by David Malouf
He waited. He was waiting for some comment from her of what she had felt or seen that would explain it, since he could not; but she lay with her face turned away and did not speak.
Her hair, which had been so rich when he first knew her, was thinning, not quite grey, and he had a particular affection for the freckling of her brow, and the area just below the line of her hair where the skin was almost transparent and the veins showed. He put his fingertips to them, and she turned her head and smiled. It worried her, he knew, that she was no longer beautiful. She thought she wasn’t.
‘He didn’t come because he had anything to say, you know. Why do you reckon he did come?’
She looked at him. ‘Because he was lonely,’ she said after a moment. ‘He had nowhere to go.’ Digger stared. ‘Maybe,’ she said lightly, ‘he fell out with his girlfriend.’ She said it carelessly. She saw immediately that she should not have.
‘What? What girlfriend?’
‘Oh – they say he’s on with Susie Stone.’
‘Who does?’
‘Oh – you know, the newspapers.’
He lay still. He was taking it in.
‘Who’s Susie Stone?’ he said at last. He was amazed by all this, but most of all by her. How did she know these things? It astonished him at times the things that went on in the world that other people took for granted and he knew nothing of. He was surprised, too, how much she accepted now that would once have shocked her. For three years before they got round to marrying, Ewen and his wife Jane had lived together – they even had a little boy. He had been a page at their wedding.
‘Susie Stone’s a designer,’ she told him. ‘Sportswear. She’s pretty well known – to young people.’
‘Do you think Ellie knows?’ he asked.
‘I expect so, yes. I don’t suppose she’s the first. It’s what I said. You can see it right off. Any woman could.’
He turned up on odd Thursdays after that, and Digger saw him more often at Bondi Junction in the end than at Keen’s Crossing. He began to bring Iris little gifts, as he had Jenny, but Iris, who had none of Jenny’s suspicion of him, took the gesture as it was intended and made a fuss over his presents and over him too. He was delighted. The things he gave her he had thought about. You could see that.
Digger never did get used to having him there, but he accepted at last that the flirtations he practised were harmless, at least where Iris was concerned, and that his real reason for coming was the one she had seen on that first occasion: there were times when he had nowhere else to go.
13
DIGGER WAS DIZZIED by the world. He could never, he felt, see it steady enough or at a sufficient distance to comprehend what it was, let alone to act on it. This was a disadvantage; but he had long since come to the conclusion that his perplexity about life, which did not prevent him from living it, was essential to him.
A nailhead. That was clear enough. Round, flanged, with ridges that allowed the hammerhead a grip. The weight of the hammer, too. Driving a nail in, feeling the point go through the soft grain to bite on the last two blows – that was the only action he knew that was simple. Everything else, the moment you really looked at it, developed complications.
Even the least event had lines, all tangled, going back into the past, and beyond that into the unknown past, and other lines leading out, also tangled, into the future. Every moment was dense with causes, possibilities, consequences; too many, even in the simplest case, to grasp. Every moment was dense too with lives, all crossing and interconnecting or exerting pressure on one another, and not just human lives either; the narrowest patch of earth at the Crossing, as he had known since he was two years old, was crowded with little centres of activity, visible or invisible, that made up a web so intricate that your mind, if you went into it, was immediately stuck – fierce cannibalistic occasions without number, each one of which could deafen you if you had ears to hear what was going on there. And beyond that were what you could not even call lives or existences: they were mere processes – the slow burning of gases for example in the veins of leaves – that were invisibly and forever changing the state of things; heat, sunlight, electric charges to which everything alive enough responded and held itself erect, hairs and fibres that were very nearly invisible but subtly vibrating, nerve ends touched and stroked.
This was how he saw things unless he deliberately held back and shut himself off.
What staggered him in others, and especially in Vic, was the certainty with which they saw the whole world as a nail to be struck squarely on the head. Yet he suspected at times that Vic did not entirely believe in the world. His capacity to deal with it had to do with his conviction that it was there only insofar as he could act on it.
Three or four times a year now Vic went overseas, to Japan, Hong Kong, London. The mineral boom and the listing of Australian shares on the international exchange took his interests out of the country. His nephew Alex had been brought in to run the Australian side. He was a chilly fellow, Alex. Digger heard this from Ellie. He lived on his own in a big old flat at Elizabeth Bay, and Ellie, though she tried, had never got close to him.
Vic came to the Crossing less often now, and when he did come their talk was of a different kind. In recent years their times together had become very easy and sociable, too much so. They had taken one another for granted. But now some of this sociability transferred itself to Bondi Junction, and this allowed their times alone to change. They both felt this, but it was Vic who had managed it, and Digger was surprised yet again, by the talent he had – it was instinctive in him – for getting what he needed.
He had begun to detach himself from things. That was what Digger saw. Or not precisely from things, but from himself. And what this involved was a moving deeper into himself. So when they talked now, it was in a quieter mood. What they were exploring was not the interest of difference, which had allowed them to turn everything they knew of one another into a game of surprises, but what they shared.
