The Watch Tower (6 page)

Besides, her mother was right: nice boys would
never speak to strange girls in the street.

Mr. Shaw was crestfallen never to find Jack Roberts in when he called at the old box factory. He had had a lot of time for Jack; he had liked their yarns about the black-market rackets Jack was in on, and it confirmed everything he knew and tickled him deeply to hear how not one honourable gentleman in the continent would refuse to pocket Jack’s bribes.

The factory was unrecognisable now. Jack had knocked out walls left, right and centre. He had a swag of females, a packer, a delivery truck, and God knew what else. After wandering in a few times and standing round like a poor relation waiting for Jack, who never turned up, to turn up, Mr. Shaw gave these social calls away. The cheap little bits who worked for Jack sniggered and asked each other, ‘Who’s Dracula come to see?’

But it was rough, when you came to think of it, not to have clapped eyes on Jack since they signed the bill of sale. And having reminded himself of the bill, a copy of which was always in his wallet, Mr Shaw looked up Jack’s address in the telephone book and detoured off up to the North Shore after unloading a few gross of peppermint creams in town. ‘Just passing, Jack!’

Lo and behold! (which was rather how it struck him) Jack’s house was a two-storeyed mansion in a sort
of Millionaires’ Row, with a huge garden and a glimpse through big double-barrelled gates of what looked extremely like a swimming pool out at the front. You would have needed high explosives to blast your way into the grounds.

Felix Shaw drove away very fast, chewing it all over in his mind, and sweating with a curious relief that he had not been spotted. Jack was a married man: the place might belong to his wife. No explanation of this sort exactly fitted Jack’s description of his circumstances, but there was nothing wrong with
Jack
.
Possibly if Felix had known the cove wasn’t really on his uppers, he might not—But a deal was a deal. It was a fair price he had received for the factory, even if it erred maybe one decimal point in Jack’s favour. Perhaps the house back there was misleading. A businessman had to put up a prosperous front. Also, old Jack definitely was not doing the business that all the activity at the factory might lead you to expect: his payments were falling further and further behind.

‘Come and have a look at this.’ Mr. Shaw and Laura were in the car together and it was Friday afternoon. Laura had dashed solemnly in and out of city shops delivering chocolates while he kept the engine running. Now on the way back to Manly, he pulled up unexpectedly in Neutral Bay in a street close to the harbour. ‘Bought myself a house yesterday.’

It was a lovely single-storeyed colonial house
painted white, with a roof of grey slate and long shady verandahs decorated with old wrought iron. There were lawns. There were daphne and camellia and gardenia bushes with dark shiny leaves. In the garden behind the house there were fruit trees, two of which were hung with enormous lemons, sweetly scented.

Inside, the rooms were large and cool, and stood awaiting furniture and embellishment at the hands of their new owner. A pattern of leaves, criss-crossed and winking light, blew and shivered on the empty white wall of the sitting-room as the poplars at the side of the house shook and sent shadows indoors.

‘Well, what do you think? And how about that view?’ Mr. Shaw was so strangely jocular that for an instant Laura wondered if the house really did belong to him, or whether he was trespassing as a kind of joke.

‘It’s beautiful. It’s the loveliest house I’ve ever been in.’

She glanced through the bare french windows, over the greenness of grass and flowering hedges to the blue ship-laden harbour, and the city beyond it. She had no idea what she was thinking.

An enterprising young chap (as Mr. Shaw described him) called Peter Trotter, opened a speciality shop in the city to sell Shaw’s factory-produced home-made chocolates exclusively.

Peter Trotter said, ‘You can sell anything these days,
but you can still sell a good sweet easier than a bad, and this line of yours is unique.’ He had three languid beauties, predictably blonde, brunette and redhead, attending to his uniformed clients. He himself, spruce and pallid, helped the ladies who drifted in, drenched with perfume, clanking charm bracelets, complaining glamorously to him about clothes coupons (which he had supplies of) and runs in the unobtainable nylon stockings so thoughtfully provided by American friends.

The ladies’ hair was often dramatically tinted and lacquered into wicker baskets with a week’s life expectancy. Peter Trotter admired these artful arrangements and his scented callers’ prosperity generally. Everyone was playing a part that called for a special American or British accent. It was lovely. The Imperial Arcade, where his little shop was, was lovely. There were ornaments like miniature chandeliers or monster pendant-earrings hanging from the arcade walls, and when the wind swept through from Pitt to Castlereagh Street their long stems chinked and tinkled like glass music in the air.

