David Malouf - The Great World

‘What a weird bloke he is,’ Digger thought. ‘Honestly, I’ll never get the hang of him.’ One moment he was all smooth impenetrability, and the next he opened up and gave himself away — but only, Digger thought, when he was afraid he might have lost you. How did he manage it? Was it calculated, or were they as guileless as he made them seem, these moments when he put himself entirely in your hands? Digger was inclined to protect himself against his own weakness. ‘A man’d be a fool,’ he told himself, ‘to make anything of this. He’ll drop me eventually. He’s bound to.’ It was so clear to him, from what he had seen, that Vic’s was a life he could have no part in. In the normal course of things they would never have met, and they were back now in the normal course of things. Still, something was restored between them, and for the moment he was relieved.

When, soon after, Vic was captured by a woman who wanted her husband to meet him, Digger excused himself. He wanted to think things over. He went off through an open arch into a factory yard. It was mostly in shadow, but the archway, where the sun broke through, cast a skew, truncated reflection of itself across the flags. He dragged a packing case out of a heap of rubbish, set it down in the sun, and rolled himself a smoke.

It was here that Ellie, coming to the archway in search of Vic, found him sitting with his head lowered, his tie loose, his new shoes set far apart on the flags. She knew who he was. Seated on his packing-case in the sun he looked ordinary enough, but there was something too that appealed to her.

He glanced up, startled. He had an odd, thin-faced, rather wooden look, and very deep-set eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He was getting awkwardly to his feet. ‘You’re Digger, aren’t you?’

‘Well,’ she added, and laughed, lifting her arms which were sheeted in a shimmering white material, ‘you can see who I am,’ and any embarrassment there might have been between them immediately vanished. Digger dropped his fag and ground it out. It was a way, for a moment, of not having to look at her.

‘I’d have known anyway,’ he found himself saying, and blushed because he couldn’t think, once it was out, why he had said it or what it meant.

She smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m glad we’ve met at last. I was wondering what you’d be like.’

‘Me?’

‘Vic’s talked a lot about you — well, not a lot, but — well, you know.’

They were standing just inside the arch. Behind Digger lay the empty yard. Looking at her the sun was in his eyes so that he squinted a little, but he could feel the edge of the archway’s shadow on his shoulder, creeping in.

Outside on the lawn the party was beginning to break up. Many of the guests were already gone. Those who remained were scattered in groups, the men all fired up with the last of the day’s arguments, sport, politics, business; some of the women now with their high heels kicked off, easing their stockinged feet in the grass. The band still played, but the floor was occupied now entirely by children, little boys in long pants and long-sleeved shirts and ties, some of them bow ties, and girls in party frocks with ribbons. They were pushing one another about on the waxed boards like perfect little adults while one or two real adults looked on. One of them, Digger saw, was Ellie’s father, Mr Warrender. He looked rather tipsy, and Digger saw him, over Ellie’s shoulder, step on to the dance floor in a top-heavy, deliberate way, as if he feared he might not make it, and begin to weave about among the couples, who looked sideways at him, embarrassed by his dancing alone like that, and steered away from him towards the corners of the floor.

Ellie, seeing Digger’s intent look, turned her head, wondering what it was that had caught his eye; but what she saw was not her father making slow circles with his arms raised among the dancing children, but Vic. He was standing just off to the side in a group of older men, all with their heads together. He had turned away from whatever it was they were discussing. With his hands in his pockets, he was watching Digger and her.

He glanced down when her eye caught him and pretended to laugh at something that was being said. But a moment later, when she looked that way again, he was again watching. This time Digger saw it too. And immediately Vic detached himself from the group, one or two of whom turned and looked after him, and came over the lawn towards them.

Ellie looked at Digger, made a face, and smiled.

‘Well,’ her look said, ‘that’s that. This is the only moment we’ll have. But that’s all right, isn’t it?’

Digger found that he too was grinning.

‘He’s scared. You know — that we might get on too well together. I mean, of what we might find out — you know, about him , not about one another — if he leaves us alone too long. He’s like that.’

‘I know,’ Digger agreed.

‘He can’t help it.’

‘He’s a difficult cuss.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me ’.

These were the thoughts that flew between them.

He wondered what it was exactly that Vic had told her; not about him but about the rest of it. Not a lot, he thought. There would be things she would never know. She would wake nights and find him sitting on the edge of the bed (Digger knew these occasions himself) with the sweat pouring off him; stuck in the real heat of a place he had been dreaming about, except that it was never just a dream and there was no way back from it.

‘You’ve found Digger,’ he said brightly, coming up and taking her arm. ‘That’s good.’

He stood looking from one to the other of them, aware of the warmth between them. They were quite easy, gave no sign that anything they had been saying had had to be cut off short by his arrival. But the smiles they wore were conspiratorial, and Digger reddened and looked down. Vic knew him too well to miss it. But Ellie was not intimidated.

‘I was just asking Digger to come and see me sometime,’ she said, contradicting what Digger thought had been agreed between them. ‘You will, won’t you, Digger?’

He glanced at Vic. He too was smiling, quite amiably you might have thought, but he said nothing, and he did not want it; Digger saw that quite plainly. Why had she suggested it?

‘I should find Iris,’ he said quickly. ‘She’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.’

A BLUSTERY DAY, late August. High up, flat-bottomed clouds were in flight, sailing fast around the world, but the air was clear and up here on the hill above the Crossing she could see in all directions at last, north, south, eastwards towards the river’s mouth and the ocean. The whole landscape was laid out for her.

Downriver, in a dozen little bays and inlets, boats were stuck like bits of paper, white on blue, unmoving at this distance. Upstream the bridge, its traffic silenced by the sound the wind was making, the wrenching of branches, fistfuls of leaves rattling at the ends of twigs and the gulls’ crying.

To one side below was the store in its elbow of low land, high and dry and isolated: the ridge of its tin roof, the four posts of her washing-lines, old barrels and kero tins with her bits of shrubs in them, Digger’s workbench under the pepper tree. Jenny was there, mooning about in a cotton frock chasing birds.

‘She doesn’t know yet,’ she thought. ‘She hasn’t realised I’m out of the house.’ The panic there would be when she went into their room and found the empty bed! The moaning and flapping! She was sorry about that.

On the high bank opposite, on one of the roofs of the weekenders that dotted the hillside over there and flashed among the trees, Digger would be working, a hammer in his belt, a stub of pencil behind his ear.