The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower Page B

morning, we’ll see. Don’t say anything.’
    ‘I don’t ever want to say anything to him again!’ Clare assured her, then added, her look incredulous, ‘Do you want us to act as if nothing has happened?’
    ‘Yes. Till I’ve seen.’
    ‘Seen what? He’ll remember. Anyway, how can we pretend?’
    Laura reasoned to herself, ‘It was a sort of—brainstorm. It won’t happen again. If we act as if nothing happened, he will, too. Do as I say. Do you hear me, Clare?’
    ‘Oh, I hear you.’ She wrapped her arms about her damp head.
    Laura rattled two white tablets out of a tube on the window-sill, and swallowed them with a drink of water. Shutting cupboard doors tight, and pressing drawers in, she glanced all about and then switched off the light.
    Downstairs on the ferry, and outside in the open air, Clare inattentively cast her eyes over the skyline, the shimmering dark-blue harbour, the over-familiar ships, gardens, red-tiled roofs and commercial buildings whose meaninglessness had begun to perplex her expectations.
    Still, it was a pleasant novelty to be abroad on a weekday afternoon, away from college and thestationery smell indigenous to all such clerical places. (She had a mild allergy. The local doctor was passing her on to a Macquarie Street man.)
    College—As people often do, she proceeded to muse about the place she congratulated herself on being absent from. College—Mrs. Robertson—Practising what she preached, Mrs. Robertson invited four girls to her flat every Saturday or Sunday for afternoon tea, and Clare went in her turn to indulge in some social life. It had sounded desirable and sensible when Mrs. Robertson had first expounded its workings—social life—but what it turned out to be like was waiting at a bus stop, a grimy bus stop with grit and traffic tearing past. She was desperate to be gone and had been waiting, it seemed, since her life began. She was staring through the grey light and grit and monochrome press of traffic and crowds, waiting for (she supposed) a bus, with longing and anxiety.
    Then, because she happened to be standing in the queue, voices addressed her in unending soliloquies, burrowing like parasites for space inside her brain. ‘I’ve told him again and again not to shape my hair in like that at the back of my head. It’s old-fashioned—The skirt’s going to have six yards in it, and underneath there’ll be this petticoat with layers of frills—Ten cartons of Nutty Roughs—With all this funny weather our suitcases were covered with green mould—Hitler’s got the right idea about the Jews, they can say whatthey like—Napoleon, there was a man! Where’s your female Einstein, your Rembrandt? Women! Why were all the Greek and Roman statues of men? Because male beauty is superior in every way—When I win the lottery—The neckline’s down to about here— After the war this block of land’ll be worth three times what we gave for it— Till you find the bluebird of happiness— It’s very important to keep your typing even.’
    Gently, mildly, she responded. Politely, she replied.
    Glances were thrown at her now and then to solder chains on her attention, since she happened to be there. She smiled and raised her eyebrows with interest. For how could you hurt people’s feelings? And it was no one’s fault. What it was she expected (and so much time had passed that she could barely remember what it was exactly) was long overdue. To her heart’s blood she craved its arrival. In the midst of this curious kind of anguish, people cheerily addressed her at life’s bus stop as they would have addressed any wooden post with ears on it.
    Without the least doubt, either, Mrs. Robertson, and Ruth and Noelene and the other girls at the college, and Laura and Felix (and these were all the people she knew) found their needs in this direction easily appeased. Yet she was grief-stricken, bleeding to death, because of these daily encounters. If she lied or acted all her life,