by David Malouf
Occasionally, sitting in a chair in one of the rooms, he would doze off, and had woken once to find a little girl preparing to poke a finger into him as if, propped up there in his old-fashioned collar and tie, he was a particularly convincing model of ancient, outmoded man. When he jerked awake and blinked at her she had screamed.
“I'd quite enjoy it, I think,” he told them at home, "if instead of shoving me into a hole somewhere you had me stuffed and sat there. No need for a card. No need for anyone to know it was me.”
5
At half past seven the first of the guests arrived. Jenny was the lookout. Hanging from one of the verandah posts, she could see headlamps swinging through the dusk and stopping at the first of their gates. Two cars. There would be two more gates to open and close before they reached the gravel slope.
She leapt down and darted into the house.
“Madge, Angie,” she called, "they're on the way. Somebody's here.”
Madge, in shoes now and a frock that emphasized the width of her hips, was standing at the sink, contemplating the two fish she had earlier found a place for at the bottom of the fridge but had now taken out again to make room for her dips.
Her whole life, she felt, had been a matter of finding room. For unhappy children, stray cats, pieces of furniture passed on by distant aunts, unexpected arrivals at mealtimes, visitors who stayed too long talking to Audley and had to have beds made up for them on the lounge-room sofa, gifts she did not want and could find no use for but did not have the courage to throw out. Now these fish.
“They're almost here,” Jenny was shrieking.
Fortunately it was only her son Jonathon with one of his girls, though he did warn her that Lily Barnes was in the car behind.
“Oh Lord,” she said. “Jenny, love, go and tell Audley Lily Barnes is here. Oh, and Jonathon.” Only then did she embrace her son.
She took the flowers he had brought and dumped them absent-mindedly into the sink. Then, not to appear rude, she turned and kissed his girl, in case she had been here before. All Jonathon's girls were of striking appearance—more appearance than reality, she had once quipped—but she could never tell one of them from the next.
“How is he?” Jonathon asked, taking a handful of nuts from one of the bowls she had laid out and tossing them, one by one, into his mouth. “What's been going on? What have I missed?”
“Nothing,” she told him, moving the bowl out of his reach. “You haven't missed a thing. Now, if you're hungry, Jonathon, I'll give you some soup. I thought you'd have eaten on the way.”
“We did. We had this terrific meal, didn't we, Susie? At Moreton.” He reached behind her and took another handful of nuts. But immediately there was the sound of Lily's voice and Audley's greeting her.
“Well,” said Madge, "that's the end of that.”
She strode out to the stone verandah.
“Is she always like that?” the girl whispered to Jonathon.
He looked at her with his mouth full. “Oh,” he said, "I thought you'd been here before.”
“No,” she said, coldly, "I have not.”
Lily Barnes was an old flame of Audley's—that was Madge's claim, though he always denied it.
“Lily Barnes,” he would say, "is a remarkable woman, but she's more than I could have handled.”
“La, hark at the man!” Madge would tell the boys, who, when they were young, had been all ears for these interesting revelations. “That means he thinks he can handle me.”
“Can you, Dad?” one of them would pipe up. “Can you?”
When Lily Barnes and Audley were at university they had been rivals for various medals and scholarships, which she had mostly won. But after they left, Audley had gone on to high public office; Lily had been, over the years, private secretary to a string of ministers, admired, feared, warily consulted, but a shadowy presence, unknown outside a narrow circle. Then when she retired three years ago she had published a book that upstaged them all, Audley included, and had become a celebrity. At seventy she was very plain and petite, twisted now with arthritis but always very formally and finely dressed.
Madge, years ago, had dubbed her the Rainbow Serpent, partly because of her sharp tongue but also because of a passion she had for coloured silks. She had meant it unkindly then, but in the years since the name had come to have a benign, overarching significance. It was an affectionate tribute.
She entered now wearing a russet-coloured skirt and a caf-au-lait blouse, leaning as always on a stick, but making an impression, for all her crooked stance and diminutive size, of elegance and charm. She had with her a young fellow, the son of some people she knew, called Barney Shannon, who had been in trouble with drugs and was now employed to drive her about. Since he wanted to bring his surfboard and was also shifting house, they had come in his ute, the back of which was piled high with his futon, several bits of old iron from which he hoped to make lampstands, a Fifties cocktail cabinet, and his library of paperbacks, all in cartons and covered with a loose tarpaulin.
“Sorry, Madge,” she called, "are we the first? It's Barney. He drives like a bat out of Hades. I think that ute of his may have cured my back by redistributing the vertebrae.” She looked about and gave one of her winning smiles. “But how lovely to be here.”
An hour later the room was full. Little noisy groups had formed, mostly of men, all vigorously arguing. Lily, moving from one group to another and leaning on her stick, would linger just long enough to shift the discussion sideways with a single interjection, then move on. She did not join the other women, young and old, who sat on the sidelines.
Fran had been hovering at the edge of these groups. She too moved from one to another of them, growing more and more irritated by what she heard and angrier with herself for having come.
