The Great World

by David Malouf

  The two boys, despite what had happened, insisted on arguing through every meal, but in a way that was inappropriate and put them all on edge.

  Greg’s arguments, as even Ellie had to admit, were erratic and one-sided. He was idealistic, full of youthful passion and the assurance of being always in the right, but everything he had to say was second-hand, and for all its predictability was so garbled and incoherent as to be very nearly incomprehensible.

  The other one, Alex, who was twenty-four and already a graduate of Harvard, was a stiff fellow, equally one-eyed and insistent, but he hid it with an assumption of coolness that outraged Greg and made him more vehement than ever.

  Greg had had great hopes of this cousin of his. An American! In his naive and open-hearted way he had been eager to be impressed and to hear at first-hand all that was happening at the centre of things.

  He was bitterly disappointed. He hid it at first; Alex was a guest. Then, when he saw that he was being patronised, he adopted an air of open hostility, but in such a hurt and inarticulate and childish way that Vic found it hard to witness. Tonight he gave Ellie a helpless look and got away. He needed to distance himself.

  He went first to sit for a time with Ma, who had gone straight up after the funeral to lie down. She too found these mealtimes exasperating.

  He sat beside her bed in the darkened room and they talked a little. What they talked of was an occasion, years back, when Pa had played a practical joke, a particularly silly one, on a dinner guest, a very pompous fellow who was in line to be a judge. Ma began to laugh, then he did, and they both stopped, not in a guilty way, but thinking, if any stranger heard them, how difficult it would be to explain. When he left her and went downstairs he did something he would not have dreamed of doing a week before. He went to Pa’s study. Seating himself at the old-fashioned desk, which was carved in Renaissance style, he sat for a time in the dark watching the lightning flicker, then put his hand out and lit a lamp.

  The sense of irritation he had felt at the table was still with him. It was associated somehow with the odd shuddery flashes of the lightning. It made him tense and with no hope of release.

  It was the hostility between the two young men he focused on, their foolish tearing this way and that of a dead cat, but he was keeping it in the foreground, he knew, because there was something else that disturbed him more, and it was this he needed to think about.

  Lucille at forty-six was not at all the girl who had left them more than twenty years ago. He would hardly have known her. She was very brisk and businesslike, and preoccupied, as was only to be expected, with the family she had left back in the States. She took an interest in all there was to catch up on, but what she saw here fell short, he guessed, of some memory she had kept – of the place, of them – and when he looked at things through her eyes he saw it too.

  He had thought what he had done – all he had achieved – was so large a thing. Yet what he was chiefly aware of when they sat down to the table together was how little had happened, and how little, in the end, was changed. Pa was gone. They were older. There were these two boys now, slugging away at one another. But the only difference, he felt, was that something he had hung on to, a sense of sweet disillusionment that had to do with Lucille and all he had felt for her, was no longer sweet – and not bitter either – but had dulled and was very nearly gone.

  He had loved his disillusionment. It gave him such a sense of his own youth. He saw its going now as the beginning, the first approach, of middle age.

  And Pa?

  How long was it since they had spoken in a way that touched what was most important to them? They were always close. There was no lack of warmth between them. But they had had little to say to one another in these last years that was new. This shocked him, and all the more because suddenly, now that he was gone, it seemed to Vic that everything he knew about Pa was a puzzle to him. From the moment of their first meeting – and before that, too, the days when his father had been Pa’s batman and exacted the promise – everything, Pa’s playfulness, his glooms, the life he had had in his head, the poems he had written, was a mystery to him. But what really disturbed him was what he had seen at the funeral today: that there were people who had never even met Pa, who knew him better perhaps than he did. He had the panicky sense of having missed the man entirely, but the source of his panic was the ghostly image this gave him of himself.

  ‘What does it mean to be,’ he thought, ‘except to be known?’

  He had been delighted, as they all were, by Pa’s success, but had never got round to the actual books. He saw now that he ought to have done. He had missed something Pa had to say that others had attended to and he had not, something too that Pa might have meant him to hear. He reached out now and drew the four volumes from the shelf. Opening one, the last as it happened, he set himself to go through it from cover to cover. He read for nearly an hour.

  It was like a hard lesson at school. He had forgotten what it was to go over and over something and find that it would not go into your head, because there was some resistance in it, or in you, that would not give.

  He had come up against this unpleasant fact before, and each time had suppressed it. Looking now at what Pa had got down, he came upon things that were just beyond his apprehension, eluding him at the very moment of his reaching out for them; but they were things, and he knew this too, that were not strange to him. That was the unpleasant part. They did not belong to some other world at all but to the one he was in, and still he could not grasp them.

  What he felt in a quite physical way was the spinning of the earth under him at the very moment when he could also say to himself: ‘But the room is still.’ And then: ‘If the world is like this and I have never properly got hold of it, what have I got hold of?’

  He sat with the book open on the desk but had stopped reading. What the poems, which he had only vaguely understood, had set off in him was going on now of its own accord.

  It is a sobering thing, even when you are a father yourself and have some force in the world, to find, in the childish part of yourself that goes on existing despite the years, that there is no hand you can reach out for.

