The Watch Tower (13 page)

‘Where could you go? You haven’t got a penny.’

‘I’d work. I couldn’t get less than I do now.’

Laura glanced back at her with speechless scepticism. They had only ever worked for Felix, and Felix had his little ways about money, but with all his faults you could not say he was mean. Look at the Christmas presents, and how munificent he was to Reg Carroll when he bought this flower factory. And he
only employed Clare as a kind of favour. He paid
her
nothing, of course, and Clare received pocket money. Also he had said enough these months of nights of abuse to convince Laura that it was hardly likely that any stranger would value their services, or even bother to try them. And he knew the business world and men.

‘Anyway,’ Laura said.

‘Anyway,’ echoed Clare’s mind.

Anyway, the obstacles were unarguably too great. Who could break out? Who could do more than marvel dully at survival? Who had energy and initiative now to spare for what was merely reasonable? What promise had the world held out ever that there was anything to escape to? What was there to desire in this nightmare but the cessation of strain? On the other hand, what sensible kind-hearted citizen would not scoff at the suggestion that there could exist in a charming white colonial house in the suburbs a human situation slightly beyond the powers of commonsense to mend? Sydney was such a pretty, ordinary city! Women are notoriously neurotic, of course! What’s the harm in a fellow having a few beers at the end of a day’s work? If his women are gloomy, no wonder he drinks! Good luck to him!

‘Why does he do it? (I feel I’m going mad. We keep saying the same things night after night.) But what makes him do it? Do you think he always has?’ Clare looked at Laura’s back with a sort of bright despair,
as if she might really have some new information on the subject.

Laura shook her head again. ‘For a long, long time he has. Since he was very young. As for
why—
He thinks as long as he can get up and go to work, no one should complain. He doesn’t realise what he’s
like
.’

‘He realises,’ Clare said implacably. ‘He’s like himself then, that’s what frightens me. He hates us. He loathes everyone, everything.’

Desperately she looked out of the car window as if some merciful passer-by might stop and say, ‘God bless you.’

Laura said nothing, looked at her watch, rubbed the fingers of her left hand across the line on her forehead which had only recently become permanent.

‘It’s almost as if he’s in disguise when he’s sober,’ Clare muttered, plastering her hair flat against her skull with all the strength of her arms.

He seemed to regard drinking himself sodden nightly and terrorising his compulsory audience as a perfectly natural way to behave. It was inconceivably baffling! And the awareness that Felix was dark, mysterious and closed to himself was eerie in her mind; and, indeed, it was clear that he was not as much as mysterious to himself, for that would have implied consciousness of there being something unknown.

Clare knew this was so, but was most unwilling to believe it. She knew why she did everything. In the very
vortex of anger or unreason or elation, had she been asked, ‘How are you behaving, and why?’ she would have answered at once with total accuracy and total calm. Surely, really, in spite of what could look like substantial evidence to the contrary, everyone was like that? Otherwise, if she had to believe that some people did not know what they were doing, it would make things slightly petrifying.

Clare had studied the works and case-histories of psychologists, but after much diligent and reflective reading, she began to think:
even so
,
even so
.
Their works contained many stock solutions, but no awe; many classifications, but no respect; many judgements, but no love.

The presence or absence of a mother or father; being youngest, being eldest, being wealthy or poor, being alone or too much in company—any one such clue magnetised a sensible scientist according to the bias of his own mind, and sent him on his infallible way to solution ninety-four, since everyone knew that all neuroses sprang from the possession of large ears or, it could be, small fathers. In time Clare learned to predict with unfailing correctness the diagnosis which would inevitably follow each pathetic confession.

Gradually, disillusioned, she turned away. Who was qualified to finger souls with confidence? Who to receive the anguish of those he did not care for?

Oh, the strange and comfortless ones whose histories resembled each other so oddly were not as easily
calculated as all that.

Shifting her position again, Clare looked at her watch. Outside, in another world, girls of her own age and young women of Laura’s hurried past in groups, or came singly clinging to uniformed arms, laughing, faces powdered gold and eyes sparkling.

