The Watch Tower (12 page)

‘Well,’ said Sir Ronald, after another ticking silence. ‘You can—ah—get dressed now, Miss Vaizey.’

For the first time since she had appeared from behind the curtain, his grey eyes raised themselves to hers. He looked briefly but deeply at Clare, and as she looked back it seemed that an invisible rocket sped between them, rocked the room, shocking and enlightening her to the very tips of her high-heeled shoes.

Oh! Behind the floral barricade she pulled on her clothes and combed her long hair hastily. For herself she was startled, but for Mrs. Robertson, who expected much of knights, she was indignant. So that was rank!

‘Thank you, Sir Ronald.’ They shook hands. ‘Goodbye.’

On her knees Laura was digging weeds out of the lawn with a small garden-fork, her soft energetic arms working fiercely. Even from the gate Clare could see that something was wrong. The rueful laughing surprise she had been juggling in her head and chest all the way home, sank instantly to a sickening sense of apprehension.

‘What?’ she asked Laura.

Laura lifted her head, eyes fevered and abstracted, then bent again to the lawn. The back of her neck was slightly sunburnt between the pinned-up light-brown wavy hair and the collar of her pink-striped blouse.
Damp cut grass stuck to the thin rubber soles of her shoes.

‘Where’s Felix?’ Clare’s eyes were everywhere; her voice was low. The garden might only seem to be deserted.

‘Out,’ Laura gasped, heaving at a deep-rooted weed.

‘What’s wrong?’ Clare looked round at the cushiony lawn, and up at the clear thin blue of the late-afternoon sky. The air was cool and moist.

‘He’s just taken the factory books and stationery over to Peter Trotter’s. It appears he sold him the business six weeks ago.’ Laura thrust the fork into the garden-bed beside which she had been working and looked to gather her limbs up from the ground by an effort of will.

‘
Sold
it?’ Clare stared warily at the side of her sister’s down-turned face as they walked towards the house.

‘So we have to tighten our belts, he said. He’s paid off the gardener.’

‘Mr. Gilroy? That’s why he hasn’t turned up! But there’s so much of it! Why didn’t he tell you before?’

Laura shrugged, though Clare’s astonishment, trepidation, and hurt on her behalf, woke her interest almost as if she had shares in her sister’s emotions and was watching prices fluctuate. Starting to peel potatoes for dinner, she said bitterly, ‘When he told me, he smiled!’ And clearly, her innocent conviction of
her value to him even in terms of mere usefulness had been felled in a second. Clare looked at her with dumb compassion and exasperation, and as she expanded with partisan bewilderment and outrage, Laura felt life become more bearable and even found excuses for Felix. Gradually, her necessity to remain in a state of frozen tension was revoked.

Felix was unusually late returning home, so Clare had dinner alone, relievedly, then shut herself in her room. In fifteen minutes or so she had polished off her shorthand homework. She next found herself brushing and brushing her hair, grey eyes fixed in warning on her looking-glass eyes. Noticing, she dropped the brush and lifted a book she had been reading with outrageous happiness—
Scarlet and Black
.
In reality now, though, all she did was listen, breathing lightly through her parted lips, at every sound moving her eyes from printed page to bed to wall to door in time with the movement of her heart. Since
that
night, apprehension, caution, came like charms to ward off evil spirits.

Hers was a pretty, sterile room carpeted in pale green; its walls were white. The bed, the dressing-table with three mirrors, and a stool were made of rosewood. So was the small chair in which no one ever sat. The curtains and covers were of a quality that should have been unprocurable, but a man who had bought a used-car business from Felix years before and made a fortune, had produced all the lovely stuff in the house coupon-free.

The room’s great disadvantage was that there was nowhere in particular to
be
in it. The centre light exposed every shadowless, polished and dust-free square inch of it. It was very silent. Clare’s other library books and the few she owned were out of sight in a compartment of the built-in wardrobe for tidyness. Anyone or no one might have lived there: she made no impression on it at all. But then, she wasn’t meant to.

‘What are you sitting in here by yourself for?’ Laura slipped softly into the room, smiling disingenuously.

