by David Malouf
In her letters, not in the poems. She was rounder, softer there. Or was that because he had translated the poems so fully into Maggie's sphere?
Either way, while remaining excited, fascinated even, he had begun to doubt his clear sense of Diane Novak, and was disconcerted by the speed with which she and Maggie, for all the differences between them, had caught one another's tone.
DIANE NOVAKwas also disconcerted. She had brought presents, of course: jewellery of various kinds for the girls, a Ferragamo scarf for Maggie. For Sam a pair of Indian moccasins. He had received them, she thought, as if they were an exchange, not quite adequate, for something she had deprived him of, rather than as a gift, and was suddenly aware of all those little signs of unease she had felt between the lines of his letters and put out of mind, but which in the man himself were too close to the surface to be ignored. Goodness, she thought, what have we got here? She was disturbed a little, amused a little, but also touched.
Because the music he had found for her was so inward, so intuitive and acute, she had assumed a degree of knowingness in him that had led her into a kind of playful exaggeration that she saw now might have been a mistake. He wasn't at all knowing. He was, for all his sleekness, altogether boyish and at the mercy of his own wild starts and emotions.
Proprietorial too, she saw. Of herself, of Maggie. Of everything. She would have to be careful of wounding him. She would have to rely on Maggie to get them through.
Thank goodness, she thought, for Maggie.
She shot Sam a glance that was meant to be reassuring, collusive even, but all he did was look alarmed, and she was reminded yet again of how much of what life cannot deal with may be taken up, taken care of and reconciled, in the work.
She was well aware of what this meant for her own work, and had assumed that he too must know it—which is why she had responded so completely to him. She saw now that he might not. And saw too, almost too clearly, how much of “life” his work might have to make up for.
Scott, meanwhile, had transferred his attention to Miss Stinson, who, seventy-five if she was a day, was glowing in the full light of his interest.
He was amazing, Scott. He had a fund of attention, of youthful excitement over this, that—everything in fact—that seemed inexhaustible and which he bestowed, in an unself-conscious way, on everything in his vicinity. Which was a bit of a problem really. She knew from her own case how easy it was to be misled. But not, in her own case, dangerously; she was pretty skilled, at this point, at protecting herself from ultimate disappointment.
Miss Stinson was telling them how she had discovered Maggie and Stella, while Stella, the subject of the story, sat placid and indulgent, but frowning. It bored her to have these ancient wonders trotted out again—as she would have said, for the forty-second time. Any glory they involved was more important, these days, to Miss Stinson than to Stella herself, who had long since put well behind her the tattered, if once glowing, clouds they trailed.
“Such funny little things, they were,” Miss Stinson told. “With no shoes, and scars on their knees, real harum-scarums. Tomboys.” They were her next-door neighbours, their father a removal man. They were always hanging over the fence to hear the scales that rose and fell behind the blinds of the little house she shared with her sister, and the big practise pieces their students performed. Longing to join in. Well, she had taken them on at last, in exchange for a couple of hours of ironing each week, because their mother had wanted something more for them—but without much enthusiasm. And lo and behold, miracle of miracles, by one of those quirks of fate that make you wonder at things—life was such a lottery, so unexpected, so unpredictable—little Stella Glynn had turned out to be just what her name suggested—a star. The one undisputed triumph of Miss Stinson's career. She won the Sun Aria. Went to study in Paris, then London. Sang at Covent Garden and the Met and was for ten years an “singer of renown,” and was still described that way when her records turned up on local radio. But the gift she had been endowed with had never meant as much to Stella as it did to others. As soon as she could manage it she gave up the irregular life of glitter and savage discipline, married her Swede, and came home. These days she co-managed a successful travel agency. It suited her to a T
Scott, dazzled to find himself in the presence of a real star, even one who seemed little interested in her own faded glow, was leaning intensely towards Miss Stinson, who was telling her story now, in an oddly flirtatious way, entirely for him.
