David Malouf - The Great World

‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘He couldn’t put up with having a woman for a boss, that was the real trouble. Thought it was beneath his dignity.’

‘Oh?’ said Pa. ‘I thought you were always the boss. I thought I was used to it.’

‘Anyway,’ said Ma, ‘we’re on top again, that’s the main thing.’

‘All these years,’ Pa said, ‘we had this secret weapon an’ didn’t even know it. We let Ma loose and the buggers fled.’

Behind all this raillery, Vic felt, there were tensions that only humour, their old rough-gentle humour, could deal with.

But it had changed Ma utterly, this move to the centre of their lives. All that had previously been lax in her had come to attention. The vagueness and languor that had seemed constitutional in her, the restless anxiety, had belonged only, it now appeared, to the conditions she had imposed upon herself — against nature, as it were; first to make way for her brother Stevie, then for Pa. When wartime changed the rules, she had simply stepped in and done what she had all along been intended to do; temporarily at first, while Pa was down with dengue fever, then, with scarcely a protest on his part, for good.

War economies had put a premium on local products. Ma, seeing the opportunity it offered, had acted and made a killing.

It astonished Pa that this woman he had lived with for twenty-five years, and known for more like forty, should suddenly reveal herself as a ‘buccaneer’. She was a Needham, and her father’s daughter, that’s what it was. Pa, who had found the old man intimidating, a bit of a ruffian in fact, was amused, but awed too, by the extent to which he reappeared now in female form. He teased Ma and made a joke of it — that was his style — but was disturbed.

Ma too found it easier to present what had happened as a freak of the times. She was pragmatic, Ma. It was one of the qualities she had had no opportunity to reveal till now, but once liberated, she gave it rein, like the rather salty humour that went with it. The agent of her liberation had been, of all things, the Japanese Imperial Army, though that, like so much else that had happened, was by the way. She had not been part of their Co-prosperity Plan.

It was too humorous a view, this, too odd, far-fetched even, to be admitted. She kept it to herself. People, she had discovered, were not very sympathetic to unusual views, however humorous they might be, or to those who expressed them.

Vic had caught the new note in her voice on the telephone. It was partly, he felt now, what had drawn him to come. There was a confederacy between them. It did not have to be evoked. All that had been settled years back in their uneasy consultations, when she had felt his commitment to her and had seen already, as he had not, that they might one day make a team.

She led him off now to see what she had been doing out there — in the factory, she meant — and without words, and taking the old relationship between them quite for granted, put it to him: we’re partners, eh?

There was no coquettishness in it. She did not play up to the male in him by pretending to be weak or in need. It was an offer between equals. On both sides an opportunity that was too good to miss.

They were standing, dwarfed as you always were here, under the great cross-beamed ceiling of the factory, a place that bore an eerie resemblance, Vic thought, to a godown — but the shadow this threw across his spirit he immediately drove off.

You came in out of strong sunlight into coolness. But it was a coolness of a particular kind, a climate all of its own, and at the touch of it he felt something restored in him. It was like that first waking up into the real temperature of your body after days of fever, the crossing over a line between zones. He felt a goosepimpling all over the surface of him, and what came back, and with an immediacy he was quite unprepared for, was the last occasion he had come here, the eve of his departure.

A self-conscious, self-important eighteen-year-old, he had stood here to take temporary leave of his life, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. Now, five years later, with the knowledge of all that, which was still bitter in him, taken fully into account, he found he could look on his former self with none of the angry disappointment he had been consumed by in the months since he got back. He could face that humourless schoolboy, standing there so full of himself and making so many promises to the world, with detachment and a wary tolerance. There was no shame — or anyway, none so deep that it demanded the penalty of death — in having been eighteen, and so ignorant of what the world could do to you.

It was the place itself that brought this home to him, and he remembered something he had heard when he went down to Keen’s Crossing but had dismissed till now as one of Digger’s mystifications.

‘It’s all right for you ,’ he had thought, looking about the clearing and observing how completely Digger fitted in to it; so much so that he had found it difficult to imagine him in any other place — had he really been up there ? But now he too felt it. Some impression of his presence had remained here and was waiting to be filled. He could, with no difficulty at all, step into it now as if he had never left.

AT LAST ELLIE arrived, dropped off by a noisy group in a red convertible. She stopped in the doorway a moment to apologise for being late. ‘No, don’t look at me,’ she told Vic when he tried to go to her, ‘I’m a mess,’ and she ran off to change. When she came down again it was in a cotton dress with little ties at the shoulder and no stockings. ‘Ah,’ Pa said, ‘here’s our girl.’

When he left she had been at school; they were mates and had told one another everything. She threw her arms around him now as if nothing had changed between them.

He glanced across to see if Lucille was watching, but she was absorbed with the child, refusing, a little too deliberately he thought, to acknowledge him.

Ellie had a job. She had been drafted at first into a munitions factory, but was working now in a motor pool, driving a six-ton truck and doing all her own maintenance. She showed him her hands. She loved zooming about all over the city, and the long trips up to Lithgow or down the coast to Wollongong. You could tell this from the way she talked about it, and the others, who must have heard her tales a dozen times, seemed delighted to hear them again.

She got up now, still talking, and fetched a bowl of unshelled peanuts that Meggsie had set out. Taking one she cracked it in half, popped one nut into her mouth, then cracked the other half and, just as she would have done in the old days, passed it to him, all the time going on with the story she was telling.

It was as if he had never been away. She had never had for him any of the intimidating glamour of Lucille, so they could fall back now, almost without thinking, or so it seemed, into little unselfconscious habits, like this one with the peanuts.

The story ended, he laughed and she looked up and said, ‘Eat your peanut.’ He had been sitting with it in his hand.

Food had an almost mystical importance to him; any food, even a crust of bread. He hoarded things, even the most useless scraps and leftovers, but knew how odd it was and hid it.

He looked now at the peanut he was holding. Very slowly, he put it in his mouth and began to chew.

All through Meggsie’s long Sunday dinner he did not look once at Lucille. In the front room afterwards he lounged, hands in pockets, in the window and watched her at play with the child.

There were just the three of them in the room. Ellie was on the phone in the hall. He could hear her laughing. The others had gone upstairs to rest. Lucille did not like being alone with him, he knew that, but was unwilling to make an issue of it.