The Great World

by David Malouf

  Vic felt uncomfortable. It was crazy, and spooky too. She was herself a kind of spook. When they played their games he would keep away from the dining room where Aunt James was sitting, her eyes, her ears too, made sharper by the dark. ‘Ah, Stevie,’ she would whisper as he tried to tiptoe past the door, ‘is that you? You come and hide by me. I won’t let him get you.’

  It did not trouble him in the daylight. He could treat it as a joke. But here in the dark, seeing her grey hair lit up in points where the light from the garden touched it, and hearing the passion in her voice, which was so low and croaky, he would feel a coldness on the back of his neck, and stop still sometimes, unable to move.

  For all Mr Warrender’s generosity to her, Aunt James was still loyal to the scapegrace Stevie, and for more than twenty years had looked forward to his return. Mr Warrender knew this. No doubt it upset him. But he accepted it as another of Aunt James’s disconcerting eccentricities.

  So when she saw in Vic’s appearance among them the return of the prodigal, the banished brother-in-law, she was making mischief. She was enlisting him in an alliance against Pa.

  Vic decided (they were all so open about it) that he could take this side of the thing lightly, presenting himself as a victim, as Mr Warrender himself was, of the old girl’s crazy fits. But it worried him a little and made him more determined than ever to do nothing, whatever turn things might take, that could be construed as disloyalty to Pa.

  He was helped in this by Aunt James’s inconsistency. There were occasions when her mind skipped sixty years rather than twenty and he became her own brother Bob, a spoiled and sickly child who had been killed in a riding accident when he was just the age that Vic was now. In this guise she would poke her tongue out and, snatching the bread off his plate, shout, ‘Let him go without, the little bugger!’ being pretty well certain that no one else could see him; or she would lean out and pinch him hard, daring him to cry out and show her up.

  He did not know how to react. He felt a fool just sitting there and letting an old lady pinch him. He could hardly pinch her back. But the girls, who had put up with Aunt James’s tricks for as long as they could remember, were delighted, they thought it hilarious. Even Pa was amused, but did give him a look as if to say, ‘Well, you see how it is, old man. It’s the same with me. But what can we do?’

  But he saw now why the girls asked their friends to the house only when Ma could guarantee that Aunt James would be out of the way, and why they had been so uneasy at first even with him.

  Ellie wasn’t – or not for long. But Ellie was just a little girl, rather wild and tomboyish, glad to have someone new to play with and a boy in the house. Lucille he had to win.

  He did it by not trying to, by letting her discover for herself how solid, how utterly loyal he was.

  They were the same age, and she too was glad at last to have a boy in the house, though for other reasons than Ellie’s. At thirteen she was quite grown-up, or thought she was, and very aware of the power she had over people, only a little scared as yet of the consequences of it.

  She did not set out to make a worshipper of him, but he became one. The little game he had been led into, of getting around the difficulties of her character, of impressing and pleasing her, became a habit, then a pleasure and a misery. Before long he was, he told himself, in love with Lucille, and in his usual way began to include her in the visions he gave himself up to of what his life would be.

  She accepted this at first. She was just the age for it, for talking dreamily of ever afters and for being in love. But she grew up faster than Vic did; he could not keep up with her. He found himself, more often than he would have wanted, turning to Ellie for the rough-and-tumble games that the boyish part of him still hungered for, and he was hurt when Lucille drew her mouth down and mocked at him.

  By the time she was fifteen Lucille Warrender had become a young woman, very demanding and wilful and with a tribe of followers. He did not despair when she began to go about with older boys. He knew he had a year or two yet in which to grow up. But he agonised, and wore such a long face that Ma, who saw all this and was increasingly fond of him, was at a loss. For all his stolidity he was easily hurt. And he had a romantic streak. Other people might miss it, but Ma didn’t. She didn’t know how to help him.

