page break

Chapter Seven
Laloma

After the war, when it was decided that their father's gratuity, helped out by the State Advance mortgage (another little Government treat for the returned soldiers), should buy the Hannays a house of their own, the children sat round the kitchen table, chanting, ‘Buy Laloma, buy Laloma, buy Laloma.’ They had never seen Laloma, but they were afraid that if it weren't bought they would get no house after all. John was tired of house-hunting, of the way Augusta went mousing in the drains and cooking arrangements of his prospective castles. Besides, to get to Laloma from Oddipore they had to change trams twice, which made it seem far away and romantic, and Eliza visioned it spotted all over with little flakes of falling snow. The children sang ‘Buy Laloma’ till Augusta gave in. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’

The name of the house was a Samoan word, meaning ‘The Abode of Love’. Laloma had its points; an ugly rickety house of white-painted wood, on a slope so steep that where in front it started life as a twodecker, at the back it had only one floor, the odd space going into cellars dominated by cats, rats, spiders, and the children. But its over-the-hills-and-far-awayness rang true. Most of the view glowed and kindled with gorse. In front was a clay precipice which Augusta called the garden, at the back a tiny lawn and a veritable native tree, a ngaio. Its branches were too thin to bear a swing, but its oily leaves, pin-pricked with gilt light, were pleasant when one lay beneath on curt grass and dandelions.

From the front you could see the old gravestones of a disused cemetery, jagged and yellow as decaying teeth. Between them at night slithered phosphorus, sometimes a mere glow-worm, sometimes long sheets of blue; behind, the hills curved softly and darkly into the bush, wilderness reached by five-mile tramps along lampless roads of brambles and little creeks. Laloma was half a mile inside civilization's fringes, and had the water laid on. The outpost was Bawder's Farm, with nothing beyond but bright broom and gorse, and stony valleys where Bawder's bull grazed, shaking its great head impatiently if the page 77 children approached. Mr Bawder supplied milk and duck-eggs, and was also the nightman for the houses without water services. His cart went rumbling along like something from Black Death days, and Mr Bawder, in a rabbit-skin cap and a red lantern at his belt, shamelessly waved and called out, ‘How's yer Ma? Tell yer Pa I could let him have that sitting of duck-eggs dirt cheap,’ causing great shame among the adolescent girls of the district, who did not quite like to recognize him, as they stood in their dusk-billowy, daisy frocks outside the gates with their boys. Mr Bawder had no remorse, and did not believe in the cleanliness of the world. ‘Eee,’ he once said of his poultry, ‘duck's a bird lays her egg in the moock, and then does something on top.’

Nearly everyone in the new district was sedate, except old Tim O'Keefe, the harness-maker, who was a Bolshie, and had in his shop window a large, unsteadily-lettered notice, ‘No Bushrangering Done Here’. He had a silver mop of hair, like an albino golliwog; John immediately made a friend of him, and Augusta, on principle, hated him all the way down from whiskers to shoe-leather. In an Irish way, he was good-natured, and tried to heal the Hannays’ family strife. ‘Ah,’ he'd say of John, ‘the big gob he makes on his face for throuble, like a thrush would be swallowing worms.’

Quietly, leaving hardly a slender pencil marking behind it, Calver Street had melted away; that happened almost overnight, as the returned soldiers, one moment arrogant and united in their rough khaki, in the next were shabby nothings in navy blue, back to their old pigeon-holes—the gentlemen (ex-merchants, or merchants’ sons), the clerks and shopkeepers, the labourers, the tramwaymen, to whom you couldn't talk, because they were cheeky. John's lean face had hardly lost its khaki hat, his body hardly decided that the fierce northerlies tearing down from the hills to Laloma were going to give him rheumatism, when he started to ‘make a big gob on his face for throuble.’ And here there were no Silly Boys, no drunken Mr Potockis, no Nigger Jacks, to take the edge off his dissension. He had come amongst the respectable. The respectable, in their way, enjoyed him tremendously. Within six months John was a branded man.

At Laloma the sitting-room was called the drawing-room, the kitchen was the breakfast-room, and the scullery was the kitchenette. John, who had ceased to sleep with Augusta in the double bed, had a little blue room to himself at the back of the house, his window opening on a dank pit known to Augusta as ‘the fernery’. Augusta and Kitch, Carly and Sandra, shared bedrooms, and Eliza had a tiny green room of her own, technically because she was studying for her senior page 78 scholarship, actually because she was restless and made things unbearable for everybody.