“Go on,” he said, when Miss Stinson paused and seemed for a moment to be following some vivid memory of her own. “What happened then?”
“Isn't this amazing,” he said aside to Diane, with no hint of irony.
Diane was quietly amused. Clearly, whatever else she might be to Scott McIvor, she was not a star.
Sam too was listening, also moved in his way by the familiar tale.
Long ago when they were all young, it was Stella he had been drawn to. She had obsessed and tormented him.
He was studying piano then with Miss Stinson's sister, Miss Minnie. Without Stella, he thought, his real life—the one he had imagined and must at all costs have—would be for ever closed to him.
He had been wrong; had almost made a fatal error, and not only of the heart. When he listened these days to the two pieces Stella had inspired in him, and which he had written for her extraordinary voice, he got a cold feeling at the base of his spine that was only partly for what came back to him, unbidden, of that old attraction, and the young man's bitter hurt with which it was still sometimes infused.
What scared him more was the echo he caught, the pre-echo, of the works he might have gone on to produce; the way his nature, his own gift might have gone if Stella, grand as she was, had continued to be his goal and inspiration. But she had been wiser than he was. Crueller. More honest. Less vain. She had understood, long before he saw it, that the true voice of what he might have in him was Maggie's. When he saw it too he was dismayed and humbled, then swept away by how obvious it was.
Miss Stinson was right. How unexpected, how simple life could be. Though not, perhaps, just at the moment.
He turned his attention to the sunroom where the children were gathered. Frowned. Got to his feet. Maggie, seeing his frown and reading the question in it, waited a beat then followed.
Sprawled on the floor out there the twins were engaged in a game of Monopoly with their cousin Jens. Cassie, who distrusted Jens and often complained about him, but succumbed immediately to the smallest attention he showed her, had been permitted to mind his cash. Jens, of course, was winning. Lars, Stella's older boy, was plugged into a Walkman. Miranda and the two interlopers, as Sam thought of them, were in a huddle of green, pink, and ash-blond heads half hidden behind the door.
Sam surveyed the scene and settled on Jens and Lars as the source of what he felt in the air as a threat of imminent disorder. They had only to step across the threshold, these two, for the twins to be transformed from awkward, leggy little girls stuck on Michael Jackson to beings who gave off a seductive glow that terrified him, it was so naked—though innocent of course. They didn't know what it meant.
Lars was sixteen. He played in a pop group and was reputed to have got a schoolgirl pregnant—they had actually heard this from the twins! He was keeping his distance today, big feet in Nike joggers thrust out into the centre of the room, head bobbing, eyes closed under bluish lids. A great six-foot lump attached to a Walkman, exerting some sort of diversionary influence on the Monopoly board by disabling the twins, who could never quite ignore him.
But Jens was the one. It was Jens with his berserker's blue eyes and con man's smile who was the killer.
“I hope you'll tell that Jens he's not allowed upstairs. I don't want him going through my things.”
This, earlier in the day, from Cassie, who was possessive of “treasures.”
“The last time he was here he walked off with a scent bottle I was keeping. He's a thief!”
And
here she was, three hours later, entirely under his spell.
Once, when he was five, they had surprised Jens with his thing out, attempting to put it into one of the twins.
Stella, who ought, Sam thought, to have been as appalled as he was, had laughed when he faced her with it.
“Oh for heaven's sake, Sam, he's five years old!" she told him. “It'd be like marshmallow in a moneybox.”
She and Maggie had collapsed at that, and Sam, enraged, had felt once again what a gap there was between the way he saw things and the world these sisters came out of, and so easily reverted to the moment they were together. Two minutes in one another's company and they were barefooted kids again, back in that disastrous household that had once, he admitted, when he was young, seemed so liberating. The easygoing carelessness and good humour. The very amenable terms these sturdy, down-to-earth sisters had appeared to be on with their own very different styles of beauty and with the world—with Life, as he would have put it then.
Well, he was less indulgent these days of that sort of carelessness. He knew now what it led to. On a daily basis.
