David Malouf - The Great World

Gravity, too.

One afternoon, in the dreamy state she fell into under the blazing sun, she had had a vision of herself as a cloud, so light and transparent that she might have dissolved or risen up and floated. But inside the cloud, far off in a spotlight at the very centre of it, a little figure was performing, not for an audience, not at all, but for himself. In a state of perfect self-absorption he was turning somersaults, and she could see him quite clearly, though in fact he was such a long way off. He wasn’t weightless, but he appeared to know enough of the secrets of gravity to play the most astonishing tricks with it. She kept her eye on him; she wanted to learn the secrets of all this — of lightness, but also her own true weight in the world.

For months, with her eyes screwed up against the sun, her feet propped on the arms of a squatter’s chair and a jug of Meggsie’s lemon drink at her elbow, she had watched him perform. He was very small and far off at first, but the far-offness had to do with time, not space. He grew as he got closer; till he was so close she no longer had to squint to make him out.

Never for a moment in all this did she feel anxious for him, or for herself either. She would not float away and he would not fall. They were held, both of them.

And she did not have to feel impatient either. He was moving in his own time and would not be hurried. He was the clock. Somewhere up ahead, at a point they had not yet arrived at, he was already sitting up in his high-chair and banging with a spoon. All she had to do was wait the days out till they were there.

‘Well,’ she said now, ‘I know Vic, too.’ She urged the child to open up for a last mouthful. ‘You’re doing just what he wants. All this carrying on! It’s to make us see what a sensitive soul he is and how careful we ought to be with him, that’s all. And to make himself the centre of things.’

Ellie looked up again. It was the note of vehemence in Lucille’s voice, not the words themselves, that shocked her.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ Ma said, and she too was angry now. ‘Honestly, Lucille, there are times when I don’t think I know you at all.’

Lucille flushed. It was humiliating to her to come under her mother’s criticism and be rebuked. She took up her things, set Alexander on her hip, and stalked from the room.

‘Why are you so down on Vic?’ Ellie asked later, when they were alone together in Lucille’s room, the child on the bed between them. Lucille was sitting up cross-legged threading a needle.

‘Am I?’ she said.

‘Yes, you are. And you haven’t even seen him. You upset Ma, too. You know how fond she is of him. What’s the matter with you?’

Lucille went on with her needle. After a moment she lowered her work and said fiercely: ‘He thinks he’s the only one in the world that anything’s happened to. I know Vic. I don’t have to see him.’

Ellie drew back. She knew these stormy, half-tearful, half-defiant moods in her sister. They were close, and had been even closer in these last months since Lucille was alone.

The three years between them made a difference.

Ellie had been too young to go out with Americans — Pa wouldn’t allow it; but she had hung about when they appeared (just as in the movies) with an orchid in a square cellophane box, or chocolates, or nylons, had sized them up in her quick down-to-earth way, and afterwards, when she and Lucille, still in her dancing dress, were rolling about on one of their beds, whispering, laughing, comparing, criticising, could catch just the drawl with which this one said, ‘We sure do, ma’am,’ or the self-satisfied sprawl or little military stamp and snap of others, or the boiled look of this one, or the muscle-bound, collar-jerking shyness of another, a certain Virgil Farson Jr of Greenwood, Mississippi, who had not been Lucille’s favourite at the start, not by any means, then was. In the Virge business she had known at every point what Lucille was up to. To the extent that Ma actually blamed her for not telling and had not spoken to her for a week.

When Vic went away Ellie was fifteen. They were friends and she was fiercely loyal to him. She had taken it for granted that in the end Lucille would choose him — there was such a tie between them — and that their other little affairs and flirtations were no more than a kind of teasing play to conceal the inevitability of it.

‘No,’ Lucille told her gravely, ‘that was just kid’s stuff. Don’t you know the difference?’ She was so sure of herself that Ellie wondered what she had missed.

Still, when she got pregnant there was the sense all round, but especially on Ma’s part, that a mistake had been made.

Lucille did not think so. She broke the news to Ellie as a sworn secret, and with so much awed excitement and triumph (Ellie had never seen her at once so elated and sober and overwrought) that Ellie had felt a little thump in her own belly at the immensity, the serious adultness of it.

Lucille, she told herself, was right. She was still a schoolgirl and had no grasp of things. Even in the midst of the war, when so much that was terrible had occurred, she had simply gone on in the old way, believing that life, their life, was a story that could end only one way, according to the rules of the films she went to and the romances she read. Lucille had broken through all that, and for all their closeness she had not seen it.

For the two weeks that she had Lucille’s secret to keep she had looked on her sister as a being transformed, suddenly endowed with urgency and purpose.

The germ of light that with each passing second was swelling and rounding in her had drawn Lucille into the line of life; and it had been put there, amazingly, in such a precise and effective way, though also no doubt in his usual barging manner and with no clear intent, by Virgil Farson, a big slow boy of less than twenty. At that moment three thousand miles away in the Islands he was lounging about an Air Force base reading his Felix the Cat comics, quite ignorant yet of what he had done.

These facts astonished Ellie. She had gone about the house in a dazed state, aware suddenly of how fragile and important things could be and feeling her bond with Lucille immeasurably deepened. Lucille had crossed a border. Ellie felt that she too had come to the edge of it and was shining now and swelling in sympathy.

It was an exaggeration, of course. She had been stirred by her own possibilities, that’s all, had felt the pull in her own nature of the change in Lucille’s. She soon came back to earth.

But the little life she had been so aware of then as a mere floating presence, a new, nameless one that had turned towards them and was starting for a point maybe sixty or seventy years away was no longer nameless. It was this odd little Alexander; who filled the house with his squalls and hungers, his smells too, and was at this moment lying on the bed between them, singing to himself, kicking up his heels, and when she put her face down into his naked belly, uttering squeals of ecstasy.

‘Do you think he’ll be so different, then?’ she asked, lifting her head. She was asking on her own account, rather wary now of what it might be that she had not understood.

Lucille was more upset than she would admit. She made a mouth and turned away. It was too difficult. She couldn’t put it into words.

He would be, of course he would. He must be. Weren’t they all? So much had happened in these last years. But Vic, she knew, had a way of closing himself off from mere happenings. It was a strength; it was also, from another point of view, a weakness. The more he was touched by a thing the more he did it.

He would be changed, sure enough, perhaps horribly, and the possibility of that, however small her own part in it, was painful to her. But he would pretend not to be, and at the same time would want you to see through it and pity him.