The Hanging Garden by Patrick White Read Free Book Online Page B

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 shiny 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 washing ceremony they went outside for no definite purpose beyond passing 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