The Great World

by David Malouf

  He had expected her to open it and see how soiled the letters were, and from that how many times they had been unfolded and read. When she did not he was disappointed. She would do that later, he guessed, in private, after he left. Or would she? Once they got talking again she seemed simply to have forgotten they were there.

  ‘I make too much of things,’ he told himself. He knew how fond she was of Mac because he knew the letters. ‘There’s a lighter way of handling all this.’ It would go, he thought, with the rowdy good humour the house had been filled with – till he stepped in and put a damper on it.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said when he was on the doorstep again. ‘Really. I appreciate it.’

  He swallowed hard. He wanted to say something to her. ‘Listen,’ he wanted to say, ‘You don’t know this – how could you? – but I watched you drink a glass of water once and it was amazing. It wasn’t you, I see that now. It was a you I made up. But it was amazing just the same. An ordinary glass of water, can you imagine it?’

  What he actually said, and he was staggered later by his own temerity, was: ‘Would it be all right if I called again?’

  If she was surprised she gave no indication of it. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Any time. Only not on weekdays. You know, because of the shop. This time Saturday is good.’

  ‘Oh, I saw you coming,’ she laughed. ‘Saw you a mile off.’

  They were lying together on the narrow bed in his room, high up on the third floor of the Pomeroy.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, turning his head so that she wouldn’t see his smile. He loved it when she presented him to himself. It was like seeing someone else. He had had no opportunity before this to indulge himself.

  ‘You had messages written all over you,’ she told him. ‘In nine languages.’

  ‘Did I?’

  All this delighted him.

  But after a moment he said solemnly: ‘It was Mac that I was coming about, that first time.’

  She might have questioned this. She did not think so. And the second? But Digger was sensitive on the point. He did not want it to appear that he had used Mac, or the letters, to come to her. He was too scrupulous, she wouldn’t have minded; but it was his own integrity he was concerned with. When she saw that, she let him have things his way, and clung to what she knew.

  He had gone out the second time on foot. It wasn’t much more than a mile and he wanted to take things slowly, no need to rush.

  He was going now on his own account. The other business, Mac’s, had been settled on the first occasion; so far as it ever would be. He felt light-hearted, youthful. It didn’t worry him that he didn’t know the right forms for this sort of thing. She would understand that and make allowances. She had an infinite understanding (that’s the impression he had taken away) of all sorts of things; things he had no notion of.

  He was very conscious of the fact that at twenty-five he was entirely without experience in some matters. Courtship and that – the sort of gallantry that some fellows can manage by instinct, he had none of. But he had a great tenderness in him. Surely if he let that speak it would be enough.

  Still, he had armed himself, just in case, with a bunch of flowers, purple and red anemones wrapped in pale tissue. The old girl he bought them from, who looked after six or seven buckets in a laneway, and sat reading the Bible all day on a folding stool, had recommended them as the freshest at this time of the week, and seeing how nervous he was had taken trouble with the wrapping. The flower heads with their strong colours and black furry centres, as if fat bumblebees were at them, just peeped out over the sky-blue tissue, and there was a bit of ribbon, a darker blue.

  He felt awkward carrying flowers. He held them downward at arm’s length where they were not so noticeable; he wasn’t one of those blokes in light suits and polished shoes you saw ringing the doorbell of apartment houses, stepping about impatiently in front of the bronze door and checking how they looked, their parting, their ties, in its diamond panes. Still, he didn’t care if he looked foolish. Who was looking, anyway?

  He had felt such a warmth of life in her. He was chilled to the bone sometimes, for all the strong sunlight here.

  She was dressmaking when he arrived. She came to the door in her stockinged feet, in a frock of some shining material, green, with the pins still in it; and when he followed her into the front room a neighbour, a young newly-married woman, was there. They were drinking beer. Snips of the material like big pointed leaves were in pools all over the floor, and the neighbour, who was a blonde, had a mouthful of pins. She said hullo through them and giggled.

  Apologising for the mess, she put the flowers for a moment on the piano stool, just as she had the letters, and promising him a beer in just a moment if he would be patient till they got round the last bit of hem, climbed on to a chair. He saw then that the hem was not quite fixed.

  The blonde girl, whose name was Amy, got down on her knees with the pins in her mouth and went on with it, glancing up every now and then to take a look at him. He guessed from this that she already knew about him. So Iris had mentioned him! Her quick little glances were glances of appraisal; she was a second opinion. He laughed at this and did not feel intimidated. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was enjoying himself.

  Iris turned in a slow circle above them – Amy kneeling, he in one of the genoa velvet chairs – shifting her stockinged feet very daintily, an inch at a time, with her arms at her side and her head lowered a little to follow the progress of the work.

  It was a quiet business and took a bit of time; the quietness imposed by the fact that one of the two parties (he thought of himself as a mere spectator) could not speak because of the pins.

  To Digger it was a lovely moment, he had known nothing like it. He was happy just sitting. But the hem was done at last, found satisfactory, and she got down, told him how patient he had been, took the flowers to put them in water, got him a beer, brought the flowers back in a glass vase, and they sat and chatted.

