by David Malouf
Long years ago, when my life had not yet declared itself to me, I had thought of devoting myself to Latin and Greek. I liked the idea (or thought I did) of a language that had stopped growing and was past change. I thought it might be safe. I had an odd idea of the classics, being essentially a romantic, and an odd idea as well of what might constitute safety.
Now, so much later, in Sydney, I was offered another chance, and it amused me that it should appear in what seemed to me to be a Roman form – except that Rome was not the finished dream of a provincial youth in love with his own lateness, but what it must always have been, a slippery world of cheap deals, ruthless bloodlettings, shabby betrayals; of flesh, knives, pillows, costumes, cash – I mean my Aunt Roo’s world, with Ashes, broken nose and all, as an emperor from the provinces and my Aunt Roo, with her frizzled afro and her flat-chested diaphanous gowns, as his very visible consort and Mistress of the Revels.
‘Listen pet,’ she told me, ‘your Uncle Ashes wants to do something for you. He’s soft-hearted really, whatever they say of him. He respects you, he appreciates your abilities, he thinks of you as a son. His own sons, poor pet, are monsters. They’ve done everything they can to hurt him – it’s not just that they’re Hungarians.’
One of these sons had started up a rival transport business that had driven his father’s company to the wall. I had a Brisbane client, a friend of Ashes, who had gone bankrupt over the affair. The other worked for a libertarian newspaper and regularly pilloried his father and all he stood for.
‘Why don’t you let Ashes help you, Phil? He’d do it because he’s fond of you, and because he’s a little bit fond of me as well and you’re my nephew, the only one I have.’ She smiled weakly, and laying her hand over mine she pressed it. ‘I feel, Phil – it’s difficult to say this – I feel we’d be doing something for your father. But also, you know, for your poor grandfather. I wasn’t always as kind to your grandfather as I should have been. I regret that now and it’s too late to tell him. I’d do anything to have him back. Can you understand any of this? Can you, pet? I feel so alone sometimes. Except for you and poor Connie there’s no one left, no one who’s actual family.’ She shook her head, went quiet and I feared she might actually produce tears.
‘Aunt Roo,’ I said firmly.
‘Yes kitten, I know. But sometimes I can’t help it. Will you let Ashes speak to you? Will you let him help you?’
‘I’ll listen, I always do, don’t I? But, you know, I’m doing quite well already.’
‘In Brisbane?’
‘Why not?’
‘In that backwater? Defending radicals and riff-raff?’
‘Aunty, we’ve been through all that. But I promise, if Ashes has anything to say, to offer, I’ll consider it, I really will.’
He was a shy man, and I wondered sometimes, hearing my radical friends describe him, how he had come to be an ogre. I never heard him say a bad word of anyone. They were all good fellows really, even his enemies. ‘Zough’ (assuming an accent he did not have) ‘not so clever, you know, ass zey sink,’ and he would tap his skull with a forefinger and show his gapped teeth in a grin.
He liked each morning to stand at the breakfast room window (he would consult his watch and get up from the table) to see the flag raised on the lawn. Standing very solemnly with his shoulders back, he would watch the colourful rag creep up the pole, like the servant of some far-flung empire renewing himself at the source.
Some mornings, in his shabby silk gown, he would look quite bowed and defeated. Perhaps he had woken in the night and heard his god deserting him, creeping away over the Axminster carpet. He had a wounded look: no longer the emperor but the emperor’s statue, even its godlike power in dispute and the broken nose even further mutilated by irreverent hands. Shuffling to the window, he would watch the flag go up, and it was as if the uniformed attendant was the merest sop to reality – the flag climbed by the force of his attention upon it in an act of heroic will. When he turned he looked younger, fresher, fully restored to his own being. He rubbed his hands, grinned, descended on the world again, where it sat in the shape of an egg in a china cup, and tapped and cracked it.
Watching him spoon coddled eggwhite into his mouth, I thought that the mysteries of power might be greater even than the mysteries of love.
