The Great World

by David Malouf

  He had, for quite a while, been buying up shares in a margarine company owned by one of their rivals. He wanted to make a bid now for the whole show. Of course they would have to sell one or two things. He laid them out for her. It didn’t look like much: an egg cup with a rabbit on it and the scooped egg turned upside down to fool someone that it was whole, two slices of dry toast, a honey pot in the shape of a hive, with a chipped bee on the lid.

  Loans? Yes, a few thousand. But interest rates were down and would go down further, according to his bank manager. Three hundred thousand, tops. Very little risk. Well, a little, you had to expect that, but not enough to spoil their sleep. It wouldn’t spoil his sleep, anyway.

  That’s how he talked.

  They went over it. The questions she asked were good ones, and he had the answers. In another moment he was on his feet, touching a napkin to his mouth with one hand and with the other reaching for his jacket.

  She sat a moment after he was gone, then put each of the pieces he had moved, the honey pot, the egg cup, the two bits of toast, back where they had been, and turned the egg over in the cup to show its ravaged side. Then she put them all back again as they had been when he left.

  In her own odd fashion she was getting used to the thing, coming to terms; as when, years back, she used to pick his socks up off the floor and sniff, then roll them in pairs. It was a form of thinking, all her own, but in their daily sessions it had become his way too; or perhaps it always had been, which is why they understood one another.

  An egg cup was just an egg cup, of course; but pick it up, move it, and you could get hold of that other more abstract thing it stood in for, which was not so easily graspable. You made it visible, got your hands on it in its momentary occurrence as egg cup, and a shift took place in your head. Once that happened you were dealing with the two things at once.

  The men he worked with, who were all very clever, ambitious fellows impressed by his energy and utterly loyal to him (though this did not mean that he trusted them with all he was thinking), assumed that his consultations with Ma were a charade, an act put on to reassure the old girl that she still had a hand in things. They would have smiled indulgently at all this business with egg cups and bits of toast. But they were wrong. Something in the presence of those domestic objects, something in Ma too, was necessary to the release in him not of the insights themselves but of his power to believe in them, and in his power to make them real.

  He had two ways of working. The public one, the one he showed and wanted people to see, was all hard edges, assured to the point of arrogance. His reputation was based on it, and if people assumed it was all there was, so much the better. It left his other nature unseen. He was not ashamed of it, but it would have worried him to reveal too clearly what he himself did not fully understand.

  This side of him was all dreamy vagueness, a lassitude in which he lost contact with the real world and where the sort of activity of which he was supposed to be a master seemed inconceivable to him. Yet it was in just this state, which if he had perceived it in another he might have despised, that he first got hold of the schemes, mere childish daydreams they were at this point, cloud-doodles, that he would knot out later and present to his more active self as proposals, then hard plans.

  He trusted this faculty in himself because it had so often proved itself; but he thought of it as a form of childishness, and everything that had to do with the child in him he feared.

  These moods in him belonged to the early morning, and would be on him when he woke. A continuation, he sometimes thought, of his sleep, they grew out of what he had been dreaming, though the dream itself eluded him.

  Careful not to wake Ellie, he would pad across the room and go downstairs barefoot in his pyjamas, feeling oddly soft and vulnerable. The day’s heat would be coming. As he wandered through the darkened house things took on a new shape, even the most familiar of them. They seemed released of their weight. Or maybe that too was part of his mood. He would sit quietly in a swing on the verandah, and as the trees on the lawn grew out of darkness his thoughts ordered themselves, became clear to him, and birds sang through them, the familiar sounds of this bird or that, very sane and comforting. This was how his thinking got done.

  But sometimes, after only a minute or two, he would go through the house to Meggsie’s kitchen.

  Meggsie, already up and dressed, would be sitting with her plump arms on the table, her hands round a heavy cup. Wordless at this hour, she would swing round to the stove where the teapot sat, haul it across and pour him a steaming cup, the pot so heavy, even in both her hands, that she could barely heft it. He would sit then, his shoulders hunched a little, his hair a mess, and drink.

  They were close. As if to make up for all the years when out of loyalty to her girls she had held out on him, she spoiled him these days as she had once spoiled Ellie and Lucille.

  She still teased him. He liked the abrasive form her affection took, and would have felt cheated if she had gone soft on him. But the teasing now was no more than the old form of a game through which they could, without embarrassment, explore their affection for one another.

  It was a different world out here.

  The cups, for instance. They were so thick you could barely get your mouth round them. The handles too.

  If it was winter the kitchen would be fuggy warm, the windows still dark. They would sit and watch them turn blue, and after a little she would get up and bring him a bowl of porridge and watch him eat.

  In summer she would already have propped the screen door open with a flat-iron, and magpies would be flopping about the dewy lawn. Little points of light on tips of grassblades would be catching the sun a moment before it quenched and dried them up.

  They barely spoke. If they did it was in monosyllables and half-finished sentences that to anyone else would have made no sense.

