Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  Jim Hodge he had lost all track of. He would, Grandpa assured me, be an old fellow of more than eighty now, sitting over a jug of cider somewhere up Leckhampton way, talking sheep with a young farmer or reminiscing over his own younger days and wondering whatever had become of his old mate Jeff Vernon, who fifty years ago had packed up and gone to New South Wales.

  The Lightning Ridge stories, all hardship and misfortune, were of another kind altogether. Grandpa’s earliest partner there, Felix Pickup, the Decent Cove, had been followed by several others; among them the Real Lout (he was sometimes Ben Thingammy and sometimes Jake Whatsit) and most important of all the Two Devils, Rilington and Hobbes, who had cheated Grandpa of everything he had and whom he suspected of a local murder. The Two Devils had trailed him to Sydney, he couldn’t shake them off. They turned up wherever he went, they haunted him. It was to give them the slip at last that he had ducked over the border into Queensland, set himself up as an insurance salesman, met my grandmother, married her, and as he wryly put it, lived happily ever after.

  He was the second son of a retired army officer from Hucclecote near Gloucester. ‘A decent little place – you can hear St Peter’s bells on a clear day and see Crickley Hill and all the road up to Birdlip on t’other side.’ He had left school early, and after a wild youth, in which he distinguished himself in no other way than as a game rider at fences and a presentable partner at hunt balls, had decided to cut his losses, break free of his mother and seek his fortune in the Empire.

  One of his uncles had gone out to Alberta and been killed in a hunting accident. But the son of a local publican had done well in Australia, and fired by the example of this Twigmore lad who was just his age and already owned a sheep station in New South Wales, he packed his bags, and with his father’s blessing, a little string bag of arrowheads and an initialled silver shaving-mug in which I was allowed on Sundays to whip up the lather for his shave, set out for Bristol and the new life.

  He was well-spoken when he cared to be, wrote a good hand, and out of his great love of the place, and from sitting about in farmhouse kitchens and over the bar at cattle fairs and grain markets, had acquired a vast knowledge of local lore, but was unqualified – this was his mother’s view – for any life but the one he was leading. He was too much a man of those particular hills, and fitted too well into the heavy tweed jackets he liked to wear (which gave off when they were soaked with rain or dew a peculiar odour of local wool) to be at home in any other place. His mother saw that. He would be a man without roots. She opposed his going and refused to bless him, and when his fortunes did fail as she predicted he laid the blame on her refusal of a benedictory kiss. It put a chill upon him that had lasted the whole of his life.

  More than once, in going over some larky adventure he had started out on with Will Burnley and Jim Hodge, he would stop dead and look thoughtful, then grim; brought up hard against his mother’s silence and the unyielding severity with which she had set her face against Australia and all that it stood for.

  So many of his stories, even those that already had him settled at the Ridge, would lead back to the dead cold of that morning as he tramped away and to a series of signs, beginning with the denied blessing, that had foreshadowed, even before he saw the ship that was to take him, all that would occur in the new land. He was, for all his reading among men of truth like Captain Marryat and Lord Macaulay, a Gloucestershire country boy at heart, full of superstitions he had never outgrown: mangles that turned of their own accord, sheep children seen in bottles at county fairs, gypsy curses, sheeps’ hearts with needles in them, bound six times round with a hazel switch.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Phil. It’s something I thought I’d forgotten. It’s funny what you remember. When I was just a wee thing, four or five years old, I had an illness. They thought I would die of it. They tried everything, called all the doctors, but I got no better. My mother cried over me, they sent the other children away.

  ‘We had a girl in those days helping cook in the kitchen. She was a bit like Della, only younger, a country girl with only half her wits, that my mother had taken in to please the vicar. Her father was a wagoner who’d been crushed in a spill with his cart. Well, this girl was fond of me, she used to take me for walks. She knew all the best walks around there – the ones with wild orchids or places where you might see a rabbit or a pair of stoats. So she crept out one night to an old woman who lived up Crickley way and she got this woman to brew up some sort of remedy, a lot of wild herbs wrapped in a plaster, and she carried it into the house without my mother knowing and she wrapped me up in it.

