by David Malouf
She thought sometimes that she would like it if Tommy was here; Jake, her second son, was mid-Atlantic somewhere on someone's yacht. There were afternoons when she found herself gazing out of her window and wishing she could just call down to the terrace, where, his mobile on the glass-topped table within easy reach, Tommy would be lazing on a daybed. She would get him to come up then and put on one of the Roy Orbison albums she liked to listen to only when he was here. Or wishing that she would look up, having caught a scent, and find him there in the doorway of her room, filling its space with his hungry presence.
What she meant was, she would like it for about five minutes. Any longer and she would discover all over again the things about this favourite child that exasperated and enraged her.
The way he stalked about, clutching his mobile like a small instrument of torture. Waiting pathetically for someone to call.
And when he gave in at last, and himself did the calling, the way he pursed his lips at the thing, as if it was a mouth; arguing with his ex-wife and sounding so mild and reasonable, or sweet-talking some girl he'd picked up on the train. Then, the moment he hung up, going glowery and dark again, casting about, like the bewildered four-year-old she saw so clearly at times in the big unhappy man, for some mischief he could get up to that would make someone pay.
Somebody, it didn't matter who.
She had been paying for more than thirty years.
Well, she could do without that just for the moment. What she needed, just for the moment, was solitude, and blessd, blessd routine.
Three days each week she went up to Siena for her chemo. They taped a plastic bubble like a third breast to the soft flesh below her shoulder and it fed mineral light into her at a slow run. The nausea it left her with was like space sickness. As if they were minerals from another planet, changing her slowly into a space creature who would be free at last of the ills of earth.
Well, she knew what that was code for!
Between visits she wore a holster packed with a flattish canister that for twenty-four hours a day played with the weather of her body—its moods, her dreams; filling her mouth with the taste of metals straight off the periodic table, getting her ready for the thing itself—the taste of earth.
For Siena she had a driver from the village and a big old Audi. Soft-leathered, air-conditioned. She sat in magisterial coolness, closed off from the straw-coloured, treeless hills, the vine rows where the grapes, as yet, were like hard little peas, but swelling, swelling towards October.
At intervals along the highway, black girls in six-inch heels toting fake Gucci handbags paced up and down in the dust. Some of them in skintight leather miniskirts, others in gold Lurex pants tight at the ankle. In the middle of nowhere! With nothing in sight but oakwoods or a distant viaduct, they paced elegantly up and down beside the hurtling traffic, in a tide of ice-cream sticks, paper cups, dried acacia blossom.
She watched them from the closed-off sanctuary of the car, and sometimes, to pass the time, kept count. On long car journeys in her Queensland childhood, she and her brother had watched for white horses. The appearance in the timeless Tuscan landscape of opulent, overdressed black girls seemed no less marvellous.
They came from as far away as Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, these girls, and drove out here in taxis to wait for the long-distance lorry drivers. Their managers (or so she had heard) were women: big African mammas who were also witches and used old-country spells to keep them in fear of their lives, or their children's lives, but to be doubly sure held their passports—a modern touch. In bodies that seemed entirely their own, and giving no hint of being fearful or enslaved, they walked up and down as if the dirt under their heels were the paving stones of some fashionable piazza in Florence or Milan.
She watched them. Hard not to envy, whatever the facts, the grace and assurance they brought to this new version of pastoral.
Till one of the lorries, with a whine of its air brakes, came powerfully to a halt, and the driver—the god—stepped down.
Her own body was not her own. In some moment of ordinary distraction, while she was on her knees in the rose bed pulling up weeds, or waiting idly for the kettle to boil, her mind God knows where, her body had taken a wrong turning, gone haywire, and now did exactly as it pleased. It was like being in the hands of a loony housebreaker who did not have your interest at heart. Who had moods and notions of his own. Was savagely perverse, and curious to see how far he could push you. And was there at every moment, making his obscene, humiliating demands. To get away from him she read, or rather, reread. Chasing up old friends in the pages of her favourite books to see how she or they had changed over the years, or to rediscover, with a little shock of affection, the earlier self who at sixteen or thirty had first been touched by them.
