David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Here Slinger, Kev, Gerry — have a go!” He stooped and hurled another. “It's all right boys, this is on me, it's my bloody chutney. Nothin’ t’ do with McPhearson. I don't account t’ him f ‘ chutney.”

But the others, suddenly sober, did not join in. At last one of them went up to him.

“Come on, mate, time t’ turn in,” he said. “We've got a heavy day.”

It ended then. They went to bed. But were woken some time later by what sounded like another jar of chutney being smashed against the storeroom wall. They all started up at once and trooped out in their underpants to see what it was. The clearing was empty, still. It was Kev who knocked, with embarrassed politeness, at the door to Claude's hut and pushed it open. They heard him gasp.

“Aw, the poor bugger!”

It hadn't sounded like a shot.

There was a note, and beside it an envelope, exactly like the one Gerry had carried earlier in the day. It was addressed to the woman and the house in town. The note asked Gerry to deliver it, and on this occasion to drive right up to the house on the bike. But when the police came they took charge of the envelope along with the body.

The remaining jars of chutney, all shot through with gold as the sun struck them, were still stacked in a ruined pyramid in the grass. The police found them difficult to fit into the picture, and the others, faced with them and with the dried stains on the storehouse wall, which looked almost natural, as if the wood had experienced a new flow of thick golden sap, turned away in common embarrassment. At last one of the policemen unlocked the storehouse door with Claude's keys, and Gerry and Charlie took the jars back and set them neatly, darkly, on the shelf.

The sight of the storeroom, with everything fastidiously in place and even the chutney now restored, unnerved Gerry. If he were to go now into that space behind the partition, and note every detail, and add to it the final disordering of all its objects by the shot, nothing would be revealed, he thought, or added to what he knew.

He watched the younger of the two policemen slip Claude's letter into his breast pocket. The policeman wore a uniform: boots, cap, shirt with epaulettes and a flash — he was official. He would ring the bell just once. And if the door wasn't answered immediately he would ring a second time, and again and again until it was.

Climbing to her seat in the organ gallery, up three flights of stairs, was such an arduous business, and she was so slow nowadays, that Clay had to begin early, even before the warning bells were sounded. She hated the thought of arriving breathless, of being locked out, or of looking, on the way up, like an old girl in need of aid. “He's cooked his goose — let him lie in it;" that was one of her sayings. Messy of course, but life is, you got used to it.

Clay McHugh had learned her survival tactics in Europe between the wars. She had studied there how to present an appearance that was never less than elegant and might be mistaken by snobs, and by the undiscerning and unworldly, for affluence. You lived in the best part of town, had one outfit of perfect cut that went to the cleaners each week, one piece of jewellery, and you never let anyone past the door.

Her present apartment was at Elizabeth Bay and she had spent all she had on it. Within its walls, among the last of her loot, she practised a frugality that would have surprised her neighbours and made social workers, and other Nosey Parkers, cry famine. Clay despised such terms. She ate a great deal of boiled rice, was careful with the lights, and on the pretext of keeping trim, she walked rather than took the bus. Her one outfit was black; her one piece of jewellery a chain of intimidating weight that chimed rather than tinkled but was too plain to suggest ostentation. Hung with mint-gold coins, seals, and medallions, it provoked questions and the answers told a story — in fact several stories, but never all. There was, each time, a little something-left-over.

This chain was her curriculum vitae. She shook it when she needed to remind herself that whatever hole she was now in, she had once been in a different one and this was her choice. The chain spoke of attachments: of men young and old, back there in Europe, who had wanted at one time or another to present her with their blue eyes, their lives, their titles, or with little flats in Paris or London or country houses near Antwerp or Rome — all of which, for good reason, she had declined. The men had slipped away, leaving only a family seal or rare coin or medal. The weight on her wrist was bearable and she thought of it as a tribute to her intention to keep free.

That was one way of putting it. Put another way, you might say that the men had escaped and that these coins were the price they'd been willing to pay. Clay looked at it different ways on different occasions, but mostly she thought of herself as having come out of all this — of life —as well as could be expected: that is, badly. But her freedom was important to her. All those dull dogs and bushy-tailed buffers, if they were still kicking, would be as old now as herself. She would, if she had accepted their offers, be no more than an expensive nursemaid to an old man's incontinence — though she was not without affection and she wouldn't have complained, even of that, after a lifetime of some other devotion, if it had been her fate; or if the right man — Karel for instance — had asked it of her. Things had turned out otherwise, that's all. She was lying with the goose.

Besides, she told herself in her scarier moments, I'll soon be in that state myself, except that I won't be. I won't hang around to get up at three in the morning like poor Grandma and make scones for people who've been dead for thirty years. I'll finish it first. I'll take the bun and the pills …

(This grandmother had lived with them. As a grown girl of fifteen she had been sent out, burning with shame before the neighbours, but also before the old woman herself, to bring her in when she went aimlessly wandering. On several occasions that now seemed like one, they had stood shouting beside a fence in the overpowering smell of honeysuckle. The old woman whined, screeched, wheedled, tried to shake off the grip on her wrist; dogs barked, children stared, other old women shook their heads behind blinds — she could still feel the pain, the humiliation of it. But the centre of the occasion had shifted now from the unwilling and angry girl to the wilful old woman, who with her hair awry and her gown open stood barefoot under the streetlamp saying over and over, "Why are you doing this to me?” The old woman was herself.)

She shook her wrist and the chain clanked against the gallery rail, as leaning forward she allowed her eye, which was sharp, to sweep the crowded amphitheatre.

Eleanor had just come in, high up in the stalls. Tall, in an emerald cloak, she was waiting for the people in her row to get up and let her through.

How like her! There was stacks of room up there, not like these gallery boxes — stacks of it! But Eleanor continued to stand, and when at last the whole row had risen to its feet, the silly woman, holding her cloak about her, moved through, gracefully inclining her head and smiling and thanking people. Settled at last, with the cloak thrown back for later, when the air-conditioning would turn the place into an icebox, she looked about; then cast her gaze upwards to the gallery and waved.

Clay immediately relented. Oh God, she told herself, I'm such a bitch. It was touching really, Eleanor's little wave — a real leap in the dark. Too vain to wear glasses, and half-blind by habit (as who wouldn't be after forty years with the dreaded doctor) she could barely see her face in the glass.