In the drawing-room stood the upright piano on which Augusta had spent more than half of the money left her when Uncle Rufus was killed on Gallipoli. His photograph, in a frame with crossed Union Jacks, stood on top. The children were to have music, piano-lessons, culture.… In their first two years at Laloma, girls and boys, according to the custom of the country, came visiting and sang sentimental ballads. Carly very soon learned to play; she had a soft little voice, like a singing mouse, and would secretly have loved to sing solo in church. But in the choir Miss Blair and Little Miss Blair (one like a frog, the other like a tadpole) had cornered the solo work, and Carly was pigeon-holed as relieving organist, shiner of church brasses, holder of stalls at St Kevin's bazaars, good girl generally. Nearly all the important people at St Kevin's were related, or connected by marriage. One built the church, another held the mortgage on it, a third was Sunday School superintendent, two were churchwardens, and the broken reed of the family worked in as janitor. When they died, their brass tablets stared from the brick walls healthy and aggressive, and Carly helped to keep them clean. The women of the clan married, no matter what their teeth looked like, exchanged recipes, and didn't go wrong.

Carly spread her fingers on the keyboard of the piano, which she loved. She took great trouble with her hands, rubbing them with lemon and cucumber rinds, and at last she had broken free from the awful, overwhelming shame of biting her nails, a trick which had come on her in her first year at college. Her finger-nails now were little pink discs. She had entered her third college year. Though she was in the B classes—C for arithmetic—she was popular, in a mousecoloured, quiet way. She liked listening to the other girls talk, giggled when they giggled, and kept her troubles to herself.

She pressed the keys, and ballad notes trickled out, honey from a hose-pipe. The boys’ voices joined in, Trevor Sinjohn's loudest. Hosepipe… Sandra had been caught prancing undressed under the hosepipe, in the front lawn, where any of the boys coming home from school might have seen her; Trevor Sinjohn might have seen her. She was so glad Trevor Sinjohn hadn't come by; she would have died. A faint red warmed her cheeks at the thought.

‘From my fond lips the eager answers fall,
Thinking I hear thee—thinking I hear thee call.’

page 79

Trevor's hand turned the pages; she knew it, detached from the rest of him, as well as though it were a piece of herself. She smiled at him, without looking up, and joined in the next song. But her voice was only a murmur under the louder voices.

Augusta loved them, the boys and girls. She went to the expense of cutting sandwiches for them without a protest, and Carly had a birthday party their first year in Laloma. Contact with frosty-cheeked youth, neither too clever nor to weary.…

But the youths and maidens came less frequently now. Either at nine o'clock Tim O'Keefe arrived, with a cargo of ale and politics on board, and talked his rubbish into the small hours; or else, after stewing thunderously in the back bedroom, with the window jammed down, John appeared, his hair ruffled up on end and some book in his hand.

‘Ever read this?’ (To any one of the white-flannelled youths.)

‘No, Mr Hannay.’ The youth's dark eyes, lean slouch, refrained from insolence, but did not get so far as deference.

‘Time you did. Time you got to know what this bloody capitalist system means.’ Seeing Augusta crinkle up, he repeated the word slowly. ‘A boy with no convictions is no bloody good to himself or anyone else.’

‘No, Mr Hannay.’ The boy, who probably had definite convictions that he loved life, that he must earn a living in some vague, rosy way unassociated with grind, that the girl Simons was gone on him, that his sister had better remember to press his bags because he would want them for the cricket tomorrow, stared with bird-bright eyes, thinking, ‘Old fool.’

The life of the district was vigorous and orthodox. The older men were a little like seed-pods, a little like sly brown animals. Religion (church, choir, Bible Class, bazaars) were focal points. So were the Sunday afternoon walks to the bush, sauntering past Bawder's bull and his broom-bright, stamping ground of hills to the jungle, where boys cut supple-jack switches, and the girls laughed and screamed as the tiny thorns of bushlawyer tugged their filament hair. Beyond grew nothing but stunted crab-apple trees, adorned in autumn with rosy O's of fruit; then, after bare hills, bush again, reputedly so thick that you had to slash your way with a knife. But the boys and girls didn't get so far. They stopped half-way, and the higher slopes dipped aloof into sunset.

