The White Garden (8 page)

They send their love. Mrs Darcy made you some rock cakes.

Margaret’s been promoted, put in charge of the whole primary school. And Louise has nearly finished the dress she’s making.

I have to go to Myers for the buttons. Frankie’s going to have her hair permed she says, and Rosie and the children came over last night and they were so funny. Try and eat your meals, duck, and brighten yourself up a bit.’ The voice tailed off. Therese lay silent and unresponsive in the bed. Her mother stared in desperation and anguish at the other women in the Sunroom.

She patted and smoothed the cover on Therese’s bed and looked kindly and earnestly into Therese’s face. But her daughter’s eyes were blank and her mouth was closed. Then suddenly Therese gripped her mother’s hand and a violent light came into her eyes. ‘Take me home,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’ But her mother shook her head in a bewildered little gesture and said,

‘No, duck, the doctor says you’ve got a long way to go before
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you can come home.’ She hesitated and then she said, ‘Bridie wanted me to tell you she’s going to enter in six weeks.’

Therese heard these words about her sister Bridie who was going into the convent. She went white and rigid and moved away so that she was no longer touching her mother. Her mother had said the words in an attempt to get Therese to show some emotion, some interest. Now she thought that perhaps she had gone too far, misjudged, that she should not have told Therese at that moment. Bridget specially wanted Therese to know. But perhaps she should have asked the doctor if it was a wise thing to say. Therese was the youngest in the family, and so sensitive and strange. When Rosie got engaged to Vincent, Therese went hysterical and locked herself in the playhouse and wouldn’t come out. They went into the playhouse afterwards and discovered that Therese had pulled all the dolls to pieces, scattering their heads and legs and arms around the floor. Now Therese stared coldly at the woman who sat anxiously at the bedside and said: ‘Tell her I hate her.’ Then she turned away, and her mother knew that she could say and do no more. She patted the bedclothes, lightly kissed the back of Therese’s head, and left. At the front desk she spoke to a nurse: ‘She isn’t eating, Sister. We are very worried.’ And the nurse, smiling up at her in reassurance said, ‘Doctor would like you to make a time to see him.’

During Mrs Gillis’s appointment Ambrose kept his feet on the floor beneath the desk. At one point it amused him to slide his hand into the desk drawer and run his fingers over the pistol he kept there. His little Browning .22 automatic. He smiled as he thought of shooting Mrs Gillis. (Dangerous lunatic Mrs Gillis who had threatened him with a sawn-off shotgun. No, mad Mrs Gillis who ran in brandishing a scimitar.) He looked at the scrawny woman in a linen overcoat, a woman with haunted and bewildered eyes. Her brow was furrowed with anxiety, her shoes were Italian, her huge tapestry handbag bulged with motherly love. Ambrose could hear her heart crying out for help. It could be, he thought, that she is more depressed than the daughter.

But she has plenty to keep her busy, and doesn’t give in so easily. The daughter is the youngest of a heap of Catholic girls.

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Sexual repression. What they all need is a good fuck, a bloody good fuck. Father’s an architect. Rich and busy building. Girls need a screw. Make a note: ‘Could be the father screws the girls.’

Any of the girls married? One. Any in convents? One going soon. So the one we’ve got here in the Sunroom is the baby, the pet. They have all spoilt her. Spoilt. Sounds like a crop of wheat. Spoilt by the floods. Therese, flooded by affection and love and too many toys, got too big for her boots and then she was crippled and depressed and wound up in the Sunroom.

Makes bad sense. Very bad sense. Won’t eat, won’t talk, won’t anything. Fading away. Needs to be taken in hand. Needs thrashing. Needs ECT, DST. Needs fuck.

‘Theresa is in very good hands here, Mrs Gillis.’ Ambrose rested his chin on his hand and smiled across the desk at Dorothy Gillis. She tried to smile. She was holding on tightly to the wooden handles of her bag which was placed on her knees.

Her feet were neatly together on the carpet.

