You came in out of strong sunlight into coolness. But it was a coolness of a particular kind, a climate all of its own, and at the touch of it he felt something restored in him. It was like that first waking up into the real temperature of your body after days of fever, the crossing over a line between zones. He felt a goosepimpling all over the surface of him, and what came back, and with an immediacy he was quite unprepared for, was the last occasion he had come here, the eve of his departure.
A self-conscious, self-important eighteen-year-old, he had stood here to take temporary leave of his life, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. Now, five years later, with the knowledge of all that, which was still bitter in him, taken fully into account, he found he could look on his former self with none of the angry disappointment he had been consumed by in the months since he got back. He could face that humourless schoolboy, standing there so full of himself and making so many promises to the world, with detachment and a wary tolerance. There was no shame — or anyway, none so deep that it demanded the penalty of death — in having been eighteen, and so ignorant of what the world could do to you.
It was the place itself that brought this home to him, and he remembered something he had heard when he went down to Keen’s Crossing but had dismissed till now as one of Digger’s mystifications.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he had thought, looking about the clearing and observing how completely Digger fitted in to it; so much so that he had found it difficult to imagine him in any other place — had he really been up there? But now he too felt it. Some impression of his presence had remained here and was waiting to be filled. He could, with no difficulty at all, step into it now as if he had never left.
3
AT LAST ELLIE arrived, dropped off by a noisy group in a red convertible. She stopped in the doorway a moment to apologise for being late. ‘No, don’t look at me,’ she told Vic when he tried to go to her, ‘I’m a mess,’ and she ran off to change. When she came down again it was in a cotton dress with little ties at the shoulder and no stockings. ‘Ah,’ Pa said, ‘here’s our girl.’
When he left she had been at school; they were mates and had told one another everything. She threw her arms around him now as if nothing had changed between them.
He glanced across to see if Lucille was watching, but she was absorbed with the child, refusing, a little too deliberately he thought, to acknowledge him.
Ellie had a job. She had been drafted at first into a munitions factory, but was working now in a motor pool, driving a six-ton truck and doing all her own maintenance. She showed him her hands. She loved zooming about all over the city, and the long trips up to Lithgow or down the coast to Wollongong. You could tell this from the way she talked about it, and the others, who must have heard her tales a dozen times, seemed delighted to hear them again.
She got up now, still talking, and fetched a bowl of unshelled peanuts that Meggsie had set out. Taking one she cracked it in half, popped one nut into her mouth, then cracked the other half and, just as she would have done in the old days, passed it to him, all the time going on with the story she was telling.
It was as if he had never been away. She had never had for him any of the intimidating glamour of Lucille, so they could fall back now, almost without thinking, or so it seemed, into little unselfconscious habits, like this one with the peanuts.
The story ended, he laughed and she looked up and said, ‘Eat your peanut.’ He had been sitting with it in his hand.
Food had an almost mystical importance to him; any food, even a crust of bread. He hoarded things, even the most useless scraps and leftovers, but knew how odd it was and hid it.
He looked now at the peanut he was holding. Very slowly, he put it in his mouth and began to chew.
All through Meggsie’s long Sunday dinner he did not look once at Lucille. In the front room afterwards he lounged, hands in pockets, in the window and watched her at play with the child.
There were just the three of them in the room. Ellie was on the phone in the hall. He could hear her laughing. The others had gone upstairs to rest. Lucille did not like being alone with him, he knew that, but was unwilling to make an issue of it.
It was a typical summer afternoon in Sydney, muggy, the sky heavy with a threat of storms. He had longed, up there, for the peculiar drowsiness of these long Sunday afternoons, with the luxury they offered of infinite time before afternoon tea, to trail across the golf links and down through the sticky paspalum to Hen and Chicken Bay, then supper, and afterwards, in the dark, their Sunday games. Now here it was.
Lucille had a pile of building-blocks. She would build them up in a pyramid, and the child, with a laugh, would punch out with his little fist and send them down. The same game over and over.
They had not spoken, but her eyes, even as she occupied herself with the child, kept touching him. He could feel it. He smiled to himself and began, very lightly, to whistle.
Lucille was disturbed. They had got through dinner well enough, but she saw that he had accepted nothing. She could feel the little pressure he was exerting on her to make a scene. She could not allow that.
It wasn’t true that she had no feeling for what he had been through. But he was too full of his own experience to give any weight to hers, that’s what she saw, and it angered her. He really did believe that only he had been touched. It was a way of telling himself that, unless he wanted it, nothing need be changed between them. That’s what she was up against. But she didn’t want a scene.
He went on whistling, very low and tunelessly. He was keeping his eyes peeled. She was pretending to be absorbed with the child, but that was a bluff; the real game, and she knew it, was with him. ‘So,’ he told himself, ‘I’ve won that round.’
But the advantage was a weak one. She was weaving around herself and the child a circle of magical containment, and kept looking up now to see if he saw this and understood what it meant.
She was a mother. That is, she had become a woman — guaranteed. But there was no guarantee that what he had been through had made him a man. It was a way of putting herself out of reach. By treating him as if he were still a boy — the same one who had gone away.
He was hurt by the unfairness of this. It seemed to him he had earned the right to be treated as a man, but could not demand it. So he was caught all ways.
In this game they were now engaged in he was, for all his swagger, inexperienced. He knew that. But what else could he be? He had lost five years. The unfairness of it choked him, but he kept whistling.
She saw the truculence in him. She knew what it was, too. He was telling himself how hard life had been on him, urging them both towards a scene. She sighed. Then suddenly she saw their situation from outside all this, in the long view, and what she had to tell him was very clear. It’s silly, all this. Our being so cross with one another. Don’t you see, your unhappiness doesn’t depend on me. But neither does your happiness. Don’t you see?
She got to her feet and stood with her hands at her side looking at him.
He stopped whistling, his hands still in his pockets. He could not tell for a moment what she was up to, but did see that something had changed in her. The child felt it too. He was sitting on the floor with his face lifted, puzzled by her having got up so suddenly and removed her attention from him.
She came closer. His mouth was a little open. Quickly she bent forward and kissed the corner of it. It was what he had exerted all his powers to make her do; but now, when her lips touched his, his willing had nothing to do with it. He could claim no triumph and he felt none. She had deprived him of it by acting entirely unexpectedly and of her own free will; in a tender way, but one that dismissed the possibility of all passion between them.