by David Malouf
‘She’s so unhappy,’ she told the rest of us as we crowded at the doorway. ‘It’s not just playing up.’
Aunt Connie, herself too highly strung, looked on terrified, as if the words, once spoken, might demand to be taken up and repeated, or as if Aunt Roo’s attacks could create a cloud or miasma in which she too would be caught up, whirled about and turned head over heels. For Aunt Roo’s manifestations, despite Aunt Ollie’s efforts, did not fall short of a certain amount of rolling about and kicking. ‘I can’t stand it,’ Aunt Connie would scream, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!’ and with her hands over her ears she would rush off down the hallway and lock herself in her room.
My father, to whom all this was deeply painful, would hang on to the rail of the bed behind Aunt Ollie and shake his head. He looked miserably at my mother, who seeing now that there was nothing to be done, and understanding how ashamed my father was, even before her, of his family’s weakness, would go off quickly to Grandpa’s room.
Only my grandmother remained calm.
‘It’s nothing,’ she would say. ‘You’re doing just what she wants. She’s been putting on turns like this since she was three years old. You know that, Ollie! It’s all play-acting. She knows just how far she means to go – certainly not far enough to break anything.’
With this scornful judgement she would turn on her heel and go back to bed, ignoring the fact that in Aunt Roo’s hysterical denunciations, which were largely aimed at her, something had already been broken, and deliberately, that would not heal.
My grandfather, who had been woken by the commotion and was suffering in his own way, would be given an account of all this by my grandmother in the course of her morning visit. He would listen with his face to the wall, recognising in my grandmother’s tone the unspoken accusation.
Aunt Roo’s unhappiness, her weakness, and all its degrading exhibitions deeply wounded him: she was his responsibility. My grandmother’s favourite, the one who pained her in the same way but about whom she was never whimperingly sentimental and for whom she made no excuse, was Uncle Gil. They must always have played favourites like this; making their choices early and drawing out of the two children, their youngest, those qualities they missed in one another and could best make use of as an indictment of betrayal.
My father and Aunt Ollie, born when their parents were still close, had been left to themselves; they needed no one’s special love. And Aunt Connie, lost in the middle of the five, was simply there. Tolerated, ignored, she was one of those who are regularly passed over. She had come to accept it as her fate.
Aunt Connie had been married, and the man, out of tolerance for her feelings, was never mentioned; but my grandmother, who had a soft spot for Jack Cassidy, still got letters from him, which she answered on my grandfather’s behalf.
‘Jack Cassidy’s a fine fellow,’ my father assured me when we met him out walking once, ‘but he was spoiled and weak when your Aunt Connie married him and she made him worse. He needed a strong woman. Not a – well, not your Aunt Connie.’
Among all these evocations of strength and weakness, of pulls, ties, repulsions that made a family, a household, a moral field, and to which I as the lone child of my generation was the only heir, it was my father and his one brother, Uncle Gil, standing in positions at opposite ends of the family, my father next to eldest, he next to youngest, who embodied the poles of steadiness and random, nihilistic violence.
‘Oh, this family!’ I would hear my mother complain to herself when my grandfather had been most trying or my grandmother too coldly insistent on some small but tyrannical point of form; or when our cramped quarters left her with a sense of having, outside the round of the sickroom, no place of her own.
She had much to resent. My parents’ late marriage had largely to do with the responsibility my father had undertaken, at barely fifteen, of sharing with his mother the management of the firm. My grandmother tended to think of them as having, as well, a shared guardianship of the others; of my father’s being, to this extent, a second husband. My mother could never forget this. Not only the long years in which she had been held back from marriage and the having of her own children, but what she saw as the stealing of my father’s youth. She had, moreover, to accept daily now my grandmother’s priority in the house and some need she had to prove that my father’s loyalty, and their deep partnership, could not be shaken. My father was often torn. He loved my mother, but he had memories as well of the lonely, defiant and beautiful young woman his mother had been in the days when she was managing alone, and of the many anxious times they had been through together. He saw, too, how much of her life and power she had given to keeping them all afloat. Her beauty mesmerised him because it had to do with her energy, which was quite undiminished and worked on everything it touched. There was something sacred in that. He must have thought at times, even after he was married, that he could not do without it.
