David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Sam,looking sleek and youthful, his locks wet-combed from the shower, wandered into the kitchen, on the prowl now that he was done with work for the day, for something he could pick at — a stick of celery, a sliver of carrot, something one of the children had been up to.

“Where is he, anyway?” he demanded, meaning Tom. He was still fretting over that business with the bike. “They'll be here any minute now. Can't we eat as a family for once?”

“He's taken his surfboard to Manly,” Maggie told him, busying around behind him. “He did ask. I said it was okay. He's to be back by five.”

“And the girls?”

“They're at the pool.”

There was an open-air saltwater pool just ten minutes away, on a walk along the Harbour.

“Miranda should have stayed,” he grumbled. “You shouldn't have to do all this.” Including the guests, there would be more than a dozen of them. He picked a round of cucumber out of the tuna salad, ruining one of her attempts at symmetry, and leaned with his back to the refrigerator.

“What can I do?”

“Open the wine and get me something to drink.”

Instead, he came up from behind, put his arms around her, and buried his face in her hair. Maggie laughed.

“That was lovely,” she told him, "but what about my drink?”

He opened three bottles of red, set them on the bench with the corks laid across their mouths, then drew her a glass of flagon white with soda.

For a few minutes they moved easily together in the space between table and cupboards, her stacks of empty egg boxes, the spilled waste from the bin; not touching, but in an easy association of bodies that was a kind of dance before the open-mouthed wine bottles.

The upper part of the house, its rooms all disorder and stopped noise, hung above them like a summer cloud, dense but still, alive with events that were for the moment suspended. The door to his workroom was closed for the day, its flow of sound also suspended, but on a chord that continued to reverberate in his head and teasingly unfold. It was there, humming away, and could wait. He would find his way back to it later.

Maggie turned and looked at him. Seeing herself reflected in his gaze, she brought the back of her hand to her forehead where a strand of hair had come loose.

It was difficult to say at such moments, she thought, whether this was before or after; whether the children were about to come bursting back into their lives from the pool, from the surf, all wet towels and hair, complaints and appetites, riddles, the smell of suntan oil and Bacon Crispies — or whether they were still waiting in youthful expectancy in that one year when there had been just the two of them, in the long nights, the short days. Not so long ago really.

They stood for a moment outside time, outside their thickened bodies, in renewed youthfulness. He nibbled. She sipped. The chord moved out through the house, discovering new possibilities in what might have passed for silence.

The doorbell rang.

“Damn,” she said. “That'll be Stell. They're always early.”

At the same moment, from the back porch, came the voices of the girls, little Cassie's breathless with grievance.

“Mummy, they tried to run away from me.”

“We did not.”

“They were chasing boys.”

“We were not”

The bell sounded again.

“You get it,” Maggie told Sam, and turned to face the onslaught.

“Now, Cassie,” she told the child, who was clinging to her hip, "stop whinging We've got visitors. Lars and Jens are here. Cressie — Ros— you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Miranda, hair dyed pink and green in the punk style she now affected, stood in the frame of the doorway, frowning, unwilling to be drawn in.

“And so should you, miss,” Maggie told her. “I let them go with you because you're sixteen and supposed to be responsible. Sometimes I wonder.”

But the rebuke, as Miranda knew, was ritual. There was no conviction in it.

“Now go and get yourselves decent, all of you. Before the real guests appear.”

The real guests were an American visitor, Diane Novak, and her friend Scott McIvor, a much younger man than they had expected who turned out to be a local sailmaker. The others were family: Maggie's sister Stella and her two boys, Lars and Jens, and Stella and Maggie's old singing teacher, Miss Stinson. Then — invited unannounced by Miranda, it seemed, but more likely uninvited and hastily vouched for — Miranda's “best friends” of the moment, an odd pair called Julie and Don, also known “The Act.”

Sam was appalled. “How did they get here?” he demanded fiercely, the minute he got Maggie alone.

“I don't know,” Maggie told him. “Any more than you do. I suppose Miranda asked them. They'll be all right. I've put all the kids out in the sunroom. You just look after the drinks. And, Sam, love,” she pleaded, "try not to make a fuss.”

Julie was an intense, waiflike creature. Tossed out of home (or so she claimed) by her stepfather, she had taken herself out of school and was living now in a squat — a plywood cubicle in an empty warehouse at Marrickville. Like Miranda she was sixteen. She got herself up, Sam thought, like an anorexic teenaged widow, entirely in black, and painted her lips black and her fingernails as well — in mourning, Sam had once suggested, for her own life.

Her partner Don, the other half of The Act, was a slight, sweet-faced boy, girlish but not it seemed gay, whose pale hair had been trained to fall perpetually over one eye and who affected little pink silk ballet slippers that Julie had embroidered with vivid scarlet and emerald-green thread. Julie was a designer. She created fashion garments from scraps picked up at the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul op shops. Miranda today was wearing one of Julie' “creations,” a recent present. It was a flared skirt made entirely of men's ties, in heavy satins and silks, a little grimy some of them but all vivid in colour and glossily shimmering.

She was always giving Miranda presents. Trashy jewellery she bought with her outsized allowance, miniature artworks of her own devising and of a crazy intricacy: cages in search of an inmate, efficient tiny guillotines involving razor blades and springs — bad-luck charms all, which Sam did not want smuggled in among them. Offerings, he had once observed, to some god of ultimate unhappiness.

“Honestly,” Miranda told him. “I can't believe you'd say a thing like that! You're so ungenerous! And you think Julie's the crazy one.”

Miranda liked to scare them with lurid accounts of what Julie, poor thing, “been through.” How at seven she was abused by a favourite uncle. How three months ago she'd been raped in her plywood cubicle by half a dozen ethnic youths but had declined to press charges.

Was any of this true? Or was it, as Maggie assured him, just another of Miranda's stories? Designed to shock them into admitting how out of touch they were, how little they knew of what was really going on.

“Young people these days see all sorts of things,” Maggie told him, trying for an unconcern she did not quite feel. “Things we had no notion of. They survive, most of them — if they're sensible. Miranda is very sensible, you know that. All this is just showing off. She wants you to be impressed.”

“Impressed!” Sam exploded.

“In your case, love,” she told him with a twisted smile, "that means scared.”

“Well, I am,” he admitted. “I'm bloody petrified. I don't know how you can be so cool about things.”

But that was just the point, the point of difference between them. And it was the mystery of this, more than anything Maggie actually said or did, that had its effect on him, a belief that Maggie did know something he did not, and that he could rely on this to get him through all doubts and difficulties. It was what she offered him. He had no idea what it might be that he offered her in return. Now, ignoring the irruption of Julie and her pallid companion into what was meant to be a private celebration, he followed Maggie's instructions and set himself to dealing with the drinks, but was not happy. It was a mistake — that's what he now decided — to have made his first meeting with Diane Novak a family affair.