David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“I'll see you home,” he was saying in that heavy, Middle-European way, all breathless gallantry, that she had found absurd even in his father and which thirty years in Australia, the rough example of contemporaries, and the half-mocking acquiescence of women like herself, had done nothing to change.

“No,” she said. “The seat. You must stay.”

He looked down again and was embarrassed. “The seat doesn't matter.”

“Oh but it does!" she said firmly. “You've been kind enough already— Nicholas. I'll get a taxi.”

He did not insist. “Then I'll find you one.”

Still holding the glass in one hand, and with the fingers of the other just pinching her elbow, he led her down the shallow steps. When they came to the foyer he made a wide arc towards one of the bars, and reaching in between packed shoulders, fumbled and set the thing down, grinning a little for the awkwardness of it.

At last they were in the open air. Out here she had no need of support. The night was fresh, and the sky, beyond harbour-rails and fig-trees, an electric blue. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, rocking gently on his heels.

“It seems a shame,” he began, "that we've never — that we had to wait so long. I'm sorry.”

She shook her head. No good going into all that. Too late, too late.

But he was determined she saw, in his discreet, passionate, pedantic way, to deal with it, an image of her that must have been, like her own picture of him as a slope-shouldered child in shorts, a stereotype: the flashy homebreaker and Jezebel who had stolen his father and left him to be the little man of the house, the resentful mother's boy. Or perhaps what he was dealing with was his father's nakedness. Well, either way, either way, he was too late.

“If you don't mind,” he was saying, "I'll call up tomorrow and see how you are. It's no trouble.”

She shook her head and made deprecating motions with her lips. What was it — kindness? — was he kind? More of his filial piety?

Fortunately the taxi had arrived. The driver gave her a look — some old girl who'd had too much to drink, and while Nicholas was giving him the address, she heard, as often before, the sound of a note being passed.

“Thank you,” she murmured, eager for nothing now except to be moving on in the dark.

“You all right, ol’ lady?” the driver asked over his shoulder. There was mockery in his voice.

“Get stuffed,” she told the fellow. That fixed him.

Eleanor's late-night telephone voice was full of concern. “No, no, I'm okay, no trouble — I was tired, that's all. How was the Schoenberg?” Then, because she was tired of making mysteries, and because sooner or later it would have to be said, she let a voice that was not quite her own announce flatly: "Karel died this morning — a heart attack. In the street …” Poor Eleanor! "No, no, I'm okay — I promise. Yes, I'll call you in the morning.”

She replaced the receiver and stood for a moment looking down at the Bay. She must have been doing that for the last hour. There were no searchlights tonight; and no angel was clamped like an aerial frogman to the wall out there, with his animal eyes upon her and his angelic, unshaven cheek pressed close to the bricks. Only below, in the dark of the Moreton Bay figs — those exiles of her own northern shore — the flying foxes, gorging on fruit.

She turned the lights out and went into her bedroom. Brightness and squalor of a small star's dressing room — den of a sorceress whose spells were expert and false according to the times, and whose powers had been worked up always out of improvident energies. Well, that spring was dry. All that was left were the half-empty bottles of the witch's fak-ery: cut-glass in what the boys these days called Deco, plastic jars full of liquors, creams, milks, balms, emulsions — unmagic potions. Unzipping the good black dress, she hung it like an empty skin in the closet — one of the rules — then sat and rolled off her stockings, leaving them anyhow on the floor; underclothes the same — she had always been messy. “You're impossible,” people told her, "you're such a perfectionist." "No,” she had sometimes answered, bitter at being misunderstood, "I'm a slob.” The nuns had known. “Clay McHugh,” she heard an old nun, Sister Ignatia complain, "if your mind in any way resembles your closet you're in for a hard time. We shall say nothing of your soul.” They had none of them said anything of her soul.

So she was naked.

She groaned aloud now, since there was no one to hear, and drew back the sheet. She laid her body out: the slack flesh of her arms and thighs, her wrinkled belly, her skull and her feet and her hands that were covered with blotches, patches of darkness that would spread.

I am lying with the goose, she told herself, that's how they'll find me. Only nobody dies of grief — grief doesn't kill us. We're too damned selfish and strong — and what we love in the end is the goose.

She unsnapped the chain. It was too heavy to sleep with. It dragged you down into dreams. With a solid clunk it hit the night table, all her stories, her insoluble mysteries: a dead sound, clunk, just like that — the last sound before silence.

He has already been pointed out to me: a flabby, thickset man of fifty-five or sixty, very black, working alongside the others and in no way different from them — or so it seems. When they work he swings his pick with the same rhythm. When they pause he squats and rolls a cigarette, running his tongue along the edge of the paper while his eyes, under the stained hat, observe the straight line of the horizon; then he sets it between his lips, cups flame, draws in, and blows out smoke like all the rest.

Wears moleskins looped low under his belly and a flannel vest. Sits at smoko on one heel and sips tea from an enamel mug. Spits, and his spit hisses on stone. Then rises, spits in his palm, takes up the crowbar. They are digging holes for fencing-posts at the edge of the plain. When called he answers immediately, "Here, boss,” and then, when he has approached, "Yes, boss, you wanna see me?” I am presented and he seems amused, as if I were some queer northern bird he had heard about but never till now believed in, a sort of crane perhaps, with my grey frock coat and legs too spindly in their yellow trousers; an odd, angular fellow with yellow-grey side-whiskers, half spectacles, and a cold-sore on his lip. So we stand face to face.

He is, they tell me, the one surviving speaker of his tongue. Half a century back, when he was a boy, the last of his people were massacred. The language, one of hundreds (why make a fuss?) died with them. Only not quite. For all his lifetime this man has spoken it, if only to himself. The words, the great system of sound and silence (for all languages, even the simplest, are a great and complex system) are locked up now in his heavy skull, behind the folds of the black brow (hence my scholarly interest), in the mouth with its stained teeth and fat, rather pink tongue. It is alive still in the man's silence, a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it; and when he narrows his eyes, and grins and says, "Yes, boss, you wanna see me?” it is not breathed out.

I am (you may know my name) a lexicographer. I come to these shores from far off, out of curiosity, a mere tourist, but in my own land I too am the keeper of something: of the great book of words of my tongue. No, not mine, my people's, which they have made over centuries, up there in our part of the world, and in which, if you have an ear for these things and a nose for the particular fragrance of a landscape, you may glimpse forests, lakes, great snow peaks that hang over our land like the wings of birds. It is all there in our mouths. In the odd names of our villages, in the pet-names we give to pigs or cows, and to our children too when they are young, Little Bean, Pretty Cowslip; in the nonsense rhymes in which so much simple wisdom is contained (not by accident, the language itself discovers these truths), or in the way, when two consonants catch up a repeated sound, a new thought goes flashing from one side to another of your head.