The Watch Tower (3 page)

She asked the question and Clare accepted its statement with no trace of grievance. Their rackety housekeeping took time but was a novelty. They were not supervised. Laura aired her pleasant voice daily and liked to stare out of the bedroom window at three huge triumphant flame trees on the slope above the cricket ground, their tangled branches. Clare liked to slide down the banisters to the ground floor. She liked to run, read, swim and sing.

They ran down the steep hill past two- and three-storeyed blocks of flats like their own, and the grey stone church balanced on the incline. Stopping for breath and running again, stopping for traffic and running, their long plaits of hair smacking their backs then curving out ahead, they at last reached the esplanade, the semicircle of pines and fine yellow sand beyond which there
was only the Pacific. If they were uncertain of everything else, they knew this was a boundary. It took them aback. Jolted to a stop, they stared and stared before, in a sense, giving up, looking away, and dropping, stiff-kneed, down the steps to the beach.

‘Did you remember to change the books, Laura?’

Stella Vaizey was lying on her dark-blue velveteen sofa under the windows, smoothing her eyebrows with a tiny brush, examining the effect in the oblong mirror from her handbag.

‘Yes, I got two of each. Don’t know what they’re like.’

At her mother’s behest she had joined the threepenny lending library and was working systematically along the shelves. Mrs. Vaizey flipped and dipped through the novels and tepid tales of travel Laura produced, but the flat was silent for hours on end while, in private lairs behind cushions and the high backs of chairs, or round in the passage between the brick laundry and the paling fence, the printed pages were taken in by her daughters with such fervour that objects any less wondrous than words would have been permanently enfeebled by it.

‘I went to town this afternoon. Some of Daddy’s friends from home rang up.’

Laura sat down on the stool, leaning forward, to listen eagerly. ‘Who? What did they say? Did they
remember us?’

It did not surprise her, as it had the first time, to hear that her mother had gone out. Frequently now when early summer produced mornings of unparalleled transparency, of a significant and singing radiance, she sauntered into them. She window-shopped and pottered and drank coffee. She had her hair set and met country visitors. She sat in the faded canvas deck-chairs facing the ocean and read what the astrologers foretold for the following week, and wrote to her brother Edward in India, and other distant relations in Somerset. More important still, she had begun to play bridge three or four times a week with a group of women who gathered in Mrs. Casson’s flat downstairs.

Stella Vaizey was convalescing. She resided rather than lived with her daughters. Languid, detached, she allowed herself to be looked after. She could venture out safely now, because it had become obvious to the girls, without a word having been uttered, that someone so small should not have to labour.
They
were Australian, medium-sized mortals, quite lacking in their mother’s fragility and exotic heritage. It was entirely natural that they should leap about, bruising their shins and hip-bones, cutting their fingers, acquiring circles under their eyes, in the process of fending for her and themselves.

In town, apart from her card-playing acquaintances, Mrs. Vaizey knew no one. The uncle whose
presence in Australia had been the pretext for her visit to the country, and in whose house she met David Vaizey, had died. David’s sister was married and living in Canada. His father, an old man now, whom she had never met, lived somewhere in the north of Queensland with his second wife. No solutions to her future were likely to be forthcoming from any of these directions, yet—

‘Something very, very nice is going to turn up one of these days,’ she promised herself, speaking aloud to Clare.

Was it? Clare watched her mother rasp a match on the box and light her cigarette. Fascinated, with an almost loving intensity, Clare watched the cigarette smoke writhe. She
knew
her mother, but still, something wonderful was going to happen. Her mother said so.

‘Who knows? I might open a gift shop down on the Esplanade or the Corso with that little bit of money Daddy left. Or I wonder if flowers—?’

She raised her face to the looking-glass never far from her hand, and inspected her smooth creamy image. Surely it had a meaning? So accurately designed. Even her hair, which was heavy and smooth, arranged in what Miss Lowe down the street called ‘a sculptured Egyptian style’, looked somehow intended. A wealthy husband, of course, was the obvious answer.

‘Yes, a gift shop! Laura supported her seriously. ‘Or flowers.’

