Girl with a Monkey (8 page)

She recalled the patterns of eight months as she walked up Denham Street, up the slight hill past shops and hotel, recalling at the left-hand fork the open-air
cinema where so often she had sat with Jon or Harry or others, palm resting moistly genial with palm on the canvas seats; seeing, too, the classrooms grow darker with the onset of rain, both pupils' faces and teacher's ghastly in the fading light, blackboard writing an impossibility and the beating din so deafening it was useless even to shout. Discipline reduced to bare essentials gave the children what was popularly known as “silent study”, while the teacher, disconsolate, stared into a playground where the crusts and paper bags of another lunch-break floated beneath the pepper-trees.

Two Chinese women passed her, rapidly communicating, their words bright hoops of sound bucketing and rolling in the lazy air down towards the main street; the milk-bar gutting the quiet with strident juke-box gave ulcers as it cured; and then came the crest of the hill whence she never failed to turn to this sudden blue of sea and great gibbous island with pleasure; below, the school. From its scrambled rickety halls, half hidden by hedge-thick camphor-laurels, tinned the three-o'clock bell, and unwilling to go down into the seething hordes now pouring with barbaric ferocity from every door she lingered for ten minutes or so below Melton Hill, watching the streets fill with children, then gradually empty once again.

Chromatics of stones, rocks, brought her feet towards the feet of Mr Duffecy who, most unusually for him at this hour, was crossing towards the school-house,
rolling slightly with obesity and self-importance. Customarily against his name in the time-book were noted incredible figures in arrival and departure columns for the delectation of gobemouche inspectors—seven fifteen in the mornings, and for departure frequently eight, nine, and even ten o'clock were noted down—allow a tea-hour, of course. The men on the staff swore that it was domestic incompatibility that lay behind this industry, and circulated the scandalous rumour that even in the wet season he took to his bed, or hammock, beneath the house. No staff member but one had ever laid eyes on this formidable wife; and Jack Reesing, who it was, declared she was a clergyman's daughter and extremely “church”. Reesing had fought bitterly with her at their first meeting over the restriction of Catholic pupils from attendance at weekly religious instruction—he was an ardent Catholic—and used to growl about her,

“Face like the back of a Bible. She's the greatest argument for the celibacy of the clergy that I know.”

Intuitively the girl and Duffecy each knew the other wished to avoid this meeting, but there was no avoidance, and the man's button-shaped eyes fell upon her with replete distaste.

“So you're off, Miss Ford. I received your letter yesterday. No regrets, I suppose?”

“No. No regrets.”

Their eyes met in challenge and held, as they had
met and held through staff meetings, school council disputes and disciplinary action over pupils. Captiousness without humour made him a dull and tiring opponent, for he could not comprehend any of Elsie's mischievous fribbling with serious matters and suspected empty-minded flippancy where actually there was merely a seeking of relief from his ponderous approach to the scribblings on lavatory walls, the littering of lunches, test failures and so on. She had at first wanted to be friendly with him, but through some quirk in his nature, some over-indulgence of his self-importance, he antagonized people almost at first meeting. Two months ago, on the night of the show, she had come nearer to intimacy with him than ever before or since. They had come by truck, she and Harry, over roads of powder, rain now being a finished flowering of summer, and, separating from Mrs Buttling's garrulous relatives, made their way in carefree fashion round exhibits to the sideshow alleys. It was the happiest night they had spent together. In spite of the fact that they found the air too ripely full of dust, almost too personal to bear, they had sucked candy and melted great gobbets of fairy floss in childlike enjoyment. Harry, who was wearing his sleeves rolled up well above the voluptuous blue lady on his upper arm, had just shot his third wooden duck when Mr Duffecy strolled by. His family was not in evidence, and since he looked lost and pathetically out of it all Elsie, with only a
momentary hesitation that withered at birth, went across to him, innately friendly. Surprised and genially smiling he was introduced to Harry without seeming to measure him against her. For a few minutes they chatted inconsequentially about the weather, the size of the crowds, and had separated almost on the verge of friendship. Her heart felt gratitude and warmth towards him for nearly a week, but soon the old acerbity, the well-known brusquerie and petty tyranny, were back again, like weeds choking out the life of the rose. Good sense told her that his sense of position would preclude a normal relationship—that of one human being to another.

