by David Malouf
The others, Ma, Pa, Aunt James, were watching. She told herself that she had to be careful now of her own emotions. The moment was critical.
His hair, which was brutally short, shaved right up above his ears, gave him the look of a convict. Was that deliberate? She was moved by this but warned herself that she could not trust him. They stood very close, with the child between them, who was crowing and working his fingers in the air.
‘How old is he?’ Vic asked.
He was staring at the child in a perplexed way, as if he had not expected him to be quite real or had underestimated how much innocent energy and egotism he would possess. The child was laughing and looking from one to another of them with no doubt at all that he was the most important person here.
‘Hello, cobber,’ Vic said when the child reached out and made a grab for his shirt.
‘Alexander,’ she told him.
‘So you see,’ she wanted to add, ‘we’re no longer the youngest ones – not any more.’ She thought this might reconcile him a little, make him see things, as she did, in the longer view.
He put his hands out then and took Alexander from her. She felt the weight go, saw how rough and scarred his hands were, and was surprised by his gentleness, but did not lower her guard. The child had knocked him off balance, that’s all. He would be looking now for a way of restoring himself. The child was on his arm and Vic was hefting him up and down as if assessing his weight.
It made her want to laugh, that. He could not enter into rivalry with a fourteen-month-old child. It was too undignified and the odds were too much on the child’s side. He was looking for a way round. ‘What funny creatures we are,’ she thought, and relaxed a little. ‘So transparent.’
‘He’s heavy,’ Vic said, and all the time the others were quiet and watching.
‘Oh, he’s heavy all right,’ she thought. ‘I could have told you that.’
She did laugh then. She was filled with such a wave of joy at the weight he added to the world, which she felt even when she herself was not holding him, and in the rush of it felt an affection for him too, for his hands that were so scabbed and swollen and for the sureness with which they held the child.
‘Listen,’ she wanted to say, ‘can’t we make this easy? There’s been a war. Extraordinary things have happened. A boy came all the way from Mississippi to sleep with me; drafted into it by the War Office in Washington. He was nineteen. He had never left home. Now he’s gone again, and it may be months before I can go to him, and Alexander is here, and the whole world is different. But it’s all right. We’re all fine – we’re alive, aren’t we? You can see just by looking at him how easy these things can be.’
He was very quick. She saw from his eyes that he had caught her moment of weakness towards him. He passed the child back, and when he put his hands in his pockets there was a little smile at the corner of his mouth, though he tried to conceal it. He had felt his strength again and was preparing to be difficult. There was a lightness in him and a little buzz, she could hear it, coming off the surface of his skin. She drew away.
She could say none of the things that just a moment ago had come to her lips.
He had felt like a ghost coming back here.
When he got off the train he had walked up and down the platform for a time consulting the timetables, the adverts, and deciphering the graffiti in the glassed-in waiting room; giving a good imitation of a man who had another train to catch.
What he was doing was hanging on to his last moments in limbo.
On a railway platform you can wait without question. You walk up and down with your hands in your pockets; stop to light a cigarette or unwrap a new stick of gum, and that’s the limit of it; no obligation to justify yourself, or to greet others or even acknowledge their presence. You stand lifting yourself up and down on your toes and whistling. You stroll to the end of the platform and look down the quarter mile of lumped gravel that serves as a shunting-line. You turn and stroll back. Only when you have passed the boy in the cap and waistcoat who idles at the gate, given up your ticket, gone down the stairs to where taxis are waiting, have you arrived. ‘I could stay here all day,’ he thought when he had read the timetables twice, and the Bible message, and the ads for Vincent’s APC Powders and Bushell’s tea, ‘or I could catch the next train back.’ But suddenly, without thought, he walked to the end of the platform, took the stairs, and before he knew it was in the street.
It was a good walk to the house, but he knew every step. Only four years ago he had been a schoolboy here.
He stopped once to peer through the fence of a canning factory where he had gone with other kids to collect metal scrap.
Just beyond it was the ghost house, a verandahed ruin set far back behind beds of cannas and rusty-looking palms. It had been inhabited then by a batty old girl who wheeled a pram with a Pomeranian in it about the streets. The house was empty now and boarded up.
At the corner of Crane Street there was a place where eight or nine years ago, when he was thirteen, he had used his house key to scratch his initials, V.C.C., into the wet cement. They were still there under the prints of a dog’s paws.
But there was a quickening in him as well, the re-emergence of a sense of himself that had been there from the moment he first told Ma that he would come.
The familiarity of the walk itself began to work on him, as his body, which had a memory of its own, slipped back into the easy knowledge of how many steps it was from the station to their front door. When he got there, he found himself, out of habit, feeling in his pocket for the key.
Two surprising things occurred when the front door was at last thrown open. Meggsie hugged him and burst into tears, and Aunt James, for the first time, recognised him as himself. ‘It’s Vic,’ she called, just behind Meggsie in the hall.