She and Clare had risen up with genuine praise and encouragement for dozens of tentative musings of this nature on their mother’s part. Unfortunately, though, her mentioning and their support always had the effect of turning an idea for action into buried experience. However—

Laura passed what passed for examinations at the business college and was commended by Mr. Sparks who owned it and had a black moustache.

‘As our top student, Laura, you could have the pick of the jobs on the register, but your mother wants you to find something locally, does she? You’d get more money in town.’ Jim Sparks, thirty-five, destined to spend his days nursing his own invalid mother, raised his moustache enquiringly.

‘It’s the travelling time. I help at home.’

‘Oh, well. That doesn’t leave us too much choice, you know.’ His pale fingers went over the card-index with a cycling motion. ‘Shaw’s Box Factory. Only a fair wage to start. No Saturdays.’

Laura had her light-brown sun-streaked plaits cut the same afternoon, and her hair hung in loose natural waves to her shoulders. Out of startled blue eyes she looked at her new face. She felt a sensation that was hard to identify. She half-thought to put it down to the loss of her hair, which had never been cut before. But it was only that reality, in the sound of a few words, had
twisted her heart.

Shaw’s Box Factory. Doctor Laura Vaizey—Laura Vaizey at Covent Garden—

She was like someone who, having gone bravely through preparations for an operation that would almost certainly truncate her life, realised with a terrible twisting of her heart just as the anaesthetist’s mask descended, that this shocking thing was truly happening, inevitable: shrieking resistance was of no avail.

‘Well, if that’s the job Mr. Sparks has suggested—’ Her mother gently acquiesced in his decision and continued her letter to Edward. Instead of evaporating as expected, Laura remained. Her silent presence made Mrs. Vaizey look up, mildly irritated but constrained to add, ‘Something very nice will turn up soon, you’ll see!’

She was rubbing her jawline delicately with her left hand. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve been bitten by a mosquito!—No, if your father had only thought—But, anyway, you’re a born homemaker, a born housewife. And you’ve got an unusual little face, pretty eyes and teeth and a small waist. You’ll—’ she stroked her jaw worriedly ‘—meet some—’ she paused again. Laura wandered off.

Mr. Shaw of Shaw’s Box Factory was a swarthy nuggety man of forty-four who looked closer to fifty. He was hardly taller than Laura in her two-inch heels. He usually wore a brown suit with the coat unbut
toned and flapping open, and had a dark-brown hat at a dashing angle on his thick black hair. Heavy untidy eyebrows overhung eyes of an extreme darkness with large irises and almost no whites. In the afternoons, by four o’clock, his beard was beginning to sprout. He looked like a pirate, and people who had never seen a Turk or a Persian thought that he looked like these foreign men, too.

Most of the time he was absent collecting materials and delivering orders. When he came to the factory his attention went with the inflexible fixity of a primitive machine from one object to another—one ledger, one journal, one carton filled with little boxes. He rarely spoke and when he did it was only ever about the particular task that had his attention. His voice grated and rasped as if his throat was perpetually rough from shouting. Since he was apt to speak without indicating which member of his staff he was addressing (by, for instance, looking someone in the face) and since he was inclined to enunciate in the manner of one talking to himself, he was very often asked to repeat his instructions. Occasionally this seemed to anger him, but in general he appeared not to notice the presence of company.

In the one-roomed factory five girls sat at a long bench opposite a row of windows; on the brick wall blearily visible through the glass they read, day in day out, in green letters on a yellow ground: try trixie tea—it’s tasty, tempting and tantalising!

Layers of cellophane material pressed into folds
and cut into solid crosses by a guillotine were stacked at each girl’s right hand. Four strokes of liquid cement and a moment’s pressure completed a box. Towers of these colourless cubes were constructed daily, the girls competing against each other for the highest wage.

Florists were Shaw’s chief customers, but jewellers and department stores were beginning to place big orders, too. The wireless played all day. The girls worked fast and sang huskily.

After a few hours’ inspection they were casually friendly to the new office girl who sat typing at her desk further along the same grimy wall. They genuinely pitied anyone who had to write shorthand and add figures. Especially since they made more money than she did, and worked the same hours. Yes, they felt quite friendly towards her.

