The Watch Tower (7 page)

On the telephone now and then Laura had heard his voice slur with anger when someone tried to argue with him, but she always leapt out of hearing with conspicuous discretion at these times. What she definitely knew was that to younger men struggling to establish businesses he could be extraordinarily generous—to the extent of penalising himself.

With his hat tilted and his jacket flapping open he sometimes entered the office like a buccaneer with an invisible crew of attendant and loving cut-throats. He had no opinion of the law, Laura knew that, and several times he had boasted of his admiration for Hitler and the Gestapo! But really, she didn’t know him at all.

‘That’s settled then, is it? You’ll marry me and you and your sister’ll come to the house in Neutral Bay.—What’s the matter? You don’t want to marry anyone else, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Well okay then!’

Apparently he wanted very much to marry her. He wanted her to live in his beautiful house. He wanted to help and take care of her, be responsible even for Clare. Mr. Shaw, Felix Shaw, Felix, a stranger who had
no obligation to, had all his attention focused on her, hoped for something of her, asked her a favour, wanted to be kind as this to her.

‘I’ll give you a couple of days,’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said to her mother and Clare.

The three women sat at the table in the small dining alcove eating lamb cutlets, green peas and tomatoes. The evening was hot and airless; outside, it was still daylight. Flies zoomed and glided near the ceiling, occasionally darting down to raid the table and be flapped away. The electric refrigerator vibrated rhythmically in the kitchen.

‘No one else can decide for you. It could be a very pleasant solution to everything, but—’ she extended both hands gracefully, eloquently. Chewing composedly, she eyed her younger daughter, whose face was expressionless.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said again, but smiled and looked down.

‘Does he talk to you about anything interesting? I think he sounds too
old
,’
Clare broke in.

‘One day I’ll give you such a box over the ears you’ll wonder what’s happened to you! Take no notice of her, Laura.—Well, I suppose Mr. Shaw will give you five minutes to make up your mind. I’ll talk to him too.’

Felix Shaw collected the Vaizeys in his car, which, Mrs. Vaizey remarked later, closely resembled a hearse,
and took them all to dinner at the Metropole. Throughout the meal he held the floor, laughing and joking so much and sometimes so incomprehensibly that his guests looked at each other bemused, as if they had stumbled in in the middle of a comedy performance that was paralysing the rest of the audience, just too late ever to see the point. No one else really talked at all. Laughing was a change, however.

The next family outing was to the house at Neutral Bay, where Mr. Shaw was not yet living. Wandering round the lawns and underneath the trees, standing on the verandah looking over the harbour, walking through the echoing rooms, they could scarcely refrain from assuming a faintly proprietorial manner. He invited them to. Mrs. Vaizey advised the dark-skinned, stocky, laughing man who might marry Laura, to visit auction sales and antique shops.

Clare looked about the pretty room that would be hers if Laura chose for some bizarre reason to belong to Felix Shaw.

In two months’ time Mrs. Vaizey was due to sail for England. Clare plaited her hair and watched the arrival of the cabin trunk that meant one change, and the chocolates, nylon stockings, silver trays and wine glasses that meant another.

Because they proved Felix Shaw’s regard, Laura was besotted by her presents, though in another indefinable way they made her uneasy. But Felix gave in so ungra
cious a manner (if she wouldn’t take these rubbishy trifles off his hands, the garbage tin or the office cleaner would) that she was half-reassured. All he implied was that they would marry when her mother left because it would be convenient and sensible.

Felix took the Vaizeys to a play at the Theatre Royal after dinner at the Australia. Apart from pantomimes and school productions of Shakespeare, it was the girls’ first experience of theatre. Clare analysed the play and the performance for weeks, and schemed to return to that red velvet curtain.

Felix escorted Laura to small restaurants at Kings Cross, and drove her to well-worn beauty spots that she had never seen. The roads smelled peculiarly of wood-alcohol, the use of which was prohibited and impossible to keep secret, but which made cars run, and was handy since the government had decided in its arbitrary way to ration petrol. ‘Pure cussedness,’ Felix called this act. ‘Just what you’d expect from that lousy crew.’

