The Complete Stories by David Malouf
Later on I saw that it must have seemed like a good idea on Mick Jolley's part to send the blacks across like that. To show him, Pa, that they could be trusted. That he could just send them off like that with a gift and it would be delivered. Sort of a soft lesson to him. But how was he to know that that was what it was? All in a moment and with no warning. A mob of blacks just walking up where he had always resisted.
He was wrong, I know that. He was wrong every way. But I want to speak up for him too.
Even when Mick Jolley come across and yelled at him and tried to get him to pay the blacks what he called compensation, I was on his side; not just by standing there beside him, but in my heart.
He did not know that black was a messenger. Who had the right to pass through all territories without harm. How could he know that? And even if he had, he mightn't have cared anyway that it was a consideration in their world. It wasn't one in ours. That they should even have considerations—that there might be rules and laws hidden away in what was just makeshift savagery, hand-to-mouth getting from one day to the next and one place to another a little further on over the horizon—that would have seemed ridiculous to him. Given they had no place of settlement nor roof over their heads to keep the sun off, nor walls to keep out the wind and the black dust that made another duller blackness where they were already blacker than the most starless night. No clothes neither, to keep them decent, and had never raised even the skinniest runt of a bean or turnip, nor turned a single clod to grow what went into their mouths, only scavenged what was there for anyone to crawl about and pick up. “Consideration,” he would have said. “Consideration, thunder!”
Yet it was true. There were messengers. Given a part to play like any sergeant or magistrate, and recognised as such even by strangers.
Though not by us.
Which made us, in some ways, the most strangers of all.
I don't believe he knew what he had done—the full extent of it. And with all that light in his blood that made him so glowing and reckless, I don't think he would have cared.
I didn't know neither, but I felt it. A change. That change in him had changed me as well and all of us. He had removed us from protection. He had put us outside the rules, which all along, though he didn't see it that way, had been their rules. The magic I'd felt when they just stood and looked, as if I was some creature like a unicorn maybe, had come from them. Now it was lifted.
These last months I had taken to going about the place with Jamie. I was just beginning to show him things, things I had discovered and knew about our bit of land that no one else did except maybe the blacks, and places no one else had ever been into, except maybe them, when it was theirs. I don't reckon those hut-keepers and shepherds had ever been there. They were places you could only reach by letting yourself slide down a bank into a gully or pushing in under the low underbrush along a creek, so low you had to go on your knees, then on your belly. Jamie would have followed me anywhere, I knew that, but I was careful always to show him marks and signs along the way. Even when he was too little to talk, he was quick to see, and knew the signs again on the way back. He had known no other place than this. There were times, little as he was, when I felt he was showing it to me. Only now I kept a good eye open when we were out together. The whole country had a new light over it. I had to look at it in a new way. What I saw in it now was hiding-places. Places where they were hidden in it, the blacks. Places too where ghosts might be, also hidden.
The story I have been telling up till now is my story. But at this point it becomes his. Pa's.
It is the story of a twelve-year-old boy treacherously struck down in the bush by unknown hands, his body hidden away in the heart of the country and for days not found, though many search parties go looking.
The mother is distraught. She has only one woman to comfort her. All the rest of those who gather at the hut, take a hasty breakfast, and set out in small groups to scour the countryside, are men, embarrassed to a profound silence by the depth of her grief. Only when they have stepped into the sunlight again, to where their horses stand restless in the sun, do they let their breath out and express what they feel in head-shaking, then anxious whispers.
They feel a kind of shyness in the presence of the father as well, but there are forms for what they can say to him. They clap him roughly on the shoulder, and impressed by the rage he is filled with, which they see as the proper form for his grief, they reach for words that will equal his in their stern commitment, their vehemence.
