The Watch Tower (2 page)

‘Now that your father’s gone—’

Stella Vaizey saw the two faces jerk, to an even sharper alertness, and hesitated. What a pair of pedants they were! What sticklers, George Washingtons, optimists!

‘Dead,’ she corrected herself firmly, with a trace of malice. ‘Now that your father’s dead, the three of us are going to live together in Sydney.’

The blank receptive faces, the wide-open eyes, turned now to their headmistress, Miss Lambert, who nodded regretful confirmation.

‘When I’ve sold the house and found a flat in the city,’ the girls’ mother continued, taking in the exchange of looks dryly, ‘I’ll let Miss Lambert know.’

A magpie or a currawong, or some other bush bird she hoped never to hear in town, gave its careless, beautifully deliberate call from a giant blue gum in the distance outside the school grounds. (Someone sighed.) Closer at hand there were energetic sounds from the tennis courts, and laughter.

‘I can’t persuade you to reconsider this, Mrs. Vaizey? If we had Laura for her last years—She’s one of our best students, you know.’ The girl had thought that she might study medicine as her father had done, though Laura had now and then expressed her willingness, in addition, to sing in opera, if pressed to do so. And laughable and unlikely though such ideas often
seemed, it was a fact, Miss Lambert had to admit, that human beings did perform in operas the world over, and that Laura had a charming mezzo-soprano voice, was musical, and had an aptitude for languages. However, her poor young father—at forty-five five years younger than Miss Lambert—had had a heart attack at the wheel of his car setting out one evening to visit a patient; and now, in a sense—from a headmistress’s point of view—his daughter’s life was in danger. (Clare’s too, of course, but she was only nine, not at such a crucial stage; was apt to say, anyway, to benevolent enquiries about her future plans, ‘I don’t know’—unlike some others of her age, who could already answer, with an aplomb Miss Lambert liked to flatter herself the school had fostered, ‘A physiotherapist, Miss Lambert’, or ‘A debutante, Miss Lambert’. Nice decisive little lasses!)

‘Laura’s career—It would make so much difference. There are scholarships—’ Miss Lambert murmured, rising even as she spoke, for Stella Vaizey was murmuring back with a soothing insulting confidence, ‘The girls understand. Their father was not very practical.’

Called on for understanding, her daughters looked at Mrs. Vaizey with a probing uncertainty. She cared for them so little they were awed. Their father had translated her to them from time to time; now Laura was obliged to attempt this for herself and Clare. Recently,
she had explained: ‘She’s wonderful, really, it’s only that she’s unpredictable. But she’s unusual because she’s not an Australian, I think. You’d be bound to be different, being born in India.’

Clare left her attention and a finger on the blue-ruled page of her homework book, and raised bright-grey eyes to her sister’s face. After an empty perusal of this face, which was intently thinking at a pastel portrait of Princess Elizabeth, Clare’s eyes dropped deep into the inky problems of trains travelling at sixty, eighty and ninety-five miles an hour between three distant cities.

‘Yes,’ Laura repeated, frowning at the princess.

‘Mmm.’ Clare’s agreement had the moody, putting-off note of one resisting an alarm-clock, but a part of her mind was grateful to hear:
wonderful
,
unpredictable
,
born India
.

But now, just ten days ago, their father, whom they had assumed to be as enduring as the sun, had turned out to be more unreliable than anyone they had ever known. Mrs. Vaizey had come with the news and gone. Their friends had crept off looking sly and sympathetic by turns, whispering at the end of the corridor, acting as if the Vaizey girls had violated the rules of some secret society. Miss Lambert and the other teachers were kind, but their helplessness in the face of events, and the chasm between the sisters and these officially affectionate, familiar people, became more and more
apparent to them as their mother shook hands with Miss Lambert now and kissed them and left the school. At a distance and slowly the idea rose on the horizon: it had only been a transaction all the time. They were only money and words and figures on an invoice.

During the remaining days there, the girls often stared into each other, profoundly surprised at the shape their world was taking. There was no precedent for death, and the snapping-off of what they had taken to be eternal friendships with Sheila and Rose, and being left (it felt) at the mercy of their mother with whom they were not very well acquainted. Monuments like Miss Lambert and the school were evidently insubstantial as the vacant creatures moulded in sand to resemble people by the sculptor on the Sydney beach they went to once.

