The Watch Tower (9 page)

He began his nightly analysis of the Allies’ blunders. Easier to win the war than think of a fellow to ask to a meal. But business is business and time is money. When they were mutually useful, Felix and his comrades pounded backs, ‘shouted’ drinks, and mirror-eyed cried ‘friend’ as often as the fabled boy cried ‘wolf’. Let the ink dry, however, bringing the instant degeneration of all golden partners into mere people, and a sort of blindness set in so that they all became, almost at once, invisible to each other. Passing later in the street, signalling across a bar, whether winner or loser, they experienced a common revulsion. He was only a husk, that fellow. Had been sucked. There was nothing more to be done with him. Out of my way there! Stand back! If I have no further use for them, people should go to the wall.

Clare glanced out of her window up past the garden-beds and the pale camphor laurels under which in their
season freesias and daffodils grew in the grass. She looked to the gate in the distance. No one was coming. The gate remained wilfully, so quietly, closed. The white path was untrodden. Leaves and plants moved in the hot spasmodic wind. No one coming. All the colours of the bay translucent. Sunday. Silence. Warmth. Lying on her bed, propped up on both elbows, Clare looked down from the open window, path and gate, to the printed page between her arms.
The Cossacks
.
No one coming yet. Patience.

This window was her look-out tower.

All windows were part of the look-out tower. All of the girl looked out of the windows almost all of the time, wherever she happened to be, whatever she might be doing.

‘Aren’t you sorry about not going back to school?’ Laura asked her, perversely exasperated.

‘No.’

‘Don’t you want to
be
something?’

‘No.’ Exactly what reaction did Laura want to extract from her? And why?

Laura insisted, ‘Felix isn’t so very rich, you know, Clare. He’s put a lot of money into this house.—But isn’t there anything you wanted to
be
?’

The girl regarded her. Laura was pressing her to be unhappy. Well, she would
not
be. Or if she would be, she would be in her own good time for her own
reasons. Across the harbour was a brick building where she had charged about and shouted in the company of other uniformed girls. In abandoning it and them she felt nothing whatever. Nothing remotely painful. Brought together as haphazardly as sardines in a net, as slippery and indifferent, she and her associates parted almost without noticing they did. As for the future, and learning—Facts did not exactly represent themselves as the key to that magic mountain—And, anyway, she had no choice. Her hair was cut so that it hung straight to her shoulders.

Laura and Felix were very, very busy. They talked about staff, and taxation, and money, and Peter Trotter, and bills, and absenteeism, and competition, and hampering government regulations, and new chocolates, and overdrafts, and the difficulty of finding parking space in town, and money, and the price of food, and money. Clare was not meant to contribute—she thought the subjects too dull to bear consideration, anyway—but Felix did like her to listen, did like to have her there to be knocked down, as it were, by the blows from his eyes and his words.

It was difficult to get away because, apart from Felix’s desire for her listening presence, Laura expected constant assistance in the house. And it was a big house, and Laura’s standards of perfection in cleanliness were very high. Clare did nothing to Laura’s satisfaction; jobs were no sooner allocated than withdrawn; but if
she was useless, at least she should be there to witness what went on. Sometimes, though, she escaped to walk round the suburban streets for miles, looking at people, weeds, traffic, flowers and clouds.

She learned to use the adding-machine, and sat at the desk with the goose-necked lamp shining on the ledger. Every Saturday night she went to the pictures at Neutral Bay Junction with Felix and her sister. Unfortunately the responsibility of having conceived, written, performed in, produced and directed the film, which she and Laura, shared, was apt to taint their enjoyment of the programme. Nevertheless, for a few hours she was sometimes in the celluloid company of people who, like people in books, concerned themselves with subjects of more intrinsic interest than the sale of chocolates, or the dust on the dining-room table. Often they were quite awe-inspiringly sane in their habit of attaching importance to what was important and none to subjects like, for instance, a crack in a cement path, or flaking paint on the eaves. It was a relief. More often than not, really, these people regarded, thought about, were involved with one another in a way which struck Clare as very reasonable, natural and lifelike, though fantastically unlike life.

Meantime, all the time, she watched out.

