David Malouf - The Great World

What angered her was the vanity of his assumption that he could soothe an outrage in her that he had not even understood.

She had lost the one little bit of ground she stood on that gave her a choice. It was that, and the shame of what she had let them do to her, that had beaten the spark out of her.

They were in a world in which forces were at work that took no account of ordinary lives, and as things everywhere got tougher he saw that Ma’s fears, which he had thought exaggerated at first, were real. All around them people were being swept into the gutter and could not save themselves.

Friends of the Warrenders, a family that had seemed quite safe and prosperous, were revealed overnight to have been living on nothing but show. The father, a solicitor, went to prison. The mother, and the boy and girl, moved to Melbourne.

Things were closing in. It was for Ma’s sake now, as well as Pa’s, that he set to work, but in a practical way, to save them. Pa was too high-strung and sensitive to be a businessman. ‘Well,’ Vic told himself, ‘I’m not sensitive, I can’t afford to be. Business will do fine for me. I’m not so particular.’

He had thought at first that he ought to be; that his readiness to muck in and dirty his hands with money-making was an indication that even his finest instincts might be coarse. But when he got to see things more clearly he began to ask himself what the value was of so much fineness if all it did was spoil you for action — and it was in action that he meant to prove himself.

He took a second look at his coarseness. What it amounted to was a wish to get on in the world, and a view, a hard-headed one, of what you might have to be to do it.

For one thing you had to see things the way they were. No good giving people credit for virtues they did not have. Most people were selfish. They had low motives rather than noble ones. You had to start from that . You ought to act nobly yourself (he always would), but you couldn’t expect others to.

He could live with that, he wasn’t squeamish. The times had revealed pretty clearly what sort of world they were in. Lack of fastidiousness might be an advantage when things got rough.

He kept faith with the glimpse Pa had given him that first day of ‘the changes’; he had been moved by all that, and if it was a term he had any use for he too might have called them poetic. He was not without idealism, or imagination either. But this did not prevent him from seeing these processes, in their real physical form, as what they were: natural occurrences accountable to strict chemical laws, and also, if need be, to the balance of costs.

He had been fascinated by the vat from the moment he saw it sitting there so cool and mysterious, the great rounded girth of it with its rows of darker rivets, the pipes climbing away at all angles, the activity it set up in the air around you, which throbbed with an added heat. Twenty-four hours a day it sat there, quietly humming to itself, and it wasn’t just soap it manufactured, the pure white cakes that moved up and down on conveyor belts, went out at last to be wrapped and packed by the girls in the work room, and from there, in trucks, to the department stores and chemist shops and beauty salons where it was handled by sales ladies, and came back at last in the form of the ready cash that Pa jingled in his pockets and doled out on Saturday mornings as pocket money, and which Ma used to run the house. No, it made something else as well, and they lived on that, too. It was a dynamo pouring out energy that when it crossed the yard was translated into the little actions and reactions that made up their daily lives. (Not literally, of course. He was thinking now in terms that in Pa’s mind would have been ‘poetic’.)

Standing at his bedroom window he would look across the dark of the yard and be reassured by the faint glow of it there, still humming away. He saw it in his sleep as well. Awesome and huge it looked, but comfortably familiar. The energy from it fired his dreams.

In the afternoons after school he would slip across to the factory to ‘bother’ Mr Hicks. But the manager, once he saw the seriousness of him, and that his interest was not just boyish curiosity in the nuts and bolts of things, was happy to show him all he knew. The boy was bright, that’s what he saw. And he had imagination, too. He saw things large.

‘That’s a good question,’ he told Vic once, chewing on his moustache. ‘If we knew the answer to that one, young feller, we’d be on the way to millions.’

‘Would we? Really?’

Hicks paused a moment. Vic, he saw, had taken him literally. The word millions meant something definite to him.

‘Well, millions is an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘Let’s say: to setting ourselves pretty firmly on our feet.’

But that wasn’t enough for Vic. It might do for a start. But millions! He put this bit of information, which was still a question, at the back of his mind. He’d work on it.

What Hicks had failed to see was that millions, even if you took it literally, wasn’t simply, as Vic saw it, cash. It was an evocation of scale rather than an accountable sum. In an action of that size, Vic thought, coarseness would blur into insignificance.

He still smarted over the presence of this negative quality in himself, but was determined not to deny it; to find instead a means of using it in an action that would be fine. At least his motives were fine. He would be doing it for them ; anything that might accrue to himself would be sheer profit. He would be repaying his debt a thousandfold. Wasn’t that noble enough? In millions! Even Meggsie might be impressed.

He had an irritant, Vic, a grain of scepticism about his own nature that would not let him rest. He could never quite prevent himself from looking, on each occasion, for the little giveaway flicker in another’s eye that would warn him he had failed to get away with it; that for all his swagger, he had been sniffed out. It gave him a dark pleasure, that, which he could not account for. It was always the one person in any company who had not been taken in, who had not succumbed to the tricks he used to win people, that he was drawn to.

He went on trying to, of course. That was only natural. But with half of him he wanted them to resist.

What he was after was a truth that could not be mocked.

He had seen at once, when Mr Warrender first took him round to the kitchen to be introduced, that Meggsie was the one here that he would have to be on guard against.

‘Vic is it, eh?’ she had said, looking once and weighing him up. ‘Well, you just watch them boots, young feller, on my floor. I jest mopped it.’

These were her first words to him. He looked at the floor. It was lino in big black and white squares like a draughts board.

‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Pa assured her, but lost confidence under her glare.

He knew what she really meant because they spoke the same language.

‘Never seen a floor like that, have you, son?’ That’s what she meant. ‘Floor and boots both, I dare say. Well, the floor’s mine, I’m the boss here. As for the boots, don’t you get too big for ’em, that’s all. You may fool some people but you won’t fool me.’

It wasn’t hostile, but it was a warning. The look of amusement on her face suggested that she would be watching with interest but he could expect no quarter. She had her girls to think of. She didn’t care for boys.

He went easy with her. No good trying to get around Meggsie. She’d see through that right off. She knew the world he had come out of and she knew, because she had scrubbed them, the grime he got on the cuffs and collars of his shirts and the state of his sheets. A kind of game developed between them. It wasn’t the sort of game the Warrenders would have understood. It was a joking game, watchful on her part and contentious, but not without affection. ‘I know you, young feller, I’ve known lots a’ fellers like you. Believe me, I can read you like a book.’