by David Malouf
‘Ol’ Vic’s doin’ well, isn’t ’e?’
‘Is ’e?’ Digger said. ‘What d’ya mean?’
Douggy laughed. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Needham’s – that’s him. He’s practically a millionaire. Makin’ money hand over fist.’
There was no irony in Douggy’s tone. He was, as he had always been, sceptical of what he called the bosses, but he took Vic’s rise in the world as reflecting on him as well, on all of them: he did not begrudge it. But who would have guessed it, eh? Who would have thought they would have a mate who was on the way – how old was he? twenty-eight, twenty-nine? – to being a millionaire? Not that he and Vic were all that close any more. But it was a wonder just the same.
‘Doesn’ ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.
‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about business.’
‘Well, ’e was never slow to blow ’is own trumpet – not in the ol’ days. What’s happened to ’im?’
‘Nothing,’ Digger said. ‘I dunno.’
‘So what do you talk about?’ Doug asked after a moment, and his look was humorous.
‘Nothing much,’ Digger told him. It was the truth. He had to think. ‘Cars an’ that,’ he added at last.
‘Oh? So what sort of car does ’e drive?’
‘Humber Hawk. Before that a Pontiac.’
Douggy looked impressed. ‘Didn’ you think from that,’ he asked, ‘that ’e might be doin’ well?’
Digger didn’t know what to say. He had seen at the wedding the sort of people Vic came from and the life they led, and had been too absorbed with the vehicles themselves, with raising the bonnet and looking in at the workings of them, to ask himself how much they might represent in the way of ‘getting on’.
Vic liked to show them off, but there was nothing show-offish or proprietorial in it. They could have been kids who had come upon the Pontiac or the Riley, the Austin Healey or the Ford Customline, parked in a street somewhere, less concerned with who owned it than with the full panoply of its metal power and the wonderful elegance and achievement of the thing; though it struck Digger as amazing at times (he shivered and went ghostly under his clothes) that they should be here to lay their hands on the sun-warmed gloss, and to feel, when they put their foot down, the full power of these models of 1949, 1952, 1954.
‘I believe you’re doin’ pretty well for yourself,’ he said at last, one day when their easiness allowed it. ‘So Doug tells me.’
‘I’m holding my end up,’ he admitted.
Digger was planing a set of planks, three or four of which stood upright against the trunk of the pepper tree. Pale shavings, almost transparent and showing the honey-coloured grain, curled off the blade as he swept his arm through, fell, turned over, and rolled away in the breeze. Vic sat on an upturned kerosene tin.
‘I didn’ realise,’ Digger said.
‘Oh –’ Vic passed it off lightly, ‘I’ve had a bit of luck, that’s all.’
It was true: things fell into his hand and multiplied. But that wasn’t the whole of it. He was smart, he worked hard, never stopped in fact, he was famous for it; he had an eye for the way things were moving and would be on the spot and ready to go before other men, more experienced men too, had seen there was a chance; and he was ruthless – he let nothing and no one get in his path. But he also had luck. It worried him.
Luck, he believed, was a thing you couldn’t rely on. It had let him down once, and badly. It could let him down again. It was his opinion that a man who depended on luck was little more than a lounger in the world and had in no way proved himself. What he believed in was character. His achievements, such as they were, all plain and visible, had to be balanced against what was not visible because it was within, but which must exist because they did, and could therefore be taken on trust.
Sitting out in the dry wind, under the pepper tree, on the upturned tin, what he was worth was not millions but just what Digger might see and reflect back to him, with no need of explanation or proof.
He looked up very frankly to where Digger had stopped still with the plane in his hand, looking at him, and there it was.
It was a moment Digger would remember; when he saw clearly, and for the first time, what Vic wanted of him. He was to be one of the witnesses to his life. Not to his achievements, anyone could see those, which is why he hadn’t bothered to draw Digger’s attention to them; but to those qualities in him that would tip the balance on the other, the invisible side.
It had taken Digger so long to grasp this because the idea that a man might need witnesses to his life was so foreign to him. But once he had seen it, though the role did not please him, he stuck. It was one more of the responsibilities that had been laid upon him. He would not have chosen it, any more than he would have chosen some of the others, but it was there. Chance, life, fate – whatever it was – chose for you, connecting and binding you into the pattern of other people’s lives, and making that at last the pattern of your own.
It was Jenny who did the resisting, and this had its comic side. None of Vic’s appearances over the years, or the little presents he brought, ever reconciled her to him.
One night they were watching TV when she suddenly turned and asked in astonishment:
‘Is that who I think it is?’
‘Yes,’ Digger told her. ‘Vic.’
‘So what’s he done?’
Her quick rule of thumb was that anyone who got on to TV, if he wasn’t a pop star or a newsreader, must be a crook.
‘Nothing, Made a bit of money, that’s all, by taking someone over – You know, buying ’em up. There’s some trouble with the unions.’
She screwed her eyes up and concentrated. That didn’t tell her anything. That wasn’t what it was about.
