The Hanging Garden Read Online Free Page A

got smeared in the kitchen. Parted from the not so heavy pie-dish she remained humped between the shoulders. There was a smear of sauce on the black dressmaker’s dummy bust. But she remained the optimist.
    Eirene recognised the symptoms from having indulged in hope herself, and for the first time felt sympathetic towards her guardian-to-be; out of sympathy she would have liked to force some of the soft vertebrae in salmon loaf from tinned salmon past the greater predominant lump in her throat.
    Mrs Bulpit seated herself and was making passes with her fork above her plate. ‘… husband’s favourite dish,’ she told. ‘Mind you, he liked his steak—a steak dinner—and meat for tea, if you gave it to ’im. Men must have their meat, wouldn’t you say Mrs Sklavos?’
    Mamma quilted her mouth, her cheekbones had taken on a pinched look. The light had made them look blue. She was chilly.
    Mrs Bulpit did not expect an answer, ‘That’s as it may be,’ she decided staring rather hard at her salmon loaf, as though she had seen something in it, before her fork dived and she was wrapping teeth and lips round a generous mouthful, sauce bubbling in beads at the crimson corners.
    ‘There’s nothing so nourishing as food,’ she said between swallows. ‘It doesn’t have to be sweet. Food is food. You’ll agree to that, Mrs Sklavos.’ She plucked a hankie from the bracelet of her wristlet watch and mopped at her pronouncement. ‘All those Hindu spices … and some foreigners cook in oil, pooh!… With us it’s always plain fare. You know where you are with the British.’
    Thus encouraged the boy began shovelling in his salmon loaf. Why not? It wasn’t too bad, and he felt empty. He filled his mouth—fuller than he should have to show them, but no-one seemed to notice. He knew how ugly he must look. He swallowed, and after a bit lost interest, except in finishing his tea.
    The Greek-Australian woman or whatever she was had laid her fork alongside her untouched food. ‘Don’t you fancy it, Madam?’ Mrs Bulpit found time to ask. Mrs Sklavos was a real pain, the boy could tell. The girl was messing around with her tea, only because someone would have gone for her if she hadn’t. She was holding her head on one side, like some governess, to show she was grateful for small mercies. However dark her face, the parting in her hair was white. He had never seen such a straight white parting. He wondered whether she did it herself, or her mother helped.
    Just then she looked up. They were looking at each other. Her face sharpened, she was no Miss Adams trying to look grateful. She had probably done her own parting, and if she offered to do yours she would toss back the hair on either side flip flap, with a sharp-toothed comb before finding where the parting went, then dig in the teeth.
    It was his eyes that surprised her. She had never looked into such pale eyes. They gave out nothing, like blind eyes, or old people with cataracts. Till they began shifting like shallow water, a thought or two scuttling through the shallows that he would rather have kept hidden from her, that he might have been afraid for her to know.
    And wondering had made her less sharp.
    The face was round when he had thought it pointed, the mouth lying soft and loose, like one of the brown skinned sea anemones when there isn’t a crab anywhere near.
    She was making him lose control of his face, his eyes were watering, when he had never meant to let this girl get a hold of him.
    It was ridiculous after all, she saw, in this ugly room, nothing to do with Mamma or Mrs Bulpit, or war, or death.
    She might have had doughnuts inside her cheeks.
    She would burst, she thought.
    They were both bursting from deep inside them.
    Mouths stretched, they could see each other’s teeth. Hers white and even, there was a gap in his and a dob of salmon loaf, would it fly out?
    As they shrieked to tear their lungs.
    A bomb might have gone off amongst all this dark