Effi Briest, who was in favour of living, poor girl, but had no principles. Mrs. Copperfield, one of the two Serious Ladies, who had always wanted to go to pieces. Gratefully she went back to them. And found herself, towards midnight, with her book in her lap and her glasses at the end of her nose, listening impatiently for the familiar clap-clap of the filter boxes and the arrival of her intruder.
She knew now who he must be.
There were woods on the far side of the village. The men who worked there these days, cutting and stacking logs, came from Eastern Europe. Poles or Yugoslavs. They had rooms in the village and sat around playing cards outside the bar. She had seen them riding through the square on top of a truck piled with firewood, their muddy boots dangling. He would be one of those. She didn't need to know which one or to see him close. She liked the idea of his being a stranger in the further sense of his having other words in his head, when she looked down and saw him gazing out over the hills, for owl, fence, distance. Of there being nothing between them but his body, either in vigorous action down there in the pool or in dreamy repose; which he did not know was being watched, and in the long hour before he made his appearance, impatiently waited for.
He came every night, not always at the same hour. Sometimes earlier—a surprise!—mostly later. There would come the clatter of the filter boxes as he brought the pool to life, and with it the quickening of her heart, which laughed quietly as she took her book up again and pretended for a moment to go back to her reading. Then she would rise, draw her robe about her, and step out on to the terrace.
Sipping her coffee each morning she caught glimpses of the pool as it shimmered and flashed between the leaves, an electric, unnatural blue. Housemartins, in their furious hunger, would be swooping for insects that danced in swarms on its surface, taking the pool's reflected light in flushes on their under-bodies. The air, down there, as it heated, would be sharp with the scent of bay.
She might have gone down to lie for a little on one of the sunbeds. It was still cool at this hour and she would get down easily enough. But where would she find the strength to climb back again?
As they moved deeper into June, the afternoons grew fiery, she could not sleep. Elbows on the parapet of her terrace, sipping cold tea, her thoughts went to a young man, Justin Ferrier, who, fifteen years before, had come out from England to be her summer help in the garden.
The son of a business contact of Gianfranco's, he was the same age as Jake and just down from Eton. Hard-working, sociable, the perfect guest.
Unused to their southern habits, he had spent long afternoons, under the low bronze sky, at work on an old 350cc motorbike he had acquired from a mechanic in the next village and set up like an idol on the terrace below her window.
Sometimes, when it was too hot to sleep, she would lean over the parapet and chat to him while he squatted like a child in his open sandals and worked, or she simply rested there on her elbows and watched. Drawing back at times in dazzled embarrassment at the intensity with which, under his flop of sun-bleached hair, he devoted all his shining attention to the mucky business of laying out on sheets of yesterday's Repubblica all the dismantled parts of the god he worshipped: chain, gears, grease-slicke
d carburettor, screws.
He'd put his stamp on the summer—even Jake and Tommy felt that. Whenever they talked of it later it was “the year Justin was here.”
Because it would have seemed shameful to shout or call one another names in front of him, they had, for a whole two months, been on their best behaviour, playing just the sort of nice per bene family he believed them to be.
Her friend Jack Chippenham, Chipper, was with them and had immediately been smitten. He had made a big play for the boy—but in a jokey way, as if it was accepted, a part of that summer's special mood, that they should all be a little in love with him.
She and Chipper had grown up together. They had met at a birthday party in Toowoomba when they were still at school. Chipper, at sixteen, was already in possession of things—style, a humourous take on the world, and himself and others—that she had only begun to be aware of. “You saved my life,” she told him on that first occasion. Meaning that without him the party would have been a write-off. He had been doing it, in different ways, ever since.
