The Great World

by David Malouf

  When, soon after, Vic was captured by a woman who wanted her husband to meet him, Digger excused himself. He wanted to think things over. He went off through an open arch into a factory yard. It was mostly in shadow, but the archway, where the sun broke through, cast a skew, truncated reflection of itself across the flags. He dragged a packing case out of a heap of rubbish, set it down in the sun, and rolled himself a smoke.

  It was here that Ellie, coming to the archway in search of Vic, found him sitting with his head lowered, his tie loose, his new shoes set far apart on the flags. She knew who he was. Seated on his packing-case in the sun he looked ordinary enough, but there was something too that appealed to her.

  He glanced up, startled. He had an odd, thin-faced, rather wooden look, and very deep-set eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He was getting awkwardly to his feet. ‘You’re Digger, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ she added, and laughed, lifting her arms which were sheeted in a shimmering white material, ‘you can see who I am,’ and any embarrassment there might have been between them immediately vanished. Digger dropped his fag and ground it out. It was a way, for a moment, of not having to look at her.

  ‘I’d have known anyway,’ he found himself saying, and blushed because he couldn’t think, once it was out, why he had said it or what it meant.

  She smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m glad we’ve met at last. I was wondering what you’d be like.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Vic’s talked a lot about you – well, not a lot, but – well, you know.’

  They were standing just inside the arch. Behind Digger lay the empty yard. Looking at her the sun was in his eyes so that he squinted a little, but he could feel the edge of the archway’s shadow on his shoulder, creeping in.

  Outside on the lawn the party was beginning to break up. Many of the guests were already gone. Those who remained were scattered in groups, the men all fired up with the last of the day’s arguments, sport, politics, business; some of the women now with their high heels kicked off, easing their stockinged feet in the grass. The band still played, but the floor was occupied now entirely by children, little boys in long pants and long-sleeved shirts and ties, some of them bow ties, and girls in party frocks with ribbons. They were pushing one another about on the waxed boards like perfect little adults while one or two real adults looked on. One of them, Digger saw, was Ellie’s father, Mr Warrender. He looked rather tipsy, and Digger saw him, over Ellie’s shoulder, step on to the dance floor in a top-heavy, deliberate way, as if he feared he might not make it, and begin to weave about among the couples, who looked sideways at him, embarrassed by his dancing alone like that, and steered away from him towards the corners of the floor.

  Ellie, seeing Digger’s intent look, turned her head, wondering what it was that had caught his eye; but what she saw was not her father making slow circles with his arms raised among the dancing children, but Vic. He was standing just off to the side in a group of older men, all with their heads together. He had turned away from whatever it was they were discussing. With his hands in his pockets, he was watching Digger and her.

  He glanced down when her eye caught him and pretended to laugh at something that was being said. But a moment later, when she looked that way again, he was again watching. This time Digger saw it too. And immediately Vic detached himself from the group, one or two of whom turned and looked after him, and came over the lawn towards them.

  Ellie looked at Digger, made a face, and smiled.

  ‘Well,’ her look said, ‘that’s that. This is the only moment we’ll have. But that’s all right, isn’t it?’

  Digger found that he too was grinning.

  ‘He’s scared. You know – that we might get on too well together. I mean, of what we might find out – you know, about him, not about one another – if he leaves us alone too long. He’s like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Digger agreed.

  ‘He can’t help it.’

  ‘He’s a difficult cuss.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me’.

  These were the thoughts that flew between them.

  He wondered what it was exactly that Vic had told her; not about him but about the rest of it. Not a lot, he thought. There would be things she would never know. She would wake nights and find him sitting on the edge of the bed (Digger knew these occasions himself) with the sweat pouring off him; stuck in the real heat of a place he had been dreaming about, except that it was never just a dream and there was no way back from it.

  ‘You’ve found Digger,’ he said brightly, coming up and taking her arm. ‘That’s good.’