Laura’s father—her
father—
was
as easily disposed of as the scraps of paper on which she had printed:
Dr
.
Laura Vaizey
.
The taken-for-granted evolution of school life—entering as a ‘little one’ and leaving as a very senior person who had worked desperately hard and passed a most difficult examination—was apparently
not
inevitable.

Laura had read books. In all except a few dramatic stories set in other centuries, involving characters and circumstances ridiculously far removed from hers, everything ended happily for young heroines. Though their plans were shattered and there was no hope at all,
it always worked out that there had been a fantastic misunderstanding. The girls and their loved ones then sped, laughing, to their rainbow-coloured future. Was she not a young heroine? Those other tragedies (Miss Lambert’s classics) were beautiful, of course, and very sad, but not like anything real. So what had happened to the Vaizeys couldn’t be tragic; it was only stupefying, left the future mysterious and unimaginable. It felt odd to plan only from morning till afternoon till night, with the next day, the next week, a featureless vacuum: and next year, or five years’ time, like the space off the edge of the world. She had a sensation of having mislaid a vital pleasure that she could not quite remember, or a piece of herself. There was nothing to dream!

Clare bore her departure from school rather better, since she had always been under the impression that she had been sent there originally as a punishment, or to be got rid of. One night long ago her parents had quarrelled. They had said words she had forgotten that nevertheless had meant what she had understood and remembered them to mean. She and Laura were not wanted. School was a place they could disappear to for ever.

Nor had anyone, since she had arrived there years before, ever explained from the beginning the purpose they were all allegedly pursuing. In another place purposes might be clearer, the beginnings of stories be told—among them, even the reason for being here at all.

***

‘I want you and Clare to take over from tomorrow morning, Miss Muffet.’ Stella Vaizey lay back in bed and extended one small, beringed and manicured hand in a final relinquishing gesture. Propped against two pillows, smoking an Abdulla cigarette, she looked tolerantly at Clare, who sat on the dressing-table stool, leaning on her knees, plaits hanging, one navy-blue ribbon untied; and at Laura, who stood, back to the windows, assessing the strange bedroom and its furnishings with quick little glances. Laura hated that ‘Miss Muffet’. It wasn’t well intended.

‘You’re fixed up at your business college; Clare’s enrolled at her school, and they’re both within walking distance. You know where the shops are, and the beach is at the bottom of the hill, so you’ve got nothing to complain about, have you?’

She was crossing them off her list!

‘And now that everything’s settled, I’m going to expect you both to take some responsibility. I’m
very
tired. I’ve had a busy, upsetting time with that oaf of a solicitor bungling everything and selling the house. It’s been a great—’ her eyes filled with tears. She sneezed, and sneezed again, and groaned luxuriously as if to say, ‘There! You can see for yourselves how ill-treated I’ve been.’

She was a very attractive woman. Her thick creamy skin tanned easily; her face was short and wide;
her eyebrows were dark and shaped with a beautiful, appeasing regularity; her mouth was pretty and her eyes were soft-looking and changed from violet-grey to amber in a way that had been considered fascinating. An Indian languor and grace of movement not always found in the offspring of British army majors had surprised and lured a number of young men none of whom was ever to be famed for his percipience: one was David Vaizey. It was clear even now, even to the girls, that she had been wrought for more congenial circumstances than these.

‘Poor Mum!’ Out in the kitchen, her tone perfunctory rather than sincere, Clare disposed of her mother and balanced on the white-painted spar of a chair, tipping it up and rocking.

‘We’ll work out a timetable and make lists. You’ll have to help!’ Laura was impressed by her own authority. Yet it was a joke in a way. Even her strict claim on Clare was made with conspiratorial laughing eyes. Yet she felt like someone else.

‘I
will
.
I
will
help,’ Clare protested, her lively speculative look fastened on the game of houses they were about to play. Giving the chair an incautious jerk, she landed horizontal on the floor, the breath knocked out of her and a bump rising rapidly on the back of her skull.