He is a man who has been touched by fate, endowed with the dignity of outrage and a cause. It draws together, in a tight knot, qualities that they felt till now were scattered in him and not reliable. When the body comes to light at last, the skull caved in, the chest and thighs bearing the wound-marks of spears, and he rides half-maddened about the country urging them to ride with him and kill every black they come across, he inspires in them such a mixture of horror and pity that they feel they too have been lifted out of the ordinary business of clearing scrub and rounding up cattle and are called to be heroic.
He is a figure now. That is why it is his story. The whole country is his, to rage up and down in with the appeal of his grief. His brow like thunder, his blue eyes bleared with weeping, he speaks low (he has no need to shout) of blood, of the dark pull of it, of its voice calling from the ground and from all the hidden places of the country, for the land to be cleared at last of the shadow of blood. He is a new man. He has discovered one of the ways at last to win other men to him and he blazes with the power it brings him. He is monstrous. And because he believes so completely in what he must do, is so filled with the righteous ferocity of it, others too are convinced. They are drawn to him as to a leader.
One clear cool act, the shedding of a little blood, and all that old history of slights and humiliations, of being ignored and knocked back, of having to knuckle under and be subservient—all that is cancelled out in the light he sees at last in other men's eyes, in their being so visibly in awe of the distinction that has descended upon him.
But that little blood was my blood, not just that black feller's. Pa's blood too. So he did come to see at last that I was connected.
For a season my name was on everyone's lips, most of all on his, and in the newspapers at Maitland and Moreton Bay and beyond. Jordan McGivern. A name to whip up fear and justified rage and the unbridled savagery of slaughter. For a season.
The blacks in every direction are hunted and go to ground. They too have lost their protection—what little they had of it. And me all that while lying quiet in the heart of the country, slowly sinking into the ancientness of it, making it mine, grain by grain blending my white grains with its many black ones. And Ma, now, at the line, with the blood beating in her throat, and his shirts, where she has just pegged them out, beginning to swell with the breeze, resting her chin on a wet sheet and raising her eyes to the land and gazing off into the brimming heart of it.
Great Day
1
Up at the house,Angie told herself, they would be turning in their bunks and pushing off sheets in the growing heat, still dozing but already with their sights on breakfast. Bacon and eggs and Madge's burnt toast. “Burnt?” Madge would bluster; "I don't call that burnt, I can do better than that. Besides, burnt toast never did your father any harm. It didn't kill him off, he thrived on it, so did your uncles. Now, who's for honey and who wants Vegemite? That's the choice.” The children would yowl and make faces but bite into the burnt toast just the same. It was a ritual that would begin precisely at seven with the banging of Madge's spoon.
Meanwhile, down here on the headland, in an expanding stillness in which clocks, voices, and every form of consciousness had still to come into existence and the day as yet, like the sea, had no mark upon it, it was before breakfast, before waking, before everything but the new tide washing in over rows of black, shark-toothed rocks that leaned all the way inland, as they had done since that moment, unimaginable ages ago, when the earth at this point w
helmed, gulped, and for the time being settled. Angie drew her knees up and locked them in with her arms.
On the reef to her left, out of sight behind the headland, her father-in-law, Audley, was fishing.
Dressed in the black suit and tie he wore on all occasions, even before breakfast, even for fishing, and standing far out on the rocky ledge with its urchin pools and ropes of amber worry-beads, he would, she thought, if you were sailing away and happened to glance back, be the last you would see of the place, a sombre column—if you were coming from the other direction, the first of the natives, providing, with his fishing rod and jacket formally buttoned, an odd welcoming party.
She raised her eyes to the sea and let herself drift for a moment in its dazzling stillness, then, dawdling a little, got to her feet and started up the path towards the house.
