David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Martinu,” the boy said with excitement. He had apple cheeks and a great deal of fluffy bronze hair.

Martinu too she had known for a time. She did not say so. She was too puzzled.

Down in the hall a character in a double-breasted suit had paused at the end of Karel's row, and after turning his head this way and that to examine the ticket, was pushing in towards the empty seat. It was a mistake — he had the wrong row; she leaned forward across the tense air to inform him.

Short, fair, balding, he pushed his way along the row, pausing frequently to excuse himself, and seemed unaware of his error. When he reached the seat at last he stood flicking it with a handkerchief, then settled. But uncomfortably, sitting too far forward, and went to work now, with the same handkerchief, on his brow. He mopped, consulted his watch, mopped again — all the time in the wrong seat; then sat with the handkerchief crumpled up in his right hand like an unhappy child, and sitting too far forward, as if his legs would not reach the ground.

It was this vision of him as an unlikely middle-aged child that gave her the clue. She saw a plump nine-year-old with sloping shoulders in front of a row of newly planted poplars. The poplars were meant to civilize a wilderness, and the child, who wore khaki shorts and sandshoes, was bearing a spade. It was a snapshot. He squinted into the sun. Well, those poplars now must be sixty-, seventy-feet high, sending their roots to block someone's drains. And the child would be — Nicholas. Nicholas!

Her heart thumped and she half rose to her feet. But the hall was ringing with applause now and the chamber group was trooping on, the lights were fading. Too late! There was a scraping and plucking as they tuned up, and she joined them with a hiss of desperation at her own slowness. It was loud enough for the boy who was her neighbour to swing his head in alarm. She made violent motions — no, it's nothing, nothing — and subsided into noiseless gloom.

That Nicholas. He had sided against his father, turned clean against him all those years ago, and now here he was occupying his father's seat. “Traitor,” she wanted to shout down at him, "you broke his heart!”

But on an abrupt and sickening change of key, old injustice and indignation gave way to alarm. Why wasn't Karel here, that was the real point. What had he said — on Friday was it? — no, Saturday. What had they talked about? What did they ever talk about, these days, these days! The music kept switching pace. She couldn't fit his voice to it. The violins were doing impossible things, leaping about off key, scraping below the bridge; no voice could be fitted to that! Oh my God, she thought, my God. The music was approaching a violent end. It ended. And the boy beside her held his hands clasped a moment, with his head thrown back and all his hair electrically tingling, before he joined the applause. “Wasn't that terrific?” he breathed. Then, when she clenched her jaw at him: "Are you all right?”

No, she was not all right! Where was Karel? Why hadn't he rung if he wasn't coming?

She got to her feet again, determined this time to rush down and call; but her head was filled with the sound of a phone ringing in an empty room, and she sat down again, plump, just like that, and covered her eyes. There was a hush. She steeled herself. Terrible Tchaikovsky bloomed all over the hall.

She managed to push her way through the harbourside bar without encountering Robert and Jeanette, or Eleanor, or the Abrams, and after an eternity of searching (Where was the man? He couldn't spend the entire interval in the loo) she found him pacing up and down under the sloping panes that gave on the dark; nervously consulting his watch and looking so like the child of thirty years ago that she immediately felt thirty years younger herself.

“Nicholas!" she accused.

He looked startled. His hands jumped and opened. There was no need to introduce herself.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

The man frowned and lowered his gaze.

The worst, she thought, it's always the worst. Damn him!

He was looking desperately about for a place they could slip away to that wouldn't be loud with people, all standing too close and with glasses in their hands, shouting.

For God's sake, she thought, why doesn't he get it over with? I know already, it's only words. The stoop of his shoulders and his look of pained, concentrated concern was too irritating; she would have preferred him to be cruel. (It struck her then that all the bad news she had ever heard had come to her in public places: in railway stations, hotel foyers, bars, or over public address systems in crowded squares. It was a mark of the century.) Go on, damn you, she thought now, say it, shout it why don't you?

At last, in desperation, he did. He tipped his balding head towards her, and with one hand cupped to his mouth, bellowed softly: "My father died this morning. I tried to ring you. He collapsed while he was out shopping. I'm very sorry.”

The vision of spilled parcels hit her harder than she expected; and Nicholas, made bold by the fear that she too might be about to fall down in a public place, took her, not quite firmly by the elbow, and kept up a dismal muttering.

They had become a centre of concern. The crowd about them had drawn back. People were staring, she must have cried out. Nicholas, deeply embarrassed, was making little gestures towards them. He was explaining why he was clutching her, that it was not this that had provoked her cry. Meanwhile, to her, he was offering more complex explanations. “You see,” he stammered, "I found the ticket — and I — well I just didn't want the seat to be empty.”

His soft eyes appealed to her for understanding of his pious but perhaps foolish sentiment.

She did understand, and suddenly felt sorry for him — for his awkward emotion and the need to explain it, but also for his grief. But it hurt, that. They must have been closer than she had guessed, Karel and this grown-up Nicholas; who would be, of course — why had she never let herself think it? — the father of the grandchildren: of Elsa and Ross. She had known about the grandchildren — she even knew their birthdays, but had thought of them as having come to him without intermediaries. And now here he was, one of the intermediaries, thin, distressed, too formal, with the sweat breaking out on his bald crown — the bearer of a weight of filial piety that she did understand and which did after all do him credit, but which she felt like a knife in her bowels.

“Listen,” she said harshly, "do you think you could find me a drink? Something good and strong. I'll be fine till you get back.”

She swayed a little but recovered. How odd it was after all the turmoil they had created — the promises, threats, curses, the real and imaginary violence — to have reached in a public place in Sydney this moment of utter aloneness: Elizabeth gone, that devout vindictive woman, now Karel also gone, and nothing left but this numbness before the brute fact. Karel! Tipped out on the pavements of a town he had never meant to live in, let alone die in, and the hot sky pulsing overhead as the angel zoomed, found his easy mark — there under the ribs — and pushed. She too felt it, the knife; and the closeness of his breath.

She looked up sharply at a gentler touch. Nicholas, with a double cognac and nothing for himself.

She smiled, thanked him, and playing the tough old girl, threw her head back and tossed it off. Then stood with the balloon resting lightly on her palm.

She looked at it — it was so fine. Tough but delicate. If she closed her fist and pressed hard enough it would splinter.

He must have felt the thought pass through her; she was surprised. He took the glass in his own pudgy fist, but had nowhere to put it.