  She was a lively girl, Amy. She kept them laughing with tales about her three sisters-in-law, who were called Faith, Hope and Charity – could you believe it? – so that they hardly spoke to one another. Just sat sipping the cold beer and looking. Once or twice Iris turned away in profile and he saw that the hairs on her neck, where she had pinned it up so that Amy could fix the collar of the new frock, were darker, damp with sweat.

  ‘Do you dance, Digger?’ Amy asked him in her uninhibited way. ‘Ben and I go every Friday night. Do you like Perry Como? Have you seen The Sign of the Cross?’

  As she fired off her questions, and he answered them, Iris gave him half-amused, apologetic looks that assured him that she was not responsible for this inquisition, and he believed it; she was quite capable of putting her own questions. But she didn’t cut Amy short either.

  The only thing that worried him was that he might be too old-fashioned for them, for her; too out of it. He was embarrassed still by the number of things people took for granted here that he had not yet caught up with. Amy was full of them. He didn’t want to be shown up. He bluffed, made a mental note of these puzzles, and wondered who he could go to later and ask.

  When the boys arrived they came in a storm, shouting and dumping their boots in the hall. Ewen’s team had won, six-three. That was a cause for celebration. With a quick little look that dared her to protest, he took a good swig of his mother’s beer. His eyes were on Digger, summing him up, Digger was aware of that, but gave no indication of what they saw.

  Jack, the younger boy, was already off out the back and was soon calling.

  ‘I’ve got to fly,’ Amy said, gathering up her things. ‘Here,’ she told Ewen, ‘leave your mother’s beer and finish mine. It’s only a few drops,’ she told Iris. ‘I’ll get murdered if Ben’s tea’s not on time.’

  She took one last look at the frock, which was hanging now from the picture-rail, to satisfy herself of her own workmanship, took a look at Digger too, actually winked at him, and went.<
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  He went himself a minute later; he had to be at the club by six. So that was all there was to it. But it was agreed that he should pick her up after work on Monday and they would do a show.

  Lying quietly at his side she got him to tell her stories, and what he had to tell – his mother and father, Jenny, everything about Keen’s Crossing – seemed stranger than it had been in the living of it. Why was that? Because he was seeing it through her eyes.

  One thing he told her shocked him. He hadn’t thought about it for nearly twenty years. If his memory were not so good he would have said he had forgotten it. It was the cruellest thing he had ever done.

  Once, when she was about eight years old, Jenny had gone up to the highway above the house and somehow or other got herself to the other side. This was forbidden, and she knew it. Why had she done it this time? Anyway, once she was across her courage entirely failed her and she dared not cross back.

  It started to get dark and, lost out there, she began to whimper and call. He heard her, crept up under cover of the bushes, and sat there, well hidden on the other side, and watched to see what she would do. She would come up to the edge of the road on her stumpy legs, screw up her courage to cross, then sit down again and weep; then come to the road again and walk up and down the edge of it as if just minutes ago it had ceased to be dirt and gravel and become a deep-flowing stream. He watched for a long time, appalled, but fascinated too by her helplessness. Finally she sank down in the growing dark and in a hopeless way sobbed his name. Over and over, ‘Digger, Digger’ – it gave him the creeps. At last, pretending he had just arrived, he stepped out into the middle of the road, stood a moment, then went quickly and took her hand.

  He was a long time silent after he told this.

  ‘Where is she now?’ Iris asked.

  ‘That’s just it,’ he said, and realised why it was that the occasion had now come back to him. ‘She’s run off somewhere. My mother thinks Brisbane. She’s terrified – mum, I mean. She’s scared we’ll all do it, go off one after another. Dad did. Now Jenny.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t gone off. She knows that. I’m different.’

  He told her stories of his mother, too, and was surprised to see from her reaction that he had made his mother fearsome, whereas what he had meant her to see was what a fierce grip on life she had – how she had given that to him too at times up there, when it was her presence, her demands on him, that had got him through. She sounded hard, but she wasn’t, not by nature. It was circumstances that had made her hard.

  ‘We think the same way,’ he explained, partly to himself. ‘On’y she doesn’ see that. Because the things I’ve got to hold on to aren’t the same as hers. Some of them are. But most of ’em aren’t. She can’t see it.’

  He described the things his mother held on to and told Iris of the room she believed she would sit in one day surrounded by all her worldly possessions; only by then they would be otherworldly. Still real and touchable, useable too, but as she too would be then, past all possibility of loss.

  ‘Just ordinary things,’ he explained, in case the picture wasn’t clear to her. ‘She’s not grasping, it’s not that. She does want the things for what they are now, but what she really wants them for is what they will be then. What they will show about her. Her life.’

  Iris looked at him rather hard. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. She was only indirectly interested in what he had to say of his mother. ‘What are the things you need to hold on to?’

  He told her a few of them. At last he told her how the two officers had come and asked him to keep a list of the names – the names and what happened in each case, insofar as it was known, to the men: a record, a kind of history. That was one thing.

  Billy, James, Leslie, May, Pearl – that was another.

  Then he told her, as well as he could, what he hadn’t told McGowan, and actually said the words: ‘Not a soul. Not a pin.’