  The fact was that she was scared of Lucille, who seemed to her too grown-up altogether. She thought too highly of herself. For days on end she would be all moods and little female fads and whims that Ma had no time for. Then suddenly there would be floods of tears and she would want to be cuddled and forgiven. She was neither one thing nor the other. She was proud and critical and unthinkingly cruel; not so much by nature as from inexperience. She did not know herself or how to act in a way that would spare either her own feelings or other people’s. It was Vic who bore the brunt of it.

  ‘After all, Vic, you’re not a stranger, are you, so it doesn’t matter.’ These were the words Ma used when she came up to his room, as in time she often did, to consult with him. ‘I can talk to you, Vic. Goodness knows, I can’t talk to the girls or Pa.’ She meant she did not want to alarm them with her fears.

  She believed, young as he was, that Vic was tough and practical. Practical was one of her favourite words, and a great compliment. He would sit feeling pleased with himself, tough, compact, and yes, practical, while she gave herself up to visions of disaster. That was the word she kept flying to.

  She was a worrier, Ma. With a magazine in one hand, The Bulletin or the London Illustrated News, which she would snatch up as a guarantee that she had something to do, and in the other a cigarette that she mostly forgot to smoke, she would prowl the house like an unhappy ghost, peering into rooms that her mother, in the days when they had five maids, had filled with whatnots and the souvenirs of travel – Venetian glass and little boxes and figurines in porcelain or Parian or bronze, that they could afford to keep dusted then but were impractical now. On Pa’s urging, and for reasons of common sense, she had cleared it all out, all the gloomy mahogany and velvet and bric-à-brac, and furnished the place in modern veneer.

  The trouble was, she missed the old things. She would put her hand out for a bit of familiar furniture and be shocked that it wasn’t there. Or she and Meggsie would spend half a morning going through drawer after drawer looking for some old newspaper cutting she wanted to consult, or a bunch of artificial violets she thought she could use on a hat, or an earring to match one that had turned up again after seven years, and she would realise with a pang that she had left it in one of the sideboard drawers when it went off to Lawson’s to be sold.

  This was her parents’ house, the one she had grown up in. What she had done, she felt, for all her talk of what was sensible, had been an attempt to drive their spirits from the place. She felt ashamed now. She ought never to have done it. And anyway, she had failed.

  Standing at the long drawing-room window and looking across to the factory, she would feel her father there in the room behind her. He would be wearing a savage look and waiting, not too patiently (he had been a rough, uneducated fellow), for her to explain herself. What had she done with his splendid enterprise?

  She thought of the answer she might give him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Pop, this is 1936!’ (As if this improvement on 1919, when he died, could stand against the other figures she would have had to give him, which these days were always down.) ‘I mean, there’s a depression on.’

  All this was nonsense, of course. ‘I ought to have been a boy,’ she would tell herself, and she would tell Vic this too. ‘Then they would have taught me how to do something about it.’ But Stevie was the boy, and her father, in a fit of self-righteousness that was to be fatal, had destroyed that possibility by driving him away. So who was to blame? And why did she feel guilty?

  Wandering about the house in her stockinged feet, elegant but careless, she could be there, as Meggsie complained, before you knew it – unless you smelled the smoke.

  ‘Lord bless the Irish!’ Meg
gsie would exclaim when Mrs Warrender appeared, anxious to have a sit-down at the kitchen table and go over some problem about the girls, ‘You scared the daylights outa me!’

  Meggsie had girls of her own: two of them unhappily married and settled, the other still getting her glory-box together. She had known Lucille and Ellie since they were babies. She spoiled them, always took their part and could see no problem with either of them.

  But Mrs Warrender was in no mind to be convinced. As if by habit, and ignoring Meggsie’s clear displeasure, she would go to the dresser, find a sharp little knife and set herself to help Meggsie peel and core apples while she went over the thing.

