The Watch Tower (23 page)

‘I am inviting the boy to stay for a while,’ Felix said, when dinner was almost over, as he helped himself
to a chunk of Gorgonzola cheese. ‘He can board. He’s due to get sick-pay. When that runs out we’ll see about the rest.’ He crunched a hard biscuit while the women considered the best way to react. It was unwise to press him, but equally unwise to seem uninterested.

‘You saw the hovel he’s been in. If he isn’t crazy, he’ll stay, and I don’t think he is. We can take him for runs in the car. He hasn’t seen anything.’

‘You haven’t asked him yet?’ Clare held her coffee cup out to Laura, who had raised eyebrows and pot at her.

‘No, he’s asleep. Old Bell gave him some sedative or other.’ To have to admit to the possibility of rejection! Supra-casual, he lifted his face, on which tomorrow’s beard of black and grey was already beginning to sprout. His eyes looked out nervously from the loose dark-brown skin of his face, from under thick untidy eyebrows all askew. His hands shook over his plate.

‘He’s in no condition to go anywhere, poor boy. He’s sure to want to stay,’ Laura said stoutly, deeply uncertain of the wisdom of this, its practicability, her own preferences.

They both looked at Clare, on whom they relied in singular situations to interpret the dangerous world and people to them. Since she was valued now in that external place by strangers (surprising promotions, salary increases, unknown people ringing her, asking her out) they had begun to notice her, as if avaricious
prospectors had tried to lay claim to a small goldmine in their very own backyard.

‘Why wouldn’t he be?’ she said lightly.

Felix beamed and sat back. He waved an inspired finger at them both. ‘I’m going to get that crystal chandelier off Dave O’Brien. Been talking about it long enough.’

‘Oh!’ Laura clasped her hands and made great circles of eyes and mouth, like a Victorian miss promised a sugar plum.

‘Let’s make some plans, why don’t we?’ Felix cried. ‘Let’s get organised and line up a few outings.’

Clare stood up and began to collect the dishes together. ‘You two can work things out while I wash up.’

Felix stopped laughing. They all exchanged looks. Laura said hastily, ‘No, no, you have to help arrange things, too.’

Did she? Yes, on second thoughts, quite definitely, she did.

‘Right,’ she said firmly, sitting down again.

‘Wait! I’ll get paper and pens.’ Laura was out of the room and back before there was time to speak, distributing scribblers and ballpoint pens. ‘Now then—’ She broke off to say, in a wondering voice, ‘Do you know—Bernard’s the first visitor we’ve had to sleep in all these years.’

Later, Laura and Felix disappeared into the invalid’s room, combed and polished and on tiptoe. Clare
refused their cordial invitations to join the company, saying mildly, ‘Have a heart. The boy’s not well.’

‘Oh, we won’t stay long,’ Laura assured her, as they slipped in for an hour’s conversation.

Strolling through to the front of the house, Clare went on to the balcony. A big liner, lighted all over, was moving noiselessly across the dark harbour in the direction of the Heads. Emptily, she watched it, breathed the moist air, stared at the level plain of sombre cloud. The ship passed out of sight.

It was Sunday morning. Clare was looking through the contents of her wardrobe. Laura sat perched on the edge of the dressing-table stool balancing words in her mind.

‘Felix’s writing some business letters.’

‘Uh-huh?’ Clare paused over a green skirt. ‘Is that too old to take?’

‘No—Clare. You wouldn’t go in and talk to Bernard for a few minutes, would you? You haven’t spoken to him since he came. He’ll think it’s funny if you don’t talk to him. You’re nearer his age, too.’

‘I’m five years older than he is. How will he think it’s funny? He doesn’t even know me.’

‘Yes, he does. He met you at dinner. We’ve mentioned you. He knows you live here.’

Clare draped a pair of slacks over her arm, saying soothingly, inattentively, ‘Honestly, he doesn’t want a
strange woman drifting in to talk to him.’

‘Please, Clare. Just for a few minutes. He seems to get nervous if he’s by himself.’

‘Nervous?—When has he had a chance to discover that? You two have been with him all the time. How is he going to get on tomorrow when you both go to work?’

Laura looked down. ‘I haven’t discussed it with Felix yet.’