‘I’m reading.’

Felix was home now. He and Laura were together in the sitting-room, with his action and her reaction between them and not mentioned, and with their minds and eyes lighted and searching, so that the room was like an arena before a bull fight.

‘I’m reading. I can’t concentrate in there.’

‘He’ll wonder what’s wrong if you don’t come in.’

‘Can’t I just want to be by myself? When I do sit in there you only talk to each other about business.’

Laura glanced back at her from her inspection of the room—making the place untidy on a cushion on the floor, pretentiously reading a book.

‘Why don’t you sit on the chair, for goodness’ sake? You look as if you’re camping here. Come on,’ she said with uncertain firmness. ‘You can often cheer him up and put him in a good mood when he’s like
this.’ If Clare was disobedient, if he did not have his way, he would not like it, and that would be unfortunate. If he did not like it, he might succumb to another of those freakish storms, or odd little moods. He might do—almost anything. Hadn’t he hinted that some unspecified action of
hers
had caused him to sell the business at what amounted to a loss? ‘Come on, Clare. Don’t be silly.’

Yes, the trap was firmly settled about her. She shook the bars once to test it. ‘I don’t want to. Do I have to?’

‘I’ve asked you!’ From leaning against the wall in a rigid and uncharacteristic pose intended to suggest extreme ease, Laura went to the door. Her voice was tart. ‘Please yourself!’ She went out blowing her nose angrily.

Clare’s heart shifted. Laura was frightened. It frightened her that Laura was frightened. ‘Damn, bugger, blast! Damn, bugger, blast!’ She clamped her teeth together till her gums pounded, drove her nails experimentally deep into her hands and arms, not knowing how to hurt herself enough.

But lately this happened all the time! Felix deliberately did or said something that mortified Laura to the bone.
She
witnessed it and felt, at the very least, upset, not happy. Then, without quite inciting her to brood and chafe helplessly when they were alone together, Laura was not discouraging, because she too was at least upset and not happy. Then there always came this marvellous turnabout. ‘Come and make Felix laugh!
Come and tease him! He likes it when you do. Concentrate on him, for my sake!’

Clare picked up her brush and applied it viciously to her scalp. In a sense, to be obliged to assume an attitude she did not feel was the worst thing that could happen to her. A thin line like an arrow advancing before her and vanishing into the future had to be kept sight of with a sort of fantastic precision. Yet from this essential tracking and waiting which was her most natural instinct, she was to be dragged again to counterfeit.

In a tumult of rebellion, she brushed her hair. Oh, she had resisted these appeals before. Oh, yes. Many times. She had kept her inner eye with passionate attachment on her way. Oh, sure. The only snag was that it was a little hard on Laura, who was allotted the role of Hostage Number One. If Felix cared to exert himself and use his power to dismay, they were vulnerable. Ruthlessness and hatred were dismaying. And, of course, he did care to, too.

‘I won’t do it,’ she said through her teeth, rising and pulling her sweater neatly over her skirt. No one felt forced to say to
her
,
‘What happened at the specialist’s? Are you by any chance dying of a fatal, incurable allergy?’ No one was so afraid of how
she
might react that they ever thought to ask, ‘How was college?’ or ‘What are you reading?’ Clearly, it mattered very much more that some people should not have their whims or
feelings slighted than that others should not.

Why should
she
dance in there like some third-rate vaudeville act shedding tears of rage inwardly enough to drown herself, and at the same time hippety-hopping round the guest of honour and showing about forty-eight teeth in a smile? She did not
want
to.

Oh, of course. She was beginning to be afraid of Felix. He was not rational.

Hair thick and smooth to her shoulders, eyes dangerous but changeable, she pushed open the door of the silent sitting-room and the performance began.

Felix was weeding the lawn. He had been weeding the lawn from before breakfast-time till about five o’clock every evening for six weeks. At first Laura had felt there was something almost abnormal about such persistence (although persistence was a virtue), but she accepted it now.

