The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

  Perfect Mahler, Gordon would have said.

  What Cassie thought was: perfect Grimm.

  The one piece of history the place boasted was the elopement, nearly a century before, of the postmaster's daughter and an archduke. A local inn commemorated the occurrence with a painted sign. There were portraits of the couple on all the fluttering racks on the news kiosks—she young and pretty, he an old buffer with side-whiskers— and within minutes of their arrival the two ladies had first asked if they knew the story and then recited, in tandem, its romantic facts, promising to show them later the exact spot where the lovers first met and the old post-house where the girl's parents had lived. Everything had been preserved, of course, and was properly kept up. People came from all over to visit, and apart from the beauty of the views it was the postmaster's daughter, Anna Plhl, and the Archduke Johann who drew them. That gay fragment of not-too-recent history was what they came to savour and record.

  The ladies were rather surprised by their ignorance but delighted that what they had come for was simply and entirely them. They hadn't been expected, of course—or not so many—but never mind, they were welcome anyway.

  The more impressive of the two was definitely Elsa Fischer, a tall woman with a streak of steel-grey across her head. She was still handsome, and still preserved the assurance of what must once have been a remarkable beauty; but one felt she had long since dismissed that as a trivial gift and valued only the insights it had brought her. In learning to exploit her beauty she had learned how to deal with power; the one lasted after the other had become no more than good posture, good bones, and a little repertoire of gestures that still suggested availability—the promise of great sad occasions and moments of abandon. If she continued to play the game it was because men recognised in her a woman who knew the rules, and liked to experience, now that there was none, the sense of risk.

  It was Cassie who saw all this. In her ugly-duckling way she valued beauty, had pondered the subject deeply, and was made aware of Elsa Fischer's great measure of that ambiguous gift in the effect it was having on Gordon. He had ceased to be plumply bored and was giving this sixty-year-old woman the sort of attention he reserved for churches, some paintings, and everything to do with himself.

  Cassie was in anguish. She wanted her life, she wanted it at all costs. But she despised the means she had to use, and had been using, to get it—the humiliations, the pretence that she had no passion, no ambition of her own, no sense of honour. Most of all she was afraid that if it came to the point she might not be willing to suffer. She writhed in a dark and stolid silence.

  The other woman, who was smaller in every way than Elsa Fischer, had red hair rather inexpertly coloured, red-rimmed eyes and a drooping nose, and seemed quite incapable of being still. She had wept when Michael greeted her and clung to his neck: he was so much like his father.

  “Isn't he just like Arnold?” she had said.

  Elsa Fischer, who kissed him on the forehead and was not tearful, looked at him with her wide blue eyes.

  “No,” she said, "I do not see it. You already look American, Michael dear, and a good thing too. It's how you should look.” She kissed him again. “I hoped you'd come.”

  “But of course,” he began.

  “No, there is no of course. But you are here, that is what matters.” And immediately, since she was aware that she had given him all the attention so far, and since there were, after all, others, she had begun to ask questions, weigh answers, demand qualifications, put things together, and soon had them all clear; and since that is what plainly offered in Gordon's awakened interest, had settled her steady gaze on him. Cassie watched him respond, and grow alert and painfully attractive, and oh so youthfully promising as he took out all his little talents and made them shine.

  She felt one of her black clouds, the one that had been riding just above her head all morning like a bleak halo, descend at last and smother her in gloom. She felt removed. She watched from a distance. And it occurred to her that if she ever stopped being under Gordon's spell she would hate him.

  Was that the cloud?

  The red-headed lady, in the meantime, had gone behind a partition, and Cassie, who might have been able to see through walls, saw her, at a little shelf, put slices of meat on pumpernickel and stand there in the half-dark pushing the stuff into one side of her face; vigorously working her jaws and gulping, so that her scalp, with its shock of coloured hair, moved up and down and her throat muscles formed stringy cords. She ate one slice, then another, then a third. Cassie was mesmerized. At last, after swallowing a difficult mouthful, she composed her features, swept her hair with a light hand, and came back into the room looking dignified. She sat, and when she caught Cassie looking at her, produced a smile that was all innocence.

