The Complete Stories (73 page)

That was his real need here: that the situation should make of him something that he painfully longed for and had come here, all unwit-
ting, to have revealed. He had no idea what it might be. He had simply followed some clue in himself and arrived. He hadn't even suspected, before now, that such a situation might exist, that high up here among the trees there was this room, magically sealed off from the rest of the world, where children slept and awaited his coming. He made no connection between these misty creatures in their nylon gowns and the crocodile of noisy schoolgirls in bottle-green tunics and straw hats that he sometimes passed down at the shops. Wandering about in the dark, blindly, hardly knowing what he was after, driven by his own restlessness, his dissatisfaction with himself and everything about him, simply lunging out into the air, down unfamiliar avenues and side streets, he had come to a wall that suggested climbing, since there must be something on the other side of it, then a garden, then an open window that could be entered, and there it was. It was as if he had climbed into a high place of his own head where he could breathe at last, and confronted it: a situation that had always been there and from which he was to force now the long withheld revelation.

But it had begun to go wrong. He had lost his grip of it.

He wondered sometimes how different things might have been if he had chosen another of the children: the child in the second bed on the right for example. They represented, these nine others, a set of possibilities he had not wakened, dreams or stories he had failed to enter, full vessels stored here unused because he had already chosen, or been chosen by—

So many possibilities confused him. They would have to be removed. He must go back to the beginning and take her with him. To a place where they could make things simple again, just the two of them. To their own place. To the tiled bathroom with its rows of mirrors above handbasins and that slow dripping from one of the cubicles.

That was the first step and she made no protest. She too seemed glad to get away. He half-closed the door behind them. It wasn't necessary to close it altogether, that might have alarmed her; and he wouldn't then be able to hear any disturbance from the dormitory. The half-closed door was enough. Here they could be alone, and here he felt the initiative
was in his own hands again. He had separated her from whatever there was that she shared with the other children, and which their presence, however supernumerary, might represent. Here in the washroom, with its naked tiles and its own rituals, as of the ordinary public life set aside and the body laid bare, they could rediscover some of the magic that was theirs alone. He could bring his own body into focus here and rediscover what part it was to play in all this. He could see her not as one of a group of maidens, all washed and white in the alien power of their united but generalized sexuality, which if anything set her at a distance from him and disarmed him of his own power, but as herself— soft, real, touchable, as she had been previously only when he summoned up her image during the day, leading her off in his imagination, and being surprised in that dimension how far she was willing to go into his world, how deeply she herself led him on.

So the washroom was the first step.

They took it.

Returning later to the silence of the dormitory, to the hush in which the others almost breathlessly waited, he felt extraordinarily liberated and sure of himself. He would have liked to laugh right out, to throw the door open and shout into whatever lay beyond, or start a pillowfight and see the feathers fly, to do something loud and exuberant and alive with energy; he felt so filled with the joy of things and the power of his own voice and limbs. He would think of this later as perhaps the happiest he had ever been, when between him and the world there had been perfect concord.

If he had given way then to his boyish desire to whoop and break out everything might have been different. But he was thwarted; and not only by his fear of discovery, which in the recklessness of the moment he might have forgotten. The attention of the others, which was fo-cussed entirely on her, had pushed him away to the edge of the scene.

“O Jane, Jane,” their eyes were saying, "what have you been
doing?”

She too saw it, and her hand touched his in an attempt to reassure him, but it was too late. He felt a surge of anger, and saw, in the blind fury of it, that he must take her further than the room next door. He must eliminate these others altogether.

So it was that he began to talk of a time when they would run away together. He sulked, he cajoled, he was insistent.

“Will you?” the others asked. Their eyes were hungry for it.

“Yes,” she said firmly It was as simple as that.

He dared not ask when. All he could do, as the nights mounted up and the pressure grew in him, was to force her closer, till the link between them was stronger than anything that might tie her to the others and their shared existence, till she stood so far beyond their understanding that she no longer had anything to say to them, and the circle in which they glowed when they sat together on her bed in the dormitory dazzled and even burned the gaze; till together they were so far beyond these others that their going would barely be noticed. He thought of their simply rising where they sat, in a kind of air-bubble, and climbing straight up out of sight.

