The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  “Nature,” he told her, "is different.”

  Miranda held her tongue but made a face at the twins, who each raised an eyebrow and looked away.

  It was Cassie, too young for the codes that were in operation here, who in all innocence had demanded, "But what about us? Aren't we nature?”

  “Of course you are, darling,” Maggie told her. “What Daddy means is, he knows what distracts him. Little people stomping. Shouting in the hallway or on the stairs. You know that.”

  They all did, and accepted it for the most part without question. However they might whisper among themselves, and complain against their father's moods, his grouchiness, his angry descents and tyrannies, they acknowledged that he was himself a force of nature, a lightning rod for energies, for phenomena that people were impressed by and wrote about in the newspaper in terms that Miranda tended to mock— but only the terms, not the fact. She would read these pieces aloud at the breakfast table, while Sam, his face screwed up with distaste and embarrassment, shook his head—disguising, he hoped, a certain measure of delight—and Maggie said flatly, "Well, I didn't understand a word of that. But what would I know? I only sang the thing.”

  “Impeccably,” Miranda quoted.

  Now it was her mother's turn to make a face.

  Their father's alternation of moods constituted the weather of their lives, which, like the weather itself, it was useless to quarrel with or resist.

  In his phases of exuberant good humour he could be wilder and noisier than any of them. Then there were what their mother called “dumps,” whole days it might be when he was like a ghost at the table and even Cassie could not get a good word out of him, and all you heard at mealtimes, since no one else dared speak either, was the clink of knives and spoons against crockery and the grinding of jaws.

  He lived in two worlds, their father—with, so far as they could see, no traffic between them.

  When it suited him he was like a boy who had never grown up, full of stories made up on the spot about stones that yodelled and perambulating washing machines that went on trips to Vienna or London and gave performances as Brnnhilde at the Met.

  He would settle into a beanbag and watch cartoons with them, utterly absorbed, producing great hoots of laughter at things even they thought silly. Then in the middle of one of his rambling tales, full of grunts, whistles, clicks, and hums, the mood of boisterous hilarity in him would lapse and go underground; he would ease off his lap whichever of the littlies had climbed there and, without a word of explanation, go off. They would wait a moment to see if it was just a call of nature, in which case he would be back. But mostly it wasn't. He had been struck. Just like that—kazoom, as Tom put it.

  You got used to it, of course, but it was disconcerting. Annoying too. They couldn't have got away with it.

  So however much they stood in awe of whatever force it was that he had given himself up to, they resented it, and took their own form of revenge.

  Asked what it was that their father did, Miranda would say blandly, "Oh, he works for the council. He's a sewage inspector.” Or as Tom once put it, "He's a burglar.”

  Intimidated by his father and puzzled by a side of him that did not keep to the rules, Tom had conceived a picture of Sam as an anarchic schoolboy, pretending to be hard at work behind closed doors but in reality reading a comic, or picking his nose, or no longer there at all but off robbing a bank.

  It was a boyish vision, to be explained not only by Tom's easy ten- dency to attribute to others what he would most wish for himself but by the resentment he felt at being the odd man out. Not only because he was the only boy in the family but also because, through some quirk of nature, he alone among them had no ear. He suffered this affliction without complaint, and even allowed himself to be teased about it with clownish good humour, but in a household where singing was as natural as speech he felt disabled, and since his first inclination was to conform, it unnaturally set him apart. He also felt, painfully, that Sam, whom he longed to please, was disappointed in him.

  Lately, out of defiance, not of his father but of fate, he had taken to sneering at every form of “artiness” “female business.”

  It would have surprised Tom to know that his father understood his perplexity and was undismayed. Composing, for Sam, was work—it was the only thing he had ever been good at—and music a condition that could manifest itself in other ways than as notes on a page or in flights of calibrated sound. He was waiting for Tom to stop feeling sorry for himself and discover his own form of the thing.

