David Malouf: The Great World

Forty-three years old he would be now, wherever he was. And now, forty-three years late, this .

She hugged his head to her breast, but after a little, when her tears stopped, she eased him off and said gently: ‘Listen, listen, Mister. I’m not leaving you. On’y I gotta get Digger, right? Right? Two minutes. Right?’

She got up, and there was still the cat, still with its head rolled towards her. She had to step around it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told it, ‘I haven’t forgot. I’ll get to you later.’

She began calling Digger under her breath all the way to the yard, and when she was in hearing distance she started shouting for him, and right away he appeared round the corner of the store.

DIGGER WAS WALKING with Ellie on a terrace of springy turf, the edge of which fell away into a wild little gully, all reddish boulders and giant ironbarks and angophoras growing straight out of the rock. Behind them was the low, ranch-style house that Vic had built. They had come out with tea mugs in their hands to see the birds that filled the garden as they did the gully below, not observing, since it was barely visible, the point where wild nature became nature tended and organised, except that the garden offered the greater variety of green things spiked or spurred or exploding in dark or dazzling showers and was the more crowded. In the space of just seconds Digger identified blue wrens, noisy mynahs, three Eastern Rosellas, two kinds of honey-eater, all as Ellie in her many descriptions of the place had promised. He had never seen it before but knew every corner of this garden as if it was his own.

Ellie walked with a limp. She had never told him of any illness or injury; he was surprised. This little change in her, and it wasn’t, as he saw after a time, the only one, alerted him to how many things in her life their correspondence might not have covered. But all that meant was how much more there was to come.

Her smile was the same, and so, almost at once, was the easiness between them.

She was very calm. Her mother was so distressed, she told him, and there had been so much noise and confusion, that she had to be.

In the evening they had been besieged by reporters. They had clambered all over the drive, banging on the doors, front and back, looming up at windows, making camp with their cameras on the lawn. None of them had shown any sort of consideration, or had the least respect for their privacy or grief, or had thought of the event, so far as she could see, as anything more than News. Ellie, who had always hated this public aspect of their lives, and feared it too, was disgusted. They had had to draw the curtains and sit like prisoners in their own house, and still the banging had gone on, the tapping at windows, the shouted appeals. Then suddenly they had all rushed off again, just packed up in great excitement and were gone. An event of world proportions had intervened, and Vic Curran’s death, which on any other day would have been headlines, was reduced to a ten-centimetre column on the front page, with a direction to page three.

As for Albert Keen, phantom dealer in millions, whose rise and fall from nothing to nothing had covered just thirty-one days, you had to go to the financial pages and read between the lines to get a hint of that. It was a story that was lost as yet in the clouds of dust in which a whole ghostly edifice had tottered and come crashing down.

The Needham’s Group had been hit, and hit badly. That at least was clear, and there were statements, cautious ones, from Alex and from the managers of two major banks.

‘Did you see what the papers are saying?’ Ellie asked him.

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But you know the papers.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s true.’ Digger looked to see how much she knew. Was she testing him? ‘He was doing something, I don’t know what. Alex knows. Something crazy. It wasn’t illegal — or not quite, he wouldn’t have done anything like that. You know what he was like. But it seems —’ Her eye moved out over the layered leaves of the garden, all the different kinds of fronds, and heart-shaped and elongated leaves, and sword-shapes and falls of colour and fiery wheels. ‘Alex says we’re in trouble. He’s out of his mind, poor Alex.’

‘It was me,’ Digger said abruptly. ‘I was in on it. Haven’t you heard?’ It was a confession. He had no reason to boast of it.

‘Yes. Alex told me. But Digger — you don’t know anything about these things.’

‘It was just the name he was using,’ he explained, but it sounded unlikely without Vic to expound the thing and make it real. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘I’m a ruined man.’

She looked at him then. They both saw the humour of it, and he thought he heard Vic laugh. It was the sort of thing that might have appealed to him.

They walked on for a minute or two.

‘Can I come and see you?’ Digger asked. ‘Or do you want to go on with the letters?’

She thought a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘Why don’t you write and ask me?’

It was too early to say any of the things they would have at last to get round to. Maybe it would be easier in writing.

They sat holding hands for a time, on a bench under the trees, then she said at last: ‘Digger, I must go, I’ve got to see my mother. Do you want me to get you a car for the station?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Now that I’m a pauper again I’d better get used to walking, don’t you reckon?’

The walk to the station was a warm one. It was hot for October. He had to stop and take his hat off for a bit to let his head breathe. From narrow patches of weeds on either side of the asphalt came the smell of dust and grass-seed, mixed in with an acrid but not at all unpleasant odour that showed there were dogs about. One or two of them came trotting past; out on their own affairs, and leaving at points along their route these sharp-smelling traces of their presence, just a few drops each time, as if it was incumbent upon them to mark their passage in this elemental and entirely personal fashion.

Digger liked the way they trotted about so lightly on their claws, with their ears flopping and their noses to the ground. They knew what they were doing, dogs. You could learn something from them. He walked on.

A list had started up in his head. He let it go on. Burton, Cable, Carwardine, Cooley, Cooper, Crane . . The next one was him.

He let the two syllables out and found himself choked a moment. He could hardly go on: Curran .

Curran, Victor Charles , one of a list. But they had, after all and despite all, been as close as any two men could be. How had that happened?

He got a flash of him as he had appeared, hovering about behind Doug, in those last days before the surrender, and experienced again, and with a force he wouldn’t have thought possible, as if time had no meaning at all, the immediate aversion he had felt. No, it was something more hidden than that. A sense of their being, in their deepest natures, inimical to one another; in some part of themselves that was not accessible to view, or to reasoning either, though they were both aware of it, and would trust it too. Except that they had not, not in the long run. What they had done instead, since they could hardly do otherwise, was let the spirit of accident lead them. First the monstrous accident of Mac’s killing, then the stranger one of their physical dependence on one another in the coming and going of their fevers, till what was revealed was something stronger even than their first instinctive hostility; unless that had been, from the start, only the negative sign of a deeper affinity. Which they might have missed, and by a long shot too, forty years, if accident had not imposed itself as the true shaper of their lives.