They stood together at the sill, her hand in his, and looked down into the garden. It murmured and was heavy with the scent of night-flowers and the tink-tink of tree-frogs and crickets.

“Will you?” he said. “Tonight?”

He was, at that moment, the more innocent of the two. The next step, beyond the intimacies of the washroom, appeared to him only in terms that were vague and unimaginable, as some going beyond a point he had not yet glimpsed and therefore dared not press for. Once they were free of the building, down there among the leaves, with earth under his boots and the night all around them, the garden itself would provide the revelation of what it was to be, would speak directly to the blood in his hands. He felt the quickening rhythm of it deep within him.

He had never had a plan. His cunning, such as it was, dealt only with immediate events, and the shape of each occasion as he stepped into it was determined by the elements of the occasion itself and his response to them: a landscape of broken surfaces—light and shadow, cloth and limbs, the black-and-white checkerboard of a bathroom floor, the softness and warmth of her belly under the nightdress, the breathing of leaves under the moon.

“Will you then?” he repeated. “Tonight?”

She looked down into the pool of nightsounds and saw that to put it off any longer would change nothing, since she had already decided. Another day or two, or twenty. She would have to go beyond this point sooner or later. That had been clear from the start.

“Tonight then,” she said, and heard the long sigh he gave, and felt his slow breath pass her. He was utterly happy. Utterly unaware of what lay before them.

For one last moment they sat together, hand in hand on the sill, and did not move.

Later there was to be no reasonable explanation for it. The whole affair would remain, especially to Miss Wilson, for whom they had always been her very own little girls, and models of good behaviour, an impenetrable mystery.

She regarded them now with a kind of horror as they copied from the board and embarked on one of her flights of fancy, starting, as always, from the given paragraph: they had fallen, while out walking, into a cave full of brilliant jewels. Marylyn Shore chewed the end of her biro— "Don't, dear,” she told the child automatically, "you don't know where it's been;” Gillian Bell sucked a pigtail, others gazed wide-eyed at the ceiling, or in the case of Bettina Falk, who was left-handed, turned at that odd angle to the desk; each of them already following her own idiosyncratic path, but all just children really, ordinary healthy little girls who would go on from this point (they all hoped) to normal lives. Watching them she felt it as some deficiency in herself that she could not connect them with the children who had sat there night after night with
him;
watching, keeping his secret, allowing Jane—

She felt a little jump of panic at letting Jane back here among the others, as if she might bring into the room, poor child, some of the terrible knowledge she must have acquired
out there.

Miss Wilson put her hand over her mouth, not to cry out, it was too awful. It threatened to send the whole afternoon flying in splinters. She had to hang on.

But how could they have permitted it? She simply could not comprehend. Allowing Jane to go off like that, without a word of protest, without the least signal of alarm. And even worse perhaps, since it wasn't a single occasion but a matter of days—no, weeks—sitting night after night watching the boy, and even, since they were impenetrably united these children, inveterately secretive, touching him, allowing him to touch them …

At first they had refused to speak at all, they simply shook their heads and were dumb; even when, as gently as possible, they had been made to
understand;
when the awful facts were made clear to them—or as clear as was necessary: what had happened to Jane, and how close they themselves had been to ultimate harm. Even then they revealed no details, they refused to speak out. Had they failed to comprehend the horror of it? Or were they merely stubborn in the defence of their own complicity, or unfeeling, or—yes that, surely—protecting themselves from the full knowledge of what they knew. They had simply gone on, in a way that alarmed and affronted her, as if nothing had occurred at all.

They were writing now with their heads bent to the task, filling the first page with the fruits of their imagination. Later she would read what they had written and give it a mark. She comforted herself with the thought that if their imagination stopped at a certain point it was just as well. It would save them, as she could no longer save herself, from the enormity of the thing.

