by David Malouf
Tam, fussing at the stove, barefoot, untidy, in a floral apron, was reliving other occasions.
It was Gerald who first heard the jumping of the two planks on the footbridge. Still tucking a clean shirt into his slacks, he stepped out into the hallway to greet them.
The old man – he must have been seventy – was magnificent. He had the look, but also the style, of a prosperous and influential squatter, the heir once, the ruler now, of a large and powerful estate. Standing at the threshold of the broken-down verandah in a Harris-tweed jacket and tie, powerful, smooth-cheeked, his thick grey hair all springy with vitality, he might have been paying a visit to a couple of scapegrace sons who were letting the family down by playing, for a spell, at being slum-dwellers. The sons in question appeared one behind the other at the end of the hallway, and looked so spare and shabby-neat the one, and so soft and dishevelled the other, that you rather admired the old man’s tolerance in visiting a place whose every bare patch in the lino, and missing verandah board and odour of unwashed clothes and scraps and old musty spots of damp, must deeply offend him.
‘Frank!’ he called softly, and opened his arms.
Frank Harland visibly shrank. But something at last moved him forward. His feet, in the floppy boots, scraped and were lifted. He was drawn down the hallway and allowed himself to be embraced.
‘Well well,’ the man gurgled. ‘Frank! I can hardly believe it.’
The two figures, locked together in the narrow passage, seemed unable to break. Frank Harland, once he had allowed himself to fall into his father’s arms, was unwilling or unable to step away. The old man was making clucking sounds such as you might use to soothe a child, and patting his son’s back, while Frank clutched at him and sobbed. Gerald, at the door of his room, was mesmerised. His face was dark with embarrassment and a kind of anguished disbelief.
‘Well, well,’ the old man snuffled, breaking away. ‘Tam – son – come ’n give your old dad a hug. You’re not sulking, I hope. You’re not harbouring a grudge.’
Tam too moved forward as if entranced, shaking his head, clutching a dishcloth, and allowed himself to be enfolded. He looked as if he might be about to raise his head and howl.
‘You know Elaine,’ the old man said severely.
Tam nodded. He held out his hand.
‘This is my wife, Elaine,’ he told the rest of us, and the woman, who was shy and pretty, dressed in her best clothes for the city, stepped in over the threshold.
‘Frank,’ she said, ‘Gerald,’ as if getting the names off her tongue would deal with the large and unmanageable maleness of them all, bulking there in the hallway, this family she had acquired of three grown-up sons and a grandson; or would clear some of the emotion that had generated in the narrow passage with its view to a drop.
I felt for her. She was scared to death of Frank. Even when we sat down to Tam’s scones and cups of scalding tea she seemed to find no room for manoeuvre in this rough household. Her bones were too brittle. Her little finger, when she raised it, looked as if it might snap off. She was afraid, if she touched anything, of acquiring a smear of dust and thus drawing attention to how much would have to be done here if the place was to be restored to decency and a measure of cosiness or grace. Not a doily in sight, and the teapot lid did not match. Neither did the cups. Not even as a broken set.
Tam watched fiercely for the least sign of condescension.
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘isn’t this grand! A real family occasion.’
Tam poured, doing the honours. He relaxed a little once the comfortable old teapot was in his hand, and the scones, which were admired, had begun to impose their own shapes and consistency on such words as found their way round buttery fragments. When all was done he sat looking large and desolate on a footstool.
Frank, glowingly silent, had retired to the window.
The old man was reminiscing and his voice immediately charged the room with its own power; it had a wonderful softness. Tam’s shoulders sagged. Frank cringed.
