by David Malouf
On such occasions the lift, loaded to capacity, made heavy work of it. And it wasn't, I thought, simply the weight of bodies (eight persons only, a notice warned) that made the old mechanism grind in its shaft, but the weight of all that sorrow, all that hopelessness and last hope, all that dignity in the privacy of grief, and silence broken only by an occasional, "Now don't you upset yourself, pet,” or a whispered, "George would want it, I know he would.” We ascended slowly.
I found it preferable on the whole to arrive early and ride up fast, and in silence, with Miss Sampson herself.
Sometimes, in the way of idle curiosity (if such a motive could be ascribed to her), she would let her eyes for a moment rest on me, and I wondered hotly what she might be seeing beyond a plump eleven-year-old with scarred knees clutching at Mozart. Like most boys of that age I had much to conceal.
But she appeared to be looking at me, not through me. She smiled, I responded, and clearing my throat to find a voice, would say in a well-brought-up, Little Lord Fauntleroy manner that I hoped might fool her and leave me alone with my secrets, "Good afternoon, Miss Sampson.”
Her own voice was as unremarkable as an aunt's: "Good afternoon, dear.”
All the more alarming then, as I sat waiting on one of the cane-bottomed chairs in the corridor, while Ben Steinberg, Miss McIntyre's star pupil, played the Max Bruch, to hear the same voice oddly transmuted. Resonating above the slight swishing and breathing of her congregation, all those women in gloves, hats, fur-pieces, packed in among ghostly pampas-grass, it had stepped down a tone—no, several—and came from another continent. I felt a shiver go up my spine. It was the Indian, speaking through her out of another existence.
Standing at an angle to the half-open door, I caught only a segment of the scene. In the glow of candlelight off bronze, at three thirty in the afternoon, when the city outside lay sweltering in the glare of a blue-black thundercloud, a being I could no longer think of as the woman in the lift, with her sensible shoes and her well-cut navy suit, was seated cross-legged among cushions, eyes closed, head rolled back with all the throat exposed as for a knife stroke.
A low humming filled the room. The faint luminescence of the pampas-grass was angelic, and I was reminded of something I had seen once from the window of a railway carriage as my train sat steaming on the line: three old men—tramps they might have been—in a luminous huddle behind the glass of a waiting-shed, their grey heads aureoled with fog and the closed space aglow with their breathing like a jar full of fireflies. The vision haunted me. It was entirely real—I mean the tramps were real enough, you might have smelled them if you'd got close—but the way I had seen them changed that reality, made me so impressionably aware that I could recall details I could not possibly have seen at that distance or with the naked eye: the greenish-grey of one old man's hair where it fell in locks over his shoulder, the grime of a hand bringing out all its wrinkles, the ring of dirt round a shirt collar. Looking through into Miss Sampson's room was like that. I saw too much. I felt light-headed and began to sweat.
A flutter of excitement passed over the scene. A new presence had entered the room. It took the form of a child's voice, treble and whining, and one of the women gave a cry that was immediately supported by a buzz of other voices. The treble one, stronger now, cut through them. Miss Sampson was swaying like a flower on its stalk …
Minutes later, behind the door of Miss Katie's sunny studio, having shown off my scales, my arpeggios, my three pieces, I stood with my back to the piano (facing the wall behind which so much emotion was contained) while Miss Katie played intervals and I named them, or struck chords and I named those. It wasn't difficult. It was simple mathematics and I had an ear, though the chords might also in other contexts, and in ways that were not explicable, move you to tears.
CHILD'S PLAY
Eustace
1
The door to the corridor was closed, but a soft light from out there flowed through the tilted fanlight, displaying, in a puzzle of shadow and highlights like a landscape on the moon, the bodies of the sleeping children, some crouched knee to chin in the centre of the bed, some spread-eagled face downwards with a footsole extended into the dark, others again laid out straight with their toes to the ceiling, the sheet rucked under their chin and their breath lightly coming and going. There were ten children in the dormitory, all girls. The room was full of their breathing and the faint scent of frangipani from the garden below.
All this, glimpsed from the washroom door, was like something the youth had never seen before.
Even after his eyes had grown accustomed to the half-darkness he found it difficult to interpret details. Was it a pillow one of the children was clasping to her, or another body? Was that a shadow or the dark strands of her hair? Was it an arm or a leg whose rounded flesh the light fell upon and made luminous? Piecing the ten bodies together as his gaze travelled from bed to bed, disentangling shadow from substance, smoothing out the creases in sheets and nightdresses to discover limbs, all this took long minutes in which he simply stood perfectly still and stared.
Then there were the sounds. Locating each of them—the murmurs words, the long slow outpourings of breath—and tracking them to an individual child so that he had each of them, each of the ten, clearly in mind; separating out the ticking of a clock, insect-noises from the park, and the dripping—was it?—of a tap in the washroom behind him, or a shower, or a cistern, together with his own breathing and the beating of his blood—it was a task to be carried out methodically and with great patience, but at some lower level than the part of him that simply observed. Something was thinking for him; that is how he might have put it. As when, with a speed and assurance that would have astonished the casual observer, he would lay out, on a sheet of newspaper he could barely read, all the working parts of a machine. Machines were the most complicated things he knew: more complicated than people— though of course he had only himself to judge by—and more reliable as well. Machines he was utterly at home with. Things fitted together part by part according to a settled order, and all the parts were congruent, screw and nut to bolthole, thread to thread. His long fingers could solve any problem of that sort in minutes, no trouble at all. His intelligence was all in his fingertips, and in his eyes.