Eighteen years he and Maggie had been together, but there were times when he was astonished all over again by how differently they took the world and what it threw at them.
As for Jens, five years old or not, he could have killed the little shit. And he could have killed him all over again right now.
Maggie, who had come up quietly behind him, laid her hand very lightly on his back.
“What is it, love? What's the matter?” she enquired. But almost immediately one of the twins, Rosalind, complained: "Mummy, Jens is cheating.”
“He is not,” Cassie told her.
“He is too.”
“Play quietly, girls,” Maggie said, barely paying attention. She was concerned now with getting Sam back to the table. She barely noticed the buzzing behind the half-open door where Miranda was closeted with her friends.
“What about Tom?” Sam now demanded, as if this all along was what had really been troubling him. “You said five. It's gone half past.”
As if she knew any more than he did. The boy was fifteen.
“Oh, you know what he's like,” Maggie told him. “He gets carried away. He'll be back.”
Stella's eye was on them from the table next door. Maggie caught it and winked.
“What are you two doing out there?” Stella called. “Come here, Sam, and explain to Diane about fire-farming. You know what a dud I am, and Scott's no help.” She was sacrificing the sailmaker, who was too pleased to have been named by her in such a familiar way to take offence.
Maggie relaxed a little. If there was anyone who could break Sam's mood it was good old Stell.
It was nearly six now and beginning to be dusk. The conversation at table was muted. The bottles of wine Sam had opened earlier, and one Stella had brought, stood empty before them among half-filled glasses and plates piled with peelings and scraps.
Diane Novak consulted her watch.
She was uncertain of the conventions here. People seemed settled in and gave no sign of moving, but she thought they should get going, that it was time to whip her sailmaker away. Suddenly there was a commotion from the sunroom—actual screams.
Miss Stinson, who was in full flight again, looked alarmed as the heads turned—she was deaf—and first Maggie, then Sam, then Stella, leapt to their feet.
“What is it?” she cried. “What's happened?”
It was at moments like this that “condition,” which for the most part she contrived very successfully to hide, came home to her—the prospect of not hearing the car that was bearing down to lift you bodily off your feet.
The scene in the sunroom when Maggie arrived was confused. It was Sam, immediately behind her, who took it all in and saw at once how things stood: Jens rushing past them to his mother in the hallway, Lars, still plugged in to his Walkman, upright now in the middle of the room, around him and under his feet small houses scattered as by a tornado among the dice and cards of the Monopoly game, the twins and Cassie, big-eyed all three, clinging together in the bay window. Still half out of sight behind the door, Miranda, Don, and the girl Julie were scrabbling in a heap on the floor. It was Julie who was screaming. But she was also flailing her arms and kicking her legs while Don and Miranda tried to hold her still and shouted her name. It was only a moment before Sam, uncomfortably sprawled with the writhing body half under him, had her controlled, but in that moment, he thought, the room was like an animal pit, as the others must have seen, coming up behind Stella—the sounds that were coming out of the child's body so little resembled anything that belonged to human speech. Sam looked back over his shoulder to where Maggie had pulled Cassie and the twins, who were staring white-faced but silent, close against her. Jens had his head hidden in his mother's shirt.
A moment. Then it was past. They were back in their ordered lives again.
“It's okay, pet,” Maggie was telling Cassie, "everything's fine now.”
She moved to relieve Sam, who was stricken, now that the girl was quiet, to find her sobbing against his chest. He let go and Maggie took over.
Picking Cassie up in his arms, Sam carried her past the others, the twins following, to the dining room, but turned back when Miss Stinson said, to no one in particular, "I expect she's taken something, poor girl. They should find out what it is.”
That “taken something” reminded him. Years back—twenty, twenty-five—Miss Stinson's sister, Miss Minnie, “taken something.”