Clem Harland was speaking of the early days after the death of his second wife, when he and all five of his boys had lived together in the one-roomed shack at Killarney. Well, they wouldn’t know the old place now. It had been renovated. New bathroom and lav – inside of course; a proper kitchen, a verandah with louvres. Not like the old days: the long lamplit evenings when they had sat together round the kitchen table while he told them stories or played a tune or two on the mouth organ. Frank was already doing his first bit of sketching by then. Yes, the first attempts of the artist belonged to those days, and who knows, maybe they owed something to the old place – Frank had always been fond of it. Certainly Killarney itself must have been an influence, couldn’t help being. Early mornings when they had all got up together in winter fog and traipsed around half-asleep, bumping into one another in the dark. They all hated to wake up, those kids – well so did he! – they liked their warm beds – and most of all poor Jim. And the frost was terrible some days, the ground cracked under your boots, and the cows lumbering in out of the mist, which was half their warm breath and the warmth coming off their flanks, and your hands so stiff you couldn’t hardly feel them till they warmed up a bit on the udders. Once you’d got the damned beasts into the stall, that is! Oh, and bath nights, the tin tub beside the sink. And how many was it, Frank? – six, seven lots of water in the old kettle? – the little ones, Tam and Pearsall together, last into the suds.
‘The little ones!’ The old man, indicating large, uncomfortable Tam, and reminding his wife of Pearsall, whom they had seen the night before, thought that a great joke. ‘Well, time works changes, eh?’
But it had been wonderful, all that. Soaping their necks, giving their hair a good scrub and rinse – it was the days when kids got nits at school, you couldn’t be too careful – while he told them some of the odd things that had happened to him. Odd things – very! Like a ghost lady he had seen once, up at the ruins of the old homestead, who had looked right through him as if he was the ghost, because he was so desperate then, so young and poor and with so little hope in the world, that he had considered – seriously considered – doing away with himself. Well, they were hard times. And now look at him! Fifty years later – no, more, more – and he was still going strong, he had escaped that ghost lady’s melancholy predictions – and here they were, all reunited again. Well, not quite all. Not Clyde, poor lad! Perhaps it was him the ghost lady had had her eye on. Could that be? Could it? Could she have had Clyde in mind, so many years before the boy was even thought of? That grief, though he couldn’t have guessed it then, so many years ahead, was so much larger than the one he had been sitting in the dumps of when she’d looked at him, the gloom of a poor boy full of ambition and no prospects. Well, not Clyde, God rest him! And not Jim either. His eldest, Jim, wasn’t here either, to share in the . . . Well, that was the Japs, no one could have predicted that. They’d never known, any of them, that they were in the shadow of another war. But Pearsall. What about him?
‘You’re wrong about Pearse, you know, Frank, you’re too hard on him! I don’t say myself that I like to see him earning his living as a – a racecourse tout, not with the education he had. It’s a disappointment to me too. But he gave us a real slap-up meal, didn’t he love? Crabs! At a place at Sandgate. And his friend, Mrs Welles, is a real lady. Very refined and with a sense of humour, whatever they say of her. Anyway, we found her so, didn’t we, love?’
Tam through all this had sat hunched on the footstool, visibly affected, both by his father’s physical presence and by the whole world he was summoning up, which was still the only safety he had ever known; he looked now as if he might weep openly for his own exile from it, or for its having fallen in such ruins about him.
Frank was fidgety. He didn’t interrupt to deny the old man’s picture of things, even to defend himself over the matter of Pearsall, but he was not easy. He kept his head half-
turned, as if he dared not meet the old man’s eye, and in that way could hide the extent to which these old scenes, so painfully happy, grieved him, and the exasperation he felt at his father’s easy sentimentality. He writhed. Once or twice he held his hand up as if to ward something off. Finally he sat just like Tam, hunched and defeated, while Clem Harland, in full flight, showed off a little now that he had made his point about Pearsall and established his ascendancy; not only for his new bride, who was clearly impressed, but for Gerald and myself.
What struck me, even more than the man’s extraordinary vitality and the seductiveness of his talk, was some missing term he provided, and not only physically, between the two brothers. I had seen no relationship till now between Tam’s soft passivity and those qualities of austerity and bleak self-discipline that were in Frank the moral counterpart of his leathery toughness. But here was their common original.
