David Malouf - The Great World

After a time it seemed to them that their correspondence was satisfactory just in itself. To meet again might drive them back from intimacy into a politeness they would regret. But he would have liked to see her; to sit, as they used to do, across a table, and watch the way she used her hands.

He sat down once a week and wrote to Ellie as once a week he had gone up to Bondi Junction and stayed with Iris, and if the thing was not quite the same, there was a continuation of a kind in the regularity of it.

He spoke of Iris. Writing was a way of keeping all that part of his life alive in him — it had in most ways been the happiest part; or rather, of finding in it, as the words brought it back, dimensions he had been only dimly aware of in the daily happening. He wrote in a light mood. They had little code-words and quick half-references that came out of the one thing they shared and could draw on, her father’s poems. So the poems too took on a new life in their letters. Odd lines and phrases, worked into what they themselves had to say, kept their old meaning, but acquired, as they used them, a new one, coloured and lit up by their feelings now.

One of the things Ellie wrote of was Greg. He had used the money Pa left him to go to Europe, overland via India and Afghanistan. He was in Amsterdam, then in Greece, then he was back home again, but in Melbourne. She knew where he was and kept in touch with him.

So six or seven years passed and Digger had a good bundle of letters. He kept them in a drawer, and sometimes, as he had once done with Iris’s letters to Mac, he took them out and read them through. It was a pleasant occupation. What he thought of when he lay them aside, full as they were of memories of Iris and of so much else besides, little things he had in mind to tell Ellie, phrases from the poems, was how full his life had been, and that too he wrote to her since she, and all this business of writing to her, was part of it.

So many letters. Seven years.

He did not realise, as he thought this, that there would be so many more. Till it was eleven years. Then twelve, then thirteen.

VIC HAD COME by his driver, Brad, in an unlikely manner.

He used to stop occasionally, when he went for a walk out of his office, at a little coffee shop in an arcade, where he could sit and be quiet with his thoughts.

It wasn’t a lively place. It had been left just as it was from the days back in the Fifties when espresso coffee first made its appearance, and a Gaggia machine raising a head of steam, a view of the Bay of Naples, and laminated, kidney-shaped counters with high stools offered the promise that somewhere at least there was a dolce vita . He liked it because the only people who came here now were tired-looking women shoppers, and a few muddy-eyed older men who wanted a place where they would not be intimidated by too much style.

Tramps half of them looked, or very nearly. They put three or four spoonfuls of sugar into their coffee and sucked it up noisily, with no loss of dignity. He would settle in a corner and feel invisible, though in fact his expensive clothes made him very conspicuous. The invisibility was in his head, but it worked on people and he was seldom approached.

One day the old fellow behind the counter, who emerged every now and then to wipe the tables down with a damp cloth, came across in his shirt-sleeves and apron and spoke to him. He was in his middle sixties, a rough-looking fellow with a shock of snowy hair.

‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ he said, and there was a smirk on his face that was very youthful. Vic felt then that he did know him, but couldn’t put a name or a place to him.

‘Felix,’ the man told him. ‘I used to work for Needham’s. In the old days. On the trucks. With Alf Lees. You remember.’

He did too, and the memory was a sweet one. Since their move up to Turramurra, everything that evoked the old house at Strathfield, and the factory, seemed sweet to him. The man, without waiting to be invited, sat down opposite — it was his place, after all — and said quietly: ‘I noticed you comin’ in here.’

He shifted the two sauce bottles and the pepper and salt shakers, setting them in a row.

‘I’ve got a favour to ask you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a boy, a good lad really — he’s honest, I mean — but he’s unsettled. Gives ’is mother a lotta worry. I was wondering if — you know, with your contacts, you could maybe do something for ’im. I know it’s a big thing to ask.’ It was more words, you could see, than he was used to finding all at the one go.

Vic was impressed by the straightness of him. He wasn’t at all obsequious. He was speaking as one man to another, taking for granted an equality between them, given a few million dollars, that Vic was glad to accept. He was speaking too as a father, and that also moved him. So he had taken the boy on as a driver.

He did not like him much. He was a young man who thought a great deal of himself. He was always glancing up to take a look at himself in the rear-vision mirror, and what he saw was a pleasure to him. He wasn’t very bright either, but did not know it. He talked too much and a lot of it was rot. But Vic liked the father, Felix, very much, and when he went to have his coffee now the man left the counter, brought a cup of his own, and they would sit together for a time and talk.

He was a sad fellow. He had driven for a big trucking company after he left the factory but had done his back in — that’s how he had missed the war. After that he had a newspaper run, out Lidcombe way; then, when he retired, had put his money into the coffee shop. He had married late. There was just the one boy.

‘I’ve done pretty well, considering,’ he said, and you could see that it did not occur to him that the man he was speaking to had done so much better. They were very easy with one another. Vic felt that in talking to Felix, though the subject was not mentioned, he was relieving himself a little of what he could not say about Greg. The tie between them was always this difficult business of fathers and sons, though it had never come out in fact that he had one.

What Vic had against Brad was that he had none of his father’s fineness of feeling. In his empty-headed, egotistical way he took Vic’s acquaintance with his father as a feather in his own cap, referring to it sometimes in a way that was quite out of place and which Vic found offensive, though out of affection for the father he did not mention it.

He had very little use for a driver, preferring, except on special occasions, to take a smaller car. Most often it was Alex Brad drove for. Alex liked to work in the car, and Brad, who was very keen on appearances, felt it gave him too a kind of importance — it was like being in a film — to have someone back there making use of a dictaphone and taking calls; though Vic, of course, was the boss.

Vic was using Brad, and the big car, when he found himself one afternoon at the Cross. He had visitors to entertain, two Japanese with whom he had just signed a sizeable contract, and a Swede. They had eaten at a good Italian place in Darlinghurst, drunk well, and these visitors, especially one of the Japanese, having heard of the Cross, wanted to take a look at it — not, Vic warned them, that there would be much to see at three o’clock in the afternoon. He told Brad he could take a bit of a walk — say, half an hour — and, leaving the car in Kellett Street, they strolled in the sunshine to an outdoor café.

He disliked the Cross and never came here except on occasions like this. Its most recent incarnation, as a playground for American servicemen on R and R from Vietnam, was done with now, gone with the war, but the sleaziness and joyless opportunism of that time had set a standard and the Cross was still living up to it. An odour of tropical despair hung over the place, from battlefields that in those days had been just hours away. The boys coming in in their freshly-laundered Hawaiian shirts had still had the smell of battle fear on them.