by David Malouf
They came to a T-junction. There was no traffic. Horses were being brought up in a long line; silvery shadows in the misty half-light, their hooves making a hollow sound on the bitumen. They might have been packhorses setting out across a continent. Charlie was reminded of a troop of soldiers—or was it Indians?—out of some black-and-white movie. Something unfamiliar anyway, not part of his world. Yet here it was, and routine to Eddie, who was grumping along at his side. Just another Sunday morning.
If I hadn't missed Cliff last night, and the girls, Charlie thought, I wouldn't know all this was here. How much else was there, he wondered, that he wouldn't have time now to discover?
He felt a little cloud of doubt, of depression, puff up in him. But just then the sun broke through, touching the grass on either side of the road, and with its sudden warmth came a strong earth smell, comfortingly dark, along with the rankness of the horses.
He dumped the bag. “I should get going,” he said.
Eddie, standing beside him at the fence, was absorbed now with what was happening out in the paddock.
“Yair, good,” he said in an absent voice. “See you round.”
He continued to stare out into the distance.
Charlie, standing for a moment, felt the pull of Eddie's absorption. In a world. In work. There was so much liveliness in the way the horses pranced about, proud and full of themselves and their power, the air blowing white from their nostrils, light rippling on their coats. When he turned and walked back briskly to where the CZ was parked, he felt in himself some of the energy they moved with, the touch of coming warmth in the air, the beginning excitement of realising that this was it, it had arrived. The day.
At home he showered, got his few things together.
He was very much aware, in a sentimental way, that these would be his last moments, for a while at least, in this room.
It had been his for the whole of his life. Its view, into the branches of an old liquidambar, was one of the first he could recall, the luminous green of star-shaped leaves in the early-morning light that went gold then rusted at the end of May, then crisped and yielded to a faint line of hills; bluish, but sometimes with the red of the sun behind them, and a flash as it was sucked down and disappeared behind their blackness.
He stood now looking out over the sill. There was just an instant when it struck him—repeating an episode from a conventional Boy's Own story—that he could still climb over the sill, grab one of those branches, swing to the ground ten feet below and be away. But where to? To Josie and the limbo, the dangling interim, of a series of safe houses?
He turned back into the room. He had slept here virtually every night of his life for almost twenty years. Seven full years that would make in all, of being laid out here in a state of suspension, colouring its darkness with his dreams. Its walls bore the record, meagre as it might be, of the dedications and brief enthusiasms of his passage—it too seemed brief—from childhood to wherever he had arrived at now of imperfect manhood. When he closed the door on it, it would remain here, complete to a point, while four thousand miles away the same body that had trusted itself each night to unconsciousness, and done its daily push-ups here on the polished floor, and sat at the desk sweating over the binomial theorem and making its way through Sons and Lovers and the Iliad and War and Peace, would be putting itself through a new set of experiences, as yet unimaginable, which it might or might not at last get back from.
He hung the greatcoat in the wardrobe—the period of that particular uniform was over—and closed the door, then stood and examined himself, hair still wet from the shower, in the mirror.
He had expected these last weeks to resolve in some way the puzzle of what he was—they had not. To provide something, caught from others, that he could take away and hang on to, refer back to, measure himself against.
He opened the door of the wardrobe and looked again at the greatcoat on its hanger, bulky and familiar. He buried his nose in it. The odour of mothballs had faded over the weeks. There was another smell now, not quite familiar. Was thathim?
Once more he closed the wardrobe door and, avoiding his image, sat for a moment, hands placed lightly on his knees, very quiet and still, on the edge of his bed, the way the characters do in a Russian novel before a journey Then went out to where his aunt, in her dressing gown, was just coming from the bathroom.
She kissed him, laying her hand very gently to his cheek. It was so unusual, the touch of her fingers added to the regular, rather formal kiss, that it came to him with a little start of reality, which those last moments in his room had not quite produced, that he was actually going.
They were quiet at breakfast, though no more than usual. His grandfather complained, which was unusual, of a neighbour's dog, which had kept him awake half the night, he insisted, with its barking—growing, as he went on, more and more aggrieved, then angry.
What Charlie saw, his aunt too, was that he really was angry, though not with the neighbour. And not with me either, Charlie said to himself, but with the fact that I am going. Maybe even with the war. But nothing of this—the war, his going or not going—had ever been discussed between them, and he wondered why. He had simply taken it for granted that if his number came up he would go, and that his grandfather and aunt, however they might fear for his safety and miss him, would expect him to, because it was the strong thing to do. Wasn't that what they had always been looking for in him? A sign that the moral weakness, or whatever it was that had made his father run, and had then brought him back again destroyed by his own hand, had passed him over. Now, when they shook hands on the veranda step and he felt himself briefly hugged and pushed away, his grandfather's anger, or sorrow, suggested something shocking: that in his own unaccustomed weakness, the old man might be willing to accept even a lack of strength in this last of his line if he could be kept home and safe from harm.
“Look after yourself, boy,” was what he said.
His aunt kissed him. Again her fingertips. Soft on his cheek.