One of the children began to mutter words out of a dream and the sounds caught his attention. He could make nothing of them. But the idea of a dream breaking into the room like that, the idea of its lying submerged under the silence (which wasn't really silence at all) and breaking surface in those unintelligible syllables, disturbed him; it introduced an unmanageable element. He took a small step forward.
It was a child in the second bed from the end. On the right. Who now turned in her sleep, changing not only her own position but all the highlights and shadows in the room, breaking his grasp of it. The dream had started a ripple that involved all the other sleepers as well. One by one they translated it, more or less according to the depth of their sleep, into stirrings, murmurs, little groans, till the whole room at the level of the beds was a shifting surface of light and dark, of rising and falling contours. He was almost sick with the unsteadiness of it. Everything was out of hand.
He turned back into the dark of the washroom with its row of hand-basins and its dripping cistern or shower, sat on the tiled floor, and began to haul on his boots, which he had been holding in his right hand, first the one, then the other; carefully knotting the laces. While he was still engaged in this the crack of light on the wall opposite began to widen, a shadow filled it, and when he jerked his head around, one of the children was there, standing barefoot in her nightdress, through which he could see the darker outline of the body.
She stood and rubbed her eyes, frowning. She must have been nine or ten years old. She stared and frowned, but didn't seem at all alarmed.
“Hullo,” he said huskily, because he couldn't think of anything else, and because the word, being the ordinary one, seemed immediately right. He gave a nervous s
mile.
She considered him a moment, then turned away as if he might be merely illusory and went to one of the washbasins.
He got shakily to his feet, suddenly too tall and thin, feeling out of his element in this big empty room with its checkerboard tiles, its row of handbasins and mirrors, its cubicles at the darker end where something dripped. He stood with his back to the door in case she panicked and tried to pass him. She was bent over a basin, drinking from the tap. Then she turned, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and considered him again, her brows drawn together in childish puzzlement. He lost his head. “Look, you won't tell anyone, will you?” he stammered.
She grew thoughtful but said nothing, and he began to move towards the window.
“It's a secret,” he said.
She continued to watch. She seemed puzzled rather than afraid.
Fearful that if he took his eyes off her for even a second she might break or cry out, he felt his way to the sill, swung a leg over, eased himself down till only his fingertips clutched the cracked paintwork, and dropped. Once safely on the ground he moved swiftly into the shadow of a tree, but did not move away. Something made him stand there, still in the half-darkness, and look up. The garden trembled all about him on tiny waves of sound that might have been wings.
The child had come to the sill, her nightdress billowing a little in the breeze. She stood there, quite calmly, looking down at him. Then she did a strange thing. She raised her right hand briefly and waved.
2
She told no one.
Waking as usual in the narrow bed, with Miss Ivers in the doorway briskly clapping her hands and calling, "Now children, now girls!" and the room already filled with groans, giggles, little shrieks, as the nine others in their different ways took on the new day, sat dangling their feet over the edge of the bed a moment, unwilling to kick off, or wandered about half asleep till the first water struck them, exuberantly teased, slapped at sheets and punished pillows, or brushed their hair with long strokes, counting, or practised whatever rituals they had need of to make the crossing from the deep privacies of sleep to this lighter, brighter world that was embodied in Miss Ivers standing straight and slim in the doorway, the exclamation mark of her body making its own clear point: "This, girls, is how we should bear ourselves in the face of Monday morning,” the clapping of her hands, and “Now girls,” providing the first little hook on which they would hang the many wandering minutes of their day—waking as usual into this utterly orderly disorderly world, she thought she must have dreamed him, the boy in the washroom, he seemed so alien to it all; she put him away with her other dreams as she swung out of bed and drew on her slippers.
But no. In the act of reaching down to ease her finger under the right heel, she saw again the laces drawn tight over his index finger, the freckles on the back of his hand, and knew he was real. Though surrounded still by the soft unreality of her sleep, so that he existed in the continuation of whatever she had been dreaming just before, he had been, none the less, utterly bulky and solid—bare-legged, gangling, freckled, with a smell, a mixture of sweat and car-grease, that did not belong to dreams. Dreams were odourless, she knew that at least. Moving with the others into the washroom she couldn't believe that they too would not catch some trace of his presence, feel some displacement he had made in the ordinariness of the room, with its mirrors above white basins, its shower and toilet cubicles. But the others were washing noisily. They caught no scent of him in their boisterous, not-quite-female world.
He had left no sign.