  Elsa Fischer, who looked untouchable and gave the impression of having always been so, had been speaking in a low concerned voice of Michael Pacher, his noble forms and glowing colours, while Gordon asked questions to which, Cassie reminded herself, he already knew the answers.

  The questions blunt Cassie wanted to put were these. What about the suffering? How do you know if you can face it? Do you just go through it and come out the other side? Does time dull the pain and anger of it?

  “Did you see?” Anick hissed, catching up with her on the lakeside path where they were walking to a restaurant. “She was eating. All by herself, behind the wall.”

  “Oh, well,” said Cassie, as if there were extenuating circumstances. She hadn't Anick's clear notions of how people should and should not behave. People were extraordinary or plain odd, that was all.

  “I was disgusted,” Anick declared. “I found it insulting. Now she will come to the restaurant and say she is not ‘ungree. I know such people. Orreeble!”

  She was right. At the restaurant both ladies excused themselves and said they had already eaten, but Elsa Fischer drank a glass of wine and made recommendations and insisted they all try the local torte. It was uncomfortable, even Gordon looked uneasy. He didn't know how he should act, and felt that some situation he had been handling very well, very urbanely, just a while back had turned into something he couldn't handle at all. Only Michael seemed untroubled. He had done the right thing already, simply by coming. He smiled incessantly and looked softly angelic. He ate heartily, drank too much, and on the walk back tried to hold Anick's hand on the narrow path, and looked hurt when she shook him off.

  Cassie's cloud refused to shift. Everything gave off a kind of blackness that added to it like smoke: the food they ate, the talk, the water, the damp meadows with the shadow of firs on them, the terrible peaks. It seemed to her that the lake might contain unbearable secrets— drowned babies, or the records, deep-sunk in leaden boxes, of an era— and that these made up the weather to which her cloud belonged, and enveloped her even in sunshine in deepest gloom. It might just be that she had stepped, back there, across a border into the rest of her life and it would go on like this for the next thirty, forty, fifty years—into another century.

  AS THEY SPED back down the autobahn, through fields that threw off wave after wave of heat, she sat far back in the seat with her eyes closed and let the others, all of them, sink into the dark. Their faces faded, their voices. It seemed boundless, her depression, eternally deep; though in fact, ten years later, married to another quite different Australian, and with three exuberant daughters who liked to sing in the car as she drove them to and from school, she would not recall this particular gloom, or its cause, and had lost contact with all the members of their trip but Anick, who had started up a correspondence and then kept it going long after Gordon, the original reason, had departed from their lives.

  “Who is Anick?” the little girls would chorus as they stared at an old album, finding it difficult to connect the slim girl under the peach tree with the lady in Paris who sent them expensive, rather inappropriate presents, or the bony figure in peasant skirt and T-shirt with their comfortable mother. Something more than time seem
ed to be involved here.

  “Anick,” Cassie would tell them, not quite sincerely, "is Mummy's best friend,” and would add, out of loyalty to one or two neighbours, "in Europe.”

  Once a year, at Christmas, the presents arrived; and then on a trip to Paris, ten years after their first encounter, Cassie made her decision and looked Anick up. They had lunch together.

  Anick was still unmarried. A hard, discontented girl of thirty, still strikingly good-looking, she had that mixture of slovenliness and chic that Cassie, to whom chic would be for ever foreign, thought of as uniquely French. She seemed much occupied with her digestion, eating little and accepting from the waiter, with only a nod of acknowledgement as she rattled on, the glass of mineral water she had not had to call for. It was for her medicine. Still talking, she took from her elegant bag a bottle of some thick white stuff, swallowed a spoonful, made a face that Cassie recalled from other occasions, and washed it down with a draught of Perrier and a “Ugh.”