She knew these people. They were the same relations and old friends and nervous hangers-on that she had been seeing for the past fifteen years, people for whom disagreement was the spice of any gathering. She felt out of place. Not because her opinions were all that different from theirs, but from temperament, and because, as everyone knew, she was a backslider. She had married one of them, been taken to the heart of the clan, then bolted. Well, that was their version. Drink in hand, looking sad-eyed and defenceless, but also spikily vigilant, she kept on the move.
Clem watched her from cover. He had mastered the art of pretending that his attention was elsewhere while all his movements about the room, along the verandah, past the open windows, had as their single object her appearance in a mirror or between the shifting heads.
He watched. Not to monitor or restrict her freedom but to centre himself. Otherwise the occasion might have become chaotic. All that din of voices. All those faces, however familiar. The fear that someone without warning might open their mouth and expect an answer from him.
Once, briefly, she had come up beside him. Her head came only to his shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he told her, "I'm doing fine. What about you?”
She cast a fierce glance about the room. “I'll survive.”
He loved this house. He had grown up on holidays here. It was where he could let go and be free. All its routines, from the dinning of Madge's early-morning spoon to the pieces Audley liked to play on the piano last thing at night, were fixed, known. Objects too.
He liked to run his fingertips along the edge of the coffee-table and feel the sand under its varnish. His brother Rupe had made that table at Woodwork when he was fifteen. Clem loved it. It was one of the objects he had clung to when he was floating out there in the absolute dark, finding his way back by clinging to anything, however unlikely, that came to hand. Rupe's table had played no special part in his life till then, but he had clung to it, it had shored him up, and squatted now, an ugly, four-legged angel, right there in the centre of the room, very solid and low to the floor, bearing glasses and a lumpy dish full of cashews. He would have knelt down and stroked it, except that he had learned to
be wary of these sudden impulses of affection in himself, towards people as well as objects, that were not always welcome or understood.
He had moments of panic still when he looked up and had no idea where he had got to. It was important then that something should come floating by that he recognised and could fling his arms around. The house was full of such things. Rupe's table, Audley's upright, the jamb of the verandah door where a dozen notches showed how inch by inch he and his brothers had grown up and out into the world—Ralph always the tallest. He had never caught up with Ralph.
And the books! Old leather-bound classics that their grandfather had collected, Fenimore Cooper and Stevenson and Kipling, and magazines no one would ever look at again, except maybe him; tomes on economics and the lives of the great, Beethoven and Metternich, and the children's books he had loved when he was little. The Tale of the Tail of the Little Red Fox one of them was called. It contained a question that had deeply puzzled him then, and still did: how many beans make five? It sounded simple but there was a trick in it, that's what he had always thought, which was intended to catch quick-thinkers and save slow ones. But from what?
He could move among these familiar things and feel easy. But when Fran was here the course he followed, the line he clung to, was determined by her. He liked the way she led him without knowing it, the form she gave to his turning this way and that, and how she held him while herself moving free.
She came to the edge of a group where Jonathon, his new girl leaning on his shoulder and pushing segments of sliced apple between her perfect teeth, was listening to a story Audley's cousin, Jack Wild, was telling. Jack Wild was a judge.
Most of the group had heard the story before and were waiting, carefully preparing their faces, for the punchline. Catching her eye, Jonathon gave her one of his bachelor winks.
They had a compact, she and Jonathon. They steered clear of each other on these family occasions, but meeting as they sometimes did on neutral ground, at openings or at one of the places in town where they liked to eat, could be sociable, even affectionate, for twenty minutes or so, teasing, reliving the times before Clem, before the wars, when they had been like brother and sister, best mates. He wasn't hostile to her or sternly unforgiving, like Rupe and Di.
She winked back, and saw with satisfaction that the girl had seen it. A little crease appeared between her perfect brows.
A moment later she had moved to another group and was half listening, half inattentively looking about, when she caught the eye of someone she had never seen before, a boy—man—who was lounging against the wall and observing her over the rim of his glass.
She looked down, then away, and almost immediately he came up to her.
He was called Cedric Pohl and rather pedantically, a bit too sure of himself she thought, spelled it out for her: P-O-H-L. He already knew who she was. Oh yes, she thought, I'll bet you do! He was an admirer of Audley's, but his time with the clan had been in one of her periods away. He had been away himself. He was just back from the States.
She listened, looking into her glass, wondering why he had picked her out and searching for something she could hold against him, and settled at last on his expensive haircut. Her mouth made a line of silent mockery.
Because, his gathered attention said, the powerful energy he was directing at her—because you looked so lost standing like that. Alone and with your eyes going everywhere.
He was attracted, she saw, by her desperation. It attracted people. Men, that is. They felt the need to relieve her of it. To bring her home, as only they could, to the land of deep content. She had been through all this before.
She lifted her chin in sceptical defiance, but had already caught the note of vibrancy, of quickening engagement in his voice that stirred something in her. Expectancy. Of the new, the possible. Hope, hope. And why not? Again, the excitement and mystery of a new man.
Moments later, she was outside, taking breaths of the clear night air. On the grass below the new deck, some young people, children mostly, were dancing. A single high-powered bulb cast its brightness upwards into the night, but so short a distance that it only made you aware how much further there was to go. The stars were so close in the clear night that she felt the coolness of them on her skin.