As for my grandmother, I don’t believe she ever asked herself what sort of affection she might have for him, or if, in fact, she had any at all. I thought I saw my father, a little wearily sometimes, trying to please her and to win some sign of approval. He seemed oddly boyish on these occasions, as if we were brothers rather than father and son, and he the younger of the two. But my grandmother held back. To praise him would have been an admission that what he gave was freely given and could be withdrawn; her power over him lay in the notion of a sacred duty of which she was the sole embodiment. And this too my mother resented.
The truth is that my grandmother cared for only one of her five children.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I heard my mother whisper, in the low voice in which they were forced to conduct all discussions, all quarrels in that house, ‘if it wasn’t so unfair! Why can’t Gil do it? What does he ever do except moon about down there and fill the boy’s head with craziness? The war’s been over for eighteen months! I don’t see why he couldn’t take some of this awful pressure off you.’
‘I’m not complaining.’
‘No, you never do. And as long as you don’t, nothing will change.’
‘Gil’s all right. He needs a bit more time, that’s all. He’s had –’
‘Don’t you dare tell me he’s had a lot to put up with. So have we all! We’re still putting up with it. Your mother could do something but she won’t. She likes him the way he is!’
‘No, you shouldn’t say that. It upsets her too. She just doesn’t show it.’
‘You’re like all the rest of this family. You all make the same excuses, over and over, and things stay just as they were.’
‘Yes,’ my father said sadly, ‘I know that. But Gil is –’
‘Crazy. Gil is crazy.’
‘No, he’s shell-shocked, and he was always – difficult. But he’s all right. He just needs time to get himself into shape.’
Uncle Gil did not live in the house. My parents were occupying what had been his room, but even before we arrived he had preferred to sleep in the rough wooden shack at the end of the yard that had once housed sacks of corn for the chooks, garden tools and a lawnmower and roller, and which now made room as well for a stretcher bed and the unpainted bathroom cupboard with half a door where he kept his clothes, his shaving equipment, a leather slingshot, an old French horn on which he occasionally blew a garbled fanfare, and a collection of marbles in a chamois bag from which he let me choose, every now and then, a glassie or a glazed taw.
I was still, myself, at that stage of half-boyhood where the highest form of independence is a cubbyhouse in a tree. There was something of the cubby about Uncle Gil’s shack. Its planks, which came only to waist level, were so grey and weather-beaten, and its nails so bent and brittle, that it provided only the flimsiest shelter. Sacking had been nailed to the roof and could be lowered in winter to keep out the winds. Otherwise it was open on all sides and had its own fuggy climate and smell; especially when the cloudbur
sts of late summer left the yard soaked but brilliant and everything gave off the essence of itself – leaves, leafmould, bark, dust, clothes – and the sacking, as it steamed and dripped, a cloudy exhalation of hemp, grain-dust and rich old mould. If the chooks got out, as often happened when the prop of the wire gate was not settled, the fowls came flapping in and roosted on Uncle Gil’s cupboard or in the rafters, which did resemble somewhat the branches of a tree, and left their soft grey-and-white spatterings to harden on the bed, the beams, the beaten dirt floor: an impossible, rock-hard snow. Against one wall of the shack was a clump of bamboo. Its dry sticks rattled in every breeze.
But for all its air of improvisation and its suggestion of the treehouse or cubbyhole, this was an adult’s refuge, not a boy’s place of escape. Uncle Gil had set himself apart.