  ‘Well, I got better. Overnight. They thought it was a miracle, they never knew. But later, when that girl – Ellen she was called – when she took me out walking one day, she took me Crickley way, down along a gully that was all overgrown with bracken – a dingle we called it – to the dirtiest little shack you’ve ever seen, with two rooms and a lot of chooks in one and the floor all trodden dirt, and a dirty grey-haired old woman in the other. She had warts all over her face and woollen mitts to her hands with the fingers poking through.

  ‘She made us tea and spread a newspaper, and brought stools for us to sit. And when we were leaving she put her hand with the woollen mitt on my head, and said: ‘You be one o’ mine,’ and grinned at me. I was terrified, I didn’t know what it meant. I suppose she meant I was a child she had saved with her cures, but I thought she had put something in that poultice that had spelled it and changed me, and that she would come one night and take me back. After that, for about three years, I was afraid of going to bed in the dark. Then I forgot all about it – oh, for ages, and only remembered it the other day. Ellen! But most of all those dirty fingers sticking out of the mitts . . .’

  He scared me sometimes with his tales of Gloucestershire. It seems such a gloomy place, all smuts from coal fires and storms in old black kettles, and curses that could cross water from ­Hucclecote to Lightning Ridge.

  But they were happy hours, those times in Grandpa’s room. The mahogany wardrobe and dressing table with their wing-shaped projections and cornices and bevelled glass stood solid against the drifting of the curtains. From the trays of the wardrobe, where Grandpa’s shirts were stacked, came a whiff of camphor or mothballs that added itself to the smell of the spirit lamp beside his bed, the disinfectant from the bedpan that was kept out of sight behind a screen, and a peculiar smell, as of sweet-spice or nutmeg, that belonged to the timbers of the house itself, especially where the boards had gone soft under the paintwork so that you could press with your thumb, feel the layer of enamel crack and produce a fine reddish dust. And beyond all this, as the long curtains stirred and lifted with the springing up at last of the sea breeze, the salty, ever-present, clean but sourish smell of the Broadwater.

  My grandfather would wake with the sea breeze and I would have to settle the spread about him. It was the sign that my mother would soon be back; that another afternoon had passed and he was still alive in the high room above the bunyahs, and that we were all, once again, in sight of tea.

  When I pulled up the spread, fussing a little in imitation of my mother, he would set his hand on the crown of my head, so light and dry that you barely felt it, and say, ‘Thank you, boy,’ a kind of blessing, and I would lean forward and kiss him on the forehead. The skin was paper-thin. You were aware of bone. But there was nothing frightening in it, and I wasn’t in any way disgusted by the odour of decay.

  Children, my mother thought, were quite capable of facing reality. It was my father’s younger sisters, Aunt Connie and Aunt Roo, who had to be spared. They came only in the morning, when he had already been brought back and restored from the ravages of the night; or in the evening, when with his hair combed wet like a schoolboy, all freshened up and buttoned into his flannel pyjamas, and with the blue night light showing its flame, he had the air of a sick and spoiled child.

  My aunts were not callous. In fact they
might have claimed an excess of feeling. But they fled from the truth. My grandfather had always known what they were and forgave them.

  ‘Don’t let the girls see,’ he would tell my mother when some physical accident of a particularly repugnant kind had overtaken him or when he was in pain.

  As for my grandmother, she treated him as she always had, and would have been ashamed, I think, to let his dying make a change in the cool proximity that was their established way with one another.

  She came in twice a day, always immaculately dressed, and sat a moment on one of the cane chairs beside his bed. She asked how he was, informed him about household matters, settled the sheet with a fold here or a smoothing gesture there, then rose, set her lips to his brow, frowned a moment, and went back to her accounts: back to what she had been occupied with for the best part of forty years; to what his fecklessness had forced upon her – the holding together, with her strict, uncompromising style, of a family, and the running of a large and profitable business.