The interviewer was a girl, and after being very nice to her, or pretending to be, calling her by her name, Jane, but showing too that he didn’t take any of what she was asking seriously, he suddenly went cold, then lost his temper. Jenny chuckled. This was what it was about.
‘She doesn’t think much of him,’ she declared.
‘Good on yer, girlie!’ she shouted. ‘She thinks he’s a crook. Is ’e?’
‘No,’ Digger told her. He was amused. ‘And that girl doesn’t think so either.’
‘Why’s she after ’im then?’
‘It’s ’er job. She’s doing ’er job, that’s all. Being aggressive.’
‘Mr Smarty Pants!’ Jenny shouted, ‘Mr Smarty Smarty Pants!’
5
VIC, STILL IN his shirt-sleeves, pushed back the breakfast plates, shifted the pepper and salt shakers and the toast-rack to a new position, poured himself more tea, lit a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair. He had a habit, when he was about to propose a new idea, of clearing a space before him. You could, Ma knew, judge how large or risky the idea was by the extent of cloth he laid bare.
Their consultations together often took place over the remains of breakfast. With Pa already installed in his office and Ellie off delivering the boy to kindergarten, they had a good half-hour to themselves. The domestic setting, the fragments of the meal (‘There is something very reassuring,’ Ma thought, ‘about burnt toast’), gave an unemphatic quality to their talk; the solid grip on things suggested by teacup handles and spoons grounded what might otherwise have seemed fantastic in the ordinary and commonplace.
It astonished Vic, when he recalled the anxieties she had been racked by, that Ma could be so changed. She had never failed him, not once. If he drew back sometimes, and even he had his moments of doubt, though he did his best not to show them, she saw it and would be there to urge him on.
Her mind was sharper than his. He came up with a scheme, presented it to her, and let her knock it down if she could. If she couldn’t find the crack in a thing it was foolproof.
He relied on her. They were a team. Arguing a deal out with her was like arguing with his other self, the sceptical one he might not otherwise have made contact with,
or not so immediately. He accepted criticisms from her that, if a man had made them, he would have felt bound to reject. They knew one another too well for that, and cared too much, both of them, for what they were doing, to be soft with one another.
He was lingering this morning, deliberately holding back. There was a vagueness in him – not quite weakness, it was never that – which she would have in a moment to acknowledge and deal with. She knew him very well by now. But there was also this new space he had opened up. ‘First things first,’ she thought.
‘So,’ she said briskly, ‘this is it, eh?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ten-thirty.’
He saw how she was looking at him. He pushed his plate back another inch.
‘I find all this a bit difficult,’ he said, ‘I mean, he can’t be that innocent. I thought he’d be tougher, a bloke like that.’
‘He is tough,’ Ma told him. ‘Don’t be fooled by all that soft talk. He’s tough in the old way, like my father. You fellows are a different breed.’
She saw the little flicker across his brow. She had not meant it as a criticism.
‘He doesn’t seem to realise that he’ll no longer have control. What does ’e think we are? A charitable institution?’
He was speaking of Jack Creely, an old school friend of Pa’s who had an engineering firm with government contracts. Needham’s were taking him over.
‘He’s so full of himself! He thinks he’s been clever, pulling the wool over our eyes.’ His pride was touched.
What disturbed him, she knew, was the talk it would generate. He had made a good many enemies these last years. People thought he was getting too big for his boots; he was too sure of himself, too successful. They would be only too eager now to use Jack Creely as further evidence against him.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’re in for forty-six thousand, aren’t we? That doesn’t look like charity to me. Jack knows the score.’
The sharpness with which she heard herself say this gave her a start. She too had come a long way in these last years.
As for the forty-six thousand, just saying it straight out like that took her breath away. As if it was nothing!
She thought of her father, and saw him raise his eyebrows, half-shocked, but half-admiring too, at the summary way she had dealt with Jack Creely. But what would really have shocked him, as it did her too a little, was the forty-six thousand. Her father’s rule had been a strict one. You stayed within limits, you kept out of debt. ‘This feller’s a lunatic,’ her father would have told her, half-admiring of that too, but with a strong suggestion that she ought to look out for herself. ‘Can’t you see that?’ She heard it so clearly in the room that she was surprised Vic didn’t jerk his head up, in that aggressive way he had, and answer him.
He had been a buccaneer, her father, but of shallow waters. They were in open waters now.
For more than three years the factory had been abandoned and boarded up. The brickwork was crumbling and weeds had sprouted, not just between the flags of the yard but on the stone windowsills, and even, in places, from the roof. The little boy, Greg, was scared to go there. She had seen him more than once standing in the archway, peering into the yard and daring himself to go on.
The house and the factory, when her father built them, had been a single unit, two halves when she was growing up of a single world. The girls who worked in the packing room were part of the family. They might step across to the kitchen to get a cup of sugar if they were short at morning teatime, and if one of them took sick she would be brought over to lie in one of the rooms off the verandah. As a little girl Ma had often put aside her dolls or her jigsaw, or left off practising with her roller-skates on the long side verandah, to go across and have a chat with her favourites among the packers, Alice Green or Mrs Danby, or to watch a van being unloaded in the yard. Or she would perch on a stool in her father’s office and cut out floral patterns from the Needham’s labels and advertising placards and paste them into a ledger.
