by David Malouf
Once it was a list of birds.
What was that doing, Digger wondered, in the scene towards the end of War and Peace where young Petya Rostov, with his fondness for sweet things and his ten pounds of seedless raisins, does ask after all, in spite of his embarrassment before the older men, about the little French drummer boy, and has him brought muddy-footed into the tent.
Mac’s presence, as Digger turned the page and interrupted his reading, imposed itself on the scene. So that for ever after, recalling it, he would think of Mac as having actually been there along with Denisov and Dolghow, and the actual birds, unlikely antipodean angels – the white throated honey-eater, a flock of fire-tails, a Regent bower bird among others – would also be there, flashing about the courtyard where young Petya hangs down from the saddle and Denisov grips the railings of the fence and howls his grief.
At other times it was tram tickets, and Digger would look at the numbers to see if they were in any way significant.
Once, with a dirty mark along the crease where Mac had used a thumb blackened with ink off the tickets he had been pulling, it was an official letter from the tramways office, in reply to a complaint he had made.
These relics moved Digger, and reminded him, if he was ever tempted to forget, of the continuity between Mac’s life and his own, which had not been broken after all in the godown that morning. He would look at one of these scraps of soiled paper, taken out of a back pocket or from Mac’s wallet when he was called to collect a fare on some late-night run out to Clovelly, and feel the other man’s presence as a physical thing, a heat in him that was different from his own, something added. Till it faded in him, the pages he read had a sharper meaning. It was a private thing. Not secret, but he found no reason to speak of it.
He and Iris seldom spoke of Mac. He connected them only lightly. Their life together was made up of things they had discovered in one another, separately and in their own way. Digger never again saw the letters he had brought her, and he did not ask about them. What they had once stood for in his life had been replaced, and filled a hundred times over, by the woman herself, who was quite different, as he now saw her, from the one who had written them. He was not, in that sense, devoted to the past.
He kept the different parts of his life separate from one another, though there was no separation in him; no conflict either.
He told his mother nothing of Bondi Junction, but she knew of course. He was astonished all over again by the extent to which she could get into his head still, and was aware, in a way that disturbed him sometimes, of what he was thinking.
Each Thursday morning she laid out clean clothes for him, shirt, socks, underpants. She did it to show him that however secretive he might have become – and he had been such an open little fellow – he could hide nothing from her.
She would have preferred him to have some local girl, and kept trying to set him up with one. She wanted him married. She wanted grandchildren. But she knew too well his capacity for loyalty, for sticking at things, to challenge him. The laying out of his clothes each Thursday became a ritual, and when she died, Jenny did it, without knowing quite what the ritual meant, except that it was one.
2
‘I UNDERSTAND,’ ERN Webber said, ‘that you an’ Douggy got an invite to the weddin’.’ There was a good deal of scorn in his voice.
‘That’s right,’ Digger told him.
‘I thought you might of been best man,’ Ern said. It was what passed, in his mind, as a stroke of wit. ‘Considerin’.’ When Digger failed to take this up he went back to his own grievance. ‘Well, he was never all that shook on me. An’ I know why, too. ’Cause I seen through ’im, that’s why, ’e never fooled me. Not after that Mac business. I notice ’e never turns up to reunions.’
‘No,’ Digger said, ‘an’ neither do I. So what does that prove?’
This sort of talk was painful to him. It raised too many ghosts, put a finger on wounds that were still raw in him. But it was no good saying any of this to Ern. He was a tactless fellow with fixed and emphatic views, and besides, was bitter now at the snub he had received.
‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Digger found himself saying to cut off further argument.
In fact Digger had not been entirely happy at the wedding, which was a very grand affair, but he did not intend to tell Ernie this.
Vic had never spoken to him of the Warrenders, not once. He was unprepared for the house at Strathfield, with its turrets and the big hallway laid with blue, white and brown terracotta tiles and lit with a fanlight, and on either side of the door coloured panels of glass. A good deal of renovation had been done for the occasion. All the stonework of the façade had been repainted and the ironwork of the upstairs verandah given a lick of paint. The vision it presented to Digger was of an opulence he had no reference for, outside of books.
He went quiet and felt awkward in his old suit. He had taken it for granted that Vic’s people would be like his own, or Mac’s or Doug’s. That was the impression he had given. Now this! ‘All that time,’ he thought, ‘he was making mugs of us.’ He felt himself flush with indignation, though there was shame in it too.
He tried to hide it. He had told Iris a good deal about Vic and of the tie between them. He did not want her to see now how shaken up he was. When Douggy raised his eyebrows and cast a look around the room where they were to leave their things that said, ‘Well now, what do you make of this?’ he played dumb, and only Douggy’s extreme good nature prevented him from taking offence.
A marquee had been set up on the lawn behind the house. It was of a transparent blue stuff, very light and airy, and all round the edges of it alcoves had been created as at a proper ball, each one hung with loops of cornflowers and pink roses and with a medallion above on which the couple’s initials, V and E, were very prettily entwined. Iris, who had been at a good many marriages, had never seen anything like it.