A FOUR-SQUARE structure of sandstone blocks, very massive and permanent-looking, it stood immediately above the sea. Its first builder was Audley's grandfather. Successive owners had simply added on in the style of the times: two bedrooms on the south in Federation shingles; later, for the children, the product of wartime austerity, a fibro sleepout. More recently Audley had added a deck of the best kauri pine where in winter they could eat out, protected at last from the prevailing southerlies, and where, when the whole clan was gathered, the overflow, as Madge called it, could bed down in sleeping bags. The grass below the deck was scythed—no mower could have dealt with it—and roses, mixed with native shrubs, threw out long sprays forming an enclosure that was alive at this time of day with wrens and long-beaked honey-eaters. Angie, lifting aside a thorny shoot, came round past the water tank. She paddled one foot, then the other, in the bucket of salt water Madge had set below the verandah and came round to the kitchen door.
“Hey, here's Angie.”
Her son, Ned, leapt up among the scattered crusts.
“Angie,” he shouted as if she were still fifty yards off, "did you know Fran was coming?”
“Yes,” she said, "Clem's bringing her.”
Ned was disappointed. He loved to be the bearer of news.
Always ill at ease in Madge's kitchen, fearful she might register visible disapproval of the mess or throw out some bit of rubbish that her mother-in-law was specially keeping, Angie perched on the end of a form as in a class she was late for and accepted a mug of scalding tea.
“But I thought they were divorced,” Ned protested. His voice cracked with the vehemence of it. “Aren't they?”
Madge huffed. “Drink your tea,” she told him.
“But aren't they?”
“Yes, you know they are,” Angie said quietly, "but they're still friends. I saw Audley,” she added, to change the subject.
Jenny looked up briefly—"Has he caught anything?"—then back to the album where she was pasting action shots of her favourite footballers. She was a wiry child of nine, her hair cut in raw, page-boy fashion. Angie cut it for her.
“The usual, I should think,” said Madge. “A cold.”
“I thought when people got divorced,” Ned persisted, "it was because they hated one another. Why did they get divorced if they're still friends? I don't understand.”
Jenny, who was two years younger, drew her mouth down, looked at her mother, and rolled her eyes.
“Ned,” Angie said, "why don't you go and see if Ralph's up?”
“He is, I've already seen him,” Jenny informed her. Ralph was their father. “He's writing. He told me to stay away.”
“People never tell me anything,” Ned exploded. “How am I ever going to know how to act or anything if I can't find out the simplest thing? How will I—”
“You'll find out,” Madge said. “Now—I want a whole lot of wild spinach to make soup. I'm paying fifty cents a load. Any takers? A load is two bucketfuls.”
“Oh, all right,” Ned agreed, "I'll do it, but fifty cents is what you paid last time. Haven't you heard of inflation?”
“Ned,” Madge told him firmly, "it's too early in the morning for an economics lecture. Besides, you know what a dumb-cluck I am. Leave me in blessd ignorance, that's my plea.” She made a clown's face and both children laughed. “Small hope in this family!”
When she had armed the children with short knives and buckets she flopped into a chair and said: "Do you think we'll get through today? I'm a dishrag already and it isn't even eight.”
The Tylers were what people called a clan. Not just a family with the usual loose affinities, but a close-knit tribe that for all its insistence on the sociabilities was hedged against intruders. Girls brought home by one or another of the four boys would despair of ever getting a hold on the jokes, the quick-footed allusions to books, old saws, obscure facts, and references back to previous mealtimes that made up a good deal of their table-talk, or of adapting to Madge's bluntness or Audley's sombre, half-joking pronouncements, the latter delivered, in the silence that fell the moment he began to speak, in a voice so subdued that you thought you must have been temporarily deafened by the previous din.
Even when they had been gathered in as daughters-in-law, they felt so out of it at times that they would huddle in subversive pockets, finding relief in hilarity or in whispered resentment of the way their husbands, the moment they crossed the family threshold, became boys again, reverting to forms of behaviour that Madge, in her careless way, had allowed and which Audley, for all his fastidiousness, had been unable to check: shouting one another down, banging with their great fists, grabbing at the food or scattering it to left and right in a barbarous way that in minutes left any table they came to a baronial wreck.
