David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Her own voice was as unremarkable as an aunt's: "Good afternoon, dear.”

All the more alarming then, as I sat waiting on one of the cane-bottomed chairs in the corridor, while Ben Steinberg, Miss McIntyre's star pupil, played the Max Bruch, to hear the same voice oddly transmuted. Resonating above the slight swishing and breathing of her congregation, all those women in gloves, hats, fur-pieces, packed in among ghostly pampas-grass, it had stepped down a tone — no, several — and came from another continent. I felt a shiver go up my spine. It was the Indian, speaking through her out of another existence.

Standing at an angle to the half-open door, I caught only a segment of the scene. In the glow of candlelight off bronze, at three thirty in the afternoon, when the city outside lay sweltering in the glare of a blue-black thundercloud, a being I could no longer think of as the woman in the lift, with her sensible shoes and her well-cut navy suit, was seated cross-legged among cushions, eyes closed, head rolled back with all the throat exposed as for a knife stroke.

A low humming filled the room. The faint luminescence of the pampas-grass was angelic, and I was reminded of something I had seen once from the window of a railway carriage as my train sat steaming on the line: three old men — tramps they might have been — in a luminous huddle behind the glass of a waiting-shed, their grey heads aureoled with fog and the closed space aglow with their breathing like a jar full of fireflies. The vision haunted me. It was entirely real — I mean the tramps were real enough, you might have smelled them if you'd got close — but the way I had seen them changed that reality, made me so impressionably aware that I could recall details I could not possibly have seen at that distance or with the naked eye: the greenish-grey of one old man's hair where it fell in locks over his shoulder, the grime of a hand bringing out all its wrinkles, the ring of dirt round a shirt collar. Looking through into Miss Sampson's room was like that. I saw too much. I felt light-headed and began to sweat.

A flutter of excitement passed over the scene. A new presence had entered the room. It took the form of a child's voice, treble and whining, and one of the women gave a cry that was immediately supported by a buzz of other voices. The treble one, stronger now, cut through them. Miss Sampson was swaying like a flower on its stalk …

Minutes later, behind the door of Miss Katie's sunny studio, having shown off my scales, my arpeggios, my three pieces, I stood with my back to the piano (facing the wall behind which so much emotion was contained) while Miss Katie played intervals and I named them, or struck chords and I named those. It wasn't difficult. It was simple mathematics and I had an ear, though the chords might also in other contexts, and in ways that were not explicable, move you to tears.

1

The door to the corridor was closed, but a soft light from out there flowed through the tilted fanlight, displaying, in a puzzle of shadow and highlights like a landscape on the moon, the bodies of the sleeping children, some crouched knee to chin in the centre of the bed, some spread-eagled face downwards with a footsole extended into the dark, others again laid out straight with their toes to the ceiling, the sheet rucked under their chin and their breath lightly coming and going. There were ten children in the dormitory, all girls. The room was full of their breathing and the faint scent of frangipani from the garden below.

All this, glimpsed from the washroom door, was like something the youth had never seen before.

Even after his eyes had grown accustomed to the half-darkness he found it difficult to interpret details. Was it a pillow one of the children was clasping to her, or another body? Was that a shadow or the dark strands of her hair? Was it an arm or a leg whose rounded flesh the light fell upon and made luminous? Piecing the ten bodies together as his gaze travelled from bed to bed, disentangling shadow from substance, smoothing out the creases in sheets and nightdresses to discover limbs, all this took long minutes in which he simply stood perfectly still and stared.

Then there were the sounds. Locating each of them — the murmurs words, the long slow outpourings of breath — and tracking them to an individual child so that he had each of them, each of the ten, clearly in mind; separating out the ticking of a clock, insect-noises from the park, and the dripping — was it? — of a tap in the washroom behind him, or a shower, or a cistern, together with his own breathing and the beating of his blood — it was a task to be carried out methodically and with great patience, but at some lower level than the part of him that simply observed. Something was thinking for him; that is how he might have put it. As when, with a speed and assurance that would have astonished the casual observer, he would lay out, on a sheet of newspaper he could barely read, all the working parts of a machine. Machines were the most complicated things he knew: more complicated than people— though of course he had only himself to judge by — and more reliable as well. Machines he was utterly at home with. Things fitted together part by part according to a settled order, and all the parts were congruent, screw and nut to bolthole, thread to thread. His long fingers could solve any problem of that sort in minutes, no trouble at all. His intelligence was all in his fingertips, and in his eyes.

One of the children began to mutter words out of a dream and the sounds caught his attention. He could make nothing of them. But the idea of a dream breaking into the room like that, the idea of its lying submerged under the silence (which wasn't really silence at all) and breaking surface in those unintelligible syllables, disturbed him; it introduced an unmanageable element. He took a small step forward.

It was a child in the second bed from the end. On the right. Who now turned in her sleep, changing not only her own position but all the highlights and shadows in the room, breaking his grasp of it. The dream had started a ripple that involved all the other sleepers as well. One by one they translated it, more or less according to the depth of their sleep, into stirrings, murmurs, little groans, till the whole room at the level of the beds was a shifting surface of light and dark, of rising and falling contours. He was almost sick with the unsteadiness of it. Everything was out of hand.

He turned back into the dark of the washroom with its row of hand-basins and its dripping cistern or shower, sat on the tiled floor, and began to haul on his boots, which he had been holding in his right hand, first the one, then the other; carefully knotting the laces. While he was still engaged in this the crack of light on the wall opposite began to widen, a shadow filled it, and when he jerked his head around, one of the children was there, standing barefoot in her nightdress, through which he could see the darker outline of the body.

She stood and rubbed her eyes, frowning. She must have been nine or ten years old. She stared and frowned, but didn't seem at all alarmed.

“Hullo,” he said huskily, because he couldn't think of anything else, and because the word, being the ordinary one, seemed immediately right. He gave a nervous smile.

She considered him a moment, then turned away as if he might be merely illusory and went to one of the washbasins.

He got shakily to his feet, suddenly too tall and thin, feeling out of his element in this big empty room with its checkerboard tiles, its row of handbasins and mirrors, its cubicles at the darker end where something dripped. He stood with his back to the door in case she panicked and tried to pass him. She was bent over a basin, drinking from the tap. Then she turned, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and considered him again, her brows drawn together in childish puzzlement. He lost his head. “Look, you won't tell anyone, will you?” he stammered.