by David Malouf
How wonderful, she wrote. How she would look forward to it. But she managed, each time, to find excuses, and he guessed that she was unwilling to put to the test this long-distance intimacy that had grown up between them. Her dying suddenly, with no suggestion of a previous illness, made him wonder how much more she had been keeping from him.
Arriving before the last of his letters, he put it into the coffin along with the many other questions to which he must accept now that there would be no answer, and since he was here, and unlikely to come back a second time, accepted an invitation to fly up to Brisbane and give a reading.
It was a strange homecoming. He knew no one in Brisbane but his cousin Corrie. He was forty-eight years old and nobody's child.
One of the few mementoes his father had left was a little green-bound pocket diary in which, for a few days in Athens, in the year of his death, he had recorded in his Queenslander's big copybook hand what he had seen of a city whose every monument he had already wandered through in dreams, but which had to be excavated, by the time he got there, from towers of rubble.
What moved Colin when he first turned its pages was the passion he found even in the driest details, and the glimpse he got, which was clear but fleeting, of a young man he felt close to but had barely known, and who had himself to be resurrected now from scribbled notes and statistics, tiny painstaking sketches of capitals and the motifs off daggers in a dusty museum, and from half a dozen hastily scrawled street maps.
He stuffed the diary into the bottom of his rucksack and when, at the end of his first year in Europe, he went to Athens, spent a whole day trying to match the sketches to a modern map of the city.
What he had hoped to recover was some defining image of his father, some more intimate view of the amateur classicist and champion athlete who had played so large and yet so ghostly a part in his existence. He stood at corner after corner turning the sketch-map this way and that until, admitting at last that he was bushed, he took himself off to a caf on Venizelou.
He was settled there in front of a cold beer, still sweating, when he was approached by a dandified stranger, a fellow not much older, he guessed, than himself, but with a gold wedding-band on his finger, who seemed to have mistaken him for someone else. Anyway, they got talking, and when his new friend, out of pure pride in the place, offered to show him around a little—the sights, the real sights—he accepted.
His guide was so knowledgeable, he talked so well and in such impeccable English, that Colin, who had been wary at first, was soon at his ease. And it was astonishing how often it happened that Giorgios in his excitable way said: "Look, Colin, now look at this,” and there it was, just what the diary had described as being wonderful but hard to come upon and which on his own he had been unable to find.
They moved deeper and deeper into a maze. After the classical sights, the Byzantine—though “after” in fact was not quite accurate, because everything here was a patchwork in which bits of one period were used to hold up or decorate another, a half-column here, a slab there with two peacocks and a laurel wreath, so that styles and centuries tended to collapse into one another. As the afternoon wore on, the sights closed in. They were in a tangle of narrow streets where men with baskets were selling twists of salt-crusted bread and sticky honey-cakes; a crowded place, noisy, garish, where his new friend seemed to know everyone they met, and introduced him to men who showed him brasswork and filigree silver and other antique relics, but gave out, in an obscure way, that they had other wares to dispose of, though he could not guess what they might be and his new friend did not elucidate.
They stepped into one dark little taverna to drink ouzo, and into another to smoke, and afterwards he had the sensation that time, as he had already discovered among the monuments, was more a continual looping here than a straight line. He half expected, as a narrow street turned back upon itself, to see his father appear in the shadowy crowd, though there was no indication in the diary that he had been in this place. Then quite suddenly, in a poky alleyway with stalls full of brazen pots and icons, his friend was gone.
It was the oddest thing imaginable. One minute he was there, as affable and eager as ever, and the next he had slipped away.
There was no misunderstanding. Or if there was, Colin had failed to observe it. Perhaps his guide had lost patience with him, with his failure—was that it?—to catch at suggestions. Or he had seen friends close by and, not wishing to desert him openly—anyway, the occasion was broken off, that is what Colin felt. Things had been moving towards some event or revelation that at the last moment, for whatever reason, had been withheld.
He was disappointed for a time, but came at last to feel that it might have been the best thing after all. He heard tales later of tourists, too trusting like himself, who had been led on and then robbed or assaulted. Perhaps the fellow had thought better of it and let him off. But the teasing suggestion of something more to come, which was unseen but strongly felt, and had to be puzzled over and guessed at, appealed to him. To a side of him that preferred not to come to conclusions. That lived most richly in mystery and suspended expectation. The afternoon had a shape that he came to feel was exemplary, and his readers might have been surprised to know how often the fictions he created derived their vagrant form, but even more their mixture of openness and hidden, half-sought-for menace, from an occasion he had never got to the bottom of, for all that he had gone back time after time and let his imagination play with its many possibilities.
SO NOW,shaved, showered and with a pot of strong coffee at his elbow, he got down to it, the usual routine.
He wrote quickly, his blood brightening the moment he took up where he had left off the day before. His people drew breath again, turned their mute, expectant faces towards him.