Audley claimed descent from two colonial worthies, a magistrate and a flogging parson, both well recorded. His roots were as deep in the place as they could reasonably go. Madge, on the other hand, had no family at all.
Adopted and brought up by farm people, she had been, when Audley first knew her, in the days when they came down here only for holidays, the Groundley girl, who helped her old man deliver milk.
“Goodness knows where you kids spring from,” she used to tell the boys when they were little. “Only don't go thinking you might be princes. Just as well Audley knows what little sprigs of colonial piety and perfect breeding you are because there's nothing I can tell you. Gypsies, maybe. Tinkers. Malays. Clem could be a Malay, couldn't you, my pet? Take your pick.”
“I was fascinated, you see,” Audley would put it, taking people aside as if offering a deep confidence. “I'd been hearing all my life about my lot—the Tylers and the Woolseys and the Clayton Joneses—made me feel like something in a dog show. Then Madge came along with those blue eyes and big hands that belonged to no one but herself—old Groundley was a little nut of a fellow. In our family everything could be traced back. Long noses, weak chests, a taste for awful Victorian hymns—it could all be shot home to some uncle or aunt, or to a cousin's cousin that only the aunt had heard of. My God, I thought, is there no way out of this? Whereas I can look at one of the boys and say, Now I wonder where he got that from? Can't be my side, must be her lot. The berserkers. The Goths-and-Vandals. It's made life very interesting.”
People who were not used to this sort of thing were embarrassed. But it was true, the boys all took after their mother, except for Clem, who took after no one. They were big-boned, fair-headed, with no physical grace but an abundance of energy and rough good humour. Not a trace of Audley's angular refinement, though they were free as well of his glooms.
As little lads Madge had let them run wild, go unwashed, barely fed—in the upper echelons of the public service where Audley moved it was a kind of scandal—but had been ready at any time to down tools and read them a story or show them how to spin pyjama cord on a cotton-reel or turn milkbottle-tops into bells. She wrote children's books, tall tales for nine-year-olds. Twice a year, regardless of household moves or daily chaos or childhood fevers or spills, she had produced a new title—she was proud of that—using as models first her children, then her grandchildren, all thinly di
sguised under such names as Bam or Duff or Fizzer for the boys and for the tomboyish girls, McGregor or Moo. “It's lucky,” she told Ned and Jenny once, "that Audley had all those family names to draw on. I'd have let my fancy rove. If it'd been up to me I'd have called the boys all sorts of things.”
“What would you have called Ralph?” Ned asked, interested in catching his father for a moment in a new light.
“I'd have called him—let me see now—Biffer!”
The children went into volleys of giggles. “That's a great name!” Ned yelled. “It really fits him. You should have called him that.”
“I did,” Madge said, "in one of my books, I forget which.”
“I know,” Jenny shouted, " The Really-Truly Bush, I've read it. The boy in that was Biffer.”
“Well, hark at the child, she got it in one.” Madge gave a snort of laughter.
But Ned was affronted. “That's not Ralph,” he insisted; "that's nothing like him. That's not Ralph.”
“No,” Madge agreed, "but that's because a whole lot of different things happened to that boy. If they'd happened to Ralph he'd be just like it.”
“Would he really?” This from Jenny.
Ned, whose idea of the world was very different, was unconvinced.
Madge laughed again. “Really and truly.”
She got letters from her readers, which she answered in the same distracted style as the books and had been looked up to by three generations of children as the mother they most wished for, a cross between a mad aunt and a benign but careless witch.
The boys too had had no complaint, though they had from the beginning to give up all hope of shirts with all the buttons on or matching pyjama tops or even a decently cooked potato. It was Audley who had attended to them, wiping their noses, picking up their toys, dishing up Welsh Rarebit, which he had learned to make at cadet camp when he was a schoolboy and which had remained his only culinary skill. They had had to fend for themselves, shouting one another down in the war for attention and growing up loud and confident. They admired their mother without qualification and were fond of Audley as well—too much so, some would have said. “The true sign of a great soul,” they would have replied, citing Goethe, "is that it takes joy in the greatness of others.” They were quoting their father, of course.