A lot of this new style of talk was about the years they had spent up there. Three years and a half, to be exact. Thirty years ago.
Vic was all questions; shy ones at times, as if it embarrassed him a little that he should have to ask them. After all, it was his life.
Digger’s own memory was exceptional, he knew that; but he was surprised just the same to how large an extent Vic had lost all detailed recollection of that period, or had suppressed it or let it go.
The emotion of it was still strong. There was a bitterness in him that he continued to chew over as Digger did not. For Digger it had been one time of his life among others; a time, simply, that had laid hard responsibilities on him, but ones that were too deeply ingrained in his nature now for regret. He accepted them. He made no complaint.
For Vic the injustice that had been done to him was absolute, a thing he could not forgive. Some possibility had been killed in him then, and though he had found others and made what he could of them – that’s how he was; that was his nature, his character – that other possibility, the one that had been starved and beaten out of him, seemed especially precious. It belonged to his youth, to some finer and more innocent self than the one he had been left with when he came back.
He could not forgive that. The hurt of it was still with him. But he had deliberately stamped out all memory of the details, and it was these now that he wanted to recollect: little individual moments of his own life that only Digger could lead him to. Events, occasions, men – their names, what they had looked like, what happened to them.
Digger thought some of this talk was dangerous. Not to himself – he had lived with it for thirty years on a daily basis; it was woven into the very fabric of his existence, in the tangled lines of what bound him here and led out into the future. But for Vic they were something else, these details. They were what he had broken contact with. And perhaps the ability to survive, in his case, had depended on it – Digger allowed for this sort of difference between them. Making himself the
guide now who would lead him back into the immediate presence of it was not a thing Digger felt easy with.
What disturbed him was the way it took him back too. There was something quite different between going over it all with another and the more ordinary business of going over it in his own head.
Looking up briefly, a kind of pain behind his eyes that half-dazzled him, he would see behind the face of this man of fifty, fifty-one, fifty-three, which he knew so well – behind the lines that were thrown like a net over his features, breaking up the skin, and behind the coarsening skin itself with its net of veins – a look that had been, all those years ago, his first real glimpse into the man, the one that had established for him, whether he wanted it or not, their bond with one another and the beginning of a responsibility he had seen, even then, as extending far into the future, and up to the moment they were in now: that candid, guilty-innocent, animal look of the twenty-year-old he had caught eating his rice, who had shown him a kind of wisdom he might not have come to himself. ‘Trust me,’ that look had said, in the very act of stealing the food out of his mouth.
It had the power still to shake him. He felt a kind of trembling in himself that might have been the last shadow, after so long, of fever – do you ever, once bitten, get over it? – but was really, he knew, not a physical thing at all but another form of emotion. He had never been much good (it was another of his deficiencies) at telling the one from the other.
14
DIGGER NO LONGER went up to town. He had no heart for it. Town had been his Thursdays with Iris. To get down off the train at Central and know he was in a city of three million souls and she was not one of them made Sydney an alien place. He couldn’t breathe the air of it, or so he felt.
That was in the early days. Later, when his pain lessened, as it did in time, and he saw things more reasonably, what was the point? He could have stayed the night with one of the boys, he would have been welcome enough. He could have gone up for Ellie’s sake. But he didn’t. He had not seen, till Iris was gone, how his little morning enjoyments had only been such because at the end of them he would be catching the tram (later it had been the bus) to Bondi Junction. Her presence had underwritten everything, even the city itself, all those millions; his own presence too, at least in that place. Only much later, when the children wrote asking why he never came to see them any more, did he begin to go down once in a while ‘to see how they were growing up’ and to walk out to Cooper Park with them.
At the service in the little chapel, the preacher, who had not known Iris personally, spoke of her easy death (she had died without warning in her sleep); of her long widowhood, and of the husband, the boys’ father, whose name she still bore, who had been lost so many years ago in the Islands.
Digger swallowed hard to have all their years together, and so much affection, and so many events, passed over; but death, he knew, is an official thing, so are its ceremonies, and there was no public record of their years together.
She was buried under the name of the man she had in one area of herself remained faithful to, and though it hurt him a little, Digger respected that. It was part of a code they had shared. He knew its rules. A good deal of his affection for her, his admiration too, lay in her commitment to it.
Nine years she had had with the husband. That was official. Thirty-four without him. Altogether, if you could count them altogether, forty-three. But twenty-six she had had with him. And if you counted the years he had shared with her before they met – not her exactly but the shadow of her that she had stepped into – twenty-nine.
What did all these calculations mean? Digger felt strange sitting there in the pew, one of the chief mourners but anonymous and unofficial, totting up figures that were just figures, when the events of any one day or one moment even might have blazed up and made nothing of them.
The boys were very gentle with him. This was in the informal moments, before and after. Ellie and Vic were also there.
So he no longer went up to town, and it was years now since he had seen Ellie. Instead they had begun a correspondence.