‘I’m just going up to the shops, Felix. Can I get you anything?’ She leaned over the verandah railing at the front of the house and called down to him. There was a pause. She waited. In time, he lifted a bleak face till his eyes were level with her shoes; he looked at them with blind contempt and bent his back again like a slave.

Laura went away.

Just as Jack Roberts had disappeared and, according to hearsay, prospered fantastically, so Peter Trotter had vanished and prospered. Now, without interest or income, Felix was too morose to go further from the house than the garden. Although it was an experience he had undergone quite often, it surprised and aggrieved him that, having sold his business and gratified Peter, he should not still have a business and see Peter as regularly as before. He chose to act with bravado; he did not choose that there should be unpleasant consequences for him.

He had a prodigious memory for unrelated facts. He could add very large columns of figures involving
pounds, shillings and pence as fast as a comptometer. He had machine-like perseverance in the uprooting of weeds, or the pursuit of a discrepancy in the company’s accounts, or in the packing of cartons. His powers of concentration went far beyond what any industrial psychologist would have described as superior. Given training, he would have excelled in a variety of careers of a scientific nature, turning miracles of attention on the puzzles and tricks set for solution. Yet what was obvious to him now, reduced to weeding this vast lawn, day in, day out, was that someone had plotted to bring this about. While his back was turned. While he was asleep. People—Of all things, they were the weirdest and most dangerous. Vengefully, he weeded.

Laura hurried back from her shopping, string bags suspended from every finger, and began to belabour the house, sighing often, as she did when she was alone. Looking surreptitiously through the floating curtains she saw her husband’s crouched figure. Poor Felix!

His misery was infectious. Not that he said anything! In fact, he was very quiet. He barely looked at anyone. He never, never smiled. You would hardly expect him to, either, considering—He merely walked slowly into the house with this dark, aggrieved and bitter air that inspired a dreadful awe and feeling of guilt in her as she let him pass. Clare watched him sombrely.

‘Where’s the
Herald
?’

(He was speaking! Oh!)

Felix began to study the ‘Businesses for Sale’ column at breakfast, which thus became a very prolonged affair. Buttery fingerprints scalloped the edge of the paper.

‘Come in here a minute. I want to dictate some letters.’

(This was another speech he sometimes made.)

After dinner and at weekends, he took his household out in the car to inspect many unique businesses which enterprising men hoped to dispose of (with the deepest regret) usually in a way diametrically opposite to that in which Felix had disposed of his, with all the benefits falling in quite another direction. The more fragile, the trickier and crankier the invention on which the purchaser’s fortune was to depend, the more it captivated Felix.

‘I’m intrigued,’ he said to an incredulous seller. ‘This’s a fascinating kind of gadget. It’s got
me
in. Why wouldn’t it sell like hot cakes?’ (The inventor did not see fit to tell him.) ‘Calculated on a population basis, I reckon—’

Laura eyed the shaky devices of cork, tin and string—toys, window de-rattlers, glove driers—with trepidation. She found several grey hairs among the loose waves of her hair.

‘Already?’ Clare said, staring at them, surprised, remembering the time when Laura had been her own age, not long ago.

‘After twenty-five,’ advertisements said, ‘nourish your skin nightly or tell-tale signs of age will mar your beauty.’ Twenty-five! She had always smiled at that. They would say anything. That was still quite young. Signs of age! Yet see this now—Laura with grey hairs showing.

In the bathroom, he took a handkerchief from his dressing-gown pocket and wiped his eyes. Christmas always affected him like this. In the midst of untying a present from Laura, he had had to work up a fictitious cough and leave the room, flapping an arm to restrain anyone from following him.

‘What’s money for, anyway?’ he said, and filled pillowcases with underwear, bathing costumes, chocolates and books.

In return he was given a shirt, a wallet, a pen, a pipe, some nuts, and a compass he had wanted for years. To save up, Laura had suffered over every sixpence of her housekeeping budget for months. Clare did some typing for Mrs. Robertson’s customers after classes, and they both withdrew the balance from bank accounts that were now nonexistent. But how worthwhile it had turned out to be!

