Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

It was several months before I realised the extent of the thing: that though we never talked of anything but deeds, contracts, figures, all this was for him a matter of profound emotion that he could not otherwise express.

  He would hum and ha, dancing about with supressed excitement, all hints but refusing to tell me what he was after, till he had got me to name some parcel of land – an acre here, ten acres there – that he pretended had slipped his mind.

  ‘You mean Warlock’s Spinney,’ I would say at last. ‘Is that it? Warlock’s Spinney?’

  ‘Ah, yairs, that’s it.’ And having got me to conjure up the place, he would sigh, give a shy smile, and step off into it.

  It was always like this. What to me were mere names, dimensions, numbers – rolls in my deeds cabinet – were to him so present and real that in the mere syllables that identified them they would blaze up as paddocks where cattle grazed among stumps and ghostly water lay just below ground, or as patches of scrub he knew every inch of, down to the last ant trail between stones.

  He had it all clearly in mind, and the names were magic. Which is why, out of some old superstition, he would not pronounce them himself. Mackay’s Bend, West Glen, Pint Pot Creek Farm, Warlock’s Spinney: ‘Yairs, that one,’ he would say, slowly expelling his breath.

  It was always the same game between us. I got used to it. And in time I came to see that it wasn’t at all random, this hunger he had for land. There was a plan. He was trusting me not only with commissions but with the knowledge, as it emerged, of a dream that could make him blush at times and lower his eyes before me – it was so large and boyish – or shrink back in wonder at what he had too nakedly revealed.

  So there was, from the beginning, an intimacy in our dealings with one another that was not quite professional, or not merely so, and which drew us into a partnership that was too deep in the end to be broken, save by a breach of trust on my part or some final irrationality on his. He had given himself away. He had made me a sharer in his world, an agent in the achieving of an ambition to which he had already devoted more than half his life.

  Why me? I never did understand that. But his shyness, his gradual unveiling of himself to me as I was allowed to shake out of him the last details of what he wanted and what he was, the softness of the man under the scratchy exterior, his real innocence beyond the slyness and crude native wit, all this touched as well as exasperated, and without ever feeling sure of my ground I grew fond of him, as I believe he was of me. Perhaps he clung to some sentiment from his Southport days, or recalled an earlier secret, deeply shared though never spoken, that already united us. More likely it was through Gerald that he was drawn to me. For it was understood that the real subject of all discourse between us, as he would in time be the recipient of all that we were piece by piece acquiring, the only inheritor of the dream, was Gerald. That too accounted for the emotion that was involved. Measurements, deed numbers, names were a form of code through which Frank Harland could express what he might otherwise admit to only in loving encounters with paint and canvas or in a rage of silence.

  Still, there were aspects of all this that unnerved me. One was the letters from the woman, Gerald’s mother – anguished cries to which, in Frank Harland’s name, I wrote terse, businesslike replies. It disturbed me that when she and Gerald met, as they certainly did, she must show them to him as evidence of his uncle’s hardness of heart and refusal to accept either her rights or her griefs, and that in so far as I had written them, she would name me as well. Though Gerald never referred to the matter, it cast a shadow between us.

  It was Aunt Roo who openly attacked me.

  ‘Phil love, I’m surprised at you. I know you’re a law man and have no interest in anything but facts – facts will destroy the lot of us if we let them, and you know it, that’s what’s so shocking – but you could at least be loyal to friends.’

  ‘But it was Gerald who took me to his uncle’s. He knew what he was doing.’

  ‘Did he? Did he? Oh you’ve got no heart, Phil, I’m sorry to say that but it’s true. The poor kid’s boxed in on all sides and you’re part of it. Can’t you see that? He doesn’t know which way to turn.’

  I brazened it out with Aunt Roo. I was willing to let her think me cold and businesslike if it pleased her. But she was right about one thing. My relationship with Gerald had become increasingly confused.

  In my dealings with Frank I did displace him. But wasn’t that what he wanted? Didn’t it leave him free?

