David Malouf - The Great World

He and Iris seldom spoke of Mac. He connected them only lightly. Their life together was made up of things they had discovered in one another, separately and in their own way. Digger never again saw the letters he had brought her, and he did not ask about them. What they had once stood for in his life had been replaced, and filled a hundred times over, by the woman herself, who was quite different, as he now saw her, from the one who had written them. He was not, in that sense, devoted to the past.

He kept the different parts of his life separate from one another, though there was no separation in him; no conflict either.

He told his mother nothing of Bondi Junction, but she knew of course. He was astonished all over again by the extent to which she could get into his head still, and was aware, in a way that disturbed him sometimes, of what he was thinking.

Each Thursday morning she laid out clean clothes for him, shirt, socks, underpants. She did it to show him that however secretive he might have become — and he had been such an open little fellow — he could hide nothing from her.

She would have preferred him to have some local girl, and kept trying to set him up with one. She wanted him married. She wanted grandchildren. But she knew too well his capacity for loyalty, for sticking at things, to challenge him. The laying out of his clothes each Thursday became a ritual, and when she died, Jenny did it, without knowing quite what the ritual meant, except that it was one.

‘I UNDERSTAND,’ ERN Webber said, ‘that you an’ Douggy got an invite to the weddin’.’ There was a good deal of scorn in his voice.

‘That’s right,’ Digger told him.

‘I thought you might of been best man,’ Ern said. It was what passed, in his mind, as a stroke of wit. ‘Considerin’.’ When Digger failed to take this up he went back to his own grievance. ‘Well, he was never all that shook on me. An’ I know why, too. ’Cause I seen through ’im, that’s why, ’e never fooled me. Not after that Mac business. I notice ’e never turns up to reunions.’

‘No,’ Digger said, ‘an’ neither do I. So what does that prove?’

This sort of talk was painful to him. It raised too many ghosts, put a finger on wounds that were still raw in him. But it was no good saying any of this to Ern. He was a tactless fellow with fixed and emphatic views, and besides, was bitter now at the snub he had received.

‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Digger found himself saying to cut off further argument.

In fact Digger had not been entirely happy at the wedding, which was a very grand affair, but he did not intend to tell Ernie this.

Vic had never spoken to him of the Warrenders, not once. He was unprepared for the house at Strathfield, with its turrets and the big hallway laid with blue, white and brown terracotta tiles and lit with a fanlight, and on either side of the door coloured panels of glass. A good deal of renovation had been done for the occasion. All the stonework of the façade had been repainted and the ironwork of the upstairs verandah given a lick of paint. The vision it presented to Digger was of an opulence he had no reference for, outside of books.

He went quiet and felt awkward in his old suit. He had taken it for granted that Vic’s people would be like his own, or Mac’s or Doug’s. That was the impression he had given. Now this! ‘All that time,’ he thought, ‘he was making mugs of us.’ He felt himself flush with indignation, though there was shame in it too.

He tried to hide it. He had told Iris a good deal about Vic and of the tie between them. He did not want her to see now how shaken up he was. When Douggy raised his eyebrows and cast a look around the room where they were to leave their things that said, ‘Well now, what do you make of this?’ he played dumb, and only Douggy’s extreme good nature prevented him from taking offence.

A marquee had been set up on the lawn behind the house. It was of a transparent blue stuff, very light and airy, and all round the edges of it alcoves had been created as at a proper ball, each one hung with loops of cornflowers and pink roses and with a medallion above on which the couple’s initials, V and E, were very prettily entwined. Iris, who had been at a good many marriages, had never seen anything like it.

There were waiters in Eton jackets with burgundy cummerbunds, stacks of champagne in dry ice, whisky, beer, soft drinks for the children. Waxed planking had been laid to make a dance floor, and there was a three-piece band to play foxtrots, quicksteps, slow waltzes, gypsy taps. They shared their alcove with Doug and his new wife Janet and some younger friends of the bride.

Meanwhile Vic, sometimes with Ellie at his side, sometimes alone, was moving through all this as if he had never known anything else. Not the least sign now, Digger thought, of the close-cropped, half-crazy character who had come to him at the Crossing. When was that — two months ago? No sign in fact of anything Digger had known of him, or of any of the things they had been through. The ease with which he wore his wedding suit, which sat very smooth and square across his shoulders, the big carnation in his lapel, the freshness and youth he suggested as he clapped older men on the back and called them Gus or Jack or Horrie, and made himself agreeable to their wives — all this appeared to make nothing of what he had been, what they had both been, just a year ago. It denied that as if it had never been.

Digger felt injured, and not just on his own part, but strangely enough on Vic’s part too, the Vic he had once been close to. And on Douggy’s and Mac’s. He didn’t know where to look.

The Warrenders, you could see, doted on him, no doubt of that, and he plumped himself up with it; you could see that too. He glowed. And the assurance of it gave him the power to submit others, the whole world maybe, to his charm.

‘What does it mean?’ Digger asked himself miserably. ‘Is he so shallow? Or is it just that he knows as well how to hide himself among this lot as he did with us?’ Either way he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He felt empty and hurt, but sorry too, and if it wasn’t for Iris, who had been looking forward to all this, would have gone straight back to the station.

She felt the tightness in him. ‘What is it, love?’ she whispered. ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself?’

She was. The Warrenders were generous people, there was no mistaking that, and some of the warmth of the occasion, and some aspects of the ceremony too, she took as extending to her and Digger: the vows, which she was always moved by, the confetti, the three-tiered wedding cake with its little columned tabernacle on top, and under it a bride and groom, which would be cut up and passed around in slices soon, and eaten, just a mouthful each, by the guests, or sent off in flat tins stamped with wedding-bells to other parts of the country or overseas. When Mr Warrender got to his feet, and instead of making a speech recited a poem he had written, she took Digger’s hand, feeling that the words, in a way she had not expected, spoke for her own emotions, which were so full that only poetry perhaps — and she knew nothing about poetry — might contain them.

Some people, she saw, thought it rather queer that what this big man, who looked like an alderman or a Rotarian, should have embarked on was a poem.

The occasion till now had been a mixture of formality and a suppressed but growing rowdiness. Some of the male guests, skylarking about in their restraining collars, and restrained as well, but only with glances, by their wives, had been making rough jokes, hinting broadly at the cruder side of things. The groom had taken this in good part, as he was bound to do, and unmarried girls, caught in a position where they could not help but overhear (which in a good many cases they were meant to), let it appear that they had not caught on; or they drew their mouths down in a disapproving but half-amused and indulgent manner and turned away. Even one or two of the formal speeches had taken advantage of what is allowable and struck a ribald note. So when Mr Warrender started, a group of the noisier fellows took it as a spoof. Only after a good many hard looks were they shamed into silence. They put on expressions of honest bemusement and let themselves be stilled. But others, Iris saw, were, as she was, moved.