Giving and getting, spending money and receiving goods bought for real cash, were symbolic and significant, painful and rewarding beyond what was normal, to Felix. To the extent that he gave, he atoned and acquired new virtues, to the extent that he received, he
was admired, loved and respected.

‘After breakfast down to the beach, then home for Christmas dinner. How’s that for a programme?’ Marching back to the bedroom, arms swinging, he shouted cheerfully ahead.

As if Felix’s smile had opened the gates of Utopia, Laura looked up at him from the bed where she was once again enveloped in visible affection wrapped in red and blue paper. Here was the real Felix at last! Not the gift-giver (she didn’t mean that), but the kind-hearted man who was easily touched by a traditional occasion, the one who looked at her now and at Clare, in appeal, craving the goodwill they were relieved to the core to be asked for. Sacks of it, sacks of goodwill, he could have. From today it was quite evident to their eyes, hopes and spirits, that this would be the permanent Felix. Heavens, he was just like everyone else, only wanting pleasant days. Laura saw that he believed at last that she had no designs on his life, savings or pride, that she wanted what he wanted—everything good for Felix. Her fingers nervously pleated the edge of a sheet of blue starry paper.

Beyond the barbed-wire barricades set up to delay the Japanese invaders, the sand glared and squeaked dryly when their feet sank into it. The surf was strong and noisy, the beach crowded. Clare went into the water alone, leaving the others half under the striped umbrella. Laura was browning her legs in the sun and
Felix was exposing his back. The swell lifted her up and let her gently down. Her arms and legs rippled like seaweed. The water was glass-green. As she lay face down in it, it supported her so, she could have moaned with relief. What an illuminated day it was! Up, up and gently down, the ocean swelled. She lay on it, slowly moving her legs and fingers, dreaming, as though it were the trustiest mattress.

‘I bought Reg Carroll’s artificial-flower factory the other day,’ Felix thought to say on Boxing Day.

Laura raised a hand to shade her eyes as she looked up at him where he stood, barefooted, untying a piece of string from the neck of the hose. ‘Did you, dear? I’m glad you’ve found something you like.’

‘You and young Clare are on the staff.’

‘Are we? Did you hear that, Clare?’

Clare, a reluctant gardener, was on her haunches by a bed of petunias, extracting weeds. ‘What doing?’

‘Bit of office work, bit of factory work.’ Felix untied the last knot and screwed the nozzle of the hose back and forth, looking down at his staff, rather enigmatic. ‘He’s got five girls there already. With you two as well it should run like clockwork. Oh, and by the way,’ he gave an exaggerated start and it was not possible, quite, to hide his pride, ‘Reg and his wife are coming for dinner tomorrow night, so you’d better throw a few extra spuds in the pot.’

Heavens, he was in a good mood, being funny and
everything!

In summer the small, single-storeyed, backyard shed which was the factory was stupefyingly hot. In winter, it was to be found, it was leaky and draughty and smelled of the kerosene heater. The row of windows behind which the girls worked faced a dilapidated brick wall. It was rat-infested when the Shaws took over.

Felix and his family drove from Neutral Bay to industrial Concord every morning in time to start work at eight. Laura brought lunch from home and made tea on an old gas-ring at half past twelve. The girls went down to the shops on the corner to buy chips, pies, hamburgers and milk shakes. At five o’clock work stopped.

‘And what do you do of an evening, love?’ Elsie Trent asked, chewing gum with white teeth behind plum-coloured lips.

‘Help Laura with the house. Read.’ Clare pressed the base of some archetypal red flower firmly round the stem she had selected from the box which sat between them, and flashed a sideways glance at her neighbour.

‘Oh!’ Elsie, who was thirty-seven, eyed the girl with dull, not bad-natured, avidity. ‘Haven’t you got a boyfriend yet, then?’

‘Not yet.’

Elsie felt her plump pompadour with one hand and took a stem with the other. ‘Ah, well! Seventeen. You’ve still got time. Money’s not everything, love.
You’ll find that out.’

Clare turned to her to understand her, and seeing Elsie’s brown eyes roll defiantly in the direction of ‘the boss’ and his wife, did.