All the girls had boys. Carly's was Trevor Sinjohn, a white-faced, black-browed chunk of clerical meat-to-be. He had fascination, the fascination of pale catlike eyes and an immense, obdurate selfishness. page 80 He would never do anything much, or try to; but all the time, seated in his little engine-house of flesh, he would be Trevor Sinjohn, clever Trevor, who saw everything, and didn't get hurt. The Bawder boy, a blundering, uncouth earnestness with a shiny face, was deeply in love with Carly, and had fought Trevor Sinjohn three times. But it wouldn't have helped him, even if he hadn't invariably been licked. His red face, so often plummy with black eyes or bleeding nose, made Carly uncomfortable. She touched the keys delicately. It was Trevor whom she loved, Trevor…

Eliza, though not quite thirteen when she came to Laloma, had her choice of three boys, one almost an idiot. She chose the grocer's boy, who could get plenty of sweets, and was very energetic in writing him notes:

There were laws. Your boy never kissed you, except in kissinggames (Trevor had kissed Carly). Relations were virginal until somewhere between sixteen and twenty years old. Sometimes then the girls developed babies, and the boys, after frantic wriggling with parsons and parents, married them at five months, both rather red-eyed. They rented little houses. Once the baby was in its perambulator, and could be tickled under the chin and praised, they were quite forgiven.

John was jealous of youth. Dark good looks, flannel bags, young girls with provocative breasts and sweet limbs beneath their limp voile frocks, lay back in limbo, sacrificed to strange urban gods, who asked him hoarsely, ‘Coming along to the meeting tonight, Comrade?’ Sometimes, not offensively, only just consciously, he tried to touch the girls’ smooth arms, or to engage them in talk; but all the time he felt that they were laughing at him. Sacrificed, sacrificed.…

Sometimes the young laughter, the young puppy voices around the drawing-room piano, were unbearable. Then he shambled to the door, his brain torn with the agony of desiring to strike, desiring not to strike. The sunny ribbons, the pink lollipop faces, the suggestion of unfledged, unscorched devil, laughed at him and defied him.

‘You're staying bloody late tonight aren't you?’

After a while the young men stopped coming, and the Hannays were a sort of subcutaneous irritation in the district, like jiggers. Augusta had to buy Trevor Sinjohn's attention for Carly with extra good suppers and flattery. And she didn't like Trevor, or countenance page 81 his family. John was dragging her pride low, watching her crawl so that Carly might flower into happiness.

He would give his soul to be transformed; at one stroke, to change all the hate into unity and love. Wasn't he a Socialist? But the miracle never came, he couldn't deviate from his path by one hairbreadth. He read long into the nights, Marx fused in a cloud of tobacco smoke with the memories of older, bitterly beautiful civilizations; slave-civilizations, their long-stemmed flowers blowing graciously over the sticky morass that fed their carrion roots. His daughter Eliza gave him a portrait of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, and often he stared at the delicate little high-bred face, the slender eyebrows like wings, the lips which a thousand centuries could not stale to desire. ‘Das’ Kapital’ and that…

Outside Laloma, he did better with politics. Verbally he never won an argument, his temper was too heady, but he was no fool, and ten times as well read as the average professional politician. Carl Withers, who now ran a little journal called Stingaree, besides the second-hand bookshop, invited him to write articles. He called the series ‘Mohammed to the Mountain’, and often laboured over them all night, filling the blue room with rank tobacco-fumes and drinking endless cups of stewed black tea. Eliza read the articles, and said, with her young condescension, that they were not at all bad. He valued even the chips of her praise; she had a mind.

It was about that time that he began an odd habit; little in the telling.

‘Come along to the pitchers tonight, Sandra?’

‘Pictures, Daddy.’

‘Pitchers, that's what I said. Come on down to the Gigantic, I believe it's a pretty good pitcher.’

‘Not pitchers, pictures.’

‘Pitchers. Pitchers. Then how do you pronounce it? You're all too bloody superior for me.’

‘Don't argue, Sandra.’ (From Augusta.) ‘Can't you see that he's only doing it?’ But Sandra ended in stamping furies, her velvet blue eyes swamped with tears. They were poor, they weren't allowed to talk to tram conductors because tram conductors gave cheek; she wanted the Hannays to be somebody, and she didn't know what, or whom. Then John said ‘Pitchers.’ The whole thing was a trap, a life-trap.