  Meggsie fumed. She had her own way of doing things, and Mrs Warrender’s did not suit her. As Ma got more and more excited, a good half of the apple she was working on would disappear as scrap. If it was peas she was shelling she would pop at least one from every shell into her mouth. Finally Meggsie would stand no more of it. Ten years older than Ma, she took the line that Ma was not much more than a girl herself. Taking the knife out of her hand, or pulling the bag of unshelled peas to her own side of the table, she would say: ‘Now you listen to me, dear. You should stop stirrin’ yourself up like this and just let things go their own way. Let nature take its course.’

  Mrs Warrender was appalled. She had seen nature take its course. That was precisely what terrified her.

  ‘They’re good girls, both. Let me tell you, you don’t know how lucky you are. Now trust me. Did I ever serve you up a brumm p’tata?’

  Mrs Warrender would sit a moment. In fact she did feel easier. Maybe it was the few minutes of working with her hands and actually doing something. More likely it was the light in Meggsie’s kitchen, which she had loved since she was just a little thing and would come to make patty cakes in the stove. Or Meggsie herself and the rhythm she imposed on things. It was different from the rhythms of the rest of the house, which were either too hectic or too lax – she should do something about that, but what? Just being in this cool, back part of the house was refreshing and she found herself wishing that Meggsie, who was proprietorial, had not made it so exclusively her own. She would have been happy to work here if Meggsie would have her: peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables, putting her hands into greasy water, acting as a slavey in her own home. But Meggsie, polite but insistent, couldn’t wait to get rid of her.

  ‘Now you go and putcher feet up on the verandah, dear, and I’ll bring you a nice cuppa tea. I’m busy. I got the pudding ta think of. If I don’t, pretty soon, there won’t be any.’

  Mrs Warrender went, feeling quieter, but dismissed.

  ‘I wish,’ she was fond of saying, ‘that my father had let me learn typing or something – or serve in a shop even. At least then I would know something and people wouldn’t talk to me as if I was some sort of dimwit. I mean, we aren’t born impractical.’

  Quite soon after Vic arrived in the house she took to waylaying him in the hallway as he came in from school, and later, when she began to see in his sturdy and sometimes grave figure a kind of equilibrium that came, she thought, from ‘experience’ (and how in the world, at his age, had he come by that?), she would at the oddest hours wander right into his room and, settling herself on the edge of the bed, start in on whatever it was that was fretting her.

  Sometimes, abstractedly, as she talked, she would pick his dirty socks up off the floor and begin to roll them, or a shirt or a pair of underpants. Once she held one of his socks up to her nose and smelled it, and did not look at all offended – in fact, rather pleased. Or she would open and close the drawers of his dressing table, moving things about and seeing they were properly folded. She wasn’t spying, he knew that, because she wasn’t actually looking at things. Just touching them and reassuring herself that one article was cotton, another wool, so many pairs. It helped her order her thoughts and re-established, in a motherly way – socks and shirts and underpants were a mother’s business – her intimacy with him.

  ‘Mr Warrender, Pa,’ she would tell him, ‘is a wonderful man. He’s the kindest, most generous –. People don’t realise. Look how he is with Aunt James! But like the rest of us he has his limits. He can’t do wonders. They keep asking too much of him.’

  Vic would sit silent and follow her restless pacing about the room, wondering at this way she had of putting a case for the defence as if she were a lawyer addressing an unseen jury, and Pa always the man in the dock.

  He was too young at first, and too unused to being confided in, to do more than take it all in and hold his tongue. But he did wonder who they could be. Ma’s parents? Aunt James, Meggsie, Mr Hicks? He decided then that Ma was rather queer in the head, or overwrought, hysterical. For a time he took an amused attitude and regarded her, secretly, with a kind of affectionate contempt.

  But as he got to know the household better he saw at last that she was the only one here who really thought about things. He did too, and she saw that and was grateful. As he got to be older and more responsible, their little ‘confabs’, as she called them, became serious discussions about family affairs, that took up the whole business of the factory and its running, loans, interest rates, finances. She knew more than you might expect, Ma, about loans and such things. What she knew she shared with him. They were in a bad way: that was the heart of the matter. That’s what she was trying to face up to.