  He stood looking from one to the other of them, aware of the warmth between them. They were quite easy, gave no sign that anything they had been saying had had to be cut off short by his arrival. But the smiles they wore were conspiratorial, and Digger reddened and looked down. Vic knew him too well to miss it. But Ellie was not intimidated.

  ‘I was just asking Digger to come and see me sometime,’ she said, contradicting what Digger thought had been agreed between them. ‘You will, won’t you, Digger?’

  He glanced at Vic. He too was smiling, quite amiably you might have thought, but he said nothing, and he did not want it; Digger saw that quite plainly. Why had she suggested it?

  ‘I should find Iris,’ he said quickly. ‘She’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.’

  3

  A BLUSTERY DAY, late August. High up, flat-bottomed clouds were in flight, sailing fast around the world, but the air was clear and up here on the hill above the Crossing she could see in all directions at last, north, south, eastwards towards the river’s mouth and the ocean. The whole landscape was laid out for her.

  Downriver, in a dozen little bays and inlets, boats were stuck like bits of paper, white on blue, unmoving at this distance. Upstream the bridge, its traffic silenced by the sound the wind was making, the wrenching of branches, fistfuls of leaves rattling at the ends of twigs and the gulls’ crying.

  To one side below was the store in its elbow of low land, high and dry and isolated: the ridge of its tin roof, the four posts of her washing-lines, old barrels and kero tins with her bits of shrubs in them, Digger’s workbench under the pepper tree. Jenny was there, mooning about in a cotton frock chasing birds.

  ‘She doesn’t know yet,’ she thought. ‘She hasn’t realised I’m out of the house.’ The panic there would be when she went into their room and found the empty bed! The moaning and flapping! She was sorry about that.

  On the high bank opposite, on one of the roofs of the weekenders that dotted the hillside over there and flashed among the trees, Digger would be working, a hammer in his belt, a stub of pencil behind his ear.

  She knew it all; where everything was. Only up here was new to her.

  And why had she left it thirty-three years to come up here and see it?

  Because she didn’t want to see things too clearly, that’s why.

  And why had she done it now?

  Because she did.

  She had left it till the very last, not to disappoint herself. She could face it now. She was past disappointment.

  Far off, forty miles it would be as the crow flies, in a soft haze in which houses, whole streets of them, and trees and harbour water were smudged to the same pastel blue, as if it was a lake not a city, and just the highest towers were visible above the surface of it, was Sydney.

  That wasn’t what she had come to see. She hadn’t even known it would be visible. In her mind it was further off than that. Halfway to England, practically. Thirty-three years off. She had knuckled under and hung on here – somebody had to; kept things together, turned her back on the rest of the world, taken on its name, Keen, and would now be buried under it.

  But suddenly, just this afternoon, she couldn’t bear to be in the house any longer, in the stuffy little back bedroom, on a day when the wind was up. Everything, every stick of furniture, every
inch of the curtains she had ordered and sewn and hung in their three rooms, every teaspoon, and the wedding picture of her husband’s parents on the sideboard, and the bags of sugar, rice, salt, and the scales in the back room on which for thirty-three years she had weighed them out in pound and half-pound packets – all that, and her kitchen chairs and saucepans, and the bucket and mop behind the door, and Jenny flopping on the counter, and all the ghosts of the others, squeezed into a corner by the stove and sucking a rusk or pushing ashes into their mouths, Leslie and James and May and Billy – all that and more, weighed on her heart and crushed her. She could have set a match to the lot of it in this high wind and watched it blaze up in a roar of smuts.

  So what sort of woman, at last, did that make her?

  The very kind she had set out not to be.

  Tearing off her bedclothes she had rushed out barefoot to the kitchen, snatched up a box of matches and struck one and threw it down, then another, and looking wildly about her said, ‘This is the sort of woman I am.’

