The Hanging Garden Read Free

edge of the pier, on the edge of the harbour, which by now was a sheet of silver that was stitched with details of gulls’ wings. There was a smell of weed and shellfish rising as the sea sucked at slimy woodwork underpinning the world of human traffic.
    *   *   *
    They were crossing the ghost of a great bridge.
    ‘You should see us in better times,’ she told him. ‘This is the brown-out—for the war.’
    He shivered slightly as they bowled along side by side in the taxi.
    ‘Cold, are you? Well, it’s winter here. You’ll soon get used to everything seeming topsy turvy.’
    In fact he felt hot in his English flannel but there was no need to tell her, and soon they were burrowing into the closed fug of the house she had brought him to. He shivered worse than ever.
    ‘This is your new house,’ she told him.
    His room was larger than any he had ever slept in, furnished with oddments and two narrow beds, one of them made up, the other with a naked mattress on it, as close to opposing walls as they could get. The room, he soon realised, was not his. It belonged to an enlarged, near lifesized photograph.
    ‘My husband,’ she explained needlessly. She had talked about him all the way across.
    Knowing his dead host by heart he no more than glanced at the photograph.
    ‘I have some fish fillets for your tea,’ she told him while poking at a pan from which a blue smoke was rising. ‘What’s your favourite fish, Gilbert?’
    ‘Soft-shelled crabs…’ It was more a murmured memory than a reply to her question.
    ‘Never heard of ’em,’ she said firmly, and poked harder at the pan she was tending. ‘I hope you’re not difficult about your food—not a finicky boy, Gilbert. Mr Bulpit went for plaice and chips when he was at Home.’
    Via the warrant officer, she got back to ‘the Colonel’ and ‘Your dear Mother—to who I was devoted—way back from our Indian days—such a thoughtful lady.’
    After the fish fillets they really got down to business, at a cane table with brass ashtrays on the kitchen’s fringe. Lahore, Poona, Simla, Bangalore, Bombay—all the old Indian names were trotted out, like the echoes from a snapshot album in Kensington. He closed down while she carried on.
    There was the pub he had heard about in the taxi.
    ‘Mind you, I don’t take to public houses, and never ever played any part except I was there if a lady was needed to smooth things over. Some of those barmaids. Reg—Mr Bulpit—fancied a public—and made a success of the old Imperial , then dropped dead—in that same basket chair where you’re sitting—while enjoying ’is evenin’ cup of Darjeeling.’
    She was steaming from resentment rather than grief, for something that had been done to her.
    Gil shifted in the dead man’s chair and made it creak. ‘Why was the clergyman’s wife wearing a safety pin in her collar?’ Mrs Bulpit suddenly asked.
    ‘Had to keep it together, I suppose.’
    He said he would go to bed. The photo-portrait had been hung in such a way that it leaned outward from the wall and threatened to crush any usurper with its vast slab of compressed meat.
    *   *   *
    Several of the boys were Lockharts and there were others too small to be at school. Lockharts took him down to the lower end of the yard where tree roots had lifted up the asphalt. They asked him what he had come here for. He couldn’t help it, he was sent, he said. They didn’t want a lot of Poms. He pointed out that he was only one. He talked like a girl, the oldest Lockhart jeered. He hit out at the Lockhart face, which began to jigger and blink as if standing on a fixed spring. Then the lot of them went into action. They rubbed his face in the asphalt where the tree roots had lifted it up.
    The bell rang for school, or what might have been the end of a round and they all marched up towards the classrooms past trees dripping blood from their armpit-hair.
    Ma Bulpit said, ‘You’ll find it hard till you know the ropes.