He kept away from people he knew, or tried to; but occasionally, in a panic, would need the comfort of a familiar voice. He would go out shakily and ring someone. Douggy mostly, since Douggy was settled; more rarely, but he had done it once or twice, the Warrenders, hoping that he might catch Lucille. It was enough on most occasions just to dial the numbers and hear the phone ring. He could go back to sleep then. Or he would wait for the answering voice and stand listening a moment, too ashamed to speak.
But there were times as well when only one person would do, and that was Digger.
He hung off as long as he could. He hated this dependence and didn’t understand it. But sooner or later he would give up fighting and seek Digger out. Once it was up the Cross. The next time he had to hitch-hike all the way up to the Hawkesbury, to Keen’s Crossing.
Facing Digger took him right back. He would be shaking so badly at times he thought it must be the malaria coming back; it was physical. But it wasn’t malaria, and after a little he would be calmer, then a great calmness would settle and spread in him; his spirit would go sleepy with it and it would last for days sometimes, like a laying on of hands.
He did not know why this was. He was moved, and grateful, and wished he had some way of showing it, but Digger needed nothing from him, barely knew, he thought, what had taken place. Digger was patient with him but also held him off. He felt hurt. He was touched at times by a spirit of generosity and affection for the world that broke something in him which needed, he knew, to be broken. He would blunder about empty-handed then, looking to some as if he were drunk, to others crazy, with the light-headed, swollen-hearted sense of being a bearer of gifts that would appear and declare themselves, must do, as soon as he found someone who would accept them from him.
2
‘WELL, HE’S COMING,’ Ma said, turning aside from her accounts. ‘He’s promised this time. But I’m not telling Pa till he’s actually here. He’d be too disappointed. Oh,’ she added, ‘and I think it would be better if we didn’t say anything, any of us — you know, about where he’s been.’
Ellie did no more than glance up briefly from her book. It was Lucille who said sharply: ‘For heaven’s sake, why not?’
She was feeding creamed pears to little Alexander. The child, peeved at the interruption, at anything that came between him and the big warmth that shone so continuously upon him, shifted his gaze to his grandmother and his lip dropped. His mother was turned away from him. The spoon was in mid-air, inches from his mouth.
Mrs Warrender did not immediately reply. She understood Lucille’s position. It was difficult to be a married woman and a mother, and to have a husband who was thousands of miles off and no household or home of your own. She knew too that where Vic was concerned Lucille was proprietorial. She had no right to be, but all that did was make her touchier.
‘Well,’ Ma said at last, ‘I know Vic and he won’t want to talk about it. If he brings it up himself it’s a different matter. But he won’t, I know he won’t.’
Lucille glowered. In these last months she had grown increasingly impatient with Ma, and now that she was about to break free, increasingly critical, scornful even, of the way they lived, the evasions and half-truths they were driven to in being so sensitive always of one another’s hurts. She wanted a life now that was robust, and open and honest, even if it hurt, and such a thing was impossible here. She was tired of being a married woman and still a child in her parents’ house.
All the months she was pregnant she had felt wonderfully separate and self-contained. She had eaten what she liked, slept till midday, spent her afternoons stretched out in the sun; with none of her usual restlessness, and none of the vexations either that went with her ‘difficult’ nature. And there was no selfishness in it, because she was no longer thinking only of herself.
Separate, but at the same time connected and in the line of something: real forces, by which she meant forces that were outside her will.
Time, for instance.
The clock that had begun ticking in her, which was perfectly synchronised to the sun, was real time, not just clock time, and it synchronised her as well. It could not be stopped or slowed or quickened. She submitted herself to it and felt no violation; in fact the opposite, a kind of release.
Gravity, too.
One afternoon, in the dreamy state she fell into under the blazing sun, she had had a vision of herself as a cloud, so light and transparent that she might have dissolved or risen up and floated. But inside the cloud, far off in a spotlight at the very centre of it, a little figure was performing, not for an audience, not at all, but for himself. In a state of perfect self-absorption he was turning somersaults, and she could see him quite clearly, though in fact he was such a long way off. He wasn’t weightless, but he appeared to know enough of the secrets of gravity to play the most astonishing tricks with it. She kept her eye on him; she wanted to learn the secrets of all this — of lightness, but also her own true weight in the world.
For months, with her eyes screwed up against the sun, her feet propped on the arms of a squatter’s chair and a jug of Meggsie’s lemon drink at her elbow, she had watched him perform. He was very small and far off at first, but the far-offness had to do with time, not space. He grew as he got closer; till he was so close she no longer had to squint to make him out.
Never for a moment in all this did she feel anxious for him, or for herself either. She would not float away and he would not fall. They were held, both of them.
And she did not have to feel impatient either. He was moving in his own time and would not be hurried. He was the clock. Somewhere up ahead, at a point they had not yet arrived at, he was already sitting up in his high-chair and banging with a spoon. All she had to do was wait the days out till they were there.
‘Well,’ she said now, ‘I know Vic, too.’ She urged the child to open up for a last mouthful. ‘You’re doing just what he wants. All this carrying on! It’s to make us see what a sensitive soul he is and how careful we ought to be with him, that’s all. And to make himself the centre of things.’
Ellie looked up again. It was the note of vehemence in Lucille’s voice, not the words themselves, that shocked her.
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ Ma said, and she too was angry now. ‘Honestly, Lucille, there are times when I don’t think I know you at all.’
Lucille flushed. It was humiliating to her to come under her mother’s criticism and be rebuked. She took up her things, set Alexander on her hip, and stalked from the room.
‘Why are you so down on Vic?’ Ellie asked later, when they were alone together in Lucille’s room, the child on the bed between them. Lucille was sitting up cross-legged threading a needle.
‘Am I?’ she said.
‘Yes, you are. And you haven’t even seen him. You upset Ma, too. You know how fond she is of him. What’s the matter with you?’
Lucille went on with her needle. After a moment she lowered her work and said fiercely: ‘He thinks he’s the only one in the world that anything’s happened to. I know Vic. I don’t have to see him.’
Ellie drew back. She knew these stormy, half-tearful, half-defiant moods in her sister. They were close, and had been even closer in these last months since Lucille was alone.
The three years between them made a difference.