Folding her clothes on the bed, Clare pointed out, ‘I am trying to get ready for a holiday, Laura. A whole month!’ With a whoop, she dropped to the floor and turned a somersault. ‘
Yes
,
I’ll talk to Bernard.’

Laura said harshly, ‘Well, comb your hair first.’

Any display of light-heartedness in this house had a way of seeming indecent.

‘I was told to bring your tonic and some fruit juice,’ Clare said, going slowly in after knocking. ‘We met a few months ago when you came to dinner.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

Impressions reached her of illness, pallor, slanted hazel eyes, noticeable cheekbones, dark-brown tousled hair. Illness. She was chastened. She had glibly derided Laura and written the boy off as a plausible young tough. Well, he was young—

While she stood in the middle of the floor and they talked about the doctor’s diagnosis and the view, Clare was recalling the night he had come to dinner. The cuffs of his sleeves were frayed. This made them
unique in her experience. Though her mind offered no comment on the sight, she kept noticing them. Then she and Bernard had shaken hands. His palm was hard and calloused. He regarded Laura and Felix steadily, in a way that Clare had resented. At one point she had seen him in profile, and in the patience and severity of its lines she had recognised experience and respected it. He had a Dutch father, an English mother; he was bilingual, and meant to be a biologist. Or a botanist. He played the violin. He appeared to have many interests. Clare had been impressed, and thought timidly, yet beyond envy:
we don
’
t know very much
.
And the next day she forgot him.

Now, out of a deep lack of interest, she had asked him a conventional question and he was going on and on, not only unreservedly and willingly, but passionately, glancing out of his large, strangely-angled hazel eyes as though he were in some quite other place and company. Clare was a little affronted by the unexpectedness of it. But she began to watch him coolly, with cool compassion, cool attention, inside herself like someone in a rocking-chair on another planet.

‘We had to come,’ he declared. ‘My father’s hands were ruined. Better not to be reminded of what his life was before. There was nothing good to remember—my sister being killed, being imprisoned himself. He was told to go to a warmer climate and work in the open air. So we came here.’

Still he continued his mournful story his—grand
mother, his mother, his young sister, Birgitte. With a wonderful lack of perspicacity, it now seemed, Clare had thought that other night that this boy was self-contained!

His voice stopped suddenly and Clare looked up, wondering what to expect. Bernard said, taking in his surroundings with something like chagrin, ‘I’ve told you my life story.’

‘Well, that’s all right,’ Clare said seriously. He was only young. And what stories could she not bear to hear? It was a long time since she had shed a tear. ‘I was interested. I did ask you questions.’ And she moved slightly on the chair, sliding forward to stand and go, but the sick boy looked at her for a moment and then started to speak again, and she saw that he believed whatever she politely said, and believed that she meant more and not less than she said. After the slightest hesitation, she sat back again in her chair because, in a way, what he thought was true.

‘My mother still wants to come when I can arrange it. She asks me all the time what I’ve done about the university. She must think it’s free, and that I’m free to go! It’s only that she wishes she could help me. She knows how important it is that I should start soon.’

‘Is it? Why?’ Clare could not help asking, shaking her head slightly. He looked wild, excited, not safe. ‘Biology.’

‘Botany. Because it’s what I would know how to do best.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause during which Clare did not think. She heard herself ask then, ‘How did you ever—choose that?’

‘My English grandfather was a botanist. He came here to Australia once. My mother used to tell me stories about him when I was young. I’ve always known that I wanted to do this.’

‘I see.’

‘But it doesn’t matter. I know that now. Nothing will ever be the same again. Whatever happens. All we ever do is pass the time.’ His voice was unemphatic. He lay propped up against Laura’s professional arrangement of pillows, staring with alarming stillness at the eiderdown.

Clare felt distracted. (
Nothing will ever be the same again
.)
What were they doing with a person like this in the house? In addition to everything else. It had begun to dawn on her, in some disused area of her consciousness, that this boy might be trying to make claims on her, that he might be asking for help.
Her
help. Through a mixture of incredulity, sadness and amusement, she realised that he had mistaken her for a different person, a person helpful to people. And she felt flattered and yet untouched by this mistake which was so far-fetched, as if he had thought her someone of merit, impossibly famous.

Bernard turned towards the windows. Yes, Clare was certain that something was expected of her. She
gave the averted head a wary look and stood up decisively. ‘You’re getting tired.’