‘My God,’ he thought, and felt a bubble of laughter rise in him. ‘If she knows me I really must be a ghost!’
There were other changes. Pa announced them, a little too quickly, Vic thought, before he could discover them for himself, adopting a humorous tone that gave no indication of what he might really feel.
‘I’m retired,’ he told Vic. ‘Put out to pasture, I reckon. Though officially it’s so I can get on with my book.’ Ma was making little sounds of disavowal, keeping up the game Pa made of it. ‘Meet the new manager.’
‘It’s true,’ she said, rather shy about it. ‘I took over three years ago. Now there’s a surprise for you!’
‘Got rid of me first thing she could,’ Pa said. ‘Sacked for incompetence. For loafing on the job.’
‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘He couldn’t put up with having a woman for a boss, that was the real trouble. Thought it was beneath his dignity.’
‘Oh?’ said Pa. ‘I thought you were always the boss. I thought I was used to it.’
‘Anyway,’ said Ma, ‘we’re on top again, that’s the main thing.’
‘All these years,’ Pa said, ‘we had this secret weapon an’ didn’t even know it. We let Ma loose and the buggers fled.’
Behind all this raillery, Vic felt, there were tensions that only humour, their old rough-gentle humour, could deal with.
But it had changed Ma utterly, this move to the centre of their lives. All that had previously been lax in her had come to attention. The vagueness and languor that had seemed constitutional in her, the restless anxiety, had belonged only, it now appeared, to the conditions she had imposed upon herself – against nature, as it were; first to make way for her brother Stevie, then for Pa. When wartime changed the rules, she had simply stepped in and done what she had all along been intended to do; temporarily at first, while Pa was down with dengue fever, then, with scarcely a protest on his part, for good.
War economies had put a premium on local products. Ma, seeing the opportunity it offered, had acted and made a killing.
It astonished Pa that this woman he had lived with for twenty-five years, and known for more like forty, should suddenly reveal herself as a
‘buccaneer’. She was a Needham, and her father’s daughter, that’s what it was. Pa, who had found the old man intimidating, a bit of a ruffian in fact, was amused, but awed too, by the extent to which he reappeared now in female form. He teased Ma and made a joke of it – that was his style – but was disturbed.
Ma too found it easier to present what had happened as a freak of the times. She was pragmatic, Ma. It was one of the qualities she had had no opportunity to reveal till now, but once liberated, she gave it rein, like the rather salty humour that went with it. The agent of her liberation had been, of all things, the Japanese Imperial Army, though that, like so much else that had happened, was by the way. She had not been part of their Co-prosperity Plan.
It was too humorous a view, this, too odd, far-fetched even, to be admitted. She kept it to herself. People, she had discovered, were not very sympathetic to unusual views, however humorous they might be, or to those who expressed them.
Vic had caught the new note in her voice on the telephone. It was partly, he felt now, what had drawn him to come. There was a confederacy between them. It did not have to be evoked. All that had been settled years back in their uneasy consultations, when she had felt his commitment to her and had seen already, as he had not, that they might one day make a team.
She led him off now to see what she had been doing out there – in the factory, she meant – and without words, and taking the old relationship between them quite for granted, put it to him: we’re partners, eh?
There was no coquettishness in it. She did not play up to the male in him by pretending to be weak or in need. It was an offer between equals. On both sides an opportunity that was too good to miss.
They were standing, dwarfed as you always were here, under the great cross-beamed ceiling of the factory, a place that bore an eerie resemblance, Vic thought, to a godown – but the shadow this threw across his spirit he immediately drove off.
You came in out of strong sunlight into coolness. But it was a coolness of a particular kind, a climate all of its own, and at the touch of it he felt something restored in him. It was like that first waking up into the real temperature of your body after days of fever, the crossing over a line between zones. He felt a goosepimpling all over the surface of him, and what came back, and with an immediacy he was quite unprepared for, was the last occasion he had come here, the eve of his departure.
A self-conscious, self-important eighteen-year-old, he had stood here to take temporary leave of his life, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. Now, five years later, with the knowledge of all that, which was still bitter in him, taken fully into account, he found he could look on his former self with none of the angry disappointment he had been consumed by in the months since he got back. He could face that humourless schoolboy, standing there so full of himself and making so many promises to the world, with detachment and a wary tolerance. There was no shame – or anyway, none so deep that it demanded the penalty of death – in having been eighteen, and so ignorant of what the world could do to you.
It was the place itself that brought this home to him, and he remembered something he had heard when he went down to Keen’s Crossing but had dismissed till now as one of Digger’s mystifications.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he had thought, looking about the clearing and observing how completely Digger fitted in to it; so much so that he had found it difficult to imagine him in any other place – had he really been up there? But now he too felt it. Some impression of his presence had remained here and was waiting to be filled. He could, with no difficulty at all, step into it now as if he had never left.