Laughing was something Clare felt she could be good at one day. But she looked at the lively faces as a soldier sitting in a ditch before a battle might look at a magazine’s technicolour advertisements of glossy rooms and waxwork people posing as lovers and families, and which featured, for his benefit, Hollywood pin-ups and jokes. She stared at the faces.

Oh, people. Oh, someone. See us here. See us.

Laura looked at her watch. ‘I don’t know—He went to one of those boarding-schools in England for naval cadets. They were very cruel in those days. He wanted to stay at home and go to a day school, but his mother wasn’t strong and he had to be sent away. Then he joined the Royal Navy and they seemed to be very brutal to young boys in those days.’

‘Maybe that depended on what they were like.’

‘He’d worked his way up to be paymaster when he caught that germ in the Persian Gulf and had to be invalided out. Hundreds of them died. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d never have left the Navy. He loves the sea.’

‘I wish to God he hadn’t.’

Clare’s muttered interjections scarcely touched
Laura’s mind. She went on, ‘Then he took his accountancy exams here in Sydney, and he used to drive racing cars. It’s a wonder he wasn’t killed when you see those scars on his forehead. They were very bad accidents. Two of them quite close together. But I don’t know—’

Even Laura, in whom circumstances had uncovered a protective tendency to wishful thinking, could not pretend to believe that the facts of Felix’s life in any way revealed him to her.

‘I know all this backwards!’

‘He’s been unlucky with some of his businesses, letting these men cheat him, but—’

Unseen in the back seat, Clare bit two bitten fingernails of her left hand down to the nail bed and they started to bleed. Better to do that than shriek aloud in the middle of the city. Better to do that than wreck the car, be carted off, rend—

Rocking painfully to and fro, clasping the torn fingers in her right hand, she lowered her face to the tangle of fists and pressed a cheek into it, eyes closed, teeth jammed together.

Laura looked at her watch. ‘I hope he’s not—’ She looked at the brick-and-tile façade of the hotel. The double swing doors were flung out at this moment and Felix stood for an instant on the step and thus elevated cast smilingly contemptuous glances on all who passed in review. His face was a very dark red and unhealthily
shiny. He stood, toes turned cockily out, coat unbuttoned, thumbs tucked somewhere into his waistcoat, growing paunch thrust forward and straining his expensive brown suit. His hat was tilted at an angle that brought Laura’s arms out in goose-flesh.

Clearing his throat with some enjoyment, he pushed his way across to the car and fumbled in.

‘Did I keep you waiting?’ he enquired, sitting there as though he had arrived home. He looked from Laura across his shoulder to Clare with a slow red smile. ‘I said—did I keep you waiting?—No answer! I should apologise. Mr. Shaw should go down on his knees, shouldn’t he? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?—Well, you know what you can do, don’t you?’ He raked the sewers of his vocabulary.

His normally so evasive eyes were now obscenely eager to make contact with other eyes, stalked them, sought them out with a strange and gloating pleasure, somehow smeared them with the filth of his own mind, gloating into them with a threatening and vile deliberation. He dared them to look away. He dared them to speak. Craven, in total submission, ruined, he wanted them to be.

Laura sat stiffly beside him on the green leather seat, every nerve at attention, her head thundering with pain. In the back seat, Clare had relaxed and now nursed her bleeding fingers in her lap, watching the two heads in front of her with almost a half-smile.

With finicky exactitude, Felix extracted tobacco and a paper from his leather pouch and began to roll a cigarette. ‘So I kept them waiting, did I?’ he asked at intervals. ‘Hmmm? Well. That’s too bad, isn’t it? Yes. That’s too bad.’

Months ago they had learned that there was no defence but silence, and that was no defence. He did so enjoy cajoling them into speech, but he had been known to be provoked to the very edge of violence by the sound of an answering voice. Not that he minded being brought to the edge of violence.

Fifteen minutes after he had returned to the car, Felix revved the engine noisily, then revved it again, then again, smiling broadly at Laura’s pale profile and back into her sister’s unwavering eyes. With a bound the car took off, passing a grey Chevrolet on the right. The driver shouted after them. As the traffic lights changed to red, Felix pushed on the accelerator and a convoy of cars with the right-of-way pressed forward.

