by David Malouf
Today was to be a meeting of the clan. All the Tylers would be there with their wives and children, a few cousins, and neighbours from as far as fifty kilometres off if they cared to drive over.
It was the Tylers’ annual party, an occasion they celebrated as a purely family affair since it was Audley's birthday. That it coincided with a larger occasion was of only minor significance—though Audley, when he was a boy, had thought it might not be, and had built his dreams on the auspicious conjunction. Later, when some of those dreams became reality, he mocked his youthful presumption as tommy-rot, but by then it had already served its purpose.
“No, no, Audley's seventy-second,” Madge was shouting into the phone. “Just come along as usual if you've got nothing better on, it won't be special. Oh no, Audley's birthday, like we always do. The other thing's too big. I couldn't cater.”
When Audley came up the path he did have something: two black-fish, each the size of an Indian club.
“Oh la,” Madge said, "now what am I going to do with those?” She stood with her hefty arms folded, looking down at where he had laid them side by side on the bench, the eyes in their heads alive but stilled, a pulse still beating under the gills. “The freezer's full of things for the party. Isn't he the last word?”
Audley, meanwhile, in his jacket and tie and with his long legs crossed, was perched on a form, hoeing into tea and burnt toast.
Angie watched him. He chewed on the blackened wafer as if he were doing penance. He appeared to enjoy it. He wants people to think he's humble, she thought.
She could never quite believe, despite the evidence, that in Audley she had come so close to power. He had none of the qualities you read about in books, but for thirty-seven years this odd, hunched figure, who was devoting himself at the moment to ingesting the last of a blackened crust, had been in charge, one after the other, of four government departments. Wasn't that power? His signature had appeared on the nation's banknotes. He had, as he put it, "had tea with the sharks,” survived a dozen blood-lettings, dealt with thugs of every political persuasion. Six prime ministers at one time or another had slipped into his office, sometimes with a bottle of whisky, to steel their nerves before a vote or share a moment's triumph or grief, and still turned up, those of them who were among the living, to check a detail in their memoirs or clear up with him a matter of protocol or just talk over what was happening in the world—meaning Canberra.
He had disciples too. The oldest among them now ran departments of their own or were professors or the editors of journals. The youngest were alert, ambitious fellows who saw in him the proof that you could get to the top, and stay there too, yet maintain a kind of decency. He bit into the blackened crust, masticating slowly, while Madge, arms folded, regarded the fish.
“Well,” she said at last, "this won't buy the baby a new blanket. Birthday or no birthday, I've got my words to do.”
She hefted the two fish into the sink, scratched about on the win-dowsill among the biros, testing one or two of them to see if they were still active, then, using her forearms to push back a pile of plates, made space for herself at the table among the unwashed tea mugs. She opened a child's plastic-covered exercise book and began to write.
Angie wandered off. She ought by now to be used to Madge's offhand discourtesies and Audley's tendency to withdraw, but the truth was that she always felt, down here, like a child who had been dumped on them for a wet weekend and could find nothing to do.
She went down the steps and stood shading her eyes, looking to where the children would be hunting the slopes above the sea for spinach. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, an arm came round her waist, so awkwardly that they nearly went over, both of them, into a blackberry bush.
“Hullo,” Ralph said, "it's me. Are you up to a bit of no good?” He kissed her roughly on the side of the neck. “Hope no one's looking.” He kissed her again.
He was a big fair fellow who had never grown out of the schoolboy stage of being all arms and legs, a bluff, shy man who liked to fool about, but then, without warning, would go quiet, as if his intelligence had just caught up with some other, less developed side of him that was all antics, leaving him suddenly abashed.
He pulled her down in the grass.
“Mmm,” he mumbled into her mouth, "this is better than Mum's toast.” He sat up. “Did Dad catch anything?”
She told him about the blackfish and he nodded his head, suddenly sober again.
“Oh, he'll be pleased with that, that's good,” he said. “What a terrific day it's going to be.”
2
An hour later Jenny was shouting from the verandah rails. “Hey Ned, Mum, Fran's here.” She ran down to the gravel turning-place to greet her.
“Where's Clem?” she demanded when she saw that Fran was alone. “Angie said you were coming with Clem.”
Fran stuck her head out of the window to look behind and backed into a shady place under the trees.
“We came in separate cars,” she explained. “He's closing the gates.”
Almost immediately they heard his engine on the slope.
Fran swung out of the car carrying the little deerskin slippers she liked to wear when she was driving, coral pink, and a soft leather shoulder bag. She was very slight and straight, and with her cropped hair looked childlike, girlish or boyish it was hard to say.
“So,” she demanded, glancing about, "what have you kids been up to?”
“When?”
“Since I last saw you, dope!” She gave Ned's head an affectionate shove, then threw her arm around him. She was barely the taller.
He grinned and hunched into himself but did not pull away.
“Our football team won the premiership,” Jenny announced. “I got best and fairest.”
“Gee,” said Fran, "did you?”
Clem slammed the door of his car and came up beside her. Smiling, he took her hand. “Do we look like newly-weds?” he asked.