Justin, like everyone Chipper set his sights on, was charmed, and was charming in return. He let Chipper drive him across to Monteriggione and Sinalunga to expensive meals, and to the summer discos all up and down the coast. There was nothing in it, of course, she knew that. But when Chipper's attentions began to be so obvious that even Gianfranco noticed, she took him aside and gave him a good talking to. After all, she was in loco parentis here. She actually said that: in loco parentis.
Chipper's response was to pretend astonishment. That she should turn out, in her old age, to be so moralistic. And humourless. It was the second charge that hurt.
And he was right. The boy enjoyed being made a fuss of, and why not? He knew just how to handle such things. There was no harm in it. But the next day, while they were having drinks before lunch, she suggested to Justin that he might like to bring his girlfriend Charlotte out, and for the rest of the summer Charlotte too worked in the garden, and they had a tent in the olive grove.
“Uh-huh,” Chipper had said. “Nice.” He might have been referring to the sip he had taken from the Bloody Mary she had just passed to him.
Maintaining his sense of humour right to the end.
One morning, to amuse the young people, as she thought of them, she raked out a dress she had kept from their Rome days twenty years before, a sleeveless low-waisted Yves Saint Laurent that came just to the knee, and which, when she tried it on, still miraculously fitted. After consulting the mirror in her room she had gone down to where they were sunbathing beside the pool—-Justin, Chipper, the girl—and was flattered that the young people, when they glanced up, did not at first recognise her.
Justin had had to take his sunglasses off, and she could tell that he was seeing her as if for the first time.
“Oh my, my,” Chipper had said, and Yes, she was saying to herself as she stood there transformed, here I am at last, this is the real me.
The dress, which was of dark green silk, fitted like a secret skin. The fashion of that particular year had been made for her. It had been her moment, her season. Which she had stepped back into as if it had never passed.
Well, it had of course. It was Chipper who got gallantly to his feet, took her hand and led her, while the others applauded, through her one celebratory twirl.
Poor Chipper! It was, after all, Chipper that this memory had been moving towards. He was dead. Six years ago in San Francisco.
“I'm not sorry,” he had written, just before the end, "to have wasted my time on such an agreeable planet.”
The last days of June came on. One night of intense moonlight, when the whole landscape, fields, vineyards, river meadows, the densely wooded surrounding hills, had the glow of midday in some other part of the universe, she realised that for several evenings now she had not heard what she thought of as the embodiment of so much silvery stillness, the bright little hammer-strokes and exuberant volleys of the nightingale. He had said “Enough” and was gone.
Standing behind her parapet, in the hard shadow of the terrace, she was even more aware of her swimmer, who had not. A small blessing, but one, she knew, that must also have its term. One night soon he would come to his feet at the end of a length and that would be that. All unknowing, she would wait the next night and he would not appear. And the next. Till she was used once again to getting through the midnight hours without him. But for the moment—maybe for the last time—he was here. The disturbance he made as he rocked the water, which was all tilted planes of moonlight and dark, set the filter boxes dancing and beating the air just as she had first heard it. Like the arrival of wings.
Back and forth he hurled himself. Effortless, the body its own affair. Weightless. As if there was no limit to the energy that powered it. As if the breath it drew on might have no end.
Elsewhere
WHEN DEBBIE LARCOMBEdied she had not been home to her family for nearly three years. Her father decided at once that he would go down to Sydney for the funeral, which was already arranged. There was no suggestion of her being brought back to Lithgow Her sister Helen couldn't go. She had the children. So Harry's son-in-law, Andy Mayo, would go with him. The two men worked together down the mine and were mates.
Andy was a steady fellow of thirty-three. He'd been to Sydney once, with a rugby team, when he was nineteen. The prospect of driving down and seeing something of the Big Smoke excited him, but he felt he should disguise the fact. After all it was a funeral. “Are you sure?” he asked Helen, who was kneeling at the bathtub bathing their youngest.
“It's only for the day,” she told him. “And Dad would like it. I'd be worried about him going down all on his own.”