  They must have had some inkling, Sam felt, of what nature was up to in Tom's case, when they named the girls Miranda, Rosalind, Cres-sida and—in a moment of recklessness—Cassandra, but for the boy had immediately settled on Tom. Not even Thomas, but Tom. Tomtom. There was, from the beginning, something wonderfully bull-like in him that would not be rarefied—even, Sam suspected, by time. He had grown up around his own literalness, and to Sam was all the more precious for it.

  As for Maggie, though she believed without question in the energy Sam poured into his work—always had, from the first note he struck in her presence—the deeper music of the household flowed, for her, from what each of her children, with all their different natures and needs (even the twins, Ros and Cressie, were of contrary colour and temperament), brought to the routine and daily muddle of their lives: hurt feelings, tantrums, head colds, the shooting pain of a new tooth pushing into the house, complaints of misunderstanding and unfairness, squeals of protest at a shampooing against head lice or as a strip of Elastoplast was ripped off. For all the time and fret this cost her she would not have had it otherwise. Not one little difficult nature, or demand, or crotchet. Not one. Though she was glad she did not have to find a system of notation for it, and even more that she did not have to sing it.

  Sam,looking sleek and youthful, his locks wet-combed from the shower, wandered into the kitchen, on the prowl now that he was done with work for the day, for something he could pick at—a stick of celery, a sliver of carrot, something one of the children had been up to.

  “Where is he, anyway?” he demanded, meaning Tom. He was still fretting over that business with the bike. “They'll be here any minute now. Can't we eat as a family for once?”

  “He's taken his surfboard to Manly,” Maggie told him, busying around behind him. “He did ask. I said it was okay. He's to be back by five.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They're at the pool.”

  There was an open-air saltwater pool just ten minutes away, on a walk along the Harbour.

  “Miranda should have stayed,” he grumbled. “You shouldn't have to do all this.” Including the guests, there would be more than a dozen of them. He picked a round of cucumber out of the tuna salad, ruining one of her attempts at symmetry, and leaned with his back to the refrigerator.

  “What can Ido?”

  “Open the wine and get me something to drink.”

  Instead, he came up from behind, put his arms around her, and buried his face in her hair. Maggie laughed.

  “That was lovely,” she told him, "but what about my drink?”

  He opened three bottles of red, set them on the bench with the corks laid across their mouths, then drew her a glass of flagon white with soda.

  For a few minutes they moved easily together in the space between table and cupboards, her stacks of empty egg boxes, the spilled waste from the bin; not touching, but in an easy association of bodies that was a kind of dance before the open-mouthed wine bottles.

  The upper part of the house, its rooms all disorder and stopped noise, hung above them like a summer cloud, dense but still, alive with events that were for the moment suspended. The door to his workroom was closed for the day, its flow of sound also suspended, but on a chord that continued to reverberate in his head and teasingly unfold. It was there, humming away, and could wait. He would find his way back to it later.

  Maggie turned and looked at him. Seeing herself reflected in h
is gaze, she brought the back of her hand to her forehead where a strand of hair had come loose.

  It was difficult to say at such moments, she thought, whether this was before or after; whether the children were about to come bursting back into their lives from the pool, from the surf, all wet towels and hair, complaints and appetites, riddles, the smell of suntan oil and Bacon Crispies—or whether they were still waiting in youthful expectancy in that one year when there had been just the two of them, in the long nights, the short days. Not so long ago really.

  They stood for a moment outside time, outside their thickened bodies, in renewed youthfulness. He nibbled. She sipped. The chord moved out through the house, discovering new possibilities in what might have passed for silence.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Damn,” she said. “That'll be Stell. They're always early.”

  At the same moment, from the back porch, came the voices of the girls, little Cassie's breathless with grievance.

  “Mummy, they tried to run away from me.”

  “We did not.”

  “They were chasing boys.”

  “We were not”

  The bell sounded again.

  “You get it,” Maggie told Sam, and turned to face the onslaught.

