David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Look after yourself, boy,” was what he said.

His aunt kissed him. Again her fingertips. Soft on his cheek.

And that, on a quiet Sunday morning in August 1968, was how Charlie Dowd went to a war.

Three years later he was back, almost unscathed and nearly two stone heavier, an ex-sergeant, released to take up civilian life where he had left off — after a period of adjustment, of course.

The house he had left was much changed. His grandfather had died the previous year and the first thing his aunt did was suggest that he move into his grandfather's room, which had been cleared and cleaned and was the best room in the house.

He declined. Though his own room now felt small, he preferred, by keeping it, to make the point that his stay was to be temporary. Till he got on his feet, worked out what he wanted to do with himself.

His aunt did not press him. Her enquiries into his plans were tactful and oblique. So were her attempts, which amused him — he thought of Cliff — to set him up with girls. Nice ones.

In fact, he had no need of help in this direction but for the moment was taking things, in this area as in all others, slowly.

The world he had come back to struck him as being very different from the one he had known. More relaxed in some ways, more strenuous in others, and his aunt's life was a measure of it.

It wasn't simply that she no longer had her father to care for, his exacting standards to meet. She no longer had him —and only now did he understand how much of her life had been devoted to fulfilling what his mother, by leaving, had passed to her in the way of duty, and of affection too. He was shocked now at what it might have cost her, and abashed at how little of this he had appreciated or shown gratitude for, perhaps because she made so little of it herself. He had scarcely considered her then in separation either from his grandfather or himself. He saw, now that things were more equal between them, that she was a woman with her own interests, and was in her own way interesting. She had a sharp eye when it came to the affairs of the town and her various friends; a sharp tongue too, now that her father was not here to monitor it. They got on well together. She still worried about him but did not fuss.

She had had the kitchen, which had been an old-fashioned place of leadlight cupboards and scrubbed-wood draining boards, fitted out with a good deal of Laminex and stainless steel. A skylight filled the whole space with the kind of light that would once have been considered dangerous, in the way of fading curtains or exposing the lurking places of ineradicable grime.

There were no curtains now, and little fear of grime. The archway into the dining room had been removed and the new space furnished with pieces of a spare “modern” design — bold fabrics, pale wood. Hard, he thought, for the old presences to find harbour in a world that was so shadowless and bright.

He wondered where his aunt had found in herself such a capacity for lightness. Had it always been there, waiting to establish itself the moment the old man was gone? A refutation, long unspoken, of his world of solid truths?

Charlie was surprised, but he enjoyed surprise. It was one of the small surprises his own nature had yielded him in recent years.

She was made wary, he saw, by his experiences. Since he offered no account of them and gave no outward sign of how they had touched him, she had had to make them up out of horrors she had read about in the papers or seen on TV. That he did not need to talk about what he had seen, and did not bring to breakfast with him the smell of napalm or of the night sweats that must accompany his dreams, was not in itself a reassurance. Neither was his lack of visible wounds. His father too had come home without wounds.

What worried her was what might be there in his head. Deep-hidden, unspoken. In the meantime they took refuge, both, since he proved to be such an obedient pupil of her rules, in good-humoured banter and routine.

But neither of them any longer believed in rules. That's what he saw. The new rule was to pretend they did, while knowing perfectly well, on each side, that the other did not.

But perhaps, he thought, she never had. Maybe that was another of the ways in which, over the years, he had misread her.

He developed his own routine: got up late, did odd jobs around the yard that he found oddly satisfying — putting new palings into the back fence, climbing up on to the roof to replace a length of guttering. He read, sat with his hands in his lap idling an hour away on the new couch in front of the TV. Took long walks along the roads that led out of town.

Walking, he found, set just the right pace for the sort of thinking he had to do; and watching people at their ordinary occupations, in a world where the commonest source of disruption was the weather, comforted him — he didn't mind the tedium of it.

People talked about the weather in a way he had never noticed till now. As if they looked to the sky for relief. For a mild irruption into their lives of chance or change that might at one time have come from the gods, but in the clear assurance now that the worst it could produce was a fistful of hail.

“Looks like it might rain,” men who stood behind a fence with a pair of shears would call across to him — entire strangers.

It was a way of invoking a link between them within a dispensation so easily admissible on both sides, and so large and all-embracing, that no answer was required.

It was in such moments that he felt closest to being home.

Sometimes, on one of his walks, he dropped in at the pub and, feeling like an old-timer himself these days, settled in his old place by the window with a beer.

He recognised one or two of the old fellows sitting alone in the sunlight, but had changed too much for them to see in him the thin-shouldered youth in the air force greatcoat who had once sat scribbling in his notebook at the sill.

He no longer wore the greatcoat or had a notebook with him, and in a general doing-over in which the whole place had been subjected to progress, the sill was no longer chocolate-coloured but a spanking white.

But when he looked across, the boy was still there, his wallet and the little machine for producing roll-your-owns, which he had long since abandoned, on the sill before him. Urgently, solemnly setting down his thoughts. Looking up. Biting the end of his pen. Writing again. Thoughts. Endless lists. Impossible now to get back into that boy's head.

Tenderly curious, he had gone in search of the notebook, but had hidden it so well from others who might stumble across it in his absence that he could not find it himself.

Occasionally a phrase came back to him, or an item from one of the lists, and he blushed, then found himself feeling oddly, indulgently protective of his former self. He had been so full of the easy belief that his thoughts, and the careful formulation of them, mattered. Perhaps it was better that the notebook was lost.

But the boy continued to haunt him. There in silhouette against the light of the window, or as a slighter sharer of his own more solid flesh. Which he shared now with other presences as well. Ghosts he carried in him who saw things in their own way.

What they felt, what they had seen, formed a glow around his own feelings that on occasion confused him and was the chief reason why he kept clear of old friends. He did not know how to present himself to them or what he had to present. In the other lives that now haunted him he had lived a different history, lighter or darker than the one he had brought home and could show.

As for the boy at the sill, the tenderness he felt for him was of a brotherly kind; blood-closeness, but with an element, as well, of distance.