The Hanging Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

be hit. There she had the advantage even over Mamma, even over boys, who might hit but can’t hurt if you are strong. And she felt strong. She felt her thoughts were leaner than Gilbert Horsfall’s. Inside the drawer the same tangle of used string, the roughed up dirty handkerchief lying on top of the laundered ones. She held her breath then slid her hand under the clean handkerchiefs, where women hide the valuables Turks and brigands are looking for, and precious secrets like love letters. Some of the letters had made her feel guilty. The jewels she had slipped on her fingers and round her neck, her flesh growing inside them. She had felt silly finally.
    Now, under Gilbert Horsfall’s handkerchiefs she came across the secret he had hidden. It was a jewel, rather a lumpy one, golden in colour, set in a brooch. Was it valuable? Had he stolen it? She shoved it back in its hiding place. She slammed the drawer. She might have reached the peak of power over this pale, threatening boy.
    She did a few twirls in the centre of the room stretching out her plait as far as it would reach. Dropped the plait. Would it make her look foreign in Australia? It ought not to matter, now that she was strong—if she was. Mamma was leaving, the boy would return when school was out.
    His used bed was still unmade. It looked very narrow against the wall. She shuffled towards and lay down on it raising her arms above her head in defiance of the bed’s rightful owner. The mattress was thin and hard. She whimpered slightly, before turning on her side, taking the shape Mamma had rejected the night before. She lay listening. Now that Mrs Bulpit had shut up, she could hear her own heart jumping round inside her like a caught fish. Otherwise silence. She had the day to fill. She did not fit in. She lay snuffling, whimpering, rubbing her cheek against the single cold pillow to warm them both.
    *   *   *
    Hid yourself most of the day. Mamma did not call or come to look. If Mrs Bulpit called she soon gave up, too intent on all she suffered: ‘… from morning to night—in Australia, madam.’ For the benefit of anyone interested, she announced, ‘We only ever serve a light lunch.’ She might have been talking to the air. Till Aunt Alison came.
    ‘Oh yes, Mrs Lockhart, Madame Sklavos is in the lounge room. The little lass. I-reenee? Your auntie! A little bit upset—and entitled to it—under the circs…’
    *   *   *
    No-one followed up this initial concern by coming in search of the ‘little lass.’ It left you free to investigate Mrs Lockhart—you could hardly think of her as aunt—by more satisfactory methods than those which adults use for children. Sisterly voices were already issuing by bursts and gusts out of the saloni window round the corner. Vines and a thicket of shrubs provided perfect cover for a listener if one of the sisters should look out the window.
    Mrs Lockhart had an older, throatier, smokier voice than Mamma’s. ‘Good Lord … meeting after all these years makes you feel bloody idiotic.’
    ‘… unnatural…’ Mamma corrected in her more precise and foreign-sounding voice from years spent in making foreigners understand, whereas Aunt Alison swallowed her words or bit them off like thread after it had served its purpose. Miss Adams would have found it slovenly speech.
    ‘… always a bombshell artist, Gerry, but never let off one like this…’ trumpets of smoke accompanied the Lockhart voice through the window.
    ‘How a bombshell to want to bring my child to safety? I am letting off nothing. A situation forced on me by fate.’
    ‘… like marrying that Greek commo—if you did—Harold bets you didn’t—not that it matters—I’d never blame anybody for not—if it wasn’t for the poor bastards of children…’
    A cigarette butt came flinging out the window to smoulder on a mattress of damp leaves.
    Mamma’s voice had never sounded so cold and pure.
    ‘We married to baptise the child. Whatever