David Malouf - The Great World

The two boys, despite what had happened, insisted on arguing through every meal, but in a way that was inappropriate and put them all on edge.

Greg’s arguments, as even Ellie had to admit, were erratic and one-sided. He was idealistic, full of youthful passion and the assurance of being always in the right, but everything he had to say was second-hand, and for all its predictability was so garbled and incoherent as to be very nearly incomprehensible.

The other one, Alex, who was twenty-four and already a graduate of Harvard, was a stiff fellow, equally one-eyed and insistent, but he hid it with an assumption of coolness that outraged Greg and made him more vehement than ever.

Greg had had great hopes of this cousin of his. An American! In his naive and open-hearted way he had been eager to be impressed and to hear at first-hand all that was happening at the centre of things.

He was bitterly disappointed. He hid it at first; Alex was a guest. Then, when he saw that he was being patronised, he adopted an air of open hostility, but in such a hurt and inarticulate and childish way that Vic found it hard to witness. Tonight he gave Ellie a helpless look and got away. He needed to distance himself.

He went first to sit for a time with Ma, who had gone straight up after the funeral to lie down. She too found these mealtimes exasperating.

He sat beside her bed in the darkened room and they talked a little. What they talked of was an occasion, years back, when Pa had played a practical joke, a particularly silly one, on a dinner guest, a very pompous fellow who was in line to be a judge. Ma began to laugh, then he did, and they both stopped, not in a guilty way, but thinking, if any stranger heard them, how difficult it would be to explain. When he left her and went downstairs he did something he would not have dreamed of doing a week before. He went to Pa’s study. Seating himself at the old-fashioned desk, which was carved in Renaissance style, he sat for a time in the dark watching the lightning flicker, then put his hand out and lit a lamp.

The sense of irritation he had felt at the table was still with him. It was associated somehow with the odd shuddery flashes of the lightning. It made him tense and with no hope of release.

It was the hostility between the two young men he focused on, their foolish tearing this way and that of a dead cat, but he was keeping it in the foreground, he knew, because there was something else that disturbed him more, and it was this he needed to think about.

Lucille at forty-six was not at all the girl who had left them more than twenty years ago. He would hardly have known her. She was very brisk and businesslike, and preoccupied, as was only to be expected, with the family she had left back in the States. She took an interest in all there was to catch up on, but what she saw here fell short, he guessed, of some memory she had kept — of the place, of them — and when he looked at things through her eyes he saw it too.

He had thought what he had done — all he had achieved — was so large a thing. Yet what he was chiefly aware of when they sat down to the table together was how little had happened, and how little, in the end, was changed. Pa was gone. They were older. There were these two boys now, slugging away at one another. But the only difference, he felt, was that something he had hung on to, a sense of sweet disillusionment that had to do with Lucille and all he had felt for her, was no longer sweet — and not bitter either — but had dulled and was very nearly gone.

He had loved his disillusionment. It gave him such a sense of his own youth. He saw its going now as the beginning, the first approach, of middle age.

And Pa?

How long was it since they had spoken in a way that touched what was most important to them? They were always close. There was no lack of warmth between them. But they had had little to say to one another in these last years that was new. This shocked him, and all the more because suddenly, now that he was gone, it seemed to Vic that everything he knew about Pa was a puzzle to him. From the moment of their first meeting — and before that, too, the days when his father had been Pa’s batman and exacted the promise — everything, Pa’s playfulness, his glooms, the life he had had in his head, the poems he had written, was a mystery to him. But what really disturbed him was what he had seen at the funeral today: that there were people who had never even met Pa, who knew him better perhaps than he did. He had the panicky sense of having missed the man entirely, but the source of his panic was the ghostly image this gave him of himself.

‘What does it mean to be ,’ he thought, ‘except to be known ?’

He had been delighted, as they all were, by Pa’s success, but had never got round to the actual books. He saw now that he ought to have done. He had missed something Pa had to say that others had attended to and he had not, something too that Pa might have meant him to hear. He reached out now and drew the four volumes from the shelf. Opening one, the last as it happened, he set himself to go through it from cover to cover. He read for nearly an hour.

It was like a hard lesson at school. He had forgotten what it was to go over and over something and find that it would not go into your head, because there was some resistance in it, or in you, that would not give.

He had come up against this unpleasant fact before, and each time had suppressed it. Looking now at what Pa had got down, he came upon things that were just beyond his apprehension, eluding him at the very moment of his reaching out for them; but they were things, and he knew this too, that were not strange to him. That was the unpleasant part. They did not belong to some other world at all but to the one he was in, and still he could not grasp them.

What he felt in a quite physical way was the spinning of the earth under him at the very moment when he could also say to himself: ‘But the room is still.’ And then: ‘If the world is like this and I have never properly got hold of it, what have I got hold of?’

He sat with the book open on the desk but had stopped reading. What the poems, which he had only vaguely understood, had set off in him was going on now of its own accord.

It is a sobering thing, even when you are a father yourself and have some force in the world, to find, in the childish part of yourself that goes on existing despite the years, that there is no hand you can reach out for.

Almost as soon as his parents died Pa had appeared. Since then it was Pa, for all his weakness, who had stood between him and the knowledge that he was alone in the world. For a time, when he was twenty, that knowledge had been forced on him, but it was premature, it did not last. As soon as he got back it lapsed in him, and once again he had moved back under Pa’s protection, relegating to him the father’s role, and was shielded. Now, for the first time, he felt orphaned.

When Ellie saw a slit of light under the door she had the odd feeling that what she would see, when she opened it, was Pa. So she approached it very quietly, turned the knob, and paused, afraid to startle herself.

He did not see her for a moment. He was seated with a pool of lamplight on the desk before him, his face half-dark. All round the shelves was the flicker of far-off lightning. He did not look up; he was not aware of her. In the moment before he turned, all that she knew of him was confirmed.

IT WAS FROM Ellie that Digger heard of the break with Greg. Vic would not have told him. In the early days he had been eager enough to talk about the boy. He always had news to tell of what a promising little fellow he was, shy, a bit clinging maybe — that was having so many women in the house — but full of questions and his own odd bright little opinions on the world. Vic was young himself in those days. His pride in the boy ran away with him. He would pull himself up, suddenly embarrassed, and laugh it off. But things changed, and after a time he spoke of the boy only with bitterness. In these last years he had barely mentioned him. Digger, hearing of this latest, this last business, did not know what to say. Ellie did not complain but he saw the grief it caused her.