David Malouf - The Great World

She was wary of him, he was out to charm her, and she kept shooting little sideways glances at Digger to see if he had noticed it. But she relaxed at last and began to enjoy herself. He was full of light notes and odd, old-fashioned sayings that surprised her. Nothing she knew of him from Digger had suggested this. Digger himself was surprised. There was no sign now of that moment on the sleep-out, or of any of that side of him; and Digger, who had little to say, went even quieter.

What he was doing, Digger thought, was restoring a kind of order in himself, making up for that little reversal out there, when for a moment his image of himself had been disturbed, by winning her approval.

Digger had never seen him playing up to a woman before. It was new to him, the way he paraded his repertoire of charms; this concentration of energy, of interest in him, that made a woman aware of herself. He was all attention, you could feel it. Digger, who knew him so well, was irritated that Iris should be so easily taken in.

She finished her ironing. He leapt up and helped her fold the board. What he wanted her to do now was play.

Lately she found playing difficult. She had arthritis, all the joints of her fingers were swollen; but she sat down, and it was ages, Digger thought, since he had seen her play so easily or with so much heart.

She played Schubert, a great favourite of Digger’s, and once or twice as she played she looked aside at him and smiled; but she was playing, he saw, for Vic, and once again he felt a pang of jealousy. Which was foolish, he knew, but he couldn’t help it.

Vic sat very silent with his head bowed, and Digger for some reason thought again of Mac, and again of how foolish it was of him to feel hurt, or to feel anything in fact but what the music spoke of — union and peace. Remote, mysterious, yet so full of quiet optimism, it took you right to the heart of things.

‘Honestly, Digger,’ Iris said later, when she had got out of him what it was that had kept him so quiet. She was half smiling to herself. It did not displease her that he could be jealous. ‘All that palaver he goes on with — it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you know that? He’s a ladies’ man. Show him a woman and he can’t help flirting with her. Even an old dame like me. There’s no harm in it.’

Digger was silent. ‘Well, it got my goat,’ he said at last, ‘him just inviting himself like that. He did it on his own account. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’

He waited. He was waiting for some comment from her of what she had felt or seen that would explain it, since he could not; but she lay with her face turned away and did not speak.

Her hair, which had been so rich when he first knew her, was thinning, not quite grey, and he had a particular affection for the freckling of her brow, and the area just below the line of her hair where the skin was almost transparent and the veins showed. He put his fingertips to them, and she turned her head and smiled. It worried her, he knew, that she was no longer beautiful. She thought she wasn’t.

‘He didn’t come because he had anything to say, you know. Why do you reckon he did come?’

She looked at him. ‘Because he was lonely,’ she said after a moment. ‘He had nowhere to go.’ Digger stared. ‘Maybe,’ she said lightly, ‘he fell out with his girlfriend.’ She said it carelessly. She saw immediately that she should not have.

‘What? What girlfriend?’

‘Oh — they say he’s on with Susie Stone.’

‘Who does?’

‘Oh — you know, the newspapers.’

He lay still. He was taking it in.

‘Who’s Susie Stone?’ he said at last. He was amazed by all this, but most of all by her. How did she know these things? It astonished him at times the things that went on in the world that other people took for granted and he knew nothing of. He was surprised, too, how much she accepted now that would once have shocked her. For three years before they got round to marrying, Ewen and his wife Jane had lived together — they even had a little boy. He had been a page at their wedding.

‘Susie Stone’s a designer,’ she told him. ‘Sportswear. She’s pretty well known — to young people.’

‘Do you think Ellie knows?’ he asked.

‘I expect so, yes. I don’t suppose she’s the first. It’s what I said. You can see it right off. Any woman could.’

He turned up on odd Thursdays after that, and Digger saw him more often at Bondi Junction in the end than at Keen’s Crossing. He began to bring Iris little gifts, as he had Jenny, but Iris, who had none of Jenny’s suspicion of him, took the gesture as it was intended and made a fuss over his presents and over him too. He was delighted. The things he gave her he had thought about. You could see that.

Digger never did get used to having him there, but he accepted at last that the flirtations he practised were harmless, at least where Iris was concerned, and that his real reason for coming was the one she had seen on that first occasion: there were times when he had nowhere else to go.

DIGGER WAS DIZZIED by the world. He could never, he felt, see it steady enough or at a sufficient distance to comprehend what it was, let alone to act on it. This was a disadvantage; but he had long since come to the conclusion that his perplexity about life, which did not prevent him from living it, was essential to him.

A nailhead. That was clear enough. Round, flanged, with ridges that allowed the hammerhead a grip. The weight of the hammer, too. Driving a nail in, feeling the point go through the soft grain to bite on the last two blows — that was the only action he knew that was simple. Everything else, the moment you really looked at it, developed complications.

Even the least event had lines, all tangled, going back into the past, and beyond that into the unknown past, and other lines leading out, also tangled, into the future. Every moment was dense with causes, possibilities, consequences; too many, even in the simplest case, to grasp. Every moment was dense too with lives, all crossing and interconnecting or exerting pressure on one another, and not just human lives either; the narrowest patch of earth at the Crossing, as he had known since he was two years old, was crowded with little centres of activity, visible or invisible, that made up a web so intricate that your mind, if you went into it, was immediately stuck — fierce cannibalistic occasions without number, each one of which could deafen you if you had ears to hear what was going on there. And beyond that were what you could not even call lives or existences: they were mere processes — the slow burning of gases for example in the veins of leaves — that were invisibly and forever changing the state of things; heat, sunlight, electric charges to which everything alive enough responded and held itself erect, hairs and fibres that were very nearly invisible but subtly vibrating, nerve ends touched and stroked.

This was how he saw things unless he deliberately held back and shut himself off.

What staggered him in others, and especially in Vic, was the certainty with which they saw the whole world as a nail to be struck squarely on the head. Yet he suspected at times that Vic did not entirely believe in the world. His capacity to deal with it had to do with his conviction that it was there only insofar as he could act on it.

Three or four times a year now Vic went overseas, to Japan, Hong Kong, London. The mineral boom and the listing of Australian shares on the international exchange took his interests out of the country. His nephew Alex had been brought in to run the Australian side. He was a chilly fellow, Alex. Digger heard this from Ellie. He lived on his own in a big old flat at Elizabeth Bay, and Ellie, though she tried, had never got close to him.