David Malouf - The Great World

‘He does these things to himself. Why? Why is that? The very thing he doesn’t want to happen he does himself. It’s as if he wanted to save himself, you know, from having it done to him. Is that it? You know him, Digger — is that what it is? So he does it himself. “I did it” — that’s what he’s saying to himself — “it wasn’t just done to me.” Then he grits his teeth in that terrible way he’s got. “Life is like this. We have to put up with it. That’s what character is for.” And he’s brought it all on himself .’

They were having a cup of tea together in a timbered booth in a quiet little place in an arcade. It was, Digger thought, one of the few occasions when their talk together was openly of Vic, though a lot of what they had to say to one another had him in mind or as a shadow on the sidelines. It was painful, this.

‘You know him, Digger — you tell me ,’ she said. She seemed desperate.

‘I don’t know him,’ Digger found himself saying, and he was sorry the moment after. It was true, it was what he felt at the moment, but it seemed like a betrayal. He saw from her look how surprised she was. He was surprised himself.

*

Vic could not have told Digger of the scene with Greg because there was nothing to tell. It was a quarrel like any other.

Vic blamed Greg for the form their quarrels took. All he could do each time was mouth the slogans he had picked up from his friends, no word of it was personal or his own, and all Vic could say in reaction, he felt, was determined by this, and was equally impersonal and beside the point.

They had never found any way of addressing one another in which the truth could be stated or their real feelings shown. So they fell back each time on what they had said before. Greg shouted his contempt for their whole way of life, all the things they stood for, which he rejected utterly and would have nothing to do with. Vic threw all this back at him, and he too shouted, only half believing in what came out. He knew too well the slipperiness of such terms as self-respect and discipline to use them as crudely as he did, but he did use them that way. He talked of the boy’s lack of character, his willingness to live off what he claimed to despise, the contempt even his own friends had for his weak-willed parroting of their every opinion and the way he ran after them, in everything he did imitating this or that one of them, with no will or character of his own. The anger in all this was real, but the arguments were the same ones they had been over on other occasions. There was no reason, no apparent reason, why this should be the last.

What Greg had wanted to say was something quite different, but he could not bring himself, out of perversity, out of the sort of pride too that his father did not credit him with, to put it into words. It would only have increased his father’s scorn for him, he thought, if he had asked for love.

Vic too had wanted to say something quite different. What he wanted to speak of were the things in his life that when he stopped and looked at them created panic in him.

To have put this into words might have been a relief, but it would have exposed him, and he believed that in his son’s eyes he ought not to appear weak.

Then, too, if he put his fear into words he might, in some magical way, give it a place in the world, where it would grow, increase its power and work against him. The desire to keep it inside, where he alone knew what it was and could control it, was enough to keep him silent, even at the risk, as he saw now, of his losing control of the very thing that lay at the heart of his panic — his vulnerability through Greg.

So nothing new was said. They went over the same accusations and counter-accusations they always used and at the end of it nothing had been said. Only this time Greg took him at his word, or decided out of pride to stick to his own. He quit the house.

One Thursday when Iris was in the front room ironing, with the television on ‘just for company’, there was a ring at the door. It was after nine, too late for neighbours to be calling.

Digger, reading in the sleep-out, looked up with his glasses on his nose. He saw Iris step out into the hallway; then a moment later she was at the entrance to the sleep-out with Vic. Her eyebrows were raised. It was a look he knew well.

Digger too was surprised. He thought there must be some sort of trouble. But Vic had no explanation to offer. He appeared to be in high spirits, he was a little drunk in fact, and had three bottles of Cooper’s Ale with him. When Iris took them, and with another little look in Digger’s direction went off to fetch glasses, he stepped into the sleep-out as if dropping in on them like this were the most natural thing in the world. Digger found it took a little getting used to.

He had forgotten till now that when Vic first appeared at the Crossing, and Jenny had come up and pointed to him mooching about there under the she-oaks, he had felt the same little sense of intrusion.

It had faded in time. Vic had come to be as much a part of his life at the Crossing as anything else. Only now did the echo of it come back. Why, after all this time, had he taken it upon himself to break in on them?

But if Vic recognised a coolness on Digger’s part he gave no sign of it. When Iris, pleading the excuse of her ironing, left them to it, believing there must be something special he had come for, he cast a glance around the sleep-out and said, ‘This is nice. All these books yours?’

‘No,’ Digger said, and folded his glasses, ‘not all of ’em.’ And then, because he still felt irritated, he said, ‘Most of them were Mac’s.’

Was it the first time Mac’s name had come up between them? Digger could not be certain. Other names came up from time to time. It would have been unusual if they had avoided that one. But they had, of course.

There was a little beat of silence. Outside in the loquat tree Digger could hear a shuffling. Possums. They had possums that sometimes came right into the house and would take a bite out of some piece of fruit in the bowl on the kitchen table, leaving paw marks all over the floor.

Digger was sorry now that he had said anything. He had done it in a moment of spite. He watched Vic take a book from the shelf, open it and look at the flyleaf as if he needed to see the name there: as proof. Or perhaps it was to feel another twist of the knife. But it wasn’t Mac’s name he would find. Hardly one of these books had Mac’s name in it. Other names, yes, and Digger, being Digger, could have reeled off each one of them. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ , for instance, which was the book he happened to be re-reading, had belonged to Janet Dawkins, Year Twelve, at Randwick Girls’ High School in 1936. Mac had picked it up at Tyrrell’s. He could have gone on to list dozens, even hundreds, more.

What Vic had in his hand was a tooled leather edition of Tennyson. The flyleaf, Digger knew, would read:

To Mr John Darnell

from

B. J. Checkley

10th May, 1889

all in sepia copperplate, and underneath it:

Kind hearts are more than Coronets

And simple faith than Norman blood.

He watched Vic read it in a sober way, then close the book and put it back.

He looked around the room, frowning a little. Perhaps he felt the oppressiveness of so many volumes set so close on the shelves, or was wondering how many he would have to open before he came to one (he might find one, an old school algebra maybe) with I. R. McAlister in it.

Outside in the front room, he settled on the arm of a lounge chair, one leg thrown easily across the other, a little subdued at first but quickly recovering his spirits. Iris turned off the television, and offered to put her ironing aside as well, but he insisted he didn’t mind, in fact he liked it. So with some embarrassment, since she scarcely knew him, she went on damping down pillowslips, handkerchiefs, an apron, one of Digger’s shirts, and the smell of heat and damp filled the room.