The Great World

by David Malouf

  In a china shell above the basin was a fresh little cake of soap, very smooth and white. He smelled it, then carefully washed his hands. The smell was allspice.

  He looked at his nails, took a little brush, and scrubbed them. They didn’t come clean, not quite, but with soap like this they would eventually, he was sure of it.

  When he dried his hands the soap smell was still on them. It was still on them when he came downstairs. He checked, in a new rush of confidence, just before he went into the room where Mr Warrender, Pa, was waiting to show him about.

  The Warrenders’ was a big old-fashioned house, dilapidated in parts and modern in others, with a cast-iron verandah in front, another wooden verandah at the back that had been closed in with pink and green glass to make a sleep-out, and on either side a squat, steep-roofed tower. It stood in a garden of firs and bunyah-pines, and to the left, with no fence between, was a factory, a square brick building with bars on the windows and a paved yard behind that was flagged and full of carboys and barrels. The barrels were brought in on trucks with ‘Needham’s’ painted on the side in a flourish of gilt. When Vic and Mr Warrender came up, one of these trucks was parked at the loading bay. Two men in leather aprons were rolling a barrel down a plank.

  ‘Hullo, Alf,’ Mr Warrender said to the older of them. ‘How’s it going?’

  Alf set his boot against the side of the barrel to steady it and said: ‘She’s right, Mr Warrender. Got a good load on today.’ He drew the back of his hand across his nose, which was running, and looked at Vic.

  ‘This is Vic,’ Mr Warrender said. ‘Vic, this is Alf Lees – and Felix.’

  Felix was a dark youth with muscles and a smirk. He said nothing. He stood with his hands under his leather apron and flapped. Vic thought at first that this was some sort of insult. He reddened and looked about to see if Mr Warrender had noticed. But Felix was rolling his eyes up, bored, his big hands under the apron, which flapped and flapped.

  ‘Vic’s come to stay with us,’ Mr Warrender explained, as if these men needed to know, and Alf, with his boot against the side of the barrel, nodded.

  ‘I thought I’d show him round.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘We won’t get in the way.’

  Mr Warrender’s shyness suddenly overcame him, and Alf, his boot against the barrel, steadying it, also looked uncomfortable.

  Vic saw for the first time now another of Mr Warrender’s oddnesses. He had difficulty in bringing things to a conclusion. He started off well enough but didn’t know how to go on. He stood looking down at the pavement, lifting his huge bulk up and down, very rhythmically, on the toes of his shoes. After a moment, to Vic’s surprise, he began to hum.

  ‘Well,’ Alf said abruptly, ‘no rest for the wicked. C’mon, Felix. Don’t just stand there,’ and, ignoring Mr Warrender, he took his foot away and allowed the barrel to move on to the bottom of the plank.

  Mr Warrender, relieved of his difficulty, said genially, ‘So long, boys.’

  Vic, glancing back, saw that Felix, under his flop of black hair, was smirking after them. Alf made a gesture to him to get on.

  The moment you went through into the dark, high-raftered gloom of the factory itself you were aware of activity; not visible activity, there was very little of that, but a brewing and bubbling that made the air tremble and produced a perceptible heat. It was like crossing the line into a new climate. The atmosphere was thicker. You began immediately to sweat.

  A great vat was the source of all this. Mr Warrender led Vic up to it, and for a moment he stood regarding the thing with a kind of awe that struck Vic as surprising; the continuous low hum of it seemed to put a spell on him. He bent his head to the metal surface as if he were listening for a message there that would provide the clue to something that had long puzzled him. Only the message, it seemed, was in a language he had failed to learn.

  The bulk of the thing under the high rafters, and Mr Warrender’s respectful silence, made Vic think of an altar. It was, little as he knew about churches, the only thing that would explain the sense Mr Warrender gave of being in the presence of something that was both grand and invisible.

  Two men wearing white coats appeared round the side of the vat, and one of them, after a brief nod, went back again. The other, looking none too pleased, Vic thought, came on.

  ‘What is it?’ Vic was asking. ‘What are they making?’

