by David Malouf
She rang daily after that but did not come again till the end.
She was sick for nine weeks. They had the night nurse. Otherwise it was Ma and Ellie who looked after her and put up with her complaints that everything they did was done badly, that the place was going to ruin, that the new girl they had got hold of might be a dab hand at foreign cooking but didn’t know the first thing about plain food.
In the afternoon while Ellie rested Pa would drop in for an hour or two, to tease her, taste her medicines and tell her jokes. ‘Stop it,’ she would yell, ‘you’re killing me.’ Vic too liked to sit with her.
He would go out in the early morning in his dressing-gown, send the nurse to make tea, and when she came back, wave her off. Ellie would find her asleep under a reading lamp in the front room.
In these hours he did all the things the nurse might have done. ‘Vic,’ Ellie told him, ‘you don’t have to do these things. That’s why we’ve got the nurse.’ She meant to spare him something she thought men shied away from, the intimate business that has to do with bodies. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘I don’t mind. It gives us a chance, you know, to talk a bit.’
‘Did you know,’ he said one day, ‘that Meggsie was a twin? Can you imagine it, two Meggsies? The other one died of the Spanish flu. She grew up in Chillagoe, did you know that? When it had a population of 7,000. It’s a ghost town now.’
He would be half-asleep on these occasions, very tender and talking half to himself. What he was talking about, she knew, was the mystery of other people’s lives, how little we know of one another; lying very close to her, just on the edge of sleep, and almost ready, she thought, because of the softness of his mood, to put into words at last the facts and details of his own life, all that part of it that was still secret in him.
One night Meggsie called to him where he sat half-dozing against the wall.
‘Vic, love, are you there? I want to give you something – a present.’ She sometimes wandered at this hour, but she did not seem to be wandering now. ‘Go to the bottom drawer of me dressing table.’
He got up and went to the cedar chest of drawers where her photographs sat in their celluloid frames. One was of the girls when they were little, the other a composite of half a dozen faded snapshots, her husband Len out west somewhere with a lot of other fellows, all standing in a row in hats.
The drawer was stiff. He had to get down on his knees to shift it. It jerked, came open, and in the half-light from the hallway he saw with a little shock that it was full of leaves. Was he dreaming?
‘Take one,’ she said behind him.
He put his hand into the drawer in a gingerly way, afraid for some reason of snails, and rustled among the dry leaves. But no, it wasn’t leaves. It was lottery tickets, hundreds of them, thousands – every fifth share she had bought, regularly on her afternoon off, from Mr McCann the local newsagent, over more than forty years. He felt among them.
But they were leaves. He had taken them for lottery tickets only in the way one’s mind works in dreams, though whether it was his dream or hers he could not tell. It was just about the time that ballots were being drawn to send young men up to Vietnam. Greg was eighteen, and he thought it might be Greg’s name he was about to draw. Or was it his own? Again? Could they ask you to go again?
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Have you got one?’
He took one of the tickets and went to the bed and showed it to her.
‘No,’ she said, without even looking at it. ‘That’s not the one.’
He brought her another.
‘No.’ She was quite short with him, as if he were being deliberately stupid. He felt like a very young child who could not see the answer to some simple problem in arithmetic.
‘Meggsie –’ he began.
‘Go on,’ she told him, ‘you’re wasting time.’
He dipped again.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Good boy! You were always a good boy really.’ She smiled. ‘Now, don’t show it to anyone, eh? Don’t tell, or you’ll lose your luck. Don’t even show it to me. Put it in your wallet.’
He obeyed. He put the ticket, which had after all never won anything the first time around, in his wallet.
‘No,’ she said, catching the feeling of despair that had come over him, ‘don’t worry. It’s a good one. I wouldn’t give you anything that wasn’t lucky, love, you know that. Don’t you know that after all this time? Trust me.’
He did not remember it had happened till the next day when he was in the office and in conference. He broke off for a moment to check his wallet, and there was the ticket.
He told Ellie about it, but wondered later if he had made the point clear, since what it had to do with was what he had felt; the odd sensation, when he put his hand into the drawer, that he was moving it among dried leaves, going back years, each with its number. Greg’s ballot too had been part of it.
With Meggsie’s death a prop went from the house. They all felt it and were surprised how her various forms of tyranny, which they had been inclined to laugh over, had determined the way they lived. Impossible to modernise the kitchen – that was Meggsie’s province. Part of her power lay in the fact that only she could manage its many inconveniences. Impossible to suggest that nobody these days ate puddings, a different one each night.
But when she was gone and they were free to make all the changes they wanted, they were at a loss where to begin. For the first time Vic talked seriously to Ma of selling the house and the adjoining factory site and moving. He did it, Ma thought, not because it was a necessary move, or one that any of them wanted, but for reasons of his own that for all their closeness she could not ask about.