Jenny was suddenly suspicious. “Why?” she asked. “Why should you?”
“I don't know. Do we?”
The two children glanced away.
Since his accident Clem said things, just whatever came into his head. They felt some impropriety now and cast quick glances at Fran to see what she thought of it, but she didn't appear to have heard. “I'm going to look for Angie,” she said “I could do with a cuppa.” She started off towards the house with her bouncy, flat-heeled stride. With the long scar across his brow, Clem was smiling.
At the step to the verandah Fran had turned and was waiting for him.
One night three years back, on a straight stretch between a patch of forest and the Waruna causeway, a child had leapt out suddenly on to the moonlit gravel. It was late, after ten. Clem was tired after a long drive. The boy, who was nine or ten years old, was playing chicken. He stood in the glare of the headlights, poised, ready to run, while his companions—who were all from the Camp, half a dozen skinny seven-or eight-year-olds—danced about on the sidelines yelling encouragement, and the little girls among them shrieked and covered their eyes.
Clem swung the wheel, narrowly avoiding the boy, and the whole continent—the whole three million square miles of rock, tree trunks, sand, fences, cities—came bursting through the windscreen into his skull. The remaining hours of the night had lasted for fourteen months. It had taken another year to locate the bit of him that retained the habit of speech.
Always the odd man out among them, the stocky dark one, he was a good-natured fellow, cheerful unless taunted, but slow, tongue-tied, aimless. Even at thirty he had been unable to see what sort of life he was to lead. It was as if something in him had understood that no decision was really required of him. The accident up ahead would settle that side of things.
When Fran first came to the house it was with one of the others. She had been Jonathon's girl. But in time the very qualities that had impressed her in Jonathon, the assurance he had of being so much cleverer than others, his sense of his own power and char
m, appeared gross. They got on her nerves in a house where everyone was clever, and shouted and pushed for room.
An outsider herself, never quite sure that Madge approved of her and whether to Audley she was anything more than an angry mouse, she had seen Clem as a fellow sufferer among them and decided it was her role to save him. From Them. She would take him away, where he could shine with his own light. “There, you see,” she wanted to tell them, "you have been harbouring a prince among you.”
“You're making a grave mistake,” Madge warned her once while they were in the kitchen washing up.
“Oh?” she had replied, furiously drying. “Am I?”
The marriage lasted two years.
After being at passionate cross-purposes for a year, they lived a cat and dog life for another, each struggling for supremacy, then separated. But when Fran got back from her year in Greece they had begun to see one another again, locked in an odd dependency. She was adventurous, what she wanted was experience, "affairs.” Clem was the element in her life that was stable. And after his accident, she became the one person with whom he felt entirely whole.
“So,” she demanded now, "what do they say about me turning up like this?” "They" meant Madge and Audley.
She had her bare feet up on a chair, a straw hat over her eyes. She looked, Angie thought, wonderfully stylish and free.
“Nothing. They wouldn't say anything to me.”
“Huh!”
Fran pushed the hat back, screwed her nose up, and squinted against the glare off the sea.
They were friends. When Fran first appeared all those years ago—Angie was already a young wife, Fran then just another of the hangers-on—they had been wary of one another; they were so unalike.
She thinks I'm bossy, like them, Fran had told herself. A know-all. A skite.
She thinks, Angie had thought, that I'm a dope.
But then they became sisters-in-law and found common cause. Angie, with Fran to lead her, discovered how much stronger her resentments were now that she had someone to share them. She admired Fran's fierce sense of humour, was bemused by her assumption that being honest gave her the right to be cruel. Fran, when she wearied, as she often did, of her own intensity, was drawn to Angie's stillness, her capacity to just sit among all that Tyler ebullience and remain self-contained.
When they were alone together Fran made a game of her rage, doing imitations of Audley's voice and manner and little turns of phrase that kept them in a state of exhausted hilarity. But Angie could never quite free herself of a feeling of discomfort, of something like impiety, when Fran took her flair for mockery too far.
The fact was that for all his peculiarities, Audley was without doubt the most remarkable person she had ever known. On this point she agreed with Ralph. Then, too, there was something in him, a side of his odd, contradictory nature, that Fran had no feeling for and for which she had coined the “Doctor Creeps.” But it was just this quality in him that Angie felt most connected to, since she recognised in it something of herself. When Fran mocked it she felt the opening between them of a dispiriting gap, a failure of sympathy on Fran's part that must include herself as well.
Angie's darkness was inherited. The Depression was already a decade past when she was born, but she had grown up with it just the same. In her parents’ house it had never ended; they were still waiting for the axe to fall. She had married to break free of that cramped and fearful world and had been surprised, when her father-in-law engaged her with a sorrowful look that said, Ah, we know, don't we, that even among the Tylers there was this pocket of the darkly familiar.
Audley had ways of disguising his moodiness with bitter jokes and a form of politeness that at times had an edge of the murderous. “Your glass is empty,” he would say to some unsuspecting guest, leaning close and whispering, full of hospitable concern, and Angie would shudder and turn away.