In her late forties, Miss Minnie had fallen passionately in love with a bus-driver, and when, after a series of approaches and ambiguous responses, he had, deeply embarrassed, made it plain that she had mistaken his interest, the poor woman had swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin. She survived, but it was a shaming business, and Miss Stinson had been devastated to find herself brought so close to a passion whose destructive consequences she too had to bear.
What surprised Sam was how entirely he had submerged and forgotten what to Miss Stinson must, for so long, have been a source of immediate and almost daily sorrow. He kissed Cassie briefly on the ear and told her: "Here, sausage, why don't you go to Miss Stinson for a moment.” They were old friends, Cassie and Miss Stinson. “I'll just go and see how Mummy is doing. And you girls,” this to the twins, "why don't you make us all a good cup of coffee. A big pot. Real grains.”
But when Sam got to the sunroom, Maggie and the others were gone. Only the boy Don, with his floppy hair and lolly-pink slippers, was there, hovering on the threshold. Like everyone else, Sam had forgotten him.
It was Diane Novak's young man Scott who stepped in. “Are you okay, mate?” he asked, at Sam's side. The boy looked tearful. “Come on here.” He came obediently, and Scott, without self-consciousness, put his arm around the boy and held him close; and at just that moment, the women reappeared at the top of the stairs—Stella, Miranda, Diane. Maggie had shushed them off and remained with Julie.
“She'll be fine,” Stella told them, "she's a bit overwrought, that's all.” She made a face at Sam, indicating that for Miranda's sake he should ask no questions.
Overwrought, they both knew, was an understatement, but for the moment must suffice.
Sam nodded. With a revulsion he could not hide, at least from himself, he turned away, but felt again in his back muscles and in the tendons of his hands the unnatural strength with which her body, slight as it was, had thrashed and jerked against his hold. Her hot breath in his ear. And the sounds that issued from her, wildered howlings at such a pitch of animal fury and uncomprehending anguish that he had almost been overcome.
By her terrible closeness. By the birdlike fragility against his ribcage of her bones and the alien power they were endowed with as he used all his weight to keep her still.
Her presence had always unnerved him. The funereal black of the miniskirts and shawls she got herself up in, her black eye make-up and the black fingernails and lips. The toxic disaster stuff she carri
ed. Which he was afraid might brush off on Miranda, or on Cassie or the twins.
Now Maggie too reappeared at the top of the stairs. “She's sleeping,” she told them.
She came on down, touching Sam's hand briefly as she passed. The twins were at the kitchen door, with a pot of coffee and a tray of mugs. “Good girls,” she said. They all made their way to the dining room and went back to being a party, but a single one now, sipping, passing things. Even Lars appeared, tempted by chocolate biscuits.
“Miss Stinson,” Maggie suggested, "why don't you play us something.” In the early days of their marriage they had often had musical evenings. Miss Stinson had always played.
Too old and too much the professional to be coy, Miss Stinson got her ancient bones together and moved to the piano.
The Schubert she chose was safe, its fountain of notes under her fingers brightly lit and secure. The regretful middle section when it appeared, with its shifts, on the same note sequence, from trancelike sureness to throbbing hesitation, its wistfulness and quiet stoicism, spoke of a world of recoveries that could still rouse itself and sing. Even the repeats, which might have been too many, as she reached for them were new-found and welcome.
Sam, under the influence of the music, and the hour and the light, which seemed one, met Diane Novak's eye across the table. She smiled and nodded.
Nothing had been said. They had barely spoken. But he felt easy again. Their meeting had not, after all, been the central event of the occasion, but had not been a mistake.
The last notes died away. Miss Stinson sat a moment, as if she were alone out there, somewhere in the dark, and they, like shy animals, had been drawn in out of the distance to listen; drawn in, each one, out of their own distance and surprised, when they looked about, that music had made a company of them, sharers of a stilled enchantment. It was only when Miss Stinson, still absent and absorbed, lifted her hands at last from the keys that Tom, who had been waiting, respectful but impatient in the doorway behind them, bursting with his news, spoke up at last, red-faced and overwrought.