At first it was just little notes – a postcard or two from her business trips with Vic, then at last proper letters.
They were, on Digger’s side, longer ones than he had ever written before. He put everything he felt into them, and Ellie wrote back of things, he thought, that she would never have told him face to face. He was surprised what words themselves could do when you gave yourself over to them; as if, in containing the expression of what was felt, they knew what you wanted to say before you did, and the very shape of a sentence, once you started on it, held just in itself the shape of what you needed to express; so it got said without embarrassment, and with no fear of falseness or of saying too much and being misunderstood.
After a time it seemed to them that their correspondence was satisfactory just in itself. To meet again might drive them back from intimacy into a politeness they would regret. But he would have liked to see her; to sit, as they used to do, across a table, and watch the way she used her hands.
He sat down once a week and wrote to Ellie as once a week he had gone up to Bondi Junction and stayed with Iris, and if the thing was not quite the same, there was a continuation of a kind in the regularity of it.
He spoke of Iris. Writing was a way of keeping all that part of his life alive in him – it had in most ways been the happiest part; or rather, of finding in it, as the words brought it back, dimensions he had been only dimly aware of in the daily happening. He wrote in a light mood. They had little code-words and quick half-references that came out of the one thing they shared and could draw on, her father’s poems. So the poems too took on a new life in their letters. Odd lines and phrases, worked into what they themselves had to say, kept their old meaning, but acquired, as they used them, a new one, coloured and lit up by their feelings now.
One of the things Ellie wrote of was Greg. He had used the money Pa left him to go to Europe, overland via India and Afghanistan. He was in Amsterdam, then in Greece, then he was back home again, but in Melbourne. She knew where he was and kept in touch with him.
So six or seven years passed and Digger had a good bundle of letters. He kept them in a drawer, and sometimes, as he had once done with Iris’s letters to Mac, he took them out and read them through. It was a pleasant occupation. What he thought of when he lay them aside, full as they were of memories of Iris and of so much else besides, little things he had in mind to tell Ellie, phrases from the poems, was how full his life had been, and that too he wrote to her since she, and all this business of writing to her, was part of it.
So many letters. Seven years.
He did not realise, as he thought this, that there would be so many more. Till it was eleven years. Then twelve, then thirteen.
15
VIC HAD COME by his driver, Brad, in an unlikely manner.
He used to stop occasionally, when he went for a walk out of his office, at a little coffee shop in an arcade, where he could sit and be quiet with his thoughts.
It wasn’t a lively place. It had been left just as it was from the days back in the Fifties when espresso coffee first made its appearance, and a Gaggia machine raising a head of steam, a view of the Bay of Naples, and laminated, kidney-shaped counters with high stools offered the promise that somewhere at least there was a dolce vita. He liked it because the only people who came here now were tired-looking women shoppers, and a few muddy-eyed older men who wanted a place where they would not be intimidated by too much style.
Tramps half of them looked, or very nearly. They put three or four spoonfuls of sugar into their coffee and sucked it up noisily, with no loss of dignity. He would settle in a corner and feel invisible, though in fact his expensive clothes made him very conspicuous. The invisibility was in his head, but it worked on people and he was seldom approached.
One day the old fellow behind the counter, who emerged every now and then to wipe the tables down with a damp cloth, came across in his shir
t-sleeves and apron and spoke to him. He was in his middle sixties, a rough-looking fellow with a shock of snowy hair.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ he said, and there was a smirk on his face that was very youthful. Vic felt then that he did know him, but couldn’t put a name or a place to him.
‘Felix,’ the man told him. ‘I used to work for Needham’s. In the old days. On the trucks. With Alf Lees. You remember.’
He did too, and the memory was a sweet one. Since their move up to Turramurra, everything that evoked the old house at Strathfield, and the factory, seemed sweet to him. The man, without waiting to be invited, sat down opposite – it was his place, after all – and said quietly: ‘I noticed you comin’ in here.’
He shifted the two sauce bottles and the pepper and salt shakers, setting them in a row.
‘I’ve got a favour to ask you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a boy, a good lad really – he’s honest, I mean – but he’s unsettled. Gives ’is mother a lotta worry. I was wondering if – you know, with your contacts, you could maybe do something for ’im. I know it’s a big thing to ask.’ It was more words, you could see, than he was used to finding all at the one go.
Vic was impressed by the straightness of him. He wasn’t at all obsequious. He was speaking as one man to another, taking for granted an equality between them, given a few million dollars, that Vic was glad to accept. He was speaking too as a father, and that also moved him. So he had taken the boy on as a driver.
He did not like him much. He was a young man who thought a great deal of himself. He was always glancing up to take a look at himself in the rear-vision mirror, and what he saw was a pleasure to him. He wasn’t very bright either, but did not know it. He talked too much and a lot of it was rot. But Vic liked the father, Felix, very much, and when he went to have his coffee now the man left the counter, brought a cup of his own, and they would sit together for a time and talk.