He was wrong, I know that. He was wrong every way. But I want to speak up for him too.
Even when Mick Jolley come across and yelled at him and tried to get him to pay the blacks what he called compensation, I was on his side; not just by standing there beside him, but in my heart.
He did not know that black was a messenger. Who had the right to pass through all territories without harm. How could he know that? And even if he had, he mightn't have cared anyway that it was a consideration in their world. It wasn't one in ours. That they should even have considerations—that there might be rules and laws hidden away in what was just makeshift savagery, hand-to-mouth getting from one day to the next and one place to another a little further on over the horizon—that would have seemed ridiculous to him. Given they had no place of settlement nor roof over their heads to keep the sun off, nor walls to keep out the wind and the black dust that made another duller blackness where they were already blacker than the most starless night. No clothes neither, to keep them decent, and had never raised even the skinniest runt of a bean or turnip, nor turned a single clod to grow what went into their mouths, only scavenged what was there for anyone to crawl about and pick up. “Consideration,” he would have said. “Consideration, thunder!”
Yet it was true. There were messengers. Given a part to play like any sergeant or magistrate, and recognised as such even by strangers.
Though not by us.
Which made us, in some ways, the most strangers of all.
I don't believe he knew what he had done—the full extent of it. And with all that light in his blood that made him so glowing and reckless, I don't think he would have cared.
I didn't know neither, but I felt it. A change. That change in him had changed me as well and all of us. He had removed us from protection. He had put us outside the rules, which all along, though he didn't see it that way, had been their rules. The magic I'd felt when they just stood and looked, as if I was some creature like a unicorn maybe, had come from them. Now it was lifted.
These last months I had taken to going about the place with Jamie. I was just beginning to show him things, things I had discovered and knew about our bit of land that no one else did except maybe the blacks, and places no one else had ever been into, except maybe them, when it was theirs. I don't reckon those hut-keepers and shepherds had ever been there. They were places you could only reach by letting yourself slide down a bank into a gully or pushing in under the low underbrush along a creek, so low you had to go on your knees, then on your belly. Jamie would have followed me anywhere, I knew that, but I was careful always to show him marks and signs along the way. Even when he was too little to talk, he was quick to see, and knew the signs again on the way back. He had known no other place than this. There were times, little as he was, when I felt he was showing it to me. Only now I kept a good eye open when we were out together. The whole country had a new light over it. I had to look at it in a new way. What I saw in it now was hiding-places. Places where they were hidden in it, the blacks. Places too where ghosts might be, also hidden.
The story I have been telling up till now is my story. But at this point it becomes his. Pa's.
It is the story of a twelve-year-old boy treacherously struck down in the bush by unknown hands, his body hidden away in the heart of the country and for days not found, though many search parties go looking.
The mother is distraught. She has only one woman to comfort her. All the rest of those who gather at the hut, take a hasty breakfast, and set out in small groups to scour the countryside, are men, embarrassed to a profound silence by the depth of her grief. Only when they have stepped into the sunlight again, to where their horses stand restless in the sun, do they let their breath out and express what they feel in head-shaking, then anxious whispers.
They feel a kind of shyness in the presence of the father as well, but there are forms for what they can say to him. They clap him roughly on the shoulder, and impressed by the rage he is filled with, which they see as the proper form for his grief, they reach for words that will equal his in their stern commitment, their vehemence.
He is a man who has been touched by fate, endowed with the dignity of outrage and a cause. It draws together, in a tight knot, qualities that they felt till now were scattered in him and not reliable. When the body comes to light at last, the skull caved in, the chest and thighs bearing the wound-marks of spears, and he rides half-maddened about the country urging them to ride with him and kill every black they come across, he inspires in them such a mixture of horror and pity that they feel they too have been lifted out of the ordinary business of clearing scrub and rounding up cattle and are called to be heroic.