  The flames he was thinking of were the ones that had leapt up round the teak logs in the clearing at Hintock Pass, which was just one fire of the many into which all the cast-offs, all the refuse and broken-down and worn-out rubbish of the world, goes when its newness has worn off, and those who have scrabbled to get and keep it no longer care whether it goes up in flames or down the sewer, or simply gets stamped back into the earth.

  You couldn’t save it from destruction. And you couldn’t make it whole again. Not in fact. But in your head you could.

  She listened. She touched his cheek, and lay the tips of her fingers to the place, just above the line of his hair, where a vein beat, feeling its steady throb.

  He also told her at last how Mac had died. She listened without looking at him, holding his head against her so that his breath, while he spoke, was on her flesh. After a time she asked quietly: ‘Was he buried?’

  ‘What?’

  The question surprised him.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘We never saw him again, the body or that. The Japs would’ve buried ’im.’

  ‘The word they sent,’ she told him, ‘was that he was missing. That’s all we ever heard.’

  ‘No,’ Digger said. ‘I saw what happened to him.’

  She was silent a while, then sat up a little and told him a story of her own.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When I was little, ten or eleven, maybe, we lived up near Gympie in Queensland. My dad had a farm. There were four of us, four girls, I was the second eldest, and my mother’s mother, our grannie, lived with us. She was very difficult. She and my mother never really got on. She had asthma and was too weak to get about. She’d sit all day out on the front verandah, and what I remember best is the rug she had. I’d never seen the sea then, but it was sea-colours, all blues and greens and purples in waves. She’d crocheted it herself, so they must have been her favourites.

  ‘They used to tell me I was like her. I mean, I was supposed to be difficult too. My mother would say: “You’re just like your grandma,” but in fact I didn’t like her very much, and if my sisters said it, you know, copying her, I’d pull their hair. Can you see me doing that?

  ‘Anyway, there was a flood. They came out to warn us. Our place was out of town, so we had time to save things. I remember they put a whole lot of furniture, beds and chairs, a sideboard, our sofa with a birdcage on it, on the grass in front of the house waiting for a wagon to take it. I remember how strange it looked. But the river came down quicker than they expected, and in the end there was a real panic. We had to get away in the night, and all the chairs and the sofa and that were swept away. I saw the water take them, it was amazing.

  ‘The thing is, grannie wouldn’t go. Or there was a quarrel or something at the last minute and she wouldn’t get into the boat. I don’t remember exactly, and later the story my mother told was different somehow. When we went back there was no sign of her. But for some reason I kept expecting her to turn up. I’d hear her wheezing in the middle of the night and get up and go to the verandah rails and expect to see her there.

  ‘My mother got furious with me. I was just, you know, at the most difficult, growing-up stage, and we didn’t get on either and she was upset by it. Maybe I was being difficult on purpose, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t accept that she was really dead.

  ‘All our other relations were buried right on the property. We used to go off and play funerals there and pick flowers and put them on the graves. You could read the stones. Being buried was what dead was, and we had never buried grandma. We’d never even seen the body. You can’t bury people in water, and water comes back, those floods did. You’d see the light of them off in the trees. I used to go out in the moonlight and look at the light there in the paddocks, under the trees, and the strangeness of it, to me, had somehow to do with my grandmother.’

  That was the story. She did not add to it, and he saw after a while that it was her husband she was speaking of, though she did not name him.

  What they were doing with the thing
s they told was revealing to one another, in the only way they could, all that was closest to them, but tracing as well the limits of their freedom.

  The one or two nights a week that she came to his room were when they had been out to a show and the boys could be left with something cold. Digger could always get someone to cover for him. She never stayed late, nor did she ever invite him to stay at Bondi Junction; and even later, when things were on a settled basis and he came up from Keen’s Crossing and stayed overnight, they preserved the fiction of being no more than friends. She made up a bed for him on the sleep-out and came to him there.

  It was the boys she was thinking of. ‘I’m a middle-aged woman,’ she told Digger lightly. ‘Forty-three,’ and she shook her head in a girlish way, as if in her real self she didn’t believe it. ‘Oh, you mightn’t think of that, but they do. I’m supposed to be past all this. That’s how young people think.’

  The boys wouldn’t have worried, even at the beginning, and certainly not later; or so Digger thought. She was observing her own code.

  He would lie, still in his singlet, and watch her undress, liking best the moment when, in just her petticoat at last, she would tilt her head first to one side, then to the other, and take off her earrings; then her rings; the pearl-and-diamond engagement ring first, then the wedding band, placing them carefully on the marble top of the wash-stand. This was the real sign of her nakedness. That she kept on her petticoat and he his singlet had nothing to do with it.

  Later, when she got up, he would lie and watch her do the whole thing in reverse.

  Only when she came to the earrings, then the engagement and wedding ring, was she no longer naked for him.

  3

  IN THE AFTERNOON he liked to sit quietly for an hour or so in the bar of the Waratah. Towards five it got crowded, and by half-past fellows would be ordering in half-dozens and lining the glasses up along the sill. He’d slip off then, get a bite to eat and stroll round in a leisurely way to the club.