The Garden Party, and Other Stories

The green blinds were drawn in the bungalows of the summer colony. Over the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back window seemed to have a pair of sand-shoes on the sill and some lumps of rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered in a haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts’ dog Snooker, who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was turned up, his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional desperate-sounding puff, as much as to say he had decided to make an end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along.

“What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort of staring at the wall?”

Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma’s bed, and the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at the window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table, for instance, was a packing-case in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice place for a watch to curl up in.

“Tell me, grandma,” said Kezia.

The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew the bone needle through. She was casting on.

“I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling,” she said quietly.

“My Australian Uncle William?” said Kezia. She had another.

“Yes, of course.”

“The one I never saw?”

“That was the one.”

“Well, what happened to him?” Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted to be told again.

“He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died,” said old Mrs. Fairfield.

Kezia blinked and considered the picture again… a little man fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole.

“Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?” She hated her grandma to be sad.

It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To look after them as a woman does, long after they were out of sight. Did it make her sad? No, life was like that.

“No, Kezia.”

“But why?” asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw things in the air. “Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn’t old.”

Mrs. Fairfield began counting the stitches in threes. “It just happened,” she said in an absorbed voice.

“Does everybody have to die?” asked Kezia.

“Everybody!”

“Me?” Kezia sounded fearfully incredulous.

“Some day, my darling.”

“But, grandma.” Kezia waved her left leg and waggled the toes. They felt sandy. “What if I just won’t?”

The old woman sighed again and drew a long thread from the ball.

“We’re not asked, Kezia,” she said sadly. “It happens to all of us sooner or later.”

Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant she would have to leave here, leave everywhere, for ever, leave—leave her grandma. She rolled over quickly.

“Grandma,” she said in a startled voice.

“What, my pet!”

“You’re not to die.” Kezia was very decided.

“Ah, Kezia”—her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head—“don’t let’s talk about it.”

“But you’re not to. You couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t not be there.” This was awful. “Promise me you won’t ever do it, grandma,” pleaded Kezia.

The old woman went on knitting.

“Promise me! Say never!”

But still her grandma was silent.

Kezia rolled off her bed; she couldn’t bear it any longer, and lightly she leapt on to her grandma’s knees, clasped her hands round the old woman’s throat and began kissing her, under the chin, behind the ear, and blowing down her neck.

“Say never… say never… say never—” She gasped between the kisses. And then she began, very softly and lightly, to tickle her grandma.

“Kezia!” The old woman dropped her knitting. She swung back in the rocker. She began to tickle Kezia. “Say never, say never, say never,” gurgled Kezia, while they lay there laughing in each other’s arms. “Come, that’s enough, my squirrel! That’s enough, my wild pony!” said old Mrs. Fairfield, setting her cap straight. “Pick up my knitting.”

Both of them had forgotten what the “never” was about.

Chapter 1.VIII

The sun was still full on the garden when the back door of the Burnells’ shut with a bang, and a very gay figure walked down the path to the gate. It was Alice, the servant-girl, dressed for her afternoon out. She wore a white cotton dress with such large red spots on it and so many that they made you shudder, white shoes and a leghorn turned up under the brim with poppies. Of course she wore gloves, white ones, stained at the fastenings with iron-mould, and in one hand she carried a very dashed-looking sunshade which she referred to as her “perishall.”

Beryl, sitting in the window, fanning her freshly-washed hair, thought she had never seen such a guy. If Alice had only blacked her face with a piece of cork before she started out, the picture would have been complete. And where did a girl like that go to in a place like this? The heart-shaped Fijian fan beat scornfully at that lovely bright mane. She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible common larrikin and they’d go off into the bush together. Pity to have made herself so conspicuous; they’d have hard work to hide with Alice in that rig-out.

But no, Beryl was unfair. Alice was going to tea with Mrs Stubbs, who’d sent her an “invite” by the little boy who called for orders. She had taken ever such a liking to Mrs. Stubbs ever since the first time she went to the shop to get something for her mosquitoes.

“Dear heart!” Mrs. Stubbs had clapped her hand to her side. “I never seen anyone so eaten. You might have been attacked by canningbals.”

Alice did wish there’d been a bit of life on the road though. Made her feel so queer, having nobody behind her. Made her feel all weak in the spine. She couldn’t believe that some one wasn’t watching her. And yet it was silly to turn round; it gave you away. She pulled up her gloves, hummed to herself and said to the distant gum-tree, “Shan’t be long now.” But that was hardly company.

Mrs. Stubbs’s shop was perched on a little hillock just off the road. It had two big windows for eyes, a broad veranda for a hat, and the sign on the roof, scrawled MRS. STUBBS’S, was like a little card stuck rakishly in the hat crown.

On the veranda there hung a long string of bathing-dresses, clinging together as though they’d just been rescued from the sea rather than waiting to go in, and beside them there hung a cluster of sandshoes so extraordinarily mixed that to get at one pair you had to tear apart and forcibly separate at least fifty. Even then it was the rarest thing to find the left that belonged to the right. So many people had lost patience and gone off with one shoe that fitted and one that was a little too big… Mrs. Stubbs prided herself on keeping something of everything. The two windows, arranged in the form of precarious pyramids, were crammed so tight, piled so high, that it seemed only a conjurer could prevent them from toppling over. In the left-hand corner of one window, glued to the pane by four gelatine lozenges, there was—and there had been from time immemorial—a notice.

LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH SOLID GOLD ON OR NEAR BEACH REWARD OFFERED

Alice pressed open the door. The bell jangled, the red serge curtains parted, and Mrs. Stubbs appeared. With her broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand. Alice was welcomed so warmly that she found it quite difficult to keep up her “manners.” They consisted of persistent little coughs and hems, pulls at her gloves, tweaks at her skirt, and a curious difficulty in seeing what was set before her or understanding what was said.

Tea was laid on the parlour table—ham, sardines, a whole pound of butter, and such a large johnny cake that it looked like an advertisement for somebody’s baking-powder. But the Primus stove roared so loudly that it was useless to try to talk above it. Alice sat down on the edge of a basket-chair while Mrs. Stubbs pumped the stove still higher. Suddenly Mrs. Stubbs whipped the cushion off a chair and disclosed a large brown-paper parcel.

“I’ve just had some new photers taken, my dear,” she shouted cheerfully to Alice. “Tell me what you think of them.”