Free The Hanging Garden by Patrick White

Whirling out in a waltz. Shoving away at a foxtrot, up against their crotches. They said your sister’s stuck up but it never reduced her market value. Geraldine Pascoe. Became a nurse. I ask you. Never believed in Gerry’s vocation for a moment. Lead them on and tie them down, erection and all, under a sheet that was it. No typing pool for Gerry. Touch typing—ha ha. Can’t think why Harold ever. Perhaps he married a typist. Those boring novels nobody will ever publish.
    I am plain, plain, plain. Mother said it. Father even called it ugly, the night of the great piss up, when he came, and went, and stayed away forever.
    Here she is. Back with the matches. Tripping pretty sweeting. Who ever said it?
    ‘Thank you, dear. It’s sweet of you.’ Hypocritical word, but what they use, ‘That’s better.’ Cough, cough. Smoke, if you could tell her, or any one of any of those damn parsons, is one of the few remaining mysteries.
    Instead cough. ‘Your mother must be proud of you.’
    The child turns on those eyes, not Gerry’s could be the Greek commo’s—or her own? God, yes, I hope they’re her own—if it wouldn’t make her lovelier.
    ‘Ireen, dear—we’re late enough—we ought to start for school—hope it won’t be too shocking—it won’t—the boys love it…’
    Oh God, she’s still looking at me.
    ‘If there’s ever anything you need, dear, or want to know—you’ll ask me, won’t you?’
    ‘Yes, Mrs Lockhart.’
    Oh God. Well I am , aren’t I?
    ‘Where’s Mrs Bulpit? We’re going! Mrs Bul-pit? On our wayhheh !’
    She comes running, the ghastly creature, head first, almost over the lounge.
    ‘The lunch,’ she gobbles. ‘A child needs a nourishing cut lunch—specially in wartime.’
    Not a bad old stick, she’s even produced a case.
    ‘Old, but it’ll serve, Mrs Lockhart, till we get something better.’
    Ireen takes the battered case. She holds it at the end of a stiff arm. It might have contained a bomb instead of this other jumping object—a cut lunch.
    *   *   *
    You didn’t want any sort of lunch, least of all a cut one. They cut Vasieolis’ throat. If you stopped eating, you would die quietly, painlessly. They will pick you up like a bunch of wilted spinach, from which the green will have drained away. No blood, either green or red.
    Anyway, for this moment, you would have liked to live in such a way, following the Australian aunt up the path through the garden to which you no longer have or want to have a right. Belonging nowhere. The cat tripping across ahead her tail in the air belongs somewhere here, in this garden which you believed was becoming yours.
    The aunt has wrinkles in her skirt below her behind. Wrinkles in her stockings. She is what Aunt Cleone calls basse classe . Mamma sees poverty as a virtue. Class is a different matter. Here Mamma would agree with Aunt Cleone even when her own sister is at stake. But Alison Lockhart is scarcely Mamma’s sister. As you have seen and heard yesterday standing on the flowerpot at the window sill.
    Scurrying up the concrete path she is wondering what she can say to me. I answer it trying to get it. I can’t help her.
    ‘Well, here’s the vehicle , Ireen. Throw your case in the back. As you can see, the boys have left it in the hell of a mess.’
    There are several pairs of scarred, muddy boots with knobbed soles, and these wads of newspapers with coloured drawings, stirred together, torn and trampled into the dust on the floor of Mrs Lockhart’s car. The case thumps and bounces where you throw it, as she told you to. Glad to be rid of the hateful ‘lunch’.
    Now she is trying to start the car. It will not go.
    ‘Asthmatic. But in the end it doesn’t let you down.’
    She is pressing and prodding and pulling at things. This is how she gets the wrinkles on her bottom. Wheezing and coughing out the smell of smoke. A bit asthmatic herself, it seems.
    ‘There—you see—reliable!’
    For the car has started to jerk and