  The man in the white coat had come right up to them now, and Mr Warrender made a little gesture in his direction, as if the right to answer, perhaps, were his. But when the man said nothing, he was forced to go on.

  ‘Soap, Vic. It’s soap. In this vat here we’ve got fats – tallow mostly – that’s what Alf and Felix were bringing in – and caustic soda. That’s right, isn’t it, Hicks?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the man in the white coat said.

  ‘This is Vic,’ Mr Warrender told him. ‘Vic, this is Mr Hicks. He’s our manager. Then,’ he went on, ‘when it’s all been boiled by the steam that’s going in there – you can feel the steam, eh? – the soap separates out from the glycerines,’ (he sounded like a boy repeating a lesson) ‘and when we’ve boiled it again, only with brine this time, we get soap.

  ‘Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘that’s a very superficial version of what happens, eh Hicks?’

  Vic could see that Mr Hicks, in his white coat and round gold-rimmed glasses, thought it was very superficial, and that Mr Warrender had not explained it very well, but Vic’s sympathy was with Mr Warrender.

  Mr Hicks moved round now and stood between them and the vat, as if he had to protect the thing, and what was mysteriously happening there, from the sort of superficial interest that might actually prevent it from taking place. Vic felt the hostility he projected. Impatience, too. No doubt he wanted to get back to his own part in the process. Mr Warrender might be the owner, but they were on his ground.

  Vic, who had a strong sense of these things, of territory, saw that and found himself feeling protective of Mr Warrender and a little injured on his behalf. He seemed out of place here, yet the factory was his.

  ‘Further along,’ he was saying, ‘we have what we call pitching and settling.’ Vic looked for the curl of Hicks’s lip. ‘One day, Mr Hicks will take you through the whole thing – eh Hicks? – and you can see it all from whoa to go.’

  He was running out of steam. In a moment they would come again to one of his awkward silences. But this wasn’t quite the end.

  ‘All these processes,’ he said, and you could see that it was the first thing so far that really interested him, ‘are called “the changes”.’ He reddened a little as he said this. The word, for him, was charged. ‘Pretty poetic, eh, for just soap?’

  Mr Hicks was scowling, he couldn’t hide it. He was affronted. Maybe he felt something proprietorial about this word, and did not care, since it had a precise scientific meaning, to have Mr Warrender use it in his own way; or maybe he objected to his even telling it at all. Mr Warrender, he guessed, from Hicks’s point of view, was not being respectful enough, or his respectfulness was of the wrong kind. The look was dismissive.

  ‘Well, thank you, Hicks, for letting us into your sanctum. Mr Hicks is pretty strict about visitors, Vic. We’re privileged.’

  Mr Warrender was talking of Hicks the way you talk about a child, humouring him, but in a way that Hicks, you could see, did not care for. He shook hands with Vic, nodded briefly to Mr Warrender, and stepped back behind the vat. Mr Warrender visibly relaxed.

  ‘Times are a bit rough, you know,’ he explained to Vic as they turned and went out under the lintel into the blinding sunlight of the yard. ‘The big companies have got us by the short hairs, if you’ll pardon the expression, we’re all men here. The makers, you know,’ and his voice took on the fruity tones of an ad on the wireless, ‘of Lux toilet soap. We’re out of our depth.’ But even this he said as if he were repeating a lesson. ‘So, young feller,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’


  ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Warrender, ‘so do I. But I didn’t grow up with it, you know. That was Mrs Warrender. Her father. And liking, old fellow, isn’t quite good enough.’

  He paused, looked at Vic, and, after considering a moment, decided not to go on.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we’d better go and take a look at the girls. Otherwise they’ll feel neglected. You’ll like the girls.’

  Some of the girls, it turned out, were over sixty. They were packers and they worked in an overwhelming scent of that allspice Vic had been so delighted by upstairs. Mr Warrender was very gallant with them, and they made a fuss of him and of Vic too.

  ‘So,’ Mr Warrender said, ‘now you’ve seen the whole show. We’ll just slip round to the kitchen and see if Meggsie can find us a nice cup of tea.’