  “Now, Cassie,” she told the child, who was clinging to her hip, "stop whinging We've got visitors. Lars and Jens are here. Cressie—Ros— you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  Miranda, hair dyed pink and green in the punk style she now affected, stood in the frame of the doorway, frowning, unwilling to be drawn in.

  “And so should you, miss,” Maggie told her. “I let them go with you because you're sixteen and supposed to be responsible. Sometimes I wonder.”

  But the rebuke, as Miranda knew, was ritual. There was no conviction in it.

  “Now go and get yourselves decent, all of you. Before the real guests appear.”

  The real guests were an American visitor, Diane Novak, and her friend Scott McIvor, a much younger man than they had expected who turned out to be a local sailmaker. The others were family: Maggie's sister Stella and her two boys, Lars and Jens, and Stella and Maggie's old singing teacher, Miss Stinson. Then—invited unannounced by Miranda, it seemed, but more likely uninvited and hastily vouched for—Miranda's “best friends” of the moment, an odd pair called Julie and Don, also known “The Act.”

  Sam was appalled. “How did they get here?” he demanded fiercely, the minute he got Maggie alone.

  “I don't know,” Maggie told him. “Any more than you do. I suppose Miranda asked them. They'll be all right. I've put all the kids out in the sunroom. You just look after the drinks. And, Sam, love,” she pleaded, "try not to make a fuss.”

  Julie was an intense, waiflike creature. Tossed out of home (or so she claimed) by her stepfather, she had taken herself out of school and was living now in a squat—a plywood cubicle in an empty warehouse at Marrickville. Like Miranda she was sixteen. She got herself up, Sam thought, like an anorexic teenaged widow, entirely in black, and painted her lips black and her fingernails as well—in mourning, Sam had once suggested, for her own life.

  Her partner Don, the other half of The Act, was a slight, sweet-faced boy, girlish but not it seemed gay, whose pale hair had been trained to fall perpetually over one eye and who affected little pink silk ballet slippers that Julie had embroidered with vivid scarlet and emerald-green thread. Julie was a designer. She created fashion garments from scraps picked up at the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul op shops. Miranda today was wearing one of Julie' “creations,” a recent present. It was a flared skirt made entirely of men's ties, in heavy satins and silks, a little grimy some of them but all vivid in colour and glossily shimmering.

  She was always giving Miranda presents. Trashy jewellery she bought with her outsized allowance, miniature artworks of her own devising and of a crazy intricacy: cages in search of an inmate, efficient tiny guillotines involving razor blades and springs—bad-luck charms all, which Sam did not want smuggled in among them. Offerings, he had once observed, to some god of ultimate unhappiness.

  “Honestly,” Miranda told him. “I can't believe you'd say a thing like that! You're so ungenerous! And you think Julie's the crazy one.”

  Miranda liked to scare them with lurid accounts of what Julie, poor thing, “been through.” How at seven she was abused by a favourite uncle. How three months ago she'd been raped in her plywood cubicle by half a dozen ethnic youths but had declined to press charges.

  Was any of this true? Or was it, as Maggie assured him, just another of Miranda's stories? Designed to shock them into admitting how out of touch they were, how little they knew of what was really going on.

  “Young people these days see all sorts of things,” Maggie told him, trying for an unconcern she did not quite feel. “Things we had no notion of. They survive, most of them—if they're sensible. Miranda is very sensible, you know that. All this is just showing off. She wants you to be impressed.”

  “Impressed!” Sam exploded.

  “In your case, love,” she told him with a twisted smile, "that means scared.”

  “Well, I am,” he admitted. “I'm bloody petrified. I don't know how you can be so cool about things.”

  But that was just the point, the point of difference between them. And it was the mystery of this, more than anything Maggie actually said or did, that had its effect on him, a belief that Maggie did know something he did not, and that he could rely on this to get him through all doubts and difficulties. It was what she offered him. He had no idea what it might be that he offered her in return. Now, ignoring the irruption of Julie and her pallid companion into what was meant to be a private celebration, he followed Maggie's instructions and set himself to dealing with the drinks, but was not happy. It was a mistake—that's what he now decided—to have made his first meeting with Diane Novak a family affair.

