David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Scott, dazzled to find himself in the presence of a real star, even one who seemed little interested in her own faded glow, was leaning intensely towards Miss Stinson, who was telling her story now, in an oddly flirtatious way, entirely for him.

“Go on,” he said, when Miss Stinson paused and seemed for a moment to be following some vivid memory of her own. “What happened then?”

“Isn't this amazing,” he said aside to Diane, with no hint of irony.

Diane was quietly amused. Clearly, whatever else she might be to Scott McIvor, she was not a star.

Sam too was listening, also moved in his way by the familiar tale.

Long ago when they were all young, it was Stella he had been drawn to. She had obsessed and tormented him.

He was studying piano then with Miss Stinson's sister, Miss Minnie. Without Stella, he thought, his real life — the one he had imagined and must at all costs have — would be for ever closed to him.

He had been wrong; had almost made a fatal error, and not only of the heart. When he listened these days to the two pieces Stella had inspired in him, and which he had written for her extraordinary voice, he got a cold feeling at the base of his spine that was only partly for what came back to him, unbidden, of that old attraction, and the young man's bitter hurt with which it was still sometimes infused.

What scared him more was the echo he caught, the pre-echo, of the works he might have gone on to produce; the way his nature, his own gift might have gone if Stella, grand as she was, had continued to be his goal and inspiration. But she had been wiser than he was. Crueller. More honest. Less vain. She had understood, long before he saw it, that the true voice of what he might have in him was Maggie's. When he saw it too he was dismayed and humbled, then swept away by how obvious it was.

Miss Stinson was right. How unexpected, how simple life could be. Though not, perhaps, just at the moment.

He turned his attention to the sunroom where the children were gathered. Frowned. Got to his feet. Maggie, seeing his frown and reading the question in it, waited a beat then followed.

Sprawled on the floor out there the twins were engaged in a game of Monopoly with their cousin Jens. Cassie, who distrusted Jens and often complained about him, but succumbed immediately to the smallest attention he showed her, had been permitted to mind his cash. Jens, of course, was winning. Lars, Stella's older boy, was plugged into a Walkman. Miranda and the two interlopers, as Sam thought of them, were in a huddle of green, pink, and ash-blond heads half hidden behind the door.

Sam surveyed the scene and settled on Jens and Lars as the source of what he felt in the air as a threat of imminent disorder. They had only to step across the threshold, these two, for the twins to be transformed from awkward, leggy little girls stuck on Michael Jackson to beings who gave off a seductive glow that terrified him, it was so naked — though innocent of course. They didn't know what it meant.

Lars was sixteen. He played in a pop group and was reputed to have got a schoolgirl pregnant — they had actually heard this from the twins! He was keeping his distance today, big feet in Nike joggers thrust out into the centre of the room, head bobbing, eyes closed under bluish lids. A great six-foot lump attached to a Walkman, exerting some sort of diversionary influence on the Monopoly board by disabling the twins, who could never quite ignore him.

But Jens was the one. It was Jens with his berserker's blue eyes and con man's smile who was the killer.

“I hope you'll tell that Jens he's not allowed upstairs. I don't want him going through my things.”

This, earlier in the day, from Cassie, who was possessive of “treasures.”

“The last time he was here he walked off with a scent bottle I was keeping. He's a thief!”

And here she was, three hours later, entirely under his spell.

Once, when he was five, they had surprised Jens with his thing out, attempting to put it into one of the twins.

Stella, who ought, Sam thought, to have been as appalled as he was, had laughed when he faced her with it.

“Oh for heaven's sake, Sam, he's five years old!" she told him. “It'd be like marshmallow in a moneybox.”

She and Maggie had collapsed at that, and Sam, enraged, had felt once again what a gap there was between the way he saw things and the world these sisters came out of, and so easily reverted to the moment they were together. Two minutes in one another's company and they were barefooted kids again, back in that disastrous household that had once, he admitted, when he was young, seemed so liberating. The easygoing carelessness and good humour. The very amenable terms these sturdy, down-to-earth sisters had appeared to be on with their own very different styles of beauty and with the world — with Life, as he would have put it then.

Well, he was less indulgent these days of that sort of carelessness. He knew now what it led to. On a daily basis.

Eighteen years he and Maggie had been together, but there were times when he was astonished all over again by how differently they took the world and what it threw at them.

As for Jens, five years old or not, he could have killed the little shit. And he could have killed him all over again right now.

Maggie, who had come up quietly behind him, laid her hand very lightly on his back.

“What is it, love? What's the matter?” she enquired. But almost immediately one of the twins, Rosalind, complained: "Mummy, Jens is cheating.”

“He is not,” Cassie told her.

“He is too.”

“Play quietly, girls,” Maggie said, barely paying attention. She was concerned now with getting Sam back to the table. She barely noticed the buzzing behind the half-open door where Miranda was closeted with her friends.

“What about Tom?” Sam now demanded, as if this all along was what had really been troubling him. “You said five. It's gone half past.”

As if she knew any more than he did. The boy was fifteen.

“Oh, you know what he's like,” Maggie told him. “He gets carried away. He'll be back.”

Stella's eye was on them from the table next door. Maggie caught it and winked.

“What are you two doing out there?” Stella called. “Come here, Sam, and explain to Diane about fire-farming. You know what a dud I am, and Scott's no help.” She was sacrificing the sailmaker, who was too pleased to have been named by her in such a familiar way to take offence.

Maggie relaxed a little. If there was anyone who could break Sam's mood it was good old Stell.

It was nearly six now and beginning to be dusk. The conversation at table was muted. The bottles of wine Sam had opened earlier, and one Stella had brought, stood empty before them among half-filled glasses and plates piled with peelings and scraps.

Diane Novak consulted her watch.

She was uncertain of the conventions here. People seemed settled in and gave no sign of moving, but she thought they should get going, that it was time to whip her sailmaker away. Suddenly there was a commotion from the sunroom — actual screams.

Miss Stinson, who was in full flight again, looked alarmed as the heads turned — she was deaf — and first Maggie, then Sam, then Stella, leapt to their feet.

“What is it?” she cried. “What's happened?”

It was at moments like this that “condition,” which for the most part she contrived very successfully to hide, came home to her — the prospect of not hearing the car that was bearing down to lift you bodily off your feet.

The scene in the sunroom when Maggie arrived was confused. It was Sam, immediately behind her, who took it all in and saw at once how things stood: Jens rushing past them to his mother in the hallway, Lars, still plugged in to his Walkman, upright now in the middle of the room, around him and under his feet small houses scattered as by a tornado among the dice and cards of the Monopoly game, the twins and Cassie, big-eyed all three, clinging together in the bay window. Still half out of sight behind the door, Miranda, Don, and the girl Julie were scrabbling in a heap on the floor. It was Julie who was screaming. But she was also flailing her arms and kicking her legs while Don and Miranda tried to hold her still and shouted her name. It was only a moment before Sam, uncomfortably sprawled with the writhing body half under him, had her controlled, but in that moment, he thought, the room was like an animal pit, as the others must have seen, coming up behind Stella — the sounds that were coming out of the child's body so little resembled anything that belonged to human speech. Sam looked back over his shoulder to where Maggie had pulled Cassie and the twins, who were staring white-faced but silent, close against her. Jens had his head hidden in his mother's shirt.