Billy, James, Leslie, May, Pearl — that was another.
Then he told her, as well as he could, what he hadn’t told McGowan, and actually said the words: ‘Not a soul. Not a pin.’
The flames he was thinking of were the ones that had leapt up round the teak logs in the clearing at Hintock Pass, which was just one fire of the many into which all the cast-offs, all the refuse and broken-down and worn-out rubbish of the world, goes when its newness has worn off, and those who have scrabbled to get and keep it no longer care whether it goes up in flames or down the sewer, or simply gets stamped back into the earth.
You couldn’t save it from destruction. And you couldn’t make it whole again. Not in fact. But in your head you could.
She listened. She touched his cheek, and lay the tips of her fingers to the place, just above the line of his hair, where a vein beat, feeling its steady throb.
He also told her at last how Mac had died. She listened without looking at him, holding his head against her so that his breath, while he spoke, was on her flesh. After a time she asked quietly: ‘Was he buried?’
‘What?’
The question surprised him.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘We never saw him again, the body or that. The Japs would’ve buried ’im.’
‘The word they sent,’ she told him, ‘was that he was missing. That’s all we ever heard.’
‘No,’ Digger said. ‘I saw what happened to him.’
She was silent a while, then sat up a little and told him a story of her own.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When I was little, ten or eleven, maybe, we lived up near Gympie in Queensland. My dad had a farm. There were four of us, four girls, I was the second eldest, and my mother’s mother, our grannie, lived with us. She was very difficult. She and my mother never really got on. She had asthma and was too weak to get about. She’d sit all day out on the front verandah, and what I remember best is the rug she had. I’d never seen the sea then, but it was sea-colours, all blues and greens and purples in waves. She’d crocheted it herself, so they must have been her favourites.
‘They used to tell me I was like her. I mean, I was supposed to be difficult too. My mother would say: “You’re just like your grandma,” but in fact I didn’t like her very much, and if my sisters said it, you know, copying her, I’d pull their hair. Can you see me doing that?
‘Anyway, there was a flood. They came out to warn us. Our place was out of town, so we had time to save things. I remember they put a whole lot of furniture, beds and chairs, a sideboard, our sofa with a birdcage on it, on the grass in front of the house waiting for a wagon to take it. I remember how strange it looked. But the river came down quicker than they expected, and in the end there was a real panic. We had to get away in the night, and all the chairs and the sofa and that were swept away. I saw the water take them, it was amazing.
‘The thing is, grannie wouldn’t go. Or there was a quarrel or something at the last minute and she wouldn’t get into the boat. I don’t remember exactly, and later the story my mother told was different somehow. When we went back there was no sign of her. But for some reason I kept expecting her to turn up. I’d hear her wheezing in the middle of the night and get up and go to the verandah rails and expect to see her there.
‘My mother got furious with me. I was just, you know, at the most difficult, growing-up stage, and we didn’t get on either and she was upset by it. Maybe I was being difficult on purpose, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t accept that she was really dead.
‘All our other relations were buried right on the property. We used to go off and play funerals there and pick flowers and put them on the graves. You could read the stones. Being buried was what dead was, and we had never buried grandma. We’d never even seen the body. You can’t bury people in water, and water comes back, those floods did. You’d see the light of them off in the trees. I used to go out in the moonlight and look at the light there in the paddocks, under the trees, and the strangeness of it, to me, had somehow to do with my grandmother.’
That was the story. She did not add to it, and he saw after a while that it was her husband she was speaking of, though she did not name him.
What they were doing with the things they told was revealing to one another, in the only way they could, all that was closest to them, but tracing as well the limits of their freedom.
The one or two nights a week that she came to his room were when they had been out to a show and the boys could be left with something cold. Digger could always get someone to cover for him. She never stayed late, nor did she ever invite him to stay at Bondi Junction; and even later, when things were on a settled basis and he came up from Keen’s Crossing and stayed overnight, they preserved the fiction of being no more than friends. She made up a bed for him on the sleep-out and came to him there.
It was the boys she was thinking of. ‘I’m a middle-aged woman,’ she told Digger lightly. ‘Forty-three,’ and she shook her head in a girlish way, as if in her real self she didn’t believe it. ‘Oh, you mightn’t think of that, but they do. I’m supposed to be past all this. That’s how young people think.’
The boys wouldn’t have worried, even at the beginning, and certainly not later; or so Digger thought. She was observing her own code.
He would lie, still in his singlet, and watch her undress, liking best the moment when, in just her petticoat at last, she would tilt her head first to one side, then to the other, and take off her earrings; then her rings; the pearl-and-diamond engagement ring first, then the wedding band, placing them carefully on the marble top of the wash-stand. This was the real sign of her nakedness. That she kept on her petticoat and he his singlet had nothing to do with it.
Later, when she got up, he would lie and watch her do the whole thing in reverse.
Only when she came to the earrings, then the engagement and wedding ring, was she no longer naked for him.
3
IN THE AFTERNOON he liked to sit quietly for an hour or so in the bar of the Waratah. Towards five it got crowded, and by half-past fellows would be ordering in half-dozens and lining the glasses up along the sill. He’d slip off then, get a bite to eat and stroll round in a leisurely way to the club.
One afternoon he was holed up in a corner, just enjoying the soft light and the scent of coolness, when he glanced up for no particular reason and Vic was there. He was on a stool at the other end of the bar and had been watching him; goodness knows for how long.
Digger felt a jolt of panic. It was uncanny the capacity this cove had for unsettling him. The once or twice they had run into one another there had been a kind of constraint that had grown at moments to open hostility.
Vic eased himself off the seat, and when he came up it was with a look of surprise and feigned indifference that made Digger furious. Why could he never be open with you? This was no accidental meeting. He had been hearing all week about this bloke who was asking around for him.
‘So, what’ve you been up to?’ Digger asked when they were settled over a beer.
Vic looked at him, and there was a little play of light in his eyes. He was preparing some cock-and-bull story, some lie maybe, that he wouldn’t even expect you to believe. He would just throw it out in contempt, and defy you to take offence at the effrontery of it. ‘Blast ’im,’ Digger thought. But when he spoke it sounded like the truth.
‘Been out west,’ he said. ‘Moree.’
‘Oh? You don’t come from out there, do ya?’
Digger was holding himself in, keeping calm and at a distance. It struck him how little he knew of the bread-and-butter things of Vic’s existence. What he did know he wanted to keep away from. It was too intimate for here. He felt a weakness in his gut. He was inwardly trembling. At the mere sight of Vic a shadow of fever had flickered over him and his body was responding to it now with shivers.