Mamma twists and turns in the arms of the Greek axiomatikos. His badly fitted uniform, particularly between the legs, Mamma is the one who cuts and thrusts. He is her dummy. Her lips wear something brittle in the cruel tango. For Papa who died? For the Greek cause? For herself? Never for you. The sticky tears rain down on the unfinished consommation in this cruel dream.
She awoke crying. Gilbert, too, must have been asleep. He felt hot and moist as they lay against each other, tumbled into the same heap. Now he started lashing about, perhaps to show he had been awake all the while. It was only she who had been a prey to dreams.
‘What you were dreaming about. Was it bad?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’ She paused, wondering how far her conscience, according to Aunt Cleone, would condone a lie. ‘Actually,’ she said, in her best Miss Adams voice, ‘I was dreaming about the moon.’
‘That old pneuma again!’
‘No, the moon,’ she corrected him firmly, as though the pneuma were her private property.
‘Sometimes,’ she conceded, ‘if you pray hard enough — if you want badly—you can be drawn up inside it.’
‘Were you — in this dream?’
‘Yes.’ She lay listening to her dishonest heart.
‘And what about me?’
‘Oh, you weren’t in it — in any way — in the dream. I don’t see why you should have been.’
They had restored the distance between them.
‘Sometimes when the Blitz was on I used to draw the black-out curtains. I thought if I could see the bombs falling I’d know the best way to escape. But you never saw. Only the moon.’
The moon’s blue, gelatinous face with the forms of those milky twins inside it.
Before falling asleep, before the act of levitation took place, they drifted together again, their unprotesting skins, inside the steamy envelope of Bulpit sheets.
* * *
Mrs Lockhart has driven up in this old brown dislocated car, maltreated by the kicks, the shoving, the protests of too many boys’ feet and bodies. She has come to investigate the niece and take her to school. Perhaps a more difficult situation than any Mrs Lockhart has ever managed, though she is used to difficult situations, what with Harold and the boys. Harold doesn’t drive. He takes the ferry to the Department. He has always considered his not driving a superior accomplishment. He refers to ‘Alison’s car’, which would have made it hers even if she hadn’t wanted it. Actually she has always wanted it. It is more her home than the equally maltreated, ricketty, weatherboard house in which they live.
Now she sits in her more personal, mobile home at the Bulpit’s gate, pausing a moment in an inevitably active life, before making an actively distasteful move. If it were not for this she could have been enjoying her freedom, under a blue sky, in a blaze of winter sunshine. She has with her everything she most needs (her supply of cigarettes and tissues) and no appendages (of course she loves the boys, she is less sure of Harold — yes, she is very very uncertain that she should have fallen into such a trap as marriage with Harold). And now Gerry’s child, Ally sighs. She swivels her dented, sunburnt nose. She sweeps the ash out of her cleavage (one bitch of a friend suggests she ought to see a dermatologist about this blackhead) and starts clambering out of the Chev. Can you be starting an early arthritis? Give Harold additional grounds for playing the absentee husband.
‘Oh yes, Mrs Lockhart, the little lass is waiting for you.’
The dreadful Bulpit has assembled her charge early, only too glad to unload her on other unwilling hands. She is standing in the lounge room, picking at the arm of one of Mrs Bulpit’s seedy chairs.
‘Here’s your auntie, love.’
The Bulpit ducks out too willingly.
The child does not look up. She continues picking. She is neater than anything Alison has ever envisaged. Alison experiences a spasm of revulsion from the contradictory details of Geraldine’s complex life. The fact that they are sisters has always amazed her. This dark child is the most amazing fact of all.
‘Well, Ireen…’
Should they kiss? At least Gerry was never a kisser. Never even seen her kiss a man. And the child obviously doesn’t want to be mauled by a gratuitous aunt.
Better sit down a moment or two for decency’s sake. Plunk on the Bulpit springs.
‘I expect you find it all very strange…’
‘esss.’
Oh Lord the lighter’s given out. These bloody wartime flints. Lord — without my cigs. ‘Do you think you could ask Mrs Bulpit for a box of matches?’
‘esss.’
She trots out. The neat, the pretty are usually cunning — the type Harold takes up with. At least he saw the red light, without even meeting Ireen, and refused to have her at the house. Blamed it on the boys.
When it’s Gerry really. Always was. Harold hadn’t turned up by then. But always. At the dances. Whirling out in a waltz. Shoving away at a foxtrot, up against their crotches. They said your sister’s stuck up but it never reduced her market value. Geraldine Pascoe. Became a nurse. I ask you. Never believed in Gerry’s vocation for a moment. Lead them on and tie them down, erection and all, under a sheet that was it. No typing pool for Gerry. Touch typing — ha ha. Can’t think why Harold ever. Perhaps he married a typist. Those boring novels nobody will ever publish.
I am plain, plain, plain. Mother said it. Father even called it ugly, the night of the great piss up, when he came, and went, and stayed away forever.
Here she is. Back with the matches. Tripping pretty sweeting. Who ever said it?
‘Thank you, dear. It’s sweet of you.’ Hypocritical word, but what they use, ‘That’s better.’ Cough, cough. Smoke, if you could tell her, or any one of any of those damn parsons, is one of the few remaining mysteries.
Instead cough. ‘Your mother must be proud of you.’
The child turns on those eyes, not Gerry’s could be the Greek commo’s — or her own? God, yes, I hope they’re her own — if it wouldn’t make her lovelier.
‘Ireen, dear — we’re late enough — we ought to start for school — hope it won’t be too shocking — it won’t — the boys love it…’
Oh God, she’s still looking at me.
‘If there’s ever anything you need, dear, or want to know — you’ll ask me, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Mrs Lockhart.’
Oh God. Well I am, aren’t I?
‘Where’s Mrs Bulpit? We’re going! Mrs Bul-pit? On our wayhheh!’
She comes running, the ghastly creature, head first, almost over the lounge.
‘The lunch,’ she gobbles. ‘A child needs a nourishing cut lunch — specially in wartime.’
Not a bad old stick, she’s even produced a case.
‘Old, but it’ll serve, Mrs Lockhart, till we get something better.’
Ireen takes the battered case. She holds it at the end of a stiff arm. It might have contained a bomb instead of this other jumping object — a cut lunch.
* * *
You didn’t want any sort of lunch, least of all a cut one. They cut Vasieolis’ throat. If you stopped eating, you would die quietly, painlessly. They will pick you up like a bunch of wilted spinach, from which the green will have drained away. No blood, either green or red.
Anyway, for this moment, you would have liked to live in such a way, following the Australian aunt up the path through the garden to which you no longer have or want to have a right. Belonging nowhere. The cat tripping across ahead her tail in the air belongs somewhere here, in this garden which you believed was becoming yours.