David Malouf - Remembering Babylon

Leona wavered. A crease came to her brow. He was something new, this schoolmaster. Even if he was at first sight more awkward than some others, Hector for example, he had a background, he knew something of the world. It embarrassed her that she had been caught out in a game with children, for Hector too was that, however he might stroke his moustache and swagger.

George sensed the little catch of interest in her and felt his confidence lift. If he was let down by anything it was the state of his shirt-cuffs, which were very grubby. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down to hide them, and noticed, as he did, the dirt that was ingrained in the knuckles of his big hands — even Hector’s, he saw, were cleaner. How careless he had allowed himself to become! His hair, for example. He ran his hand through it. It was a bird’s nest; whereas Hector’s — Hector was altogether, for all his overgrown limbs and the harelip, very neat, and was not barefooted but wore flash new boots.

George was surprised how keen his return to society had made him. He felt the resurgence of his old vigour, and his soul leapt forward to a time when he and Leona, Miss Gonzales (he preferred to think of her, for the moment, in this more formal way, it set them further apart from the others) would be frank with one another, and tenderly, touchingly close. A conversation in this mode began in his head, and under the influence of the pleasure it provided, his whole being soared, as if the book in his pocket, which he had forgotten, had been transformed along with the rest of him, and was fluttering over the table in the form of a putto with rainbow-coloured wings enclosing a face of quite cherubic innocence, and no discommodious body at all.

Leona, meanwhile, had taken charge of the occasion; in a rather schoolmistressly way, George thought with some amusement. Was she mocking him? If so, he did not resent it. Quite the contrary. He was surprised what a pleasure it was to give in to her authority and be relieved of his own; to be playfully bossed; even if it set him at the same level as Hector Gosper. He had, suddenly, a tender fellow feeling for the harelipped youth that dissolved all rivalry between them in a common response to the rather bantering tone in which Miss Leona softly bound and ruled them. It was a reflection, this, of their shared youthfulness. Hector too bucked up and lost a little of his edgy watchfulness.

The two little girls were astonished by the turn things had taken. They were used to these afternoons when Hector or one of the other boys turned up — it was usually Hector — and the teasing way Leona treated them, but had not expected her to treat Mr Abbot so. Even less that he should accept it, though Janet saw after a little that this was another version of the fortune-telling, only this time the game was between Leona and Mr Abbot.

She saw something else as well. That in playing his part Mr Abbot had no more to do than Hector had. They only thought they were playing, because Leona managed things so cleverly, putting words into their mouth that they had never in fact spoken, and taking both parts herself. Janet was surprised how clear this was to her. The world recently, she thought, kept reaching out to show her things, to catch her attention and enlighten her.

‘That’s better children,’ Mrs Hutchence said, ‘that’s what I like to see.’ She herself had said nothing. She sat listening, but everything, you felt, was contained by her listening, and without it would have been different.

After a time, Mrs Hutchence and Janet went off to attend to the bees. George, Leona and Hector were left alone — but not quite alone. The smaller of the McIvor girls stayed behind, not quite discouraged, George thought, by Leona. She watched them thoughtfully from the end of the table, and when they went out to the back verandah to see Mrs Hutchence and Janet moving about in sunbonnets and veils in a grove below the house, she sat on a woodblock with her elbows on her knees and her chin supported on her fists, missing nothing that passed between them. George wondered if it was just childish curiosity or a kind of jealous love that made her so narrowly watchful, but whether it was for Leona or Hector he could not tell.

Their talk was desultory now. Leona might have been bored with them. There were silences in which George felt at a loss, as if it was up to him now to justify the place she had offered him with some demonstration of gallantry or wit, but the conversation he had begun in his head, which was so full of frankness and intimacy, belonged to the future; he could not catch its tone in the present and he embarrassed himself by asking, out of terror at the gap that had opened, which was too full of the afternoon light and the little McIvor girl’s eyes, a question, a direct one, which was in itself of no importance but was put in a manner too blunt, almost brutal — he saw that as soon as the words were out. Miss Leona looked grieved, as if she might, after all, have been mistaken in him. What dismayed him was that he should have made such an error, when he was otherwise in a state of such heightened sensitivity.

It did not escape him, even in the midst of his confusion, that a little self-satisfied smile had come to the corner of Hector’s mouth, which he was trying to hide by looking very fixedly at his own immaculate boots, while, with his hands in his pockets, he shifted his weight back and forth so that the silence was filled with their cheeping. Was he really, George wondered, the more self-possessed of the two, or was it only that he had discovered, over time, how to fall in with the girl’s rather perplexing demands?

But Leona was generous. She did not make him suffer for his lapse. ‘Ma,’ she began, ‘— I call her Ma, you know, though we aren’t related — Ma,’ she went on, ‘has taken a great liking, George — she doesn’t always, you know. Normally — but why should that surprise you? She’s sharp, Ma, very, you’d be astonished at what she can see in people, and at first glance too. She has seen something in you — in Hector too, though not in just anybody, she isn’t general . She sees into people, it’s a gift. And usually they know it immediately — Hector did, didn’t you Hector? — and feel easy with her. That’s why we’re all so free here. It isn’t me, I’m not easy. But she is, you’ve no idea. And good too. Wonderfully. She’s been wonderfully good to me .’

George had no idea what all this meant, and doubted, from the look of him, that Hector did either; but he did feel easy, and understood that Leona was not speaking only for her Ma.

From where they stood at the verandah’s rails, he watched that shadowy figure, with the smaller one at her side, move about among the square bee-boxes, loosing clouds of smoke out of her sleeves, and felt a pleasant drowsiness and lack of concern for himself, an assurance that he could leave now and come back, and when he did there would be a place for him.

‘I should be off,’ he said. It did not bother him that he was leaving the field to Hector, who had, after all, waited him out.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘But you will come again.’

He agreed, and set off over the lumpy yard. He did not have to look back to know that Hector and the tall young woman were watching him go, with the little McIvor girl at Leona’s skirts. He was filled with a sense of his own lightness. Some heavier self had been laid asleep in him, and another woken that was all open to the westering glow in which the drab bush trees along his way found a kind of beauty, all their leaves glancing and the earth under them alight along its ridges, and the sky above a show, a carnival, of cloud shapes transforming themselves from forms he could name to others, equally pleasing, that he had no name for, but did not for that reason feel estranged from; he might, he thought, have a name for those later. He had the feeling that there were many things in the world that were still to come to him.