“So,” Fran said, "what's the cast list at this wake? As if I didn't know! Jonathon, Rupe and Di, the Rainbow Serpent—”
Angie laughed.
“God, why did I come? Am I really such a masochist? Well, you'd better not answer that.”
Clem, meanwhile, was with his mother at the pinewood bench in the house, sipping tea from a chipped mug while she chopped and prepared spinach. Madge looked up briefly, then away. The scar across his brow was so marked that all other signs of age seemed smoothed away in him.
“Tell me when I was six, Mum,” he was saying, and he gave a cheery laugh as at an old joke between them. Madge paused, then chopped.
It was a thing he used to say when he was a little lad of nine or so: "Tell me when I was six,” he would say, "when I was four, when I was just born.” It was an obsession with him. But no detail you gave was ever enough to convince him that he really belonged among them.
Madge had had no time for the game then. Too many other questions to answer. And the house, and their homework, and Audley's many visitors. Now she made time. Clem's questions were the same ones he had been asking for nearly thirty years, but these days they had a different edge. Ashamed to reveal how much of his life was a blank, he had become skilful at trapping others into providing the facts he was after. Starting up a conversation or argument with Audley and his brothers, he would turn his head eagerly from one to another of them like a child catching at clues that the grown-ups would give away only by default; or he would begin stories that the others, with their passion for exactitude, would immediately leap to correct.
“You should ask Audley,” Madge told him now, turning her eyes from his glowing face. “He's the archive.”
“But I want you to tell me.”
She paused, looked at the worn handle of her knife. “You were a strange little lad,” she began after a moment.
He laughed. “How was I strange?”
“You had this knitted beanie you liked to wear.”
“What colour?”
“Red. It was a snow cap, in fact, though we never went near the snow. It looked like a tea-cosy. It was too big for you, but you wouldn't go anywhere without it. It made you look like a sort of mad elf. If I said no, you'd rage at me.”
“What would I say?”
“I can't remember what you'd say. Just the look of you.”
“Was this when I was six?”
“Five, six, something like that.”
“Go on.”
“Ralph used to refuse to go out with you. My God, what a pair you were! People will look, he'd tell me, they'll think he's a dill.”
“Was I?”
“No, of course you weren't. You were just a funny little boy.” She paused and looked at him. “Don't you remember any of this, Clem?”
“No,” he said happily. “It's all news to me.”
He wasn't a dill. He had, in fact, been an intense, old-fashioned little fellow, but with a form of intelligence that wasn't quick like the others— a sign, perhaps, an early one, of a relationship to the world that was to be obscure and difficult and a life that was not to shoot forward in a straight line but would move by missteps and indirections through all those crazes taken up and dropped again that had filled a cupboard with abandoned roller-skates, a saxophone, a microscope and slides, all the gear for scuba diving. He looked down now, embarrassed by what he had to ask, but hitched his shoulders and plunged in.
“Did you and Dad love me?”
His voice was painfully urgent, but what struck her, as she clutched the knife to her breast, was his odd, dislocated cheerfulness. She closed her eyes.
There were times, years back, when they were all shouting and clutching at her skirt, when she would, for just a second, close her eyes like this and pretend they were not there, that they had succumbed to lockjaw or whooping-cough, or had never found the way through her to their voices and demanding little fists. It was restful. She could rest in the emptiness of herself, but only for a second. Immediately struck with guilt, she would catch up the littlest of them and smother him with kisses, till he felt the excessi
veness of it and fought her off.
“What's it like,” some silly young woman had once asked her, one of the hangers-on, "to live in a house full of boys?”
She had given one of her straight answers: "The lavatory seat is always up.”
Now, opening her eyes again, she looked at Clem, at the darkness of his brow, and said, "Of course we did. Do. How could we help it?” He stared at her with his blue eyes, so clear that they could see right through you. “You were Audley's favourite—always. You know that. If he was hard on you sometimes it was because he was afraid of his own feelings, you know how he is. Of being swept away.”
“I thought I was a disappointment to him.”
“Maybe. Maybe that too. Things get mixed up. Nothing's just one thing. You know that.”
He nodded, fixing his eyes on her, very intent, an alert seven-year-old, as if there was something more to what she was saying than the words themselves expressed, some secret about Life, the way the world is, that he would some day catch and make use of.
“Ah, here's your father,” she said, relieved at the promise of rescue. Audley was coming up the track between the banksias.
Clem immediately leapt to his feet. Hurling himself through the wire-screen door and down the steps, he flung his arms around his father, clasping him so tight that Audley, with his head thrown back and his arms immobilised, had the look of a black-suited peg-doll. “Clem,” he said, clutching at his glasses, but allowing himself to be danced about as Clem hung on and shouted: "It's me, Dad, I'm so glad to see you!”
3
MOSEYINGabout on the slope beyond the house in swimming trunks, sneakers, and a green tennis-shade, Ned glimpsed through the trees a party of interlopers. Stopped on the stony track, among blackboys and leopard gums that had been blackened the summer before by a bushfire, they were gathered in a half-circle round a charred stump.