  Almost as soon as his parents died Pa had appeared. Since then it was Pa, for all his weakness, who had stood between him and the knowledge that he was alone in the world. For a time, when he was twenty, that knowledge had been forced on him, but it was premature, it did not last. As soon as he got back it lapsed in him, and once again he had moved back under Pa’s protection, relegating to him the father’s role, and was shielded. Now, for the first time, he felt orphaned.

  When Ellie saw a slit of light under the door she had the odd feeling that what she would see, when she opened it, was Pa. So she approached it very quietly, turned the knob, and paused, afraid to startle herself.

  He did not see her for a moment. He was seated with a pool of lamplight on the desk before him, his face half-dark. All round the shelves was the flicker of far-off lightning. He did not look up; he was not aware of her. In the moment before he turned, all that she knew of him was confirmed.

  12

  IT WAS FROM Ellie that Digger heard of the break with Greg. Vic would not have told him. In the early days he had been eager enough to talk about the boy. He always had news to tell of what a promising little fellow he was, shy, a bit clinging maybe – that was having so many women in the house – but full of questions and his own odd bright little opinions on the world. Vic was young himself in those days. His pride in the boy ran away with him. He would pull himself up, suddenly embarrassed, and laugh it off. But things changed, and after a time he spoke of the boy only with bitterness. In these last years he had barely mentioned him. Digger, hearing of this latest, this last business, did not know what to say. Ellie did not complain but he saw the grief it caused her.

  ‘He does these things to himself. Why? Why is that? The very thing he doesn’t want to happen he does himself. It’s as if he wanted to save himself, you know, fr
om having it done to him. Is that it? You know him, Digger – is that what it is? So he does it himself. “I did it” – that’s what he’s saying to himself – “it wasn’t just done to me.” Then he grits his teeth in that terrible way he’s got. “Life is like this. We have to put up with it. That’s what character is for.” And he’s brought it all on himself.’

  They were having a cup of tea together in a timbered booth in a quiet little place in an arcade. It was, Digger thought, one of the few occasions when their talk together was openly of Vic, though a lot of what they had to say to one another had him in mind or as a shadow on the sidelines. It was painful, this.

  ‘You know him, Digger – you tell me,’ she said. She seemed desperate.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ Digger found himself saying, and he was sorry the moment after. It was true, it was what he felt at the moment, but it seemed like a betrayal. He saw from her look how surprised she was. He was surprised himself.

  *

  Vic could not have told Digger of the scene with Greg because there was nothing to tell. It was a quarrel like any other.

  Vic blamed Greg for the form their quarrels took. All he could do each time was mouth the slogans he had picked up from his friends, no word of it was personal or his own, and all Vic could say in reaction, he felt, was determined by this, and was equally impersonal and beside the point.

  They had never found any way of addressing one another in which the truth could be stated or their real feelings shown. So they fell back each time on what they had said before. Greg shouted his contempt for their whole way of life, all the things they stood for, which he rejected utterly and would have nothing to do with. Vic threw all this back at him, and he too shouted, only half believing in what came out. He knew too well the slipperiness of such terms as self-respect and discipline to use them as crudely as he did, but he did use them that way. He talked of the boy’s lack of character, his willingness to live off what he claimed to despise, the contempt even his own friends had for his weak-willed parroting of their every opinion and the way he ran after them, in everything he did imitating this or that one of them, with no will or character of his own. The anger in all this was real, but the arguments were the same ones they had been over on other occasions. There was no reason, no apparent reason, why this should be the last.

  What Greg had wanted to say was something quite different, but he could not bring himself, out of perversity, out of the sort of pride too that his father did not credit him with, to put it into words. It would only have increased his father’s scorn for him, he thought, if he had asked for love.

  Vic too had wanted to say something quite different. What he wanted to speak of were the things in his life that when he stopped and looked at them created panic in him.

  To have put this into words might have been a relief, but it would have exposed him, and he believed that in his son’s eyes he ought not to appear weak.

  Then, too, if he put his fear into words he might, in some magical way, give it a place in the world, where it would grow, increase its power and work against him. The desire to keep it inside, where he alone knew what it was and could control it, was enough to keep him silent, even at the risk, as he saw now, of his losing control of the very thing that lay at the heart of his panic – his vulnerability through Greg.

  So nothing new was said. They went over the same accusations and counter-accusations they always used and at the end of it nothing had been said. Only this time Greg took him at his word, or decided out of pride to stick to his own. He quit the house.

  One Thursday when Iris was in the front room ironing, with the television on ‘just for company’, there was a ring at the door. It was after nine, too late for neighbours to be calling.

  Digger, reading in the sleep-out, looked up with his glasses on his nose. He saw Iris step out into the hallway; then a moment later she was at the entrance to the sleep-out with Vic. Her eyebrows were raised. It was a look he knew well.

