These moods in him belonged to the early morning, and would be on him when he woke. A continuation, he sometimes thought, of his sleep, they grew out of what he had been dreaming, though the dream itself eluded him.
Careful not to wake Ellie, he would pad across the room and go downstairs barefoot in his pyjamas, feeling oddly soft and vulnerable. The day’s heat would be coming. As he wandered through the darkened house things took on a new shape, even the most familiar of them. They seemed released of their weight. Or maybe that too was part of his mood. He would sit quietly in a swing on the verandah, and as the trees on the lawn grew out of darkness his thoughts ordered themselves, became clear to him, and birds sang through them, the familiar sounds of this bird or that, very sane and comforting. This was how his thinking got done.
But sometimes, after only a minute or two, he would go through the house to Meggsie’s kitchen.
Meggsie, already up and dressed, would be sitting with her plump arms on the table, her hands round a heavy cup. Wordless at this hour, she would swing round to the stove where the teapot sat, haul it across and pour him a steaming cup, the pot so heavy, even in both her hands, that she could barely heft it. He would sit then, his shoulders hunched a little, his hair a mess, and drink.
They were close. As if to make up for all the years when out of loyalty to her girls she had held out on him, she spoiled him these days as she had once spoiled Ellie and Lucille.
She still teased him. He liked the abrasive form her affection took, and would have felt cheated if she had gone soft on him. But the teasing now was no more than the old form of a game through which they could, without embarrassment, explore their affection for one another.
It was a different world out here.
The cups, for instance. They were so thick you could barely get your mouth round them. The handles too.
If it was winter the kitchen would be fuggy warm, the windows still dark. They would sit and watch them turn blue, and after a little she would get up and bring him a bowl of porridge and watch him eat.
In summer she would already have propped the screen door open with a flat-iron, and magpies would be flopping about the dewy lawn. Little points of light on tips of grassblades would be catching the sun a moment before it quenched and dried them up.
They barely spoke. If they did it was in monosyllables and half-finished sentences that to anyone else would have made no sense.
They might have been a quite different pair: she the mother who had just roused him, heavy-headed and unwilling, for the early shift at a factory or in the pit; he a big, loose-shouldered, barefoot fellow, rather lazy and fond of drink, fond of the girls too, but still tied, with only a show of rebellion, to her apron strings.
Often it was Greg who would come out at last to look for him. He would hang there in the doorway, his hair a bird’s nest, his stance very like his father’s, whom he imitated in everything. He was a timid little fellow, and Meggsie scared him. He wouldn’t come in.
‘Mummy says,’ he would say, ‘where are you?’
6
IT SURPRISED VIC, as the years went by, that, leaping right over what had been the grimmest period of his life, he so often found himself back in the year before his mother died and the time afterwards when he had lived with his father. He would go itchy under his clothes — the well-cut suit, the shirt Meggsie had starched — and would find himself standing high up on the dunes under a sky that was just on the turn between day and night, waiting for his body to release him into the future and send him hurtling out of himself into a new life. A kind of despair would come over him. The future he yearned for would not appear — and yet here he was right in the midst of it, assured and powerful beyond anything he could have dreamed.
He would stand and watch the wall of sand-grains shift, his mouth agape but unable to cry out as in a vast wave it rose and covered him.
He did not drink, or very little. He saw too clearly the connection between it and a violence he feared was in his nature, and which drink might let loose. It was his son who showed him this. One day, when Vic was especially angry with him, the child suddenly flinched and drew away, as if he had seen the shadow of Vic’s hand before he had raised it.
‘What are you doing?’ His voice was full of shock, but all the boy heard was anger. ‘I’m not going to hit you. You know that. Why are you crying? Nobody’s going to hurt you.’
This scene, which Vic found so distressing, took place at just the time that Greg was old enough to be a presence in the house, a new focus of energy and will, subtly changing all their lives by exerting pressures this way and that to make room for itself. He was very spoiled, and when he was challenged gave way to tears. His mother, his grandmother, even Meggsie, made excuses for him, and the more they did it, Vic thought, the more the boy whined and the more resourceful he became at getting his way.
He seemed very much, as he developed, a smaller version of the father, with Vic’s stance and squareness of frame, his expressions too — everyone noticed it. But the father’s qualities had taken their own direction in him, so that what might have appeared as sturdy self-confidence had in the boy become a defensive petulance.
He was sorry for the child, feeling he knew only too well what he was suffering. He was afraid for him. But the likeness was unnerving. It showed up in a naked, even shameless way — though only perhaps because the boy was too young as yet to have learned how to disguise it — all that he, Vic, had taken such pains to conceal.
When Greg was still quite young, not yet seven, he developed the habit of lying. His lies were stupid ones that were bound to be exposed, which was, perhaps, just what he intended. They were lies whose only purpose was to win attention. But what was the point of that, Vic demanded, when all it showed was that he was a liar? In low voices, in bed, he and Ellie argued over it.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’re making too much of it. Children grow out of things.’
He tried to talk to the boy man to man. He hated untruth. He found him playing with his Meccano set and made him stand still and listen, but his attention kept wandering and Vic grew angry and did not know how to go on. He was infuriated to see a little smile at the corner of the boy’s mouth, as if he was not fearful at all, despite his seeming so timid, and was getting just what he wanted out of him.
By twelve he had found a kind of strength, but it was covert and indirect. On the one occasion when Vic did at last raise his fist the boy’s look was of such contempt and triumph, still with that flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and Vic saw himself so clearly reflected in it, that he was appalled.
He tried to pass the thing off with a recognition of fault on both sides, but the boy knew he had won and was defiant. Vic was powerless.
Everything in himself, in his inheritance too, that he had worked to push down and control, had come to independent existence in the boy and acted against him. That’s what he saw, and he saw it the more clearly because Greg was just the age that he had been in his last year with his father.
He looked at the boy, saw his contemptuous smile and the likeness between them, and on the other side saw his father; and there was likeness there, too. This was what Ellie and the others could not know. He felt powerless, and at a time when power was just what came to him so easily, and publicly, elsewhere.
7
ON ONE OF his usual Thursdays, a bright winter day when there was a little chill to the air but the whole of George Street, all the way to the harbour, was bathed in clear soft sunlight, Digger was just about to cross at the Market Street lights when a woman spoke to him. He recognised her immediately.