Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  I had been afraid of my grandmother in the old days. She had so much contempt for things and was herself such a straight, stiff little person. Now, after so long, I saw a yielding in her. She had begun in that room, despite the difference of light and furniture and for all her strictness of gesture, to resemble my grandfather. The likeness was striking, almost shocking.

  I had seen no resemblance between them when Grandpa was still living. They gave no sign, with their opposite and unaccommodating styles, of having shared a life. But they had, and my grandmother began to speak of him now as if they had indeed been a couple. Some of her stories were cruel and showed lingering resentment, but there were others in which she and my grandfather appeared as young people with a passionate affinity, and it was out of these, as they softened her mouth in the telling, that the likeness emerged. Freed at last of the threat posed by his weakness, she let her own appear, and began once again, but shyly, to approach him.

  ‘He was the handsomest man I’d ever laid eyes on, your grandfather. When he first came to us. And I was – goodness! – such a plain little thing. He was very gentle and had lovely manners but there was a spark. You could see he’d been a bit of a devil – back there in Gloucestershire. I liked that. But he’d had to work like a navvy down at the Ridge. You should have seen his poor hands! They were all cracked and swollen – no amount of scrubbing would get them clean. He tried to keep them out of sight. He was always pushing them into his pockets and refusing things so he wouldn’t have to show them – he was ashamed. But I loved them, I really did! I used to look and look and want to touch them, and say to myself that I’d work my own hands to the bone if he was mine, I’d do anything for him. He’d never have to break his back or use his hands like that, ever again! What he couldn’t see, poor dear, was that without them he’d have been too beautiful. I’d have felt – intimidated. Well, I was a silly schoolgirl, sixteen. I didn’t know what I was saying, I didn’t know what work was. And it all came true in the end, every bit of it. As you know.’

  She lowered her eyes, smoothing the quilt with a ringed hand, and her mouth, which was unsteady these days, developed a shake. She brought her hand up to control it and the rings glittered.

  ‘I wasn’t always patient with him – towards the end. It all went on too long. Life does.’

  The household was much changed. Della was gone – not, as it happened, with the iceman but to a niece at Mullumbimby where she had three grandnephews to cook for. Aunt Connie too was gone – back to her husband. She was living in a cottage at Chelmer and putting up again with his going off three nights a week to ‘choir practice’ and coming back thick-tongued and amorous. All the lower part of the house was boarded up, and Aunt Ollie cooked now in a modern kitchenette, which was all she needed to prepare invalid meals for her mother and a steak and salad for Uncle Gil; there were no more visitors. She and Uncle Gil had grown closer, preparing, I thought, like any old couple, for their last days together. Once a week, on Thursdays, he drove her to the supermarket to do the shopping, holding the big Super Snipe to a pace that allowed them to ‘note every change’, as Southport, that colonial version of an English watering place, was left behind by the spirit of progress that was sweeping south along the surf. Uncle Gil had slowed down. The something that had shaken loose in his head had settled back again, like a sheet of roofing iron after a storm, or had lost all connection. He lived on his pension and spent his days in a dinghy on the Broadwater or in the quieter reaches of the river. He had retired into his boyhood.

  Only Aunt Roo had broken free. After a good deal of suspenseful hesitation she had married a stockbroker called Harry Price. Translated to Brisbane and a showy mock-Tudor house on Hamilton Heights, she had redeemed her shameful untruths by making them real: her name was in the society pages, she was president of a little theatre group, Harry Price had twice taken her to England. It was perhaps because she had anticipated these events in the telling by a round ten years, and had already assimilated them long before they occurred, that they sat so lightly upon her. She continued to dress ten years younger than she was (and began to look it), gave up her bouts of hysteria, lost her sharp, defiant look, and if she remained what people called theatrical it was the theatricality now of a once-famous actress in retirement, about whom there hung, in odd inflections of the voice or in the way she lifted her arms on occasion, an echo of the characters she had played: Hedda, Mrs Alving, Olga in The Three Sisters, Lady Macbeth, and before that, Juliet. Young people thought her wonderful. She could quote lines, strike attitudes that hit off great players to a tee, and had, it appeared, seen everybody: Pavlova and Oscar Asche, Dame Edith, Flora Robson and the Oliviers in London, Marie Bell in Paris, the Lunts in New York. Aunt Connie was astonished by the extent to which, in just a few years, her little sister had escaped her past (or recaptured it in a daring actuality) and exceeded now their most vivid notions of her. Occasionally, timidly, she accepted one of Aunt Roo’s invitations. She would sit stunned and silent on the hot-pink upholstery, among the vases, between the celebrities, and stare. When I was old enough, I too was invited. I made no impression. Aunt Roo, whose confidant I had been in the old days, and who had thought of me then as a fellow spirit nourishing exotic dreams, was deeply disappointed.

