David Malouf - The Complete Stories

On the reef to her left, out of sight behind the headland, her father-in-law, Audley, was fishing.

Dressed in the black suit and tie he wore on all occasions, even before breakfast, even for fishing, and standing far out on the rocky ledge with its urchin pools and ropes of amber worry-beads, he would, she thought, if you were sailing away and happened to glance back, be the last you would see of the place, a sombre column — if you were coming from the other direction, the first of the natives, providing, with his fishing rod and jacket formally buttoned, an odd welcoming party.

She raised her eyes to the sea and let herself drift for a moment in its dazzling stillness, then, dawdling a little, got to her feet and started up the path towards the house.

A FOUR-SQUARE structure of sandstone blocks, very massive and permanent-looking, it stood immediately above the sea. Its first builder was Audley's grandfather. Successive owners had simply added on in the style of the times: two bedrooms on the south in Federation shingles; later, for the children, the product of wartime austerity, a fibro sleepout. More recently Audley had added a deck of the best kauri pine where in winter they could eat out, protected at last from the prevailing southerlies, and where, when the whole clan was gathered, the overflow, as Madge called it, could bed down in sleeping bags. The grass below the deck was scythed — no mower could have dealt with it — and roses, mixed with native shrubs, threw out long sprays forming an enclosure that was alive at this time of day with wrens and long-beaked honey-eaters. Angie, lifting aside a thorny shoot, came round past the water tank. She paddled one foot, then the other, in the bucket of salt water Madge had set below the verandah and came round to the kitchen door.

“Hey, here's Angie.”

Her son, Ned, leapt up among the scattered crusts.

“Angie,” he shouted as if she were still fifty yards off, "did you know Fran was coming?”

“Yes,” she said, "Clem's bringing her.”

Ned was disappointed. He loved to be the bearer of news.

Always ill at ease in Madge's kitchen, fearful she might register visible disapproval of the mess or throw out some bit of rubbish that her mother-in-law was specially keeping, Angie perched on the end of a form as in a class she was late for and accepted a mug of scalding tea.

“But I thought they were divorced,” Ned protested. His voice cracked with the vehemence of it. “Aren't they?”

Madge huffed. “Drink your tea,” she told him.

“But aren't they?”

“Yes, you know they are,” Angie said quietly, "but they're still friends. I saw Audley,” she added, to change the subject.

Jenny looked up briefly—"Has he caught anything?" — then back to the album where she was pasting action shots of her favourite footballers. She was a wiry child of nine, her hair cut in raw, page-boy fashion. Angie cut it for her.

“The usual, I should think,” said Madge. “A cold.”

“I thought when people got divorced,” Ned persisted, "it was because they hated one another. Why did they get divorced if they're still friends? I don't understand.”

Jenny, who was two years younger, drew her mouth down, looked at her mother, and rolled her eyes.

“Ned,” Angie said, "why don't you go and see if Ralph's up?”

“He is, I've already seen him,” Jenny informed her. Ralph was their father. “He's writing. He told me to stay away.”

“People never tell me anything,” Ned exploded. “How am I ever going to know how to act or anything if I can't find out the simplest thing? How will I—”

“You'll find out,” Madge said. “Now — I want a whole lot of wild spinach to make soup. I'm paying fifty cents a load. Any takers? A load is two bucketfuls.”

“Oh, all right,” Ned agreed, "I'll do it, but fifty cents is what you paid last time. Haven't you heard of inflation?”

“Ned,” Madge told him firmly, "it's too early in the morning for an economics lecture. Besides, you know what a dumb-cluck I am. Leave me in blessd ignorance, that's my plea.” She made a clown's face and both children laughed. “Small hope in this family!”

When she had armed the children with short knives and buckets she flopped into a chair and said: "Do you think we'll get through today? I'm a dishrag already and it isn't even eight.”

The Tylers were what people called a clan. Not just a family with the usual loose affinities, but a close-knit tribe that for all its insistence on the sociabilities was hedged against intruders. Girls brought home by one or another of the four boys would despair of ever getting a hold on the jokes, the quick-footed allusions to books, old saws, obscure facts, and references back to previous mealtimes that made up a good deal of their table-talk, or of adapting to Madge's bluntness or Audley's sombre, half-joking pronouncements, the latter delivered, in the silence that fell the moment he began to speak, in a voice so subdued that you thought you must have been temporarily deafened by the previous din.

Even when they had been gathered in as daughters-in-law, they felt so out of it at times that they would huddle in subversive pockets, finding relief in hilarity or in whispered resentment of the way their husbands, the moment they crossed the family threshold, became boys again, reverting to forms of behaviour that Madge, in her careless way, had allowed and which Audley, for all his fastidiousness, had been unable to check: shouting one another down, banging with their great fists, grabbing at the food or scattering it to left and right in a barbarous way that in minutes left any table they came to a baronial wreck.

Audley claimed descent from two colonial worthies, a magistrate and a flogging parson, both well recorded. His roots were as deep in the place as they could reasonably go. Madge, on the other hand, had no family at all.

Adopted and brought up by farm people, she had been, when Audley first knew her, in the days when they came down here only for holidays, the Groundley girl, who helped her old man deliver milk.

“Goodness knows where you kids spring from,” she used to tell the boys when they were little. “Only don't go thinking you might be princes. Just as well Audley knows what little sprigs of colonial piety and perfect breeding you are because there's nothing I can tell you. Gypsies, maybe. Tinkers. Malays. Clem could be a Malay, couldn't you, my pet? Take your pick.”

“I was fascinated, you see,” Audley would put it, taking people aside as if offering a deep confidence. “I'd been hearing all my life about my lot — the Tylers and the Woolseys and the Clayton Joneses — made me feel like something in a dog show. Then Madge came along with those blue eyes and big hands that belonged to no one but herself — old Groundley was a little nut of a fellow. In our family everything could be traced back. Long noses, weak chests, a taste for awful Victorian hymns — it could all be shot home to some uncle or aunt, or to a cousin's cousin that only the aunt had heard of. My God, I thought, is there no way out of this? Whereas I can look at one of the boys and say, Now I wonder where he got that from? Can't be my side, must be her lot. The berserkers. The Goths-and-Vandals. It's made life very interesting.”

People who were not used to this sort of thing were embarrassed. But it was true, the boys all took after their mother, except for Clem, who took after no one. They were big-boned, fair-headed, with no physical grace but an abundance of energy and rough good humour. Not a trace of Audley's angular refinement, though they were free as well of his glooms.

As little lads Madge had let them run wild, go unwashed, barely fed — in the upper echelons of the public service where Audley moved it was a kind of scandal — but had been ready at any time to down tools and read them a story or show them how to spin pyjama cord on a cotton-reel or turn milkbottle-tops into bells. She wrote children's books, tall tales for nine-year-olds. Twice a year, regardless of household moves or daily chaos or childhood fevers or spills, she had produced a new title — she was proud of that — using as models first her children, then her grandchildren, all thinly disguised under such names as Bam or Duff or Fizzer for the boys and for the tomboyish girls, McGregor or Moo. “It's lucky,” she told Ned and Jenny once, "that Audley had all those family names to draw on. I'd have let my fancy rove. If it'd been up to me I'd have called the boys all sorts of things.”