David Malouf - The Great World

An egg cup was just an egg cup, of course; but pick it up, move it, and you could get hold of that other more abstract thing it stood in for, which was not so easily graspable. You made it visible, got your hands on it in its momentary occurrence as egg cup, and a shift took place in your head. Once that happened you were dealing with the two things at once.

The men he worked with, who were all very clever, ambitious fellows impressed by his energy and utterly loyal to him (though this did not mean that he trusted them with all he was thinking), assumed that his consultations with Ma were a charade, an act put on to reassure the old girl that she still had a hand in things. They would have smiled indulgently at all this business with egg cups and bits of toast. But they were wrong. Something in the presence of those domestic objects, something in Ma too, was necessary to the release in him not of the insights themselves but of his power to believe in them, and in his power to make them real.

He had two ways of working. The public one, the one he showed and wanted people to see, was all hard edges, assured to the point of arrogance. His reputation was based on it, and if people assumed it was all there was, so much the better. It left his other nature unseen. He was not ashamed of it, but it would have worried him to reveal too clearly what he himself did not fully understand.

This side of him was all dreamy vagueness, a lassitude in which he lost contact with the real world and where the sort of activity of which he was supposed to be a master seemed inconceivable to him. Yet it was in just this state, which if he had perceived it in another he might have despised, that he first got hold of the schemes, mere childish daydreams they were at this point, cloud-doodles, that he would knot out later and present to his more active self as proposals, then hard plans.

He trusted this faculty in himself because it had so often proved itself; but he thought of it as a form of childishness, and everything that had to do with the child in him he feared.

These moods in him belonged to the early morning, and would be on him when he woke. A continuation, he sometimes thought, of his sleep, they grew out of what he had been dreaming, though the dream itself eluded him.

Careful not to wake Ellie, he would pad across the room and go downstairs barefoot in his pyjamas, feeling oddly soft and vulnerable. The day’s heat would be coming. As he wandered through the darkened house things took on a new shape, even the most familiar of them. They seemed released of their weight. Or maybe that too was part of his mood. He would sit quietly in a swing on the verandah, and as the trees on the lawn grew out of darkness his thoughts ordered themselves, became clear to him, and birds sang through them, the familiar sounds of this bird or that, very sane and comforting. This was how his thinking got done.

But sometimes, after only a minute or two, he would go through the house to Meggsie’s kitchen.

Meggsie, already up and dressed, would be sitting with her plump arms on the table, her hands round a heavy cup. Wordless at this hour, she would swing round to the stove where the teapot sat, haul it across and pour him a steaming cup, the pot so heavy, even in both her hands, that she could barely heft it. He would sit then, his shoulders hunched a little, his hair a mess, and drink.

They were close. As if to make up for all the years when out of loyalty to her girls she had held out on him, she spoiled him these days as she had once spoiled Ellie and Lucille.

She still teased him. He liked the abrasive form her affection took, and would have felt cheated if she had gone soft on him. But the teasing now was no more than the old form of a game through which they could, without embarrassment, explore their affection for one another.

It was a different world out here.

The cups, for instance. They were so thick you could barely get your mouth round them. The handles too.

If it was winter the kitchen would be fuggy warm, the windows still dark. They would sit and watch them turn blue, and after a little she would get up and bring him a bowl of porridge and watch him eat.

In summer she would already have propped the screen door open with a flat-iron, and magpies would be flopping about the dewy lawn. Little points of light on tips of grassblades would be catching the sun a moment before it quenched and dried them up.

They barely spoke. If they did it was in monosyllables and half-finished sentences that to anyone else would have made no sense.

They might have been a quite different pair: she the mother who had just roused him, heavy-headed and unwilling, for the early shift at a factory or in the pit; he a big, loose-shouldered, barefoot fellow, rather lazy and fond of drink, fond of the girls too, but still tied, with only a show of rebellion, to her apron strings.

Often it was Greg who would come out at last to look for him. He would hang there in the doorway, his hair a bird’s nest, his stance very like his father’s, whom he imitated in everything. He was a timid little fellow, and Meggsie scared him. He wouldn’t come in.

‘Mummy says,’ he would say, ‘where are you?’

IT SURPRISED VIC, as the years went by, that, leaping right over what had been the grimmest period of his life, he so often found himself back in the year before his mother died and the time afterwards when he had lived with his father. He would go itchy under his clothes — the well-cut suit, the shirt Meggsie had starched — and would find himself standing high up on the dunes under a sky that was just on the turn between day and night, waiting for his body to release him into the future and send him hurtling out of himself into a new life. A kind of despair would come over him. The future he yearned for would not appear — and yet here he was right in the midst of it, assured and powerful beyond anything he could have dreamed.

He would stand and watch the wall of sand-grains shift, his mouth agape but unable to cry out as in a vast wave it rose and covered him.

He did not drink, or very little. He saw too clearly the connection between it and a violence he feared was in his nature, and which drink might let loose. It was his son who showed him this. One day, when Vic was especially angry with him, the child suddenly flinched and drew away, as if he had seen the shadow of Vic’s hand before he had raised it.

‘What are you doing?’ His voice was full of shock, but all the boy heard was anger. ‘I’m not going to hit you. You know that. Why are you crying? Nobody’s going to hurt you.’

This scene, which Vic found so distressing, took place at just the time that Greg was old enough to be a presence in the house, a new focus of energy and will, subtly changing all their lives by exerting pressures this way and that to make room for itself. He was very spoiled, and when he was challenged gave way to tears. His mother, his grandmother, even Meggsie, made excuses for him, and the more they did it, Vic thought, the more the boy whined and the more resourceful he became at getting his way.

He seemed very much, as he developed, a smaller version of the father, with Vic’s stance and squareness of frame, his expressions too — everyone noticed it. But the father’s qualities had taken their own direction in him, so that what might have appeared as sturdy self-confidence had in the boy become a defensive petulance.

He was sorry for the child, feeling he knew only too well what he was suffering. He was afraid for him. But the likeness was unnerving. It showed up in a naked, even shameless way — though only perhaps because the boy was too young as yet to have learned how to disguise it — all that he, Vic, had taken such pains to conceal.