She was dressmaking when he arrived. She came to the door in her stockinged feet, in a frock of some shining material, green, with the pins still in it; and when he followed her into the front room a neighbour, a young newly-married woman, was there. They were drinking beer. Snips of the material like big pointed leaves were in pools all over the floor, and the neighbour, who was a blonde, had a mouthful of pins. She said hullo through them and giggled.
Apologising for the mess, she put the flowers for a moment on the piano stool, just as she had the letters, and promising him a beer in just a moment if he would be patient till they got round the last bit of hem, climbed on to a chair. He saw then that the hem was not quite fixed.
The blonde girl, whose name was Amy, got down on her knees with the pins in her mouth and went on with it, glancing up every now and then to take a look at him. He guessed from this that she already knew about him. So Iris had mentioned him! Her quick little glances were glances of appraisal; she was a second opinion. He laughed at this and did not feel intimidated. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was enjoying himself.
Iris turned in a slow circle above them — Amy kneeling, he in one of the genoa velvet chairs — shifting her stockinged feet very daintily, an inch at a time, with her arms at her side and her head lowered a little to follow the progress of the work.
It was a quiet business and took a bit of time; the quietness imposed by the fact that one of the two parties (he thought of himself as a mere spectator) could not speak because of the pins.
To Digger it was a lovely moment, he had known nothing like it. He was happy just sitting. But the hem was done at last, found satisfactory, and she got down, told him how patient he had been, took the flowers to put them in water, got him a beer, brought the flowers back in a glass vase, and they sat and chatted.
She was a lively girl, Amy. She kept them laughing with tales about her three sisters-in-law, who were called Faith, Hope and Charity — could you believe it? — so that they hardly spoke to one another. Just sat sipping the cold beer and looking. Once or twice Iris turned away in profile and he saw that the hairs on her neck, where she had pinned it up so that Amy could fix the collar of the new frock, were darker, damp with sweat.
‘Do you dance, Digger?’ Amy asked him in her uninhibited way. ‘Ben and I go every Friday night. Do you like Perry Como? Have you seen The Sign of the Cross?’
As she fired off her questions, and he answered them, Iris gave him half-amused, apologetic looks that assured him that she was not responsible for this inquisition, and he believed it; she was quite capable of putting her own questions. But she didn’t cut Amy short either.
The only thing that worried him was that he might be too old-fashioned for them, for her; too out of it. He was embarrassed still by the number of things people took for granted here that he had not yet caught up with. Amy was full of them. He didn’t want to be shown up. He bluffed, made a mental note of these puzzles, and wondered who he could go to later and ask.
When the boys arrived they came in a storm, shouting and dumping their boots in the hall. Ewen’s team had won, six-three. That was a cause for celebration. With a quick little look that dared her to protest, he took a good swig of his mother’s beer. His eyes were on Digger, summing him up, Digger was aware of that, but gave no indication of what they saw.
Jack, the younger boy, was already off out the back and was soon calling.
‘I’ve got to fly,’ Amy said, gathering up her things. ‘Here,’ she told Ewen, ‘leave your mother’s beer and finish mine. It’s only a few drops,’ she told Iris. ‘I’ll get murdered if Ben’s tea’s not on time.’
She took one last look at the frock, which was hanging now from the picture-rail, to satisfy herself of her own workmanship, took a look at Digger too, actually winked at him, and went.
He went himself a minute later; he had to be at the club by six. So that was all there was to it. But it was agreed that he should pick her up after work on Monday and they would do a show.
Lying quietly at his side she got him to tell her stories, and what he had to tell — his mother and father, Jenny, everything about Keen’s Crossing — seemed stranger than it had been in the living of it. Why was that? Because he was seeing it through her eyes.
One thing he told her shocked him. He hadn’t thought about it for nearly twenty years. If his memory were not so good he would have said he had forgotten it. It was the cruellest thing he had ever done.
Once, when she was about eight years old, Jenny had gone up to the highway above the house and somehow or other got herself to the other side. This was forbidden, and she knew it. Why had she done it this time? Anyway, once she was across her courage entirely failed her and she dared not cross back.
It started to get dark and, lost out there, she began to whimper and call. He heard her, crept up under cover of the bushes, and sat there, well hidden on the other side, and watched to see what she would do. She would come up to the edge of the road on her stumpy legs, screw up her courage to cross, then sit down again and weep; then come to the road again and walk up and down the edge of it as if just minutes ago it had ceased to be dirt and gravel and become a deep-flowing stream. He watched for a long time, appalled, but fascinated too by her helplessness. Finally she sank down in the growing dark and in a hopeless way sobbed his name. Over and over, ‘Digger, Digger’ — it gave him the creeps. At last, pretending he had just arrived, he stepped out into the middle of the road, stood a moment, then went quickly and took her hand.
He was a long time silent after he told this.
‘Where is she now?’ Iris asked.
‘That’s just it,’ he said, and realised why it was that the occasion had now come back to him. ‘She’s run off somewhere. My mother thinks Brisbane. She’s terrified — mum, I mean. She’s scared we’ll all do it, go off one after another. Dad did. Now Jenny.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I haven’t gone off. She knows that. I’m different.’
He told her stories of his mother, too, and was surprised to see from her reaction that he had made his mother fearsome, whereas what he had meant her to see was what a fierce grip on life she had — how she had given that to him too at times up there, when it was her presence, her demands on him, that had got him through. She sounded hard, but she wasn’t, not by nature. It was circumstances that had made her hard.
‘We think the same way,’ he explained, partly to himself. ‘On’y she doesn’ see that. Because the things I’ve got to hold on to aren’t the same as hers. Some of them are. But most of ’em aren’t. She can’t see it.’
He described the things his mother held on to and told Iris of the room she believed she would sit in one day surrounded by all her worldly possessions; only by then they would be otherworldly. Still real and touchable, useable too, but as she too would be then, past all possibility of loss.
‘Just ordinary things,’ he explained, in case the picture wasn’t clear to her. ‘She’s not grasping, it’s not that. She does want the things for what they are now, but what she really wants them for is what they will be then. What they will show about her. Her life.’
Iris looked at him rather hard. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. She was only indirectly interested in what he had to say of his mother. ‘What are the things you need to hold on to?’
He told her a few of them. At last he told her how the two officers had come and asked him to keep a list of the names — the names and what happened in each case, insofar as it was known, to the men: a record, a kind of history. That was one thing.