There were waiters in Eton jackets with burgundy cummerbunds, stacks of champagne in dry ice, whisky, beer, soft drinks for the children. Waxed planking had been laid to make a dance floor, and there was a three-piece band to play foxtrots, quicksteps, slow waltzes, gypsy taps. They shared their alcove with Doug and his new wife Janet and some younger friends of the bride.
Meanwhile Vic, sometimes with Ellie at his side, sometimes alone, was moving through all this as if he had never known anything else. Not the least sign now, Digger thought, of the close-cropped, half-crazy character who had come to him at the Crossing. When was that – two months ago? No sign in fact of anything Digger had known of him, or of any of the things they had been through. The ease with which he wore his wedding suit, which sat very smooth and square across his shoulders, the big carnation in his lapel, the freshness and youth he suggested as he clapped older men on the back and called them Gus or Jack or Horrie, and made himself agreeable to their wives – all this appeared to make nothing of what he had been, what they had both been, just a year ago. It denied that as if it had never been.
Digger felt injured, and not just on his own part, but strangely enough on Vic’s part too, the Vic he had once been close to. And on Douggy’s and Mac’s. He didn’t know where to look.
The Warrenders, you could see, doted on him, no doubt of that, and he plumped himself up with it; you could see that too. He glowed. And the assurance of it gave him the power to submit others, the whole world maybe, to his charm.
‘What does it mean?’ Digger asked himself miserably. ‘Is he so shallow? Or is it just that he knows as well how to hide himself among this lot as he did with us?’ Either way he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He felt empty and hurt, but sorry too, and if it wasn’t for Iris, who had been looking forward to all this, would have gone straight back to the station.
She felt the tightness in him. ‘What is it, love?’ she whispered. ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself?’
She was. The Warrenders were generous people, there was no mistaking that, and some of the warmth of the occasion,
and some aspects of the ceremony too, she took as extending to her and Digger: the vows, which she was always moved by, the confetti, the three-tiered wedding cake with its little columned tabernacle on top, and under it a bride and groom, which would be cut up and passed around in slices soon, and eaten, just a mouthful each, by the guests, or sent off in flat tins stamped with wedding-bells to other parts of the country or overseas. When Mr Warrender got to his feet, and instead of making a speech recited a poem he had written, she took Digger’s hand, feeling that the words, in a way she had not expected, spoke for her own emotions, which were so full that only poetry perhaps – and she knew nothing about poetry – might contain them.
Some people, she saw, thought it rather queer that what this big man, who looked like an alderman or a Rotarian, should have embarked on was a poem.
The occasion till now had been a mixture of formality and a suppressed but growing rowdiness. Some of the male guests, skylarking about in their restraining collars, and restrained as well, but only with glances, by their wives, had been making rough jokes, hinting broadly at the cruder side of things. The groom had taken this in good part, as he was bound to do, and unmarried girls, caught in a position where they could not help but overhear (which in a good many cases they were meant to), let it appear that they had not caught on; or they drew their mouths down in a disapproving but half-amused and indulgent manner and turned away. Even one or two of the formal speeches had taken advantage of what is allowable and struck a ribald note. So when Mr Warrender started, a group of the noisier fellows took it as a spoof. Only after a good many hard looks were they shamed into silence. They put on expressions of honest bemusement and let themselves be stilled. But others, Iris saw, were, as she was, moved.
As for Mr Warrender, he gave no indication that there was anything out of the way in what he was doing. He spoke as if poetry was his normal manner of address, and after a moment or two it was accepted as such.
He wasn’t solemn. There was often a little kick to what he had to say that was quite humorous, and this surprised Iris; she didn’t understand it. She had to get Digger, later, who had a gift in that direction, to repeat some of Mr Warrender’s lines (he could too, word for word) before she got hold of what she had been so moved by:
‘Eternal.’ On our lips the extravagant promise
That spirit makes. The animal in us knows
The truth, but lowers its dumb head and permits itself for this
One day to be garlanded and led
Beyond never-death into ever after, being
In love with what is always out of reach:
The all, the ever-immortal and undying
Word beyond word that breathes through mortal speech.
That was one bit of it.
When Digger spoke these lines they lacked some of the ordinariness Mr Warrender had given them. Even under the circumstances of the tent and its decorations, which were unusual enough, and the guests all subdued and with their hands held back a moment from the clatter of knives and forks, and from glasses even, gravely or politely listening, there had been something very natural and straightforward about it; as if, at the moment of his getting up and looking around at them all, the words the occasion demanded had simply come to him of their own accord. It all seemed so fitting to Iris, and so easy too, because the words Mr Warrender came up with might have been her own, even if some of them were a puzzle to her.
But when Digger repeated the lines, they seemed fixed and formal. He might have been reading them off a printed page. And now that it was long past, it was not simply the one occasion they referred to but all such occasions, and this too, Iris thought, she had understood, if only vaguely, at the moment itself. As if there were more of them present, many more, than the guest-list would have shown:
Noon here in this garden, and the daystar
Shakes out instant fire to call up earth, water, air,
Grass, flowers, limbs and the still invisible presences
That hold their breath and stand in awe about us.