  But the box fell from her hand, the matches spilled. Without looking back she had broken out of the house and, plunging off into the scrub with no thought in her head, only the wind and the high clouds flying, begun to climb.

  Once she was actually climbing she was all excitement and haste, as if she had wanted to do this every day of her life and was to see at last what she had for years been held back from. She pushed past ledges of rock where she had to use both hands to haul herself up, and the big, flesh-coloured angophoras with their fat-rolls like naked angels, till she was high enough to get a grip on the dimension of things. She wasn’t a coward. No one could have called her that. She could face anything.

  When she reached the summit, she looked about, took it all in, then, hunched on an outcrop among scratchy, waist-high grass, and with her arms hugging her breast, chewed on the bitterness of things.

  Now that it was about to occur, the thing she had dreamed of, the descent of peace and the gathering around her of all the objects of her life, she did not want it, any of it. She did not want her life – the fifty-four years, so many days and days and the disappointments and defeats and little silent triumphs – to be made visible at last and piled up around her so that she had to say: ‘So this is what it comes to.’

  That’s what she had wanted to get away from, and had, in her head, already burned the evidence of. Not to have, forever, to sit at the centre of it.

  Gibbons. That was the name she had been born to.

  ‘My God,’ she thought, looking about at the spiky heads of the blockboys, ‘where is she? Where’s Marge Gibbons? And Bert. Marge and Bert.’ It disturbed her that she could no longer actually see them: two hopeless little kids she had let wander off and get lost. They had been so real in the world, and still were, in her mind somewhere, if she could only get back to them past all the things she had accumulated that shut them out.

  She began to pluck at the wool of her bedjacket. Little bits of pink fluff blew about in the air and joined the light little seeds and balls of pollen that were streaming and tumbling. The wind could not tell the one from the other of them.

  Keen. She had taken that name, and the result was she would be buried under it.

  And him? Billy? He was off chasing another war, and had found one too, in Korea this time. He would go on till he found the one that would do for him. She had known for years now that he would not come back.

  She plucked at the bedjacket, pecking at it with the hard tips of her fingers. The pink stuff rose up and sailed. But suddenly there was a barging about in the bushes close by, then a wailing, and she was found, which was just how it had been the first time. The big blubbery girl found her and kept clutching and clutching and would not let her be.

  *

  ‘She won’t come in,’ Jenny told Digger. ‘She says she never wants to. Ever again.’

  She was wheeling about in the yard under the clothes-line and wringing her hands. Their mother, wrapped in an eiderdown, was in an old cane chair that had been chucked out as rubbish, her back to the house and shivering.

  Digger put his tool-box down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, but his calm was pretence. ‘You go in an’ make us a cuppa tea. I’ll talk to ’er.’

  He did, but she remained woodenly silent, as if she could no longer hear.

  Jenny brought tea. She took a cup, but just sat with it while he drank, and Jenny, who was terrified, kept well away on the kitchen step.

  But she would not go back into the house, and though he talked and tried to tempt her with things she had once cared about, she did not hear or would not listen. When it got dark he brought more blankets, wrapped her, put on another sweater himself, and they continued to sit as night deepened and the stars came out, and Jenny, behind a lighted window in the house, looked on.

  Jenny brought him something to eat. It wasn’t much. She was too upset to make anything proper. Digger sat on an upturned can and ate potatoes with a fork, with bread and a bit of gravy, and their mother continued to sit with her back to the house. It was ashes in her head. The house, the store and all its contents. She had put a match to them, whether or not the flame had taken. Digger could do nothing with her.

  He had faced this sort of thing before but had not expected to see it again in his lifetime, and not here. She was willing herself out of the world, and she would do it too.

  It was a strange thing, to have the house there, all lighted, and her sitting in the dust in front of it in a broken chair, with the scrub and all its night sounds around them.

