The Hanging Garden by Patrick White Read Free Book Online

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 shivered 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 goddess.’
    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 superstition.’
    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 God. 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 assumed 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 passing 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