  ‘Weren’t Grandma and Grandpa happy?’ I asked my father once.

  He looked embarrassed. It was an effect of our new closeness to one another that I could speak to him like this, and he wanted to be frank with me; but his whole life was built on the assumption that such questions were never put, because they were irrelevant, or because they were too difficult to answer. He was sufficiently like his father to feel threatened by my grandfather’s failings, and had spent many years proving to his mother that natural affinities could be transcended by force of character. His loyalty was to her.

  ‘Your grandmother’s had a lot to put up with,’ was all he said now. ‘She’s been very – brave.’

  ‘Grandpa’s brave,’ I asserted, thinking of how patient he was in all his trials. ‘Mumma says so. He makes so little trouble.’

  ‘Well, there’s different sorts – of bravery, I mean. Your grandmother’s is the moral sort.’

  I chewed hard on that. I thought my grandmother might, in time, come to have the same opinion of me as she had of Grandpa. I didn’t have my father’s resistence to natural weakness, which was his own form of bravery and which my grandmother approved of because it was modelled so closely on her own.

  She was, at this time, a woman of sixty-seven, still imposingly beautiful in her way and still empowered with an energy that had never, one felt, found its proper outlet. The business was large but it was not large enough. Given some other place than our modest backwater – given Chicago or New York – she might have led a different life altogether. She belonged, I thought, to the world of big deals, of big desks, with a window full of skyscrapers at her back and a sense of real power under her fist. Utterly modern in her tastes, she loathed this big old-fashioned house and its Victorian clutter. Her marriage to my grandfather had been a misalliance, not only of temperaments and styles but of epochs. Everything about him, his stance, his pace, the stories he told, even the silver-topped sticks he carried, belonged to the century he was born in, which had passed with his first manhood. My grandmother had rejected all that as she had rejected him.

  Married at sixteen, before she could have had any notion of what the coming world was to be, or of her own part in it, she had subdued her energy, her angers, her passionate sense that she had the ability to move at a faster tempo and achieve things, and produced, as any girl was expected to do, five children in almost as many years; my Aunt Ollie first, then my father, then Connie, then Roo, then Gil. Her husband, meanwhile, the Englishman whose accent and good manners had so impressed her parents, had drifted from one position to another, and then into a style of living where he had no position at all.

  She was alarmed at first, then cast down, then glowingly resentful of how little lay behind his fine exterior, how little, that is, beyond kindness and charm; but soon saw in it her own good fortune. With money inherited from an aunt and the advice of a clever lawyer – the first of several male supporters – she set her husband up in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business, then ordered him to stay out of sight. She kept him in well-cut suits and the best imported hats, used his presence as a defence against scandal, and devoted herself to the creating of one of the biggest marketing firms in the state.

  Full of energy and imagination, utterly ruthless, and ever ready in her proud way for a fight, she was a born businesswoman. Men were admiring but wary. She used their own weapons against them, and when that failed she fell back on her charms. They resented it as they resented having to deal with her as an equal, but she was cleverer than they were, had good luck, and soon won their regard. As for the opinion of women, she thought no more of that than the men did. She had never cared for women. She lived in style again and her children were well kept – that is what she cared about. If my grandfather suffered he was too proud to show it. She left the amour propre of that soft, well-meaning man, who loved his children and was astonished at what his child bride had become, to look after itself. What she had become, in fact, was a beauty; having discovered that beauty, in her case, was a natural consequence of the exercise of power.

  All this lay deep in the past. I knew of it only what my father told: how his mother had started the Section and how as soon as he was old enough he had gone in with her, and had largely, in latter years, taken over, though my grandmother still managed the book-keeping side of things from a bare, neat little office at home. Here she lived her own life, drinking vast quantities of tea, which she made for herself at a galley, arguing long-distance on the telephone and emerging only for meals. The rest of us never went there. She had no time to spare on me – I don’t think she liked children, even her own – and she must have known anyway that I had gone over to Grandpa. I felt that I barely knew her. I went in terror, as everyone did, of getting in her way.

