David Malouf - The Great World

As for Mr Warrender, he gave no indication that there was anything out of the way in what he was doing. He spoke as if poetry was his normal manner of address, and after a moment or two it was accepted as such.

He wasn’t solemn. There was often a little kick to what he had to say that was quite humorous, and this surprised Iris; she didn’t understand it. She had to get Digger, later, who had a gift in that direction, to repeat some of Mr Warrender’s lines (he could too, word for word) before she got hold of what she had been so moved by:

‘Eternal.’ On our lips the extravagant promise

That spirit makes. The animal in us knows

The truth, but lowers its dumb head and permits itself for this

One day to be garlanded and led

Beyond never-death into ever after, being

In love with what is always out of reach:

The all, the ever-immortal and undying

Word beyond word that breathes through mortal speech.

That was one bit of it.

When Digger spoke these lines they lacked some of the ordinariness Mr Warrender had given them. Even under the circumstances of the tent and its decorations, which were unusual enough, and the guests all subdued and with their hands held back a moment from the clatter of knives and forks, and from glasses even, gravely or politely listening, there had been something very natural and straightforward about it; as if, at the moment of his getting up and looking around at them all, the words the occasion demanded had simply come to him of their own accord. It all seemed so fitting to Iris, and so easy too, because the words Mr Warrender came up with might have been her own, even if some of them were a puzzle to her.

But when Digger repeated the lines, they seemed fixed and formal. He might have been reading them off a printed page. And now that it was long past, it was not simply the one occasion they referred to but all such occasions, and this too, Iris thought, she had understood, if only vaguely, at the moment itself. As if there were more of them present, many more, than the guest-list would have shown:

Noon here in this garden, and the daystar

Shakes out instant fire to call up earth, water, air,

Grass, flowers, limbs and the still invisible presences

That hold their breath and stand in awe about us.

We are all of us guests at a unique, once only

Occasion — this one, this , the precarious gift

Alive in our hands again, the mixed blessing

Offered and accepted. .

‘The mixed blessing’. That was one of the things that had puzzled her. It had seemed out of place, suggesting as it did a kind of doubt rather than the easy conviction that is usual to such occasions. But she had come, in time, to see that it said several things at once — that was just the point of it, and she saw then what it was in Mr Warrender that had struck her. He did not take things for granted or just as they appeared. What he said was: ‘Yes — but,’ in this way allowing for what really was, as well as what you might want life to be.

Vic had sat very attentive through it all, with a single deep crease between his brows, either because he thought he might have at some point to defend Mr Warrender against the rowdy element or because what his father-in-law was saying was important to him and he too was struggling to get hold of it.

Ellie on the other hand was following the poem with her lips, as if she already knew it, word for word.

Later, going over the events of the day, the spring heat that had set their skin prickling and given everything such a fresh glow, then the coolness as shadows began to fall, the music, Mr Warrender’s poem, even the magpies sitting humped and patient, waiting for the crowd to thin out so that they could dive after soaked crumbs — going over all this, they came to feel that the occasion had been a special one for them too, and that it was Mr Warrender who had given expression to the various moods of it, and his words, as Digger repeated them, through which they could best recover what they had felt.

But there had been something embarrassing as well. Later in the day Digger had gone up to Mr Warrender to say a few words, and to see if he could find in the man himself some indication of where it came from, the poem, but also his boldness in being able to get up in public like that and deliver it.

Nothing came of the meeting. Mr Warrender was all noise at first, all bluffness and easy affability. Digger was embarrassed. Then Mr Warrender was too and stood ignoring Digger altogether, lifting himself up and down on the toes of his shoes, observing the ground and humming. Digger had had the greatest difficulty in getting away.

Except for a moment outside the church, when he and Iris and Doug and Janet had gone up together to shake his hand, Digger had not spoken to Vic, and Vic, he thought, had gone out of his way afterwards to avoid them. After what he had seen, Digger was not surprised by this, but he did find it uncomfortable. Why had he bothered to invite them? To show himself off? Was that all it was?

Towards the end of the day, while Iris was taking the opportunity offered by bathrooms and such to look over the house, Digger, still chewing on the grievance he felt, went to moon about for a bit under some firs. It was over against a high brick wall where there had till recently, he guessed, been a chicken run; maybe they had got rid of it for the wedding. There were still some feathers about, clinging to the fir branches and caught in the needles underfoot, and resting in a corner were the planks that had made up the perches, all split along the grains, encrusted with droppings and beginning to be overgrown with moss. It was quite secluded in here. He walked up and down and was too deep in himself to see that someone had come up beside him and had been standing, he could not guess for how long, just a few feet away.

‘Hullo, Digger,’ he said lightly. ‘What are you up to?’

He spoke as if there was no constraint between them — not on his part. He had seen nothing, Digger realised, of what he was feeling. His mood was entirely calm, joyful even — well, why shouldn’t he be? — and Digger felt abashed, as if he was the one who was at fault.

‘They looking after you?’ he enquired. ‘Had a piece of wedding cake?’

He had a piece himself and was holding it, half-eaten, in his palm.

‘Enough to drink?’

It pleased him, you could see, to have this opportunity to play host. He did it in a very grave way, but with a kind of shyness too, in case you thought he was being smug, that communicated itself immediately to Digger and made him feel again that he had done him an injustice and was in the wrong. He mumbled something, but could not come up with the light reply that might have made things easy between them.

Vic stood, swaying a little, and looked over his shoulder at the crowd. He had an empty glass in one hand and in the other the remains of his piece of cake. They stood a moment. Then, with a gesture Digger had seen him make a thousand times, but under very different circumstances, he tilted his head back, cupped his palm, and, very careful not to lose any, let the crumbs and mixed fruit roll back into his mouth.

It was utterly characteristic. That, his concern not to let a single crumb get lost, and the way too, when he tilted his head back, that his whole throat was bared, gave so much away to anyone who could feel it that Digger found himself choked. All the resentment he had felt went right out of him.

Vic meanwhile was examining his tie and the front of his suit for crumbs. He picked one off and put it on his tongue; then looked up, half-shy, as if he had been caught at something, and they were back immediately in an intimacy that was so strong, and appealed to something so deep in both of them, that they had to draw back from it.