  Playing on an affection he had aroused in me that had much to do with my longing not to be an only child, Gerald had made an elder brother of me, offering me up as the nephew Frank really wanted and ceding to me, in the wake of our earlier rivalry, both his birthright and his girl.

  He had used me, I knew that; but I had agreed to be used as he had agreed to be displaced. I still resented his presence in our uneasy threesome, but my discomfort now took a darker form: as before a brother whose girl I had come to by trickery and low stealth.

  None of this could I have explained to Aunt Roo. She did me an injustice and I felt it, but I would not defend myself.

  ‘You’re all in it,’ she insisted, ‘and you’ll all be responsible if the poor boy’s driven to the edge. That awful Frank Harland on one side, the awful mother on the other, and now you! Playing the uncle’s hand for him in cruel letters that take no account of feelings. The woman has some rights, I suppose.’

  ‘I thought you disapproved of her.’

  ‘I do, I disapprove of her way of life – so far as I’ve heard. She lives with an SP bookie, some sort of Syrian or Albanian, something like that. But a mother has feelings and they ought to be respected. Gerald’s fond of her. He’s torn, poor pet.’

  ‘I do what I’m asked to do.’

  ‘Ah yes, that’s the let-out, you’re not involved. But you are! The poor boy comes to me because he’s got nobody else. He’s in tears sometimes, pulled this way and that between the lot of you. If you saw him then, or if you took your eyes off your damned legal documents – I’m sorry to use such words, but you deserve it – and had to look that woman in the face, you wouldn’t do it, I know you wouldn’t. How can you let yourself?’

  In fact I had already looked the woman in the face, as Aunt Roo put it, if only fleetingly. Dodging into the Astoria one afternoon out of a thunderstorm, and standing blind among the old-fashioned tables with their check cloths and cane-bottomed chairs, I had come upon Gerald and his mother in a corner, leaning together over a pot of tea and a tiered dish of pikelets and afternoon-tea cakes. The woman, I realised from her sharp look, knew me at once. Perhaps I had been pointed out to her on a previous occasion.

  She was smartly dressed in a style that my mother would have called ‘fast’: a pillar-box hat with a checkered bow, a navy-blue suit, white plastic earrings. She was smoking, she wore too much makeup. No one could have predicted, from her air of brassy assurance, the intense, and in its own way guileless, passion of her letters, which rose immediately between us and made me blush.

  As for Gerald, he might have been more embarrassed by the plate of cream cakes, one of which, half-bitten, he held in his hand, and by the smear of icing sugar on his mouth. I saw immediately (or thought I did) what it was that Frank feared from her influence. She brought out the pudgy child in him. But I saw too, in her, something Frank had warned me against and which I had failed perhaps to give full credit to. Gerald had her completely in his power. They looked more like lovers than mother and son – the spoiled young man and the older woman who pays.

  ‘The boy’s a fascinator,’ Frank told me, ‘he can’t help it. It’s a power or a weakness he’s inherited. He uses it to make things easy for himself. He tries it on everyone. You too, I’ve seen it. You’d better watch out. He’ll win you over in the end, he’s bound to, one way or the other, you’ll see. He knows just how to handle you. Well I can’t afford to be won over. He’s won her
already, but there’s no depth to it because there’s no depth to her – a woman who tells you every second week how much she loves, how much she suffers! Real love isn’t talked about. Not in those terms. Oh these people and their suffering! They can spin off whole yards of it at the drop of a hat!’

  From Gerald I had another view.

  I had no need of a warning about the ways he could work on me, or win me over as Frank put it, but I didn’t think it was that – not this time. And it wasn’t, either, mere resentment of Frank’s acknowledged fame, though that too – a mixture of awe before the fact and a refusal to believe in the reality of it – was an element in his hostility to the man; for Gerald really was, in his way, the more sensitive of the two, the more nervously responsive and aware, and had more obviously the fine, the ‘artistic’ temperament.

  What Gerald failed to see was that this had nothing to do with it. Frank’s understanding did not arise from his nerves. It was too broad and strong for that. It didn’t glance or dash at things, wasn’t at all quick. It worked by some slow process of absorption. What Gerald wanted was mystery, and what he had learned in his life with Frank was that there was none; only the question of how greatness – if that is what it was – might exist in a soul that was also petty, spiteful, selfish, ignorant and perverse. He despised Frank but could not get past him.

