David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You don't understand him,” Clem would tell her; "you're being unfair.” But the truth was, there was something phony in these tremendous statements. A challenge perhaps for you to call his bluff and unmask him. Crooked jokes.

He paused now and, after a silence that was calculated, she thought, to the last heartbeat, went off bearing her glass.

Once again she felt the need to escape. I'll find Angie, she thought. She'll get me out of this. The last thing she wanted now was to get caught in an exchange of soul-talk with Audley

She saw Angie standing alone in a corner, in a dream as usual, wearing that dark, faraway look that kept people off. How beautiful she is, Fran thought.

She was in black — an old-fashioned dress that might have belonged to her mother, with long sleeves and a high neck that emphasized her tallness. Fran was about to push between shoulders towards her when she felt a hand at her skirt. It was Tommy Molloy's wife, Ellie.

“Hi, Fran,” she said. “You lookin’ good.”

“Hi, El,” Fran said, and, settling on the form beside her, stretched out her legs and sat a moment looking at her shoes.

“Wasser matter?” the older woman asked, but humourously, not to presume. She was Tommy's second wife, a shy, flat-voiced woman. “You in the dumps too?”

“No,” Fran said. “Not really.”

In fact, she added to herself, not at all. I'm holding myself still, that's all, so that it won't happen too quickly. So that I won't go spinning too fast into whatever it is that may be — just may be, beginning.

She let these thoughts sweep over her to the point where, suddenly ashamed of her self-absorption, she drew back. “What about you, El?” she asked. “Why are you in the dumps?”

“Oh, I dunno. Things. You know. It gets yer down.”

Fran looked at her, smiled weakly, and really did want to know, but Ellie of course would not tell. Not just out of pride, but because she did not believe that Fran, even if her interest was genuine and not just the usual politeness, would understand.

I would, Fran wanted to say. Honestly, I would. Try me! But Ellie only smiled back and looked away.

Fran knew Ellie from the days before Audley's retirement, when, from the Camp, which was less than a mile away, she had kept an eye on the house and a key for visitors. Sitting beside her now, Fran felt a weight of darkness descend that for once had nothing to do with herself.

Occasionally, driving out to collect the keys, she had had a cup of tea in Ellie's kitchen, had sat at the rickety table telling herself, in a self-conscious way: I'm having a cup of tea in the house of a black person.

What she felt now, with a kind of queasiness, was how slight and self-dramatising her own turmoils were, how she exaggerated all her feelings, took offence, got angry, wept too easily, and all about what?

“See you, El,” she said, very lightly touching the woman's hand. She pushed through to where Angie stood.

“Listen,” she said, "can we get out of here? I'm being pursued.”

Angie looked interested. “Who by?”

“You know who,” she said. “He's got that look. He keeps — hovering.” She frowned. This was only half the truth.

Angie laughed. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go down to the beach.”

When Audley returned to the deck, a moment later, Fran was nowhere to be found. He was disappointed. There were things he wanted to ask — things he wanted to say to her.

He set the glass of wine on the rails, an offering, and sat on a chair beside it.

He would have liked to consult her about one or two things. About Clem. About his own life. About Death: would she know anything about that? About love as well, carnal love. Which he thought sometimes he had failed to experience or understand.

Absent-mindedly, he took the glass he had brought for her— forbidden, of course — and sipped, then sipped again. Just as well, he thought, that Madge wasn't around!

6

From the headland above, the sea was flat moonlight all the way to the horizon, but down in the cove among the rocks, almost below sea-level, it rose up white out of the close dark, heaped itself in the narrow opening, then came at them with a rush. Fran leapt back at first, up the shelving sand. “I don't want to get wet!” She had to yell against the sea as well as get out of the way of it. But when she saw how Angie just let the light wash in around her ankles, then higher, darkening all the lower part of her skirt, she laughed and gave in, but did tuck her dress up. It was grey silk and came to her calves. She did not want it spoiled.

They walked together, Angie half a head taller, along the wet beach, their heels leaving phosphorescent prints, and laughed, talked, regaled one another with stories.

It was a secret place down here. With the sea on one side and the cliffs on the other, you were walled in, but the clouds were so high tonight and the air so good in your lungs that you didn't feel its narrowness, only a deep privacy.

“Do you know this Cedric What's-his-name?” Fran asked after a time. “Pohl — Cedric Pohl. Isn't that a hoot?”

She disguised the spurt of excitement, of danger she felt at saying the name twice over. “He's a good-looking boy, isn't he?”

“He isn't a boy,” Angie said. “He's thirty-three.”

“He asked if he could drive back with me.”

“I thought you were staying.”

“No. That was a mistake. I can't stay.”

They walked on in silence.

“Actually,” Angie said at last, "he's a bit of a shit.”

“Who is?”

“Your Cedric Pohl.”

“He isn't mine,” Fran said, but it exhilarated her to be speaking of him in these terms.

“So,” she said when a decent interval had elapsed, "what do you know about him? He's married, I suppose.”

“Was.”

“Well, that's nothing against him.”

“She left him and took the kids. He was two-timing her.”

Fran gave a little laugh, then thought better of it. “Well,” she said, "I haven't committed myself. He can go back with the Bergs.”

They came round the edge of the knoll and once again the sea was before them.

A slope, low dunes held together by pigface and spiky grass, led down to the beach. On any other occasion they would have hauled up their skirts at this point and sprinted, but the beach was already occupied. There was a party down there round a leaping fire. They made a face at one another, lifted their skirts like little girls preparing to pee in the open (was that what gave the moment an air of the deliciously forbidden and set them giggling?) and sat plump down in the cool sand to spy.

The fire had been built in the most prodigal way, a great unsteady pyramid of flames. A man with a sleeping bag round his shoulders was tending it, occasionally tossing on a branch but otherwise simply contemplating it, watching the sparks fly up and the nest of heat at its centre breathe and glow. Something in his actions suggested a trancelike meditation, as if the pyre had drawn his mind out of him and he were living now as the fire did, subdued to its being but also feeding his and the fire's needs. Watching him you too felt subdued yet invigorated, taken out of yourself into its overwhelming presence.

They sat with their arms round their knees, unspeaking, and the silence between them deepened. Drawn in by the slow gestures of the man as he tossed branch after branch on to the pyre — and, like him, by the pulse of the fire itself, which was responding in waves to the breeze that came in from the sea, and which they felt on the hairs of their arms — they might have stepped out of time entirely.

The others — there were three little groups of them — lay away from the fire but still in the light of its glow.