David Malouf - The Complete Stories

I found it easier to ignore this than deny it.

“Aren't you goin’ to ask me what about?”

“I suppose it's about Katie,” I said. I was wondering why, after so many weeks, he had broached the subject at last, and so directly. Did being out here make things different, relax the rules? Or was it that he had somehow come to the end of his tether? I emptied the second billy and for a second time drew it slowly across the surface of the lagoon. I had caught the little smile he had given me. Good shot, Angus. You got it in one. Satirical, I thought.

He waited for me to stop fooling with the second billy, then reached down and I handed it up to him.

“So,” he said, holding on to the handle but not yet taking its weight so that I was caught looking up at him, "what do you know about all this, eh, Angus? What's happening? One minute everything was fine— you saw that. An’ the next she's gone cold on me.”

“Honestly, Stuart, I don't know what's happened. She wouldn't say anything to me.”

He looked doubtful.

“I'm beat,” he said suddenly, taking the billy at last and hoisting it over to sit beside the other one on the log. I thought there were tears in his eyes. I was shocked.

“I just don't know what she wants out of me.”

“Stuart—”

“Yair, I know,” he said. “I'm sorry, Angus.” He sniffled and brushed his nose with his knuckled fist. “If you knew what it was like …”

I thought I did, though not from experience.

“The thing is,” he said, sitting on the low branch, his face squared up now, the cheeks under the narrowed eyes wooden, the eyes gazing away into himself, "if this goes wrong it'll be the finish of me. For me it's all or nothing. If she would just have me — let me have her —it'd be all right— my life, I mean — hers too. If she won't I'm finished. She knows that, she must. I told her often enough. So why's she doing it?”

I found I couldn't look at him. We remained poised like that, the question hanging, the open expanse of water like glass in the early light. He got up, took one of the billies, then the other, and set off back to camp.

I sat on at the bank for a moment. Then I crouched down and splashed cold lagoon water over my face, then again, and again.

Stuart's misery scared me. My own adolescent glooms I had learned to enjoy. I liked the sense they gave me of being fully present. Even more the bracing quality I felt in possession of when I told myself sharply to stop play-acting, and strongly, stoically dealt with them. Did I despise Stuart because he was so self-indulgent? Was he too playacting, but not alert enough to his own nature to know it? I preferred that view of him than the scarier one in which his desperation was real. I didn't want to be responsible for his feelings, and it worried me that out here there was no escape from him.

He tackled me again later in the day.

“You know, Angus,” he said mildly as if he had given the matter some thought and got the better of it, "you could put in a good word for me. If there was the opportunity.”

We were standing together on a shoot, just far enough from the others not to be heard, even in the late-afternoon stillness.

Braden was with his father and Henry Denkler, a little away to the left. The air was still, the ground, with its coarse short grass, moist underfoot. Steely light glared off the nearby lagoon. The dogs, in their element now, had discovered in themselves, in a way that impressed me, their true nature as bird-dogs, a fine tense quality that made them almost physically different from the rather slow creatures they were at home. They were leaner, more sinewy.

“You could do that much,” he persisted, "for a mate. We are mates, aren't we?”

I turned, almost angry, and found myself disarmed by the flinching look he gave me, the tightness of the flesh around his eyes, the line of his mouth.

I was saved from replying by a clatter of wings, as a flock of ducks rose out of the glare that lay over the surface of the big lagoon and stood out clear against the cloudless blue. But it was too late. I had missed my chance at a shot and so had Stuart. The others let off a volley of gunfire and the dogs went crashing through the broken water to where the big birds were tumbling over in the air and splashing into the shattered stillness of the lake, or dropping noiselessly into the reeds on the other bank.

“Damn,” I shouted. “Damn. Damn!”

“What happened?” Braden asked, when we stood waiting in a group for the dogs to bring in the last of the birds. “Why didn't you fire?”

I shook my head, and Braden, taking in Stuart's look, must have seen enough, in his quick way, not to insist. The dogs were still coming in with big plump birds. There were many more of them than would go into the pot.

“Good girl, Tilly,” he called, and the dog, diverted for a moment, gave herself a good shake and ran to his knee. He leaned down, roughly pulled her head to his thigh and ruffled her ears. The strong smell of her wet fur came to me.

I spent the rest of the day stewing over my lost chance, exaggerating my angry disappointment and the number of birds I might have bagged, as a way of being so mad with Stuart that I did not have to ask myself what else I should feel. Braden and I spent the whole of the next morning with Matt Riley and Jem, but in the afternoon I came upon Stuart sitting on a big log a little way off from the camp, with a scrub-turkey at his feet. I stopped at a distance and spent a moment watching him. I thought he had not seen me.

“Hi,” he said. I stepped out into the clearing. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing much,” I told him.

I settled on the log a little way away from him.

“Listen, Stuart,” I began, after a bit.

“Yair, I know,” he told me. “I'm sorry.”

“No,” I said, "it's not about yesterday. You've got to stop all this, that's all. She won't change her mind. I know she won't. Not this time.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No. Not in so many words. But she won't, I know she won't. Look, Stuart, you should leave me out of it, that's what I wanted to say. I don't know anything so I can't help you. You've got to stop.”

“I see,” he said. “That's pretty plain. Thanks, Angus. No, I mean it,” he said, "you're right, I've been foolin’ myself. I can see that now.”

“Look, Stuart—”

“No, you're right, it was hopeless from the start. That's what you're telling me, isn't it? That I might as well just bloody cut my throat!”

I leapt to my feet. “Shut up,” I told him “Just stop all this. Bloody shut up!”

He was so shocked that he laughed outright.

“Well,” he said after a moment, with bitter satisfaction. “Finally.”

What did that mean? He gave me a look that made me see, briefly, something of the means he might have brought to bear on her. But she was harder than I was. I knew the contempt she would have for a kind of appeal that she herself would never stoop to.

I stood looking at him for a moment. I did not know what more I could say. I turned and walked away.

“I thought you were on my side,” he called after me.

I had heard this before, or an echo of it. I looked back briefly but did not stop.

“I thought we were mates,” he called again. “Angus?”

I kept walking.

I did know what he was feeling, but he confused me. I wanted to be free of him, of his turmoil. The nakedness with which he paraded his feelings dismayed me. It removed all the grounds, I thought, on which I could react and offer him real sympathy. It violated the only code, as I saw it then, that offered us protection: tight-lipped understatement, endurance. What else could we rely on? What else could I rely on?