‘How’re ya goin’, Laurie? Watcha up to this arvo, love?’ They peered over at her typewritten page, at her notebook, laying warm hands on her shoulders. Idle for a moment, kindly patronising, smelling of face powder and pickled onions and liquid cement, they paused to joke with her and tease her.

On Laura’s fourth day at the factory, she yelped at the sight of two large rats running not very quickly in her direction along the ledge behind the girls’ feet.

Aileen and Greta, the senior girls, choked over their boxes, laughing. ‘They’re our pets! Doncha like ’em? Feed ’em our crusts!
They
won’t hurt you! More
afraid of you.’

The young ones, Shirley, Diane and Bernadette, cried inextricably, ‘They don’t like ’em eether, Laurie. They’re havin’ you on. Dirty big things!—The rats, the rats, we meant!’ they shrieked, voices and faces cracking with giggles as their elders threatened to crown them.

Returning to the factory at three that afternoon, Mr. Shaw found a tin of poison on his desk. He read the label, ponderously turned the tin upside-down, then raised his eyes to look at Laura for what appeared to her to be the very first time.

‘What’s all this? Where did this come from?’ His voice was thick and slow.

Laura told him she had bought it, and why.

Mr. Shaw began to laugh in rather a startling way. He looked—jocular, Laura thought, but he laughed the way people did in pantomimes, the way the Dame did, as if he was listening to himself.

Feeling herself blanch, Laura returned his smile conventionally and asked, cringing from the thought, if she could put the poison down.

‘Well, now! Well, now!’ With a stunning abruptness Mr. Shaw
stopped
laughing, and looked at Laura with a very serious frown, as if she had brought up some entirely different subject, and was asking him to throw away half his assets. She felt, and was abashed to feel, that she had begged a colossal favour. After all, in a way, he did
own
the rats.

Her nerve fluctuated; she could understand nothing. Seeing her waver, Mr. Shaw started to laugh again in a way that was meant to be, but was not entirely, reassuring.

‘Okay!’ he declared largely, tossing all sensible deliberation aside. ‘Out they go! And I’ll put it down myself.’ This girl had actually spent
her
money to get rid of
his
rats. This fact continued to strike him. No, he was not indifferent to it. ‘Save you the trouble,’ he added.

After this, Laura felt a vague sort of loyalty to the man. Somehow he had put her under an obligation.

Mrs. Vaizey sat in the sun on the tiny back balcony of their flat. From the rubbish-chute leading down to the incinerator there was a slight, disagreeable smell of burning paper. She stared out peevishly at the blue sky, the red-brick walls of buildings identical to the one in which she lived, at two pairs of striped pyjama trousers animated by the wind performing a sailor’s hornpipe on the clothes-line next door.

To her brother Edward, she wrote: ‘Something will have to happen soon. This can’t go on. One’s connections are all at home in England. Suburban life here is out of the question. The girls don’t mind it. They are their father’s daughters.’

Their father’s daughters pushed through the Saturday
morning shoppers, their string bags bumping and knocking. They worked their way into the butcher’s shop, stood amongst women’s backs and sides of beef and waited.

Coming out, Clare was radiant. ‘Laura. That girl in the blue shorts in there. She smiled at me. Laura. She looked friendly. I thought she was going to speak to me. Laura? I wish—’

Laura was glancing down her list. She looked about for Clare. ‘Where were you?’

‘Here. I was telling you—’

No one ever listened. You might as well not have a voice. They walked on together. Clare’s fair face was softly coloured and in the heat today as damp as a leafy plant. Again it brimmed with brightness, information, enthusiasm. ‘Laura! Laura! Listen. In that milk bar just back there, there was a man who looked exactly like Dad. He saw us, too. He might have said something, if we hadn’t been going so fast.’

Laura tutted as they angled in and out among the slower walkers.

‘He was probably going to ask you to stop staring at him. You do this all the time.’

‘No, he wasn’t. I do not,’ Clare defended herself and mooched along watching the ground for a few moments. She knew she was always—not exactly staring at people, but looking out for them. Looking out.

‘Well, that’s the lot.’ Laura eyed the pedestrian
crossing up ahead that led homewards across the busy street, then looked down at her young sister, whose thick fair plaits dangled over her shoulders. Obscurely angry, she said, ‘People can’t just speak to other people in the street if they don’t know them, Clare.’