David Malouf - The Great World

‘What’s gunna happen,’ she got out at last, painfully twisting her brow, ‘to Mumma’s things ?’

‘Her clothes, you mean?’ He went on working, taking a pencil from behind his ear.

‘No. Her things . They’re her things.’

He looked at her now.

‘The furniture an’ that,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Saucepans. You know.’

‘Nothing’s going t’ happen to them,’ he said gently. ‘What did you think? They’re yours now. Ours.’

‘Are they? Did she leave ’em?’

What had she expected, he wondered. He had no idea, even after so long, how her mind worked. Perhaps she too had taken their mother’s vision literally, the one she had herself in the end turned her back on, and expected all the furnishings of the house, right down to the serviette rings and the tea-strainer, to be taken up in some way. Maybe literally. If not that, then in essence. Was that it? So that they were no longer, as they had been till now, quite solid and useable.

Or perhaps she thought their mother’s spirit had appropriated them and made them dangerous to touch.

The chair she had sat in all night still stood in an awkward place under the lines, but neither of them had thought to move it. It was broken, its canes cracked and bleached by the weather; so much more like a natural thing than a piece of abandoned furniture that after a time, as it sank lower on one leg, they would barely notice it.

‘Yes,’ he said very quietly, ‘she left them to you. They’re yours now. You just do whatever you want with ’em.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘All right.’

She stood a moment, looking serious, then went off, and he heard her shifting things about in the kitchen, clearing the shelves and rinsing things, instituting little changes that she might have been wanting to make for years — who could know the order her mind followed? — and wouldn’t have dared make while their mother was alive.

DIGGER WAS TO discover that he had been wrong on two counts that day of the wedding. Against the odds he did see Ellie again, though not for more than six years, and then only by accident, and Vic did not, as he had put it, ‘drop him’. Two or three times a year, sometimes more often, he turned up unannounced at the Crossing and they would pass an hour together. He would sit out under the pepper tree and watch Digger at work at the bench he had there, getting up to steady the other end of a four-by-two Digger was sawing; or Digger would haul out a spare rod and they would go off and fish.

It wasn’t always easy. There were times when he was in one of those moods where everything was an irritation to him. He had come for no other reason, Digger thought, than to pick over some old resentment or injury and provoke you into wounding him. Sometimes he succeeded, and Digger would be irritated himself when he saw Vic’s satisfaction at having got him to strike out, the odd little smile he wore as he turned his head away. But on other occasions, though Vic went on and on, he would resist. Suddenly, without warning, Vic would be all appeasement, and minutes after in such excellent spirits that Digger could scarcely credit the change in him. It was as if in Digger’s refusal to be on bad terms with him he had found the capacity to be on good terms once again with himself.

But there were many occasions when he came only because he had picked up something, some new gadget, that he thought Digger would be interested in and ought to see, or because the mood was on him to do a bit of quiet fishing, or simply because two or three months had gone by and they hadn’t seen one another. They never discussed whatever business it was he was involved in. It was only when Doug mentioned it that Digger began to get an idea of what a figure he was cutting out there.

‘Ol’ Vic’s doin’ well, isn’t ’e?’

‘Is ’e?’ Digger said. ‘What d’ya mean?’

Douggy laughed. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Needham’s — that’s him. He’s practically a millionaire. Makin’ money hand over fist.’

There was no irony in Douggy’s tone. He was, as he had always been, sceptical of what he called the bosses, but he took Vic’s rise in the world as reflecting on him as well, on all of them: he did not begrudge it. But who would have guessed it, eh? Who would have thought they would have a mate who was on the way — how old was he? twenty-eight, twenty-nine? — to being a millionaire? Not that he and Vic were all that close any more. But it was a wonder just the same.

‘Doesn’ ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.

‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about business.’

‘Well, ’e was never slow to blow ’is own trumpet — not in the ol’ days. What’s happened to ’im?’

‘Nothing,’ Digger said. ‘I dunno.’

‘So what do you talk about?’ Doug asked after a moment, and his look was humorous.

‘Nothing much,’ Digger told him. It was the truth. He had to think. ‘Cars an’ that,’ he added at last.

‘Oh? So what sort of car does ’e drive?’

‘Humber Hawk. Before that a Pontiac.’

Douggy looked impressed. ‘Didn’ you think from that,’ he asked, ‘that ’e might be doin’ well?’

Digger didn’t know what to say. He had seen at the wedding the sort of people Vic came from and the life they led, and had been too absorbed with the vehicles themselves, with raising the bonnet and looking in at the workings of them, to ask himself how much they might represent in the way of ‘getting on’.

Vic liked to show them off, but there was nothing show-offish or proprietorial in it. They could have been kids who had come upon the Pontiac or the Riley, the Austin Healey or the Ford Customline, parked in a street somewhere, less concerned with who owned it than with the full panoply of its metal power and the wonderful elegance and achievement of the thing; though it struck Digger as amazing at times (he shivered and went ghostly under his clothes) that they should be here to lay their hands on the sun-warmed gloss, and to feel, when they put their foot down, the full power of these models of 1949, 1952, 1954.

‘I believe you’re doin’ pretty well for yourself,’ he said at last, one day when their easiness allowed it. ‘So Doug tells me.’

‘I’m holding my end up,’ he admitted.

Digger was planing a set of planks, three or four of which stood upright against the trunk of the pepper tree. Pale shavings, almost transparent and showing the honey-coloured grain, curled off the blade as he swept his arm through, fell, turned over, and rolled away in the breeze. Vic sat on an upturned kerosene tin.

‘I didn’ realise,’ Digger said.

‘Oh —’ Vic passed it off lightly, ‘I’ve had a bit of luck, that’s all.’

It was true: things fell into his hand and multiplied. But that wasn’t the whole of it. He was smart, he worked hard, never stopped in fact, he was famous for it; he had an eye for the way things were moving and would be on the spot and ready to go before other men, more experienced men too, had seen there was a chance; and he was ruthless — he let nothing and no one get in his path. But he also had luck. It worried him.

Luck, he believed, was a thing you couldn’t rely on. It had let him down once, and badly. It could let him down again. It was his opinion that a man who depended on luck was little more than a lounger in the world and had in no way proved himself. What he believed in was character. His achievements, such as they were, all plain and visible, had to be balanced against what was not visible because it was within, but which must exist because they did, and could therefore be taken on trust.