She had moved out here to get away from the feeling, suddenly, that too much might be happening too fast. Glass in hand, she looked down at the dancers.
Ned was there. So was Jen, along with three or four of their cousins, one of them a little lad of no more than five or six, Rupe and Di's youngest. They were moving barefoot to the ghetto-blaster's tatty disco, looking so comically serious as they rotated their hips and rolled their shoulders in a sexiness that was all imitation—of sinuosity in the girls, of swagger in even the tiniest boys—that she wanted to laugh.
Jen glanced up and waved. Fran raised her hand to wave back and was suddenly a little girl again at the lonely fence-rails, waving at a passing train.
She had always been an outsider here; in the clan, among these people who believed so deeply in their own rightness and goodwill. They had meant to pass those excellent qualities on to her, having them, they believed, in their gift. But for some reason she was resistant and had remained, even after her marriage, one of the hangers-on, one of those girls in lumpish skirts and T-shirts (though in fact she had never worn clothes like that, even at nineteen) who'd got hooked on the Tylers, not just on whichever one of the boys had first brought them in but on Aud-ley's soft attentions, Madge's soups, the privilege of being allowed to do the drying-up after a meal, the illusion of belonging, however briefly, to the world of rare affinities and stern, unfettered views they represented. Girls, but young men too, odd, lonely, clever young people in search of their real family, were caught and spent years, their whole lives sometimes, waiting to be recognised at last as one of them.
She had told herself from the beginning that she could resist them, that she would not, in either sense, be taken in.
In the early days, on visits like this, she had spent half her time behind locked doors, sitting on the lowered lavatory seat or cross-legged on her bed, filling page after page of a Spirex notebook with evidence against them: the terrible food they ate, their tribal arrogance and exclusivity, the jokes, everything they stood for—all the things she had railed against in grim-jawed silence when she was forced to sit among them and which, as soon as she was alone, she let out in her flowing, copybook hand in reports so wild in their comedy that she had to stuff her fist into her mouth so that they would not hear, gathered in solemn session out there, her outrageous laughter, and come bursting in to expose her as God's spy among them. At last, in an attempt to rid herself of all memory of her humiliations and secret triumphs, she had torn up every page of those notebooks and flushed them down the loo in a hotel in Singapore, on her way to Italy and a new life.
Remembering it now, she was tempted to laugh and free herself a second time, and was startled by Audley's appearance, out of nowhere it might have been, right beside her.
“Let me get you something,” he said very softly, relieving her of her glass. Setting his sorrowful eyes upon her he gave her one of those looks that said: We know, don't we? You and I.
Do we? she asked herself, and felt, once again, the old wish to succumb, then the old repulsion and the rising in her of a still unextin-guished anger.
These cryptic utterances were a habit with him, part of his armoury of teasing enticements and withdrawals. They were intended, she had decided long ago, in their suggestion of a special intimacy, to puzzle, but also to intimidate.
“You don't understand him,” Clem would tell her; "you're being unfair.” But the truth was, there was something phony in these tremendous statements. A challenge perhaps for you to call his bluff and unmask him. Crooked jokes.
He paused now and, after a silence that was calculated, she thought, to the last heartbeat, went off bearing her glass.
Once again she felt the need to escape. I'll find Angie,
she thought. She'll get me out of this. The last thing she wanted now was to get caught in an exchange of soul-talk with Audley
She saw Angie standing alone in a corner, in a dream as usual, wearing that dark, faraway look that kept people off. How beautiful she is, Fran thought.
She was in black—an old-fashioned dress that might have belonged to her mother, with long sleeves and a high neck that emphasized her tallness. Fran was about to push between shoulders towards her when she felt a hand at her skirt. It was Tommy Molloy's wife, Ellie.
“Hi, Fran,” she said. “You lookin’ good.”
“Hi, El,” Fran said, and, settling on the form beside her, stretched out her legs and sat a moment looking at her shoes.
“Wasser matter?” the older woman asked, but humourously, not to presume. She was Tommy's second wife, a shy, flat-voiced woman. “You in the dumps too?”
“No,” Fran said. “Not really.”
In fact, she added to herself, not at all. I'm holding myself still, that's all, so that it won't happen too quickly. So that I won't go spinning too fast into whatever it is that may be—just may be, beginning.
She let these thoughts sweep over her to the point where, suddenly ashamed of her self-absorption, she drew back. “What about you, El?” she asked. “Why are you in the dumps?”
“Oh, I dunno. Things. You know. It gets yer down.”
Fran looked at her, smiled weakly, and really did want to know, but Ellie of course would not tell. Not just out of pride, but because she did not believe that Fran, even if her interest was genuine and not just the usual politeness, would understand.
I would, Fran wanted to say. Honestly, I would. Try me! But Ellie only smiled back and looked away.
Fran knew Ellie from the days before Audley's retirement, when, from the Camp, which was less than a mile away, she had kept an eye on the house and a key for visitors. Sitting beside her now, Fran felt a weight of darkness descend that for once had nothing to do with herself.