‘No,’ Peter shook his head, looking through his window at the ladies wearing violets and camellias on their winter suits. (He could never fathom what anyone found to complain about these war-time days.) ‘No. These sweets of yours are unique.’

Felix Shaw laughed slowly, but was none the happier for the praise. Indeed, the very reverse was
true. Something elusive, something desirable, something Peter Trotter had found in Shaw’s Chocolates was passing him by, though
he
had invented them. Practically.

‘Do you think you could ask Mr. Shaw if there’s some job Clare might have at the factory now that she’s fourteen?’

‘Oh, no!’

‘Why not? It’s good enough for you. Not in the factory, of course, but helping you.’ Mrs. Vaizey unscrewed her jar of hand cream and looked imperturbably at her eldest daughter.

‘We-ell.’ Laura paused.

‘If you didn’t want to work with her, I wouldn’t blame you.’ Mrs. Vaizey raised her voice a little, and massaged cream into her hands soothingly.

Out in the kitchen, Clare was washing dishes—a fair, provoking, indolent, moody, silent, sarcastic girl.

‘Oh, she’s a difficult girl!’ Mrs. Vaizey shook her head with a sort of indifferent vexation; she had other, urgent interests looming. Breathing and pondering and smoothing her slippery hands together she looked through to the kitchen again. She had never had any trouble with Laura; Laura had never treated her like this. There was a kind of dangerousness, almost, in the girl at times. A fierceness. People talked about caged tigers and, really, Mrs. Vaizey knew what they meant.

Scraping at a burnt saucepan, Clare listened to the
ravings of the philosophical
Bluebird of Happiness
.

Laura hesitated before flinging the blue chenille cover over her mother’s bed. Then she did throw it over and leaned across to tuck it under the pillows.

‘Now don’t sulk with me, Laura. I won’t have it, you know. You think she should go to a business college, do you? Oh, we all know you were going to be a great specialist or a second Melba, but Clare doesn’t want to be anything. You’ll both be married in a few years’ time. Still, I suppose we could manage it if it would satisfy you both. Clare! Come here!’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you. Your Uncle Edward wants me to go back home to England, to Somerset, now that he’s retired there. People are asking for me. All my old friends. This country’s never been home to me. It’s different for you two. You don’t know any better.’

Their faces would not even try to express their feelings.

Laura sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Leave us? Go to England in the middle of the war?’

‘It can’t last indefinitely. I’d go anyway.’

‘The other side of the world,’ Laura said.

Clare stood, feeling dizzy.

Turning from the triple-sided mirror to face her girls and their surprise, Mrs. Vaizey said mildly, ‘It’s no use saying the war, the war, to me. Uncle Edward’s fixing my passage from his end. He knows people. And
by the time I go, Clare will be settled in her job, and you can both be bachelor girls together. What’s wrong with that?—Laura, on Monday morning I want you to ask Mr. Shaw if he can get me a cabin trunk wholesale.’

‘What job?’ Clare asked.

‘Do they still make them?’ Laura brushed a fly off her knee. ‘Cabin trunks?’

Walking home past Manly Pool, deserted, seaweedy and bleak, this stormy evening, the girls had agreed to point out the soldier’s bus rank at the end of the street. He was from the country and lost. Even Laura felt there was no harm in him. Then Clare had to make everything complicated by asking, ‘What will you do when it’s over?’ and he smiled such a smile, right into her eyes.

‘Architecture or design,’ the swarthy young soldier said. ‘One or the other.’

Clare nodded her belief and readiness to be told more.

‘Have you ever watched one of these big buildings going up? My uncle was a contractor. I used to hang round his jobs when I came for holidays. These buildings—if they’re any good—you can see how they follow the pattern of any living thing in nature. See this leaf!’ He had only to put out his hand and an example fell into it. ‘See how the veins grow progressively thinner towards the top where they’ve got less
to support? Wait a minute. Even in cathedrals—Where’s some paper?’ He was in all his pockets. ‘I’ll show you.’

They sat on the wooden seat at the bus stop while he drew lines with professional assurance on the back of a yellow travel permit, breathing, half-smiling, like someone quite alone. Laura’s interest was neutralised by her formal terror that he might miss his bus. Buses were large important machines that ought not to be trifled with. They would not change their departure times because of any tomfoolery like this. The boy was only doing this to show off or entice them, or—

‘Do you see this grid effect?’ Using his pencil as a pointer he began his explanation again, stammering in his eagerness, glancing up, quickly side-tracked into further beautiful lines.

