David Malouf - The Great World

‘That’s right,’ the man in the white coat said.

‘This is Vic,’ Mr Warrender told him. ‘Vic, this is Mr Hicks. He’s our manager. Then,’ he went on, ‘when it’s all been boiled by the steam that’s going in there — you can feel the steam, eh? — the soap separates out from the glycerines,’ (he sounded like a boy repeating a lesson) ‘and when we’ve boiled it again, only with brine this time, we get soap.

‘Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘that’s a very superficial version of what happens, eh Hicks?’

Vic could see that Mr Hicks, in his white coat and round gold-rimmed glasses, thought it was very superficial, and that Mr Warrender had not explained it very well, but Vic’s sympathy was with Mr Warrender.

Mr Hicks moved round now and stood between them and the vat, as if he had to protect the thing, and what was mysteriously happening there, from the sort of superficial interest that might actually prevent it from taking place. Vic felt the hostility he projected. Impatience, too. No doubt he wanted to get back to his own part in the process. Mr Warrender might be the owner, but they were on his ground.

Vic, who had a strong sense of these things, of territory, saw that and found himself feeling protective of Mr Warrender and a little injured on his behalf. He seemed out of place here, yet the factory was his.

‘Further along,’ he was saying, ‘we have what we call pitching and settling.’ Vic looked for the curl of Hicks’s lip. ‘One day, Mr Hicks will take you through the whole thing — eh Hicks? — and you can see it all from whoa to go.’

He was running out of steam. In a moment they would come again to one of his awkward silences. But this wasn’t quite the end.

‘All these processes,’ he said, and you could see that it was the first thing so far that really interested him, ‘are called “the changes”.’ He reddened a little as he said this. The word, for him, was charged. ‘Pretty poetic, eh, for just soap?’

Mr Hicks was scowling, he couldn’t hide it. He was affronted. Maybe he felt something proprietorial about this word, and did not care, since it had a precise scientific meaning, to have Mr Warrender use it in his own way; or maybe he objected to his even telling it at all. Mr Warrender, he guessed, from Hicks’s point of view, was not being respectful enough, or his respectfulness was of the wrong kind. The look was dismissive.

‘Well, thank you, Hicks, for letting us into your sanctum. Mr Hicks is pretty strict about visitors, Vic. We’re privileged.’

Mr Warrender was talking of Hicks the way you talk about a child, humouring him, but in a way that Hicks, you could see, did not care for. He shook hands with Vic, nodded briefly to Mr Warrender, and stepped back behind the vat. Mr Warrender visibly relaxed.

‘Times are a bit rough, you know,’ he explained to Vic as they turned and went out under the lintel into the blinding sunlight of the yard. ‘The big companies have got us by the short hairs, if you’ll pardon the expression, we’re all men here. The makers, you know,’ and his voice took on the fruity tones of an ad on the wireless, ‘of Lux toilet soap. We’re out of our depth.’ But even this he said as if he were repeating a lesson. ‘So, young feller,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’

‘I liked it.’

‘Good,’ said Mr Warrender, ‘so do I. But I didn’t grow up with it, you know. That was Mrs Warrender. Her father. And liking, old fellow, isn’t quite good enough.’

He paused, looked at Vic, and, after considering a moment, decided not to go on.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘we’d better go and take a look at the girls. Otherwise they’ll feel neglected. You’ll like the girls.’

Some of the girls, it turned out, were over sixty. They were packers and they worked in an overwhelming scent of that allspice Vic had been so delighted by upstairs. Mr Warrender was very gallant with them, and they made a fuss of him and of Vic too.

‘So,’ Mr Warrender said, ‘now you’ve seen the whole show. We’ll just slip round to the kitchen and see if Meggsie can find us a nice cup of tea.’

HE GREW FOND of the Warrenders, especially of Mr Warrender, Pa. He was delighted at last to give his softer instincts scope. He had wanted, always, to be the perfect son, and this was easy because the Warrenders were so nearly what he might have conceived of as the perfect parents. He put the past behind him, rediscovered a kind of innocence, and let his spirit loose, slipping back into his heavier nature only when he had shut a door behind him. He could look grim then, and Mrs Warrender, if she had seen it, would have been stricken. A nervous woman, always on the lookout for what was about to go wrong, she might have had to ask herself what they had done to the boy to make him so miserable.

The Warrenders were a source of endless astonishment to him. He had known a life till now that was too harsh to allow for playfulness. The poker games his parents had gone in for, all cigarette smoke and beer, had been rough affairs.

A spirit of boisterous exuberance prevailed in the Warrender house. The games they preferred were childish ones, played at night with all the lights off and a lot of noise. Even Ma, rushing about in her stockinged feet and with her hair flying, would give herself up to easy recklessness, shrieking louder than either of the girls. The girls were wild enough — they were encouraged to be — but Ma outdid them.

Aunt James, who was too old for what she called ‘high-jinks’, would sit in the dark of the dining room and laugh under her breath, while Ellie or Lucille or Ma tiptoed in and hid behind her chair, and lights flashed on and off in the hallway, and there were rushes, stumblings, evasions that took no heed at all of chairs or vases, then shrieks of childish laughter as the seeker shouted: ‘I’ve got Pa’ — or Lucille or Ellie or Vic.

These night games were not the only ones they indulged in, and Vic, who was prudish, found he was often tested, and not at all in the ways he had expected. He had thought he might be too rough for them, so he was surprised when Pa, with no sign of embarrassment, talked about farting, and the girls took it up and elaborated, and even Ma had a laughing fit.

There was a carelessness about the Warrenders, an indifference to what he had imagined was good behaviour and propriety, that would always be foreign to him. They had a passion, all of them, for practical jokes, physical ones, the rougher the better; even Aunt James was not spared. It was a test of character here to take these raw dealings with equanimity and a show of sporting humour. He was delighted when he was at last included and became the butt of one, but never got used to being caught out and mocked. He thought too, after a time, that there was something false in it. What they pretended was that they were all very thick-skinned and impervious to hurts; whereas in fact, as he soon discovered, they were always protecting one another from truths that really wounded, and this rough-and-tumble was a way of disguising it.

Lucille, for instance. He realised after a little that all these eccentricities and raw jokes her parents went in for were a mortification to her. She hated them. She was very proud, and he had thought her hostility to him had to do with that. But he saw at last that what she really had against him was the extent to which they had exposed themselves to him. She was afraid he might take it upon himself to judge Ma and Pa and despise them. She did herself sometimes and was ashamed of it, but her pride would not allow him to.

In the beginning he was flattered by this, but saw that he would have to sacrifice his vanity if he was to make her see he could be trusted. And he could be, too. His loyalty to Pa and Ma was beyond question. It had to be, and especially this matter of loyalty to Pa. The whole household was based on it. Pa’s moods, his whims, had at every moment to be respected and allowed for. Ma saw to this, and the girls and Aunt James, even Meggsie, for all her grumbling, complied. Mr Warrender tyrannised over his house of women. They spoiled him and made a great show of it; but the spoiling was a substitute for something he wanted more and which they thought he might never get. The fuss they made was to conceal from him that he had no real authority. But Pa was too intelligent to be deceived. If the household was shaky, and it was at times, it was because of this.