David Malouf - The Complete Stories

All day, intimidated perhaps by the years they had known one another, his wife and this almost famous cousin, and the times they had shared, or by a kind of play between them which was too light, too full of allusions he could not catch, and which represented a side of Corrie he did not feel comfortable with, Eric had been sulky, watchful; determined, Colin thought, not to be drawn in or impressed. Now, suddenly, he had sprung to life. He expanded, he was voluble. It was as if he and Coralie shared a single source of energy, and when one of them drew on it the other wilted. Or perhaps it was simply that he was on home ground at last.

He had just made a surprising discovery. That Colin, who in all other respects seemed a well-informed sort of chap, was entirely ignorant on the subject of futures.

“I can't believe it,” he kept saying. “Corrie, can you believe it?”

Futures, it seemed, were what everyone was into.

Eric, in a way that was almost winning, he was so shyly passionate about the thing, began a lecture on futures and how they worked, keeping the tone light — he did not want to appear ponderous — but making certain that Colin should not miss the fact that here too a certain imagination and flair might be demanded. The thing had its own sort of drama, and considering the dreams that were dependent on it, and the suspense and disappointments, might have the makings of a plot.

Colin nodded, but it was like listening to something that, however coherent it might be, made no sense; like a poem in another tongue. Did Coralie follow it? Was she even listening? He could make nothing of the little smile she wore. Anyway, she must have tired of whatever amusement it gave her to see him so easily discomfited. After a moment or two she got up and said: "Well, I'd better see what I can rustle up to eat.” She was abandoning — no, relinquishing — him. When she called them in, twenty minutes later, Eric had his arm across Colin's shoulder and had become cheerily sentimental. They might have been old friends who had just recaptured, in a series of boyish reminiscences, a moment forty years back when as spirited ten-year-olds they had slit their wrists Indian style and shared blood and spit. Colin did not trust himself to look in Coralie's direction.

“Big things are happening here,” Eric was telling him. “We're going on by leaps and bounds. No holding us. You ought to come back and be part of it, Colin. We need him, don't we, Corrie?”

“Mango,” Coralie told Colin, who was separating something from the green of his salad, "and shredded ginger,” and their eyes did meet for a moment. But any alliance between them could only be fleeting. And Eric was too deep in his pleasure in the occasion to see how lightly they let him off. Was she always so indulgent, Colin wondered.

Forgive me, she was saying.

No, he said. No need. I'm the one.

The fact was, he was a disappointment to her. She had read too many of his books. Eric's advantage was that he had read none of them. Then there was Jane, and London, and all those years when they had been so close that he could barely separate, when he looked back, what had been his experience and what hers. He had stolen a good deal of it — she of all people must know how much — and made it his own. But the fact that he had used it in his work did not mean that he had used it up, or got to the end of its mysteries. It was still precious to him, all of it, and she was so much part of the way it played on his mind and on his senses, especially here among so many familiar sounds and objects, that his feeling for her was as fresh and real in him as it had ever been. This is what he had wanted, all day, to say to her. But they had spent the time in small talk. He had said nothing. And in the end it was Eric who had stepped in and claimed him, and would establish the tone of their last hours together.

There was a kind of comedy in that, and they might have to settle for the recognition of it in a shared glance as the nearest they would get, this time round, to their old closeness or the promise of a new one.

“Goodnight, Colin,” she said softly when the taxi arrived and they went out into the gathered nightsounds of the verandah. The touch of her hand very softly on his cheek was an assurance.

“Goodnight, mate — keep in touch,” Eric told him, leaning into the window of the taxi. And he called again from the foot of the steps where Coralie fitted into the hollow of his arm: "And remember, we need you. Come back soon.”

3

The events of the following hours he would have rejected outright if they had presented themselves to him as the components of a plot. They were too extravagant for the web of quiet incident and subtle shifts of power that were the usual stuff of his fiction. But they occurred and he was not granted the right of refusal. From the moment the Ped-ersens saw him into the cab (the front seat beside the driver) he was aware that some agency had taken over whose imagination was wilder than his own and which he could neither anticipate nor control.

The driver himself was part of it. Young, bearded, in boxer shorts and sneakers, he was one of the sociable ones, an Armenian or Yugoslav with the broad vowels of the local accent drawlingly prolonged and the consonants of another tongue altogether.

When a few direct questions established that Colin was a visitor, he began evoking possibilities for the remainder of the night: a gambling club, a massage parlour, other darker, more dangerous amenities that were not to be named. When Colin, with a wave of his hand, rejected them, he shrugged and removed himself to a sulky distance, one hairy arm on the steering wheel, the other angled out of the window and drumming lightly on the roof. After five minutes or so of this Colin said abruptly: "Look, just let me out at the next corner, will you? I need a breath of air. I'll walk.”

The driver pulled in. “Please yerself,” he said. “You're the driver.” He sniggered at his own joke, consulted a card, made calculations, very slowly as if the figures wouldn't add up, and named a price. Safely outside, Colin passed him a note and relinquished the change.

The driver grinned. It wasn't a pleasant grin, and Colin wondered, as he set off beside a row of dingy shops that appeared sinister but were merely unlit, if the fellow hadn't after all delivered him over to one of those obscure and perhaps hazardous occasions that had not been named.

The city at this hour was deserted. The street (and he could see down a dip a good half-mile of it) was clear. He thought of flagging down another cab. But that was silly. He knew this place, he had grown up in it, his hotel was five minutes away, and he had the odd conviction that if he did hail a cab it would turn out to be the one he had just got out of making a circle around the block.

He had gone no more than forty yards — past a gunsmith's, its barred windows stacked with rifles and binoculars, a jeweller's, the frosted windows of a bank — when he was aware of a car, a battered Kingswood, that had slowed to walking pace and was travelling close to the pavement beside him. The driver's head was thrust out, in an effort, he realised, to see him more clearly in the diminished light.

He tried to conceal his anxiety, but began to walk faster. When the Kingswood put on speed at last and swung round the next corner, he crossed briskly against the lights, and was just beginning to regain his composure and admonish himself for being a fool when he heard behind him the footfalls of someone running, and a moment later was being pushed back hard against a wall.

It was a matter of seconds. His attacker, too close for him to get any impression except of damp flesh, had him pinioned and was breathing heat into his neck.