And the man really was fond of me. He would take my hand sometimes in his hairy fist and shake it so that I too felt the animal power; but was too shy to say anything or to make a clear offer. Perhaps he feared letting me see too deeply into his affairs. He wanted me to play the ideal son to his ideal father, but the facts of how he exercised authority would not bear scrutiny. (His own sons had done just what he expected of them: shown themselves true offspring of the wolf.) What he preferred was to call me into his den when he had a record on, settle me with a glass, pour himself a Carlsberg, and with his sleeves rolled up share with me, beyond the actualities of ordinary discourse, the triumphs of that other boy from Eisenstadt who had also made good, his beloved Haydn.
‘He is the real master, you know’ he would tell me with passion. ‘He’s half a peasant, you can hear that – hear? – that drone? – and half a prince, but superior absolutely to his own princes. No fuss, no fuss, that’s the master for you.’ He would draw his great head down to his shoulders, tapping his foot and making little percussive noises with his lips. ‘That drone he would have heard as a boy – oh, any Sunday, from a village band. And he takes it into the halls of princes!’
‘So what do you think of all this?’ he asked me once as we wandered glass in hand through the throng. His gesture suggested that he had just conjured the whole show up.
I shrugged my shoulders and began, with a preliminary ‘Oh,’ what was never meant to be a reply. He laughed and slapped me lightly on the back, and I was reminded, in a ghostly way, of Uncle Haro; I wondered if Aunt Roo had ever seen the resemblance. One of his secrets, I saw, was to make no judgements of people, and no demands either so long as they did not get in the way of his will.
‘Look,’ he said with a grin. ‘It’s Hector.’
Close by, in a group of overdressed women, a man was standing on one foot like an elegant waterfowl, holding the other, which was obscenely naked and white, in the air before him. Hanging from the ends of his fingers, and retaining the shape of the foot like a black skin he had slipped off, was a semi-transparent sock.
He was a Scotsman called Hector McPhail, a handsome man of sixty with a crest of silver hair, an unmistakable figure. I had seen a woman swim up to him once at one of these promiscuous affairs and say breathlessly: ‘It’s you, I know it is! You’re Hector McPhail.’ ‘Oh my dear woman,’ he told her grandly, sweeping a hand over his shining hair, ‘I wish I were. You do me too much honour, to take me for that extraordinary genius!’
He was a painter, very much admired and not at all a fake; but a talent for self-promotion, his infallible touch, and the success it had brought him, made him fear that he was. He drank too much and was a great performer in front of the ladies.
‘You see,’ he was explaining now, ‘we all have a totem, just like the abos, but a secret one, though our bodies sometimes betray it. I’ve got these webbed feet for instance. See?’
He displayed one, standing firm on the other like a dancer, and did not wobble. He lifted his head on the rather scraggy neck and showed his crest. The naked foot, which looked as if it had never seen sunlight, was indeed webbed.
The ladies looked at it askance; as if it might stand for something other than itself, or as if a great man’s feet, if they were not of clay, ought to remain discreetly hidden. Or maybe they feared that his penetrating eye had discerned their own totem: the mushroom, the butcher-bird, the red-necked paddymelon.
He glanced up, caught my eye, gave a half-shy grin and said: ‘Hello, Phil, how’s the old Frank?’
The ladies turned to see who it was but saw no one they recognised
.
Hector’s enquiry was ritual. He admired Frank and had often asked me with real solicitude if there was anything he could send him, anything he might need. But this public question, the result usually of my surprising him in a performance he was not quite proud of, was a spell to ward off an alien and uneasy spirit.
‘Now Sir Charles there, Ashes,’ he announced, ‘is a kind of giant panda, see?’
Uncle Ashes beamed.
In her old way of deep loyalty to ‘causes’, Aunt Roo introduced me once again to Jacky, since she too had ‘got somewhere’. She had made a name for herself (it wasn’t her own, of course) as a designer of trim custom-made clothes for the boutiques. She was married, separated and had two small boys.
