David Malouf - The Great World

Sitting out in the dry wind, under the pepper tree, on the upturned tin, what he was worth was not millions but just what Digger might see and reflect back to him, with no need of explanation or proof.

He looked up very frankly to where Digger had stopped still with the plane in his hand, looking at him, and there it was.

It was a moment Digger would remember; when he saw clearly, and for the first time, what Vic wanted of him. He was to be one of the witnesses to his life. Not to his achievements, anyone could see those, which is why he hadn’t bothered to draw Digger’s attention to them; but to those qualities in him that would tip the balance on the other, the invisible side.

It had taken Digger so long to grasp this because the idea that a man might need witnesses to his life was so foreign to him. But once he had seen it, though the role did not please him, he stuck. It was one more of the responsibilities that had been laid upon him. He would not have chosen it, any more than he would have chosen some of the others, but it was there. Chance, life, fate — whatever it was — chose for you, connecting and binding you into the pattern of other people’s lives, and making that at last the pattern of your own.

It was Jenny who did the resisting, and this had its comic side. None of Vic’s appearances over the years, or the little presents he brought, ever reconciled her to him.

One night they were watching TV when she suddenly turned and asked in astonishment:

‘Is that who I think it is?’

‘Yes,’ Digger told her. ‘Vic.’

‘So what’s he done?’

Her quick rule of thumb was that anyone who got on to TV, if he wasn’t a pop star or a newsreader, must be a crook.

‘Nothing, Made a bit of money, that’s all, by taking someone over — You know, buying ’em up. There’s some trouble with the unions.’

She screwed her eyes up and concentrated. That didn’t tell her anything. That wasn’t what it was about.

The interviewer was a girl, and after being very nice to her, or pretending to be, calling her by her name, Jane, but showing too that he didn’t take any of what she was asking seriously, he suddenly went cold, then lost his temper. Jenny chuckled. This was what it was about.

‘ She doesn’t think much of him,’ she declared.

‘Good on yer, girlie!’ she shouted. ‘ She thinks he’s a crook. Is ’e?’

‘No,’ Digger told her. He was amused. ‘And that girl doesn’t think so either.’

‘Why’s she after ’im then?’

‘It’s ’er job. She’s doing ’er job, that’s all. Being aggressive.’

‘Mr Smarty Pants!’ Jenny shouted, ‘Mr Smarty Smarty Pants!’

VIC, STILL IN his shirt-sleeves, pushed back the breakfast plates, shifted the pepper and salt shakers and the toast-rack to a new position, poured himself more tea, lit a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair. He had a habit, when he was about to propose a new idea, of clearing a space before him. You could, Ma knew, judge how large or risky the idea was by the extent of cloth he laid bare.

Their consultations together often took place over the remains of breakfast. With Pa already installed in his office and Ellie off delivering the boy to kindergarten, they had a good half-hour to themselves. The domestic setting, the fragments of the meal (‘There is something very reassuring,’ Ma thought, ‘about burnt toast’), gave an unemphatic quality to their talk; the solid grip on things suggested by teacup handles and spoons grounded what might otherwise have seemed fantastic in the ordinary and commonplace.

It astonished Vic, when he recalled the anxieties she had been racked by, that Ma could be so changed. She had never failed him, not once. If he drew back sometimes, and even he had his moments of doubt, though he did his best not to show them, she saw it and would be there to urge him on.

Her mind was sharper than his. He came up with a scheme, presented it to her, and let her knock it down if she could. If she couldn’t find the crack in a thing it was foolproof.

He relied on her. They were a team. Arguing a deal out with her was like arguing with his other self, the sceptical one he might not otherwise have made contact with, or not so immediately. He accepted criticisms from her that, if a man had made them, he would have felt bound to reject. They knew one another too well for that, and cared too much, both of them, for what they were doing, to be soft with one another.

He was lingering this morning, deliberately holding back. There was a vagueness in him — not quite weakness, it was never that — which she would have in a moment to acknowledge and deal with. She knew him very well by now. But there was also this new space he had opened up. ‘First things first,’ she thought.

‘So,’ she said briskly, ‘this is it, eh?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ten-thirty.’

He saw how she was looking at him. He pushed his plate back another inch.

‘I find all this a bit difficult,’ he said, ‘I mean, he can’t be that innocent. I thought he’d be tougher, a bloke like that.’

‘He is tough,’ Ma told him. ‘Don’t be fooled by all that soft talk. He’s tough in the old way, like my father. You fellows are a different breed.’

She saw the little flicker across his brow. She had not meant it as a criticism.

‘He doesn’t seem to realise that he’ll no longer have control. What does ’e think we are? A charitable institution?’

He was speaking of Jack Creely, an old school friend of Pa’s who had an engineering firm with government contracts. Needham’s were taking him over.

‘He’s so full of himself! He thinks he’s been clever, pulling the wool over our eyes.’ His pride was touched.

What disturbed him, she knew, was the talk it would generate. He had made a good many enemies these last years. People thought he was getting too big for his boots; he was too sure of himself, too successful. They would be only too eager now to use Jack Creely as further evidence against him.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’re in for forty-six thousand, aren’t we? That doesn’t look like charity to me. Jack knows the score.’

The sharpness with which she heard herself say this gave her a start. She too had come a long way in these last years.

As for the forty-six thousand, just saying it straight out like that took her breath away. As if it was nothing!

She thought of her father, and saw him raise his eyebrows, half-shocked, but half-admiring too, at the summary way she had dealt with Jack Creely. But what would really have shocked him, as it did her too a little, was the forty-six thousand. Her father’s rule had been a strict one. You stayed within limits, you kept out of debt. ‘This feller’s a lunatic,’ her father would have told her, half-admiring of that too, but with a strong suggestion that she ought to look out for herself. ‘Can’t you see that?’ She heard it so clearly in the room that she was surprised Vic didn’t jerk his head up, in that aggressive way he had, and answer him.

He had been a buccaneer, her father, but of shallow waters. They were in open waters now.

For more than three years the factory had been abandoned and boarded up. The brickwork was crumbling and weeds had sprouted, not just between the flags of the yard but on the stone windowsills, and even, in places, from the roof. The little boy, Greg, was scared to go there. She had seen him more than once standing in the archway, peering into the yard and daring himself to go on.

The house and the factory, when her father built them, had been a single unit, two halves when she was growing up of a single world. The girls who worked in the packing room were part of the family. They might step across to the kitchen to get a cup of sugar if they were short at morning teatime, and if one of them took sick she would be brought over to lie in one of the rooms off the verandah. As a little girl Ma had often put aside her dolls or her jigsaw, or left off practising with her roller-skates on the long side verandah, to go across and have a chat with her favourites among the packers, Alice Green or Mrs Danby, or to watch a van being unloaded in the yard. Or she would perch on a stool in her father’s office and cut out floral patterns from the Needham’s labels and advertising placards and paste them into a ledger.