  But there was something else now that put a chill upon the boy, and it was this that he tried to make me see.

  We were, once again, in a corner of the Criterion. He was hunched over a glass of beer. His faced was pallid and blotched, his voice so low I could barely hear it.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I know you think I’m ungrateful, and weak, and a whinger – isn’t that what he says about me? – but you’ve got no idea, no idea at all, what it’s really like, how sordid and horrible, living in a house with two old men. Uncle Tam’s half-crazy – don’t you see that? He’s spent his whole life as a kind of nursemaid to my grandfather, in one room up there at Killarney – he’s like an old woman. Disgusting! all that white flesh – the breasts! When he goes out shopping he stops in the park, I’ve seen him, to watch the schoolgirls playing netball. And at night his bed’s on the other side of the wall from mine. The walls in that place are like paper, you can hear every breath. I have to listen to him panting, moaning – you know what I mean. It’s horrible. I can’t do it myself because of what I have to hear him doing – it disgusts me, it’s worse than boarding school. The whole house is just a shed really with partitions. At night all the boards creak and the rafters as well – it’s the dew or the day’s heat going out of them, but it sounds like people walking in the hallway or climbing over your head in the beams.

  ‘I can hear him too – the other one. You’d be surprised how much noise old men make in a house like that – the phlegm in their throats, the farts, the things they mutter in their sleep, the sounds they make getting up in the morning – dressing, pissing in the bowl. You can’t get away from it, you can’t shut it out.

  ‘He prowls round his room at night hugging himself – he’s always doing that, have you noticed? Hugging his ribs and hissing through his teeth. I don’t think he ever sleeps. I just lie there sometimes, listening to the boards creak and wondering where he is. And sometimes, when he thinks I’m asleep, he comes and stands in the doorframe and stares. Then he creeps right up to the bed, and squats down with his face close to mine – I can feel his breath – and sort of moans. He doesn’t actually touch me, it’s worse than that. He – I can’t explain it – he does it with his eyes. I turn my head away pretending to be asleep but I can feel it. He stares at the inside of my elbow where my arm’s outside the sheet. I can feel it, it’s like he was a dog licking. I can feel his breath, I get goosepimples. It’s like being licked by a mangy old dog. I lie as still as I can, trying to breathe normally – you know, deeply, as if I was asleep – but I want to scream. And sometimes, you know, I feel I’m going to choke. I could weep with – with shame! – can you understand that? I feel ashamed! I hate him because of what he wants. Oh, I know what he wants. He wants me to love him, that’s what it is, and that’s what disgusts me. It’s a kind of love, all that hovering over me, all that licking – he thinks it’s love, but it disgusts me. He thinks he’s selfless and pure, and he is in a way, but to me it’s – I can’t say it! I feel I should get up and wash when he’s crept out again but I have to lie there in the filth. I listen to him creeping away on his horrible bare feet – I can hear them sticking, and the sucking sound when he lifts them off the lino – and I haven’t even been touched, that’s the thing. I have to sleep in the idea of filth. And the worst is, he must come sometimes when I really am asleep. I can’t bear the thought of it. I wake up half-dead from trying to be awake enough, while I’m sleeping, to know if he’s been there, and what he’s – can you understand any of this? I feel sometimes that I’m getting just like them. I’ll end up scratching my belly just the way Uncle Tam does, while he’s talking to you, and stop combing my hair, and grow breasts, and sit perving on schoolgirls in the park. Or I’ll be pure like him, absolutely eaten up with the need to love someone and with no way I can let myself show it. That’s the worst thing, you know. Not knowing what I am, and being shit-scared of what I’m halfway to becoming. Except that I can’t be like him because I haven’t got any talent and wouldn’t be willing – don’t worry, I know these things! – to pay the price.