  For one thing, it had become clear that she hadn't made this trip “down here” only to see him. However eager she appeared to be, and full of interest in his workplace, the house, the bottlebrush with its sprays of pink-and-gold blossom that drooped over the front porch— "Callistemon, I think,” she pronounced accurately—all the flow of energy in her, and it was considerable, was towards the young sailmaker, Scott, one of those easy-going, utterly likeable, ponytailed young fellows from good North Shore families and the best private schools who, instead of following their fathers into accountancy or the law, went back, led by nothing more radical than their own freewheeling interest, to trades their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had practised, and became carpenters and did up houses, or built boats, or made surfboards or sails.

  Diane Novak was from Madison, Wisconsin. Three years ago Sam had come across one of her poems in an anthology and was led to set it to music. Later he sought out others and had ended up with a loose cycle. He wrote to her. Diane Novak wrote back. A correspondence developed.

  Correspondence.

  He had never given much consideration to the word till then, but “correspondence” and all it implied seemed entirely rich and right for what had since then flowed so easily between them: the current of curiosity and interest, of shy revelations on his part, flights of extravagant fancy on hers; jokes, wordplay, essays in boldness that took them, he had sometimes felt, to the edge of flirtation; small hints at the erotic. A hint too of darker things. Disappointment. Pain. Which his music had found in the poems, and which corresponded, he felt—there! that word again—to something in himself that had remained to this point wordless, though not entirely unspoken.

  There was nothing dangerous in it. No suggestion of an affair, even a long-distance one. He passed all Diane's letters on to Maggie, though he suspected she did not read them, and could, without fear, have shown her his own. The deeper connection was impersonal. It lay in the inwardness with which he had taken her words, felt out the emotion there that had given them just their own shape, weight, texture, and found music for it. Released, she migh
t have said, the music that was already in them and in her. She recognised that. Had felt it strongly as something secret, though not quite hidden, that he had subtly but again secretly made plain, for which she was grateful to the point of an agreeable affection that constituted a correspondence of an even more intimate kind. Inexpressible, or rather not needing expression, because he had already expressed it for them in the thing itself—the music.

  So there was no need for them to meet, she told him. They had already done that, in their own chaste but public consummation, there.

  In the meantime, they could joke about passing one another as intimate strangers on the moving walkway in some airport, Hawaii or Atlanta, or pressing fingertips on either side of a glass partition in Anchorage.

  When she wrote out of the blue announcing a visit, he had assumed, foolishly, and with some trepidation, that she was coming because of him. But then, from her hotel, she had called and admitted to another “down here,” this Scott the sailmaker, whom she had met at a poetry reading in Seattle. And now they were seated, Diane Novak, this Scott, who at twenty-seven or so was a good twenty years younger than his companion, at the big pinewood table in their front room, together with Maggie's sister, Stella, and Miss Stinson. Maggie and Diane, Sam thought, seemed entirely relaxed and easy with one another, like old friends united in understanding.

  Of what? he wondered. Him?

  Only now did it strike him that Maggie might have her own correspondence with Diane Novak. Through the words he had found music for. To which Maggie, in performance, had brought an exploratory sense, which she was now testing, of the other's shifting emotions, but also her own presence and breath. Is that why he felt so uncomfortably displaced, the only one here who seemed out of tune with the occasion?

  The truth was, he was confused.

  Very blonde and tanned, very carefully presented, but in a stringy way that was a mite “American,” Diane Novak was not what he had pictured. There were angularities to her that he had not foreseen. Something in the way she came at things—too directly, he thought— set him ill at ease. He wondered now if there had not been in her letters a suggestion of—what? Artfulness and high self-mockery that she had expected him to share but that he had mistaken or missed.