David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Country Women's Association, just two or three. Most difficult of all are places like Karingai where the population “mixed" — that is, part Australian, part Italian, part Aboriginal, part Indian; and worst of all is Karingai itself, where even the Indian population is split into sects that worship at rival temples. I make certain, so far as these things can be arranged, that towns like Karingai appear on my itinerary no more than once every two or three years. Bridging the gap is all very well, but there is a limit to what a man can do with the discovery poems of Douglas Stewart and a slide evening with William Dobell.

The culture business, it's a box of knives! I could show wounds. I have been at it now for half a lifetime: twenty years as an expatriate with the British Council in Sarawak, Georgetown, Abadan; a stint at a West African University; two years as tutor to the brother-in-law of a sheikh — I'm not altogether without experience. But at fifty-six I have no firm foot on the ladder. There are always the young, pouring out of the universities with their heads full of schemes for converting the masses; little blond geniuses, all charm and killer-instinct, looking for cover while they finish a novel; girls with a flair for doling out rejection-slips and serving coffee to visiting celebrities; streamlined lesbians who know just how to re-organise everything so that it works. I have enemies everywhere, and they have not scrupled to poison the ear of authority with insinuations that I am not what I claim to be: that my post at that flyblown university, for example, was not on the teaching side but in catering. Life is a constant struggle.

I meet it with energy. Boundless energy. Nothing disarms people so completely, I have discovered, as breathless enthusiasm. Hopping about on one foot, crowing, chuckling, slapping one's thigh, pinching people's elbows in an excess of delight at finding them alive, well, and just where they might be expected to be; peppering the speech with absurd formulations like “Aren't we all having a marvellous time? Isn't this just what the doctor ordered?” or such patent insincerities as “Hello there, all you lovely, lovely people!;” above all buttering the ear with flattery, flattery so excessive that only the most hardened egotist could take it seriously and lesser men curl up with embarrassment — these are powerful weapons in the right hand, and immediately establish the user as a harmless crank, too clownlike, too scatty, too effusive and highly strung to be a master of calculation.

Well, it's one of the strategies. In fact I am full of good will and want only to be left alone to make my way and to enjoy a moment of late sunshine at the top of the tree, but to achieve that I must protect myself, and protecting myself means playing the buffoon and avoiding places like Karingai where for reasons quite beyond my control (like the fact that the wretched Indians have rival temples) I will be left presenting my Brett Whiteley extravaganza to the wife of the Methodist minister, a retired timbergetter who is rewriting the works of Henry Lawson, and the hapless two-year incumbent of the one-teacher school.

2

I had finished my lecture and was waiting for the minister's wife, C. of E. on this occasion, to lead me to supper. The coffee-urn and the trestle table laden with sausage rolls, anzacs, rainbow cake, date-loaf, and pavlova were waiting at the end of the hall, presided over by two large-bosomed ladies who had spent the whole of my talk in setting it up, its impressive abundance determined less by the expected size of the audience than by their own sense of what was due to the Arts — the Arts, out here, meaning Cookery, of which the higher forms are cake-decoration and the ornamental bottling of carrots. The platform lights had been removed, the extension lead and projector, like some image of local veneration, had been restored to its hutch.

“If y’ don't mind, Mr. Trist, I'd appreciate a few words. You might ‘ear somethin’ t’ yer advantage.”

It was the legal phrase that startled me — I was used to the little confusion about my name.

The speaker was a diminutive woman of sixty-five or seventy, very battered looking, whom I had taken when she first came in, she was so dark-eyed and brown, for one of the Indians; except that she wore a hat, a crumpled straw with two roses pinned to the brim, and a pair of white gloves that suggested Anglo-Saxon formality, the effort a woman makes who has to see her lawyer about the terms of a separation, or a doctor for what might prove, if luck is against her, to be a fatal illness— occasions she would want, later, to remember and be dressed for.

She had made no pretence, I noticed, of following my lecture, though it is one of my finest and had been delivered with all my customary verve. “Arthur Boyd and the Mystic Bride" was not, it seems, her cup of tea. Easing off her shoes with a series of gasps and sighs that was itself very nearly mystical, and which she in no way attempted to hide, she had slumped deeper and deeper into the canvas chair, blinking her eyes at one moment, as if what she saw on a vivid slide alarmed her, then once more sinking from view; and had difficulty, when it was over, in getting back into her shoes. An inconsiderate woman, who astonished me now by announcing: "It's t’ do with that article you writ on Alicia Vale.”

Now there is such a paper. It is one of several on a wide range of topics — West Nigerian gold-weights, Renaissance scissors, house interiors in Muscat and Oman. My publications at least are indisputable and can be produced as proof positive of their own existence. It's a little coup it gives me great satisfaction to produce. But that my Vale monograph, which isn't entirely unknown to followers of the Diva, should have found its way to Karingai! And into the hands of this odd, ungrammatical woman!

“You've read it?” I said foolishly.

She ignored the question. “I can't talk ‘ere, it isn't the right place. But I reckon you'll be interested in some information I got.” She worked her mouth a little, having lost control for the moment of her teeth, which she must also have assumed for the occasion. She snapped, got them fixed again, and went on. “And things. I got some ‘v ‘er things. ‘Ere's me address. I've writ it on this bitta paper. I'll expecher round ten.”

She thrust a page of ruled notepaper into my hand, “Thanks" — once to me and again to the minister's wife — and was off.

“Who was that?” I asked, and stood staring at the floral back.

Mrs. Logan allowed her lips to form a superior smile. “Oh that, poor soul, was our Mrs. Judge. She's quite a character. Lives out near the Indians.”

My first thought, I should admit, was that it was a trap. My passion for the Diva, my obsession we might as well call it, with her life, her records, her relics, is pretty well-known at the Council, and I have enemies who would be happy to see me discomforted.

As a matter of simple caution I pushed the scrap of paper into my breast pocket as if it were of no importance, rubbed my hands together in a gesture of exaggerated delight at the prospect of sausage rolls and pavlova (overdoing it as usual to the point where it declared itself to be quite plainly an act), and waited for Mrs. Logan to move. She did not. She was observing me with amused but dangerous detachment.

She was a tall young woman whose husband had hopes of being a bishop. She was bearing their period in the wilderness with a good grace but was impatient. It showed. Her words snapped, her fingers flew at things, the tendons in her neck were strained. Her intelligence, finding no object out here, had begun to spin away from her, and since she leaned so much towards it, had set her off balance. She was poised but unstill, and seemed quite capable, I thought, of taking an interest in me, and in the unfortunate Mrs. Judge, out of boredom, or because no larger opportunity offered itself for revealing how superior she was to the follies and passions of men.