  Thank God I don't have a digestion, Cassie thought. That'd be worse than the Black Cloud. She felt embarrassed by her bouncy good health. She was never ill—barring pregnancies of course, which didn't count.

  “Cheers,” Anick proclaimed dolefully, shaking the remains of her mineral water to make it fizz. And Cassie, who felt extraordinarily liberated, shouted in response, "Haro!,” and might have done a little dance on the spot, in the manner of her youngest daughter when they were out on a hunting party being vengeful squaws. Anick looked astonished, and then delighted by what she recognised as a form of behaviour she couldn't have indulged in herself but which pleased her in others. Cassie had always, in her eyes, been marvellously free. “Haro!” Cassie shouted again, and gave one of her deep wheezy laughs, kicking up imaginary heels and draining her half of Burgundy.

  Her smile was one of triumph. What she had caught sight of—the tail-end of a darker possibility, back there, that still haunted her at times—had gone to earth, startled perhaps by the exuberance of her war cry; it needn't again, for a moment, be disturbed. And Anick, who had never even caught sight of it or known they were on a hunting party at all, looked puzzled, but did her best to enter the spirit of things, though she didn't rise to “Haro!”

  They continued to face one another for a whole hour in the mutual perplexity of their national styles and from the vantage point of different lives, while Cassie tried to give some indication of the close web of her life as it involved three little girls, all extraordinarily different from one another and from herself, and a husband whose difficulty both challenged and pleased her. But the particulars of domesticity told nothing. They were flat, uninteresting. It was a holding warmth she needed to express, and she might have illustrated it best by simply leaning across the table and grasping Anick's neat little hand in her own larger, coarser one.

  She did not. Instead she watched the details she provided in response to Anick's questions about colour of eyes and hair, the car—a station wagon!—the number of rooms in their house, slot in under the French girl's mascara and become a dead ordinary place—'orreebly provincial—where she had settled for a quiet, an ordinary fate.

  But I am happy, she wanted to protest. I almost lost my life. And then, by the skin of my teeth, I saved it.

  But there was no way of explaining this. They had no shared language, most of all when it came to the smaller words. She began to wonder, as her high spirits evaporated, what she and Anick had ever had in common.

  Oh yes! She had almost forgotten. Gordon!

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly It astonished her that it was Anick, after so long, who most clearly remembered. “I haven't seen him for years. Sydney's a big place. He's in town planning or something.”

  Anick nodded.

  There was nothing more to be said. Or rather, there was what there had always been. Cassie continued to write long jaunty letters in her formal, seventeenth-century French, mostly because it pleased her to tell about her children, adding more and more to Anick's image of the ‘orreeble place and describing in sinister detail trips to resorts Anick would never have wanted to visit and could never find on the map. Anick continued to send postcards and presents.

  The time came when this was, for each of them, their oldest and most satisfying correspondence. The children no longer “Who is.

  Anick?,” not even to have the pleasure of hearing the known answer and of closing, with a rhythmic question and response, one of the gaps in their world. Instead they told their schoolfriends, rather grandly: "This is from Anick, our mummy's best friend—in Europe.”

  Europe was a place they would visit one day and see for themselves.

  The Empty Lunch-tin

  He had been there for a long time. She could not remember when she had last looked across the lawn and he was not standing in the wide, well-clipped expanse between the buddleia and the flowering quince, his shoulders sagging a little, his hands hanging limply at his side. He stood very still with his face lifted towards the house, as a tradesman waits who has rung the doorbell, received no answer, and hopes that someone will appear at last at an upper window. He did not seem in a hurry. Heavy bodies barged through the air, breaking the stillness with their angular cries. Currawongs. Others hopped about on the grass, their tails switching from side to side. Black metronomes. He seemed unaware of them. Originally the shadow of the house had been at his feet, but it had drawn back before him as the morning advanced, and he stood now in a wide sunlit space casting his own shadow. Behind him cars rushed over the warm bitumen, station wagons in which children were being ferried to school or kindergarten, coloured delivery vans, utilities—there were no fences here; the garden was open to the street. He stood. And the only object between him and the buddleia was an iron pipe that rose two feet out of the lawn like a periscope.