“You asked for this transfer, didn't you?”

His mouth twisted a little as he spoke, for it did not do a man any good to have his staff trying to get away; head office did not like it. There'd been that business over the monthly lesson notes, too, when the whole staff . . . and Charlie French the year before, and that boy—what was his name? Hillen or something—and that trollop from 6B. His lips curled.

“Yes. As a matter of fact I did,” she replied looking straight at him.

“Well,” he held out his hand reluctantly, “best wishes to you, Miss Ford.”

She took it briefly.

“And best wishes to you, too, Mr Duffecy.”

Never again, never exquisitely again to hear the
worn-out amplifier playing Colonel Bogey for the children to march in after recess, torturingly sharpening in semitones as the gramophone ran down and Duffecy, testy and inarticulate, gestured to a class prefect standing by to adjust it; never again to see the dull parades when he harangued the assembled school on the use of garbage bins, playground roistering, the straightening of lines, while in temperatures of over ninety children dropped like flies. He had never heard of
John O'London's Weekly
, and once when she asked if he had ever read the
New Yorker
said that neither he nor his wife liked suggestive literature. After the last blunder each was puzzled as to how the other held the job.

Poincianas and acalyphas yet unflowering fretted sky and convent walls across Mitchell Street. Thick-fruited the acalyphas would soon be with their strange single-seeded nutlets prolific amongst the ornamental foliage; she had taken home armfuls of it when she first saw it, or thrust branches into glass bottles for the classroom. The sarmentose fringes of date-palms along the Strand were just visible above the roofs.
Les cimes
 . . .
Le ciel est pardessus le toit si bleu si calme
. Poetry like a swelling wave crescendo of green water swept compellingly through her mind as she paused at the foot of the stairs watching this well-known view for the last time.
La mer est infinie, je ne veux que la mer, je ne veux que le vent pour me bercer
 . . . How did those
lines of Mirmont go? “Beyond the port now nothing more than a smudged image, the tears of departure no longer burn my eyes” . . .
ne brûlent plus mes yeux. O ces beaux adieux!
These beautiful departures. Merely to say,
“Car j'ai de grands départs inassouvis en moi”
—“For I have great unassuaged departures in myself”—made her cheeks tingle.

Into her mind she tried to paint unforgettably this minute of branches, buildings, and sky so that later the inner eye might feed upon it when the four walls and the silence of hotel rooms pressed in upon the single figure on the bed. There is a certain permanence of beauty and truth to be extracted from natural scenery. We all have those moments of crystalline perception when the flesh, divinely prompted, seems to melt into nothingness, leaving the mind nervously aware, apprehending, cut off from was or will be, swung from there to here: those times when pausing at night beside the weatherboard house, starved for real music, a piano cuts the stillness with melodic scimitars, boomerangs of tune; or being a new-comer to the stunning plainsong of mountain and valley sweeping down into green sunlight, the breath is held unaware. But these truths take place on smaller canvases—the lady with simian face hirsute and deformedly ashamed responds to your unasked and therefore wonderful smile, so that you feel a touch of godhead within your very person; or, lying beneath pandanus patterning the ants' world umber,
zebra-striped with shadow, you see the shivery grass terrified by your orange-scented breath.

The stairs, weathered and splintered, received her step, the classroom, trestle blackboards and empty desks—where is there a desolation as complete as that of the emptied school?—the walls made of perpendicular louvred boards to combat the heat lay open to her. Old battleground. On the unused press in the corner were her rain-cape and books, white with chalk dust. The pigeons which lived in dozens in the eaves just above this room spoke murmurously, and she dragged a form across to a chair, and sitting down rested her leg. There seemed to be no one left within the building except where an irregular thumping betrayed the presence of a cleaner working in Desmond's room in the far wing. She thought that before she tackled once more the walk back to the hotel she would sit for a few moments and absorb these last unpleasant stage props.

