David Malouf - The Complete Stories

She had spoken with feeling, and now that it was over, her own small show, there was an awkwardness. It had grown dark. The night, a block of solid ice with herrings in it, deep blue, was being cranked down over the plain; you could hear it creaking. He stamped a little, puffing clouds of white, and shyly, sheepishly grinned. “Cold,” he sang, shuffling his feet, and when she laughed at the little dance he was doing he continued it, waving his arms about as well. Then they came, rather too quickly, to the end of his small show. She pulled at her gloves and stood waiting.

Something more was expected of him, he knew that. But what? Was he to name it? Should he perhaps, in spite of her earlier disclaimer, offer a tip? Was that it? Surely not. But money was just one of the things, here in Europe, that he hadn't got the hang of, the weight, the place, the meaning; one of the many — along with tones, looks, little movements of the hands and eyebrows, unspoken demands and the easy meeting of them — that more than galleries or torture chambers made up what he had come here to see, and to absorb too if he could manage it. He felt hopelessly young and raw. He ought to have known — he had known— from that invisible kick of the heels, that she had more to show him than this crumblingly haunted and picturesque corner of the past, where sadness, a mood of silvery reflection, had been turned into the high worship of death — a glory perhaps, but one that was too full of shadows to bear the sun. He felt suddenly a great wish for the sun in its full power as at home, and it burned up in him. He was the sun. It belonged to the world he had come from and to his youth.

The woman had taken his hand. “My dear friend,” she was saying, with that soft tremor in her voice, " — I can call you that, can't I? I feel that we are friends. In such a short time we have grown close. I would like to show you one thing more — very beautiful but not of the past. Something personal.”

She led him along the edge of the canal and out into a street broader than the rest, its cobbles gleaming in the mist. Stone steps led up to classical porticoes, and in long, brightly lit windows there were Christmas decorations, holly with red ribbons, and bells powdered with frost. They came to a halt in front of one of the largest and brightest of these displays, and he wondered why. Still at the antipodes, deep in his dream of sunlight and youth, he did not see at first that they had arrived.

“There,” the woman was saying. She put her nose to the glass and there was a ring of fog.

The window was full of funerary objects: ornamental wreaths in iridescent enamel, candles of all sizes like organ pipes in carved and coloured wax, angels large and small, some in glass, some in plaster, some in honey-coloured wood in which you saw all the decades of growth; one of them was playing a lute; others had viols, pan pipes, primitive sidedrums; others again pointed a slender index finger as at a naughty child and were smiling in an ambiguous, un-otherworldly way. It was all so lively and colourful that he might have missed its meaning altogether without the coffin, which held a central place in the foreground and was tilted so that you saw the richness of the buttoned interior. Very comfortable it looked too — luxuriously inviting. Though the scene did not suggest repose. The heavy lid had been pushed strongly aside, as if what lay there just a moment ago had got up, shaken itself after long sleep, and gone striding off down the quay. The whole thing puzzled him. He wondered for a moment if she hadn't led him to the site of another and more recent miracle. But no.

“Such a coffin,” she was telling him softly, "I have ordered for myself. Oh, don't look surprised! — I am not planning to die so soon, not at all! I am paying it off. The same. Exactly.”

He swallowed, nodded, smiled, but was dismayed; he couldn't have been more so, or felt more exposed and naked, if she had climbed up into the window, among the plump and knowing angels, and got into the thing — lain right down on the buttoned blue satin, and with her skirt rucked up to show stockings rolled tight over snowy thighs, had crooked a finger and beckoned him with a leer to join her. He blushed for the grossness of the vision, which was all his own.

But his moment of incomprehension passed. His shock, he saw, was for an impropriety she took quite for granted and for an event that belonged, as she calmly surveyed it, to a world of exuberant and even vulgar life. The window was the brightest thing she had shown him, the brightest thing he had seen all day, the most lively, least doleful.

So he survived the experience. They both did. And he was glad to recall years after, that when she smiled and touched his hand in token of their secret sympathy, a kind of grace had come over him and he did not start as he might have done; he was relieved of awkwardness, and was moved, for all his raw youth, by an emotion he could not have named, not then — for her, but also for himself — and which he would catch up with only later, when sufficient time had passed to make them of an age.

As they already were for a second, before she let him go, and in a burst of whitened breath said, "Now, my dear, dear friend, I will exact my fee. You may buy me a cup of chocolate at one of our excellent cafs. Okay?”

Odd the conjunctions,some of them closer than any planet, that govern a life. I am an only child because of my father's brother, Uncle Jake. In an otherwise exemplary line of seven brothers and sisters he made so sharp a detour, and so alarmed my mother with the statistical possibilities, that she refused, once my father's desire for an heir had been satisfied, to take further risks. She was not, needless to say, a gambler — even one chance was one too many — and she spent a good deal of her time watching for signs of delinquency in me. As the years passed and familiar features began to emerge, a nose from one side of the family, a tendency to bronchitis from the other, she grew more and more apprehensive, and was only mildly relieved when I came to resemble the plainest of her sisters.

A nose is obvious enough, it declares itself. So does a tendency to wheeze when the skies grow damp. But bad blood is a different matter. It takes a thousand forms and loves to disguise itself in meek and insidious qualities that allay suspicion and then endlessly and teasingly provoke it. My mother could never be sure of me. I was too quiet — it was unnatural. And Uncle Jake did leave his mark.

Was he really so bad?

Bad is hard to define. I am speaking of a time, the middle Thirties, and a place, Brisbane, in which it took very little in the way of divergence from the moderately acceptable for heads to come together and for a young person to get a reputation — and all reputations, of course, were bad.

There are crimes that defy judgment because they defy understanding. A mild-mannered newsagent shuts his shop one evening, goes out to the woodpile where chooks are dealt with, takes an axe, sits for ten minutes or so listening to the sounds of the warm suburban night, then goes in and butchers his whole family, along with a child from next door who has come in for the serials. The law-courts do what they can, and so too, at a level where local history becomes folk-lore, do the newspapers; but horrors of this sort cannot be gathered back into the web of daily living, there is too much blood, too much darkness in them. We must assume the irruption among us of some other agency, a wild-haired fury that sets its hand on a man and shakes the daylights out of him, or a god in whom the rival aspects of creation and chaos are of equal importance and who knows no rule. But bad is civil; it is small-scale, commonplace — something the good citizen, under other circumstances, might himself have done and is qualified to condemn.