David Malouf - The Great World

When Greg was still quite young, not yet seven, he developed the habit of lying. His lies were stupid ones that were bound to be exposed, which was, perhaps, just what he intended. They were lies whose only purpose was to win attention. But what was the point of that , Vic demanded, when all it showed was that he was a liar? In low voices, in bed, he and Ellie argued over it.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’re making too much of it. Children grow out of things.’

He tried to talk to the boy man to man. He hated untruth. He found him playing with his Meccano set and made him stand still and listen, but his attention kept wandering and Vic grew angry and did not know how to go on. He was infuriated to see a little smile at the corner of the boy’s mouth, as if he was not fearful at all, despite his seeming so timid, and was getting just what he wanted out of him.

By twelve he had found a kind of strength, but it was covert and indirect. On the one occasion when Vic did at last raise his fist the boy’s look was of such contempt and triumph, still with that flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and Vic saw himself so clearly reflected in it, that he was appalled.

He tried to pass the thing off with a recognition of fault on both sides, but the boy knew he had won and was defiant. Vic was powerless.

Everything in himself, in his inheritance too, that he had worked to push down and control, had come to independent existence in the boy and acted against him. That’s what he saw, and he saw it the more clearly because Greg was just the age that he had been in his last year with his father.

He looked at the boy, saw his contemptuous smile and the likeness between them, and on the other side saw his father; and there was likeness there, too. This was what Ellie and the others could not know. He felt powerless, and at a time when power was just what came to him so easily, and publicly, elsewhere.

ON ONE OF his usual Thursdays, a bright winter day when there was a little chill to the air but the whole of George Street, all the way to the harbour, was bathed in clear soft sunlight, Digger was just about to cross at the Market Street lights when a woman spoke to him. He recognised her immediately.

‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘It’s Digger, isn’t it.’

They stood smiling at one another.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you.’

He did not feel free to call her by her name; but whether it was the unexpectedness of being caught together like this at the lights, forced by something quite outside themselves to come to a halt, or the softness of the day, or simply the pleasure he always had at being briefly in town, among so many people, Digger felt a wave of light-headedness catch him up — as it had, he recalled, the last time they had spoken, as if whenever they came together they were immediately translated to a special place where his awkwardness left him and he was entirely at ease.

They might have been stepping back here into a relationship that went back ages, in which all the usual difficulties had had their edges worn down through long acquaintance arid habit. There was no shyness between them.

‘I thought you lived — where is it? —’

‘Keen’s Crossing.’

‘Yes. Don’t you?’

‘I come up to town sometimes. Every Thursday in fact.’

Their eyes met and he thought she might be wondering, in that case, why he had never taken up her invitation and got in touch. But she knew why.

‘I’ve been buying a few things,’ he told her, to explain the packages he was carrying. They were outside a hardware store where he liked to potter about for articles he couldn’t pick up so easily at home, the new products they had these days, the magic glues and power tools.

‘It’s Vic’s birthday Saturday,’ she told him as the lights changed and they stepped off the kerb. He did not know that. ‘I’m shopping. Why don’t you come with me, if you’re finished.’ They were on the other side now. ‘We can have morning tea. I won’t be long.’

‘All right,’ he said.

Downstairs at Farmer’s Ellie looked at ties, holding one or two of them up to Digger’s shirt-front as she talked. They were wide ones, too colourful for him — for Vic too he would have thought, though no doubt she knew better than he did. When at last she had chosen one she bought two Island cotton shirts, then silk socks, then handkerchiefs.

Digger hung back. It was a slow business and might have been boring, but it made the talk between them so easy, and there was for him so much novelty in it, that he stopped being impatient and found he was enjoying himself. By the time it was all done they had caught up on a good many facts that it might have taken them much longer to uncover if they had not been continually on the move, and if the gaps between one question and the next had not been filled, for him, with the distractions of the store itself, the banks of lights in the ceiling, the escalators, so many women, some of them with children, some with a husband in tow, all happily spending, and turning things over on the open counters while they waited for their parcels to be wrapped; all of which he took in — the dummies too, looking so perfect with their real hair and eyelashes and doll-like eyes — while Ellie was engaged with one of the sales ladies or going through the drawers of hand-sewn handkerchiefs. At last they went upstairs into a big room overlooking the street, found a table away from the mothers and children, and ordered tea. They could relax now. A silence fell and they were forced to look at one another; but they could face that because they had already, in their half-hour of movement and talk, got so far with one another.

Ellie looked at him in a candid, clear-eyed way that sought to see, Digger thought, what there might be beyond his shyness; something she had glimpsed, and been looking for too, he thought now, when she held up to his open shirt-collar one of the expensive ties.

She looked at his hands and he saw her register something — that he worked with them? At his eyes again — What did she see there? (He found he did not mind her scrutiny.) It would be nothing of what really mattered to him. So when he looked at her, and saw the way her hair curled in just at shoulder level, the neatness of her brows, the colour on her lips, he took it for granted that what mattered most to her was also invisible, and would remain so unless she found the words to tell him of it.

She surprised him by speaking almost immediately of her father.

‘I remember that poem he read,’ Digger told her, ‘at your wedding. “The precarious gift alive in our hands again, the mixed blessing”.’ He did not say, though she might have guessed it from the quality of his voice, that the lines meant something special to him.

‘But fancy you remembering it,’ she said.

‘Oh, I know the whole thing off by heart,’ he told her. He didn’t mean to show off, and blushed in case she suspected him of it.

‘The whole poem?’

‘It’s a trick,’ he said, sorry he had ever let on. ‘It’s nothing.’

She told him of the work she did. Her father had published two books in the past five years, one a book of poems — Digger could find the Wedding Ode there, if he looked — the other a collection of essays. In the small world of writers, reviewers, university lecturers and other people who cared for these things, he had begun to be well known, but it was a very small world of course; most people didn’t even know it existed. She did his secretarial work for him. That, together with the house and her little boy, was enough to keep her going. The next time they met she would bring copies of the books, now that she knew he was a reader.