We are all of us guests at a unique, once only
Occasion – this one, this, the precarious gift
Alive in our hands again, the mixed blessing
Offered and accepted . . .
‘The mixed blessing’. That was one of the things that had puzzled her. It had seemed out of place, suggesting as it did a kind of doubt rather than the easy conviction that is usual to such occasions. But she had come, in time, to see that it said several things at once – that was just the point of it, and she saw then what it was in Mr Warrender that had struck her. He did not take things for granted or just as they appeared. What he said was: ‘Yes – but,’ in this way allowing for what really was, as well as what you might want life to be.
Vic had sat very attentive through it all, with a single deep crease between his brows, either because he thought he might have at some point to defend Mr Warrender against the rowdy element or because what his father-in-law was saying was important to him and he too was struggling to get hold of it.
Ellie on the other hand was following the poem with her lips, as if she already knew it, word for word.
Later, going over the events of the day, the spring heat that had set their skin prickling and given everything such a fresh glow, then the coolness as shadows began to fall, the music, Mr Warrender’s poem, even the magpies sitting humped and patient, waiting for the crowd to thin out so that they could dive after soaked crumbs – going over all this, they came to feel that the occasion had been a special one for them too, and that it was Mr Warrender who had given expression to the various moods of it, and his words, as Digger repeated them, through which they could best recover what they had felt.
But there had been something embarrassing as well. Later in the day Digger had gone up to Mr Warrender to say a few words, and to see if he could find in the man himself some indication of where it came from, the poem, but also his boldness in being able to get up in public like that and deliver it.
Nothing came of the meeting. Mr Warrender was all noise at first, all bluffness and easy affability. Digger was embarrassed. Then Mr Warrender was too and stood ignoring Digger altogether, lifting himself up and down on the toes of his shoes, observing the ground and humming. Digger had had the greatest difficulty in getting away.
Except for a moment outside the church, when he and Iris and Doug and Janet had gone up together to shake his hand, Digger had not spoken to Vic, and Vic, he thought, had gone out of his way afterwards to avoid them. After what he had seen, Digger was not surprised by this, but he did find it uncomfortable. Why had he bothered to invite them? To show himself off? Was that all it was?
Towards the end of the day, while Iris was taking the opportunity offered by bathrooms and such to look over the house, Digger, still chewing on the grievance he felt, went to moon about for a bit under some firs. It was over against a high brick wall where there had till recently, he guessed, been a chicken run; maybe they had got rid of it for the wedding. There were still some feathers about, clinging to the fir branches and caught in the needles underfoot, and resting in a corner were the planks that had made up the perches, all split along the grains, encrusted with droppings and beginning to be overgrown with moss. It was quite secluded in here. He walked up and down and was too deep in himself to see that someone had come up beside him and had been standing, he could not guess for how long, just a few feet away.
‘Hullo, Digger,’ he said lightly. ‘What are you up to?’
He spoke as if there was no constraint between them – not on his part. He had seen nothing, Digger realised, of what he was feeling. His mood was entirely calm, joyful even – well, why shouldn’t he be? – and Digger felt abashed, as if he was the one who was at fault.
‘They looking after you?’ he enquired. ‘Had a piece of wedding cake?’
He had a piece himself and was holding it, half-eaten, in his palm.
‘Enough to drink?’
It pleased h
im, you could see, to have this opportunity to play host. He did it in a very grave way, but with a kind of shyness too, in case you thought he was being smug, that communicated itself immediately to Digger and made him feel again that he had done him an injustice and was in the wrong. He mumbled something, but could not come up with the light reply that might have made things easy between them.
Vic stood, swaying a little, and looked over his shoulder at the crowd. He had an empty glass in one hand and in the other the remains of his piece of cake. They stood a moment. Then, with a gesture Digger had seen him make a thousand times, but under very different circumstances, he tilted his head back, cupped his palm, and, very careful not to lose any, let the crumbs and mixed fruit roll back into his mouth.
It was utterly characteristic. That, his concern not to let a single crumb get lost, and the way too, when he tilted his head back, that his whole throat was bared, gave so much away to anyone who could feel it that Digger found himself choked. All the resentment he had felt went right out of him.
Vic meanwhile was examining his tie and the front of his suit for crumbs. He picked one off and put it on his tongue; then looked up, half-shy, as if he had been caught at something, and they were back immediately in an intimacy that was so strong, and appealed to something so deep in both of them, that they had to draw back from it.
‘What a weird bloke he is,’ Digger thought. ‘Honestly, I’ll never get the hang of him.’ One moment he was all smooth impenetrability, and the next he opened up and gave himself away – but only, Digger thought, when he was afraid he might have lost you. How did he manage it? Was it calculated, or were they as guileless as he made them seem, these moments when he put himself entirely in your hands? Digger was inclined to protect himself against his own weakness. ‘A man’d be a fool,’ he told himself, ‘to make anything of this. He’ll drop me eventually. He’s bound to.’ It was so clear to him, from what he had seen, that Vic’s was a life he could have no part in. In the normal course of things they would never have met, and they were back now in the normal course of things. Still, something was restored between them, and for the moment he was relieved.