‘Poor Jacky. He was a brute that Bailey Gayle, I can’t tell you the life he led her. She’s so brave! But she always was, Jacky, she’s got grit. She stuck to him when any other woman would have . . . Oh, I could have predicted the sort of hopeless type she’d go for! Smooth as cream. But he beat her up on the quiet, she was always having to lie and hide the bruises. Soft but brutal, you know the sort, they’re always like that. Blond, puffy. He had lovely white hands that looked as if they wouldn’t know how to make a fist – no visible bones. But he broke the poor girl’s arm once, then went to all his friends – his women friends as well as the men – and whined for sympathy because she’d made him violent. Well, that was his line – expecting people to take pity on him because he was a brute. She needs something good to happen to her, she’s been unfortunate. And she’s got a soft spot for you, Phil, deep down, she always did have. You were the type she should have gone for.’
‘What type’s that?’ I asked ironically.
Aunt Roo gave me one of her looks. She had no use for irony. ‘Well not a brute, anyway. Because you know, pet, you’re quite tough in the end. It’s the soft men go for violence.’
‘Is this another of your theories, Auntie?’
‘No, it’s observation. I’ve been around long enough, you know, to do some observing of my own.’
Just the same, Jacky, when we finally got round to speaking of it, had a different story to tell.
‘It’s true what Bailey says, though he does himself no good going round confessing to people. It’s disgusting, in fact. He ought to have more pride. But we were happy enough for a while.’ Her brow creased. Always utterly honest with herself she made an amendment. ‘No, that’s not true either – it was blissful. Only I frustrated him, I was too dissatisfied with things, too restless, he had to hit out to save himself. Then he found he got more satisfaction out of that than . . . Well, maybe it was what I wanted as well, the bruises were proof of something. But Roo’s wrong, I didn’t hide them. I went round showing them off like medals! People bring out the worst in one another. There are no rules. Actually, I look at him sometimes, great soppy blond thing that he is, when he comes round to take the boys, and I think he’s still the most delicious man I ever saw. That’d shock Roo. She’d think I was crazy. But there it is.’
It came to be a custom that on afternoons when I was free I would go out in the green van she drove to help Jacky make deliveries. We would sit sipping flagon white in little partitioned spaces at the back of boutiques, among the new creations on hangers, while Jacky and her friends – easy, self-confident girls who were mostly separated, as she was – laughed, joked, teased and drew me in. I felt like a schoolboy, raw and provincial. I had no talent for slipping in and out of skins; it required a kind of wit I entirely lacked. I felt the weight of my seriousness. Though they were not unkind. Just quietly amused that people elsewhere, it seemed, lived differently.
It was more than a difference of style, which was the word they used over and over. It was, I thought, a question of character – an old-fashioned word that nobody used at all. It had to do with pasts, with futures. To justify myself to them I would have had to produce my whole life, my father with his small-town dandyism and extravagance, my grandfather, Aunt Ollie, Aunt Roo as she had been in the old days and was now. It would have been the history of a place more coherent than this, more settled, and for all its tropical realities of heat and storm, more English – all terms that had no currency here. Most of all, I would have had to produce Frank; not as the Bottlebrush Man of the newspaper headlines but as he was.
It was my devotion to Frank that I might have found it hardest to account for. What had begun casually, almost by accident, had become a vocation – that was how I saw it; and not just a vocation either; a fate. When I looked back to the beginning (but where had it begun? At the Pier Pictures, in my father’s interest in prodigies and lame ducks?) and puzzled over myself, over a temperament and all that had shaped it, Frank was central, I could see that now. Everything had conspired to make him so. I had developed, I guessed, some of his oddness – that too was a matter of character declaring itself at last.