  They might have been a quite different pair: she the mother who had just roused him, heavy-headed and unwilling, for the early shift at a factory or in the pit; he a big, loose-shouldered, barefoot fellow, rather lazy and fond of drink, fond of the girls too, but still tied, with only a show of rebellion, to her apron strings.

  Often it was Greg who would come out at last to look for him. He would hang there in the doorway, his hair a bird’s nest, his stance very like his father’s, whom he imitated in everything. He was a timid little fellow, and Meggsie scared him. He wouldn’t come in.

  ‘Mummy says,’ he would say, ‘where are you?’

  6

  IT SURPRISED VIC, as the years went by, that, leaping right over what had been the grimmest period of his life, he so often found himself back in the year before his mother died and the time afterwards when he had lived with his father. He would go itchy under his clothes – the well-cut suit, the shirt Meggsie had starched – and would find himself standing high up on the dunes under a sky that was just on the turn between day and night, waiting for his body to release him into the future and send him hurtling out of himself into a new life. A kind of despair would come over him. The future he yearned for would not appear – and yet here he was right in the midst of it, assured and powerful beyond anything he could have dreamed.

  He would stand and watch the wall of sand-grains shift, his mouth agape but unable to cry out as in a vast wave it rose and covered him.

  He did not drink, or very little. He saw too clearly the connection between it and a violence he feared was in his nature, and which drink might let loose. It was his son who showed him this. One day, when Vic was especially angry with him, the child suddenly flinched and drew away, as if he had seen the shadow of Vic’s hand before he had raised it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ His voice was full of shock, but all the boy heard was anger. ‘I’m not going to hit you. You know that. Why are you crying? Nobody’s going to hurt you.’

  This scene, which Vic found so distressing, took place at just the time that Greg was old enough to be a presence in the house, a new focus of energy and
will, subtly changing all their lives by exerting pressures this way and that to make room for itself. He was very spoiled, and when he was challenged gave way to tears. His mother, his grandmother, even Meggsie, made excuses for him, and the more they did it, Vic thought, the more the boy whined and the more resourceful he became at getting his way.

  He seemed very much, as he developed, a smaller version of the father, with Vic’s stance and squareness of frame, his expressions too – everyone noticed it. But the father’s qualities had taken their own direction in him, so that what might have appeared as sturdy self-confidence had in the boy become a defensive petulance.

  He was sorry for the child, feeling he knew only too well what he was suffering. He was afraid for him. But the likeness was unnerving. It showed up in a naked, even shameless way – though only perhaps because the boy was too young as yet to have learned how to disguise it – all that he, Vic, had taken such pains to conceal.

  When Greg was still quite young, not yet seven, he developed the habit of lying. His lies were stupid ones that were bound to be exposed, which was, perhaps, just what he intended. They were lies whose only purpose was to win attention. But what was the point of that, Vic demanded, when all it showed was that he was a liar? In low voices, in bed, he and Ellie argued over it.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’re making too much of it. Children grow out of things.’

  He tried to talk to the boy man to man. He hated untruth. He found him playing with his Meccano set and made him stand still and listen, but his attention kept wandering and Vic grew angry and did not know how to go on. He was infuriated to see a little smile at the corner of the boy’s mouth, as if he was not fearful at all, despite his seeming so timid, and was getting just what he wanted out of him.

  By twelve he had found a kind of strength, but it was covert and indirect. On the one occasion when Vic did at last raise his fist the boy’s look was of such contempt and triumph, still with that flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and Vic saw himself so clearly reflected in it, that he was appalled.

  He tried to pass the thing off with a recognition of fault on both sides, but the boy knew he had won and was defiant. Vic was powerless.

  Everything in himself, in his inheritance too, that he had worked to push down and control, had come to independent existence in the boy and acted against him. That’s what he saw, and he saw it the more clearly because Greg was just the age that he had been in his last year with his father.

  He looked at the boy, saw his contemptuous smile and the likeness between them, and on the other side saw his father; and there was likeness there, too. This was what Ellie and the others could not know. He felt powerless, and at a time when power was just what came to him so easily, and publicly, elsewhere.

  7

  ON ONE OF his usual Thursdays, a bright winter day when there was a little chill to the air but the whole of George Street, all the way to the harbour, was bathed in clear soft sunlight, Digger was just about to cross at the Market Street lights when a woman spoke to him. He recognised her immediately.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘It’s Digger, isn’t it.’

  They stood smiling at one another.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you.’

  He did not feel free to call her by her name; but whether it was the unexpectedness of being caught together like this at the lights, forced by something quite outside themselves to come to a halt, or the softness of the day, or simply the pleasure he always had at being briefly in town, among so many people, Digger felt a wave of light-headedness catch him up – as it had, he recalled, the last time they had spoken, as if whenever they came together they were immediately translated to a special place where his awkwardness left him and he was entirely at ease.

  They might have been stepping back here into a relationship that went back ages, in which all the usual difficulties had had their edges worn down through long acquaintance arid habit. There was no shyness between them.

  ‘I thought you lived – where is it? –’

  ‘Keen’s Crossing.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘I come up to town sometimes. Every Thursday in fact.’

