The Hanging Garden Read Online Free PDF

angry.
    ‘Yes.’ It sounds like ‘esss’—silly little baby teeth falling out on the sheet, it is what she wants.
    ‘I knew darling, you would see.’
    She gets up, and goes back towards the window, her stockinged feet thumping across the gritty carpet, offering her face to the light from the window, Mamma no longer has the advantage.
    ‘When are you going?’
    She has these lines down her face. Like the ventriloquist’s doll at the Zappeion.
    ‘Well, soon—at once—because they have offered me return passage in this boat. I can’t lose the opportunity, can I? To go back to where I am needed.’ The way she swallows on what she is saying.
    ‘Aunt Alison will come to fetch me—Take me to the boat. Alison will always be here—and kind Mrs Bulpit. You will not be alone.’ She is staring at the light as it was on the window, or the curve of a branch knocking on the glass—or nothing. ‘And soon we shall be together again.’
    *   *   *
    For the time being everyone seemed to have forgotten about her though Mrs Bulpit offered a bowl of what she called ‘porridge.’ It was as convenient to forget as it was to be forgotten. The house was buzzing with the thoughts and actions of those separately in it. As she went outside leaving Mamma to tissues and the bathroom, Mrs Bulpit was attacking the kitchen. Her gloves had changed from asbestos to rubber, her curls hidden in a scarf, the ears of which trembled as she scrubbed, poked, and sang. She had just finished Two Sleepy People , and was starting on Red Sails in the Sunset .
    Light lay heavy—it made the paths look substantial where the concrete had not crumbled, tree trunks and the branches of trees had knotted like the muscles in men’s bodies. Wherever rust had broken out it glowered like blood in the act of drying.
    At a moment when they least expected each other the boy came down into the yard. Perhaps for this reason the half-rotten terrible steps ahead threw him and the things in the half-empty case he was carrying rattled round inside it.
    He was forced by the situation to grunt something about ‘… school…’
    ‘Mmh…?’ she answered.
    ‘When you commin?’ There was menace in his voice, forced on him by school or the light or Australia or something.
    ‘I haven’t been told,’ she replied with as much precision as she could muster.
    She took a sideways look at the blond legs but could not face the pale blue eyes.
    Though it wasn’t called for, she informed him, ‘My aunt—Mrs Lockhart—is coming for my mother.’
    He muttered again, something about ‘Bruce and Kevin…’ to convey contempt, before turning his back. As he mounted the slope to reach the street he was grinding his soles into the concrete. His socks were down around his ankles. She knew enough to sense he was wearing them that way deliberately.
    He had scarcely gone when she ran back quickly inside. Mrs Bulpit had started on Yours . It seemed quite natural that Mrs Bulpit and Mamma should be so irrelevant, not in control of the house. What she most feared, that Gilbert Horsfall might dispute her ownership, no longer troubled her. Certainly he was temporarily absent; but his presence would not have mattered now that she felt mastery was within her reach.
    Skipping, almost, inside the room where he had spent the night, and which still had the smell of what she supposed was a boy’s sleep, she did not even bother to glance at the warrant-officer’s blown-up portrait. That too was irrelevant. She only slightly hesitated before approaching the chest-of-drawers with the dried-out wishbone of some large bird, goose or turkey, lying where she had noticed it the night before. With a confidence she would have found odious in anyone else, she hummed a little of the tune the woman was singing in the kitchen. She gave her imitation a tinny edge reaching a crescendo as she dragged on the sticky knob of that same upper drawer. Again it shot out and hit her where women don’t like to