  One day, passing her little office, I was surprised to see through the half-open door that she was in tears. The sight was shocking. I had never seen her weep or give way to passion. She had always been, for me, the strict figure, impeccably groomed, always in control, whose ironic eye kept watch over our ordinary follies, which she did not openly condemn but for which she had a superior and silent contempt. Standing back now where I was hidden by the turn of the stairs, I watched her shoulders heave, and heard sounds that even in her, when she stifled them with a handkerchief held hard over her mouth, could not help being raw and ugly and suggesting real pain.

  My own emotions surprised me. I had no sort of pity for her such as I would have felt immediately for Aunt Connie or Aunt Roo because I could not imagine her accepting it. What I felt was curiosity, and of a kind that seems to me now to have been distinctly erotic. I was shocked, fascinated, but also felt, on Grandpa’s behalf, a degree of satisfaction in perceiving that she too could suffer.

  I have no idea what had upset her. Something to do with Uncle Gil perhaps, who was her favourite and had always been difficult, and even more so since he got back from the war, or some sense of her own weakness before the Fates and all that she was accountable for. I saw things too simply to believe that it might have to do with my grandfather.

  She looked up suddenly and caught me observing her.

  ‘Oh Phil, it’s you.’ Turning her head aside, she blew violently into the handkerchief and was immediately herself again. ‘Come in a moment. I want to talk to you.’

  I stood awkwardly where I was. I had never crossed the threshold of her little office and didn’t care to. She had never asked me to go there on a message; if she needed something from one of its cupboards or drawers she always went herself. I hovered now, and she turned in her office chair and faced me.

  Her interest was aroused, and I wondered what it was I might have revealed, as with one hand resting on the rolltop desk with its files and ledgers, and the other tight round the balled handkerchief, she observed me over the rim of her glasses. Behind her, in an old-fashioned gothic bookcase, were photographs of the Section and its displays.

  �
�Come in, Phil. Sit with me a minute.’

  I sat on the edge of the chair she offered.

  She seemed uneasy now that she actually had me there. She was always so formal. I had some sort of advantage – and not simply because I had seen her in a moment of weakness. She reached out, took my hand and looked at it sadly, as if she read my life there; then turned it over and began, almost absent-mindedly, to stroke the back of it.

  ‘You’ve got your father’s hands – your grandfather’s. I’ve noticed that before.’

  I didn’t know what to say. She was telling me something but I couldn’t guess what. That she was fonder of me than I thought, and could show it at this moment because she too felt the need for affection?

  ‘You judge people too harshly, Phil. It’s easy to judge people when you’re young. But people make mistakes – you’ll learn that. We have to be –’

  Like my father she did not finish the sentence. Perhaps because she herself was so seldom what she was asking me to be – forgiving. She cast about, wanting I think to make something more of the occasion that would constitute a bond between us. She was still holding my hand but as if she had forgotten what it was. I wanted to take it back but couldn’t. It had ceased to be mine. At last she laid it back in my lap, and opening the little silver box she carried, said ‘Here, have one of these musks.’

  She put one in her mouth, and after a moment’s hesitation I reached out and took one too. I hated musk. I tasted it and she smiled. A moment later I got up and left.

  It was only outside, as I began to climb the stairs to Grandpa, that it struck me. When I kissed him now he would smell it. He would know I had been with her and accepted a favour. I tried, when I leaned over him, to keep my mouth closed so that he would not notice, and immediately retreated to the foot of the bed, but the betrayal was clear. Listening to him tell one of his stories – it was one I had heard a dozen times before – I saw something in his face, an expression, very characteristic, that struck me now as silly. Grandpa! How could I? I had never doubted him before. I wanted to rush and hug him and make amends, but the smell of musk would only have made it worse.