  3

  HE GREW FOND of the Warrenders, especially of Mr Warrender, Pa. He was delighted at last to give his softer instincts scope. He had wanted, always, to be the perfect son, and this was easy because the Warrenders were so nearly what he might have conceived of as the perfect parents. He put the past behind him, rediscovered a kind of innocence, and let his spirit loose, slipping back into his heavier nature only when he had shut a door behind him. He could look grim then, and Mrs Warrender, if she had seen it, would have been stricken. A nervous woman, always on the lookout for what was about to go wrong, she might have had to ask herself what they had done to the boy to make him so miserable.

  The Warrenders were a source of endless astonishment to him. He had known a life till now that was too harsh to allow for playfulness. The poker games his parents had gone in for, all cigarette smoke and beer, had been rough affairs.

  A spirit of boisterous exuberance prevailed in the Warrender house. The games they preferred were childish ones, played at night with all the lights off and a lot of noise. Even Ma, rushing about in her stockinged feet and with her hair flying, would give herself up to easy recklessness, shrieking louder than either of the girls. The girls were wild enough – they were encouraged to be – but Ma outdid them.

  Aunt James, who was too old for what she called ‘high-jinks’, would sit in the dark of the dining room and laugh under her breath, while Ellie or Lucille or Ma tiptoed in and hid behind her chair, and lights flashed on and off in the hallway, and there were rushes, stumblings, evasions that took no heed at all of chairs or vases, then shrieks of childish laughter as the seeker shouted: ‘I’ve got Pa’ – or Lucille or Ellie or Vic.

  These night games were not the only ones they indulged in, and Vic, who was prudish, found he was often tested, and not at all in the ways he had expected. He had thought he might be too rough for them, so he was surprised when Pa, with no sign of embarrassment, talked about farting, and the girls took it up and elaborated, and even Ma had a laughing fit.

  There was a carelessness about the Warrenders, an indifference to what he had imagined was good behaviour and propriety, that would always be foreign to him. They had a passion, all of them, for practical jokes, physical ones, the rougher the better; even Aunt James was not spared. It was a test of character here to take these raw dealings with equanimity and a show of sporting humour. He was delighted when he was at last included and became the butt of one, but never got used to being caught out and mocked. He thought too, after a time, that there was something false in it. What they pretended was that they were all very thick-skinned and impervious to hurts; whereas in fact, as he soon discovered, they were always protecting one another from truths that really wounded, and this rough-and-tumble was a way of disguising it.

  Lucille, for instance. He realised after a little that all these eccentricities and raw jokes her parents went in for were a mortification to her. She hated them. She was very proud, and he had thought her hostility to him had to do with that. But he saw at last that what she really had against him was the extent to which they had exposed themselves to him. She was afraid he might take it upon himself to judge Ma and Pa and despise them. She did herself sometimes and was ashamed of it, but her pride would not allow him to.

  In the beginning he was flattered by this, but saw that he would have to sacrifice his vanity if he was to make her see he could be trusted. And he could be, too. His loyalty to Pa and Ma was beyond question. It had to be, and especially this matter of loyalty to Pa. The whole household was based on it. Pa’s moods, his whims, had at every moment to be respected and allowed for. Ma saw to this, and the girls and Aunt James, even Meggsie, for all her grumbling, complied. Mr Warrender tyrannised over his house of women. They spoiled him and made a great show of it; but the spoiling was a substitute for something he wanted more and which they thought he might never get. The fuss they made was to conceal from him that he had no real authority. But Pa was too intelligent to be deceived. If the household was shaky, and it was at times, it was because of this.

  He was an odd fellow, Pa. For all his generosity of flesh he was not expansive. People who thought that all large men should be jolly and lovers of life were disappointed in him. He was not jolly at all, and the roughness of the games he liked to play, the practical jokes, far from expressing a crude vitality, belonged to a version of himself that he reached out for but could not catch. He was often despondent, and sometimes downright gloomy. On nights when he did not happen to be in the mood for noise he would sit with his eyes closed, his brow lowered, while Ma or one of the girls rubbed his shoulders to soothe the ache he felt in being all locked up in himself.

