David Malouf - The Complete Stories

She did not. Instead she watched the details she provided in response to Anick's questions about colour of eyes and hair, the car — a station wagon! — the number of rooms in their house, slot in under the French girl's mascara and become a dead ordinary place—'orreebly provincial — where she had settled for a quiet, an ordinary fate.

But I am happy, she wanted to protest. I almost lost my life. And then, by the skin of my teeth, I saved it.

But there was no way of explaining this. They had no shared language, most of all when it came to the smaller words. She began to wonder, as her high spirits evaporated, what she and Anick had ever had in common.

Oh yes! She had almost forgotten. Gordon!

“No,” she said matter-of-factly It astonished her that it was Anick, after so long, who most clearly remembered. “I haven't seen him for years. Sydney's a big place. He's in town planning or something.”

Anick nodded.

There was nothing more to be said. Or rather, there was what there had always been. Cassie continued to write long jaunty letters in her formal, seventeenth-century French, mostly because it pleased her to tell about her children, adding more and more to Anick's image of the ‘orreeble place and describing in sinister detail trips to resorts Anick would never have wanted to visit and could never find on the map. Anick continued to send postcards and presents.

The time came when this was, for each of them, their oldest and most satisfying correspondence. The children no longer “Who is.

Anick?” not even to have the pleasure of hearing the known answer and of closing, with a rhythmic question and response, one of the gaps in their world. Instead they told their schoolfriends, rather grandly: "This is from Anick, our mummy's best friend — in Europe.”

Europe was a place they would visit one day and see for themselves.

He had been there for a long time. She could not remember when she had last looked across the lawn and he was not standing in the wide, well-clipped expanse between the buddleia and the flowering quince, his shoulders sagging a little, his hands hanging limply at his side. He stood very still with his face lifted towards the house, as a tradesman waits who has rung the doorbell, received no answer, and hopes that someone will appear at last at an upper window. He did not seem in a hurry. Heavy bodies barged through the air, breaking the stillness with their angular cries. Currawongs. Others hopped about on the grass, their tails switching from side to side. Black metronomes. He seemed unaware of them. Originally the shadow of the house had been at his feet, but it had drawn back before him as the morning advanced, and he stood now in a wide sunlit space casting his own shadow. Behind him cars rushed over the warm bitumen, station wagons in which children were being ferried to school or kindergarten, coloured delivery vans, utilities — there were no fences here; the garden was open to the street. He stood. And the only object between him and the buddleia was an iron pipe that rose two feet out of the lawn like a periscope.

At first, catching sight of him as she passed the glass wall of the dining room, the slight figure with its foreshortened shadow, she had given a sharp little cry. Greg! And it might have been Greg standing there with only the street behind him. He would have been just that age. Doubting her own perceptions, she had gone right up to the glass and stared. But Greg had been dead for seven years; she knew that with the part of her mind that observed this stranger, though she had never accepted it in that other half where the boy was still going on into the fullness of his life, still growing, so that she knew just how he had looked at fifteen, seventeen, and how he would look now at twenty.

This young man was quite unlike him. Stoop-shouldered, intense, with clothes that didn't quite fit, he was shabby, and it was the shabbi-ness of poverty not fashion. In his loose flannel trousers with turnups, collarless shirt, and wide-brimmed felt hat, he might have been from the country or from another era. Country people dressed like that. He looked, she thought, the way young men had looked in her childhood, men who were out of work.

Thin, pale, with the sleeves half-rolled on his wiry forearms, he must have seen her come up to the glass and note his presence, but he wasn't at all intimidated.

Yes, that's what he reminded her of the Depression years, and those men, one-armed or one-legged some of them, others dispiritingly whole, who had haunted the street corners of her childhood, wearing odd bits of uniform with their civilian cast-offs and offering bootlaces or pencils for sale. Sometimes when you answered the back doorbell, one of them would be standing there on the step. A job was what he was after: mowing or cleaning out drains, or scooping the leaves from a blocked downpipe, or mending shoes — anything to save him from mere charity. When there was, after all, no job to be done, they simply stood, those men, as this man stood, waiting for the offer to be made of a cup of tea with a slice of bread and jam, or the scrapings from a bowl of dripping, or if you could spare it, the odd sixpence — it didn't matter what or how much, since the offering was less important in itself than the unstinting recognition of their presence, and beyond that, a commonness between you. As a child she had stood behind lattice doors in the country town she came from and watched transactions between her mother and those men, and had thought to herself This is one of the rituals. There is a way of doing this so that a man's pride can be saved, but also your own. But when she grew up the Depression was over. Instead, there was the war. She had never had to use any of that half-learned wisdom.

She walked out now onto the patio and looked at the young man, with just air rather than plate glass between them.

He still wasn't anyone she recognised, but he had moved slightly, and as she stood there silently observing — it must have been for a good while — she saw that he continued to move. He was turning his face to the sun. He was turning with the sun, as a plant does, and she thought that if he decided to stay and put down roots she might get used to him. After all, why a buddleia or a flowering quince and not a perfectly ordinary young man?

She went back into the house and decided to go on with her housework. The house didn't need doing, since there were just the two of them, but each day she did it just the same. She began with the furniture in the lounge, dusting and polishing, taking care not to touch the electronic chess-set that was her husband's favourite toy and which she was afraid of disturbing — no, she was actually afraid of it. Occupying a low table of its own, and surrounded by lamps, it was a piece of equipment that she had thought of at first as an intruder and regarded now as a difficult but permanent guest. It announced the moves it wanted made in a dry dead voice, like a man speaking with a peg on his nose or through a thin coffin-lid; and once, in the days when she still resented it, she had accidentally touched it off. She had already turned away to the sideboard when the voice came, flat and dull, dropping into the room one of its obscure directives: Queen to King's Rook five; as if something in the room, some object she had always thought of as tangible but without life, had suddenly decided to make contact with her and were announcing a cryptic need. Well, she had got over that.

She finished the lounge, and without going to the window again went right on to the bathroom, got down on her knees, and cleaned all round the bath, the shower recess, the basin, and lavatory; then walked straight through to the lounge room and looked.