For a long time now he had felt a kind of emptiness in him that had to do, he thought, with the way he had closed his heart in the last days before his mother’s death, had shut out so completely all the pain and loss he felt that afterwards there was nothing to go back to. Now, in grieving for Meggsie he grieved at last for his mother, in the kind of linking over and back (he was thinking of the way his mother hemmed a skirt) that made up the odd, cross-hatched line he was following.
But there was something else as well. For a time, between eighteen and twenty-one, death had been the closest of all realities to him, a daily thing, more common in that place than the sound of a woman’s voice, or a bath running, or a clean shirt. He had thought he would never get used to any other condition of life; that those ordinary things – clean shirts, hot baths, a woman’s hand – would go on being so miraculous as to be barely graspable, and only the proximity of death quite real.
The whole of his energy at that time had been engaged in pushing it off; in clinging to his own body and dragging the little bit of life in it from one day to the next. It was huge, that, but also simple. Pure, too. The effort was so pure. You knew what the other was because from time to time, when it was necessary, you held a man whose death was near so close against your ribs that his heart was just a paper thinness from your own, and the beating of it was like your own heart flopping and failing.
For years now no death had come close enough to touch him. Now Meggsie’s did, and after so long, his mother’s death too. (He was not ready yet to think of his father.) Most of all, he began once again to live with his own, but it seemed mysterious to him now because he was surrounded by so much that obscured even the possibility of it, and because when it came to him here it would, given the odds, be of a kind he had not yet faced, a natural one.
10
FOR MORE THAN twenty years Digger’s visits to town had followed the same pattern. Thursday was the day, because in the early years it had been Iris’s day off. Later, when the cake shop closed and she retired, they stuck to Thursdays out of habit. Digger went up on an early train, spent the night, and came back on the milk train Friday morning.
If it was one of the days when he was to meet Ellie he would not go to Bondi Junction till after lunch. Otherwise, after a bit of shoppin
g on his own, he went immediately. They would take a picnic to Cooper Park, or eat quietly at home, and in the afternoon he would read a bit or do whatever jobs needed doing. Now that the boys were gone there was always some little thing to be set right. In the evening they took in a show, or went round and had tea at Ewen’s or Jack’s, who were married now with families of their own.
He got on well with the wives. There had never been any embarrassment about his standing among them. The children called Iris Grannie and Digger was ‘Grannie’s friend’. They called him Digger because their fathers did – he had baulked at ‘Uncle’.
They were freer with him than with any uncle. Their mothers had to step in and prevent them, the moment he appeared, from climbing all over him like some sort of natural phenomenon, an especially cooperative tree or rock. He was fond of children. He showed them old-fashioned tricks even their fathers did not know, with balls made of silver paper out of cigarette packets, that if weighted at one end could be made to dance, and how to weave pyjama-cords on cotton reels. He brought them wooden toys he had made and told them stories, serious ones, that left them struck but which for some reason they could not get enough of. Thursdays he was a family man. He spent a lot of his time during the week thinking up tricks to amuse ‘the kids’.
The whole tenor of his life on that one day of the week was different, and had been for so long, given the little changes that had taken place in it, that when he found himself at Central Station on a Monday morning, same hour but a different day of the week, he felt disorientated.
It wasn’t simply that his own routine had been broken. The whole feel of the place was different. The Monday morning crowds wore different faces. The streets had a different pace. It felt less like another day of the week than another city.
He had come up for the funeral of the poet, Hugh Warrender. He was doing it out of affection for Ellie, but also out of respect for a man he had spoken to only once, and then in an unsatisfactory way, but whom he felt he had got to know over the years, and grown close to. Iris went with him.
It was an odd gathering. There were groups of older people who Digger guessed would be friends of the family or business acquaintances of Vic’s; but there were others whose presence was so unlikely that he thought they must have mistaken the time and come to the wrong ceremony. A lot of the men were in jeans and high-collared Indian shirts, and some wore washed-out combat jackets with Chairman Mao caps. Most of the girls too wore jeans, but some were got up in full-length cotton like Indian women and had children with them in the same outlandish garb. There was a flock of schoolgirls as well, all in gingham and straw hats.
The presence of so many hippies, he thought, was unfortunate. It did not occur to him till later, when he saw how sober and attentive they were, that some of these people might have the same sort of distant but personal relation to Hugh Warrender that he did and had come in the same spirit. He saw them differently then.
It was February, and hot. Outside in the sunken rose garden where they had milled about waiting, the birds were singing, in a regular, repeatable way but at odd intervals just whenever they pleased, breaking in on the organ music. They were a distraction. Very argumentative and bold they sounded, getting on with their noisy lives while people settled and subdued themselves.