  ‘My nephew’s a law student,’ she told people the moment I appeared – I was articled and in my third year at the Inns of Court – as she said of Harry: ‘my husband, the stockbroker.’ But occasionally, to everyone’s confusion, she would introduce me as ‘our junior axeman’. Adding sweetly: ‘We expect him to be State Champion one day, don’t we, pet?’

  They were very loose and informal, Aunt Roo’s parties. Arranged on the spur of the moment after a dress rehearsal or performance and open to all-comers – including strangers who just happened to be passing and would drop in to see what was on – they took their tone from the actors, all amateurs who worked by day as secretaries or bank clerks. So one of these late-night festivities might have the languid air of a gathering at a French château, all muted endings and lyrical cynicism, since half the guests were still walking about in lives they had been allotted by Jean Anouilh, while another, though the same faces were to be seen there, had all the tenseness of a Puritan outpost at the edge of the forest, beset by real devils or menaced from within by darker forces than even the wilderness knew.

  It was all very lively. There was a real snap in the air of restraints grown elastic and outrageously breaking, of creatures about to burst into a new form as an excitement worked through them that the more formal events of the theatre had failed to contain. The actors would not step down. Nor, now that the spell of change was on them, would they stick to their parts. A young fellow in invisible high heels, who had played a chauffeur and was still sporting, along with his makeup, a leather cap and gauntlets, would suddenly assume the manner – the old-world refinements and studied hauteur – of the Countess he meant to be (in real life he was a window-dresser called Noël Clark); or a sensible librarian, typecast as a Lady’s Companion, would tower up, grow craggy, and silence the company with a flood of mortal injuries – a born King Lear.

  All this was just what Aunt Roo intended. Her parties were meant to make things appear. She herself appeared as a flamboyant ruler of the spirits, while Harry – impressed, but also, he would have confessed, just a wee bit intimidated – wondered and looked on. He was proud of her. She had so much verve. And she was always discovering people – she had discovered him. He found that he liked the smell of greasepaint and was sorry when people he approached were embarrassed by his suit or his solidity or by the trace of carmine on their cheeks. It made him feel like an intruder, whereas all he wanted, in his own house, was to be taken in.

  He was a grave and courtly fellow of sixty, an ex-footballer, one of nature’s bachelors.

  ‘Harry’s a brick,’ Aunt Roo insisted, and he proved it by going the colour of one. But I guessed that there smouldered under his double-breast
ed jackets some obscure, un-Presbyterian dream that he caught just the tail of on Aunt Roo’s theatre nights, and that it was this he reached out for in the menagerie his house became on such occasions and in my Aunt’s now sumptuous and commanding arms.

  It was after midnight at one of the noisiest of these gatherings that I found myself sitting on a sofa next to a pale, intense girl with freckles, and a boy in uniform who was drunkenly asleep against her shoulder.

  The girl was eating an apple and kept switching her ponytail, which was red, in an angry way from side to side, till she said to no one in particular, though I took her exclamation as being addressed to me, ‘Oh actors! They drive me up the wall. I could murder the lot of them!’

  ‘Aren’t you one?’ I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. She took a good bite of the apple and said firmly, ‘Not me, I’m too sensible.’