It went on, creeping into all the tested words, all the things stringently taught them as ‘manners’, holding them aloof from the weltering mass of old sad men who blew their noses on the backs of their hands page 82 and scattered their H's. Always, when Sandra stamped her foot, John replied with obstinate meekness, ‘That's what I said, didn't I?’

The Water Babies, The Heroes, Tanglewood Tales; Gerard climbing up the tree, with the she-bear after him; Beatrix Esmond looking coldly down the staircase, her satin gown spread wide like a purple wine-stain; ‘O Rome, my country!’ ‘It seemed an unspeakably dirty trick,’ thought Eliza, ‘to go back on that, on the one given thing. Without drink, without drugs, without robbing a till or running away with a woman, to go gently on the beach.’

But there was his trend, understood by none of them; to get into the masses who have no consolation but life and death, no refinements or artifices thrust between themselves and the blind things they would face. Joy in facing, naked, such an enemy. Obstinately, always by a wrong means, John was seeking to rejoin the whole.

All the time, even in the heat of combat, his eyes prickled with oversensitive tears, his mouth, under the little brown moustache, twitched on the verge of the old smile. He couldn't understand why he was shouting, what it was all about. Wasn't he John, who had put coats over their beds in winter nights, and on Guy Fawkes’ Day turned off the lights in the kitchen at Calver Street, and described great beautiful arcs of blue, mauve and crimson flame with Roman matches? But his facade of sham violence crashed against Augusta's genuine toughness of spiritual fibre. It was impossible to wound her on the surface, light wound for light kiss. She had no surface, she was all quite true.

Carly's Johannesburg gentleman turned out oddly for John, who invented him one night when they were quarrelling.

‘Go back to Johannesburg,’ he roared at Augusta. ‘Go back to Johannesburg. Go back to your bloody gentleman.’ On ‘gentleman’ the door crashed.

Carly had never quite got over her yearning for sworded aristocrats with laughing eyes, light manners, and town and country houses. (One reason for loving Trevor Sinjohn was that properly his name should be spelt ‘St John’, and his black brows and cat eyes were aristocratic.) The more John raved about the gentleman in Johannesburg the more Carly cottoned to him. He wore gold lace, she thought, and a red horse rubbed against his hand… but she didn't want any part in that, she was scared of horses.

She was by far the gentlest of the Hannays; a little owl with round, childlike face and clear grey eyes. Beside her, Eliza, all ragged, pineneedle hair and brown eyes, looked foxy. One night, following on an instalment of the Johannesburg gentleman serial, she looked up at John and said quietly, ‘You're not my father.’

page 83

John's mouth dropped open. Augusta gave a little, wounded cry.

‘No,’ said Carly, with a glance, all affection and tender understanding, at her mother. ‘He is.’ The Johannesburg gentleman thenceafter was Carly's story, and she stuck to him. John, after phases of rage, amusement and shame, did the most characteristic thing: he adopted Carly's legend, she was no daughter of his. She and her mother could go back to the bloody Johannesburg gentleman.

Between quarrels, he went about with tears in his eyes, declaring that Carly was the only decent one among his children. But Carly was not to be drawn. Her Johannesburg gentleman gave her a curious exemption from family troubles. ‘I'm not yours,’ she reminded John gravely; and he left her alone.

Sometimes Eliza wished she had thought of it first. But at the back of her mind there was still a cubbyhole in which her father's image was far clearer than those of the beautiful young men in flannel bags. She felt, ‘You couldn't get much but babies out of them,’ and despised Carly's adoration of Trevor Sinjohn. Daddy, at least, read books. The grocer boy and spotty Johnny Tyler didn't really count. Mr Duncan like Calver Street, was an occasional and obscure memory, though sometimes she wanted to run and run back, and see his cross Scotch face behind the desk.

Before they came to Laloma, Mr Duncan and Daddy had quarrelled terribly; Daddy's fault, of course, Augusta said his filthy jealousy was to blame. He hadn't sent Eliza a word of congratulation when she won her scholarship, though she had worked mostly to please him; and when Mr Bellew pinned a silver dux medal on her front, and pointed out her name, first in gold letters on the new school's roll of honour, Mr Duncan wasn't there. Augusta said it was John's doing, and Eliza supposed she should have hated him.

She loved him; only, as he lay smoking pipes of fierce tobacco, drinking tea, reading the white lacy beauty of the antique world in an atmosphere which sweated like an Eskimo's igloo, she could picture him quite clearly, the pillows doubled back under his head, and she didn't want him to touch her.

