David Malouf - The Great World

But he saw now why the girls asked their friends to the house only when Ma could guarantee that Aunt James would be out of the way, and why they had been so uneasy at first even with him.

Ellie wasn’t — or not for long. But Ellie was just a little girl, rather wild and tomboyish, glad to have someone new to play with and a boy in the house. Lucille he had to win.

He did it by not trying to, by letting her discover for herself how solid, how utterly loyal he was.

They were the same age, and she too was glad at last to have a boy in the house, though for other reasons than Ellie’s. At thirteen she was quite grown-up, or thought she was, and very aware of the power she had over people, only a little scared as yet of the consequences of it.

She did not set out to make a worshipper of him, but he became one. The little game he had been led into, of getting around the difficulties of her character, of impressing and pleasing her, became a habit, then a pleasure and a misery. Before long he was, he told himself, in love with Lucille, and in his usual way began to include her in the visions he gave himself up to of what his life would be.

She accepted this at first. She was just the age for it, for talking dreamily of ever afters and for being in love. But she grew up faster than Vic did; he could not keep up with her. He found himself, more often than he would have wanted, turning to Ellie for the rough-and-tumble games that the boyish part of him still hungered for, and he was hurt when Lucille drew her mouth down and mocked at him.

By the time she was fifteen Lucille Warrender had become a young woman, very demanding and wilful and with a tribe of followers. He did not despair when she began to go about with older boys. He knew he had a year or two yet in which to grow up. But he agonised, and wore such a long face that Ma, who saw all this and was increasingly fond of him, was at a loss. For all his stolidity he was easily hurt. And he had a romantic streak. Other people might miss it, but Ma didn’t. She didn’t know how to help him.

The fact was that she was scared of Lucille, who seemed to her too grown-up altogether. She thought too highly of herself. For days on end she would be all moods and little female fads and whims that Ma had no time for. Then suddenly there would be floods of tears and she would want to be cuddled and forgiven. She was neither one thing nor the other. She was proud and critical and unthinkingly cruel; not so much by nature as from inexperience. She did not know herself or how to act in a way that would spare either her own feelings or other people’s. It was Vic who bore the brunt of it.

‘After all, Vic, you’re not a stranger, are you, so it doesn’t matter.’ These were the words Ma used when she came up to his room, as in time she often did, to consult with him. ‘I can talk to you, Vic. Goodness knows, I can’t talk to the girls or Pa.’ She meant she did not want to alarm them with her fears.

She believed, young as he was, that Vic was tough and practical. Practical was one of her favourite words, and a great compliment. He would sit feeling pleased with himself, tough, compact, and yes, practical, while she gave herself up to visions of disaster. That was the word she kept flying to.

She was a worrier, Ma. With a magazine in one hand, The Bulletin or the London Illustrated News , which she would snatch up as a guarantee that she had something to do, and in the other a cigarette that she mostly forgot to smoke, she would prowl the house like an unhappy ghost, peering into rooms that her mother, in the days when they had five maids, had filled with whatnots and the souvenirs of travel — Venetian glass and little boxes and figurines in porcelain or Parian or bronze, that they could afford to keep dusted then but were impractical now. On Pa’s urging, and for reasons of common sense, she had cleared it all out, all the gloomy mahogany and velvet and bric-à-brac, and furnished the place in modern veneer.

The trouble was, she missed the old things. She would put her hand out for a bit of familiar furniture and be shocked that it wasn’t there. Or she and Meggsie would spend half a morning going through drawer after drawer looking for some old newspaper cutting she wanted to consult, or a bunch of artificial violets she thought she could use on a hat, or an earring to match one that had turned up again after seven years, and she would realise with a pang that she had left it in one of the sideboard drawers when it went off to Lawson’s to be sold.

This was her parents’ house, the one she had grown up in. What she had done, she felt, for all her talk of what was sensible, had been an attempt to drive their spirits from the place. She felt ashamed now. She ought never to have done it. And anyway, she had failed.

Standing at the long drawing-room window and looking across to the factory, she would feel her father there in the room behind her. He would be wearing a savage look and waiting, not too patiently (he had been a rough, uneducated fellow), for her to explain herself. What had she done with his splendid enterprise?

She thought of the answer she might give him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Pop, this is 1936!’ (As if this improvement on 1919, when he died, could stand against the other figures she would have had to give him, which these days were always down.) ‘I mean, there’s a depression on.’

All this was nonsense, of course. ‘I ought to have been a boy,’ she would tell herself, and she would tell Vic this too. ‘Then they would have taught me how to do something about it.’ But Stevie was the boy, and her father, in a fit of self-righteousness that was to be fatal, had destroyed that possibility by driving him away. So who was to blame? And why did she feel guilty?

Wandering about the house in her stockinged feet, elegant but careless, she could be there, as Meggsie complained, before you knew it — unless you smelled the smoke.

‘Lord bless the Irish!’ Meggsie would exclaim when Mrs Warrender appeared, anxious to have a sit-down at the kitchen table and go over some problem about the girls, ‘You scared the daylights outa me!’

Meggsie had girls of her own: two of them unhappily married and settled, the other still getting her glory-box together. She had known Lucille and Ellie since they were babies. She spoiled them, always took their part and could see no problem with either of them.

But Mrs Warrender was in no mind to be convinced. As if by habit, and ignoring Meggsie’s clear displeasure, she would go to the dresser, find a sharp little knife and set herself to help Meggsie peel and core apples while she went over the thing.

Meggsie fumed. She had her own way of doing things, and Mrs Warrender’s did not suit her. As Ma got more and more excited, a good half of the apple she was working on would disappear as scrap. If it was peas she was shelling she would pop at least one from every shell into her mouth. Finally Meggsie would stand no more of it. Ten years older than Ma, she took the line that Ma was not much more than a girl herself. Taking the knife out of her hand, or pulling the bag of unshelled peas to her own side of the table, she would say: ‘Now you listen to me, dear. You should stop stirrin’ yourself up like this and just let things go their own way. Let nature take its course.’

Mrs Warrender was appalled. She had seen nature take its course. That was precisely what terrified her.

‘They’re good girls, both. Let me tell you, you don’t know how lucky you are. Now trust me. Did I ever serve you up a brumm p’tata?’

Mrs Warrender would sit a moment. In fact she did feel easier. Maybe it was the few minutes of working with her hands and actually doing something. More likely it was the light in Meggsie’s kitchen, which she had loved since she was just a little thing and would come to make patty cakes in the stove. Or Meggsie herself and the rhythm she imposed on things. It was different from the rhythms of the rest of the house, which were either too hectic or too lax — she should do something about that, but what? Just being in this cool, back part of the house was refreshing and she found herself wishing that Meggsie, who was proprietorial, had not made it so exclusively her own. She would have been happy to work here if Meggsie would have her: peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables, putting her hands into greasy water, acting as a slavey in her own home. But Meggsie, polite but insistent, couldn’t wait to get rid of her.