The Great World

by David Malouf

  The meeting, when he thought back over it, was a joyful one. They repeated it over the years, sometimes weekly. At other times, depending on what else was happening in their lives, whole months would pass before they could arrange it.

  They would go for tram rides to Watson’s Bay, and walk round the path under the coral trees from Camp Cove to where the sea crashes against South Head. They took ferry trips across to Cremorne and Mosman, shopped, went to the art gallery or the city library, or sat in the gardens and watched the crowds. Each time her father published a new book she brought him one.

  He did not mention these meetings to Vic, though there was nothing secret about them. He thought it was Ellie’s right to tell. If she did, Vic gave no indication of it.

  Iris teased him, but only mildly, about his ‘lady friend’. She liked to pretend she was jealous. Was she? he wondered. Just a little? She had no need to be.

  8

  IT SEEMED TO Ellie, when she gave thought to the matter, that things could not have fallen out otherwise than they had; and this was strange, because when she looked back ten years and saw them all as they were then, she could find no sign of what was coming – none at all.

  A good deal of this had to do with Lucille.

  Lucille had been gone for seven years. Her marriage to Virge had broken up almost as soon as she joined him. She was married now to an older man with children of his own, a company lawyer in Denver, Colorado, where she too had a business, in real estate.

  These changes dismayed Ellie. They had been very close over the Virge business, which had appeared then to be a culmination and had turned out, for all its intensity and the significance they had put upon it, to be no more than an episode on the way to something else. She wrote to Lucille twice a month, and the letters that came back were racy and full of news, but she could no longer connect them to the girl she had grown up with.

  As little things they had fought like tigers. Ellie recalled occasions when they had struggled and torn at one another, red-faced and sweaty in their singlets and pants, both tearful with rage, pulling at one another’s hair and spitting.

  Meggsie’s way of handling this had been to close the door and leave them to it. When they came out, still hot and angry but also ashamed, she would say: ‘All right now, you little devils. Go an’ wash your faces and take off those filthy clothes’ (they had been rolling on the floor) ‘an’ I won’t tell yer Ma what you’ve been up to. Hurry on now. I’ve made some nice cold lemonade.’

  It had been hard for Ellie. Lucille was just that much older. She had already established her rights in the world, and made some things in the house so much her own that Ellie could not take them up without appearing, as she so often was, an imitator.

  She was a latecomer in people’s hearts too, they had to make way for her. Lucille didn’t mean to be imposing, she couldn’t help it. People noticed her and only later, Ellie felt, saw that she too was there, trailing along behind and wondering what it might be in her that was anything more than a reflection of her more brilliant sister.

  What puzzled her was that none of this appeared to make Lucille happy. Lucille was by nature restless, difficult, discontented. She was the easy one.

  Then, just about the time that Vic came to live with them, they had discovered how close they were, how even the animosity they felt, the way they jockeyed against one another, was a bond. It was the element Vic added that made them see this.

  He was a boy, and they were astonished, angered too, to observe how this simple fart impressed everyone – Pa, Ma, even Meggsie, though she didn’t quite give in to him.

  Ellie had been pleased at first to see Lucille displaced, but soon understood that if Lucille was harmed she was too.

  They teased him. That was easy. He was an awkward boy once you got past his cockiness. But he was a novelty, too; that’s what they couldn’t resist. Quite soon new affinities had begun to form. A secret one at first between Lucille and him, and once again Ellie found herself on the sidelines, a watcher of the little drama that had begun to unfold. Vic was at a loss in this, because although he and Lucille were the same age, he was still just a boy. So Vic and Ellie had ganged up on Lucille. Lucille thought she was so marvellous, so grown-up. Ellie still belonged, as he half did, to the world of animal spirits and fun.

  But in all that she had missed something after all, some other, more important strand; some perversity or quirk in Lucille that had made her fly in the face of all that appeared to have been laid up for her, perhaps for the very reason that it was so fixed and had come so easily. She got pregnant, married Virge. None of this, Ellie knew, had had her in view, yet her life too had been changed by it.

  The point on which it turned was that moment in the half-dark of the piano room, during what was to be the last of their games. Everything had been quite clear to her at that moment, and to Vic too. They saw in a flash all that had led up to it and all that would lead away from it. But Lucille, she thought, had seen it before them.

  So the household was hers. Ma, all her energies taken up with business, was quite happy to hand it over. There was no question of their moving into a place of their own. It was as if the house already contained the forms their life would need. She and Vic had their separate life in it but the household went on as it had always done.

  It was for this reason, there being so little visible change, that it took her so long to understand what he and Ma were doing.

  Their style of life did not change. She and Meggsie settled up the weekly accounts, and they remained pretty much what they had always been. They took the same amount of bread and milk, and these things cost the same whether you are worth thousands or just sixpence. You use the same number of towels, sleep in the same sheets.