Jean Robertson, her shorthand teacher, was married, small, sallow, had dark curly hair, a pointed nose and
prodigious commonsense. She took a social worker’s interest in her girls.

‘What these kids don’t know would fill the Public Library,’ she said at morning-tea time to her assistant, an older woman, Mrs. Cochrane.

‘You’ll think so when you see these general knowledge papers,’ Mrs. Cochrane said with some disgust, stirring her tea. ‘
Question
:
Name the mythical person who turned men into swine.
Answer
:
Shakespeare. Jesus.’

Rationing had soured Mrs. Cochrane. She abominated letter-writing, but so many of her neighbours indulged in black-marketeering that she was obliged to keep in touch constantly, anonymously, with the Government. Mrs. Cochrane was patriotic, and described herself to new acquaintances as ‘a war-bride of the First World War’.

Unmoved in her down-to-earth nature, Jean Robertson campaigned amongst the girls. Her statements on all matters not pertaining to shorthand and typewriting were gifts of apple from the tree.

The typing speed-tests ended, and the day was almost over. The teacher sat in front of the class, thoughtfully poking at her curly hair with a pencil. ‘Have you started up any social life for yourselves since you joined the college?’ she asked them abruptly.

They looked at her.

‘For example, have you, Clare, invited Ruth home for a record session at the week-end? And Jill, have
you and Erica thought of joining a tennis club or the dramatic art society?’

No one answered. Further scales fell. Jean Robertson crossed her legs. The girls waited, agog. To be given secrets, the key to the code, by a grown-up not related, was—

‘How do you think people make friends? How do you think adults get to know each other?’

They had no idea. They appeared to struggle to work it out. They still had no idea. They hardly really even yet expected to turn into adults. They were born
children
.
They had begun to see that they might have to turn into taller, older children, but when they were warned about changing into adults it was so far-fetched they had to giggle and giggle. Because they knew that just as they had (luckily) been born young and children, grown-ups came into being old and made that way.

Mrs. Robertson shook her head despairingly. ‘Adults all start out as strangers. Then they’re either introduced, or they’re brought together in some group, and if they take to each other they arrange to meet.’

‘This is elementary even for them, isn’t it?’ Mrs. Cochrane bent to murmur in her ear, passing through the room.

She looked back over her shoulder at her superior assistant while the girls giggled and chirruped in subdued voices like very young and early birds at
dawn. They crossed their legs like Mrs. Robertson and waggled their high-heeled shoes.

Later, Jean Robertson argued, ‘With the war and the changes, they’re absolutely adrift. Families split up—’ She had read, recently, about people having roots.

‘Well—’ Laura looked up from her typewriter, leaving all her wound-up concentration on her work. Her blue eyes were stinging with strain. It was eleven o’clock on Thursday night. She and Felix had been lost in accounts and correspondence since dinner, and back before that the day and its labour and duties and worries receded to sunrise. It was a matter for wonder to Laura that
any
business required quite as much vigilance, as many letters, as many stock-takings and balances, as this: but Felix was preternaturally thorough in all he undertook, and thoroughness, of course, was a virtue.

‘Well—’ Laura was half-whispering. ‘I suppose you could ask the girl over on Saturday. But what would you do? I don’t know if Felix wanted us to go out in the car or anything.’

Standing by the desk, Clare snapped a bulldog paper-clip open and shut. ‘I could stay home. I don’t have to go, too.’

‘He does like you to. You can’t very well—’

Clare dropped the metal clip slowly, and looked into Laura’s eyes in so peculiarly level a manner that
though her face was expressionless, Laura turned back to her machine, distracted.

‘Well what would you
do
,
for goodness’ sake? All this fuss!’

There was a sound of the bathroom door unlocking and opening.

‘Does that
matter
?
I don’t know. She might bring some records over, or her stamp collection, or we could just talk, or go for a walk.’

Laura drew a long-suffering breath through her parted lips. ‘You don’t even know her,’ she objected, beginning to type again. It was so irregular and unnecessary, asking a stranger to the house. Also you had to remember that it was Felix’s house and it was only right that he should be consulted.