3
AT LAST ELLIE arrived, dropped off by a noisy group in a red convertible. She stopped in the doorway a moment to apologise for being late. ‘No, don’t look at me,’ she told Vic when he tried to go to her, ‘I’m a mess,’ and she ran off to change. When she came down again it was in a cotton dress with little ties at the shoulder and no stockings. ‘Ah,’ Pa said, ‘here’s our girl.’
When he left she had been at school; they were mates and had told one another everything. She threw her arms around him now as if nothing had changed between them.
He glanced across to see if Lucille was watching, but she was absorbed with the child, refusing, a little too deliberately he thought, to acknowledge him.
Ellie had a job. She had been drafted at first into a munitions factory, but was working now in a motor pool, driving a six-ton truck and doing all her own maintenance. She showed him her hands. She loved zooming about all over the city, and the long trips up to Lithgow or down the coast to Wollongong. You could tell this from the way she talked about it, and the others, who must have heard her tales a dozen times, seemed delighted to hear them again.
She got up now, still talking, and fetched a bowl of unshelled peanuts that Meggsie had set out. Taking one she cracked it in half, popped one nut into her mouth, then cracked the other half and, just as she would have done in the old days, passed it to him, all the time going on with the story she was telling.
It was as if he had never been away. She had never had for him any of the intimidating glamour of Lucille, so they could fall back now, almost without thinking, or so it seemed, into little unselfconscious habits, like this one with the peanuts.
The story ended, he laughed and she looked up and said, ‘Eat your peanut.’ He had been sitting with it in his hand.
Food had an almost mystical importance to him; any food, even a crust of bread. He hoarded things, even the most useless scraps and leftovers, but knew how odd it was and hid it.
He looked now at the peanut he was holding. Very slowly, he put it in his mouth and began to chew.
All through Meggsie’s long Sunday dinner he did not look once at Lucille. In the front room afterwards he lounged, hands in pockets, in the window and watched her at play with the child.
There were just the three of them in the room. Ellie was on the phone in the hall. He could hear her laughing. The others had gone upstairs to rest. Lucille did not like being alone with him, he knew that, but was unwilling to make an issue of it.
It was a typical summer afternoon in Sydney, muggy, the sky heavy with a threat of storms. He had longed, up there, for the peculiar drowsiness of these long Sunday afternoons, with the luxury they offered of infinite time before afternoon tea, to trail across the golf links and down through the sticky paspalum to Hen and Chicken Bay, then supper, and afterwards, in the dark, their Sunday games. Now here it was.
Lucille had a pile of building-blocks. She would build them up in a pyramid, and the child, with a laugh, would punch out with his little fist and send them down. The same game over and over.
They had not spoken, but her eyes, even as she occupied herself with the child, kept touching him. He could feel it. He smiled to himself and began, very lightly, to whistle.
Lucille was disturbed. They had got through dinner well enough, but she saw that he had accepted nothing. She could feel the little pressure he was exerting on her to make a scene. She could not allow that.
It wasn’t true that she had no feeling for what he had been through. But he was too full of his own experience to give any weight to hers, that’s what she saw, and it angered her. He really did believe that only he had been touched. It was a way of telling himself that, unless he wanted it, nothing need be changed between them. That’s what she was up against. But she didn’t want a scene.
He went on whistling, very low and tunelessly. He was keeping his eyes peeled. She was pretending to be absorbed with the child, but that was a bluff; the real game, and she knew it, was with him. ‘So,’ he told himself, ‘I’ve won that round.’
But the advantage was a weak one. She was weaving around herself and the child a circle of magical containment, and kept looking up now to see if he saw this and understood what it meant.
She was a mother. That is, she had become a woman – guaranteed. But there was no guarantee that what he had been through had made him a man. It was a
way of putting herself out of reach. By treating him as if he were still a boy – the same one who had gone away.
He was hurt by the unfairness of this. It seemed to him he had earned the right to be treated as a man, but could not demand it. So he was caught all ways.
In this game they were now engaged in he was, for all his swagger, inexperienced. He knew that. But what else could he be? He had lost five years. The unfairness of it choked him, but he kept whistling.
She saw the truculence in him. She knew what it was, too. He was telling himself how hard life had been on him, urging them both towards a scene. She sighed. Then suddenly she saw their situation from outside all this, in the long view, and what she had to tell him was very clear. It’s silly, all this. Our being so cross with one another. Don’t you see, your unhappiness doesn’t depend on me. But neither does your happiness. Don’t you see?
She got to her feet and stood with her hands at her side looking at him.
He stopped whistling, his hands still in his pockets. He could not tell for a moment what she was up to, but did see that something had changed in her. The child felt it too. He was sitting on the floor with his face lifted, puzzled by her having got up so suddenly and removed her attention from him.
She came closer. His mouth was a little open. Quickly she bent forward and kissed the corner of it. It was what he had exerted all his powers to make her do; but now, when her lips touched his, his willing had nothing to do with it. He could claim no triumph and he felt none. She had deprived him of it by acting entirely unexpectedly and of her own free will; in a tender way, but one that dismissed the possibility of all passion between them.