  He was a man who had spent a day in heavy traffic with the world, which had buffeted and exhausted him. He needed to be restored now with the ministering of soft hands. The fact that all this had been mental traffic made no difference. The results were the same.

  He had spent his day getting under everyone’s feet, as Meggsie put it, poking about the house looking for things that he or other people had mislaid, making angry phonecalls to lawyers in town, to the council or the newspapers, enervating himself with trivialities to the point where he was quite incapable of settling to any work.

  What this work might be, if he did settle, remained unclear. Sometimes it was the regimental history he was writing, in which, Vic supposed, his father might figure – he would be interested in that. More often it was ‘something literary’. He had an office and a desk, all leather, that had belonged to Mrs Warrender’s father; but he had no sooner got himself in there than he was out again, calling for a pencil-sharpener or his tobacco pouch or the paper, or the volume of Gibbon he had been reading that morning in the lav, or his glasses or his old boots.

  On the day each month, ‘our dreadful Fridays’, Ma called them, when he had to appear at the Needham’s board meeting, he would be exhausted, utterly drained, a mere shadow of himself. He would sit through these meetings in a state of maddened irritability, listening to gloomy reports from auditors that he could make nothing of, and angry ones from travellers that he kept rewriting in his head, illiterate accounts, full of irrelevant details or diversions, of encounters with the managers of department stores and chemist shops and beauty parlours, and all the while, under the eye of the chairman, he would be filling the margins of the page with doodles, little half-imaginary animal figures or scornful caricatures.

  He would laugh at these meetings the day after, finding in them a source for extravagant mimickry, but the occasions themselves were painful to him. He knew he was of no use there, a straw man, invited only to make up the numbers and have a member of the family on show. He was ashamed of the frivolous manner he assumed but could find no other. He felt humiliated.

  Vic was surprised, and sometimes in a painful way, by the differences between this baffled household figure and the one he had sat beside in the train, in whom he had found so much manly steadiness, and warmth and ease. But he continued to honour without qualification the understanding that had been struck between them. What he would remember always was that on that occasion of their first being alone together, and at leisure to observe, Pa, out of an innat
e generosity, had seen only his best qualities, and accorded him, even if he was just a kid, the full measure of his possibilities. It was for Vic a matter of feeling. The affection it evoked in him, and the loyalty, endured.

  Of course he had been presenting himself in the best possible light. It was an opportunity and he had taken it. If Pa had been deceived in some ways, what he had seen was also the truth; it was what Vic, in his deepest nature, aspired to be.

  Perhaps Pa too had recognised an opportunity to show the better side of himself. What he had shown, as Vic soon discovered, was the mere externals of his nature, but Vic understood that and would not allow it to make a difference.

  He did not reason these things out. He could, with Pa, move back into a state of feeling where those first moments on the train extended themselves and covered all the years to come. The understanding between them, once achieved, was undiminished.

  And there was a further dimension to all this. Pa’s difficulties offered him an opportunity, or so Vic felt, to step in and show that the qualities that had been accorded him were actual and could be put to use. One day he would do for them what a son might do, and that perhaps was just what had all along been intended.

  It was under this aspect of a larger and as yet undeclared purpose that he considered Aunt James’s refusal to see him as a stranger. She had simply assumed, from the first day, that he was a member of the family, but, in the weird view she took of these things, a secret one. The fact that she had got the details wrong was neither here nor there.

  ‘I kept all your letters,’ she told him in a whisper the first time they were alone. ‘I knew you’d be back. They told me you were dead, Stevie, but I knew that couldn’t be true. And it isn’t, is it, sweetie?’ She laughed and poked him in the ribs, as if it were a good joke between them that he was not a ghost. ‘Well, I would have thought your own sister might have known you.’

  Stevie was Mrs Warrender’s brother. Years back, at a time when Ma and Pa’s marriage was being settled, he had got into some sort of trouble, been despatched to New Zealand, and died there by taking his own life.