Laura sat on the edge of the seat, looking now at Felix crouching over the wheel, and now at the lights, the dense traffic, the crossroads ahead, the bridge toll-gates. In the back, Clare sat utterly at ease, not quite smiling, her right hand stuck to her left with blood.

Felix guided the car in between two others, making them swerve dangerously. The drivers shouted. Chuckling and darting gay looks at his passengers, he pretended to speed into the oncoming traffic on the bridge, then diverted himself by breaking the law and
changing lanes. Men shouted. Leaving the bridge, he pressed his foot to the floorboards and the car hurtled up a narrow and almost vertical hill, passing everything, horn blaring.

In fear of death, her shoulders queerly hunched and not daring to speak, Laura watched the road, her husband, the descending cars that Felix, grunting to himself, avoided less and less carefully while he passed and edged in front of steady travellers to the peril and anger of all.

With apparent pleasure, and totally at ease, Clare watched the playful game. She was sufficiently indifferent to it, however, to notice and admire in the steep grounds of the old convent a row of dark pines stiffly pointing into the exquisite and prophetic evening sky. And from her soul, the while, she sent a still, intense and loving prayer: Crash us. Kill us. Crash us.

‘What do you make of these atom bombs?’ Elsie Trent asked the boss’s wife, when the boss was outside talking confidentially to one of his suppliers.

Laura looked up from her typewriter, startled. ‘I don’t know, Elsie. It’s the end of the war, of course, and that’s wonderful, though it makes you think of all the poor boys—’

The day the war ended officially they would be officially and permanently dead, the boys who were not coming back. Till that day it would always seem that peace could resurrect them, fully fleshed.

‘It will be a very sad day for a lot of people.’

‘It will that,’ Elsie agreed, regarding a blue flower of her own creation in a disparaging way. She took another stem from the box and cleaned under her nails with it. ‘But what do you make of the new bombs?’

‘Well—’ Laura smoothed her fingers along the shiny keys of her machine. ‘It might be
clever
to kill more people with fewer, and they say it means terrible things, but I can only think—if someone’s killed, what would the brand of the bomb matter? But I’m probably wrong,’ she added hastily, to forestall announcements that she certainly was.

‘Well, you know what men are. Anything new gets them in. They like a big bang. They see these things different from us.’ Completing her manicure with the poison-green stem, Elsie proceeded, daintily, to stick petals round it.

At the beginning, Elsie had been inclined to respect Mrs. Shaw: she was terrific when anyone was sick, and kind and capable and never fussed. She was a first-class worker; too. But something about the way the boss treated her tickled Elsie and the others. He was a pig to her, really, and she was nice and everything and gentle and ladylike, but you had to giggle. Without ever turning in their direction, or acknowledging their powers of hearing, he subtly gave them leave to take a poke at her. So they did, just for a bit of fun. Elsie found a new bantering tone to use on Mrs. Shaw, and
the younger girls kidded her. She never let on, though.

‘Are you goin’ to watch the victory parade and everything?’ Elsie asked, one afternoon a few weeks later.

‘Oh, no!’ Laura smiled a little patronisingly at the idea. ‘We always think home’s best on days like that. We don’t like being out in crowds. It’s very pleasant to have a quiet day at home. We’ve got a lot to do in the garden.’

In truth, she had suggested to Felix that they might go into town. ‘It would be nice to be with all the other people. It’s a historic occasion, after all. By yourself it doesn’t seem so much of a celebration.’

‘What’ve
I
got to celebrate?’

‘I didn’t mean celebration. Event.’

‘The Taxation Department’s going to sting me for the best part of what I’ve made this year!’

‘A little break would do you good. You never get a change of scene.’

‘And would you mind telling me where I’m going to find a place to park my car? I wouldn’t take it into town on V.J. Day if you gave me a million quid.’

Elsie pushed her pointed chin deep into her neck, making little rolls of powdered flesh ripple out from it. ‘Hoh!’ she scoffed. ‘You can stay home when you’re an old lady. What do you want a quiet day for at your age? You need a bit of life! You’re as white as anything.’

‘Oh well—’ Laura smiled with the sadder air of
one who is wiser, and glanced down at her shorthand notes and back at her page. You could hardly explain to Elsie that people had different values.