‘Oh, look out!’ Laura whispered, giggling, as their mother called out from the bedroom, ‘What on
earth—
?’

They giggled silently as Clare picked herself up, and
their mother’s voice continued to rebuke their thoughtless noise. And they went on giggling—now that they had started—because of something embarrassing to do with their father, whom they had not known very well either; because this was the first day in their new home, a furnished flat, in an unknown suburb—Manly, in a huge city, Sydney—and they had to walk alone into strange institutions tomorrow.

They laughed, and they had to sit down; and they laughed, and bit their hands, and wrapped their arms round their middles, and started each other off again when the riot seemed to be waning. They laughed till all their laughter emptied out, then almost instantly they felt very tired. They smelt the clean and unfamiliar odours of the flat—new paint, empty cupboards—and draughts of the salty wind that rattled the loose windows.

‘She’ll get up tomorrow or the next day.’ Clare shivered and yawned; and, standing up to go to bed, staggered for no reason and started to laugh again. And even as she laughed a strange silent panic rose up in her and she thought, with a sort of bright rigidity:
I want to go home
.
She was trapped here. She wanted to go home. Laura was locking the back door, and her arms looked white and weak. Laura knew no more than she did.

The school, teachers, friends, had cast them off.
Their father was nowhere. I want to go home, Clare thought again stubbornly, pushing with her mind against the knowledge that she had really nowhere to want to go. Caught, not safe, cold—There were no reliable people. It was all wrong! She kicked the chair that had made her fall over.

‘What were they like at school?’ Laura carefully washed the chops that had slid with gentle wilfulness from griller to linoleum.

‘All right. One girl said I put on jam. I
don
’
t
talk funny. I
told
her it was only Miss Carroll’s speech class. What were they like at your place?’ She set out the cutlery on her mother’s tray.

‘All right.’ Laura had learned a number of illuminating facts not connected with shorthand and typewriting: for instance, it was pitiable, awful, not to have a boyfriend; it was repellent to have your hair in plaits and not to wear makeup; it was peculiar to be without a father, yet to have a mother who need not work; it was the very nadir of dullness in a female of her age not to be able to discuss film and recording stars. ‘I hope I’ll like it. When I get to know them better.’

On one side of the dining-room table Laura was practising shorthand outlines, on the other Clare was brooding over an atlas.

‘How long,’ she asked, her eyes roaming the
coloured world, ‘how long do you think Mum’s going to stay in bed? Because it’s weeks and weeks.
I
don’t think she’s very sick.’ Clare looked through to the kitchen where dirty dishes stood in dismal mounds on the sink; she pushed her face out of shape with her fists and crossed her eyes.

Laura stopped work to sharpen her pencil with a razor blade. ‘It’s her nerves,’ she said loyally, looking into her young sister’s eyes, then dropping her own. But it was important to believe that your mother, at least, was truthful, at least. She, Laura, was seven years older than Clare so it was up to her—

‘Well, why,’ asked Clare darkly, having considered the proposition of her mother’s nerves for some seconds, ‘won’t she let us go out or anything?’

‘We went swimming on Sunday and we’re allowed to go to the pictures next Saturday afternoon.’ Laura pressed the sharp point of her pencil on the page and broke it.

‘Yes, but you know what I mean. That’s just us. Why can’t we go to see any of the girls ever?’

‘Because she likes to know where we are and who we’re with,
and
’
—
Laura looked up again from grinding away at the lead pencil—‘they can’t come here because Mr. and Mrs. Kirby downstairs own the place and they’d ask us to go if you brought fifty noisy little friends home.’

Clare wriggled her shoulders and grimaced at the map of the world. ‘Old India!’

‘Anyway, when would there be time?’ Laura asked, unanswerably.

They were rarely unoccupied. Afternoons ticked into evenings while tomatoes and apples were bought, potatoes peeled, bathroom and kitchen floors washed, dinner cooked, homework prepared; and on Saturday there were groceries to buy, carpets to hoover, washing to be sloshed all over the laundry and hung out; then on Sunday there was ironing, more cooking and homework. Though there was swimming, too, now that it was hot again.