It was a noisy house—old house creak-and-crack, with rats romping in the cellar and behind the walls. You could hear every little thing that happened, hear what people said, almost hear their hearts beat. Twelve stairs climbed between Eliza's little green room and John's blue one. If he had asked her, she would have replied, ‘Yes, Daddy, I do love you. I'm not sure if it's best, it's such a different way from loving Mother. But I don't want you to kiss me.’

Augusta could be surprising, too. Once she was ironing starched page 84 things in the kitchen, while Eliza read out a poem from an old magazine, ‘The Triad’:

‘But while I feel your kisses on my mouth,
And while your live hair clings about my hand,
I would not give this evil love of mine
For all the freedom in the world.’

‘Yes,’ said Augusta. ‘Yes, that's what real love is like.’ Then her right hand took up water from a china basin, and shook out drops on the starched collar. The starch hissed as she pressed down the iron, turning it into a gloss like cream velvet. Eliza stared at her. She didn't seem at all different—red hair, worn face, square-shouldered spare body—and yet she had said that about evil love. They had never known their mother, she thought, in the positive… the way she would be if she really loved someone: only in the negative, the way she acted and looked and talked if she didn't love a man. Of course, she was positive with her children—Carly, Eliza, Sandra, Kitch—but that was another thing; asking little bodies, asking minds, which often had to be put off. She was too busy, where the children were concerned, for any of them to stand apart and say, ‘This is exactly how my mother loves me.’ It all came in the form of groceries and little frocks run up on the hand-machine, and what you mustn't say or let people say to you if you're to pass muster among decent folk.

The bloody Johannesburg gentleman: John had invented him, Eliza was as certain of her mother's respectability as she was of the kitchen floorboards under her feet. But suppose, just as a dream, he had existed, still existed, and a whole intrinsic world around his face? Ah, in that world, a red-haired strong woman could drop her ironing, let the starch-water fall with a blue crash to the kitchen floor, and run and run and run…

The first time John brought home one of his objets d'art, Augusta simply couldn't believe her eyes or ears; not that the latter were at first affronted, for Olaf was one of our Dumb Brethren, and hardly opened his mouth except to shovel in great masses of pink rabbit stew. He had no top front teeth, and you could see a long way down his gullet and throat. Also Olaf had hair, like an old-fashioned English sheepdog, but less meek; a straggling moustache on which gravy had made a delicate dew, fierce little darker spikes in his ears and nostrils, and on his chest (visible through an open blue shirt) a thick dark pelt, which curled.

John, plainly in love, hung about the back of Olaf's chair, begging page 85 him to have some more pudding. When the pudding gave out, Olaf sighed, unbuckled his belt over his stomach, stretched his legs, and lit up. Augusta, her lips a thin red line, like British soldiers in romantic verse, rose to bring the tea, slamming open a window as she passed Olaf's pipe. John, pathetically anxious that the Hannays should pass muster with his darling giant, plunged into proletarian literature.

‘London's People of the Abyss—great stuff in it, but with half his soul, Jack London was the journalist. He had his sovereign ready, he could climb out when he pleased. That's the trouble with his work. It's sincere as far as it goes—power, insight, but always the bus-fare home. He wasn't really involved. It's another thing when a man writes from his leg-rope.’

‘Oy,’ agreed Olaf. Augusta handed him tea, and he greeted her as a mother of the Gracchi.

‘Ship, Oy ban choock her oop.’

‘What's that?’

John explained about the cruel capitalist sea-captains.

‘It'd make your hair stand on end, ’Gusta, if you knew what's going on aboard some of these little cargo boats.’

‘I've no doubt,’ said Augusta, setting down each cup with a firm little ring. ‘What was your grievance, Mr… er… Olaf?’

‘Food,’ said Olaf. ‘She ban crawl.’ He poured his tea into his saucer and blew on it. Kitch said, ‘Oo—we're not allowed—’ but Olaf didn't notice.

‘Oy tell Cook,’ he continued tenderly. ‘She can—himself.’ Augusta made a sound like a tyre-tube pierced by a hatpin, and John slid swiftly into Jack London's The Iron Heel. Afterwards Carly played accompaniments, and Olaf bellowed from his stomach. Kitch, his holland smock stained with porridge and the day's travail, trotted beaming after them. ‘Fwog,’ he said, when Olaf had finished. ‘Fwog.’

There was a kitchen war about Olaf's bed for the night. Eliza and Sandra heard their parents at it.

