David Malouf - The Great World

Digger said nothing, but did observe her assumption that this meeting was not to be their last. He would not have made the suggestion himself but was pleased that she had. They talked on after that, with no hurry to get everything said. There would be time for the rest of it next time.

He told her about his mother, who had been gone for nearly a year now, but whose end, all her bravery and defiance gone down to despair, still haunted him. About Jenny too. At last about Iris. She told him about the little boy, Greg. Some time, she promised, when Vic was going to the Crossing, she would send him along.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’d better go. Next time, I promise, the books.’

She was proud of what her father had done. He liked that and wondered what Vic made of it.

It was odd that in all the things they had touched on, they had never once referred directly to him . Not deliberately — it wasn’t deliberate on his part, and he thought it wasn’t on hers either, but to preserve an area between them that was for them alone. If they had tried to include Vic, he would have swallowed up the whole of what they had to say to one another, especially in the beginning, when he might have seemed the only thing they had in common.

She had a particular look, he thought, at moments when the natural thing to do might have been to say ‘Vic and I’ or ‘we’, or at moments when, though she did not directly speak of him, he was clearly in her mind. There would be a little change in her then, as if something had come to the surface in her that was secret, not to be spoken of, yet was on the very tip of her tongue. It was, he felt, the thing he had been wondering about that was most important to her. When it came up he could feel the heat of it, as in his case it had been there (had she felt it?) when he spoke the lines of her father’s poem, but especially just afterwards, when he had owned up to his trick of recall, which always evoked what was deepest in him.

The meeting, when he thought back over it, was a joyful one. They repeated it over the years, sometimes weekly. At other times, depending on what else was happening in their lives, whole months would pass before they could arrange it.

They would go for tram rides to Watson’s Bay, and walk round the path under the coral trees from Camp Cove to where the sea crashes against South Head. They took ferry trips across to Cremorne and Mosman, shopped, went to the art gallery or the city library, or sat in the gardens and watched the crowds. Each time her father published a new book she brought him one.

He did not mention these meetings to Vic, though there was nothing secret about them. He thought it was Ellie’s right to tell. If she did, Vic gave no indication of it.

Iris teased him, but only mildly, about his ‘lady friend’. She liked to pretend she was jealous. Was she? he wondered. Just a little? She had no need to be.

IT SEEMED TO Ellie, when she gave thought to the matter, that things could not have fallen out otherwise than they had; and this was strange, because when she looked back ten years and saw them all as they were then, she could find no sign of what was coming — none at all.

A good deal of this had to do with Lucille.

Lucille had been gone for seven years. Her marriage to Virge had broken up almost as soon as she joined him. She was married now to an older man with children of his own, a company lawyer in Denver, Colorado, where she too had a business, in real estate.

These changes dismayed Ellie. They had been very close over the Virge business, which had appeared then to be a culmination and had turned out, for all its intensity and the significance they had put upon it, to be no more than an episode on the way to something else. She wrote to Lucille twice a month, and the letters that came back were racy and full of news, but she could no longer connect them to the girl she had grown up with.

As little things they had fought like tigers. Ellie recalled occasions when they had struggled and torn at one another, red-faced and sweaty in their singlets and pants, both tearful with rage, pulling at one another’s hair and spitting.

Meggsie’s way of handling this had been to close the door and leave them to it. When they came out, still hot and angry but also ashamed, she would say: ‘All right now, you little devils. Go an’ wash your faces and take off those filthy clothes’ (they had been rolling on the floor) ‘an’ I won’t tell yer Ma what you’ve been up to. Hurry on now. I’ve made some nice cold lemonade.’

It had been hard for Ellie. Lucille was just that much older. She had already established her rights in the world, and made some things in the house so much her own that Ellie could not take them up without appearing, as she so often was, an imitator.

She was a latecomer in people’s hearts too, they had to make way for her. Lucille didn’t mean to be imposing, she couldn’t help it. People noticed her and only later, Ellie felt, saw that she too was there, trailing along behind and wondering what it might be in her that was anything more than a reflection of her more brilliant sister.

What puzzled her was that none of this appeared to make Lucille happy. Lucille was by nature restless, difficult, discontented. She was the easy one.

Then, just about the time that Vic came to live with them, they had discovered how close they were, how even the animosity they felt, the way they jockeyed against one another, was a bond. It was the element Vic added that made them see this.

He was a boy, and they were astonished, angered too, to observe how this simple fart impressed everyone — Pa, Ma, even Meggsie, though she didn’t quite give in to him.

Ellie had been pleased at first to see Lucille displaced, but soon understood that if Lucille was harmed she was too.

They teased him. That was easy. He was an awkward boy once you got past his cockiness. But he was a novelty, too; that’s what they couldn’t resist. Quite soon new affinities had begun to form. A secret one at first between Lucille and him, and once again Ellie found herself on the sidelines, a watcher of the little drama that had begun to unfold. Vic was at a loss in this, because although he and Lucille were the same age, he was still just a boy. So Vic and Ellie had ganged up on Lucille. Lucille thought she was so marvellous, so grown-up. Ellie still belonged, as he half did, to the world of animal spirits and fun.

But in all that she had missed something after all, some other, more important strand; some perversity or quirk in Lucille that had made her fly in the face of all that appeared to have been laid up for her, perhaps for the very reason that it was so fixed and had come so easily. She got pregnant, married Virge. None of this, Ellie knew, had had her in view, yet her life too had been changed by it.

The point on which it turned was that moment in the half-dark of the piano room, during what was to be the last of their games. Everything had been quite clear to her at that moment, and to Vic too. They saw in a flash all that had led up to it and all that would lead away from it. But Lucille, she thought, had seen it before them.

So the household was hers. Ma, all her energies taken up with business, was quite happy to hand it over. There was no question of their moving into a place of their own. It was as if the house already contained the forms their life would need. She and Vic had their separate life in it but the household went on as it had always done.

It was for this reason, there being so little visible change, that it took her so long to understand what he and Ma were doing.

Their style of life did not change. She and Meggsie settled up the weekly accounts, and they remained pretty much what they had always been. They took the same amount of bread and milk, and these things cost the same whether you are worth thousands or just sixpence. You use the same number of towels, sleep in the same sheets.