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Patrick White
The shady side was where she kept her staghorn ferns, and fish-
bones, and the pots of maidenhair. The water lay sparkling on the
maidenhair even in the middle of the day. In the blaze of summer
the light at either end of the tunnel was like you were looking
through a sheet of yellow cellophane, but as the days shortened,
the light deepened to a cold, tingling green, which might have piade
a person nervous who didn't know the tunnel by heart.
Take Mrs Dolan the evening she came in to ask for the loan of a
cupful of sugar. 'You gave me a shock, Mrs Natwick. What ever
are you up to?'
'Looking at the plants,' Mrs Natwick answered, whether Mrs
Dolan would think it peculiar or not.
It was the season of cinerarias, which she always planted on that
side, it was sheltered and cold-green. The wind couldn't bash the
big spires and umbrellas of blue and purple. Visiting cats were the
only danger, messing and pouncing. She disliked cats for the smell
they left, but didn't have the heart to disturb their elastic forms
curled at the cineraria roots, exposing their colourless pads, and
sometimes pink, swollen teats. Blushing only slightly for it, she
would stand and examine the details of the sleeping cats.
If Royal called she could hear his voice through the window.
'Where'uv you got to, Ella?'
After he was forced to take to his bed, his voice began to sort of
dry up like his body. There were times when it sounded less like a
voice than a breath of drowsiness or pain.
'Ella?' he was calling. 'I dropped the paper. Where are yer all this
time? You know I can't pick up the paper.'
She knew. Guilt sent her scuttling to him, deliberately composing
her eyes and mouth so as to arrive looking cheerful.
'I was in the garden,' she confessed, 'looking at the cinerarias.'
'The what?' It was a name Royal could never learn.
The room was smelling of sickness and the bottles standing on
odd plates.
'It fell,' he complained.
She picked up the paper as quick as she could.
'Want to go la-la first?' she asked, because by now he depended
on her to raise him and stick the pan under.
But she couldn't distract him from her shortcomings; he was
shaking the paper at her. 'Haven't you lived with me long enough
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to know how to treat a newspaper?'
He hit it with his set hand, and certainly the paper looked a mess,
like an old white battered brolly.
'Mucked up! You gotter keep the pages
aligned.
A paper's not
readable otherwise. Of course you wouldn't understand because
you don't read it, without it's to see who's died.' He began to cough.
'Like me to bring you some Bovril?' she asked him as tenderly as
she knew.
'Bovril's the morning,' he coughed.
She knew that, but wanted to do something for him.
After she had rearranged the paper she walked out so carefully it
made her go lopsided, out to the front veranda. Nothing would
halt the traffic, not sickness, not death even.
She sat with her arms folded, realizing at last how they were
aching.
'He hasn't been,' she had to call after looking at her watch.
'Who?' she heard the voice rustling back.
'The gentleman in the pink Holden.'
She listened to the silence, wondering whether she had done
right.
When Royal called back, 'Could'uv had a blow-out.' Then he
laughed. 'Could'uv stopped to get grogged up.' She heard the frail
rustling of the paper. 'Or taken an axe to somebody like they do
nowadays.'
She closed her eyes, whether for Royal, or what she remembered
of the man sitting in the Holden.
Although it was cold she continued watching after dark. Might
have caught a chill, when she couldn't afford to. She only went
inside to make the bread-and-milk Royal fancied of an evening.
She watched most attentively, always at the time, but he didn't
pass, and didn't pass.
'Who?'
'The gentleman in the Holden.'
'Gone on holiday.' Royal sighed, and she knew it was the point
where a normal person would have turned over, so she went to
turn him.
One morning she said on going in, 'Fancy, I had a dream, it was
about that man! He was standing on the side path alongside the
cinerarias. I know it was him because of his funny-shaped head.'
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