She paused at her work and said for the third or fourth time, "It's so sudden! I can hardly believe it.”
Andy, stirred by a rush of tenderness, but also of tender sensuality, brought his fingertips to a strand of hair, damp with steam, that had stuck to the soft white of her neck. Responding, she leaned back for a moment into the firmness, against her nape, of his extended forefinger and thumb, which lightly stroked.
He'd barely known Debbie; in fact he'd met her only twice. She had already left home when he arrived on the scene. After training college at Bathurst she had taught in country towns all up and down the state and had ended up at Balmain, in Sydney. She was four years older than Helen.
The one occasion they'd spent any time together—he had sat up late with her on the night of her mother Dorothy's funeral—Andy had been impressed but had also felt uneasy. She was nothing like Helen, except a little in looks—same nose, same big hands. Keen that she should see him as more than the usual run of small-town fatheads and mug lairs she had known before she left, but unpractised, he was soon out of his depth. They'd gotten drunk together—she was quite a drinker—and he was the one, being unused to spirits, who had ended up fuzzy-headed.
She sat with her legs crossed and smoked non-stop. Her legs were rather plump, but the shoes she wore, which had thin straps across the instep, were very fashionable-looking. Expensive, Andy thought. Though in no way glamourous, she was a woman who took trouble with herself.
The impression he'd got was that she moved in a pretty fast crowd down there, and some of what he caught on to of what Balmain was, and the people she knew—poets and that—and the fact that she lived now with one poet, and had been the girlfriend earlier of another, excited him. He had had very little of that sort of excitement in his own life.
He'd been a football player, good but not good enough. At sixteen he'd gone down the mine. Married at twenty. That there was another life somewhere he had picked up from the magazines he saw and the talk, some of it rough, of fellows who got down to the city pretty regularly and had much to tell. In Debbie, he had, for an hour or so, felt the breath of something he had missed out on. Something extra, something more. Now she was dead.
At thirty-six, some woman's problem. An abortion he guessed, though Helen had done no more than raise a suspicion
and the old man of course knew nothing at all. So far as Harry knew, all Debbie had been was a high-school science teacher.
It hadn't struck Andy till now, but everything he'd heard of Debbie's doings had come from Helen and he wondered how much more she knew than she let on. Out of loyalty to Debbie no doubt—but also, he thought, to protect him from a side of herself that might be less surprised by Debbie's way of life, and less disapproving of it, than she pretended.
He felt, vaguely, that here too he had missed out. There was something more he hungered for, and occasionally pushed towards, that Helen would not admit. Because for all the twelve years they had passed in the closest intimacy, she did not want him to see in her the sort of woman who might recognise or allow it.
The drive down was uneventful. Harry was silent, but that wasn't unusual. They were often silent together.
All this, Andy thought, must be hard on him. He'd never asked himself how Harry felt about Debbie's being away. Proud of her, certainly, as the only one of them who had got enough of an education to make a new life for herself. Sad to see so little of her. Worried on occasion. Now this.
Andy followed these thoughts on Harry's behalf—he was fond of Harry—then followed his own.
Which sprang from the lightness he felt at having a day off like this in the middle of the week. The sunlight. The high white clouds set above open country. The freedom of being behind the wheel. The freedom too—he felt guilty to be thinking this way—of being off the hook, away from home and its constrictions. And along with all that, the exhilaration, the allure, of a faster and more crowded world “down there” that he would finally get to see and feel the proximity of.
He was surprised at himself. Here he was, a grown man, twelve years married, two kids, seated side by side with his father-in-law, both of them in suits on the way to a funeral, and he might have been seventeen, a kid again, he was so full of expectation at what the day might offer. In some secret place where the life in him was most immediately physical, he still clung to a vision of himself that for a time back there had seemed golden and inextinguishable. He thought he had dealt with it, outgrown it, let it go, and without too much disappointment replaced its bouts of extravagant yearning with the reality of small prospects, work, the life he and Helen had made together. And now this.