  Vic talked a good deal at first of the sums they were dealing in. The figures doubled and trebled, you could grasp that. It was worth boasting about. It pointed to a personal agency you could identify, to foresight, boldness, imagination. But when the momentum increased, as if subject to some law of its own that was purely mathematical, the personal side of it disappeared. There was a scale to it now that was beyond the capacity of the mind to grasp. Keep adding noughts, and although the thing is still there, and in fact occupies more and more space, there develops in it a kind of vacuum, as if the noughts, the nothings, had predominance. The mind loses all trace of it.

  Ellie was amazed by him. So was Pa. They looked on in wonder at these powers he had, which like the enterprise itself appeared to double, treble, then move in progressions that were inhuman, magical; though this was only because their imagination could not contain him any more than they could the figures.

  Where did it come from, she wondered, this energy and animation that she experienced as such a physical thing? He was so full of it that you wondered how so much force could limit itself, when needed, to the merely commonplace business of manoeuvring a knife or getting peas on to a fork, or as she saw it, to the moments they shared when she would watch him pull a clean shirt over his head and walk round the room in his socks and suspenders, or sit, as he sometimes did, very quiet and abstracted with a towel in his hand, his hair still wet from the shower, on the edge of their bed.

  It pained her when she went out to hear him spoken of in a cruel and dismissive way by people who did not know him as she did, from within. He had enough success, she saw, to have become a figure who aroused hostility, envy, also fear, and often this was in men, and women too, to whom he was no more than a name. They had never laid eyes on him.

  When she met this impersonal version of him, even if it was only in people’s eyes across a dinner table or theatre foyer, she went cold. The certainty with which they were prepared to judge! All the more when she found it in print.

  But if he thought himself misunderstood, as she knew he did, he bore it stoically, hiding his hurt behind a show of arrogance. He hid things. The more she knew him, the more she saw that, and understood how extraordinary had been that glimpse of him in the dark of t
he piano room, how completely she had grasped then what it was in him that she would spend the rest of her life grappling with.

  He read the papers with a look on his face that even she could not fathom. It was pain. She could tell that, if others couldn’t. But he found a kind of satisfaction in it too. There was, just at the corner of his mouth, the play of a smile. Perhaps he felt flattered that they were making so much of him.

  To her these assaults were merely painful. How could she not feel them personally when she had given so much of herself to him, and taken into her custody so much that was vulnerable in him?

  She spoke to no one of all this, but it was there often enough, unspoken, between her and Pa, who, looking at things from his own distance, and from a very different centre of power, was as struck as she was by the proximity of so much energy. Some of the capacity Pa himself had discovered over these last years, or so she thought, came as an attempt to understand Vic’s kind of power and balance it.

  Pa too had surprised them. Who could have predicted that his peculiar nervousness, which had kept the whole household on edge and been so aimless and self-consuming, would find a focus at last in what she dealt with daily now, the individual words and lines that sat, when she typed them, so squarely on the page and spoke with so much authority and had such weight in the world?

  The one thing that alarmed her, and increasingly as the years went by, was Vic’s attitude to the boy. Nothing else caused her such heartbreak or led to so many quarrels between them.

  She was by nature optimistic. She believed people were reasonable. Given time, things solved themselves; all you had to do was be patient. But in this case things got worse, not better. By the time Greg was twelve a coldness had developed between Vic and the boy, a kind of contempt on both sides that she did not know how to deal with.

  He was a good-natured boy, full of affection and eager to please, perhaps too much so; but he could not please his father, and after a time, out of disappointment, did not want to, or pretended he didn’t.

  As for Vic, everything the boy did unsettled or irritated him, especially as he grew out of childishness and became a young man.

  The more she argued with him, the more unreasonable Vic grew, and at last she gave up. She had begun to fear the things that were said between them. So long as they were unspoken they had no force. Once they got into the world, and could be gone back to and brooded over, they were real.

  ‘Vic,’ she told him wearily, ‘they’re all like this, all these young people. He’s no different from the rest.’ She named Greg’s friends, some of whom were the sons and daughters of men Vic knew and thought well of. ‘What does it matter how he wears his hair?’

  But he clamped his mouth shut and would not answer. He was angry with her, she knew, because she took the boy’s part.

  ‘I would have hoped,’ he said at last, like a man repeating something he had already prepared, ‘that a son of mine would think for himself, not just go along with what others do.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, but gently, ‘a son of yours.’

  ‘He’s got no character. No character, no interests, no ambitions. What else can I think?’

  It was part of the vision he had of the hardness of things, based on his own life and of the qualities you needed not to go under. She could have no idea how afraid he was of every sort of weakness, how panicky he felt, and when he looked at his son, the vulnerable region that opened in him.

  Ellie did know this, and it scared her. But she saw something else, too: that things weren’t hard any more, they were easy, and he was one of the men who had made them so. Young people had time now to play. That wasn’t a crime, was it?