He is a figure now. That is why it is his story. The whole country is his, to rage up and down in with the appeal of his grief. His brow like thunder, his blue eyes bleared with weeping, he speaks low (he has no need to shout) of blood, of the dark pull of it, of its voice calling from the ground and from all the hidden places of the country, for the land to be cleared at last of the shadow of blood. He is a new man. He has discovered one of the ways at last to win other men to him and he blazes with the power it brings him. He is monstrous. And because he believes so completely in what he must do, is so filled with the righteous ferocity of it, others too are convinced. They are drawn to him as to a leader.
One clear cool act, the shedding of a little blood, and all that old history of slights and humiliations, of being ignored and knocked back, of having to knuckle under and be subservient—all that is cancelled out in the light he sees at last in other men's eyes, in their being so visibly in awe of the distinction that has descended upon him.
But that little blood was my blood, not just that black feller's. Pa's blood too. So he did come to see at last that I was connected.
For a season my name was on everyone's lips, most of all on his, and in the newspapers at Maitland and Moreton Bay and beyond. Jordan McGivern. A name to whip up fear and justified rage and the unbridled savagery of slaughter. For a season.
The blacks in every direction are hunted and go to ground. They too have lost their protection—what little they had of it. And me all that while lying quiet in the heart of the country, slowly sinking into the ancientness of it, making it mine, grain by grain blending my white grains with its many black ones. And Ma, now, at the line, with the blood beating in her throat, and his shirts, where she has just pegged them out, beginning to swell with the breeze, resting her chin on a wet sheet and raising her eyes to the land and gazing off into the brimming heart of it.
Great Day
1
Up at the house,Angie told herself, they would be turning in their bunks and pushing off sheets in the growing heat, still dozing but already with their sights on breakfast. Bacon and eggs and Madge's burnt toast. “Burnt?” Madge would bluster; "I don't call that burnt, I can do better than that. Besides, burnt toast never did your father any harm. It didn't kill him off, he thrived on it, so did your uncles. Now, who's for honey and who wants Vegemite? That's the choice.” The children would yowl and make faces but bite into the burnt toast just the same. It was a ritual that would begin precisely at seven with the banging of Madge's spoon.
Meanwhile, down here on the headland, in an expanding stillness in which clocks, voices, and every form of consciousness had still to come into existence and the day as yet, like the sea, had no mark upon it, it was before breakfast, before waking, before everything but the new tide washing in over rows of black, shark-toothed rocks that leaned all the way inland, as they had done since that moment, unimaginable ages ago, when the earth at this point w
On the reef to her left, out of sight behind the headland, her father-in-law, Audley, was fishing.
Dressed in the black suit and tie he wore on all occasions, even before breakfast, even for fishing, and standing far out on the rocky ledge with its urchin pools and ropes of amber worry-beads, he would, she thought, if you were sailing away and happened to glance back, be the last you would see of the place, a sombre column—if you were coming from the other direction, the first of the natives, providing, with his fishing rod and jacket formally buttoned, an odd welcoming party.
She raised her eyes to the sea and let herself drift for a moment in its dazzling stillness, then, dawdling a little, got to her feet and started up the path towards the house.
A FOUR-SQUARE structure of sandstone blocks, very massive and permanent-looking, it stood immediately above the sea. Its first builder was Audley's grandfather. Successive owners had simply added on in the style of the times: two bedrooms on the south in Federation shingles; later, for the children, the product of wartime austerity, a fibro sleepout. More recently Audley had added a deck of the best kauri pine where in winter they could eat out, protected at last from the prevailing southerlies, and where, when the whole clan was gathered, the overflow, as Madge called it, could bed down in sleeping bags. The grass below the deck was scythed—no mower could have dealt with it—and roses, mixed with native shrubs, threw out long sprays forming an enclosure that was alive at this time of day with wrens and long-beaked honey-eaters. Angie, lifting aside a thorny shoot, came round past the water tank. She paddled one foot, then the other, in the bucket of salt water Madge had set below the verandah and came round to the kitchen door.
