The Hanging Garden Read Online Free

The Hanging Garden
Book: The Hanging Garden Read Online Free
Author: Patrick White
Pages:
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at the centre like a navel, and the warrant officer’s arms glow like a butcher’s shop. The moustache, darker in a blond face, almost drops. He could have varnished his moustache before he left for the photograph. Or is it blood? There is nothing to fear, now he is dead. I am the live one, so hungry I could eat a plate of meat— chirino , stifatho , brizoles —stuff it in—bones and all. The wife and Mamma too busy talking money and woollen underclothes to notice. Only the boy will watch. Is he already watching? On this ugly chest a dry wishbone. Drag on this sticky knob and the drawer grinds, hits me in the breast. There is a snotty string spreading on the handkerchiefs, one of them used. Yes, I am watched. It is his room.
    *   *   *
    All the house, the garden, must belong to one or other of them. There was nothing they could possibly share, the girl knew as the rotten, ricketty steps allowed her access to her garden. It was hers, like the past, those memories of the Royal or National Garden, whichever way you look at it—nothing could destroy her. She must ferret out this boy if he would not face her, and make it clear.
    Then she was looking up into the heart of this black tree, her face held flat like an empty plate and his boy’s face slanted above her from looking down empty-eyed into her other emptiness. There was no question of how they might fill the silence. The moment before it might have smashed to smithereens below, or dissolved in a stream of spittle from the tree into her mouth, instead the voice floated from out of the house light and girlish as nobody had heard, ‘Come away, Irene—Gilbert! Children? Something lovely for your tea…’
    *   *   *
    They were all three seated round the large black shiny table of a dining room you could tell was seldom used because so much was on display, dishes standing on their edges, silver for a wedding, a clock which had stopped between marble columns below a pediment (Greek in fact) the air unbreathed, cleaner than in any of the other dustier, used rooms, the two children heads bowed, the boy playing with cutlery the girl tracing the pattern (or was it her fate?) in a tea-dipped crochet doiley, ‘Madame’ Sklavos staring ahead with a smile of disbelief as they waited for their hostess to bring whatever she had for them.
    Madame Sklavos sighed and still smiling her disbelieving smile suggested ‘I expect you miss Mother and Father, Gilbert.’
    The boy grunted and raised a shoulder. Because it was only one of those questions they ask children, he did not bother to tell her Mother was dead.
    The boy’s hair was as pale gold as she had been told, Madame Sklavos noticed. Blond men left her unmoved.
    ‘Don’t you think you ought to leave that doily alone, Eirene? You might unpick it.’
    She spoke with distaste either for the ugly lace, her dark child, the blond boy, the situation in the dining room, or the whole of life stretching out of and away from the house on the precipice.
    ‘Doiley…’ Eirene muttered a new word.
    She gave the flat mat a pat or slap. The cutlery on either side of it clattered alarmingly.
    Their hostess saved the situation. ‘… Hope you like it!’ she half-panted, half-giggled from the kitchen. Forestalling the person her words hung in the dining room surrounded by a black line like what they say in a cartoon.
    When Mrs Bulpit appeared she was wearing a pair of asbestos gloves halfway up her marzipan arms, her figure stooped out of proportion to the size and weight of the battered pie-dish she was carrying.
    ‘It’s salmon pie’ she told them, slapping the pie-dish on the sideboard and then seeming to wonder whether the hot aluminium had marked the varnish.
    Madame Sklavos was more than ever disbelieving, her chin tilted in that way of hers. Eirene more interested, for something foreign, but Gil Horsfall, a man amongst so many women, gloomed and refused to show what he thought of salmon pies. Mrs Bulpit’s smile had
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