The pain within the leg, the pain within the mind, and the silence of the room all became one splendid thing.

July

They had brought the girl to her while the high jumps were still being held on the far side of the grounds. She was a tall bony creature from sixth grade, long, lachrymose of countenance with hair dark and stringy. Now
she gazed appealingly at Elsie, her face a putty colour under the tan.

“What's the matter, Beverly?” asked Elsie. “Aren't you feeling well?”

“It's me arm, miss. It's just burst.”

Elsie and Laura looked down with interest at the child's forearm wondering what anatomical horror lay in store. Like some small mountain the boil reared its head, erupting slowly. The girl's face was grey with pain, for there is nothing much worse than knocking such a sore.

“How did you do it?” they asked.

Beverly nursed her arm and rocked backwards and forwards on her running shoes.

“It was in the two-twenty relay and I knocked against someone right at the beginning of the race. I don't know what it was. I think a baton must of hit me.”

“Well, what are we to do about it?” queried Laura. Her fastidious nose matched the upswept roll of mechanically neat hair.

“Mr Duffecy sent me to you, miss. He said you were in charge of first aid for our school.”

“Hell's bells! That's the first I've heard of it!” said Laura testily. She had had a heavy night at Garbutt mess. Turning to Elsie she hissed, “How typical of the old b—to palm a job onto someone, not even tell them, and then send no equipment.”

She silently shaped a blasphemy with her mouth and rolled her eyes in anguish. Elsie laughed.

“Here, I'll fix it. Have you a hanky, Beverly?”

“Oh yes, miss.”

Quickly she fumbled at the leg of her bloomers and produced a scrubby piece of rag. Laura moaned faintly and Elsie said, “No, that won't do at all. I'll have to use mine, but I'm afraid it's rather small. You look away, Miss Marten. This is going to be messy.”

The thermometers were posted at eighty-five for most of the day, and here, away from the sea with no wind blowing and the hard, cropped turf flinging the sunlight back, there was no relief. Elsie bent over the child's arm and, drawing the skin back on either side of the boil, applied even pressure. It was a messy business, and it went on for five minutes, at the end of which Elsie turned away white and the girl was promptly sick on the grass.

“Gee, thanks, miss,” she said, when the attack was over. “I don't think I'll run any more, though. Might get it poisoned.”

She re-joined her two gum-chewing friends who had been standing a little distance away, watching the whole process with the fascination and repulsion these things have for the onlooker. They had made exaggerated squeals of horror and turned to the shelter of each other's arms with mock illness and giggles. And they weren't, thought Elsie, a scrap sympathetic. Soon
they were lost in the jostling, noisy mass of children.

“You're certainly a ministering angel,” said Laura. “No bonus for that, little one, and if the child develops septicaemia the grateful parents will sue. I suppose you know those things can be contagious, especially if you've got a scratch yourself. Oh, my God!” She shuddered in retrospect.

“I think I'm right,” replied Elsie, inspecting her hands for skin fissures. Absent-mindedly she thrust the handkerchief back into her pocket where it stayed all day in the festering heat.

They sat together under the dusty mango-trees on the south side of the oval, eating their lunches, slapping the flies and sighting the entire hot circle through sunglasses. On the western side at the entrance gates, like some mammoth python, the children from the seven main primary schools queued patiently for free packaged sandwiches. There was still a tiny crowd of winners of heats round the recorders' table in the centre, but after a while they, too, moved off and the officials followed them, their hats well forward or sunshades up to protect their faces. Laura watched with boredom two men who had detached themselves from the main group of teachers and were strolling towards the mango-trees. One was top-heavily built with craning head; the other, small and pear-shaped, mopped sweat from round his forehead and neck and shifted the position of his panama.

“That,” said Laura indicating the taller, “that is Roughley of—well, let the school be nameless.”

“Should his name mean anything?”

Laura bit into her whitebait sandwich with extreme delicacy.