The Hanging Garden Read Online Free Page B

furniture. Mrs Sklavos closed her eyes, her nerves couldn’t stand it, all they had been through.
    ‘Whatever’s so funny?’ Mrs Bulpit shouted when she had recovered from her alarm, and her teeth had settled back to normal. ‘I’m surprised at you, Gilbert. I always thought you was a gentleman.’
    He had left his chair, and was rolling around on the floor, as if he had the stomach-ache.
    Or poisoned by salmon loaf it crossed her mind. It made her laugh the harder.
    Mamma said, ‘Stop, Eirene. You’re hysterical. At once. Please .’
    She obeyed more or less, perhaps because she was a girl. Anyway, she settled into a more controlled, gradually spasmodic mewing, above the skewed doiley in front of her. Mrs Sklavos admires the lace. Mrs B explains the doileys have been dipped in tea. ‘Effective, aren’t they?’
    Gilbert Horsfall continued rolling on the floor, bellowing a little longer, before returning to his chair with the black barley-sugar woodwork. He sneezed once or twice and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
    ‘The idea!’ Mrs Bulpit said. She said children get out of hand when there is a war on, she said a joke was a joke but , and a bit more in that vein.
    The children sat behind their eyelids. They might have been sulking, wondering how much they had given away to each other, if little ripples had not returned from time to time to their cheeks.
    *   *   *
    Mrs Bulpit had given up her own room to the mother and daughter. She wanted them to feel at home. She would sleep on the lounge, she said. Detecting a martyr, Mrs Sklavos did not protest. She was too exhausted anyway. After looking at herself in the dressing-table glass and stroking up her hair fiercely with extended fingers she took off her dress, prodded the bed, and got into it in her slip.
    ‘Aren’t we undressing properly?’
    ‘I’m too tired.’
    The scene in the dining room was still jumping around inside Eirene. She felt she wanted to prowl a bit. The owner had left behind a scattering of hairpins, a dusting of face powder. She would have liked to open drawers and doors but Mamma might have opened her eyes.
    Instead she prowled in her socked feet (Mamma had not taken off her stockings). She took off her dress, as Mamma had done. She looked very thin out of it, her upper arms, compared with plumped out woman’s flesh and her shoulder blades. In the glass the shoulder blades were looking as sharp as Aunt Cleone’s ivory paperknife marking the Lives of the Saints. The shoulder blades were unmarked. Nobody had bitten into them. She saw this woman in the naked dress, her back, her shoulders, covered with little red marks, like a rash, or rubber kisses. The woman either didn’t know, or didn’t care, as she waited for the long black car to pick her up. Black eyelids of the man. The woman folding her umbrella before getting inside.
    ‘Eirene, aren’t you coming to bed?’ Mamma frowned without opening her eyes.
    It was already warm, but sagging, in the bed which had been the Bulpits’. They were still rolling like porpoises as you fitted yourself into a place beside Mamma. Would she want to touch? You could have plastered yourself against her side, deeper if she would have received you, if the warm wave of flesh you were expecting rolled towards you, its perfect darkness lapping around the little sleeping trout you were waiting to become. She did heave a little, to share with you a fleshy moistness, if not the perfect dark curve you were waiting to fit inside.
    It was still only Geraldine Sklavos. Her rings hurt. Her suspender pimples. Why hadn’t she undressed? Was she waiting to jump up and leave? Were the Germans, or some other enemy going to arrive?
    ‘Oh dear,’ she sighed. ‘What a lumpy, uncomfortable bed.’
    At least she reached down and started peeling off her stockings. And threw them out. Should you take off your socks?
    ‘Those creatures…’ She began slightly giggling.
    ‘What?’ Should you giggle in