  The issues they fought over were small ones, the length of the boy’s hair, the clothes he wore: Ellie thought they were small. But it infuriated Vic to see his son, and all these worthless kids he ran around with, dressed in cast-offs. Old waistcoats and shirts without collars that his father might have worn. Grimy old-fashioned suits like the ones they had been given after the war, still with the sweat stains on them (they did not care about that), and all over both lapels the badges of a war they thought they were waging, gaudy passwords and proclamations of revolt. Sweat-stained felt Akubras (except for these clowns only Digger wore a hat these days), greasy ties and evening scarves, all picked up at street markets or at Tempe Tip, or off the racks of the St Vincent de Paul; the fashionable fancy dress of a misery they knew nothing about, and did not care about either, for all their mouthing of slogans and the rag-tag principles of a revolution they would never have to mount.

  He thought bitterly of a wet day when he was maybe nine years old and was taken with a gang of other children to a room at the School of Arts. They were the poorest kids of the district, guaranteed so by the headmaster; though you could have seen it for yourself from the reach-me-down clothes they wore, the sweaters that had to be pushed up at the elbows, the trousers drawn in six inches with a bit of string, the little girls’ frocks that came down past their knees.

  Herded into the dingy hall, they were presented with a row of smiling, sympathetic ladies and a pile of clothes that had been tipped out of bags onto the floor.

  Red-faced and ashamed, they were let loose among them like rag pickers. He had snatched up the first thing he saw, eager to do what they wanted, choose something and get away, and had stuffed what he got, without even looking to see how good it was, down the back of a seat on one of the bus shelters along the shore. The rough wool of it still prickled and rubbed his flesh, as if he had worn it next to his skin for years.

  Rags, cast-offs, the stink of other people’s sweat – all that was horrible to him. It made his flesh itch. Because for him, and for so many others too, it had been necessity. But to these kids it was just play-acting, in uniforms you could change the moment you were bored with them. Poverty to them was just another rag you could put on, if you were rich enough, to make yourself interesting, or different, or to see how it suited you.

  Greg lately had taken to going about without shoes; in a suit with a felt hat, and no shoes. He choked on that. He thought of the lines of men he had seen falling in in the drizzle, to whom the lack of a pair of boots up there had meant death. He was not thinking of himself. He did not mean to refer back to his own suffering, though he felt it again, and with a sense of injustice and anger and weak self-pity that sickened him, but of what others had been through.

  It would have shamed him to speak of these things. That a man, even a boy, should not know them already, was incomprehensible to him.

  When he and Greg argued there was no common ground between them. Ellie felt helpless. What the boy shouted in his own defence was useless, she knew that and felt sorry for him, and Vic set his jaw and would not speak.

  9

  MEGGSIE, WHO WAS past seventy, sat down in a chair one day at her kitchen table and found she could not get up. Her legs had gone.

  She was very shocked, and frightened too, but did not cry out. She thought of doing so, but it seemed so foolish that when her mouth opened she promptly clamped it shut again and sat frowning, feeling a kind of darkness come over her. She had never felt anything like it. She had her moods, but this one came from outside her, like weather, leaving the windows full of clear sunshine but darkening her mind. She felt weak and increasingly helpless and afraid, but could not bring herself to break the habits of a lifetime and shout. When they found her at last it was because of the smell of burning.

  All the time she had sat there a custard had been boiling over on the stove, and she had not noticed it. The mess was awful. She kept apologising for it as they lifted her, and for the trouble she was giving them, and it was this more than anything else that upset Pa. She was the sort of woman, Meggsie, who never apologised.

  Her daughters were scattered. One lived outside Rockhampton up in Queensland, another out west. The third, Vera-me-youngest as Meggsie called her, and as she had always been known to them, was married to a lawyer on the North Shore. They phoned he
r now, and two hours later she drove up in a Mazda.

  Ma had known her as a girl and had found her very clever and offensive in those days. She was now a good-looking woman in her fifties, very tastefully dressed. Ma, feeling embarrassed at her own shabbiness, still thought of her as Vera-me-youngest, but she introduced herself as Mrs Moreton.

  She was cold at first. For several years now she had wanted Meggsie to give up working and come and live with her. Meggsie was torn but had decided she was too well settled to leave the Warrenders. Mrs Moreton believed they had influenced her, and she looked about now for something that would allow her to feel superior.

  She found it at last.

  The cars in the drive – there were three of them – were what you might have expected. But the house! The furniture, for example. She knew what these people were worth – who didn’t? – but there was no decent furniture in the place, not a thing you could look at. No antiques. Shoddy Thirties veneer, old-fashioned and ugly. They had made no improvements. She remembered coming here once a week, when she was sixteen or seventeen, to collect her pocket money and to be given a box of handkerchiefs or a pair of gloves by Mrs Warrender when her birthday came round. In those days she had thought the place unattainably grand. She was angry with herself for having been so naive. Her own house was a dozen times more impressive.

  They left her alone with Meggsie and did not hear what was said.

  She wanted Meggsie to go to hospital. Meggsie refused. She was happy where she was: they had a night nurse for her. Mrs Moreton was put out. She was grateful for what they were doing but felt snubbed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Meggsie told her.