David Malouf: The Great World

He stood a moment, looking pleased with himself and fingering the notes. Then, losing confidence, he turned, grabbed the girl, who was swaying about on the pavement, and dragged her off.

The others sat staring. They could not see what it meant, what embarrassing intimacy or bit of odd local behaviour had been revealed to them, and Vic did not bother to explain. He did not bother with them at all. Stumbling to his feet, he took the bill, paid it at the counter inside and they had to set off after him.

They found the car. The driver, with an ice-cream cone in his hand, was walking up and down the pavement keeping an eye on it. Up here he liked to keep a good lookout — he was smart that way.

He twigged immediately that something had gone wrong. When they had dropped the Swede off, then the two Japs, he glanced up enquiringly into the rear-vision mirror, past his own reflection this time. Old Trader Vic (as he called him when he was showing off to his mates) was slumped in the corner against the window. He looked like someone had king-hit him. Brad turned his head so that the old fellow would see something more than just the back of his neck. It was a form of question.

He came back to reality then and asked to be driven to a place Brad had never taken him before, way up beyond Ku-ring-gai Chase to the Hawkesbury, and some bit of a store on the river up there where he had to sit around kicking his heels for ages, and a crazy old girl with no hair practically had offered him a cup of tea, then in the middle of it, for no reason he ever discovered, did her block and started to perform and play rough with him.

THEY WERE THE years now of the real boom. What had come before was nothing compared to this. What had been measured in millions was to be measured now in hundreds of millions. No one had seen anything like it.

When Jenny saw Vic on the television these days she sat glum and silent.

It wasn’t him that worried her — she knew him. She didn’t know what he did , or any more about him than she ever had, but she had been in the same room with him, her own kitchen, and seen the way he sipped his tea with his eyes looking out over the rim of the cup, and ate a pikelet, and the way the skin wrinkled on the back of his hand. She knew the smell of him too. That wasn’t what worried her. What she could not fathom was what he was doing in the world of TV, the News and that. How had he got there? She knew how he had got to the Crossing. Through Digger. But the TV was different.

The moment his name came up and his face appeared in the lighted window there, smiling, assured, with his striped shirts and his brushed hair and the face so bronzed and lifelike, the whole thing lost its credibility for her. She couldn’t listen to what they were saying or believe any bit of it. The News! She would go glum and start counting in her head — one, two, three, four — till they took him off.

Vic had always played things close to his chest. All his success had come from his willingness to take responsibility for what he was doing, stay quiet, bear the risks, and keep his nerve. Ma had been his only real confidante. She was so still. He would tell her anything she wanted to know, she had only to ask. Alex he told as little as he could get away with.

He had chosen Alex because he was family, and because he had seen, in a hard-nosed way, that the qualities Alex possessed were the ones he lacked. They were qualities he had no time for in fact — they had all to do with caution, consultation, bookkeeping, accountability — but they were what the times, it seemed, demanded. He had chosen Alex as well because he thought, being family, he would have a kind of ascendency over him.

He had been wrong in this. Alex was stubborn. He held to the code he lived by with a fanaticism Vic found he could neither ignore nor negotiate.

Alex was a company man. Accountability was his gospel. When he spoke it was with all the facts at his fingertips and the approval, always, of a board with whom he had gone over every detail. He could not understand Vic. Or rather, he did understand but could not deal with him.

‘He’s a dinosaur,’ he complained to the few men he could trust not to bear tales. ‘It was fine in the old days. It was open slather then. This was Hicksville. He could be a one man show and get away with it. He was brilliant, I agree. But we’re in a new phase now. Everything’s more complicated. That’s what he won’t accept. I have to watch him like a goddamn hawk. You’ve got no idea the tricks he gets up to.’

‘So what are you griping about?’ Vic would argue when some scheme he had been engaged in was in the open at last and his hand revealed. ‘We made money on it, didn’t we? Have I ever got us into anything that was a loss? What about that Riverdale business? Who got us into that little pile of pooh?’

He knew Alex was watching him, that he was being humoured — patronised, in fact — and that Alex had a core of supporters, fellows full of his sort of ideas who were determined to restrain and thwart him and would one day ease him out. He watched them, and after a time he began to watch outside as well. He had a nose for that, for what was not quite right; a sixth sense that warned him when someone was on his tail. He had played that game himself and knew the signs. When he was sure of what was happening he took action but told no one, acting as he always had done, alone. If Alex was in it, he would be caught out and exposed. If he wasn’t, he would be delighted, wouldn’t he? — astonished too — that the thing had been seen and forestalled.

It was his big gamble. He needed it. He needed the excitement, and the chance it offered to show, once and for all, what he was worth. When all was ready, fixed and about to go, he would lay his hand down and watch their faces.

He had advisers of his own, of course; you needed them these days. But them too he kept in the dark. It would have been good, he thought, to go over it with Ma. He had no wish to deceive her. But Ma was nearly ninety; still clear-headed but racked with anxieties again that he was afraid to catch.

The one person he could be open with was Digger, he owed him that; and the advantage of Digger was that he offered no arguments. He might have done. There were times, certainly, when he looked doubtful enough. But Digger was out of his element. He did not understand the danger, the beauty of the thing.

So though he tried to stay away, he found himself, as the affair reached its crisis, going back and back to the Crossing, eager to have someone to listen while once again he went over the details of it. It was watertight. No doubt of that. He had considered every eventuality. But he needed to talk it into action, to keep it going where he could best control each movement of it: in his head.

Digger had caught on to one or two things that set him thinking. They had come up in passing, but in a way that caught his ear. One of them had to do with the market’s being ‘nervous’. He was struck by the word because it had already occurred to him in connection with Vic.

He talked a good deal about how cool he was. He prided himself on that. But what Digger saw was that he was overheated, and he could not judge, since he had never seen him till now under circumstances like these, whether it was normal or not, whether it was or was not to be expected as a by-product of what kept him cool. He would have liked to discuss this with someone, with Ellie for instance; she would know. But the secrecy Vic demanded held him back.

This secret side of things was an agony to him. He wondered how necessary it was outside of Vic’s need to impose it. Its effect was to bind them even closer now, as fellow conspirators, but in an area where only Vic knew the rules. He swallowed his doubts, afraid, when so much depended on confidence, and trust, that if he spoke them aloud he might bring about the very thing he wanted to prevent — the upsetting of some balance in Vic that would put him off.