‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘It’s Digger, isn’t it.’
They stood smiling at one another.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you.’
He did not feel free to call her by her name; but whether it was the unexpectedness of being caught together like this at the lights, forced by something quite outside themselves to come to a halt, or the softness of the day, or simply the pleasure he always had at being briefly in town, among so many people, Digger felt a wave of light-headedness catch him up — as it had, he recalled, the last time they had spoken, as if whenever they came together they were immediately translated to a special place where his awkwardness left him and he was entirely at ease.
They might have been stepping back here into a relationship that went back ages, in which all the usual difficulties had had their edges worn down through long acquaintance arid habit. There was no shyness between them.
‘I thought you lived — where is it? —’
‘Keen’s Crossing.’
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
‘I come up to town sometimes. Every Thursday in fact.’
Their eyes met and he thought she might be wondering, in that case, why he had never taken up her invitation and got in touch. But she knew why.
‘I’ve been buying a few things,’ he told her, to explain the packages he was carrying. They were outside a hardware store where he liked to potter about for articles he couldn’t pick up so easily at home, the new products they had these days, the magic glues and power tools.
‘It’s Vic’s birthday Saturday,’ she told him as the lights changed and they stepped off the kerb. He did not know that. ‘I’m shopping. Why don’t you come with me, if you’re finished.’ They were on the other side now. ‘We can have morning tea. I won’t be long.’
‘All right,’ he said.
Downstairs at Farmer’s Ellie looked at ties, holding one or two of them up to Digger’s shirt-front as she talked. They were wide ones, too colourful for him — for Vic too he would have thought, though no doubt she knew better than he did. When at last she had chosen one she bought two Island cotton shirts, then silk socks, then handkerchiefs.
Digger hung back. It was a slow business and might have been boring, but it made the talk between them so easy, and there was for him so much novelty in it, that he stopped being impatient and found he was enjoying himself. By the time it was all done they had caught up on a good many facts that it might have taken them much longer to uncover if they had not been continually on the move, and if the gaps between one question and the next had not been filled, for him, with the distractions of the store itself, the banks of lights in the ceiling, the escalators, so many women, some of them with children, some with a husband in tow, all happily spending, and turning things over on the open counters while they waited for their parcels to be wrapped; all of which he took in — the dummies too, looking so perfect with their real hair and eyelashes and doll-like eyes — while Ellie was engaged with one of the sales ladies or going through the drawers of hand-sewn handkerchiefs. At last they went upstairs into a big room overlooking the street, found a table away from the mothers and children, and ordered tea. They could relax now. A silence fell and they were forced to look at one another; but they could face that because they had already, in their half-hour of movement and talk, got so far with one another.
Ellie looked at him in a candid, clear-eyed way that sought to see, Digger thought, what there might be beyond his shyness; something she had glimpsed, and been looking for too, he thought now, when she held up to his open shirt-collar one of the expensive ties.
She looked at his hands and he saw her register something — that he worked with them? At his eyes again — What did she see there? (He found he did not mind her scrutiny.) It would be nothing of what really mattered to him. So when he looked at her, and saw the way her hair curled in just at shoulder level, the neatness of her brows, the colour on her lips, he took it for granted that what mattered most to her was also invisible, and would remain so unless she found the words to tell him of it.
She surprised him by speaking almost immediately of her father.
‘I remember that poem he read,’ Digger told her, ‘at your wedding. “The precarious gift alive in our hands again, the mixed blessing”.’ He did not say, though she might have guessed it from the quality of his voice, that the lines meant something special to him.
‘But fancy you remembering it,’ she said.
‘Oh, I know the whole thing off by heart,’ he told her. He didn’t mean to show off, and blushed in case she suspected him of it.
‘The whole poem?’
‘It’s a trick,’ he said, sorry he had ever let on. ‘It’s nothing.’
She told him of the work she did. Her father had published two books in the past five years, one a book of poems — Digger could find the Wedding Ode there, if he looked — the other a collection of essays. In the small world of writers, reviewers, university lecturers and other people who cared for these things, he had begun to be well known, but it was a very small world of course; most people didn’t even know it existed. She did his secretarial work for him. That, together with the house and her little boy, was enough to keep her going. The next time they met she would bring copies of the books, now that she knew he was a reader.
Digger said nothing, but did observe her assumption that this meeting was not to be their last. He would not have made the suggestion himself but was pleased that she had. They talked on after that, with no hurry to get everything said. There would be time for the rest of it next time.
He told her about his mother, who had been gone for nearly a year now, but whose end, all her bravery and defiance gone down to despair, still haunted him. About Jenny too. At last about Iris. She told him about the little boy, Greg. Some time, she promised, when Vic was going to the Crossing, she would send him along.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’d better go. Next time, I promise, the books.’
She was proud of what her father had done. He liked that and wondered what Vic made of it.
It was odd that in all the things they had touched on, they had never once referred directly to him. Not deliberately — it wasn’t deliberate on his part, and he thought it wasn’t on hers either, but to preserve an area between them that was for them alone. If they had tried to include Vic, he would have swallowed up the whole of what they had to say to one another, especially in the beginning, when he might have seemed the only thing they had in common.
She had a particular look, he thought, at moments when the natural thing to do might have been to say ‘Vic and I’ or ‘we’, or at moments when, though she did not directly speak of him, he was clearly in her mind. There would be a little change in her then, as if something had come to the surface in her that was secret, not to be spoken of, yet was on the very tip of her tongue. It was, he felt, the thing he had been wondering about that was most important to her. When it came up he could feel the heat of it, as in his case it had been there (had she felt it?) when he spoke the lines of her father’s poem, but especially just afterwards, when he had owned up to his trick of recall, which always evoked what was deepest in him.
The meeting, when he thought back over it, was a joyful one. They repeated it over the years, sometimes weekly. At other times, depending on what else was happening in their lives, whole months would pass before they could arrange it.