  Their eyes met and he thought she might be wondering, in that case, why he had never taken up her invitation and got in touch. But she knew why.

  ‘I’ve been buying a few things,’ he told her, to explain the packages he was carrying. They were outside a hardware store where he liked to potter about for articles he couldn’t pick up so easily at home, the new products they had these days, the magic glues and power tools.

  ‘It’s Vic’s birthday Saturday,’ she told him as the lights changed and they stepped off the kerb. He did not know that. ‘I’m shopping. Why don’t you come with me, if you’re finished.’ They were on the other side now. ‘We can have morning tea. I won’t be long.’

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  Downstairs at Farmer’s Ellie looked at ties, holding one or two of them up to Digger’s shirt-front as she talked. They were wide ones, too colourful for him – for Vic too he would have thought, though no doubt she knew better than he did. When at last she had chosen one she bought two Island cotton shirts, then silk socks, then handkerchiefs.

  Digger hung back. It was a slow business and might have been boring, but it made the talk between them so easy, and there was for him so much novelty in it, that he stopped being impatient and found he was enjoying himself. By the time it was all done they had caught up on a good many facts that it might have taken them much longer to uncover if they had not been continually on the move, and if the gaps between one question and the next had not been filled, for him, with the distractions of the store itself, the banks of lights in the ceiling, the escalators, so many women, some of them with children, some with a husband in tow, all happily spending, and turning things over on the open counters while they waited for their parcels to be wrapped; all of which he took in – the dummies too, looking so perfect with their real hair and eyelashes and doll-like eyes – while Ellie was engaged with one of the sales ladies or going through the drawers of hand-sewn handkerchiefs. At last they went upstairs into a big room overlooking the street, found a table away from the mothers and children, and ordered tea. They could relax now. A silence fell and they were forced to look at one another; but they could face that because they had already, in their half-hour of movement and talk, got so far with one another.

  Ellie looked at him in a candid, clear-eyed way that sought to see, Digger thought, what there might be beyond his shyness; something she had glimpsed, and been looking for too, he thought now, when she held up to his open shirt-collar one of the expensive ties.

  She looked at his hands and he saw her register something – that he worked with them? At his eyes again – What did she see there? (He found he did not mind her scrutiny.) It would be nothing of what really mattered to him. So when he looked at her, and saw the way her hair curled in just at shoulder level, the neatness of her brows, the colour on her lips, he took it for granted that what mattered most to her was also invisible, and would remain so unless she found the words to tell him of it.

  She surprised him by speaking almost immediately of her father.

  ‘I remember that poem he read,’ Digger told her, ‘at your wedding. “The precarious gift alive in our hands again, the mixed blessing”.’ He did not say, though she might have guessed it from the quality of his voice, that the lines meant something special to him.

  ‘But fancy you remembering it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I know the whole thing off by heart,’ he told her. He didn’t mean to show off, and blushed in case she suspected him of it.

  ‘The whole poem?’

  ‘It’s a trick,’ he said, sorry he had ever let on. ‘It’s nothing.’

  She told him of the work she did. Her father had published two books in the past five years, one a book of poems – Digger could find the Wedding Ode there, if he looked – the other a colle
ction of essays. In the small world of writers, reviewers, university lecturers and other people who cared for these things, he had begun to be well known, but it was a very small world of course; most people didn’t even know it existed. She did his secretarial work for him. That, together with the house and her little boy, was enough to keep her going. The next time they met she would bring copies of the books, now that she knew he was a reader.

  Digger said nothing, but did observe her assumption that this meeting was not to be their last. He would not have made the suggestion himself but was pleased that she had. They talked on after that, with no hurry to get everything said. There would be time for the rest of it next time.

  He told her about his mother, who had been gone for nearly a year now, but whose end, all her bravery and defiance gone down to despair, still haunted him. About Jenny too. At last about Iris. She told him about the little boy, Greg. Some time, she promised, when Vic was going to the Crossing, she would send him along.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’d better go. Next time, I promise, the books.’

  She was proud of what her father had done. He liked that and wondered what Vic made of it.

  It was odd that in all the things they had touched on, they had never once referred directly to him. Not deliberately – it wasn’t deliberate on his part, and he thought it wasn’t on hers either, but to preserve an area between them that was for them alone. If they had tried to include Vic, he would have swallowed up the whole of what they had to say to one another, especially in the beginning, when he might have seemed the only thing they had in common.

  She had a particular look, he thought, at moments when the natural thing to do might have been to say ‘Vic and I’ or ‘we’, or at moments when, though she did not directly speak of him, he was clearly in her mind. There would be a little change in her then, as if something had come to the surface in her that was secret, not to be spoken of, yet was on the very tip of her tongue. It was, he felt, the thing he had been wondering about that was most important to her. When it came up he could feel the heat of it, as in his case it had been there (had she felt it?) when he spoke the lines of her father’s poem, but especially just afterwards, when he had owned up to his trick of recall, which always evoked what was deepest in him.