  Digger too was surprised. He thought there must be some sort of trouble. But Vic had no explanation to offer. He appeared to be in high spirits, he was a little drunk in fact, and had three bottles of Cooper’s Ale with him. When Iris took them, and with another little look in Digger’s direction went off to fetch glasses, he stepped into the sleep-out as if dropping in on them like this were the most natural thing in the world. Digger found it took a little getting used to.

  He had forgotten till now that when Vic first appeared at the Crossing, and Jenny had come up and pointed to him mooching about there under the she-oaks, he had felt the same little sense of intrusion.

  It had faded in time. Vic had come to be as much a part of his life at the Crossing as anything else. Only now did the echo of it come back. Why, after all this time, had he taken it upon himself to break in on them?

  But if Vic recognised a coolness on Digger’s part he gave no sign of it. When Iris, pleading the excuse of her ironing, left them to it, believing there must be something special he had come for, he cast a glance around the sleep-out and said, ‘This is nice. All these books yours?’

  ‘No,’ Digger said, and folded his glasses, ‘not all of ’em.’ And then, because he still felt irritated, he said, ‘Most of them were Mac’s.’

  Was it the first time Mac’s name had come up between them? Digger could not be certain. Other names came up from time to time. It would have been unusual if they had avoided that one. But they had, of course.

  There was a little beat of silence. Outside in the loquat tree Digger could hear a shuffling. Possums. They had possums that sometimes came right into the house and would take a bite out of some piece of fruit in the bowl on the kitchen table, leaving paw marks all over the floor.

  Digger was sorry now that he had said anything. He had done it in a moment of spite. He watched Vic take a book from the shelf, open it and look at the flyleaf as if he needed to see the name there: as proof. Or perhaps it was to feel another twist of the knife. But it wasn’t Mac’s name he would find. Hardly one of these books had Mac’s name in it. Other names, yes, and Digger, being Digger, could have reeled off each one of them. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, for instance, which was the book he happened to be re-reading, had belonged to Janet Dawkins, Year Twelve, at Randwick Girls’ High School in 1936. Mac had picked it up at Tyrrell’s. He could have gone on to list dozens, even hundreds, more.

  What Vic had in his hand was a tooled leather edition of Tennyson. The flyleaf, Digger knew, would read:

  To Mr John Darnell

  from

  B. J. Checkley

  10th May, 1889

  all in sepia copperplate, and underneath it:

  Kind hearts are more than Coronets

  And simple faith than Norman blood.

  He watched Vic read it in a sober way, then close the book and put it back.

  He looked around the room, frowning a little. Perhaps he felt the oppressiveness of so many volumes set so close on the shelves, or was wondering how many he would have to open before he came to one (he might find one, an old school algebra maybe) with I. R. McAlister in it.

  Outside in the front room, he settled on the arm of a lounge chair, one leg thrown easily across the other, a little subdued at first but quickly recovering his spirits. Iris turned off the television, and offered to put her ironing aside as well, but he insisted he didn’t mind, in fact he liked it. So with some embarrassment, since she scarcely knew him, she went on damping down pillowslips, handkerchiefs, an apron, one of Digger’s shirts, and the smell of heat and damp filled the room.

  She was wary of him, he was out to charm her, and she kept shooting little sideways glances at Digger to see if he had noticed it. But she relaxed at last and began to enjoy herself. He was full of light notes and odd, old-fashioned sayings that surprised her. Nothing she knew of him from Digger had suggested this. Digger himself was surprised. There was no sign now of that moment on the sleep-out, or of any of that side of him; and Digger, who had little to sa
y, went even quieter.

  What he was doing, Digger thought, was restoring a kind of order in himself, making up for that little reversal out there, when for a moment his image of himself had been disturbed, by winning her approval.

  Digger had never seen him playing up to a woman before. It was new to him, the way he paraded his repertoire of charms; this concentration of energy, of interest in him, that made a woman aware of herself. He was all attention, you could feel it. Digger, who knew him so well, was irritated that Iris should be so easily taken in.

  She finished her ironing. He leapt up and helped her fold the board. What he wanted her to do now was play.

  Lately she found playing difficult. She had arthritis, all the joints of her fingers were swollen; but she sat down, and it was ages, Digger thought, since he had seen her play so easily or with so much heart.

  She played Schubert, a great favourite of Digger’s, and once or twice as she played she looked aside at him and smiled; but she was playing, he saw, for Vic, and once again he felt a pang of jealousy. Which was foolish, he knew, but he couldn’t help it.

  Vic sat very silent with his head bowed, and Digger for some reason thought again of Mac, and again of how foolish it was of him to feel hurt, or to feel anything in fact but what the music spoke of – union and peace. Remote, mysterious, yet so full of quiet optimism, it took you right to the heart of things.

  ‘Honestly, Digger,’ Iris said later, when she had got out of him what it was that had kept him so quiet. She was half smiling to herself. It did not displease her that he could be jealous. ‘All that palaver he goes on with – it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you know that? He’s a ladies’ man. Show him a woman and he can’t help flirting with her. Even an old dame like me. There’s no harm in it.’

  Digger was silent. ‘Well, it got my goat,’ he said at last, ‘him just inviting himself like that. He did it on his own account. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’