  She might have been quoting a remark she had heard made of herself, something perhaps that her mother told visitors, and she gave me a sharp look now to see how I took it, whether as a recommendation or a profound lack. ‘What about you?’ she challenged.

  ‘I’m a nephew,’ I told her. ‘Of Aunty – of Mrs Price. I’m Mrs Price’s nephew. She’s my aunty.’

  She burst out laughing, showing all her teeth and with a bit of apple on her tongue, and when she had quietened down indicated the boy on the other side. He too was red-headed, but darker. He wore a bloused uniform with puttees, and was sleeping with his knees spread in the rough khaki and his hands hanging loose between them. I had taken him for another actor in costume. I saw now that he was in National Service.

  ‘He’s a nephew too,’ she informed me. ‘Of Frank Harland the painter – though I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him.’

  ‘Oh but I have,’ I told her, astonished to have the name recur. ‘As a matter of fact we used to know him. Quite well.’

  She looked impressed, then checked herself; not much was said at these gatherings that you could take on trust. She flicked me a sideways glance that in no way committed her to belief.

  ‘Well I’ve never met him,’ she said, ‘and Gerald won’t take me there. I’ve asked him to, heaps of times, but he won’t. I think he’s ashamed. Here Gerald, wake up! There’s a boy here who knows your uncle.’ But Gerald did no more than murmur and settle more deeply into sleep.

  ‘Look,’ the girl said, leaning across and setting their two faces side by side – his tanned one, sullen in sleep, with very white lids and a mouth that was too full, and her own, all cheekbones, sharply alert – ‘don’t you think we’re alike? Everyone says we are. People just assume we’re brother and sister. Or twins. But Gerald’s nineteen and we’re not even related. We go in taxis sometimes, he calls me sis, and we start carrying on in the back – you know, cuddling and breathing hard. You should see some of those drivers, they can’t keep their eyes on the road. Gerald’s a terrific actor, even your aunty says so. I just play dumb and breathe.’

  Gerald Harland was one of my Aunt’s ‘discoveries’, and it was she, some weeks later, who raised his case.

  ‘Listen pet,’ she began on an afternoon when we had reverted to the intimacy of a time at Southport when I was the only sharer of her illusions, ‘I want you to be nice to him. Really, you must, I don’t know why you’ve got it in for the boy. He’s unfortunate. He lives with two awful uncles. One of them is that Frank Harland who used to come to the house at Southport, one of your father’s lame ducks, a painter, though he’s never got any­where.’ She meant by this that he was fifty and had never got to Sydney.

  ‘Actually you’d be surprised,’ I said. ‘He’s quite highly thought of.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Harland – the painter.’

  She made a mouth. ‘Well Gerald says he’s a horror, and I can believe it. He was a horror when I knew him. The place is a pigsty, and he never stops nagging the boy, worse even than the mother – oh, there’s a mother as well! No pet, really, you must try and be nice to him. He’s sensitive and has a lot to put up with. All I’m asking you to do is to talk to him sometimes, or at least listen. No, Phil, don’t put that look on your face, it doesn’t suit you. It isn’t in your nature to be cynical. You’re soft-hearted really, like your father. If you don’t watch out it’ll grow to fit, you’ll become a cypher.’

  ‘Honestly Aunty, a cypher! Where do you get these ideas?’

  ‘From listening. To clever men.’

  ‘Fifth-rate actors you mean, pretending to be other people.’

  ‘No kitten,’ she said seriously, ‘you’re wrong about that. Actors don’t pretend to be other people. They become themselves by finding other people inside them. A man who pretends to be someone he isn’t is a cypher. Now promise me you’ll give Gerald a hearing and don’t try to be smart with me. I’ve known you too long. I’m not impressed.’

