David Malouf - The Great World

What he would have wanted, given the power, was to take it all back again, down to the last razor blade and button off a baby’s bootee, and see it restored. Impossible, of course.

He wanted nothing to be forgotten and cast into the flames. Not a soul. Not a pin.

He said none of this to McGowan, but wished later he had done and taken the risk.

‘I’m like one of those old blokes you see poking about the bins,’ he would have had to say, making a joke of it. But he was serious.

‘Not a soul,’ he would have said. ‘Not a pin.’

ONE SATURDAY AROUND three o’clock he did something he had been meaning to do for weeks. He got himself ready and took a tram out to Bondi Junction to find Mac’s sister-in-law, Iris. He carried with him the letters Mac had given him. It was all he had to pass on to her.

He recognised the house easily enough from the description Mac had given him, but the woman who opened the door was not at all what he expected.

He had seen her often enough. He had stood behind the door in the kitchen and seen her come in, turn on the tap, pour herself a glass of water, and then, with wonderful slowness, drink it, all the time looking out through the window in a dreamy way at the stars.

That woman had worn her hair in a style he remembered from before the war. She was very sober and tall. This one, with the light of the hallway behind her, was shorter, heavier too, and she stepped out of a moment of hilarity that had to do with something that was still going on in the depths of the house. There was a radio playing. He heard thumps from back there and saw the flash of a blue shirt — one of the boys that would be — between the hallway and the back stairs.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said in the midst of her laughter. ‘Come on in.’

He stepped into the narrow hallway. He was cleaned up, his hair combed, his feet washed — that was normal now. But he wore a tie as well, feeling the constriction of it, and had the letters, in a clean envelope, in his right-hand breast pocket.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me take your hat.’

‘Oh — good,’ he said. He had been just standing there, staring about.

He had thought he would know the place, and he did in some ways; Mac’s sleep-out would be the bottom of the hall to the right. But the whole house was lighter than he had imagined, more airy. More cheerful, too. Mac had described only the things his own plain taste would have put here; the rest he had left out. A lot of what Digger saw now was fanciful: a tall Chinese vase with umbrellas on it, and a little Alpine house with a man and woman in peasant costume, who came out, the one or the other, according to whether it was fine or would rain.

She settled him in the front room, then went out to turn the wireless down, put a kettle on, and at the same time to shout something through a window into the yard. Digger had a chance to look about.

Above the upright piano, which was covered with a green velvet cloth, was a certificate showing that Elizabeth Iris Ruddick had her letters from the Trinity College of Music in 1921 — the year, as it happened, of his birth. There was a metronome, a bust of Beethoven, a bronze rose bowl with a wirework lid. Another object that took his eye was an ornamental tray in mother-of-pearl. On it was a young fellow in olden-days dress, a satin coat and breeches, who sat with two shepherdesses in a moonlit ruin. In a corner, on a little lacquered stand, was a basket of a kind he had seen before only in the foyers of picture theatres, where it would have been filled with gladiolus spears. This one had half a dozen dolls in it, their spangled skirts fixed to bentwood crooks.

Nothing in her letters suggested any of this. She had subdued her liveliness there, limiting herself maybe to the way Mac saw her. Anyway, it had given him the wrong idea, and when she came back now, bringing in tea and a slice of Napoleon, he observed her with different eyes. She apologised for the Napoleon. It came from a shop.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Sargents.’

She was surprised at that, and at his knowing already that she worked there, and he restrained himself from telling her greedily how much more he knew: the sweet-peas, the tomato jam she made that he and Mac had so often talked about and smacked their lips over, the forty-nine piece dinner set Mac had given her and Don as a wedding present, and how upset she had been when she broke the lid of a soup tureen the first time she washed it up. These facts seemed trivial now. He had made too much of them.

Several times, as they drank their tea, he caught her eye on him, a frankly puzzled look, and it was a while before he saw the reason for it. She had no idea really who he was. Mac, he saw, had never mentioned him, or if he had she had forgotten it.

She asked questions of him: where he came from — he gave her a quick sketch of Keen’s Crossing — what he was doing in Sydney, where he lived. She came from Queensland herself. Had he been up there? He told her about the boxing. He had never found it so easy to talk about himself.

Once the preliminaries were over they barely mentioned Mac. She simply took it for granted that what he had come for, now that he was here, had to do with her.

The idea alarmed him at first. It took him a little time to get used to it. But once he did he had to admit that it was true, and had been right from the start. How quickly she had seen it! That was a woman for you. She was over forty, he guessed, working backwards from the date on the certificate, but hadn’t lost the assurance of her own attractiveness.

She called the boys up to get a piece of Napoleon. They came in barefoot and in their house clothes, shorts and ragged shirts, and were awkward at first but found their tongues at last under her meaningful looks. He knew them already, of course. Ewen, the eldest was. He would be sixteen. The younger boy, Jack, was the high-jumper. They were making something down in the yard and were keen to get back to it. They shifted from foot to foot, and after a decent interval she relented and let them go.

So they came at last to the letters.

He had expected them to provide the climax of his visit and had prepared a speech. But so much had already happened that they seemed like an afterthought now, and when he said what he had to say it was in such a confused, emotional way that it sounded false.

‘Goodness,’ she said, when he told her what the envelope contained. She looked at it a moment, turned it over in her hands, then lay it, unopened, on the piano stool; and there it sat, very white and clean, for the rest of his visit.

He had expected her to open it and see how soiled the letters were, and from that how many times they had been unfolded and read. When she did not he was disappointed. She would do that later, he guessed, in private, after he left. Or would she? Once they got talking again she seemed simply to have forgotten they were there.

‘I make too much of things,’ he told himself. He knew how fond she was of Mac because he knew the letters. ‘There’s a lighter way of handling all this.’ It would go, he thought, with the rowdy good humour the house had been filled with — till he stepped in and put a damper on it.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said when he was on the doorstep again. ‘Really. I appreciate it.’

He swallowed hard. He wanted to say something to her. ‘Listen,’ he wanted to say, ‘You don’t know this — how could you? — but I watched you drink a glass of water once and it was amazing. It wasn’t you, I see that now. It was a you I made up. But it was amazing just the same. An ordinary glass of water, can you imagine it?’

What he actually said, and he was staggered later by his own temerity, was: ‘Would it be all right if I called again?’