David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“I'd quite enjoy it, I think,” he told them at home, "if instead of shoving me into a hole somewhere you had me stuffed and sat there. No need for a card. No need for anyone to know it was me.”

5

At half past seven the first of the guests arrived. Jenny was the lookout. Hanging from one of the verandah posts, she could see headlamps swinging through the dusk and stopping at the first of their gates. Two cars. There would be two more gates to open and close before they reached the gravel slope.

She leapt down and darted into the house.

“Madge, Angie,” she called, "they're on the way. Somebody's here.”

Madge, in shoes now and a frock that emphasized the width of her hips, was standing at the sink, contemplating the two fish she had earlier found a place for at the bottom of the fridge but had now taken out again to make room for her dips.

Her whole life, she felt, had been a matter of finding room. For unhappy children, stray cats, pieces of furniture passed on by distant aunts, unexpected arrivals at mealtimes, visitors who stayed too long talking to Audley and had to have beds made up for them on the lounge-room sofa, gifts she did not want and could find no use for but did not have the courage to throw out. Now these fish.

“They're almost here,” Jenny was shrieking.

Fortunately it was only her son Jonathon with one of his girls, though he did warn her that Lily Barnes was in the car behind.

“Oh Lord,” she said. “Jenny, love, go and tell Audley Lily Barnes is here. Oh, and Jonathon.” Only then did she embrace her son.

She took the flowers he had brought and dumped them absent-mindedly into the sink. Then, not to appear rude, she turned and kissed his girl, in case she had been here before. All Jonathon's girls were of striking appearance — more appearance than reality, she had once quipped — but she could never tell one of them from the next.

“How is he?” Jonathon asked, taking a handful of nuts from one of the bowls she had laid out and tossing them, one by one, into his mouth. “What's been going on? What have I missed?”

“Nothing,” she told him, moving the bowl out of his reach. “You haven't missed a thing. Now, if you're hungry, Jonathon, I'll give you some soup. I thought you'd have eaten on the way.”

“We did. We had this terrific meal, didn't we, Susie? At Moreton.” He reached behind her and took another handful of nuts. But immediately there was the sound of Lily's voice and Audley's greeting her.

“Well,” said Madge, "that's the end of that.”

She strode out to the stone verandah.

“Is she always like that?” the girl whispered to Jonathon.

He looked at her with his mouth full. “Oh,” he said, "I thought you'd been here before.”

“No,” she said, coldly, "I have not.”

Lily Barnes was an old flame of Audley's — that was Madge's claim, though he always denied it.

“Lily Barnes,” he would say, "is a remarkable woman, but she's more than I could have handled.”

“La, hark at the man!” Madge would tell the boys, who, when they were young, had been all ears for these interesting revelations. “That means he thinks he can handle me.”

“Can you, Dad?” one of them would pipe up. “Can you?”

When Lily Barnes and Audley were at university they had been rivals for various medals and scholarships, which she had mostly won. But after they left, Audley had gone on to high public office; Lily had been, over the years, private secretary to a string of ministers, admired, feared, warily consulted, but a shadowy presence, unknown outside a narrow circle. Then when she retired three years ago she had published a book that upstaged them all, Audley included, and had become a celebrity. At seventy she was very plain and petite, twisted now with arthritis but always very formally and finely dressed.

Madge, years ago, had dubbed her the Rainbow Serpent, partly because of her sharp tongue but also because of a passion she had for coloured silks. She had meant it unkindly then, but in the years since the name had come to have a benign, overarching significance. It was an affectionate tribute.

She entered now wearing a russet-coloured skirt and a caf-au-lait blouse, leaning as always on a stick, but making an impression, for all her crooked stance and diminutive size, of elegance and charm. She had with her a young fellow, the son of some people she knew, called Barney Shannon, who had been in trouble with drugs and was now employed to drive her about. Since he wanted to bring his surfboard and was also shifting house, they had come in his ute, the back of which was piled high with his futon, several bits of old iron from which he hoped to make lampstands, a Fifties cocktail cabinet, and his library of paperbacks, all in cartons and covered with a loose tarpaulin.

“Sorry, Madge,” she called, "are we the first? It's Barney. He drives like a bat out of Hades. I think that ute of his may have cured my back by redistributing the vertebrae.” She looked about and gave one of her winning smiles. “But how lovely to be here.”

An hour later the room was full. Little noisy groups had formed, mostly of men, all vigorously arguing. Lily, moving from one group to another and leaning on her stick, would linger just long enough to shift the discussion sideways with a single interjection, then move on. She did not join the other women, young and old, who sat on the sidelines.

Fran had been hovering at the edge of these groups. She too moved from one to another of them, growing more and more irritated by what she heard and angrier with herself for having come.

She knew these people. They were the same relations and old friends and nervous hangers-on that she had been seeing for the past fifteen years, people for whom disagreement was the spice of any gathering. She felt out of place. Not because her opinions were all that different from theirs, but from temperament, and because, as everyone knew, she was a backslider. She had married one of them, been taken to the heart of the clan, then bolted. Well, that was their version. Drink in hand, looking sad-eyed and defenceless, but also spikily vigilant, she kept on the move.

Clem watched her from cover. He had mastered the art of pretending that his attention was elsewhere while all his movements about the room, along the verandah, past the open windows, had as their single object her appearance in a mirror or between the shifting heads.

He watched. Not to monitor or restrict her freedom but to centre himself. Otherwise the occasion might have become chaotic. All that din of voices. All those faces, however familiar. The fear that someone without warning might open their mouth and expect an answer from him.

Once, briefly, she had come up beside him. Her head came only to his shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he told her, "I'm doing fine. What about you?”

She cast a fierce glance about the room. “I'll survive.”

He loved this house. He had grown up on holidays here. It was where he could let go and be free. All its routines, from the dinning of Madge's early-morning spoon to the pieces Audley liked to play on the piano last thing at night, were fixed, known. Objects too.

He liked to run his fingertips along the edge of the coffee-table and feel the sand under its varnish. His brother Rupe had made that table at Woodwork when he was fifteen. Clem loved it. It was one of the objects he had clung to when he was floating out there in the absolute dark, finding his way back by clinging to anything, however unlikely, that came to hand. Rupe's table had played no special part in his life till then, but he had clung to it, it had shored him up, and squatted now, an ugly, four-legged angel, right there in the centre of the room, very solid and low to the floor, bearing glasses and a lumpy dish full of cashews. He would have knelt down and stroked it, except that he had learned to be wary of these sudden impulses of affection in himself, towards people as well as objects, that were not always welcome or understood.