‘She needs, she needs a period of rest and medication. She may well be a candidate for our new program of Deep Sleep Therapy which sends the brain on a little holiday.’ Dorothy’s eyes registered a flicker of desire for such a little holiday. ‘But first we need to approach her problems through a program of what is called “truth drug”. Therese has already undergone some sessions of this form of therapy, and she is, I can assure you, responding well. The truth drug isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds. The patient is given a dose of Sodium Amytal and Ritalin and then speaks freely and easily into a tape-recorder. I later go through the tape with a fine-tooth comb and I note the salient points, the points of worry and conflict in the patient’s mind. I bring these matters up with the patient at later appropriate times. These tapes are of course completely confidential between myself and the patient. It is usually possible with this type of treatment to bring the patient to a point where normal desires for food and social contact and so on are restored. And at that point it can be the time for Deep Sleep. Do you have any questions you would like to ask me, Mrs Gillis?’

‘When is she going to be better?’

‘Well, a month, two months. Who can say. Took her twenty
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years to get this far, after all. Unravelling it all can take some time. But she is young and intelligent. An attractive young woman with everything to live for. What she needs is a good rest and the right medication.’

He brought his hands together, placed them on the desk and stood up. Dorothy got up and he put a firm hand of reassurance on her shoulder as they walked to the door. ‘Feel that you can be in touch with us here at any time, Mrs Gillis. It is important that we should all work together to get Therese back on her feet.’

Several times Therese returned to the cubicle where she lay for hours in silence with the tape running. One day, in a kind of absence of mind, she began to speak, and what she said was recorded:

‘It’s really hard for someone to know how to start. You are here all alone and the tape-recorder is making a funny little noise as its wheels go slowly round and round and the ribbon runs on and on from one spool to the other and the face of the moment imprints on the ribbon as the ribbon runs like water and life the water of life and words come from my mouth and they land on the tape and the tape goes on and on, winding and winding, and I don’t know what to say. So I put my hands to my face and my face is cold and I feel my blood draining away, seeping onto the ribbon as the ribbon runs, every thought, every breath, every blink of my eye, every word of my lips, the truth and the lies, goes whirry, whirry, whirry into the little black box like a magician’s box, it’s a trick, a trick by a Turk and a turkey at a Christmas dinner with bread stuffing and cranberry sauce like blood. Blood running from my mother into me and out again and into the little black box of blood and words blah, blah, blahed. “Ch-ch” the needle goes in and “zzzzz” the wooshy juice goes singing along to the heart that beats and sends the juicy juice sailing along to the poor dead brain. Poor little match-girl brain. Redhead, deadhead. And the brain goes “Zupp!” and the curtains open and the curtains swish and the audience sits back softly in the velvet armchairs and the armchairs float along in clouds and clouds of clouds. Pink. Things happen slowly and the feeling is nice — nice and quiet and soft and safe and sound like a baby in a cradle rock-a-bye-baby on the tree top and just

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one little “ch-ch” and it’s done, opened up, up and over, when the wind blows, and split the oyster.

‘I used to lie in the big bed with my sisters called Frankie and Loulou and Margaret and Rosie and Bridie. Six peas in a pod my father said and I was the smallest pea. Sweet Pea. That’s me. Sweet Pea. A pink satin ribbon ran all along the edge of the blanket and I would stroke the satin and sometimes I chewed the corner and sucked the woolly taste through the satin. I am trying to tell the story of all this. Every Sunday Father May would tell my father he had six
fine
girls, and then he would say that I was the little one, the Little Flower of the family. I was pink and white and sugar and rose petals. That was how I looked on the surface, on the skin of things. But secretly I sucked the satin on the blanket and played a quiet juicy tune on Myself. There are dirty words for Myself but I don’t know them. Not really. Sometimes I think I know them. Nobody ever says. People smile. I said to Bridie to taste my fingers when I was playing on Myself and she sucked my fingers and then she laughed and then she slapped me and took my fingers in her mouth and bit them very hard. I loved her and she slapped me and bit me and pulled my hair. Then she would get into trouble.

Bridie bit me, I would say, and I would cry and cry.