And that, on a quiet Sunday morning in August 1968, was how Charlie Dowd went to a war.
Three years later he was back, almost unscathed and nearly two stone heavier, an ex-sergeant, released to take up civilian life where he had left off—after a period of adjustment, of course.
The house he had left was much changed. His grandfather had died the previous year and the first thing his aunt did was suggest that he move into his grandfather's room, which had been cleared and cleaned and was the best room in the house.
He declined. Though his own room now felt small, he preferred, by keeping it, to make the point that his stay was to be temporary. Till he got on his feet, worked out what he wanted to do with himself.
His aunt did not press him. Her enquiries into his plans were tactful and oblique. So were her attempts, which amused him—he thought of Cliff—to set him up with girls. Nice ones.
In fact, he had no need of help in this direction but for the moment was taking things, in this area as in all others, slowly.
The world he had come back to struck him as being very different from the one he had known. More relaxed in some ways, more strenuous in others, and his aunt's life was a measure of it.
It wasn't simply that she no longer had her father to care for, his exacting standards to meet. She no longer had him—and only now did he understand how much of her life had been devoted to fulfilling what his mother, by leaving, had passed to her in the way of duty, and of affection too. He was shocked now at what it might have cost her, and abashed at how little of this he had appreciated or shown gratitude for, perhaps because she made so little of it herself. He had scarcely considered her then in separation either from his grandfather or himself. He saw, now that things were more equal between them, that she was a woman with her own interests, and was in her own way interesting. She had a sharp eye when it came to the affairs of the town and her various friends; a sharp tongue too, now that her father was not here to monitor it. They got on well to
gether. She still worried about him but did not fuss.
She had had the kitchen, which had been an old-fashioned place of leadlight cupboards and scrubbed-wood draining boards, fitted out with a good deal of Laminex and stainless steel. A skylight filled the whole space with the kind of light that would once have been considered dangerous, in the way of fading curtains or exposing the lurking places of ineradicable grime.
There were no curtains now, and little fear of grime. The archway into the dining room had been removed and the new space furnished with pieces of a spare “modern” design—bold fabrics, pale wood. Hard, he thought, for the old presences to find harbour in a world that was so shadowless and bright.
He wondered where his aunt had found in herself such a capacity for lightness. Had it always been there, waiting to establish itself the moment the old man was gone? A refutation, long unspoken, of his world of solid truths?
Charlie was surprised, but he enjoyed surprise. It was one of the small surprises his own nature had yielded him in recent years.
She was made wary, he saw, by his experiences. Since he offered no account of them and gave no outward sign of how they had touched him, she had had to make them up out of horrors she had read about in the papers or seen on TV. That he did not need to talk about what he had seen, and did not bring to breakfast with him the smell of napalm or of the night sweats that must accompany his dreams, was not in itself a reassurance. Neither was his lack of visible wounds. His father too had come home without wounds.
What worried her was what might be there in his head. Deep-hidden, unspoken. In the meantime they took refuge, both, since he proved to be such an obedient pupil of her rules, in good-humoured banter and routine.
But neither of them any longer believed in rules. That's what he saw. The new rule was to pretend they did, while knowing perfectly well, on each side, that the other did not.
But perhaps, he thought, she never had. Maybe that was another of the ways in which, over the years, he had misread her.
He developed his own routine: got up late, did odd jobs around the yard that he found oddly satisfying—putting new palings into the back fence, climbing up on to the roof to replace a length of guttering. He read, sat with his hands in his lap idling an hour away on the new couch in front of the TV. Took long walks along the roads that led out of town.
Walking, he found, set just the right pace for the sort of thinking he had to do; and watching people at their ordinary occupations, in a world where the commonest source of disruption was the weather, comforted him—he didn't mind the tedium of it.
People talked about the weather in a way he had never noticed till now. As if they looked to the sky for relief. For a mild irruption into their lives of chance or change that might at one time have come from the gods, but in the clear assurance now that the worst it could produce was a fistful of hail.
“Looks like it might rain,” men who stood behind a fence with a pair of shears would call across to him—entire strangers.
It was a way of invoking a link between them within a dispensation so easily admissible on both sides, and so large and all-embracing, that no answer was required.
It was in such moments that he felt closest to being home.
Sometimes, on one of his walks, he dropped in at the pub and, feeling like an old-timer himself these days, settled in his old place by the window with a beer.
He recognised one or two of the old fellows sitting alone in the sunlight, but had changed too much for them to see in him the thin-shouldered youth in the air force greatcoat who had once sat scribbling in his notebook at the sill.
He no longer wore the greatcoat or had a notebook with him, and in a general doing-over in which the whole place had been subjected to progress, the sill was no longer chocolate-coloured but a spanking white.
But when he looked across, the boy was still there, his wallet and the little machine for producing roll-your-owns, which he had long since abandoned, on the sill before him. Urgently, solemnly setting down his thoughts. Looking up. Biting the end of his pen. Writing again. Thoughts. Endless lists. Impossible now to get back into that boy's head.
