Nothing in her letters suggested any of this. She had subdued her liveliness there, limiting herself maybe to the way Mac saw her. Anyway, it had given him the wrong idea, and when she came back now, bringing in tea and a slice of Napoleon, he observed her with different eyes. She apologised for the Napoleon. It came from a shop.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Sargents.’
She was surprised at that, and at his knowing already that she worked there, and he restrained himself from telling her greedily how much more he knew: the sweet-peas, the tomato jam she made that he and Mac had so often talked about and smacked their lips over, the forty-nine piece dinner set Mac had given her and Don as a wedding present, and how upset she had been when she broke the lid of a soup tureen the first time she washed it up. These facts seemed trivial now. He had made too much of them.
Several times, as they drank their tea, he caught her eye on him, a frankly puzzled look, and it was a while before he saw the reason for it. She had no idea really who he was. Mac, he saw, had never mentioned him, or if he had she had forgotten it.
She asked questions of him: where he came from — he gave her a quick sketch of Keen’s Crossing — what he was doing in Sydney, where he lived. She came from Queensland herself. Had he been up there? He told her about the boxing. He had never found it so easy to talk about himself.
Once the preliminaries were over they barely mentioned Mac. She simply took it for granted that what he had come for, now that he was here, had to do with her.
The idea alarmed him at first. It took him a little time to get used to it. But once he did he had to admit that it was true, and had been right from the start. How quickly she had seen it! That was a woman for you. She was over forty, he guessed, working backwards from the date on the certificate, but hadn’t lost the assurance of her own attractiveness.
She called the boys up to get a piece of Napoleon. They came in barefoot and in their house clothes, shorts and ragged shirts, and were awkward at first but found their tongues at last under her meaningful looks. He knew them already, of course. Ewen, the eldest was. He would be sixteen. The younger boy, Jack, was the high-jumper. They were making something down in the yard and were keen to get back to it. They shifted from foot to foot, and after a decent interval she relented and let them go.
So they came at last to the letters.
He had expected them to provide the climax of his visit and had prepared a speech. But so much had already happened that they seemed like an afterthought now, and when he said what he had to say it was in such a confused, emotional way that it sounded false.
‘Goodness,’ she said, when he told her what the envelope contained. She looked at it a moment, turned it over in her hands, then lay it, unopened, on the piano stool; and there it sat, very white and clean, for the rest of his visit.
He had expected her to open it and see how soiled the letters were, and from that how many times they had been unfolded and read. When she did not he was disappointed. She would do that later, he guessed, in private, after he left. Or would she? Once they got talking again she seemed simply to have forgotten they were there.
‘I make too much of things,’ he told himself. He knew how fond she was of Mac because he knew the letters. ‘There’s a lighter way of handling all this.’ It would go, he thought, with the rowdy good humour the house had been filled with — till he stepped in and put a damper on it.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she said when he was on the doorstep again. ‘Really. I appreciate it.’
He swallowed hard. He wanted to say something to her. ‘Listen,’ he wanted to say, ‘You don’t know this — how could you? — but I watched you drink a glass of water once and it was amazing. It wasn’t you, I see that now. It was a you I made up. But it was amazing just the same. An ordinary glass of water, can you imagine it?’
What he actually said, and he was staggered later by his own temerity, was: ‘Would it be all right if I called again?’
If she was surprised she gave no indication of it. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Any time. Only not on weekdays. You know, because of the shop. This time Saturday is good.’
‘Oh, I saw you coming,’ she laughed. ‘Saw you a mile off.’
They were lying together on the narrow bed in his room, high up on the third floor of the Pomeroy.
‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, turning his head so that she wouldn’t see his smile. He loved it when she presented him to himself. It was like seeing someone else. He had had no opportunity before this to indulge himself.
‘You had messages written all over you,’ she told him. ‘In nine languages.’
‘Did I?’
All this delighted him.
But after a moment he said solemnly: ‘It was Mac that I was coming about, that first time.’
She might have questioned this. She did not think so. And the second? But Digger was sensitive on the point. He did not want it to appear that he had used Mac, or the letters, to come to her. He was too scrupulous, she wouldn’t have minded; but it was his own integrity he was concerned with. When she saw that, she let him have things his way, and clung to what she knew.
He had gone out the second time on foot. It wasn’t much more than a mile and he wanted to take things slowly, no need to rush.
He was going now on his own account. The other business, Mac’s, had been settled on the first occasion; so far as it ever would be. He felt light-hearted, youthful. It didn’t worry him that he didn’t know the right forms for this sort of thing. She would understand that and make allowances. She had an infinite understanding (that’s the impression he had taken away) of all sorts of things; things he had no notion of.
He was very conscious of the fact that at twenty-five he was entirely without experience in some matters. Courtship and that — the sort of gallantry that some fellows can manage by instinct, he had none of. But he had a great tenderness in him. Surely if he let that speak it would be enough.
Still, he had armed himself, just in case, with a bunch of flowers, purple and red anemones wrapped in pale tissue. The old girl he bought them from, who looked after six or seven buckets in a laneway, and sat reading the Bible all day on a folding stool, had recommended them as the freshest at this time of the week, and seeing how nervous he was had taken trouble with the wrapping. The flower heads with their strong colours and black furry centres, as if fat bumblebees were at them, just peeped out over the sky-blue tissue, and there was a bit of ribbon, a darker blue.
He felt awkward carrying flowers. He held them downward at arm’s length where they were not so noticeable; he wasn’t one of those blokes in light suits and polished shoes you saw ringing the doorbell of apartment houses, stepping about impatiently in front of the bronze door and checking how they looked, their parting, their ties, in its diamond panes. Still, he didn’t care if he looked foolish. Who was looking, anyway?
He had felt such a warmth of life in her. He was chilled to the bone sometimes, for all the strong sunlight here.