed unsurprised, when you-or was it Nigel?-led her farther into these desolated streets which belonged to you both by rights of the life you had begun to share, through imagination and dreams.

He looked at her again to see what she was thinking, from her side-on face. If he had pulled her round and stared at her eye to eye, she would have had the round, gently breathing face of the yellow, bomber's moon. Side-on, she was this sharp know-all. If he had touched her elbows or knee-caps they would have been as sharp, as cutting as the words of teachers in cla.s.s or the Lockhart louts-Kevin and Bruce. He couldn't tell which side she was on.

When they were seated one each side of her at the kitchen table their guardian told them, *You may wonder at us eating such a nice piece of steak in wartime. It's because Mr Strutt did me a favour-a mate of Reg's-another of us from the Old Country-always down at the Imperial when we was running it-all returned men-things was different in those days.'

She had cut up her steak very fine. She was only messing with it, the chips were more to her taste. She gobbled at them in between what she had to tell. One of the big flabby chips fell out of her mouth and landed in the gravy, which shot up and spotted her dress.

*You children,' she said, *wouldn't understand.'

Then she realised she ought to clean up the gravy spots and began mopping at them with a hankie. Her red lip-stuff had worn off. Her mouth should have looked normal, except most grown-ups never look that.

Gilbert Horsfall looked across at Irene Sklavos. They should have felt good for a giggle, but they weren't. Like Ma Bulpit, the girl was only picking at her food. She had the sniffles. She looked darker than ever, if not positively green.

In between observing the others and disapproving their wasted opportunities, Gilbert Horsfall polished off his own plateful. He still felt hungry. He might have helped out, he thought-urgh, no, not the mess Ma Bulpit's s.h.i.+ny teeth had refused, now sitting in its own fat. But Irene had hardly touched her tea. He could imagine taking a mouthful of the untouched steak and converting the stringy old stuff into a delicious tenderness. He s.h.i.+vered as his teeth entered the soft, greasy chips. All his imagined acts were becoming so real, he wondered whether Irene would see that he was almost peeing himself. But she kept her eyelids lowered.

Ma Bulpit had begun pulling out. *Expect you're waiting on the pudding,' she mumbled. *All young things have a sweet tooth,' chair grating almost to toppling, *that's why we lose them,' as she stumbled in the direction of the kitchen which swallowed her signature tune. *In the old days I was famous for my Apple Betty.'

Irene Sklavos raised her eyelids.

*What is this Betty?'

Her question promoted Gilbert Horsfall to the rank of friend. He was both grateful for the honour and reluctant to accept it.

*Arr,' he said, sticking out his lips remembering his Lockhart mentors, *it's got these sort of pip-scales in it that make you wanter puke-right enough if you've still got to fill your belly.'

She looked so unhappy he clenched his knuckles under the table. He hoped she wouldn't take him for a Lockhart, but could think of no way of showing her he was otherwise.

Aluminium began battering the silence which had gathered in the kitchen.

Mrs Bulpit appeared leaning in the doorway. *Got a bit burnt,' she explained, *on the top.'

The accident didn't prevent laughter spilling out from around her teeth. She could even have been feeling relieved, anyway for a moment, because in aiming at, and plummeting into her chair, she declaimed, *... you gotter forgive ... me migraine's coming on ... a martyr to it.'

She sat holding a hand above her eyes, like a vast white celluloid shade, while her audience wondered whether they were impressed or suspicious.

Suddenly removing the shade from her afflicted eyes, she announced, *It's the migraine that's kept me from turning out the lovely room I have for our little la.s.s. Too much happening at once,' she sighed. *I'll get round to it, but tonight she'll have to camp somewhere else.'

Eirene Sklavos sat very upright, her neck grown as thin as the stem of a flower. The lobes of her ears seemed to flicker like freshly opened peablossom, only that was impossible. It was more likely that her earlier suspicion would be confirmed, and that she would have to share Mrs Bulpit's bed.

*Aren't we going to get the pud, Mrs Bulpit?' Gilbert Horsfall thought it reasonable to ask.

She was too preoccupied to answer.

And Eirene thought him stupid not to recognise the direction from which serious threats can be expected. In spite of his male strength, he would remain an unreliable ally.

The Bulpit was starting again. *What I think I'll do,' she mumbled as she unlocked her thighs gripping the chair arms with her great white squelchy hands, *I'll make up the other bed in Reg's-in Mr Bulpit's room-till we get ourselves sorted out.'

She sounded as though she was addressing herself-or the former W/O-rather than those more deeply concerned. Of these, Eirene might have felt relief, Gilbert Horsfall could have been stunned, but neither of them revealed a reaction, which in any case their guardian was prepared to ignore.

As she rolled once again out of her constricting chair, she appeared more than anything relieved to have made what amounted to a decision. *... and I wouldn't call it a bad one...' She continued mumbling as she moved about in different dark recesses of the house *... the best I can manage to suit us all' her voice additionally blurred and furry from the smells of damp and mothb.a.l.l.s she was dragging out of cupboards.

At one stage pa.s.sing through the room in which the less important actors in the play had continued sitting, herself a blanketed monument with a train of sheet attached, she suggested, *If you two kids thought of getting on with the was.h.i.+ng up, a person would be much obliged.'

Gilbert Horsfall grimaced, winked, and went through a series of wriggly motions with his torso. In normal circ.u.mstances it might have amused his audience. Now Eirene Sklavos could only accept his leaders.h.i.+p and follow him dully into the kitchen.

There at least it was warm, not to say fuzzy from the charred ruin of the pudding in its aluminium dish, the remains of congealed steak and chips, and what must have been brandy fumes, judging from a half-emptied bottle standing beside the sink in important isolation.

Gilbert grabbed it and reeled as he thrust it at Eirene. *'Ave a swig?' he croaked.

She ducked away. But some of the brandy splashed over her.

Gilbert actually stuck the mouth of the bottle in his and she thought she heard a glug or two and saw his throat in motion. She couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything about this boy. But for the moment she depended on him. For that reason she even loved him, she thought.

Removing the bottle from his lips, he gasped, *So much for the orgy. Now it's down to business.'

He was filling the sink, swizzling the water with soap imprisoned in a wire basket sc.r.a.ping plates into an already smelly bin.

She would have liked to help, but didn't know how. In their Marxist household there had been Vaso, with her arthritika, in Aunt Cleone's vaguely democratic Republican establishment there was Evthymia to attend to duties beneath a lady. Without slaves, Eirene Sklavos p.r.i.c.ked her finger on a fork before throwing that weapon into the sinkful of frothing water.

She stood looking at the pinpoint of blood on the cus.h.i.+on of her finger. It provided some kind of focus point.

*Here, dreamy. Take the towel, if you're too grand to dirty your hands.'