She glanced quickly at her watch. “Time, children,” she said briskly. “You have two more minutes. Make sure you have a concluding paragraph, label it, and see that your name is printed clearly at the top of the page.”

She stood at the window, with her arms clasped to her breast as if she were cold, though it was in fact too warm today. The garden below was approaching the full thickness of summer, every leaf separate and astir in the afternoon breeze, discovering darkness as an edge of shadow, the hungry little birds dipping and feeding on berries and squabbling disgracefully over the remains.

And in one way or another they had accepted it, the others. They allowed Jane, who had never been popular among them, and whose face soon grew dim in their minds, to walk out of their lives as she had walked out of the dormitory, and made as little as possible of her failure to come back.

The event itself remained for them a series of glowing but unreal moments when they had sat on a bed in the unlighted dormitory and watched Jane and the boy, two figures already touched by the strangeness of distance and the night; high dreamlike occasions between stretches of sleep, when they had, briefly, touched on something outside the rules of their daily existence, the rules that would govern their lives
afterwards, and which they knew now was
there,
had always been there, and would never, even in their own case, and despite the rules, be entirely exorcised; though it did not have to be confronted—or not yet. They would recognise it again later, at a point further on, past the husbands and the children still to come. It was ten years off for one, at the bottom of twelve feet of water; twenty years for another, for others fifty sixty even. It would reappear in a different and quite unpredictable form to each one of them: as a tree trunk suddenly illuminated on a country road, every scribble in its bark clearly readable; or a lump secretly nourished in one of the soft parts of the body; or a welling up, beyond the faces of children and grandchildren, of a sea of blood. At that moment they might understand her at last, their lost schoolfellow, and in whatever part of themselves they harboured a memory of all this, without precisely recalling it, see themselves getting up out of their solid childlike bodies to follow.

Meanwhile there was Miss Wilson's essay to finish—the marvellous cavern to be got out of.

They wrote on.

T
here is more goes on in this suburb than meets the eye. But naturally.

Waiting at McAllister's newsagency yesterday for a magazine order I overheard a conversation between our popular newsagent and Doctor Cooper of Lancaster Road. “You know, McAllister,” the doctor remarked, "you must be about the most regular man, time-wise, in this whole city. I hear your wagon turn into Arran Avenue in the morning and I say to myself, ‘That's McAllister. It must be five thirty. Time to get back into my clothes and go home.’ ” McAllister was delighted. Three minutes later he was repeating the story to a new customer as an example of the complete reliability of his service.

There's no better place than a newsagent's for finding out what goes on in the world. And I don't mean by reading the papers.

Ours is one of the older suburbs, no longer fashionable as it was forty or fifty years ago but still retaining a certain desirable elegance, and still, with its expansive gardens and tree-lined avenues, a place where a mode of life can be observed that has not yet surrendered to the patios, clothes-hoists, and drive-in supermarkets of the Estates. Houses here are of painted weatherboard in the colonial style: with gables, turrets, pepperpot domes, bull's-eye windows of emblazoned glass, verandahs, wrought-iron railings, and venetians that hum in a storm. Bougainvillea and Cardinal Creeper grow thick over outhouse roofs and the lattice-
work that keeps out the westering sun. Lawns planted with old-fashioned natives like hoop-pine and bunya, along with the deodars and Douglas firs of empire, make secluded spaces, some of them close to parklike, where willy-wagtails feed and fat grasshoppers wobble in flight above the cannas. It's a quiet area. Lawn sprinklers weave elaborate loops and figures-of-eight; kids on bicycles hiss over the gravel; a station wagon driven by a young housewife rolls along under the bouhineas, delivering a kindergarten group or a riot of small footballers. Deep in a garden somewhere, a splash, then laughter as children lark about in a backyard pool. That's the nearest you might come to a disturbance of the heavy stillness. At night a tennis court, one wire wall thick with cestrum, suddenly lights up in the sub-tropical dusk and there will be, for an hour or two, the leisurely
thwack thwack
of a ball. So that the assaults, when they broke out, seemed especially shocking.