What was sleek and plump in the old man – the result, you felt, of years of pampering and self-regard – had become in Tam a fatal laxness. The one quality he had failed to inherit was a belief in his own centrality. Tam did not have it because he had ceded that from the beginning to his father.
With Frank it was the opposite. He might have taken his father as a model for all he was not or would not be; or allowing for the large space in the world that his father occupied, and which he too conceded, sought qualities in himself that would make hard use of the rest. I had seen in Frank, on occasions when he wanted to make up to me for some deception or some imposition on my time or patience, a kind of charm that was very like what now appeared in the father. But it was shy in Frank’s case; he distrusted it, it came too close to his vanity; which I also recognised the source of, and which he also distrusted. I thought I saw too what Frank had meant when he told me once: ‘If you want to achieve anything in this world you’ve got to go against nature. Your own nature.’
Such a radical view of things was beyond Gerald, and it was for this reason perhaps that he missed Frank’s powerful originality. As for his own, which had always been problematical, it seemed deeply compromised now by this garrulous old man, whose charm was his own charm raised to the highest pitch and shamelessly exploited. He blushed to see himself so nakedly exposed.
The old man, regardless, talked on. He was too pleased with himself and the occasion, too deeply in love with his own voice and the warmth of his feelings to be aware of the consternation he caused. Suddenly, without warning, Tam rose and fled, and Frank, with an abrupt gallantry I had never before seen in him, offered to show Elaine ‘our bit of scrub’. Gerald and I were left alone with the man.
‘Call me Grandpa,’ he insisted with something like a whine. ‘I am your grandpa, you know, an’ you’re the only one. I’d like to hear it. Grandpa. It’s been too long, boy, too long.’ He made to put a hand on Gerald’s shoulder but Gerald ducked. ‘You’re like your father,’ the old man said softly, ‘when he was your age. My boy Jim.’
Frank had led the woman on to the back porch, where she stood for a time admiring the drop. When I picked them up again, minutes later, on the jungle slope that led down to the river, he was raising his hand to break a spider’s web. He looked back grinning. Gallantly or with malice – I couldn’t tell at that distance – he beckoned her in.
The old man, meanwhile, was engaged on yet another ghost story. I had missed the beginning.
‘“You jus’ go an’ get cleaned up,” she says, “an’ it’ll be on the table before you can say Jack Robinson, it’s your favourite, steak ’n kidney.” Well, I was astonished! You see, steak ’n kidney was my favourite, but how could the woman ’av known? She’d never seen me in ’er life before, an’ I’d never seen her. I just stopped at that house because it looked clean, and cheap, an’ because I’d been on the road all day an’ thought, well I’ve had enough, I’ll hole up for the night. So I step out of the kitchen, wash a bit – the bathroom was right across the hall – and when I come back it’s already on the table. Steak ’n kidney – one of the best I’ve ever eaten.
‘We sit on either side o’ the table, tuck in, and don’t say a blind word. Which is unusual for me – I like a bit of a talk when I’m eating, always have, it’s more sociable. But she wasn’t the type. She just watches me eat, and asks once or twice how it is and whether I’d like another helpin’, and when we’re finished she clears the table, puts all the dishes in the sink and says: “You go on if you’re tired, I won’t be long.” Righty-oh, I say. But when I go out into the hall I don’t really know which way t’ go, and when I glance back she’s there at the kitchen door holdin’ a tea towel, keepin’ an eye on me. As if she wants to see – you know, if I know the room.
‘Well, there were only two rooms. Hers was on the right. The other one, on the left, must’ve belonged to ’er son – or ’er brother, I don’t know. I stepped in, and I could feel she was still there in the light of the kitchen door, listening. I knew she hadn’t come after me because I’d of heard the boards creak. She was waiting but, listening. Weird, I think. I was beginnin’ t’ get the creeps.