‘You're not going to let that great brute sleep in your bed. He might have a disease.’

‘He can have a shake-down under the house.’

‘Prowling about in the cellars, and with not a safe lock on the windows, thanks to your laziness. It's a pity you can't think of your own daughters.’

John's remark about his own daughters was rather like Olaf's about the cook.

‘Who paid for the beds, anyhow? Who owns this bloody house?’

‘The Government, and by the rate you're going they'll still own it page 86 after you're dead and buried. And who's been your unpaid slave for twenty years? Who's wasted a lifetime cooking for you, bringing up your children?’

Sandra whispered, ‘The Johannesburg gentleman comes next. It's a pity Carly isn't here, it perks her up.’

When Carly's black shoe was tired of pressing on the soft pedal, Olaf told stories about Sweden. But Augusta was victor in the kitchen war. John lent Olaf ten shillings, the giant said good-night, and was never seen again. Eliza and Sandra hadn't expected him back.

‘I liked about when he was in the north of Sweden, and the captain turned him off with a kick on his pants, and it was below zero, and he went to sleep against the cow and would have frozen to death if the old woman hadn't come out with a lantern and said, “My poor boy, what are you doing here?” And where they all got into the one bed together, the old woman and her husband and Olaf and her son, and the bed shut into the wall like a cupboard. Carly, wouldn't it be fun to sleep four in a bed, shut up into the wall? I wonder if you'd sleep standing on your head? All the blood would run down…’

‘Horrid,’ said Carly. ‘They might all snore, and you couldn't turn over.’

‘He had nice eyes—blue, like a baby's,’ said Eliza.

‘Eliza always like men,’ said Sandra. ‘But he won't ever come back. He blew on his tea, and he swore frightfully.’

‘It wouldn't have mattered if it had been D, or even B. Mother doesn't like it, but she can put up with it. But not if it's F.’

Olaf was the first. The next was a rather nice, much less hairy little man called Harry, who kept a fruit-stall. His politics weren't very conspicuous. He hoped there would be a Labour Government one day, much as a patient snail may hope for the abolition of thrushes. But when John slanged the bloody capitalists, Harry said, ‘Ah, poor old Billy Massey.’ The King of England was the Poor Old King, England was the Poor Old Motherland, the Germans, though a shrapnel-chip had stiffened his left arm in a crook at the elbow, were Poor Old Jerry. The leader of the New Zealand Labour Party was Poor Old Harry Holland, and Eliza was sure that if Daddy started on atheism instead of politics, God would be Poor Old God.

Then Harry brought a bride to call. When they had gone, she complaining shrilly of the ache Laloma's hill had produced inside her narrow patent leather shoes, Augusta collapsed in a chair.

‘How could he? However could he? A vixen like that, a cheap, flaunting hussy.’

‘Oh, my dear ’Gusta, how could he not?’ asked John.

page 87

‘In front of your own children—’

‘When people get big in front like that, they have babies soon,’ Carly explained. Kitch stuffed a sack under his jersey, and ran about, calling that he was going to have a baby. Carly stopped him.

‘Don't be silly. You can't, it's only girls.’

‘Why can't I?’

‘Because.’

‘I'll ask Mum-mum,’ Kitch threatened. Carly's white, worried look claimed her little face.

‘We aren't supposed to talk about it. A girl at college did, and Miss Verriam nearly expelled her, for spoiling our childhood. Please don't tell Mother, Kitch.’

‘Tell-pie-tit, his tongue will be slit,’ sang Sandra. She was still a baby as to her pale gold ringlets, which never grew up; but she was leggy and thin, and her Scandinavian blue eyes could be very determined. Kitch took notice of her. Eliza said, ‘Come along and I'll tell you my poem about the goblins in the hedge again,’ and Kitch trotted after her, quite enchanted. Alone in the world of men, he loved Eliza's poems.

Joseph, a fireman from a boat, was John's next prize; a whipcord, black-eyed little rat of an Irishman, with the shoulder muscles of a bull, and a heart full of the awe, wonder and glory of Joseph. He trolled Two Eyes of Grey in a fine baritone, staring boldly at Carly; but as Carly's reaction was to seize her white sewing and flee into her bedroom, Joseph turned to Eliza. Once or twice they went walking over the hills. Every night, Eliza undressed before the mirror in her little green room, and looked closely to see if her waist had grown any smaller; she longed for Augusta's unattainable eighteen inches, and liked Joseph because he could lift her over high barbed-wire fences on the hillside, as if she were a doll. He asked her to marry him, qualifying it, ‘as soon as I get me divorce.’ He added, ‘You can trust old Joseph, kiddie,’ and told her a long story about his wife on their wedding eve.