‘We used to see the Girl in the wash-house. The Girl lingered by the wash-house door in the twilight. She was nearly as big as Bridie and she had a navy dress and school shoes and socks and her face was the same as the Mona Lisa. She smiled like that and she just stood there where the vines hang down over the lattice and there was a smoky look about her, and a perfect silence. She smiled and said nothing, ever. We weren’t scared, but we always wished she would say something. Are you a ghost, I would say. Tell us. Speak to us. Sometimes I see her in the street. She never changes and she never speaks. She stands in misty doorways trying to tell me something, but she never, ever speaks. She could even be here in the hospital, somewhere.

I wonder if Bridie ever sees her now. I never talk to Bridie. She’s going into the convent, going away to Queensland. I’m glad it’s Queensland because I never want to see her again. Go into your convent and stay there, Bridie, Sister Bridie, Bride of Christ,
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Sister High and Mighty Bride of Christ. Merry Christmas. What ever happened to Roger Lewis. I thought you were supposed to marry him in a secret Protestant wedding with no family and just the cleaning lady and the postman to be witnesses and you in his sister’s old wedding dress with the pearl buttons all the way up to the neck.

‘Bridie is pretty. Everybody says Bridie is pretty. Too pretty to be a nun. Dad will pretend to be pleased, but I know he won’t like it. Mum is pleased. Mum wished she had a vocation herself when she was young. Instead she had all of us and now the grandchildren, Rosie’s children, and Mum never gets a minute to herself. She’s a martyr to the family, the backbone, forever looking after Rosie’s children while Rosie goes out working to pay off the mortgage, getting out our old toys and books and making gingerbread men run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man. And she takes them to the zoo to see the animals and go on the rides.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this — this meaningless drivel, drivelling on about the convent and the zoo and the children and Bridie and Roger and the Girl at the wash-house door. I don’t know why and— and I do know why. I’m saying all this to fill in the spaces in the air, because I’m scared of explaining the things I have never explained, the things nobody knows except me. It’s too strange, the things I know, the things I think. They’d lock me up if they knew the truth about me. And I am locked up, and so that goes to show. So I might as well say anyway.

I can’t be more locked up than I am already. Locked up in the cellar and nobody hears you call, walled up in the tower. Let me out, let me be, let me die, let me be free, let me see. These are just words and I don’t mean them. I don’t mean a word of this; I just sing like a singsong like a ding-dong bell. What are words? What does it matter what I say, if I say these words or some other words. Who cares? Who’s listening? Who has their ear to the keyhole, eye to the crack, nose to the grindstone. Is there anybody there, said the traveller, knocking at the moonlit door. Nobody. Someone came a-knocking at my wee, small door.

But the Girl with the smile has vanished. Washed away with the tide. Washed away, splashed with muddy water and caught

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in the tide and all washed away, all washed up, driftwood and drivel and dribble and trouble and double double toil and trouble. Sad, bad, mad. I am here. I am speaking to you. I am Therese — Therese Martin. The Little Flower. Sister Therese of the Infant Jesus and the Holy Face.’

The words stopped there but the tape kept running. Therese was dazed by her own soft words, and she stared far into space, seeing nothing of the grey ceiling above her, seeing nothing but an empty mist. She was conscious only of a feeling of elation, of having got the right answer at last, of breaking through a terrible barrier into a new and sweeter world. She was aware of a faint perfume around her, and of the distant sound of women intoning psalms. High cool voices in the beloved chapel of the convent in Normandy. For a long time Therese listened to the far-off harmonies and then she began to sing: ‘Flower ye forth like the lily’. Her voice was high and sweet and pure. The sister on duty heard her singing and came into the cubicle. ‘Nearly done then, are we?’ she said, and Therese repeated her song, gazing in a strange way at the air, looking through the other woman, her face bright and shining. The sister had seen this kind of thing before and she thought very little of it. She was pleased that the patient was still in the bed and that the tape was still running.

She left the room, but Therese had fallen silent and after a while the tape finished with a loud click. Therese lay there in a peaceful trance, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed. Then the sister helped her back to bed in the Sunroom.

LITTLE FERRET, LITTLE QUEEN

On the bridge in the Norman town of Alencon, Zelie the Lace-maker met Louis the Clockmaker and they fell in love.