David Malouf - The Great World

He was an odd fellow, Pa. For all his generosity of flesh he was not expansive. People who thought that all large men should be jolly and lovers of life were disappointed in him. He was not jolly at all, and the roughness of the games he liked to play, the practical jokes, far from expressing a crude vitality, belonged to a version of himself that he reached out for but could not catch. He was often despondent, and sometimes downright gloomy. On nights when he did not happen to be in the mood for noise he would sit with his eyes closed, his brow lowered, while Ma or one of the girls rubbed his shoulders to soothe the ache he felt in being all locked up in himself.

He was a man who had spent a day in heavy traffic with the world, which had buffeted and exhausted him. He needed to be restored now with the ministering of soft hands. The fact that all this had been mental traffic made no difference. The results were the same.

He had spent his day getting under everyone’s feet, as Meggsie put it, poking about the house looking for things that he or other people had mislaid, making angry phonecalls to lawyers in town, to the council or the newspapers, enervating himself with trivialities to the point where he was quite incapable of settling to any work.

What this work might be, if he did settle, remained unclear. Sometimes it was the regimental history he was writing, in which, Vic supposed, his father might figure — he would be interested in that. More often it was ‘something literary’. He had an office and a desk, all leather, that had belonged to Mrs Warrender’s father; but he had no sooner got himself in there than he was out again, calling for a pencil-sharpener or his tobacco pouch or the paper, or the volume of Gibbon he had been reading that morning in the lav, or his glasses or his old boots.

On the day each month, ‘our dreadful Fridays’, Ma called them, when he had to appear at the Needham’s board meeting, he would be exhausted, utterly drained, a mere shadow of himself. He would sit through these meetings in a state of maddened irritability, listening to gloomy reports from auditors that he could make nothing of, and angry ones from travellers that he kept rewriting in his head, illiterate accounts, full of irrelevant details or diversions, of encounters with the managers of department stores and chemist shops and beauty parlours, and all the while, under the eye of the chairman, he would be filling the margins of the page with doodles, little half-imaginary animal figures or scornful caricatures.

He would laugh at these meetings the day after, finding in them a source for extravagant mimickry, but the occasions themselves were painful to him. He knew he was of no use there, a straw man, invited only to make up the numbers and have a member of the family on show. He was ashamed of the frivolous manner he assumed but could find no other. He felt humiliated.

Vic was surprised, and sometimes in a painful way, by the differences between this baffled household figure and the one he had sat beside in the train, in whom he had found so much manly steadiness, and warmth and ease. But he continued to honour without qualification the understanding that had been struck between them. What he would remember always was that on that occasion of their first being alone together, and at leisure to observe, Pa, out of an innate generosity, had seen only his best qualities, and accorded him, even if he was just a kid, the full measure of his possibilities. It was for Vic a matter of feeling. The affection it evoked in him, and the loyalty, endured.

Of course he had been presenting himself in the best possible light. It was an opportunity and he had taken it. If Pa had been deceived in some ways, what he had seen was also the truth; it was what Vic, in his deepest nature, aspired to be.

Perhaps Pa too had recognised an opportunity to show the better side of himself. What he had shown, as Vic soon discovered, was the mere externals of his nature, but Vic understood that and would not allow it to make a difference.

He did not reason these things out. He could, with Pa, move back into a state of feeling where those first moments on the train extended themselves and covered all the years to come. The understanding between them, once achieved, was undiminished.

And there was a further dimension to all this. Pa’s difficulties offered him an opportunity, or so Vic felt, to step in and show that the qualities that had been accorded him were actual and could be put to use. One day he would do for them what a son might do, and that perhaps was just what had all along been intended.

It was under this aspect of a larger and as yet undeclared purpose that he considered Aunt James’s refusal to see him as a stranger. She had simply assumed, from the first day, that he was a member of the family, but, in the weird view she took of these things, a secret one. The fact that she had got the details wrong was neither here nor there.

‘I kept all your letters,’ she told him in a whisper the first time they were alone. ‘I knew you’d be back. They told me you were dead, Stevie, but I knew that couldn’t be true. And it isn’t, is it, sweetie?’ She laughed and poked him in the ribs, as if it were a good joke between them that he was not a ghost. ‘Well, I would have thought your own sister might have known you.’

Stevie was Mrs Warrender’s brother. Years back, at a time when Ma and Pa’s marriage was being settled, he had got into some sort of trouble, been despatched to New Zealand, and died there by taking his own life.

Vic felt uncomfortable. It was crazy, and spooky too. She was herself a kind of spook. When they played their games he would keep away from the dining room where Aunt James was sitting, her eyes, her ears too, made sharper by the dark. ‘Ah, Stevie,’ she would whisper as he tried to tiptoe past the door, ‘is that you? You come and hide by me. I won’t let him get you.’

It did not trouble him in the daylight. He could treat it as a joke. But here in the dark, seeing her grey hair lit up in points where the light from the garden touched it, and hearing the passion in her voice, which was so low and croaky, he would feel a coldness on the back of his neck, and stop still sometimes, unable to move.

For all Mr Warrender’s generosity to her, Aunt James was still loyal to the scapegrace Stevie, and for more than twenty years had looked forward to his return. Mr Warrender knew this. No doubt it upset him. But he accepted it as another of Aunt James’s disconcerting eccentricities.

So when she saw in Vic’s appearance among them the return of the prodigal, the banished brother-in-law, she was making mischief. She was enlisting him in an alliance against Pa.

Vic decided (they were all so open about it) that he could take this side of the thing lightly, presenting himself as a victim, as Mr Warrender himself was, of the old girl’s crazy fits. But it worried him a little and made him more determined than ever to do nothing, whatever turn things might take, that could be construed as disloyalty to Pa.

He was helped in this by Aunt James’s inconsistency. There were occasions when her mind skipped sixty years rather than twenty and he became her own brother Bob, a spoiled and sickly child who had been killed in a riding accident when he was just the age that Vic was now. In this guise she would poke her tongue out and, snatching the bread off his plate, shout, ‘Let him go without, the little bugger!’ being pretty well certain that no one else could see him; or she would lean out and pinch him hard, daring him to cry out and show her up.

He did not know how to react. He felt a fool just sitting there and letting an old lady pinch him. He could hardly pinch her back. But the girls, who had put up with Aunt James’s tricks for as long as they could remember, were delighted, they thought it hilarious. Even Pa was amused, but did give him a look as if to say, ‘Well, you see how it is, old man. It’s the same with me. But what can we do ?’