Everything was new to Laura: eating foreign food, riding in cars instead of buses and trams, seeing some trees and patches of open country, having someone notice her, getting to know the city she had always felt shy in, an interloper from the bush. Her mother had always
said
something nice would turn up. Her mother was pleased about Felix.

The knowledge that she could, if she chose, be
relieved of all her responsibilities, lifted Laura to such heights that she felt almost literally buoyant. Not to have to worry and plan for three seemed so glorious a collection of negatives that Laura supposed she must be terrifically happy. Evidently, it looked as if, she loved Felix Shaw.

Clare had turned very noisy.

After years of solitary confinement, after silence, starvation, house arrest, nights lurid with dreams of war and death, after school’s juggernaut lunacy, lamb chops and the price of peas, new things were happening.

‘Do be quiet, Clare. I can’t hear myself think.’ Mrs. Vaizey had a million details on her mind. The singing stopped.

‘Laura—Laura—’ Cunningly she tried to wrest her sister from her vast dreamy preoccupation by speaking low. ‘Listen to this:
“But for Roderick
,
on the bridge beside her
,
this moment had a quite different sense—some sort of assuagement or satisfaction at her having rested even so much of her as her hands
,
for however short a time
,
on even this bar of unknowing wood
.
His pity
,
speaking to her out of the stillness of his face
,
put her in awe of him
,
as of a greater sufferer than herself—no pity is ignorant
,
which is pity
’
s cost
.
”
Laura? Don’t you think that’s—’

‘What?’ Laura sounded asleep though her eyes were open. ‘I’m busy. I wish you’d keep quiet.’

‘Sure! Who cares?’ Clare rushed away, clutching the book she had quoted from, begging its forgiveness. Not she, but something beautiful had been traduced. Oh, but I know what you mean, she exulted, holding it to her on the dark balcony and smiling like someone in love. I truly do.

How
she knew, the particular occasion of her knowing, she could not remember. But, yes, the gratitude and relief of the witness seeing those hands on the harmless rail of the bridge—

She knew about pity. Every day, every day, people walked on clouds of illusion. In that play at the Theatre Royal there was an actress who thought herself lovely, and who was plump and too old for the part. The leading actor meant to be brilliant and subtle, yet no single gesture or inflexion was inspired by talent. Clare’s heart was wrung. She suffered for them, loved and shielded them. When they bowed before the curtain and beamed at the applause, tears rolled down her cheeks. It was unbearable. They must never know.

Daily, she heard conversations from adults and from adolescents who, starting from some illogical premise in space, constructed gingerbread houses trimmed with
non sequiturs
and stood back to assess their handiwork with pride and gravity. They thought they knew what they were saying! They thought that what they said had meaning! Girls were bewitched by their own ability to curl their hair and embroider hideous
daisies on hideous teacloths. Boys boasted because they could eat five potatoes with a roast dinner. Oh, accomplished! Oh, somnambulists! Silence, everyone! Take care!

On the balcony to which she had retreated, forearms resting on its brick wall, Clare summarily called up her dear ones and relations out of books. They knew her. What did it matter if there had never been anyone about to talk to? These others knew the real world was not tables and chairs and meat and vegetables—or that, given food and shelter, you could surely agree to, had obligations to—venture out? With her head on her folded arms, she stood dreaming.

‘I tell you what.’ Felix and Laura were eating cheese-and-gherkin sandwiches in the office. ‘To save rents overlapping, we’ll get it over the morning your mother’s sailing. She can come and check up on us and you can move into my house the same day. How’s that?’

‘Yes. All right.’ Laura put down her chipped cup. She felt lately like someone on a runaway train: events flashed by like stations, with no reference at all to her.

‘Well, then!’ Felix jumped up and gave her a boisterous kiss and pretended to punch her chin, and smiled into her face. ‘Hiya, Mrs. Shaw! You better put your thinking-cap on. We’ve got work to do.’

The factory, the flat, Felix’s house, her mother’s departure, and wedding arrangements, all concurrently required Laura’s total concentration.

‘No churches!’ Felix warned her. ‘Morbid damn’ places. Give you the willies. A registry office’s the shot. You don’t want veils and all that hocus-pocus.’

‘No. No.’ On the contrary. Laura was stupid with relief. Who would want to stand in a church with dozens of friends and relations on Felix’s side, and exactly two people on hers? In bed at night she had suffered over this picture.