He had always been wild for adventure, and when war broke out he immediately joined the Air Force and was sent overseas. Shot down over the North Sea, he had suffered a concussion that jarred his brain, or he had ‘seen something’ as a prisoner in Germany that defied imagination and for that very reason kept us in awe. Della’s opinion was that he had gone too fast. Our local pace was that of the bicycle, however many cars were on the road, and Uncle Gil, in one of his dives, had ‘got ahead of himself, poor boy, and left his brains behind’. Or exposure to another hemisphere had done it, where the times of day and seasons of the year were upside down – a place so heavy with history, with crowns, swords, Catholic churches, big names, massacres and other forms of injustice, that our own simpler world, when he got back, was too light to hold him. He swung between poles, each with its different pace and its different light or dark.
For long weeks he would be as mild as a lamb. I liked then to go down and help him with his tasks: the hoeing and staking of plants, the filling of bag after bag with beans, the gathering (slipping your hand carefully under the nervous hens) of eggs. He seldom spoke more than a few syllables then, as he directed me in the crosswise setting of a stake or the knotting of the string that tied it. Grasshoppers rose up as we approached, heavy-bodied, lifting themselves awkwardly out of reach. He would grab and catch one, snapping its head off with a flick of the wrist. ‘There,’ he’d say mildly, ‘that’s one more of the buggers done for.’ I might have felt then that of all the adults in that household he was the one whose nature came nearest my own.
Such quiet spells did not last. One day, suddenly, he would be in a talking mood. The next day he couldn’t stop, and the talk was terrible. The sounds as they tumbled over one another and flashed and bubbled and exploded in what would soon be a rage, were terrifying to me because they made no sense. Ordinary words such as we all shared and used without question had become parts of another language, and Uncle Gil was possessed by them and became another person. His fingers jerked, his body was clenched or flung about like a puppet’s, spit flew from his lips; he would clasp me by the shoulders and shake me bodily with the effort of getting the sense of what he was saying out of his head into mine. I understood only the emotion and struggled to get free of it.
When the words did occasionally cluster, or collide in comprehensible fragments, it was in obscene attacks on his sisters and all women, in savage resentment of my father (who judged him, he felt, and had never made allowance for the difference between them and the fact that two men might see things from opposite angles) or as a deep rage against life itself, which was a stinking muckheap of injustice and hypocrisy and petty torments and an evil that was irredeemable. There was nothing to do but blast the lot of it out of the eye of God – the priests, the politicians, the fucking small-minded butchers and their wives, with their moralities and their little fingers crooked and lifted as they drank blood.
Only Aunt Ollie, the mildest of that family, could make contact with the man when these moods were upon him. Undeterred by knives or rages, and deaf to obscenities, she would go down and sit quietly till he had shouted himself out, or had run aground on the rock-like solidity of her calm. They would lean together, not talking, while the bamboo fretted and sighed and shifted its light behind them and the wet sacking dripped.
At last he would be drawn back to one of his tasks. Leaving the kitchen to Della, Aunt Ollie would stay, seated on an upturned packing case, with her legs apart and her elbows propped upon them, in the same pose in which she was painted by Frank Harland – I recall the pose now because of the painting; it suggested all the weight and stability, all the permanence with which, forgetting the number of things that had to be done elsewhere, she could settle for a few minutes as if they were, in some other method of computing time, whole years or centuries. It was this, I think, that led Uncle Gil back again to his own slower rhythms, and inevitably then to the tasks in which they were fixed.
After a time, without speaking, she would simply push herself to her feet and go.
For Aunt Ollie, Uncle Gil, like the others, was infinitely forgiveable. As a tiny thing she had nursed, fed, washed him and learned all his tricks and moods. Nothing he did surprised her. When he was a boy he had played the French horn. Beautifully. She often spoke of the lovely sound of it as if it were, for her, the true note of his youth. Later, when he would creep home drunk, it was she who watched and listened for him. Laughing softly and leaning into the warmth of his big sister, as heavy as a bear, he would pretend to be drunker than he was and she would struggle with him in the hallway and guide him barefoot to his room while he laughed and chanted: ‘Sorry Ol, Ol, Ol, Ol,’ his warm beery breath in her ear, her mouth, against her bare neck and shoulders.