She told no one, and the day went on as if nothing had occurred. It was organised so tightly, and they moved through it at such a keen pace, that it was difficult to let any new thing in to find a place there: doing mental sums as fast as you could and then sitting up very straight when you had the answer, with your hands on your head and your elbows pushed back—straining, but not too obviously, to be called; vaulting the horse with your chin up and your eyes straight ahead as each of the others, one, two, three, four, went off before you, blonde, black or brown ponytails swishing; copying, but fast, before the blackboard was turned over, the chief products of Western Australia; all this kept your head filled with so many immediacies that there was no time for daydreaming, and no corner, with so much that was public and organised, in which anything unusual could lurk. Even when they wrote a composition and had to use their imagination the lines were strictly drawn. Miss Wilson wrote the opening paragraph on the blackboard. It was an old house on Dartmoor, in England, deep in fog, and they went on from there, filling the house with darkness and the sound of creaking doors, that might be ghosts but would more likely turn out to be tramps or stray dogs that left all mysteries explained in a last paragraph, which they were required to label conclusion.
Faced with the open invitation to confess a mystery, she might have let the boy in. But he didn't seem to fit. He was too tall, too ungainly, too much part, in his desert boots and T-shirt, of the sprawling sub-tropical town that began at the walls of their park, to enter the realms of the imagination as Miss Wilson defined it or to find himself on Dartmoor, in England. But she did think of him briefly. She allowed him to approach out of the fog and come up, in his floppy desert boots, to the door of that deserted cottage. Looking vaguely scared, he stood at the threshold, his whole body tense with what might now be required of him. Then she relented and let him off. She let him move away from his meeting with the perfectly conventional spirit she now introduced, who had once, in the olden days, been a witch whom the village people had drowned (though she wasn't really a witch at all, just a crazy old woman) in a greasy millpond, along with her cat called Lock.
There was an occasion during prep when she considered telling her best friend of the moment, Adele Morgan, who slept in another dormitory; was on the very point of it; but didn't. She had the odd sense that she would not be believed. There was no detail she could produce that would be at all convincing, and she was too matter of fact, had too clear a sense of the real and too high a regard for the truth, to invent one. She would wait till such a detail presented itself.
Besides, she had already anticipated the questions Adele would ask and they were not interesting. “Did he do anything? Weren't you scared?”
No, he did nothing at all. He was just there. And she hadn't been scared because there was nothing to be scared of. He was just an ordinary boy with red hair. Very tall when he stood up, and very shy. When she first saw him he had been sitting on the floor with one bare knee drawn up so that he could tie his shoelace (one was tied already, the other, drawn taut, was still, after the first simple knot, looped over his forefinger) and she had been reminded of how her younger brother, Jack, had learned to tie laces by practising it over and over, all one morning, on the verandah steps. The boy had had that same look of anxious concentration. It was perhaps his coming to her thus out of her own past that made her believe at first that she was still asleep in her bed and dreaming. That is why she had turned away a moment to look at her cool face in the mirror, to see that her eyes were open, and to drink. When she turned back he had got to his feet and was staring.
A tall boy, carrot-haired and unexplained; but he didn't scare her any more than if she had dreamed him. At that odd hour, and in the lingering heaviness of sleep, he seemed like a continuation rather than an interruption of her dreams; as if she had first dreamed him and then found him there. What was there to explain?
Of course his presence wasn't related to her daytime life, to the world of corridors and stairs and stairwells and rooms where the blackboards were filled, even in darkness, with chalked up facts. But then neither were her dreams. These hours that were for sleep belonged to nowhere. They were outside the rules. No bells governed them, they were free. She had dreamed the strangest things, and had sometimes been very frightened indeed. Once she had dreamed of being on a picnic with her family when a ship rode up the beach that had no sail. The sailors, who were very ragged and foreign-looking, begged for
some garment they could rig up to sail home and she had offered her dress, a bright yellow one. They had fixed it to the mast and sailed right out of view on the still moonlight, out of sight of her parents and her two brothers, while she, in one of those strange dreamworld experiences of being quite palpably in two places at once, stood both at the water's edge watching and at the rails of the ship, while the yellow dress (which had not been hers in fact but her cousin Millie's) stood out stiffly in the breeze.
Compared with that, an unexplained but entirely ordinary boy with red hair wasn't extraordinary at all. He had just gulped and “Hullo.” But when she stood at the windowsill and watched him, where he was half-hidden below the Chinese elm, he had looked, she thought, like a painting. She saw him in a field struck by the wind, all agitated gold. His long legs, bare, his arms long and hanging at his side, his face tilted towards her, had made him at that moment not “too tall” as she had first thought but like someone drawn out, drawn upwards with the strain of being where he was, or who he was, as in one of the swirly paintings in the school corridor. It was the heightened reality of him that attracted her. As if he belonged to a world with other rules of perspective, or to another order of beings, and had come to induct her into other possibilities than she had so far discovered at home or at school, to reveal to her how she might cross into the further reaches of herself. Until he came into her life she had not known how suffocated she felt here, where every moment of the day was for something and had to be filled; or how it frightened her that the whole of life might be like this, that those corridors where you must never run, and stairs you went down only on the left, and quietly, might lead to places where the rules that applied were different only in detail, not in kind, and were invisible to her only because no one had ever pointed them out (that was for later, as Miss Ivers said of so many things) or given them names.