‘No, but I thought you might of had one,’ Elsie pursued, licking her forefinger and thumb to separate some pink petals, ‘because you been looking a bit peaky. I said to my hubby: either she’s seeing too much of some young chap or not enough.’

Clare stared. Elsie had thought about her when she was not present! What a surprising thing! How kind of Elsie! This had never happened to Clare before. She was sure it hadn’t. She felt a little the way she had when, as a very small child staring into a mirror, she realized for the first time that she was not of necessity observed by others full face, that she had these unknown sides to her face, that even when her eyes were not fixed on someone else’s, they could look at her. It had made her feel oddly as if there was more of her and, also, as she grew older, that people in this way deceived and were deceived. People thought they could possess you when you were not looking and listening, and perhaps you thought the same.

Elsie scratched at her pompadour, using one of the stiff green stems to get through to her scalp. ‘Not that you’d have any trouble getting a boy if you wanted one! They’re getting worse! You only have to be looking in a shop window and they pop out of the
awnings. “Surrender!” I say, “Listen, kids, I could be your mother.” Does that bother them?’ She laughed. ‘Really, I’ve got a lot of time for the Yanks. I don’t care what they say. Oh well, we’ll soon have our own boys back.’

In the front seat Laura sat white and tense. Clare hurled herself into a new position in the back seat of the car, and with arms welded across her chest, stared out at the grey street, footpath and crowds with hopeless grinding anger.

‘If we could only catch the ferry! But we sit here outside the hotel every afternoon of our lives for nearly two hours! Such a great favour leaving the factory early. I’d rather stay! Anything! Anything!’

‘What’ve you got to complain about?’ Felix would sneer at their silence. ‘You’re not working, are you? You’re just sitting around in my car twiddling your thumbs, aren’t you? Taking it easy like ladies? That’s a joke!’

‘Well, you can’t catch the ferry.’ Laura’s voice was dead, yet she spoke with a terrible, feeble kind of forcefulness. It went without saying, really, that neither of them could move.

‘And then,’ Clare continued, low and bitter, ‘by the time we do get home he’s like a lunatic. He isn’t sane. And we have to sit and be—’

With murderous deliberation his glass moved from
table to mouth, his hand moved from glass to bottle, his eyes moved unwinking from one woman to the other, his whole face contorted.

Not having realised that Felix had been ‘on the wagon’, they did understand now that he was off it.

Clare shivered coldly and shook herself back to the moment. ‘If you could just do something without having to think about him! If you could—But it’s like a prison!’ Her tone was desperate but abstracted because her mind was occupied at a deeper level, because unfinished conditional sentences had become a reflex. ‘If I could live my own life!’

Over her shoulder Laura cast back a scornful look. Live her own life! How affected! What would she do with a life of her own? Who did she think she was?

‘How didn’t you know he was like this? All those years you worked for him!’

The double swing doors of the hotel were held almost permanently open by the increasing numbers of men who thronged from office, building site and shop, to find fulfilment with one foot on the rail and their own kind six deep behind them clamouring for numbness, unconsciousness.

Bleakly, Clare looked away.

‘He never came near the place when he’d been drinking,’ Laura began in a quiet, tight monotonous voice, and no more than she had attended to her sister did the girl attend to her now. ‘Evidently he had enough
sense to go home and stay in bed. And he isn’t like this all the time. He can give it up for months when he decides to.’

‘Do you think he ever will again?’

‘I don’t know. When he begins to remember he could kill himself off with it he might.’

The bygone days when Felix had been merely unfathomable, irrational and frightening, merely unlike other people and unpredictable as an unexploded bomb, had begun to seem idyllic. If there could be a return to them now—

‘He can’t keep this up night after night. His health won’t stand it.’ Laura looked at but did not notice the traffic lights at the corner changing from red to green.

‘
His
health! So you’ve been saying for months.’

There was another silence. Then the expressionless voices continued their separate monologues.

‘I want to go away, Laura. I can’t stand it.’

When the traffic lights had changed again, she repeated, ‘I have to go away. I can’t stand it.
I can
’
t stand it
.’