David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Lying alone here, half dozing in her white party dress, she gazes through flickering lids and an archway of stone to where the harbour, in a film of blue, gently rises and falls like the skin of some strange and beautiful animal that has come to sprawl at her feet, and whose breath she feels tugging the silk of her sleeves. The garden is full of scents: bruised gardenia, cypress, the ooze of gum. Insects are brooding over a damp place in the bushes where something is coming into existence, or has just left it. Clouds are building to a storm. Suddenly, up the long steps from the water, through the light of the archway, disguised now as a sailor and with his eyes burning in a wilderness of hair, his beard electrically alive, comes the monk Rasputin with a finger to his lips.

She knows him immediately. He reassures her of who she is and of where they have both come from. He too has escaped, lived through seven bullet-wounds in a frozen courtyard, after the murderers, terrified of his advance towards them — a mad dog dancing in the snow, that had already eaten poison and taken seven rounds of lead into his body — had turned on their heels and fled. Now he too is moving unrecognised through the world, waiting only to declare himself.

He has enemies and is pursued. He stays only long enough to warn her that she too has pursuers. When a voice calls from the house above he is startled, kisses the child's brow, raises his rough hand over her in a last blessing, and slips away in his sailor's garb down the long stairs to the water, where he pauses a moment and is framed against the stormy light, then descends to a waiting dinghy. Only the dark smell of his beard, which stirs her memory and is unmistakable, still remains with her. And it is this that she uses to evoke him, her one protector: his gnarled feet — the feet of a monk — retreating over the stone flags. And the water rhythmically lifting and falling, the breath of a drowsing beast …

Sixty years ago.

The voice calling from the terrace, having come to earth again, is her mother's. Alicia Vale.

6

I was writing up the report of my Karingai lecture, comfortably at ease in dressing gown and slippers, with a bottle of whisky at my elbow.

These things write themselves. Comfortable clichs, small white lies to convince the holders of the country's purse-strings that big things are being achieved out there in the wilderness, that we missionaries of the Arts are making daily converts to the joys of the spirit and to higher truth. I'm a whizz at such stuff. Devoting myself for half an hour to the official lie was a way of not facing my own difficult decision: how far I was prepared (Oh Adrian, not another of your discoveries! Yes, yes, my dears, Uncle Adrian's at it again!) to risk my reputation and face a cruelly sceptical world in defence of Mrs. Judge's problematical birth.

The rain had come down as the woman predicted. Sheets of it! The earth turned to mud, bushes thrashed, trees swam in subaqueous gloom, the din on the roof of my motel cabin was deafening. So that I did not hear the tapping at first, and was startled when I glanced up out of the pool of lamplight to see framed in the dark of the window, and wordlessly signalling, like a man going down for the third time, the woman's husband, George. I hurried to the door to let him in but he refused to come further than the verandah. He stood there barefoot, his waterproof streaming.

“I jus’ slipped out,” he told me, "while she's sleeping. I wanted t’ tell you a few things.” He set his lamp down on the boards.

“But you must come in,” I said. “Come in and have a drink.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said very solemnly. “No I won't, if it's all the same.” He looked past me into the lighted room with its twin chenille bedspreads, its TV set, the hinged desk-lamp. “I'm too muddy.”

He was, but I guessed there was another and deeper reason. It represented too clearly, that room, the world I had come from, a world of slick surfaces and streamlining, of appliances, of power, that threatened him, as it threatened the woman too at the very moment of her reaching out for it.

“I'll stay out ‘ere, if you don't mind.”

So our conversation took place with the rain cascading from the guttering just a few feet away and in such a roaring that he could barely be heard.

He began to unbutton his cape. “I jus’ wanted,” he repeated, "t’ tell you a few things.” He paused, his thumb and forefinger dealing awkwardly with a stud.

“Like — like them people she thinks ‘ave been makin’ enquiries about ‘er. Over the years like. Well, I made ‘em up.” He looked powerfully ashamed, standing barefoot with the streaming cape on his shoulders and his brow in a furrow. “I wanted t’ tell you that right off like. T’ get things straight.” He met my eyes and did not look away. I turned up the collar of my gown, though it wasn't at all cold, and nodded; an inadequate representative, if that is what he needed, of the forces of truth. In other circumstances I might have got out of my embarrassment by doing a little dance. But he wasn't the man for that sort of thing, and at that moment I wasn't either.

“Y’ see,” he said, "I didn’ want t’ lose ‘er. I didn’ intend no harm. I wanted ‘er t’ think she needed me. I don't reckon it'll make all that much difference, will it? I mean, you'll still do what she wants.”

“I don't know. I don't know what she wants.”

“Oh, she wants people t’ know at last. Who she is.” He shook his head at some further view of his own that he did not articulate, though he wrestled with it. “I suppose it means she'll go back, eh? To them others.”

Which others? Who could he mean? Who did he think was out there — out where? — that she could go back to? Didn't he realise that sixty years had slipped by, in which day by day a quite different story had been unfolding, in the papers and out of them, that involved millions and was still not finished and held us all in its powerful suspense?

He began to button the cape again, which was easier to deal with than silence; then said firmly: "I'm a truthful man for the most part, I reckon I can claim that. On'y — I didn't want t’ lose ‘er. She's a wonderful woman. You don't know! We've been happy together, even she'd say that. I tried t’ make ‘er happy and I've been happy meself No regrets, no regrets at all! There hasn’ been a cross word between us in all the years. That ought t’ count for somethin'. When I first met ‘er, y’ know, she was just a girl — that light and small I was scared of even brushin’ against ‘er. I was a carter then, and she was workin’ f ‘ rich people, out at Vaucluse. We used t’ talk after work, and one night she told me the whole thing. I never knew such a world existed. She wanted t’ get away where they wouldn’ be on to ‘er, so we just kep’ movin’ till we holed up here.” He looked again, with a furrowing of his brow, at his own view of the thing. “I better be gettin’ back,” he said, "before she wakes up an’ starts wor-ryin’ where I am. She does worry, y’ know. She was sleepin’ when I left. Knocked out.” There was another silence. Then he put his hand out, as he had earlier in the day, and we shook.

“You do believe ‘er, don't you?” he said, holding my hand in his giant grasp. “It'd be best if you did, whatever it costs. She wants t’ be known at last. But it's up to you. You just do whatever you reckon is the right thing. For all concerned.”

He broke his grip, took up the hurricane-lamp, and with a curt little nod went down into the rain, leaning heavily into the wall of it, and I watched the light, and the play of it on his cape, till it flickered out among the trees. Holding my dressing gown about me, though it wasn't at all cold, I turned towards the empty room, its welcoming light and warmth, and was unwilling for a moment to go in. The sky roared, the big trees rocked and swayed, the water came sluicing down. The truth is that I have a great fear these days of being alone.