David Malouf - The Great World

Vic came to the Crossing less often now, and when he did come their talk was of a different kind. In recent years their times together had become very easy and sociable, too much so. They had taken one another for granted. But now some of this sociability transferred itself to Bondi Junction, and this allowed their times alone to change. They both felt this, but it was Vic who had managed it, and Digger was surprised yet again, by the talent he had — it was instinctive in him — for getting what he needed.

He had begun to detach himself from things. That was what Digger saw. Or not precisely from things, but from himself. And what this involved was a moving deeper into himself. So when they talked now, it was in a quieter mood. What they were exploring was not the interest of difference, which had allowed them to turn everything they knew of one another into a game of surprises, but what they shared.

A lot of this new style of talk was about the years they had spent up there . Three years and a half, to be exact. Thirty years ago.

Vic was all questions; shy ones at times, as if it embarrassed him a little that he should have to ask them. After all, it was his life.

Digger’s own memory was exceptional, he knew that; but he was surprised just the same to how large an extent Vic had lost all detailed recollection of that period, or had suppressed it or let it go.

The emotion of it was still strong. There was a bitterness in him that he continued to chew over as Digger did not. For Digger it had been one time of his life among others; a time, simply, that had laid hard responsibilities on him, but ones that were too deeply ingrained in his nature now for regret. He accepted them. He made no complaint.

For Vic the injustice that had been done to him was absolute, a thing he could not forgive. Some possibility had been killed in him then, and though he had found others and made what he could of them — that’s how he was; that was his nature, his character — that other possibility, the one that had been starved and beaten out of him, seemed especially precious. It belonged to his youth, to some finer and more innocent self than the one he had been left with when he came back.

He could not forgive that. The hurt of it was still with him. But he had deliberately stamped out all memory of the details , and it was these now that he wanted to recollect: little individual moments of his own life that only Digger could lead him to. Events, occasions, men — their names, what they had looked like, what happened to them.

Digger thought some of this talk was dangerous. Not to himself — he had lived with it for thirty years on a daily basis; it was woven into the very fabric of his existence, in the tangled lines of what bound him here and led out into the future. But for Vic they were something else, these details. They were what he had broken contact with. And perhaps the ability to survive, in his case, had depended on it — Digger allowed for this sort of difference between them. Making himself the guide now who would lead him back into the immediate presence of it was not a thing Digger felt easy with.

What disturbed him was the way it took him back too. There was something quite different between going over it all with another and the more ordinary business of going over it in his own head.

Looking up briefly, a kind of pain behind his eyes that half-dazzled him, he would see behind the face of this man of fifty, fifty-one, fifty-three, which he knew so well — behind the lines that were thrown like a net over his features, breaking up the skin, and behind the coarsening skin itself with its net of veins — a look that had been, all those years ago, his first real glimpse into the man, the one that had established for him, whether he wanted it or not, their bond with one another and the beginning of a responsibility he had seen, even then, as extending far into the future, and up to the moment they were in now: that candid, guilty-innocent, animal look of the twenty-year-old he had caught eating his rice, who had shown him a kind of wisdom he might not have come to himself. ‘Trust me,’ that look had said, in the very act of stealing the food out of his mouth.

It had the power still to shake him. He felt a kind of trembling in himself that might have been the last shadow, after so long, of fever — do you ever, once bitten, get over it? — but was really, he knew, not a physical thing at all but another form of emotion. He had never been much good (it was another of his deficiencies) at telling the one from the other.

DIGGER NO LONGER went up to town. He had no heart for it. Town had been his Thursdays with Iris. To get down off the train at Central and know he was in a city of three million souls and she was not one of them made Sydney an alien place. He couldn’t breathe the air of it, or so he felt.

That was in the early days. Later, when his pain lessened, as it did in time, and he saw things more reasonably, what was the point? He could have stayed the night with one of the boys, he would have been welcome enough. He could have gone up for Ellie’s sake. But he didn’t. He had not seen, till Iris was gone, how his little morning enjoyments had only been such because at the end of them he would be catching the tram (later it had been the bus) to Bondi Junction. Her presence had underwritten everything, even the city itself, all those millions; his own presence too, at least in that place. Only much later, when the children wrote asking why he never came to see them any more, did he begin to go down once in a while ‘to see how they were growing up’ and to walk out to Cooper Park with them.

At the service in the little chapel, the preacher, who had not known Iris personally, spoke of her easy death (she had died without warning in her sleep); of her long widowhood, and of the husband, the boys’ father, whose name she still bore, who had been lost so many years ago in the Islands.

Digger swallowed hard to have all their years together, and so much affection, and so many events, passed over; but death, he knew, is an official thing, so are its ceremonies, and there was no public record of their years together.

She was buried under the name of the man she had in one area of herself remained faithful to, and though it hurt him a little, Digger respected that. It was part of a code they had shared. He knew its rules. A good deal of his affection for her, his admiration too, lay in her commitment to it.

Nine years she had had with the husband. That was official. Thirty-four without him. Altogether, if you could count them altogether, forty-three. But twenty-six she had had with him . And if you counted the years he had shared with her before they met — not her exactly but the shadow of her that she had stepped into — twenty-nine.

What did all these calculations mean? Digger felt strange sitting there in the pew, one of the chief mourners but anonymous and unofficial, totting up figures that were just figures, when the events of any one day or one moment even might have blazed up and made nothing of them.

The boys were very gentle with him. This was in the informal moments, before and after. Ellie and Vic were also there.

So he no longer went up to town, and it was years now since he had seen Ellie. Instead they had begun a correspondence.

At first it was just little notes — a postcard or two from her business trips with Vic, then at last proper letters.

They were, on Digger’s side, longer ones than he had ever written before. He put everything he felt into them, and Ellie wrote back of things, he thought, that she would never have told him face to face. He was surprised what words themselves could do when you gave yourself over to them; as if, in containing the expression of what was felt, they knew what you wanted to say before you did, and the very shape of a sentence, once you started on it, held just in itself the shape of what you needed to express; so it got said without embarrassment, and with no fear of falseness or of saying too much and being misunderstood.