David Malouf - The Great World

Vic talked a good deal at first of the sums they were dealing in. The figures doubled and trebled, you could grasp that. It was worth boasting about. It pointed to a personal agency you could identify, to foresight, boldness, imagination. But when the momentum increased, as if subject to some law of its own that was purely mathematical, the personal side of it disappeared. There was a scale to it now that was beyond the capacity of the mind to grasp. Keep adding noughts, and although the thing is still there, and in fact occupies more and more space, there develops in it a kind of vacuum, as if the noughts, the nothings, had predominance. The mind loses all trace of it.

Ellie was amazed by him. So was Pa. They looked on in wonder at these powers he had, which like the enterprise itself appeared to double, treble, then move in progressions that were inhuman, magical; though this was only because their imagination could not contain him any more than they could the figures.

Where did it come from, she wondered, this energy and animation that she experienced as such a physical thing? He was so full of it that you wondered how so much force could limit itself, when needed, to the merely commonplace business of manoeuvring a knife or getting peas on to a fork, or as she saw it, to the moments they shared when she would watch him pull a clean shirt over his head and walk round the room in his socks and suspenders, or sit, as he sometimes did, very quiet and abstracted with a towel in his hand, his hair still wet from the shower, on the edge of their bed.

It pained her when she went out to hear him spoken of in a cruel and dismissive way by people who did not know him as she did, from within. He had enough success, she saw, to have become a figure who aroused hostility, envy, also fear, and often this was in men, and women too, to whom he was no more than a name. They had never laid eyes on him.

When she met this impersonal version of him, even if it was only in people’s eyes across a dinner table or theatre foyer, she went cold. The certainty with which they were prepared to judge! All the more when she found it in print.

But if he thought himself misunderstood, as she knew he did, he bore it stoically, hiding his hurt behind a show of arrogance. He hid things. The more she knew him, the more she saw that, and understood how extraordinary had been that glimpse of him in the dark of the piano room, how completely she had grasped then what it was in him that she would spend the rest of her life grappling with.

He read the papers with a look on his face that even she could not fathom. It was pain. She could tell that, if others couldn’t. But he found a kind of satisfaction in it too. There was, just at the corner of his mouth, the play of a smile. Perhaps he felt flattered that they were making so much of him.

To her these assaults were merely painful. How could she not feel them personally when she had given so much of herself to him, and taken into her custody so much that was vulnerable in him?

She spoke to no one of all this, but it was there often enough, unspoken, between her and Pa, who, looking at things from his own distance, and from a very different centre of power, was as struck as she was by the proximity of so much energy. Some of the capacity Pa himself had discovered over these last years, or so she thought, came as an attempt to understand Vic’s kind of power and balance it.

Pa too had surprised them. Who could have predicted that his peculiar nervousness, which had kept the whole household on edge and been so aimless and self-consuming, would find a focus at last in what she dealt with daily now, the individual words and lines that sat, when she typed them, so squarely on the page and spoke with so much authority and had such weight in the world?

The one thing that alarmed her, and increasingly as the years went by, was Vic’s attitude to the boy. Nothing else caused her such heartbreak or led to so many quarrels between them.

She was by nature optimistic. She believed people were reasonable. Given time, things solved themselves; all you had to do was be patient. But in this case things got worse, not better. By the time Greg was twelve a coldness had developed between Vic and the boy, a kind of contempt on both sides that she did not know how to deal with.

He was a good-natured boy, full of affection and eager to please, perhaps too much so; but he could not please his father, and after a time, out of disappointment, did not want to, or pretended he didn’t.

As for Vic, everything the boy did unsettled or irritated him, especially as he grew out of childishness and became a young man.

The more she argued with him, the more unreasonable Vic grew, and at last she gave up. She had begun to fear the things that were said between them. So long as they were unspoken they had no force. Once they got into the world, and could be gone back to and brooded over, they were real.

‘Vic,’ she told him wearily, ‘they’re all like this, all these young people. He’s no different from the rest.’ She named Greg’s friends, some of whom were the sons and daughters of men Vic knew and thought well of. ‘What does it matter how he wears his hair?’

But he clamped his mouth shut and would not answer. He was angry with her, she knew, because she took the boy’s part.

‘I would have hoped,’ he said at last, like a man repeating something he had already prepared, ‘that a son of mine would think for himself, not just go along with what others do.’

‘Oh,’ she said, but gently, ‘a son of yours.’

‘He’s got no character. No character, no interests, no ambitions. What else can I think?’

It was part of the vision he had of the hardness of things, based on his own life and of the qualities you needed not to go under. She could have no idea how afraid he was of every sort of weakness, how panicky he felt, and when he looked at his son, the vulnerable region that opened in him.

Ellie did know this, and it scared her. But she saw something else, too: that things weren’t hard any more, they were easy, and he was one of the men who had made them so. Young people had time now to play. That wasn’t a crime, was it?

The issues they fought over were small ones, the length of the boy’s hair, the clothes he wore: Ellie thought they were small. But it infuriated Vic to see his son, and all these worthless kids he ran around with, dressed in cast-offs. Old waistcoats and shirts without collars that his father might have worn. Grimy old-fashioned suits like the ones they had been given after the war, still with the sweat stains on them (they did not care about that), and all over both lapels the badges of a war they thought they were waging, gaudy passwords and proclamations of revolt. Sweat-stained felt Akubras (except for these clowns only Digger wore a hat these days), greasy ties and evening scarves, all picked up at street markets or at Tempe Tip, or off the racks of the St Vincent de Paul; the fashionable fancy dress of a misery they knew nothing about, and did not care about either, for all their mouthing of slogans and the rag-tag principles of a revolution they would never have to mount.

He thought bitterly of a wet day when he was maybe nine years old and was taken with a gang of other children to a room at the School of Arts. They were the poorest kids of the district, guaranteed so by the headmaster; though you could have seen it for yourself from the reach-me-down clothes they wore, the sweaters that had to be pushed up at the elbows, the trousers drawn in six inches with a bit of string, the little girls’ frocks that came down past their knees.

Herded into the dingy hall, they were presented with a row of smiling, sympathetic ladies and a pile of clothes that had been tipped out of bags onto the floor.