‘How do you account for it?’ Felix-the-vision asked, twisting his eyebrows. ‘You must be a very unpopular girl.’

All she could ever think of to say, was, ‘But no one knows about us. No one has ever known we were here.’

In the course of packing, Mrs. Vaizey sold a few of what she called her ‘treasures from the old days’—ugly pieces of silver for the most part—and from the proceeds bought Laura’s wedding clothes. Laura herself possessed seventeen pounds, and Clare had five in the bank.

‘I’ll be in it,’ Peter Trotter said, agreeing to act as a witness. ‘The girls can look after the shop. They won’t eat too many of the best lines. They’re all slimming.’

Felix drove between the flat and the house, and the factory and Peter’s shop. Carriers removed Mrs. Vaizey’s luggage. Her daughters unpacked at Felix’s the night before the wedding.

When the ceremony was over, and she was about to board the ship, Mrs. Vaizey said, ‘I leave you the
mistress of a beautiful house, Laura. You’ll have a new life now as a young married woman. Clare won’t be any worry with Felix taking care of you both. You’re a very lucky girl.’

A little distance off, along the wharf, Felix was talking to an official in a navy-blue uniform. It was half past two in the afternoon.

Mrs. Vaizey glanced across at the men. ‘You can’t stay to say goodbye, because nobody will tell us when we’re sailing. It’s just as well.’ Her creamy face, her large amber eyes, were impenetrable. She was like a park that had never once removed its
Don
’
t Walk on the Grass
signs. The black veil of her little hat pricked her daughters’ cheeks in turn, and their clothes brushed together.

On the sunny windy wharf, beside the big camouflaged ship, with a war in progress, having just been married, saying goodbye to her mother, Laura felt herself falter. None of this—wharf, ship, war, marriage, farewell—was of her planning. Who had constrained her? She felt like an object.

Clare scowled miserably at the tears streaming up from some place in her chest and out through her eyes. She wanted to shriek with indignation, to fall on the ground, to complain loudly in a loud rough voice. They had all been cheated. She and Laura had never been loved, and certainly not by this woman. Nor for years had she, Clare, felt the slightest affection for her. But not to care that they were parting! Not to care! Her heart was torn to think of all that they
had missed.

Accompanied by Peter Trotter, Felix joined them. ‘What’s the trouble, eh? She’s safe as houses. The submarines’ve all been rounded up. You’re safer in a convoy than trying to cross Pitt Street!’

Clare gave her misguided comforters a look and, walking away from the ship, extracted her arm from its unnatural, sickening link with Laura’s. At times Laura confused what was with what ought to be in a way that deeply antagonised her uncompromising sister. Striding on ahead, laughing loudly at one of Peter’s quips, Felix left his wife to follow in her cream silk wedding dress, with a small wreath of olive leaves on her head.

‘Well, look, I know it’s your honeymoon and all that tomorrow, Felix, but can you get me out a carton of number fourteens before one o’clock?’

‘Oh, I guess we can manage that. With all these women to keep I’d better not lose any orders, eh?’ Felix looked sideways at all the two women and gave his slow laugh.

‘What do we want with holidays?’ Felix said in the morning. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to get these orders out and you’d better give me a hand.’

He looked at Laura in much the same way as he had when she was his employee merely. She was almost relieved. Evidently what happened at night was not carried forward like the petty cash balance to the next
day. It would not have been proper. Felix was modest and prim. She was glad. If he teased her a little cruelly, smiling fixedly as he pointed out her defects, she would have to learn not to be too touchy. It was true that she was ignorant. He was no more than right when he told her that she was not beautiful. Yes, she was relieved. Things, shapeless feelings, nightmarish and strange as mountains fighting, as landslides and ranges rising out of the sea, were best curtained off by the gold light of day. It was right to keep days and nights in separate compartments the way Felix did. Fortunately, fortunately, people had the sense not to go about in the mornings, in the streets, as if they guessed, or even (the thought really stunned her) had similar secrets. Evidently in Felix’s mind, one section at a time was all that could stay open. This could be a useful habit to aspire to. Assume forgetfulness if you have it not—