  Towards dawn he dozed off and she did at last begin to speak to him. The things she told him were terrible. He had not known she was in such despair. Bert, she called him. ‘No,’ he wanted to say, ‘that’s not my name. I’m Digger. Remember?’ but he was afraid of interrupting her.

  But he was wrong, or she did not remember or did not want to. ‘Bert,’ she called, and he woke, and the conversation they had been having went deep down into him and was gone.

  *

  ‘Digger,’ Jenny said. ‘Would you mind if I ast you something?’

  She had come out to where, in an old pair of shorts and with his shirt off, he was at his workbench in the yard. There was a smell of freshly sawn timber.

  ‘Fire away,’ he said without looking up. He had thrown himself into work as a way, for a time, of not thinking. He needed a little time always to recover himself, and had settled now for the pleasure of putting a saw into soft wood, the smell of it, very sweet and spicy, and the warmth of the sun on his back.

  ‘What’s gunna happen,’ she got out at last, painfully twisting her brow, ‘to Mumma’s things?’

  ‘Her clothes, you mean?’ He went on working, taking a pencil from behind his ear.

  ‘No. Her things. They’re her things.’

  He looked at her now.

  ‘The furniture an’ that,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Saucepans. You know.’

  ‘Nothing’s going t’ happen to them,’ he said gently. ‘What did you think? They’re yours now. Ours.’

  ‘Are they? Did she leave ’em?’

  What had she expected, he wondered. He had no idea, even after so long, how her mind worked. Perhaps she too had taken their mother’s vision literally, the one she had herself in the end turned her back on, and expected all the furnishings of the house, right down to the serviette rings and the tea-strainer, to be taken up in some way. Maybe literally. If not that, then in essence. Was that it? So that they were no longer, as they had been till now, quite solid and useable.

  Or perhaps she thought their mother’s spirit had appropriated them and made them dangerous to touch.

  The chair she had sat in all night still stood in an awkward place under the lines, but neither of them had thought to move it. It was broken, its canes cracked and bleached by the weather; so much more like a natural thing than a piece of abandoned furniture that after a time, as it sank lower on one leg, they would barely notice it.

  ‘Yes,’ he s
aid very quietly, ‘she left them to you. They’re yours now. You just do whatever you want with ’em.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘All right.’

  She stood a moment, looking serious, then went off, and he heard her shifting things about in the kitchen, clearing the shelves and rinsing things, instituting little changes that she might have been wanting to make for years – who could know the order her mind followed? – and wouldn’t have dared make while their mother was alive.

  4

  DIGGER WAS TO discover that he had been wrong on two counts that day of the wedding. Against the odds he did see Ellie again, though not for more than six years, and then only by accident, and Vic did not, as he had put it, ‘drop him’. Two or three times a year, sometimes more often, he turned up unannounced at the Crossing and they would pass an hour together. He would sit out under the pepper tree and watch Digger at work at the bench he had there, getting up to steady the other end of a four-by-two Digger was sawing; or Digger would haul out a spare rod and they would go off and fish.

  It wasn’t always easy. There were times when he was in one of those moods where everything was an irritation to him. He had come for no other reason, Digger thought, than to pick over some old resentment or injury and provoke you into wounding him. Sometimes he succeeded, and Digger would be irritated himself when he saw Vic’s satisfaction at having got him to strike out, the odd little smile he wore as he turned his head away. But on other occasions, though Vic went on and on, he would resist. Suddenly, without warning, Vic would be all appeasement, and minutes after in such excellent spirits that Digger could scarcely credit the change in him. It was as if in Digger’s refusal to be on bad terms with him he had found the capacity to be on good terms once again with himself.

  But there were many occasions when he came only because he had picked up something, some new gadget, that he thought Digger would be interested in and ought to see, or because the mood was on him to do a bit of quiet fishing, or simply because two or three months had gone by and they hadn’t seen one another. They never discussed whatever business it was he was involved in. It was only when Doug mentioned it that Digger began to get an idea of what a figure he was cutting out there.