  ‘Poor Tam! He’s so good-natured, and he’s never had any sort of life at all. He suffers but can’t break out. I’m fond of him, I really am. Only I can’t bear to look at him sometimes, and I don’t want us to be allies or conspirators or mates, I don’t want to be like him. I can’t bear it when he assumes, because I understand him, and because we’re driven into a kind of alliance against him, that we’re alike. We’re not. We never will be, not ever! I’d rather –’

  His cheeks were feverish; he no longer looked young. I felt for a moment, and the idea scared me, that I might not know him at all. There was a light in his eyes, and an odd whiteness about the mouth that made me think he might end up one day as a fanatic. But of what faith?

  ‘I want to be clean,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I mean by that?’ There were angry tears in his eyes. ‘I want to be straight and open and live a life that’s – but everything around is so filthy. It’s all lies and secrets and mean little plots, and I have to lie and plot as well. I hate it! How can I be clean or straight when it’s all so filthy, and everything is so crooked and mean?’

  I had no reason to doubt his sincerity in all this. The truth of it was too plainly, too painfully there in the hunch of his shoulders and the ugly, pinched look of his mouth and jaw. But there was in everything Gerald did an element of exaggeration. He protected himself from the reality of what he felt by pushing it further – into play-acting.

  So I did not reach out as I might have done. I sat stolid, square, and gave no indication of the turmoil he had aroused in me, and after a moment he let out a kind of laugh. It was very loose and contemptuous and it convinced me more than anything he had said that he might be in real trouble.

  But by then it was too late. He set his jaw at me. He defied me to offer consolation. If I had, I think, he would have hit me.

  [4]

  It happened that I was present in the house at West End on an extraordinary occasion; or perhaps Frank, for some reason of his own, had seen to it that I was there.

  This was the visit, during a trip to a Brisbane eye-specialist, of the father, Clem Harland, and the wife whose advent in the old man’s life, after nearly thirty years of being a widower, had disrupted the household and driven Tam Harland out.

  When I got there the visitors had not yet arrived. Tam, in a highly nervous state, was in an apron, ducking his head in and out of the oven to see after scones. Gerald was at the kitchen table. He seemed amused. I guessed he had been teasing the older man.

  ‘Tam’s in such a state,�
� he announced in a singsong voice. ‘Aren’t you Tam? Afraid of being shown up in front of the lady. Gunna show her what real scones are, aren’t we Tam? Remind poor ol’ dadda what he lost, what he’s missing.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Tam told him, ‘or I’ll belt you one with the fuckin’ iron.’

  ‘Oh, playing tough! Gunna impress daddy, are we, with what a tough little boy we’ve become since we left home? Or is it the lady we’re going to impress? Goodness me, what scones! Mr Harland – I mean – Taaam, where did you ever –?’

  Tam swung around and made to hit him, but Gerald was already on his feet, fists up, dancing, while the older man, light on his toes but heavy-fisted and panting, swiped at him and Gerald darted his head to left and right, laughing.

  ‘All right, Tam, all right, you silly bugger! I know what a temper you’ve got. No need to impress me.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Frank thundered from the doorway opposite. ‘Will you two stop it! Tam! Lay off. Gerald, I would of expected you to have more sense. Your Uncle Tam’s on edge.’

  Gerald laughed.

  ‘Tam,’ the older brother said gently, ‘I’m sorry all this had to be put onto you. It’d suit me a lot better too if they weren’t … The fact is,’ he explained, turning to me, ‘that my father treated Tam shabbily. He’s a very remarkable man, on’y – Gerald, you’d oblige me if you did your hair and changed that shirt.’ He reverted, with a frown, to the subject of the father. ‘There are men, you know, whose power is – difficult to resist. It’s a sign of greatness in some ways. But if it isn’t harnessed and used, it makes them – dangerous.’

  He began, nervously, to beat at his thinning hair with an open palm. It was combed wet in a line across his skull, and his shirt, though tieless, was buttoned to the throat like a boy’s. I couldn’t have known it then, but in Frank Harland’s mind this was a repetition of all those times, more than forty years back, when his father came to see him at Stanthorpe and his aunt had got him ready in just this way: hair watered and combed in a cowlick, a long-sleeved shirt all neatly done up.