  He was a year or two younger than I was, loose, lean, athletic, defiantly careless; indifferent to the impression he was making but with an eye, I thought, for effects. He would confess with disarming simplicity that he was ‘no great shakes as an actor, you know’, or ‘an absolute no-hoper at the office’ (he was articled like me), but these deficiencies were so cheerfully asserted, and with so much boyish frankness, that you felt bound to disagree, or to take them as failures in an area where he disdained to succeed. He had, I thought, a pretty good sense of his own superiority. What his self-disparagement said was: ‘By your lights I may be all these things, but those lights, you know, may be too crude to catch my particular star. Still, I’m easy, I don’t insist.’ He carried his jackets hussar-fashion over one shoulder, rode a CZ two-stroke, and was good at games, especially tennis, which we played on a double court at my aunt’s, behind a fence weighed down with pink-flowering antignon. All dash and flamboyance on the court, and with a most intense desire to win, he lounged off it as if competition were beneath him. He leaned against the wall of green with his legs crossed and a racquet across his arms, or sat between sets with his long legs extended, his flagrant hair dark from the tap and richly flopping. He tested his attractions on me as he did on everyone, but I rejected his assumption that everything he felt and did was of universal interest.

  ‘Listen,’ he would say solemnly if you were out drinking with him, ‘I’ve got to go out now and take a leak.’ Or quite out of the blue he would begin telling some happening from his childhood at Albury or Glen Innes, or from the time at the end of the war when he and his mother lived in eleven different boarding houses in a single year.

  ‘You know,’ he would say gravely, ‘we were very poor, we had no money at all – only what my mother could pick up by working in shops and places, where she was always being pestered – you know, by men. There were times when we couldn’t pay the rent and had to pack up and get away in the night – you know, do a flit – and there was always something we had to leave behind. We were always abandoning things. I remember some of those places best by what got left there. Well, I wanted a watch, a real one that ticked – I was five, maybe six, and had just started to tell the time – only we couldn’t afford it so my mother bought me a little egg-timer instead. It was filled with blue sand, and the sand sort of dimpled – I loved that – and all the grains rolled clockwise and drained away, then you turned it up and it happened all over again. I used to count the minutes off by it, especially at night when my mother was away. She was always having to go out and leave me – I used to be scared that one day I would be what got left. Well, one day of course we left the egg-timer behind, and by the time I discovered it it was too late, we couldn’t go back. I cried for a whole week. It was like losing a pet. It was just about the time my dad was reported missing – in the war you know – and my mother put adverts in the paper asking if any soldiers or anyone, POWs, had come across him or had news. Men used to reply, lots of them. I got several – you know – uncles that way. Not real ones of course. I just called them that.’

/>   I found Gerald’s stories embarrassing. It was difficult to tell in what spirit they were offered or how you were to take them. They seemed like signs of a particular intimacy or trust, then you discovered that other people had already heard them: he told them to anyone who would listen. And they went too far. Beginning as self-conscious attempts to make himself interesting, they ended as dream-monologues that left the narrator isolated, withdrawn, in a silence it was not easy to break, unless he himself broke it with a kind of giggle. He would blush then and gulp his beer, looking at you sideways out of his bright round eyes. Then five minutes later would be at it all over again.

  Girls found it touching – his life, his childhood sorrows and shames – especially those of them who were susceptible to a lean cheek and an adam’s apple, and he soon learned to play up to them; but Jacky was the only one he was close to.

  They were often together, and with their red hair and freckles might indeed have been twins. Even I saw it now. It wasn’t so much their looks as the suggestion they gave of having deep secrets, shared jokes and affinities that were second nature to them and went back to a time even they might not recall. They leaned together, they whispered; or after sitting quite silent for long minutes would suddenly burst out laughing at the same instant. They had a language I could not fathom. It unnerved me.

  Geraldn’Jacky.

  I hated the ease with which their names, welded into a single breath, could be rolled off the tongue. As when they roared up on the CZ with Jacky riding pillion and people shouted: ‘Here they are, it’s Geraldn’Jacky!’ Or when, glancing round the faces in a room, someone would look crestfallen and say, ‘But where are Geraldn’Jacky?’ This glib linking of the two, this creation of a joint person with a single being, maddened me. It was as if the names were themselves powerful, and once linked must inevitably bring their owners together as well. Each time I heard it, that single breath of five syllables, I would wince and feel side-lined, excluded.