  They did not give themselves airs, the Warrenders – they had too much style for that. They would have been ashamed to appear opulent when around them so many others were being crushed. The car they drove, a grey Hup, was the same one they had been careering about in for fifteen years. You still had to crank it. The house was large enough, but a lot of it was in poor repair and half the rooms they never went in to except when they played games. There was only Meggsie to do anything. The girls had been brought up to think of themselves as poverty-stricken, and might have been ragged if Meggsie hadn’t taken a hand.

  All that was a kind of insurance, a sop to the fates. They were not poor, not by most people’s standards, but they soon might be. Poverty these days could hit you just like that. Ma had seen it happen to others, and she was scared. What scared her was that she did not know what it was, or how, when it came, she would meet it.

  Vic knew and could have told her, but what would she have learned from that? He would have had to bare at last what he was determined to keep hidden, even from her.

  Occasionally, when he came in from school, there would be a man in the yard, often, as he grew, a boy not much older than himself, chopping wood for Meggsie’s stove. Normally this was his job.

  Resting on the axe a moment, his shirt dark at the armpits and sticking to the small of his back, the man would draw a wrist across his brow, which was dripping, and nod under the greasy hat. Some of these fellows were not used to it, you could see that. They were making a mess of the job.

  They were men out of work, battlers who came to the back door looking for any employment they could get: chopping wood, cleaning out gutters or drains. Meggsie had authority, or had assumed it, to give them something, usually bread and dripping or a bowl of soup. The work was an acknowledgement that what they got they had earned, a gesture towards masculine pride and the insistence that what they were after was work, not charity. Meggsie knew them like her own. They might have been her sons or brothers. Just the same, she kept an eye on them.

  They haunted Vic, these men or half-grown boys who a few months back had been storemen or clerks in shipping offices or drillers in mines. He felt his shoulders slump a little at the sight of them. He felt humbled. When he had taken his school jacket off and rolled his sleeves, he would go out sometimes and have a word with them – nothing much, but he knew the language.

  They were embarrassed. He didn’t talk like a boss, but he was at home here. So what was he? What did he want? They wished after a while that he would leave them alone to get on with it. He felt the hardening in them of something he had touched and offended, and knew what it was but cou
ld not help himself. He found excuses for hanging about the factory yard with his hands in his pockets, kicking stones under the firs.

  Worst of all were the times when he came on one of them hunched over the soup Meggsie had given him, apart and feeding.

  They scared him, these men. Not physically – there was very little that scared him that way. It was his spirit that shivered and got into a sweat. They were everywhere you went: hanging about with no change in their pockets outside the picture shows, the boldest of them still flash enough to whistle at girls; in lines on the pavement. You would have had to tag on to the end of one of these straggling, endlessly shuffling lines to find out what it was, up ahead, that had drawn them. He didn’t really want to know, but felt there was something wrong. He had got off too easily. He was in the wrong dream.

  He went out for a time with a girl, not one of Ellie and Lucille’s friends, but a girl he had met at a dance. She lived at Granville and worked as a salesgirl in the city. She had two older brothers who were out of work, her father too, and could type a hundred words a minute and take shorthand, but the only job she could get was selling paint in a hardware shop. He was getting nowhere with her but he didn’t mind, he liked her so much; she was so lively and certain of her own competence, and so pleased with herself because she had a job. Her whole family depended on her.

  But one hot night when he went out to meet her, as he sometimes did, at the tram, she was in tears and would not speak to him, just went rushing past in her neat high heels, sobbing, and when he caught up with her she pushed him off.

  She had been sacked. They’d sacked her for coming in three minutes late from lunch. It had been so hot that she and another girl had stopped off a minute in the park, sitting on the edge of a fountain to bathe their feet and let the spray blow over them. Three minutes! In a mood of over-confidence set off by their moment at the fountain, which was still bubbling away in her, she had stood up for herself and the manager had sacked them, both of them – and the other girl hadn’t said a word! She was inconsolable. She just looked at him. Didn’t he see what it meant? Was he too stupid even to see that?