Peter Carey - Collected Stories

He whistled a lot. They were old-fashioned optimistic songs, written before she was born.

When, finally, she spoke, it was to talk about the sweeping.

“You’re bringing more dirt in than you’re sweeping out.”

He did not look surprised that she had spoken but he noted the softness of her voice and hoarded it away with delight. He considered the floor, scratching his bristly head and rubbing his hand over his newly shaven chin. “You’re quite correct,” he said. He sat on the long wooden bench beneath the windows and began to take off his boots, intending to continue the job in stockinged feet.

“Here,” she said, “give it to me.”

He gave her the broom. A woman’s touch, he smiled, never having heard of women’s liberation.

5.

That night at dinner she told him her story, leaning intently over the table and talking very softly.

It was beyond his experience, involving drugs, men who had abused her, manipulated her, and finally wished to kill her. He was too overwhelmed by it to really absorb it. He sat at the table absently cleaning a dirty fork with the tablecloth. “Fancy that,” he would say. Or: “You’re better off now.” And again: “You’re better off without them, that’s all.”

From the frequency of these comments she judged that he wished her to be quiet, but really they were produced by his feeling of inadequacy in the face of such a strange story. He was like a peasant faced with a foreigner who speaks with a strange accent, too overcome to recognize the language as his own.

What he did absorb was that Anna had been treated badly by the world and was, in some way, wounded because of it.

“You’ll get better here,” he said. “You’ve come to the right place.”

He smiled at her, a little shyly, she thought. For a brief instant she felt as safe and comfortable as she had ever been in her life and then fear and suspicion, her old friends, claimed her once more. Her skin prickled and the wind in the trees outside sounded forlorn and lonely.

She sat beside the kerosene lamp surrounded by shadows. That the light shone through her curling fair hair, that Dermott was almost unbearably happy, she was completely unaware.

6.

Weeks passed and the first chill of autumn lay along the river. Dermott slowly realized that Anna’s recovery would not be as fast as he had imagined, for her lips remained sad and the sleepy eyes remained lustreless and defeated.

He brought things for her to marvel at — a stone, a dried-out frog, a beetle with a jewel-like shell — but she did not welcome the interruptions and did not try to hide her lack of interest, so he stood there with the jewel in his hand feeling rather stupid.

He tried to interest her in the river, to give to her the pleasure the old inspector had given him, but she stood timidly on the bank wearing a dress she had made from an old sheet, staring anxiously at the ground around her small flat feet.

He stood in the water wearing only baggy khaki shorts and a battered pair of tennis shoes. She thought he looked like an old war photo.

“Nothing’s going to bite you,” he said. “You can stand in the water.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“I’ll teach you how to catch crays.”

“No.”

“That’s a silky oak.”

She didn’t even look where he pointed. “You go. I’ll stay here.”

He looked up at the sky with his hands on his hips. “If I go now I’ll be away for two hours.”

“You go,” she insisted. The sheet dress made her look as sad as a little girl at bedtime.

“You’ll be lonely. I’ll be thinking that you’re lonely,” he explained, “so it won’t be no fun. Won’t you be lonely?”

She didn’t say no. She said, “You go.”

And he went, finally, taking that unsaid no with him, aware that his absence was causing her pain. He was distracted and cast badly. When a swarm of caddis flies hatched over a still dark pool he did not stay to cast there but pushed on home with the catch he had: two small rainbows. He had killed them without speaking to them.

He found her trying to split firewood, frowning and breathing hard.

“You’re holding the axe wrong,” he said, not unkindly.

“Well, how should I hold it then?”

She stood back with her hands on her hips. He showed her how to do it, trying to ignore the anger that buzzed around her.

“That’s what I was doing,” she said.

He retired to tend the garden and she thought he was angry with her for intruding into his territory. She did not know that his mother had been what they called “a woman stockman” who was famous for her toughness and self-reliance. When she saw him watching her she thought it was with disapproval. He was keeping an anxious eye on her, worried that she was about to chop a toe off.

7.

“Come with me.”

“No, you go.”

That is how it went, how it continued to go. A little litany.

“Come, I’ll teach you.”

“I’m happy here.”

“When I get back you’ll be unhappy.”

Over and over, a pebble being washed to and fro in a rocky hole.

“I can’t enjoy myself when you’re unhappy.”

“I’m fine.”

And so on, until when he waded off downstream he carried her unhappiness with him and a foggy film lay between him and the river.

The pattern of his days altered and he in no way regretted the change. Like water taking the easiest course down a hillside, he moved towards those things which seemed most likely to minimize her pain. He helped her on projects which she deemed to be important, the most pressing of which seemed to be the long grass which grew around the back of the house. They denuded the wild vegetable garden of its dominant weed. He had never cared before and had let it grow beside the tomatoes, between the broad leaves of the pumpkin, and left it where it would shade the late lettuce.

As he worked beside her it did not occur to him that he was, in fact, less happy than he had been, that his worry about her happiness had become the dominant factor of his life, clouding his days and nagging at him in the night like a sore tooth. Yet even if it had occurred to him, the way she extended her hand to him one evening and brought him silently to her bed with a soft smile on her lips would have seemed to him a joy more complex and delightful than any of those he had so easily abandoned.

He worked now solely to bring her happiness. And if he spent many days in shared melancholy with her there were also rewards of no small magnitude: a smile, like a silver spirit breaking the water, the warmth of her warm white body beside him each morning.

He gave himself totally to her restoration and in so doing became enslaved by her. Had he been less of an optimist he would have abandoned the project as hopeless.

And the treatment was difficult, for she was naked and vulnerable, not only to him, to the world, but to all manner of diseases which arrived, each in their turn, to lay her low. In moments of new-found bitterness he reflected that these diseases were invited in and made welcome, evidence of the world’s cruelty to her, but these thoughts, alien to his nature and shocking for even being thought, were banished and put away where he could not see them.

She lay in his bed pale with fever. He picked lad’s love, thyme, garlic and comfrey and ministered to her with anxious concern.

“There,” he said, “that should make you better.”

“Do you love me, Dermott?” she asked, holding his dry dusty hand in her damp one. They made a little mud between them.

He was surprised to hear the word. It had not been in his mind, and he had to think for a while about love and the different things he understood by it.