‘Sorry, Ol,’ he would say now, standing shamefaced among the beans, barefoot still in an old singlet and dungarees. Till the next time, it was over.
He had gone too fast and too far. But Uncle Gil’s view of things, however irrational, did not entirely lack reason. The cruelties he raged against were real – so was the evil. I saw that, even in the ordinary rituals of our lives; but we kept them contained, or we averted our eyes and pretended they had been dealt with.
Uncle Gil’s outbursts were also contained: in the care with which he lifted hens’ eggs and showed them in the palm of his hand – smooth, white, often pasted with shit – and in the regular rhythm with which he threaded wire or staked and tied young plants. If he did break out some day, and taking the axe from the woodpile, laid bare the chicken brains as he called them of Aunt Roo and Aunt Connie, or set fire to the house, or went out and grabbed the first old woman he saw and tossed her off Southport bridge, or in a reign of terror bloody-well did for the fucking politicians – if he did any of that, I thought, it would be no less part of him than the rest, and continuous with the most orderly things in him, with knotted strings and green, young, transparent beans in sunlight, his whole world and view.
My own view, as I began that year to stake out the limits of it, seemed increasingly complex. There was my grandfather’s dying, both the process of it – a physical process no more alien or alarming as it took him out of the world than the one, felt in every sense and nerve at times, that was drawing me into it – and the particular occasion, still to come, that would put an end to our stay here and change yet again all the details of our lives. Then there was the family, that close, disorderly unit, threatened by conflicts that might at any moment make it fly apart but held always by lines of affection and dependence and by habits that could not be broken: by my father’s concern for all members of it, my grandmother’s power, sustained over long years and taking many forms, and the ministrations with pots, pans, cleavers of my Aunt Ollie and Della that three times a day, winter and summer, called us all together, sometimes in unity, sometimes in a formal play of irritations and hostilities, round the big scrubbed table outside or the narrower one in the dining room; and also tied, though separate, like an island held in uneasy federation with a continent, my Uncle Gil, whose notions, given scope, could shatter whole areas of what I had staked out, leaving a charred stump – though even that, I thought, woul
d be part of it and inevitably connected.
[4]
It ended as we might have expected. That is, unexpectedly.
One afternoon, much like every other over the past year and a half, I was sitting curled up in my usual position at the bottom of grandfather’s bed, reading I remember the Cymbeline story from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and must have been lost for a time in the wild and distant landscape of it, because when I glanced up, as I did every few minutes or so ‘to see what Grandpa was doing’, he had slipped sideways in the bed, at the very edge of his great bulwark of pillows, and had what I knew immediately, though I had no experience of it, was a look beyond sleep.
His mouth was open. One hand hung over the side of the mattress, the other lay open on the sheet. But the sheet there was rucked and creased, as if in the moment before the fingers relaxed he had been grasping at it in an attempt, against terrible odds, to climb back or hang on. Whatever struggle he had been engaged in I had missed. It had taken place while I was far off in another country.
It was unusually quiet. A bank of dull cloudless heat hung over the Broadwater. The sky was glaring but grey. On such still days the only sound was of gulls, their shrill, far-off loops and whimperings.
I got down from the bed as quietly as possible – I do not know why I felt I should creep rather than walk in a normal barefoot manner – went out into the hallway, and pushed at the door of my parents’ room.
It was another large, high-ceilinged room, of pale blue tongue-and-groove, with a picture rail from which Frank Harland’s landscape hung. The gauze curtains were drawn. My mother, fully dressed but with her shoes off, lay on her half of the double bed, on a blue spread embroidered with ox-eyed daisies and green clover-leaf. One arm was folded over her eyes, the other lay loosely across her breast.