‘She asks me to get into bed with her, and I says, “To-morrow night, anything you say goes, but not to-night, see? For I couldn't trust meself, Elsie, and that's a fact.” So she says, “Won't you, to please me, Joseph? Won't you, now?” And I says, “I don't know what you mean, Elsie, but I'm going now,” and with that I took me hat and walked out. A fine-looking woman she was, too, but with one of her eyes a bit crossed-like.…’

Joseph cooked his goose by dramatizing in Augusta's hearing. He was up in the sheets, the fell first mate stood directly below.…

page 88

‘So I thought, “Got you where I want you now, you bastard”—saving your presence, Mrs Hannay—and with that I let fly with me spike, and missed braining him by an inch. But I took a chip off his fat ear.’

‘That would have been murder. Deliberate, cold-blooded murder of one of your officers.’

Eliza, seeing her mother's face, thought, ‘Good-bye, Joseph,’ for like Balaam's Ass, so far would Augusta go, and then she stuck.

For a week or two, Joseph wrote her little letters beginning, ‘Dear Freckles.’ Augusta confiscated and burned them. Eliza raged and threatened to run away, not because Joseph stirred her, but because Augusta couldn't be got to see that the notes were ‘my letters,’ territory not to be trampled on. Of complete integrity herself, Augusta was too strong, too overwhelming to let other people keep their dignity. She hit out with the hairbrush, and wouldn't understand that it was not just a smack, but a blow at one's new, quivering, desolate pride. She read letters, and quoted them in family council. She said things out loud—not hysterical lies, like John's, but hard, true things that she had picked up in moments of weakness. There was nothing to do but to shut one's eyes, blindly to strike back. But to hurt Augusta badly was almost intolerable, for if she ever cried at all, it came so hard.

Sandra and Eliza decided that Joseph, though in one way a point of honour, wasn't worth fighting for.

‘You wouldn't know what to do with him if you got him,’ Sandra said. ‘He's pretty awful. There was something funny about that tattooed mermaid on his arm.’

Elderberries and wild honeysuckle, tangling all the way down to flat Okori Road, which led to the College. Eliza called College ‘Little Ease,’ after reading in an old book of a dungeon where you couldn't properly sit down, lie, or stand up. She was swotting now for her senior scholarship. When she got the junior one, nobody had seemed excited. Augusta took it in an ‘Of course you did’ way, though only Eliza and God knew how weak her mathematics were, now Mr Duncan had gone. And John, who was going through a Scarlet Woman phase, said that she had the eyes of a harlot.

On the dusty elderberry bushes cream flakes of blossom appeared; then the wine-coloured berries, in huge clusters. The boys said you could make crimson dye of them. Crimson… lovely word. The starlings and wax-eyes throve here, honeysuckle with its trailing branches sweetened the wild roads. There was a native tree, its red berries slit with a fleshy black pupil; they called it ‘the red eye tree.’

page 89

Sometimes you could find four-leaved clovers here; only among the kind that have ruby pips splashed on their leaves.

In the other direction, over the hills, lay the bush, its smell an aggregate of rotting leaves, mould, golden-brown water, sunlight and earth venturing into leafy decay. Karaka berries, purple, fell and rotted to nothing if the birds didn't find them. No stream ran clear. The sunlight mottled it with gliding fins, amber, and wild mint stood in it knee-deep, cattle used it and the spoil from the old cemetery ran down in wet weather: but the golden-brown maintained its thready way, and heaped around the cold flesh of trout. Boy Scouts caught the trout and wrapped them in handkerchiefs, stuffed them into their shirts so that the Ranger would not see. But Boy Scouts don't know everything, though it is they who make the thin piercing blue of campfire-smoke in the bush.

The bush loves Eliza, wants her. Beyond the first slopes and the crab-apples, you have to slash your way with knives. ‘I'll run away,’ she thought, ‘I'll run away, live with the bush and never be turned out. It wants me, if nobody else does. Its berries will fall deep on to the soil, my soil, and the fantails come in surprised graceful arcs straight at me, and when they have found a twig behind my eyes they will sit there, preening themselves.