Bernard turned back to her without lifting his eyes. ‘You are all very kind to me.’

How terrible something was! Clare glanced at the pale, sick face with its lowered eyelids. ‘I must finish my packing. My holidays start tomorrow. I’m going up the north coast.’

There was a silence.

‘Oh, are you?’ He actually changed colour.

‘Yes,’ Clare insisted enthusiastically, half-aware of the voiceless demands and expectations, half-inclined to pass her intuitions off as imagination, a little surprised that he did not share her sense of anticipation. ‘I’ll see you before I go,’ she said, leaving the room.

‘How about young Clare playing nurse for a week?’ Felix suggested, looking at Laura blandly.

Without force, she protested, ‘Oh, but she’s all ready to go off in the morning on her holiday.’

Clare nodded inwardly. She had seen this coming a mile off, a mile off. She said nothing. If they liked to pretend she was not present, she could pretend, too.

Leaning on the verandah rail, they all stared at the rocks on the point straight ahead while the chameleon colours of the day yielded to the breeze before their eyes.

‘You can’t stay home after being in Melbourne,
and I can’t,’ Felix argued, ultra-reasonable.

Laura agreed. ‘Of course it isn’t that he needs a lot of attention, only that he shouldn’t be left alone in the house all day.’

It did seem to be insoluble.

Clare admired the bulk, majesty and glow of a tremendous armada of clouds passing slowly over the city.

‘He’s very intelligent. And he has nice manners. And he’s read more books than I have.’ Laura straightened her diamond ring. ‘He’s a little bit secretive, though,’ she admitted. ‘I mean, if Joy in the factory hadn’t heard about his father from his gossipy old landlady we just wouldn’t know about it.’

‘Well, I guess he’ll just have to look after himself,’ Felix said philosophically.

‘I suppose so,’ Laura agreed, looking round-eyed at Clare.

Clare nodded, equally round-eyed, as if she supposed so, too. Her job was exacting. She was tired. Her head, eyes, ears and teeth shared a general neuralgic ache. Putting a hand over her right ear, she wondered what Laura could mean by ‘secretive’. Not what
she
did.
She
had heard Bernard’s life history in half an hour flat. And very like most war films of occupied Europe she had ever seen, it was. Very like any newspaper feature, any short story about immigrants she had ever
read—hackneyed, in slightly poor taste, strained.

‘He can play chess,’ Felix said.

‘You can hold great tournaments when he’s a bit better.’

‘He could work more overtime in our place. No need to clean office buildings.’

Clare listened to their talk, without attending to it. She was twenty-three and life was a game she had rejected utterly. Nothing about her own situation or anyone else’s moved her in the least. A spectator distant from all turmoil and emotion, she took a theoretical interest in the play and in a sort of aside to herself registered very faintly the feeling that would have been natural to each situation had she and her fellows been real and alive and the universe of any import.

Still. She so wanted everyone to receive justice. And this boy might be an impostor like all the others. Poor Laura and Felix! (He had mentioned Felix’s generosity in paying the doctor’s fee. Her heart had fallen.) Then again, if he were not any sort of confidence trickster, but simply what he appeared to be—a sick, harrowed boy who knew more than she did—think of the coils and toils and tentacles all ready to strangle him.

‘It’s practically spring,’ she said, with a glance at the retreating armada.

‘It’s midwinter. You’re mad to take your holidays now.’ Felix’s dark, dark eyes watched her.

‘Oh, well—’

‘If you’re going inside, Clare, I wonder if you’d mind taking Bernard’s tablet in to him. It’s just due. The green one.’

‘Right.’

‘You can’t really expect her to put her holiday off,’ Laura said, brushing the shoulder of Felix’s jacket with her hand and smoothing it down.

But Felix had been ruminating; his eyes quite twinkled. ‘He’ll be all right. Better than in that old dump or some lousy hospital. You can leave his lunch on the hot-plate. I guess he’ll be a bit bored by five o’clock, but we’ll be home then. We’ll cheer him up.’ He gave Laura what her mother would have called an old-fashioned look.

‘Your tablet, Bernard, and a glass of water,’ Clare said firmly. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up.’

‘I wasn’t sleeping.’

From her remote eyrie Clare noted that he looked at her over-intently, appearing to find significance in her least word and movement. ‘There you are, then. The tablet’s in the saucer. Would you like something to read?’