Clare was only awareness of him. Her intuition rejoiced. Oh, human! He was human! Unconscious of unfamiliar girls or what they thought of him. Willing to be defenceless. Without the smallest motive. His simplicity was holy. He was wonderful. Mentally she bowed to him. She would have embraced him with her arms and sent blessings from her fingertips but that the quality she saluted could not have existed side by side with a knowledge of itself. Weak with happiness, she sat beside the fabulous boy.

‘There’s your bus,’ Laura said, with shattering commonsense. ‘You’ll miss it if you don’t run. And we’d better get home, Clare.’

The hand with the blunt pencil stopped sketching those dull lines. Laura was glad. ‘Oh!’ The soldier looked up slowly, as after a blow, and shyly, with regret. ‘Oh! I’m sorry. If I’d had time—’ he moved off backwards towards the bus, talking, ‘— I could’ve shown you what—’

‘It’s going!’ Laura warned him, and with a loose smiling shrug, he turned and ran.

‘What’s so funny?’ Laura asked her young sister as the bus lurched away.

The street lights all came on suddenly.

‘Nothing!’ Clare sounded indignant. She started off across the road.

‘Look where you’re going!—Well, you were laughing! Laura said strictly.

‘I was not!’ (What a thing to say!) ‘I was just—’ She looked up over the buildings at the flat grey evening sky and with her face turned right away from Laura’s, she smiled.

Mr. Shaw listened, then he said, ‘Going away, is she? You and Clare’ll be by yourselves, eh?’

He and Laura were checking Peter Trotter’s order prior to stacking it in the car. The temperature was well over ninety.

Laura started to draw a flower over the tick beside the Coconut Roughs. ‘Yes. We’ll move into a boarding-house.’ She added some thorns.

‘What’s the trouble, then? Come on. You’d better tell me.’

Startled, Laura looked up from her order into his hot dark-brown eyes. The sensation she had of his eyes’ heat half-hypnotised her. His tone was excessive in some way that was disturbing, almost disagreeable to her. He stood over her in her chair, mouth closed, lips down-turned in a smile as if he thought—what he couldn’t possibly think! How kind to take an interest in her affairs!

She looked down quickly. ‘It’s only that—it’s unexpected. If my mother had stayed we might’ve kept Clare at school. Things like that.’

‘Mmm.’ He moved his mouth ruminatively, never quite displacing that superior smile and its odd suggestion of complicity. Again he hummed out that long reflective noise. ‘I don’t know if we couldn’t fix that up.’

Laura was aware suddenly that her eyes felt strained and sore; the skin of her lips felt taut and cracked with the heat. Talking in this personal way to Mr. Shaw made her feel nervous and giddy, or just peculiar and unlike herself.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, smiling his significant, enigmatic smile. ‘I think we could arrange something for young Clare, all right.’ He looked very merry. His eyes wandered over the yellow calcimined walls as if they
were covered with convulsively funny murals.

‘What do you mean?’

Taking in her bewilderment, Mr. Shaw rolled his eyes quickly away from hers in an extreme of secret glee. ‘Better forget all that Mr. Shaw stuff for a start,’ he advised her in his smiling growl. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking at the dirty wall rather critically now, ‘I think we can take care of that little problem. I think you’d better just marry me, and both of you come to live in the new house. I’ll fix everything.’

Apart from her father, the neighbours of those remote country days and, more recently, men who sold vegetables, meat and fish to her over counters, and the few young soldiers who spoke on trams and ferries, Laura had never known any men. By this time she had been longer in the company of Felix Shaw than of any other man, but she had never thought she knew him. He was more than twenty years older than she was for one thing; he employed her, for another. Nor had it ever occurred to Laura that he had any interest in her. He had certainly never shown it. He had always concentrated on this particular gross of boxes, or these special Easter eggs for Peter Trotter. After years of daily contact she knew virtually nothing about his past, his friends, his private life. He was rarely unpleasant to the staff and at Christmas time he gave them bonuses, but his attitude was never familiar in the sense of being relaxed and assured. He was abstracted, ignored them, lost in
accounts; or he was gruffly jovial, laughing in a hearty, not very natural manner. When the older women who worked as confectioners presumed to flatter him with a deference that was at once obvious and sly, he took it in good part. In fact, he seemed almost bashful.