The order of things was impressive. Ellie read one of her father’s poems, quite a short one that was unfamiliar to Digger though he knew all the books. If it spoke of death, and he was by no means certain of that, it did so in a light-hearted way, closer to the hubbub the birds were creating than to the solemn music. There was an image of night-smelling jasmine – the flower itself out of sight somewhere, its invisible presence in the room, and of a household, also unseen, all busy voices. One word was repeated and Digger was moved by it. The word was ‘returns’.
When the poem was over some overtones of it, of its music, lingered in him, and in the others too, he thought. Iris very lightly touched his hand as on that other occasion, and once again what Mr Warrender had to say drew them together.
There was no sadness in it, none at all. Quite the opposite really. It spoke of presence and completeness, of ‘returns’. Much later, Digger would think of the poem and be pleased that he and Iris had heard it together. It would comfort him for his loss. But at the moment it was his mother he was thinking of. It struck him with panic, that image of her sitting in a broken chair out in the yard, with behind her the house and its contents, all she had clung to and held against such odds, turned to ashes in her head.
He had spent so many hours in the consideration of it because the law she had lived by was so like his own. What he was left wondering was how, when the time came, he might let go of things without believing, as she had, that he was not only losing them but had never in any real sense had them.
Mr Warrender’s grandsons, Greg and an older boy, Alex, who had come across with his mother from America, were to read the lessons; and strangely enough, it was precisely what Digger had been turning over in his head that Greg now spoke of.
It was many years since Digger had seen him. He had been just a lad then, a neat little fellow in a duffle coat and new boots. He was rather gangling now (he had heard something of him from Ellie, from Vic too once or twice), and was so much, Digger thought, what Vic had been when he first knew him that he decided the differences he saw must have to do with his eyesight. He forked his glasses out of his right-hand breast pocket as the boy read, but saw, when he set them on his nose, that the lack of focus he had been aware of was in the boy himself.
He was less compact than Vic had been. But it wasn’t that. What he lacked, and it made all the difference, was cockiness. It brought back to Digger, and vividly, considering the years, just what he had felt about Vic in those early days, his intense antipathy – and what had happened to that?
‘In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble,’ he read, ‘and the strong men bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are too few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened . . . Also when they shall be afraid of that which is on high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshoppers shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets . . .’
From his place in the front row Vic looked up. The boy did not read confidently. He stumbled in places and seemed unsure of how the words were connected. Vic’s face in profile, as Digger saw it, wore a concerned look, either because he was anxious for the boy on this public occasion, as Ellie was too – Digger could see that – or because of something in the words themselves.
Iris had remarked earlier when they arrived how little changed he was. It was more than twenty years since she had seen him. Digger was surprised. When he turned up at the Crossing it was his immediate mood that Digger looked out for – little signs he had learned to recognise that meant their time together would go easily, others which, however much he disguised them, indicated the opposite. Till Iris mentioned it, he had never considered him in the light of change.
‘They go fast,’ Iris thought, ‘when they do go. That sort.’ Digger was of the other kind. He was spare and leathery, and under the hat was very nearly bald. She no longer felt any embarrassment when they were out, together. He might have been sixty as she was. (Sixty-seven, in fact.)
The other boy, who spoke with an American accent, was too confident, Digger thought. He read as at a performance. It jarred.
There was a third speaker, a man from the university who had written on Hugh Warrender and came here, as a good many of the mourners did, as a sharer in his public life, though public, as he pointed out, was the wrong word for something which, in the case of each one of them, and in the poet’s case too, was so hidden that if one was to be true to the spirit of it, it could be referred to only in terms that were tentative and indirect.
He was speaking of poetry itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives, especially here in Australia,
though it was common enough – that Was the whole point of it – and of their embarrassment when it had, as now, to be brought into the light. How it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn’t always possible, but in precise ones just the same, for what is deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too – that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own.
This speech made an impression on Digger. That ‘other history’ meant something to him. When they stepped outside into the strong sunlight, which was thick with bees, he saw a few people go up to the young man who had said so much, shake hands and congratulate him; he looked embarrassed but also pleased with himself.
Digger did not make the mistake this time of approaching him. He settled for the words themselves. They had struck a chord in him, and touched, he felt, on the very thing he had been thinking of earlier: what it is that cannot be held on to but nonetheless is not lost.
11
IT WAS THE night of Pa’s funeral and still hot. Big storm clouds were building over the flat land towards Hen and Chicken Bay and nervous shudders of lightning touched the edges of them. Vic came away from the table feeling displeased with everyone, and with himself too.
Pa’s death, which had come without warning, had hit him hard, and Lucille’s arrival with Alex, all adding to the adjustments and changes that had to be made in the household, had made these last days painful to him.