Tenderly curious, he had gone in search of the notebook, but had hidden it so well from others who might stumble across it in his absence that he could not find it himself.
Occasionally a phrase came back to him, or an item from one of the lists, and he blushed, then found himself feeling oddly, indulgently protective of his former self. He had been so full of the easy belief that his thoughts, and the careful formulation of them, mattered. Perhaps it was better that the notebook was lost.
But the boy continued to haunt him. There in silhouette against the light of the window, or as a slighter sharer of his own more solid flesh. Which he shared now with other presences as well. Ghosts he carried in him who saw things in their own way.
What they felt, what they had seen, formed a glow around his own feelings that on occasion confused him and was the chief reason why he kept clear of old friends. He did not know how to present himself to them or what he had to present. In the other lives that now haunted him he had lived a different history, lighter or darker than the one he had brought home and could show.
As for the boy at the sill, the tenderness he felt for him was of a brotherly kind; blood-closeness, but with an element, as well, of distance.
It wasn't a question of innocence, or the loss of innocence—he found these days he could no longer talk in such terms, and people who did made him angry.
There were fellows he had come across “up there” who were, in a childlike way, unknowing; others who, again like children, seemed unmarked by the evil they had come up against. The first was just that—childishness. The second, maybe, a form of grace. We lose whatever innocence we might have laid claim to the moment we are drawn into that tangle of action and interaction, of gesture and consequence, where the least motion on our part, even the drawing of a breath, may so change things that another, close by or far off, will be nudged just far enough out of the clear line of his life as to be permanently impaired.
That, so Charlie would have written now, if he still had his notebook and thought it worth the effort of setting down, was the price of living.
To that extent, no man is innocent. As for the loss of innocence, how could you lose what you'd never had? He had never claimed to be innocent. Only alive.
Ah, thoughts. Thoughts.
He saw himself as a man who, whole as he might look, in that he had no wound to show, had come back just the same with a limb missing, a phantom limb that continued to putrify
Or with fragments of shrapnel in his flesh that sent metal detectors into electronic fits, whether others had ears for it or not.
Or bearing on his breath spores from the soil of a disorderly and darkly divided country where for two whole years he had taken the infected air into his lungs, so that that too—along with the dulled habit of boredom, the unnatural excitements and dreams he had been dragged through, the brutal descents into degradation and a blundering despair without hope of renovation—had come home with him, in selves who had their own other and haunting lives to live.
It scared him at times that one of these ghostly selves who now sheltered in him might speak up and send a conversation skidding in some new and terrible direction. He would have to deal then with a look on the face of whatever companion he had found of startled incomprehension, as if with no warning a mask had slipped.
So he watched himself. Watched them. These others who had set up in him, who insisted at times on drawing attention to themselves and had motives that were not his own.
The need to be heard was theirs, not his. He had no wish to discuss what he had been witness to, and there was no way of doing it anyway. So he did not mention that he had been to the war.
Some people knew it already. They did not mention it either. Embarrassed for him, and for themselves, in case it led to argument. There was a lot of argument on the subject, but only, up here
, on the TV, which had smuggled itself now into every household all up and down the country, where it dominated the front room like a child overexcited by the power to say at last the once unsayable.
Up here an older decorum prevailed. People had as little appetite as ever for open dispute.
He thought of Josie and wondered how deep she was now in her hostility to the war, and her disappointment with fellows, like him, who had been duped into going. But he wasn't sure of that—of having been duped. He had had no illusions. The experience had offered itself, that's all, and he had accepted. He did not disagree with the arguments he heard against the war, and his aunt, he suspected, was fiercely opposed to it, though she did not say so. He picked this up from the line of her profile as they sat watching the news together. Her sharp little glances to see how he was taking it. She was afraid of offering some insult to what he “been through.”
He recognised this and was touched. Her fierceness, he knew, was on his behalf. She meant to protect him. But it was too late for that.
What affronted him was not the opinions he heard but the gap between their glib abstractions and what he himself had come across in the way of fact: the heaviness of a soaked pack and mud-caked army boots; grime, dank sweat, the death smell of bloated corpses; the incessant tense preoccupation with keeping all the parts of a body that was suddenly too large, and could not effectively be hidden, clear of the random brute agents of destruction that kept hurtling in from every direction; death-dealing but indifferent. For whom you, warm and intelligently alive as you might be, were no more than another object in their path, though the roar with which they came at you was specific and the collision, when it came, so wet and personal.
On the few occasions when people did argue he turned his back. He had only his experience—combustive actualities—to offer, and they weren't an argument. He screwed his mouth shut and sat sullen over his beer.
The wall of silence he felt between himself and others, which he refused to breach, was noise of a kind they could not even begin to conceive: so dense with the scream of metal and the lower but distinguishable screams of men, with the splash of heavy objects through oil-slicked swamp, and night calls out there in the stilled other world of nature that might be birds but might also be the location signals of a waiting enemy, and with heartbeats and the thump-thump of rotor blades, that not even the music he liked to listen to, and which his aunt thought unnecessarily loud, could block it out.
