David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Redeeming a football boot he'd failed to notice, she set it on the bottom step — she'd carry it up later — and went back to the kitchen, a little song rising in her throat, set off perhaps by a suggestion in one of the chords. She sang three or four bars of it, then returned in silence to the sink, where, in a high, soft head voice, she launched into the rest while she topped and tailed celery sticks and scored a dozen radishes that, when they were plunged into cold water, would open and transform themselves into peppery, pink-and-white roses.

Twelve years ago,when they first moved in, this house had seemed perfect.

It was a big Federation house on three levels, with pierced work above the solid doors and in the archway between the ground-floor rooms, leadlight windows that in the early morning threw dancing colours on the walls, and balconies that broke out in unexpected places on a view of palm crowns and glinting water. The children had been more manageable then, and fewer.

These days, everything above the ground floor, which Maggie tried to keep clear, had been abandoned to general mayhem and din. She tolerated this, and only intermittently dealt with it, so long as there was no clattering on the stairs, no shouting in the hallway, and, above all, no argument with the law “down here,” and the garden outside their father's window, was the sacred realm of Silence. Silence, in this house, was a positive not a negative commodity, a breathing space and pause that was essential not only to the production of their father's work but to the work itself, as they knew very well from counting out the fixed measures of it, either in their head or with the muted tapping of a foot, when they played or sang.

But silence, outside music, was hardly absolute.

“What about the birds?” Miranda had demanded once, meaning the bad-tempered Indian mynahs that carried on an incessant warfare around the bottlebrush and pomegranates below their father's window, screaming and driving off the natives.

She kept her voice civil, draining it of any suggestion — she was twelve then — of rebelliousness or irony. Her father already suspected her of the first. He did not consider her old enough, as yet, for the second.

“Nature,” he told her, "is different.”

Miranda held her tongue but made a face at the twins, who each raised an eyebrow and looked away.

It was Cassie, too young for the codes that were in operation here, who in all innocence had demanded, "But what about us? Aren't we nature?”

“Of course you are, darling,” Maggie told her. “What Daddy means is, he knows what distracts him. Little people stomping. Shouting in the hallway or on the stairs. You know that.”

They all did, and accepted it for the most part without question. However they might whisper among themselves, and complain against their father's moods, his grouchiness, his angry descents and tyrannies, they acknowledged that he was himself a force of nature, a lightning rod for energies, for phenomena that people were impressed by and wrote about in the newspaper in terms that Miranda tended to mock— but only the terms, not the fact. She would read these pieces aloud at the breakfast table, while Sam, his face screwed up with distaste and embarrassment, shook his head — disguising, he hoped, a certain measure of delight — and Maggie said flatly, "Well, I didn't understand a word of that. But what would I know? I only sang the thing.”

“Impeccably,” Miranda quoted.

Now it was her mother's turn to make a face.

Their father's alternation of moods constituted the weather of their lives, which, like the weather itself, it was useless to quarrel with or resist.

In his phases of exuberant good humour he could be wilder and noisier than any of them. Then there were what their mother called “dumps,” whole days it might be when he was like a ghost at the table and even Cassie could not get a good word out of him, and all you heard at mealtimes, since no one else dared speak either, was the clink of knives and spoons against crockery and the grinding of jaws.

He lived in two worlds, their father — with, so far as they could see, no traffic between them.

When it suited him he was like a boy who had never grown up, full of stories made up on the spot about stones that yodelled and perambulating washing machines that went on trips to Vienna or London and gave performances as Brnnhilde at the Met.

He would settle into a beanbag and watch cartoons with them, utterly absorbed, producing great hoots of laughter at things even they thought silly. Then in the middle of one of his rambling tales, full of grunts, whistles, clicks, and hums, the mood of boisterous hilarity in him would lapse and go underground; he would ease off his lap whichever of the littlies had climbed there and, without a word of explanation, go off. They would wait a moment to see if it was just a call of nature, in which case he would be back. But mostly it wasn't. He had been struck. Just like that— kazoom, as Tom put it.

You got used to it, of course, but it was disconcerting. Annoying too. They couldn't have got away with it.

So however much they stood in awe of whatever force it was that he had given himself up to, they resented it, and took their own form of revenge.

Asked what it was that their father did, Miranda would say blandly, "Oh, he works for the council. He's a sewage inspector.” Or as Tom once put it, "He's a burglar.”

Intimidated by his father and puzzled by a side of him that did not keep to the rules, Tom had conceived a picture of Sam as an anarchic schoolboy, pretending to be hard at work behind closed doors but in reality reading a comic, or picking his nose, or no longer there at all but off robbing a bank.

It was a boyish vision, to be explained not only by Tom's easy ten- dency to attribute to others what he would most wish for himself but by the resentment he felt at being the odd man out. Not only because he was the only boy in the family but also because, through some quirk of nature, he alone among them had no ear. He suffered this affliction without complaint, and even allowed himself to be teased about it with clownish good humour, but in a household where singing was as natural as speech he felt disabled, and since his first inclination was to conform, it unnaturally set him apart. He also felt, painfully, that Sam, whom he longed to please, was disappointed in him.

Lately, out of defiance, not of his father but of fate, he had taken to sneering at every form of “artiness” “female business.”

It would have surprised Tom to know that his father understood his perplexity and was undismayed. Composing, for Sam, was work — it was the only thing he had ever been good at — and music a condition that could manifest itself in other ways than as notes on a page or in flights of calibrated sound. He was waiting for Tom to stop feeling sorry for himself and discover his own form of the thing.

They must have had some inkling, Sam felt, of what nature was up to in Tom's case, when they named the girls Miranda, Rosalind, Cres-sida and — in a moment of recklessness — Cassandra, but for the boy had immediately settled on Tom. Not even Thomas, but Tom. Tomtom. There was, from the beginning, something wonderfully bull-like in him that would not be rarefied — even, Sam suspected, by time. He had grown up around his own literalness, and to Sam was all the more precious for it.

As for Maggie, though she believed without question in the energy Sam poured into his work — always had, from the first note he struck in her presence — the deeper music of the household flowed, for her, from what each of her children, with all their different natures and needs (even the twins, Ros and Cressie, were of contrary colour and temperament), brought to the routine and daily muddle of their lives: hurt feelings, tantrums, head colds, the shooting pain of a new tooth pushing into the house, complaints of misunderstanding and unfairness, squeals of protest at a shampooing against head lice or as a strip of Elastoplast was ripped off. For all the time and fret this cost her she would not have had it otherwise. Not one little difficult nature, or demand, or crotchet. Not one. Though she was glad she did not have to find a system of notation for it, and even more that she did not have to sing it.