  At first, catching sight of him as she passed the glass wall of the dining room, the slight figure with its foreshortened shadow, she had given a sharp little cry. Greg! And it might have been Greg standing there with only the street behind him. He would have been just that age. Doubting her own perceptions, she had gone right up to the glass and stared. But Greg had been dead for seven years; she knew that with the part of her mind that observed this stranger, though she had never accepted it in that other half where the boy was still going on into the fullness of his life, still growing, so that she knew just how he had looked at fifteen, seventeen, and how he would look now at twenty.

  This young man was quite unlike him. Stoop-shouldered, intense, with clothes that didn't quite fit, he was shabby, and it was the shabbi-ness of poverty not fashion. In his loose flannel trousers with turnups, collarless shirt, and wide-brimmed felt hat, he might have been from the country or from another era. Country people dressed like that. He looked, she thought, the way young men had looked in her childhood, men who were out of work.

  Thin, pale, with the sleeves half-rolled on his wiry forearms, he must have seen her come up to the glass and note his presence, but he wasn't at all intimidated.

  Yes, that's what he reminded her of the Depression years, and those men, one-armed or one-legged some of them, others dispiritingly whole, who had haunted the street corners of her childhood, wearing odd bits of uniform with their civilian cast-offs and offering bootlaces or pencils for sale. Sometimes when you answered the back doorbell, one of them would be standing there on the step. A job was what he was after: mowing or cleaning out drains, or scooping the leaves from a blocked downpipe, or mending shoes—anything to save him from mere charity. When there was, after all, no job to be done, they simply stood, those men, as this man stood, waiting for the offer to be made of a cup of tea with a slice of bread and jam, or the scrapings from a bowl of dripping, or if you could spare it, the odd sixpence—it didn't matter what or how much, since the offering was less important in itself than the unstinting recognition of their presence, and beyond that, a commonness between you. As a child she had stood behind lattice doors in the country town she came from and watched trans
actions between her mother and those men, and had thought to herself This is one of the rituals. There is a way of doing this so that a man's pride can be saved, but also your own. But when she grew up the Depression was over. Instead, there was the war. She had never had to use any of that half-learned wisdom.

  She walked out now onto the patio and looked at the young man, with just air rather than plate glass between them.

  He still wasn't anyone she recognised, but he had moved slightly, and as she stood there silently observing—it must have been for a good while—she saw that he continued to move. He was turning his face to the sun. He was turning with the sun, as a plant does, and she thought that if he decided to stay and put down roots she might get used to him. After all, why a buddleia or a flowering quince and not a perfectly ordinary young man?

  She went back into the house and decided to go on with her housework. The house didn't need doing, since there were just the two of them, but each day she did it just the same. She began with the furniture in the lounge, dusting and polishing, taking care not to touch the electronic chess-set that was her husband's favourite toy and which she was afraid of disturbing—no, she was actually afraid of it. Occupying a low table of its own, and surrounded by lamps, it was a piece of equipment that she had thought of at first as an intruder and regarded now as a difficult but permanent guest. It announced the moves it wanted made in a dry dead voice, like a man speaking with a peg on his nose or through a thin coffin-lid; and once, in the days when she still resented it, she had accidentally touched it off. She had already turned away to the sideboard when the voice came, flat and dull, dropping into the room one of its obscure directives: Queen to King's Rook five; as if something in the room, some object she had always thought of as tangible but without life, had suddenly decided to make contact with her and were announcing a cryptic need. Well, she had got over that.

  She finished the lounge, and without going to the window again went right on to the bathroom, got down on her knees, and cleaned all round the bath, the shower recess, the basin, and lavatory; then walked straight through to the lounge room and looked.