In my relationship with Jacky it was Frank now, not Gerald, who stood between us. Years back, when we had parted and gone our ways, seeking lives to replace the one we might have shared, it was Frank who had become my responsibility. For Jacky it was her boys.
Two small, insistent bodies, very different from one another and too stubborn in their demands to be ignored, they were called Errol and Mark. I was fond of them but would not let them call me uncle, though they would have preferred it; it would have made things easier with their friends.
[3]
The island always had something new for him. He spent long hours poking about in bits of scrub, among sandy patches where blackboys grew among shimmering, sunlight-silvered grasstops, always with an eye for the detail that was essential and repeated, small-scale and large: the coiled shellshape of fern buds or the line of regular knobs along the backbone of a frond.
Each morning, just after dawn, he took a solitary walk along the shore. From far off I would see him splashing through channels where the beach was scored with light, stooping in his old hat to examine a ghost crab frozen on the sand and waiting to scuttle off down a pinhole, the three-toed print of an oyster-catcher, or the bird itself holding its profile against the sea, its scissor-beak shut but its eye, sharper than the beak, alert to pounce. Gulls scattered before him, lifting their legs out of the wet, and took off yelping, clappering. When he came back it would be with new additions to the hoard of beach finds that lay in piles on tabletops and rickety shelves or in heaps outside the entrance to the tent: land things the sea had taken that came back shaped by the sea, the shucking of forests, transparent crab or cicada shapes where a creature had slipped out of itself, twists of frayed rope, horned driftwood, moulded plastic, lumps of pumice, cuttlefish bones.
One afternoon, turning over all this evidence of the island’s life, and of the life around it, I found something unlikely. ‘What’s this, Frank?’
He was taken off-guard for a moment. As always when first challenged he closed himself tight against scrutiny, then with a shy grin opened up, let me in on a secret. ‘It’s a present,’ he told me. ‘From a young lady.’
It was a little gold-and-black-striped tiger in nylon fur, of the kind that bobs about over dashboards or in the rear windows of cars.
‘There are these young people. They come over to surf. They’ve been coming – oh, for ages. They drop in sometimes for a cuppa. Jeff and Darren are the boys and the girl’s Katie. They don’t read the newspapers so they don’t know I’m a misfit. They seem – well, they’ve sort of adopted me, they call me –’ He gave a chuckle and would have swallowed the word, but at last got it out. ‘Pop! They call me Pop.’ He glanced up to see how I took it. ‘They’re not just being kind, you know. They treat me – well you’ll see how. The boys are very beautiful. It’s frightening.’
He sat very still, grown serious again, and shook his head over whatever vision it was he had called up; he was not easy with it. He turned away to his work, and we sat on in silence while bees stumbled about on their rounds, flies
bubbled or whizzed, and the long, downward-pointing gumleaves turned from pink to grey as the sun shifted.
I did see them at last. One Sunday afternoon when we were seated together in the deepening light, Frank hunched over his work, I on that occasion reading to him from a new book, there was a shout from below. Frank, brush in hand, went to the edge of the workshop. A barefoot, half-naked figure had appeared about twenty yards off on the white-sand path.
‘Hi Pop, seeyah!’
‘Hi Jeff. Aren’t you coming up?’
‘Nah, you got visitors, we’ll seeyah next week. Just wanted to make sure you were okay.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Good then. Seeyah Satterday.’
Frank lifted his hand and stood for a moment watching the figure move off in silhouette through the line of trees.
‘That was Jeff,’ he told me when he had come back and settled. ‘He’s a panelbeater at Barnes Auto. He’s the one that does the talking. Darren’s a house-painter. All he ever says is unreeel.’ He chuckled and repeated it in something like the boy’s voice: ‘Unreel! Katie says hiya, then she starts cleaning up. She reckons I’m a bit of a mess – can’t see why, can you?’ He glanced round at the shambles that was his camp. I had seldom seen him in a better humour. ‘She’s doing a diploma in Human Movements, whatever that is. I’d rather not think.’