He had moved the desk so that it faced the wall. The sun was already high and the city in a swelter, but the room he was writing in seemed within reach of invisible snow peaks. He wrote in coolness, while down there in weatherboard houses under weeping figs, behind mango and banana trees and spindly rust-coloured palms, his people sweated it out; till just on four in the afternoon, as a longish paragraph found its way towards that hour, the sky cracked, struck, and a storm broke, turning closed rooms into gigantic side-drums crazily beaten and shutting off, for a time, all chance of speech.
He put his pen down. It was almost ten. Quite soon his hosts would appear. That cloudburst had cleared the air. He could leave his people suspended in it, waiting to hear how they should go on.
It had cleared his own head as well, giving things, when he went to the window, an intense glow as if lit from within. The big trees in the Gardens opposite, that in their darkness of packed leaves might have been sinister, seemed filled with a powerful energy: gigantic angels momentarily stilled.
Greenness, that was the thing. Irresistible growth. Though it wasn't always an image of health or of fullness.
He thought of the mangroves with their roots in mud, and under their misshapen arches the stick-eyes of crabs and their ponderous claws. They had been banished for a time under concrete freeways, but would soon be pushing up fleshy roots, their leathery leaves, black rather than green, agleam with salt.
Vegetation spread quickly here. Everything spread quickly—germs, butter, rumours. There was talk of plantations outside the city, in pockets deep in the foothills of the Range, where cannabis was being grown in dense plantations. Each night late, trucks would move into the city, on the lookout for teenagers who had nowhere to sleep or were simply loose in the streets, available for whatever might bring a little action into their lives. They would be approached, hired, loaded on to trucks, and driven blindfolded to the marijuana fields, where in long rows, until first light, they would go about the business of harvesting the green stuff, the dream stuff. Then, towards four thirty, when the sun began to show, after being paid and blindfolded again, they would be driven back and dropped off in the Valley or at Stones Corner, or along the various bus routes into the city.
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True? It did not have to be. It was convincing at some deeper level than fact. It expressed something that was continuous with the underground history of the place, with triangles and flayed ribs, the leper colony on its island in the Bay, the men with scabbed and bloody hands sleeping on sacks behind the Markets, an emanation in heavy light and in green, subaqueous air, of an aboriginal misery that no tower block or flyover could entirely obliterate.
He moved one of his characters into place somewhere along Petrie Terrace where he could be approached. Loose, open, waiting for the truck that had just set out from a covered shed and was wobbling, low down on a rutted track, under moonlit leaves.
It was ten. Precisely. Any moment now his cousin Corrie would ring.
2
He and Coralie had grown up together. In the war years, with his father gone and his mother taken up with a social round that had a new definition as war work, he had spent the long weeks of the Christmas holidays at his Grandfather Lattimer's house at Woody Point, in a muddle of uncles and aunts and their children of whom Coralie James, who was just his age, had always been closest to him. In the obsessive way of only children they had done everything in tandem, having discovered in one another feelings they had thought too private, too much their own and only theirs, to be shared. They exchanged whispered secrets, scared one another with ghost stories, had their own coded language full of private jokes and references, which they would recognise only later as another version of the Lattimer exclusivity, and had, at eight or nine years old, to the amusement of the grown-ups, committed themselves to marriage. They had even picked out the house they meant to live in. A two-storeyed cottage with dormer windows, it was sufficiently unlike the houses they and their friends lived in to suggest possibilities of behaviour, of feeling too, quite different from the ones they found unsatisfactory at home.
Well, it had come to nothing, of course. A childish dream. Only once after those early years had he and Coralie spent any time together.
At twenty-five she had turned up in Swinging London, at a time, just after the birth of their second daughter, when he and Jane were still dealing happily with broken nights, babies’ bottles, and wet nappies drying on a ceiling rack in the damp little kitchen. Coralie, while she made up her mind between a teaching job in Portugal and a return to the arms of a boy in Brisbane who was prepared to wait, though not perhaps for ever, had spent six weeks on the floor of their basement living room.
It was the time, as well, of his first novel, which he wrote each night at the kitchen table, in the early hours while his family slept in the room next door; getting up every half-hour or so and stepping away from the warm sunlight of his Brisbane childhood to feed the coke-fire or make himself a mug of tea, and when the baby woke to walk her up and down a little while a bottle heated. His head would be so brimming with sunlight, and images and whole sentences that he needed to set down before they were gone, that he would write on sometimes with the baby over his shoulder, feeding off her warmth, in a state of wholeness and ease with his life and work that he was never to know so completely again.
In the conspiratorial way of lovers, he and Jane had made alliance against their wanted, unwanted guest. When he crept to bed at last, Jane would tease him about his other woman out there—and he could never be sure how serious she was and whether it was Coralie she meant or his book.
And in fact there was a sense in which they could scarcely be separated, that's what he saw after a time, since it was Coralie's presence he was drawing on when so many vivid pictures came back to him. Of blue sand-crabs spilled from a gunnysack and setting out over the red-earth floor of a hut, till they could be grabbed by the back legs and dropped squealing into the pot. Of tiger-moths at a wire-screen door and the peculiar light of a ribbed sandbank when the tide rippled out and a whole battalion of soldier crabs wheeled and flashed, then darkened.