‘I put the light on, and the room is very clean, which I knew it would be from the outside of the house. Good bed, good springs to it. Only things don’t feel right. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was the shoes. You see, all round the walls, there were these pairs of shoes, all neatly set out side by side and polished. A dead man’s shoes! That’s the thought that come into me head. And straight away I saw what it was all about. The woman thought I was someone else – a ghost of some brother or son who’d got killed in the war. That’s what it was. I’d eaten the steak ’n kidney and now she wanted to see if I’d get into the bed.
‘Well, I didn’t! I tell you, I was so scared all of a sudden that when I went down that hallway she might’ve thought I was a ghost, I was as white as one, and shakin’ so hard I could barely stay on me pins. I rushed right out of the front door, and didn’t stop till the next town.
‘I did feel sorry but – for the woman I mean. There were lots of women left like that, in those days, after the war. Maybe she’d never had any final news an’ had just gone on hoping. I don’t know. Sometimes later I used to think, well maybe I was a fool and missed an opportunity – you know – I’d been hearin’ too many jokes of the commercial traveller variety. But I don’t think it was that. She didn’t try to stop me or anything. I went flying right past her. She was still standin’ there with the tea towel in her hands, she didn’t even call out. It was scary. I’ve often thought of it.’
Frank and the woman had come back – she was all smiles now, quite charmed with him – and their appearance in the room broke a kind of spell. It was something in the man’s voice, some quality of low-keyed breathlessness and wonder in him at his own life, that mesmerised and drew you in.
They left soon after, for the good hotel room Frank had provided. We saw them to the gate, and Frank, a little anxious, asked me to go and find Tam. When I went down to his favourite hiding place under the house he was sitting on the old wood-block in the half-dark, hunched up like a sulky child and hugging a bottle of Fourex.
‘Are they gone?’ he asked. I told him they were waiting to say goodbye, but he refused to budge. ‘Well, you’ve seen ’im now,’ he said tearfully, ‘you c’n see why I’m so upset. That woman’s not the sort to look after him the way I did. I loved that place! It was all I had. Nobody wants me here.’ I tried to reason with him but he would not come up, and in the end it was Frank who went down to him.
Gerald, still gloomily subdued by all he had seen, came to the door with me. He stopped at the hole in the verandah; peering down past the forest of stumps to where Frank and Tam were seated side by side on the wood-block.
‘Look at them,’ he said.
I looked. The two figures leaned together. Frank was clasping Tam in his arms like a child, soothing the man’s sobs with a low cooing that was so gentle, so warm and feminine, that for a moment
I shared Gerald’s surprise, though not the disgust or shame or sense of bewildered rage with which he suddenly tore himself away, broke past me and plunged into his room.
A week later, with a hundred pounds in banknotes that he had stolen out of a tea caddy, Gerald disappeared. He was traced to Sydney and brought home. Frank refused to charge him and there was, Tam told me, no scene; but when Tam went down next day to sit on the wood-block under the house, and comfort himself or sulk, there was something new there, swinging feet-down from one of the beams.
‘Honest t’ God Phil, I’ll never get over this. Never. Nor will Frank. I just looked up and –’ He closed his eyes, shook his head and drove the terrible image off. ‘I’ll never go down there again, not ever. It gives me the shivers just t’ think of it. I couldn’t! Not f’ the life of me.’
I thought of Gerald’s fascination with the place, the way he had set his eye to the hole in the verandah boards and stared, but never went close, already feeling perhaps the tug upon him of what was to happen there in its forest of stumps but unable as yet to make out what it was. I remembered the shiver in his voice – ‘Isn’t it scary?’ – when he invited me to look down and breathe its dust, asking me, I thought now, to make light of it, to assure him it was all safe as houses down there, that it was his own too lively imagination that made it a place he dared not approach. It was his horror of it, rather than the act itself, that haunted me. I could imagine that. The rope business I could not. He would have had to crawl up through its layer of dust till the beam was low enough, and the ladder he was dragging had purchase on the slope. Minutes! I could imagine that. When I thought of it the blood rose in me. I choked.
‘I don’t know, Phil,’ my aunt told me when I appeared on her doorstep, ‘whether I really want to see you. I don’t want to see anybody just now. But especially you.’
