They would go for tram rides to Watson’s Bay, and walk round the path under the coral trees from Camp Cove to where the sea crashes against South Head. They took ferry trips across to Cremorne and Mosman, shopped, went to the art gallery or the city library, or sat in the gardens and watched the crowds. Each time her father published a new book she brought him one.
He did not mention these meetings to Vic, though there was nothing secret about them. He thought it was Ellie’s right to tell. If she did, Vic gave no indication of it.
Iris teased him, but only mildly, about his ‘lady friend’. She liked to pretend she was jealous. Was she? he wondered. Just a little? She had no need to be.
8
IT SEEMED TO Ellie, when she gave thought to the matter, that things could not have fallen out otherwise than they had; and this was strange, because when she looked back ten years and saw them all as they were then, she could find no sign of what was coming — none at all.
A good deal of this had to do with Lucille.
Lucille had been gone for seven years. Her marriage to Virge had broken up almost as soon as she joined him. She was married now to an older man with children of his own, a company lawyer in Denver, Colorado, where she too had a business, in real estate.
These changes dismayed Ellie. They had been very close over the Virge business, which had appeared then to be a culmination and had turned out, for all its intensity and the significance they had put upon it, to be no more than an episode on the way to something else. She wrote to Lucille twice a month, and the letters that came back were racy and full of news, but she could no longer connect them to the girl she had grown up with.
As little things they had fought like tigers. Ellie recalled occasions when they had struggled and torn at one another, red-faced and sweaty in their singlets and pants, both tearful with rage, pulling at one another’s hair and spitting.
Meggsie’s way of handling this had been to close the door and leave them to it. When they came out, still hot and angry but also ashamed, she would say: ‘All right now, you little devils. Go an’ wash your faces and take off those filthy clothes’ (they had been rolling on the floor) ‘an’ I won’t tell yer Ma what you’ve been up to. Hurry on now. I’ve made some nice cold lemonade.’
It had been hard for Ellie. Lucille was just that much older. She had already established her rights in the world, and made some things in the house so much her own that Ellie could not take them up without appearing, as she so often was, an imitator.
She was a latecomer in people’s hearts too, they had to make way for her. Lucille didn’t mean to be imposing, she couldn’t help it. People noticed her and only later, Ellie felt, saw that she too was there, trailing along behind and wondering what it might be in her that was anything more than a reflection of her more brilliant sister.
What puzzled her was that none of this appeared to make Lucille happy. Lucille was by nature restless, difficult, discontented. She was the easy one.
Then, just about the time that Vic came to live with them, they had discovered how close they were, how even the animosity they felt, the way they jockeyed against one another, was a bond. It was the element Vic added that made them see this.
He was a boy, and they were astonished, angered too, to observe how this simple fart impressed everyone — Pa, Ma, even Meggsie, though she didn’t quite give in to him.
Ellie had been pleased at first to see Lucille displaced, but soon understood that if Lucille was harmed she was too.
They teased him. That was easy. He was an awkward boy once you got past his cockiness. But he was a novelty, too; that’s what they couldn’t resist. Quite soon new affinities had begun to form. A secret one at first between Lucille and him, and once again Ellie found herself on the sidelines, a watcher of the little drama that had begun to unfold. Vic was at a loss in this, because although he and Lucille were the same age, he was still just a boy. So Vic and Ellie had ganged up on Lucille. Lucille thought she was so marvellous, so grown-up. Ellie still belonged, as he half did, to the world of animal spirits and fun.
But in all that she had missed something after all, some other, more important strand; some perversity or quirk in Lucille that had made her fly in the face of all that appeared to have been laid up for her, perhaps for the very reason that it was so fixed and had come so easily. She got pregnant, married Virge. None of this, Ellie knew, had had her in view, yet her life too had been changed by it.
The point on which it turned was that moment in the half-dark of the piano room, during what was to be the last of their games. Everything had been quite clear to her at that moment, and to Vic too. They saw in a flash all that had led up to it and all that would lead away from it. But Lucille, she thought, had seen it before them.
So the household was hers. Ma, all her energies taken up with business, was quite happy to hand it over. There was no question of their moving into a place of their own. It was as if the house already contained the forms their life would need. She and Vic had their separate life in it but the household went on as it had always done.
It was for this reason, there being so little visible change, that it took her so long to understand what he and Ma were doing.
Their style of life did not change. She and Meggsie settled up the weekly accounts, and they remained pretty much what they had always been. They took the same amount of bread and milk, and these things cost the same whether you are worth thousands or just sixpence. You use the same number of towels, sleep in the same sheets.
Vic talked a good deal at first of the sums they were dealing in. The figures doubled and trebled, you could grasp that. It was worth boasting about. It pointed to a personal agency you could identify, to foresight, boldness, imagination. But when the momentum increased, as if subject to some law of its own that was purely mathematical, the personal side of it disappeared. There was a scale to it now that was beyond the capacity of the mind to grasp. Keep adding noughts, and although the thing is still there, and in fact occupies more and more space, there develops in it a kind of vacuum, as if the noughts, the nothings, had predominance. The mind loses all trace of it.
Ellie was amazed by him. So was Pa. They looked on in wonder at these powers he had, which like the enterprise itself appeared to double, treble, then move in progressions that were inhuman, magical; though this was only because their imagination could not contain him any more than they could the figures.
Where did it come from, she wondered, this energy and animation that she experienced as such a physical thing? He was so full of it that you wondered how so much force could limit itself, when needed, to the merely commonplace business of manoeuvring a knife or getting peas on to a fork, or as she saw it, to the moments they shared when she would watch him pull a clean shirt over his head and walk round the room in his socks and suspenders, or sit, as he sometimes did, very quiet and abstracted with a towel in his hand, his hair still wet from the shower, on the edge of their bed.
It pained her when she went out to hear him spoken of in a cruel and dismissive way by people who did not know him as she did, from within. He had enough success, she saw, to have become a figure who aroused hostility, envy, also fear, and often this was in men, and women too, to whom he was no more than a name. They had never laid eyes on him.
When she met this impersonal version of him, even if it was only in people’s eyes across a dinner table or theatre foyer, she went cold. The certainty with which they were prepared to judge! All the more when she found it in print.