‘Listen,’ she wanted to say, ‘can’t we make this easy? There’s been a war. Extraordinary things have happened. A boy came all the way from Mississippi to sleep with me; drafted into it by the War Office in Washington. He was nineteen. He had never left home. Now he’s gone again, and it may be months before I can go to him, and Alexander is here, and the whole world is different. But it’s all right. We’re all fine — we’re alive, aren’t we? You can see just by looking at him how easy these things can be.’
He was very quick. She saw from his eyes that he had caught her moment of weakness towards him. He passed the child back, and when he put his hands in his pockets there was a little smile at the corner of his mouth, though he tried to conceal it. He had felt his strength again and was preparing to be difficult. There was a lightness in him and a little buzz, she could hear it, coming off the surface of his skin. She drew away.
She could say none of the things that just a moment ago had come to her lips.
He had felt like a ghost coming back here.
When he got off the train he had walked up and down the platform for a time consulting the timetables, the adverts, and deciphering the graffiti in the glassed-in waiting room; giving a good imitation of a man who had another train to catch.
What he was doing was hanging on to his last moments in limbo.
On a railway platform you can wait without question. You walk up and down with your hands in your pockets; stop to light a cigarette or unwrap a new stick of gum, and that’s the limit of it; no obligation to justify yourself, or to greet others or even acknowledge their presence. You stand lifting yourself up and down on your toes and whistling. You stroll to the end of the platform and look down the quarter mile of lumped gravel that serves as a shunting-line. You turn and stroll back. Only when you have passed the boy in the cap and waistcoat who idles at the gate, given up your ticket, gone down the stairs to where taxis are waiting, have you arrived. ‘I could stay here all day,’ he thought when he had read the timetables twice, and the Bible message, and the ads for Vincent’s APC Powders and Bushell’s tea, ‘or I could catch the next train back.’ But suddenly, without thought, he walked to the end of the platform, took the stairs, and before he knew it was in the street.
It was a good walk to the house, but he knew every step. Only four years ago he had been a schoolboy here.
He stopped once to peer through the fence of a canning factory where he had gone with other kids to collect metal scrap.
Just beyond it was the ghost house, a verandahed ruin set far back behind beds of cannas and rusty-looking palms. It had been inhabited then by a batty old girl who wheeled a pram with a Pomeranian in it about the streets. The house was empty now and boarded up.
At the corner of Crane Street there was a place where eight or nine years ago, when he was thirteen, he had used his house key to scratch his initials, V.C.C., into the wet cement. They were still there under the prints of a dog’s paws.
But there was a quickening in him as well, the re-emergence of a sense of himself that had been there from the moment he first told Ma that he would come.
The familiarity of the walk itself began to work on him, as his body, which had a memory of its own, slipped back into the easy knowledge of how many steps it was from the station to their front door. When he got there, he found himself, out of habit, feeling in his pocket for the key.
Two surprising things occurred when the front door was at last thrown open. Meggsie hugged him and burst into tears, and Aunt James, for the first time, recognised him as himself. ‘It’s Vic,’ she called, just behind Meggsie in the hall.
‘My God,’ he thought, and felt a bubble of laughter rise in him. ‘If she knows me I really must be a ghost!’
There were other changes. Pa announced them, a little too quickly, Vic thought, before he could discover them for himself, adopting a humorous tone that gave no indication of what he might really feel.
‘I’m retired,’ he told Vic. ‘Put out to pasture, I reckon. Though officially it’s so I can get on with my book.’ Ma was making little sounds of disavowal, keeping up the game Pa made of it. ‘Meet the new manager.’
‘It’s true,’ she said, rather shy about it. ‘I took over three years ago. Now there’s a surprise for you!’
‘Got rid of me first thing she could,’ Pa said. ‘Sacked for incompetence. For loafing on the job.’
‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘He couldn’t put up with having a woman for a boss, that was the real trouble. Thought it was beneath his dignity.’
‘Oh?’ said Pa. ‘I thought you were always the boss. I thought I was used to it.’
‘Anyway,’ said Ma, ‘we’re on top again, that’s the main thing.’
‘All these years,’ Pa said, ‘we had this secret weapon an’ didn’t even know it. We let Ma loose and the buggers fled.’
Behind all this raillery, Vic felt, there were tensions that only humour, their old rough-gentle humour, could deal with.
But it had changed Ma utterly, this move to the centre of their lives. All that had previously been lax in her had come to attention. The vagueness and languor that had seemed constitutional in her, the restless anxiety, had belonged only, it now appeared, to the conditions she had imposed upon herself — against nature, as it were; first to make way for her brother Stevie, then for Pa. When wartime changed the rules, she had simply stepped in and done what she had all along been intended to do; temporarily at first, while Pa was down with dengue fever, then, with scarcely a protest on his part, for good.
War economies had put a premium on local products. Ma, seeing the opportunity it offered, had acted and made a killing.
It astonished Pa that this woman he had lived with for twenty-five years, and known for more like forty, should suddenly reveal herself as a ‘buccaneer’. She was a Needham, and her father’s daughter, that’s what it was. Pa, who had found the old man intimidating, a bit of a ruffian in fact, was amused, but awed too, by the extent to which he reappeared now in female form. He teased Ma and made a joke of it — that was his style — but was disturbed.
Ma too found it easier to present what had happened as a freak of the times. She was pragmatic, Ma. It was one of the qualities she had had no opportunity to reveal till now, but once liberated, she gave it rein, like the rather salty humour that went with it. The agent of her liberation had been, of all things, the Japanese Imperial Army, though that, like so much else that had happened, was by the way. She had not been part of their Co-prosperity Plan.
It was too humorous a view, this, too odd, far-fetched even, to be admitted. She kept it to herself. People, she had discovered, were not very sympathetic to unusual views, however humorous they might be, or to those who expressed them.
Vic had caught the new note in her voice on the telephone. It was partly, he felt now, what had drawn him to come. There was a confederacy between them. It did not have to be evoked. All that had been settled years back in their uneasy consultations, when she had felt his commitment to her and had seen already, as he had not, that they might one day make a team.
She led him off now to see what she had been doing out there — in the factory, she meant — and without words, and taking the old relationship between them quite for granted, put it to him: we’re partners, eh?
There was no coquettishness in it. She did not play up to the male in him by pretending to be weak or in need. It was an offer between equals. On both sides an opportunity that was too good to miss.
They were standing, dwarfed as you always were here, under the great cross-beamed ceiling of the factory, a place that bore an eerie resemblance, Vic thought, to a godown — but the shadow this threw across his spirit he immediately drove off.