All this had brought the world of manufacturing and business into their daily lives, so that for her there had been no gap between them, the two worlds were interpenetrable. It was this view of things that she meant to re-establish by making the breakfast table the scene of her consultations with Vic, and all the more because what they were engaged with was no longer something you could stroll across to the other side of the garden and see.
Margarine. That had been their first move. Astonishing how easily, given a little capital, you could shift from one commodity to another. Soap, margarine – it was all the same, it seemed, though her father mightn’t have thought so. He had brought his knowhow about soap-making from the Old Country, and from the Lake District, where he grew up, the recipes for the perfumes he used. It was all very personal to him, and to all of them. The soaps had been named after English flowers, lilac, violet, musk-rose, and the finest and most expensive of them after her mother, Mary Louise. At Christmas, special packets were made up as presents to clients and friends.
But there was no call these days for things that were hand-made. Hicks had seen the point of the move straight off, and was delighted to be let loose on a new product, with new premises and a real staff, including a dozen trained technicians.
The amount they had had to borrow was terrifying. Hadn’t she just got them out of the red? But Vic saw things in a different way.
‘Listen,’ he told her, ‘things have changed. There’s nothing to be gained by playing safe and staying out of debt. A millionaire isn’t a man who’s got a million. He’s a man who owes a million, and if he owes ten million, all the better. That’s how we’ve got to think. If it worries you, Ma, just you leave it to me.’
‘My God,’ she’d thought. But once she took the idea in she found she could live quite easily with it. That was him. He was all energy and unbounded confidence. What’s more, the system worked.
His other idea was what he called spread. It had nothing to do with margarine – quite the opposite, in fact. Instead of limiting themselves to one commodity, one sort of venture, they took up, in an opportunistic way, whatever offered, using one company to raise credit for another, or they simply let things sit and appreciate.
So he took them into real estate, buying up corner sites all over the suburbs, odd rows of shops, that could be sold off to the petrol companies for service stations. They got into the building trade, financing new-style units, and quite soon owned a demolition company as well. For no other reason than that it was going cheap, he acquired a factory for bicycle parts, but seeing the possibilities in it, switched to specialist parts for the motor industry. Get a hold on just one of those parts, a reputation for being reliable – no strikes, no hold-ups – a good transport side, make yourself indispensable to an assembly-line somewhere, and you were made. Lately he had developed an interest in mining – sand mining up the Queensland coast, bauxite mining in Cape York Peninsula – and had his eye now on several oil-search enterprises, one of them in New Guinea, another in north-west Western Australia. Sooner or later, somewhere on the continent, they would strike oil. The thing was to get in on the ground floor. All this was spread.
It seemed a long step to her, from a place on the other side of the yard to sites they had a stake in that were three thousand miles away. But this was precisely what he was excited by, the sense of far-flung spaces to be opened up: a map on the wall, and the geography of the whole continent to move in, and not just what was above ground either, but what was below ground as well; and beyond men geographical space, all those decades to come when these provisional ventures and far-sighted risks and hunches would pay off.
He was astonishing. She kept waiting for the moment to come when her father’s voice might prevail and she could no longer go with him; but he leapt, and each time she took a good breath and went with him.
Looking now at the area he had opened up among their breakfast things she did not feel anxious. Part of what sustained her, but forced her too, was the need he had to
take her with him. What came back to her then was the times she had paced his room, all anxiety, and he had sat so stolidly on his bed – how old was he? thirteen? fourteen? – and she had relied on him. What she had seen in him then was increased now a hundredfold.
She had never told him, but many years before, when she was not long married herself, she had seen his father. She had had no idea then that they would one day be connected.
A good-looking Irish fellow, a coalminer, who ought to have been rough, and was no doubt, but knew how to act soft if it suited him. All that, she had thought, must go over well with the girls, and he tried it out a little with her – having seen that it might be best, if he was to get what he wanted from Pa, to make an impression on her. He knew Pa pretty well, she guessed. That is, he knew how to get round him.
He had been very much then what Vic was now; the same age too, just thirty. Twelve years later, when Vic turned up, the image of the man had come back to her and she saw what he might grow up to be.
It was a type that appealed to her. She could admit that now. The father had seen it and given her the eye, but in a humorous way that said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m no danger. You’ll never see me again. I’ve got what I wanted here.’
What she had been struck by was the quickness with which he had summed them up. He had been looking them over to see if they would do. The cheek! She could have laughed outright now when she recalled it. ‘You’ll do, I reckon,’ the look said. The effrontery of it!
But he had known better than she had (something had known) what was good for them. For all of them.
Vic consulted his watch. Quickly now he outlined the thing to her. He had needed first to clear the air of that other business, Jack Creely. He wanted to start off with everything clear between them. So here it was.