David Malouf - The Complete Stories

A moment. Then it was past. They were back in their ordered lives again.

“It's okay, pet,” Maggie was telling Cassie, "everything's fine now.”

She moved to relieve Sam, who was stricken, now that the girl was quiet, to find her sobbing against his chest. He let go and Maggie took over.

Picking Cassie up in his arms, Sam carried her past the others, the twins following, to the dining room, but turned back when Miss Stinson said, to no one in particular, "I expect she's taken something, poor girl. They should find out what it is.”

That “taken something” reminded him. Years back — twenty, twenty-five — Miss Stinson's sister, Miss Minnie, “taken something.”

In her late forties, Miss Minnie had fallen passionately in love with a bus-driver, and when, after a series of approaches and ambiguous responses, he had, deeply embarrassed, made it plain that she had mistaken his interest, the poor woman had swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin. She survived, but it was a shaming business, and Miss Stinson had been devastated to find herself brought so close to a passion whose destructive consequences she too had to bear.

What surprised Sam was how entirely he had submerged and forgotten what to Miss Stinson must, for so long, have been a source of immediate and almost daily sorrow. He kissed Cassie briefly on the ear and told her: "Here, sausage, why don't you go to Miss Stinson for a moment.” They were old friends, Cassie and Miss Stinson. “I'll just go and see how Mummy is doing. And you girls,” this to the twins, "why don't you make us all a good cup of coffee. A big pot. Real grains.”

But when Sam got to the sunroom, Maggie and the others were gone. Only the boy Don, with his floppy hair and lolly-pink slippers, was there, hovering on the threshold. Like everyone else, Sam had forgotten him.

It was Diane Novak's young man Scott who stepped in. “Are you okay, mate?” he asked, at Sam's side. The boy looked tearful. “Come on here.” He came obediently, and Scott, without self-consciousness, put his arm around the boy and held him close; and at just that moment, the women reappeared at the top of the stairs — Stella, Miranda, Diane. Maggie had shushed them off and remained with Julie.

“She'll be fine,” Stella told them, "she's a bit overwrought, that's all.” She made a face at Sam, indicating that for Miranda's sake he should ask no questions.

Overwrought, they both knew, was an understatement, but for the moment must suffice.

Sam nodded. With a revulsion he could not hide, at least from himself, he turned away, but felt again in his back muscles and in the tendons of his hands the unnatural strength with which her body, slight as it was, had thrashed and jerked against his hold. Her hot breath in his ear. And the sounds that issued from her, wildered howlings at such a pitch of animal fury and uncomprehending anguish that he had almost been overcome.

By her terrible closeness. By the birdlike fragility against his ribcage of her bones and the alien power they were endowed with as he used all his weight to keep her still.

Her presence had always unnerved him. The funereal black of the miniskirts and shawls she got herself up in, her black eye make-up and the black fingernails and lips. The toxic disaster stuff she carried. Which he was afraid might brush off on Miranda, or on Cassie or the twins.

Now Maggie too reappeared at the top of the stairs. “She's sleeping,” she told them.

She came on down, touching Sam's hand briefly as she passed. The twins were at the kitchen door, with a pot of coffee and a tray of mugs. “Good girls,” she said. They all made their way to the dining room and went back to being a party, but a single one now, sipping, passing things. Even Lars appeared, tempted by chocolate biscuits.

“Miss Stinson,” Maggie suggested, "why don't you play us something.” In the early days of their marriage they had often had musical evenings. Miss Stinson had always played.

Too old and too much the professional to be coy, Miss Stinson got her ancient bones together and moved to the piano.

The Schubert she chose was safe, its fountain of notes under her fingers brightly lit and secure. The regretful middle section when it appeared, with its shifts, on the same note sequence, from trancelike sureness to throbbing hesitation, its wistfulness and quiet stoicism, spoke of a world of recoveries that could still rouse itself and sing. Even the repeats, which might have been too many, as she reached for them were new-found and welcome.

Sam, under the influence of the music, and the hour and the light, which seemed one, met Diane Novak's eye across the table. She smiled and nodded.

Nothing had been said. They had barely spoken. But he felt easy again. Their meeting had not, after all, been the central event of the occasion, but had not been a mistake.

The last notes died away. Miss Stinson sat a moment, as if she were alone out there, somewhere in the dark, and they, like shy animals, had been drawn in out of the distance to listen; drawn in, each one, out of their own distance and surprised, when they looked about, that music had made a company of them, sharers of a stilled enchantment. It was only when Miss Stinson, still absent and absorbed, lifted her hands at last from the keys that Tom, who had been waiting, respectful but impatient in the doorway behind them, bursting with his news, spoke up at last, red-faced and overwrought.

“I had an accident,” he hooted.

He was triumphant, despite the bump on his forehead and his discoloured eye. “I got hit by a board. I had to have stitches!”

Still pumped, still caught up in the world of mishap and risk he had come from, but torn now between the wish to astonish them and at the same time not to alarm, he came forward to show his mother the wound.

“It's not serious,” he told her. “I had to go in an ambulance. Is that okay? Do we belong?”

It was true, it was nothing, nothing much. A gash that would heal, leaving a scar over his left eye that would be interesting. But it must have been close just the same, and because it was so physical, and came so soon after their earlier commotion, Maggie shocked the boy by suddenly clasping him to her and bursting into tears. He faced the others — his father, Miranda — over her shoulder and did not know what he had done.

“Honestly,” he told them, "it's nothing. I hardly felt it.”

Sam, recalling how angry he had been with the boy, was suddenly heartsick. Tom saw it.

“Hey, Dad,” he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“That's all right, son,” Sam told him, playing calm. “We've had a bit of an afternoon, that's all. Come and get something to eat.” It surprised him that his tone was so much one that Maggie might have used. She too caught it, gave him a swift look, and laughed.

“Well,” she said, releasing Tom, then drawing him back to give him a light kiss on the corner of his mouth, "welcome back from the wars.”

The guests were gone, the children settled. Upstairs was quiet, all the lights out except in Tom's room; the rooms left and right down the hallway filled with quiet breathing, their windows half open to the summer night of clicking insects and the barely audible slow flapping past of flying foxes, the stirring of possums among leaves. Downstairs the washing-up was stacked in racks above the sink.

Sam and Maggie, having shut the kitchen door behind them, were in Sam's sleepout workroom, Maggie, with closed eyes, in an upright chair by the door, Sam at the piano. Idly his fingers struck a chord, the same one that earlier in the day, out in the kitchen, had led her to an old song that was there somewhere in the four ordinary notes. But what moved out into the silence now was full of other, stranger possibilities that brought the room into a different focus: the air, rather thick and heated; the bright ellipse of the lamp under its hood, where it lit the keys and the reddish wood of the piano; Sam's profile, lips slightly apart in anticipation; the glare of the louvres, parted to let in a scent of leaves and distant water.