“She's still in love with you,” Jane whispered. “She thinks I'm a mistake. She thinks I'm the interloper.”
“Don't be silly,” he protested.
“She thinks you two were made for each other. And you love it—you really love it. Being the rooster with two hens.”
“Do I?” he asked, genuinely surprised but not entirely displeased with this new and more dashing version of himself.
“Yes, you do—bastard!” Her voice, in playful accusation, had a throatiness, a sensuality that stirred him. “At heart you're a philanderer.”
“No I'm not,” he told her. “What do you mean? I'm not,” and he clasped her more warmly in the rumpled bed.
It became a joke between them, one of her ways of playing up to his ego and exciting him. It had taken him another seven years to see that it was also true.
But she had been wrong about Coralie. Their moment was past. He found her presence at the edge of his enclosed and sufficient family an irritation. Too keen-eyed, too deeply imbued with their Lattimer scepticism, she was an infidel. He resented her humourous disbelief in his being so easily settled. Being settled was important to him—too important, perhaps, that is what she had seen, and if he had been less concerned to defend his own small victory over aimlessness and the fear that without the constraints of a conventional family life he would sink back into the perplexities and self-destructiveness of adolescence, he too might have seen it.
How little he had known himself! What a mess he had made of things. And now, after half a lifetime, this late reunion.
It did not help that Coralie and Jane had remained friends, and that she knew, from Jane's side, all the sorry details, the whole sad story. And would have heard as well that of his two daughters, Eleanor would see him only to make their meetings, each time, the occasion of bitter recriminations and punishment, and Annabel, who had been his favourite, would not see him at all.
They had been to the North Coast—a patchy occasion, despite the perfect weather. Now, sun-dazed, they were having drinks on the Ped-ersens’ verandah above the river. Coralie, shoes discarded, her bare legs tucked away under her, had retreated into silence. It was Eric who did the talking.
All day, intimidated perhaps by the years they had known one another, his wife and this almost famous cousin, and the times they had shared, or by a kind of play between them which was too light, too full of allusions he could not catch, and which represented a side of Corrie he did not feel comfortable with, Eric had been sulky, watchful; determined, Colin thought, not to be drawn in or impressed. Now, suddenly, he had sprung to life. He expanded, he was voluble. It was as if he and Coralie shared a single source of energy, and when one of them drew on it the other wilted. Or perhaps it was simply that he was on home ground at last.
He had just made a surprising discovery. That Colin, who in all other respects seemed a well-informed sort of chap, was entirely ignorant on the subject of futures.
“I can't believe it,” he kept saying. “Corrie, can you believe it?”
Futures, it seemed, were what everyone was into.
Eric, in a way that was almost winning, he was so shyly passionate about the thing, began a lecture on futures and how they worked, keeping the tone light—he did not want to appear ponderous—but making certain that Colin should not miss the fact that here too a certain imagination and flair might be demanded. The thing had its own sort of drama, and considering the dreams that were dependent on it, and the suspense and disappointments, might have the makings of a plot.
Colin nodded, but it was like listening to something that, however coherent it might be, made no sense; like a poem in another tongue. Did Coralie follow it? Was she even listening? He could make nothing of the little smile she wore. Anyway, she must have tired of whatever amusement it gave her to see him so easily discomfited. After a moment or two she got up and said: "Well, I'd better see what I can rustle up to eat.” She was abandoning—no, relinquishing—him. When she called them in, twenty minutes later, Eric had his arm across Colin's shoulder and had become cheerily sentimental. They might have been old friends who had
just recaptured, in a series of boyish reminiscences, a moment forty years back when as spirited ten-year-olds they had slit their wrists Indian style and shared blood and spit. Colin did not trust himself to look in Coralie's direction.
“Big things are happening here,” Eric was telling him. “We're going on by leaps and bounds. No holding us. You ought to come back and be part of it, Colin. We need him, don't we, Corrie?”
“Mango,” Coralie told Colin, who was separating something from the green of his salad, "and shredded ginger,” and their eyes did meet for a moment. But any alliance between them could only be fleeting. And Eric was too deep in his pleasure in the occasion to see how lightly they let him off. Was she always so indulgent, Colin wondered.
Forgive me, she was saying.
No, he said. No need. I'm the one.
The fact was, he was a disappointment to her. She had read too many of his books. Eric's advantage was that he had read none of them. Then there was Jane, and London, and all those years when they had been so close that he could barely separate, when he looked back, what had been his experience and what hers. He had stolen a good deal of it—she of all people must know how much—and made it his own. But the fact that he had used it in his work did not mean that he had used it up, or got to the end of its mysteries. It was still precious to him, all of it, and she was so much part of the way it played on his mind and on his senses, especially here among so many familiar sounds and objects, that his feeling for her was as fresh and real in him as it had ever been. This is what he had wanted, all day, to say to her. But they had spent the time in small talk. He had said nothing. And in the end it was Eric who had stepped in and claimed him, and would establish the tone of their last hours together.
There was a kind of comedy in that, and they might have to settle for the recognition of it in a shared glance as the nearest they would get, this time round, to their old closeness or the promise of a new one.