‘It's funny that the natural sounds never wound, never irritate. I never lose my temper and pray, “Oh, God, don't let them,” when it's streams and birds, and yet they are quite rowdy. But I feel as if they will take me, hide me, cover me up; and I never feel that about people.’

Carly sang in St Kevin's choir except when Mr Priestly was absent, and she had to be organist. Then the organ droned so loud (adenoids of thick red plush and the fuzz of years) that you could only see her opening and shutting her mouth. Sandra in church looked like an angel (she was ten now) but she had to be kept away from the Schmidts, who sold the Hannays Laloma, and who also attended St Kevin's. The moment they entered the church, she started an audible mutter: ‘Meanies, meanies, mean old Schmidts.’ The Schmidts, before leaving, had rooted out the dear little lily-of-the-valley, its blooms like seed-pearls on its dark green leaves. Because of that, the Hannay children had never quite felt that Laloma was delivered over to them as promised. ‘Meanies. Mean old Schmidts.’

Eliza wore a starched confirmation veil. When the Bishop lays his hands on your head, Something Wonderful will happen to you.…

It might have been anything, from a beloved white dove circling the altar to the gift of healing; the mad, glorious delight of being able to dangle serpents by their tails, or make the little girl Burke's page 90 tubercular hip suddenly round out again, so that she wouldn't lurch. She was nice—fourteen, apple-cheeked, with a square-set, stolid determination that, over all things else, it was her duty to get a boy. But you knew at once that while she lurched so, she never would. She couldn't see herself sideways on.

But when the Bishop laid his hands on Eliza's head, nothing happened at all, though other people, with other touches, had made her tremble, if they couldn't give her the gift of healing. After ordinary church service at St Kevin's, she could now remain and sip at the communion chalice, filled with brackish watered claret. It advanced along a row of kneeling people, and as each drank, the Vicar with a lace kerchief wiped the spot. Old Miss Tudor really needed a moustache cup, and nearly always she knelt next to Eliza. Her knee-joints crackled getting up; you could see tiny reddish beads of claret in her moustache.

‘And, with the dawn, those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved, long since, and lost awhile.’

The strong voices, some tuneless, some thin like worn sixpences, rang on the rafters; beautiful because they were fused and unself conscious, fused in an old song whose pattern was rubbed off long ago. The clothes of the congregation were dark, their shoulders ox-patient. Heads bowed or lifted, at the Vicar's command. A steam of breath frosted the windows; the laborious, sighing wheezes of old Miss Tudor, the closed faces of middle age, mixed with the pink-and-white of little boys drugged by the air to lethargy.

A long time ago they had lost their angel faces, clear-minted with individuality and beloved significance. Now they huddled close, waiting.

O God, you pass your level sword of light very cleanly through the one stained-glass window they could afford. But wouldn't it be better to smash the roof and all the glass, saying, ‘What a fug?’ I would like You to be cold as frost and gay as fire: and yet, You know, the very type and image of them.

Meaningless, sad, constipated goodness… its Heaven is so worthless beside its earth. A revival would be horrible… treating God like a gigolo. Religion which is an emotional dilation, which finds outlet by puffing out its cheeks, is always at the critical moment going to play into the dirtiest hands available. Real religion is clear-cut, black and white; philosophy and magic. Philosophy for living, magic that man's stave shall blossom. I can't imagine the one without the other.

page 91

Which of us, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature? But don't You see, the way we live, everything, punishment, reward, system, all dwarf the stature—contraction, not expansion? Isn't man like a clenched fist, cramped, that of its own agonized irritability must hit out, probably at the wrong thing? You were a carpenter's boy, loving the smooth feel of some crude plane against wood. Didn't You feel better when the movement of hand and chisel fitted in with the soothing movement of Everything? Aren't the grained atoms the real morning stars, singing together? Listen, I will tell You. When we bought Laloma, my father got a carpenter's tool-set and also things for mending our boots. But he never planes wood now, and the greenhide slabs he plasters on our shoes, just anyhow, are so clumsy and thick that we cry if we have to wear them. It's because his heart is contracted, not his hands.

‘Eliza, don't drop that collection bag.’

Thirty or more pieces of silver. Augusta's face is tired out. She has listened to every word of the service. Softly she shakes Kitch by the shoulders. His boy head is down on his coat. She frowns at Eliza, on principle.

There is a guard between the two, civil, military and religious. Above all, a guard of eunuchs.