‘But I would
get
to,’ Clare reasoned with her at a frantic rate now that Felix was tramping down the hall. She leaned the palms of her hands lightly on the desk.

They stared at each other. Footsteps were approaching.

‘Good night!’ Clare kissed her sister’s jaw and darted off. ‘Oh!—Good night, Felix.’

‘Off to bed, are you?’ He offered his face and she kissed him. He surveyed her with a very mixed expression. ‘Half your luck! Look at us—still slaving.’ He was serious, and teasing, and reproachful, and forbearing, and boastful, and resentful, and amused.

‘Do you want me to help?’

Laura said, ‘I told her to go to bed.’

‘No, no. Off you go. Another night I’ll rope you in, though. All hands on deck!’ Laughing abruptly, Felix banged her on the back, and then because they did not know each other very well, the three smiled and waved, oddly wary.

In some new way, since they had come to live in this house, it seemed to Clare that words, silences, gestures and the absence of gestures, being present, being absent, had all come to seem more meaningful than they were, to mean something other than what they meant. There was the effect of striking C natural and hearing B flat, so that the mind registered small disagreeable shocks constantly, as if a scientist with a new machine was playing tricks on it.

It just goes to show, as Laura said later. Ruth’s Saturday visit was a staggering success. A lively conventional girl, five feet tall, overweight, with a pretty pink-and-white complexion, Ruth was as arch and polite to the Shaws as they were to her. Rarely had she been deferred to as much as this by adults!

The credit for the day belonged chiefly to Felix. After simmering indecisively all morning and keeping his household mesmerised with uncertainty and alarm, he unexpectedly went to shower and change from filthy gardening shorts to new grey slacks, silk shirt and scarf.
Then he sauntered into company and exhibited himself to be beamed on, praised and admired.

‘Make some of your melting moments and a chocolate log, why don’t you?’ he asked Laura, giving her permission. ‘I’ll go up in the car and get some ice- cream, if you like.’

Her eyes questioned his to discover his meaning. He smiled, giving nothing away, so Laura thought she would try being jubilant. ‘Our first real visitor! Yes, little girls love ice-cream, Felix. That would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Clare?’ Never taking her eyes from his face, she added coyly, ‘I know some little boys who like ice-cream, too, don’t you, Clare?’

Felix cast his eyelids down and gave a sheepish smile, seriously.

Clare raised an unwise eyebrow (something she had only recently learned to do) but no one noticed.

Ruth came and brought records and her bicycle, intending to teach Clare to ride it. When this had been declared quite beyond any talents Clare might possess, Felix lay down on the carpet to adjust the radiogram. Then he danced in turn with Laura and the two girls, who could not dance, swinging them off their feet. Short, solid and weighty, he was gratified to surprise them with his physical strength. Laura had to say, ‘Don’t be too rough with them, dear!’ In his hands their wrists and arms were feeble, their bones fragile as chicken-bones. Felix danced daintily on tiptoe with
a good deal of elegant arm flourishing and tiny extra steps that were sheer inspiration. The carpet was such a handicap it was an asset, making them stumble and laugh till they were quite disabled by their hilarity.

During and after a period of enjoyable eating and drinking, Felix performed card tricks, asked riddles and juggled—all with a disarming congested glee that made Ruth say, sentimentally, as she and Clare walked up the hill together carrying records, pushing the bike, ‘Gee, they’re lovely! Uncle Felix’s funny! I nearly died. That was a scrumptious chocolate cake. I’m just about bursting. Gee, it’s a terrific house, too.’

‘Yes.’ Clare looked into an intense afternoon sky of savage, almost clamorous, blue. At a great height a few vaporous streaks of cloud stood between the earth and eternity. She had a vague desire to scream, and thought she might be dying.

‘I’m starting my new dress tonight,’ Ruth said, with another freshening of vivacity. ‘It’s going to be gathered on to a wide yoke
here
,
and then—at the
waist—
’

Cars passed. Gardens were being hosed and sprinkled. Two dogs were barking a duet somewhere in a distant street.

‘Well, wasn’t that nice?’ Laura asked, washing the dinner dishes in her brisk and competent way. ‘Ruth’s a very pleasant little girl.’