David Malouf - The Great World

All this had brought the world of manufacturing and business into their daily lives, so that for her there had been no gap between them, the two worlds were interpenetrable. It was this view of things that she meant to re-establish by making the breakfast table the scene of her consultations with Vic, and all the more because what they were engaged with was no longer something you could stroll across to the other side of the garden and see .

Margarine. That had been their first move. Astonishing how easily, given a little capital, you could shift from one commodity to another. Soap, margarine — it was all the same, it seemed, though her father mightn’t have thought so. He had brought his knowhow about soap-making from the Old Country, and from the Lake District, where he grew up, the recipes for the perfumes he used. It was all very personal to him, and to all of them. The soaps had been named after English flowers, lilac, violet, musk-rose, and the finest and most expensive of them after her mother, Mary Louise. At Christmas, special packets were made up as presents to clients and friends.

But there was no call these days for things that were hand-made. Hicks had seen the point of the move straight off, and was delighted to be let loose on a new product, with new premises and a real staff, including a dozen trained technicians.

The amount they had had to borrow was terrifying. Hadn’t she just got them out of the red? But Vic saw things in a different way.

‘Listen,’ he told her, ‘things have changed. There’s nothing to be gained by playing safe and staying out of debt. A millionaire isn’t a man who’s got a million. He’s a man who owes a million, and if he owes ten million, all the better. That’s how we’ve got to think. If it worries you, Ma, just you leave it to me.’

‘My God,’ she’d thought. But once she took the idea in she found she could live quite easily with it. That was him . He was all energy and unbounded confidence. What’s more, the system worked.

His other idea was what he called spread . It had nothing to do with margarine — quite the opposite, in fact. Instead of limiting themselves to one commodity, one sort of venture, they took up, in an opportunistic way, whatever offered, using one company to raise credit for another, or they simply let things sit and appreciate.

So he took them into real estate, buying up corner sites all over the suburbs, odd rows of shops, that could be sold off to the petrol companies for service stations. They got into the building trade, financing new-style units, and quite soon owned a demolition company as well. For no other reason than that it was going cheap, he acquired a factory for bicycle parts, but seeing the possibilities in it, switched to specialist parts for the motor industry. Get a hold on just one of those parts, a reputation for being reliable — no strikes, no hold-ups — a good transport side, make yourself indispensable to an assembly-line somewhere, and you were made. Lately he had developed an interest in mining — sand mining up the Queensland coast, bauxite mining in Cape York Peninsula — and had his eye now on several oil-search enterprises, one of them in New Guinea, another in north-west Western Australia. Sooner or later, somewhere on the continent, they would strike oil. The thing was to get in on the ground floor. All this was spread .

It seemed a long step to her, from a place on the other side of the yard to sites they had a stake in that were three thousand miles away. But this was precisely what he was excited by, the sense of far-flung spaces to be opened up: a map on the wall, and the geography of the whole continent to move in, and not just what was above ground either, but what was below ground as well; and beyond men geographical space, all those decades to come when these provisional ventures and far-sighted risks and hunches would pay off.

He was astonishing. She kept waiting for the moment to come when her father’s voice might prevail and she could no longer go with him; but he leapt, and each time she took a good breath and went with him.

Looking now at the area he had opened up among their breakfast things she did not feel anxious. Part of what sustained her, but forced her too, was the need he had to take her with him. What came back to her then was the times she had paced his room, all anxiety, and he had sat so stolidly on his bed — how old was he? thirteen? fourteen? — and she had relied on him. What she had seen in him then was increased now a hundredfold.

She had never told him, but many years before, when she was not long married herself, she had seen his father. She had had no idea then that they would one day be connected.

A good-looking Irish fellow, a coalminer, who ought to have been rough, and was no doubt, but knew how to act soft if it suited him. All that, she had thought, must go over well with the girls, and he tried it out a little with her — having seen that it might be best, if he was to get what he wanted from Pa, to make an impression on her. He knew Pa pretty well, she guessed. That is, he knew how to get round him.

He had been very much then what Vic was now; the same age too, just thirty. Twelve years later, when Vic turned up, the image of the man had come back to her and she saw what he might grow up to be.

It was a type that appealed to her. She could admit that now. The father had seen it and given her the eye, but in a humorous way that said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m no danger. You’ll never see me again. I’ve got what I wanted here.’

What she had been struck by was the quickness with which he had summed them up. He had been looking them over to see if they would do. The cheek! She could have laughed outright now when she recalled it. ‘You’ll do, I reckon,’ the look said. The effrontery of it!

But he had known better than she had ( something had known) what was good for them. For all of them.

Vic consulted his watch. Quickly now he outlined the thing to her. He had needed first to clear the air of that other business, Jack Creely. He wanted to start off with everything clear between them. So here it was.

He had, for quite a while, been buying up shares in a margarine company owned by one of their rivals. He wanted to make a bid now for the whole show. Of course they would have to sell one or two things. He laid them out for her. It didn’t look like much: an egg cup with a rabbit on it and the scooped egg turned upside down to fool someone that it was whole, two slices of dry toast, a honey pot in the shape of a hive, with a chipped bee on the lid.

Loans? Yes, a few thousand. But interest rates were down and would go down further, according to his bank manager. Three hundred thousand, tops. Very little risk. Well, a little, you had to expect that, but not enough to spoil their sleep. It wouldn’t spoil his sleep, anyway.

That’s how he talked.

They went over it. The questions she asked were good ones, and he had the answers. In another moment he was on his feet, touching a napkin to his mouth with one hand and with the other reaching for his jacket.

She sat a moment after he was gone, then put each of the pieces he had moved, the honey pot, the egg cup, the two bits of toast, back where they had been, and turned the egg over in the cup to show its ravaged side. Then she put them all back again as they had been when he left.

In her own odd fashion she was getting used to the thing, coming to terms; as when, years back, she used to pick his socks up off the floor and sniff, then roll them in pairs. It was a form of thinking, all her own, but in their daily sessions it had become his way too; or perhaps it always had been, which is why they understood one another.