David Malouf - The Complete Stories

There was a pool at Schindler's. In the old days Jack and his father had swum there each morning. Jack would cling to the edge and kick, while his father, high up on the matted board, would leap, jackknife in the air, hang a moment as if he had miraculously discovered the gift of flight, then plummet and disappear. Then, just when Jack thought he was gone altogether, there would be a splash and he would reappear, head streaming, a performance that gave Jack, after the long wait in which his own breath too was held, a shock of delighted surprise that never lost its appeal.

Schindler's was a boarding-house down the “Bay” at Scarborough. They went there every holiday.

The pool these days was empty, closed, like so much else, for “duration.” But Jack, who this year would have been old enough to use the board, liked each morning to walk out to the end and test its spring. Toes curled, arms raised, beautifully balanced between the two blues, the cloudless blue of the early-morning sky and the painted one that was its ideal reflection, he would reach for what he remembered of his father's stance up there, grip the edge, strain skyward with his fingertips, push his ribcage out till the skin felt paper-thin, and hang there, poised.

He had got this part of it perfect. For the rest he would have to be patient and wait.

HIS FATHER was missing — that was the official definition. Or, more hopefully, he was a prisoner of war. More hopefully because wars have a foreseeable end, their prisoners come home: to be missing is to have stepped into a cloud. Jack's mother, who was aware of this, never let a mealtime pass without in some way evoking him.

“I suppose,” she would say, "your daddy will be having a bite to eat about now.”

They knew quite well he wouldn't be sitting down, as they were, to chops and boiled pudding, but it kept him, even if all he was doing was pushing a few spoonfuls of sticky rice into his mouth, alive and in the same moment with them.

When St. Patrick's Day came round she would say: "Sweet peas. They're your father's favourites. You should remember that, Jack. Maybe by the time they're ready he will be home.”

One year, struck by one of the models in a Paton and Baldwin pattern book, she knitted a cable-stitch sweater for him. Jack held the wool when it was wound, watching the yards and yards it would take pass over his hands. Twenty skeins! When all the parts were finished and had been assembled into the shape of a sweater, his mother held it up to her shoulders. “Look, Jack.”

He was astonished by the bulkiness of it. He hadn't remembered his father's being so big. In a moment when his mother was out of the room he held its roughness to his cheek, but all he could smell was new wool.

Collapsed now between layers of tissue, it lay in a drawer of his father's lowboy acquiring an odour of naphthalene.

But as the months slipped by and they still had no news of him, no postcard or message on the radio, Jack saw that his mother's assurance had begun to fail. She still spoke as if his father were just out of the room for a bit, at a football match or having a drink down at the boat club, but she was pretending. For his sake — that is what he felt — and it worried him that she might realise that he knew. They would have to admit something then, and it was imperative, he thought, that they should not. If she no longer had faith, then he must. If his father was to survive and get home, if he was to hang on to whatever light thread was keeping him in the world, then he was the one who must keep believing. It was up to him.

“Now, Milly!You can't just sit around mooning. Stan wouldn't want that. You're young, you need a break. You need to get out and have a bit of fun.”

This was his aunt Susan speaking, his father's sister. Jack wondered how she could do it.

“Look,” she said, holding his mother's hair up, "like this. You've got such lovely bones.”

They looked into the mirror, his aunt lifting the thick hair in her hands like a live animal, their two bodies leaning close.

His mother regarded herself. “Do you really think so?” she said dreamily. “That I could get away with it?”

Jack frowned. Don't, Mum, he said silently.

The two figures in the mirror, his mother smiling now, her head turned to one side, disturbed him; there was a kind of complicity between them. When they looked at one another and leaned closer, their eyes full of daring and barely suppressed hilarity, he felt they had moved away into a place where he was not invited to follow. Other rules applied there than the ones he knew and wanted her to keep.

“Well, I don't know,” his mother was saying. But she looked pleased, and his aunt Susan giggled. “Maybe,” she said. “What do you think, Jack?”

He looked away and did not answer. She must know as well as he did that his father hated anything of that sort — rouge, painted toenails, permed hair. What was wrong with her?

For the past few weeks she had been working one night a week at a canteen. Now, under his aunt Susan's influence, she changed her hair- style to a glossy pompadour, put on wedgies, and, drawing Jack into it as well, began to teach herself the newest dances. They tried them out with old gramophone records, on the back verandah; Jack rather awkward in bare feet and very aware that he came only to her shoulder. I'm only doing it to make her happy, he told himself. He felt none of the pride and excitement of the previous year, when he had gone along each Saturday night in a white shirt and bow tie to be her beau at the Scarborough dances.

Americans began to appear at their door. Escorts, they were called. It had a military ring, more formal, less personal than partner. They brought his mother orchids in a square cellophane box and, for him, "candy,” which only Americans could get. He accepted, it was only polite, but made it clear that he had not been bought.

His mother asked him what he thought of these escorts and they laughed together over their various failings. She was more critical than Jack himself might have been and this pleased him. She also consulted him about what she should wear, and would change if he disapproved. He was not deceived by any of this, but did not let her see it.

And in fact no harm was done. New dances replaced the old ones every month or so, and in the same way the Rudis, the Dukes, the Vergils, the Kents, were around for a bit and sat tugging at their collars under the tasselled lamps while his mother, out in the kitchen, fixed her corsage and they made half-hearted attempts to interest or impress him, then one after another they got their marching orders. Within a week or two of making themselves too easily at home, putting their boots up on the coffee-table, swigging beer from the bottle, they were gone. The war took them. They moved on.

MILT,Milton J. Schuster the Third, was an air force navigator from Hartford, Connecticut, a lanky, fair-headed fellow, younger than the others, with an Adam's apple that jumped about when he was excited and glasses of a kind Jack had never seen before, just lenses without frames. Jack took to him immediately.

He wasn't a loud-mouth like so many of the others, he did not skite. And for all that he was so young, he had done a lot, and was full of odd bits of information and facts that were new to Jack and endlessly inter- esting. But most of all, it was Milt who was new. He was put together with so much lazy energy, had so many skills, so much experience that he was ready, in his good-humoured way, to share.

“Jack,” his mother protested, "give us a break, will you? That's the fifty-seventh question you've asked since tea.”

But where Milt was concerned Jack could never get to the end of his whats and whys and how comes and who said sos, or of Milt's teasing and sometimes crazy answers.