“Hey, here's Angie.”
Her son, Ned, leapt up among the scattered crusts.
“Angie,” he shouted as if she were still fifty yards off, "did you know Fran was coming?”
“Yes,” she said, "Clem's bringing her.”
Ned was disappointed. He loved to be the bearer of news.
Always ill at ease in Madge's kitchen, fearful she might register visible disapproval of the mess or throw out some bit of rubbish that her mother-in-law was specially keeping, Angie perched on the end of a form as in a class she was late for and accepted a mug of scalding tea.
“But I thought they were divorced,” Ned protested. His voice cracked with the vehemence of it. “Aren't they?”
Madge huffed. “Drink your tea,” she told him.
“But aren't they?”
“Yes, you know they are,” Angie said quietly, "but they're still friends. I saw Audley,” she added, to change the subject.
Jenny looked up briefly—"Has he caught anything?"—then back to the album where she was pasting action shots of her favourite footballers. She was a wiry child of nine, her hair cut in raw, page-boy fashion. Angie cut it for her.
“The usual, I should think,” said Madge. “A cold.”
“I thought when people got divorced,” Ned persisted, "it was because they hated one another. Why did they get divorced if they're still friends? I don't understand.”
Jenny, who was two years younger, drew her mouth down, looked at her mother, and rolled her eyes.
“Ned,” Angie said, "why don't you go and see if Ralph's up?”
“He is, I've already seen him,” Jenny informed her. Ralph was their father. “He's writing. He told me to stay away.”
“People never tell me anything,” Ned exploded. “How am I ever going to know how to act or anything if I can't find out the simplest thing? How will I—”
“You'll find out,” Madge said. “Now—I want a whole lot of wild spinach to make soup. I'm paying fifty cents a load. Any takers? A load is two bucketfuls.”
“Oh, all right,” Ned agreed, "I'll do it, but fifty cents is what you paid last time. Haven't you heard of inflation?”
“Ned,” Madge told him firmly, "it's too early in the morning for an economics lecture. Besides, you know what a dumb-cluck I am. Leave me in blessd ignorance, that's my plea.” She made a clown's face and both children laughed. “Small hope in this family!”
When she had armed the children with short knives and buckets she flopped into a chair and said: "Do you think we'll get through today? I'm a dishrag already and it isn't even eight.”
The Tylers were what people called a clan. Not just a family with the usual loose affinities, but a close-knit tribe that for all its insistence on the sociabilities was hedged against intruders. Girls brought home by one or another of the four boys would despair of ever getting a hold on the jokes, the quick-footed allusions to books, old saws, obscure facts, and references back to previous mealtimes that made up a good deal of their table-talk, or of adapting to Madge's bluntness or Audley's sombre, half-joking pronouncements, the latter delivered, in the silence that fell the moment he began to speak, in a voice so subdued that you thought you must have been temporarily deafened by the previous din.
Even when they had been gathered in as daughters-in-law, they felt so out of it at times that they would huddle in subversive pockets, finding relief in hilarity or in whispered resentment of the way their husbands, the moment they crossed the family threshold, became boys again, reverting to forms of behaviour that Madge, in her careless way, had allowed and which Audley, for all his fastidiousness, had been unable to check: shouting one another down, banging with their great fists, grabbing at the food or scattering it to left and right in a barbarous way that in minutes left any table they came to a baronial wreck.
Audley claimed descent from two colonial worthies, a magistrate and a flogging parson, both well recorded. His roots were as deep in the place as they could reasonably go. Madge, on the other hand, had no family at all.
Adopted and brought up by farm people, she had been, when Audley first knew her, in the days when they came down here only for holidays, the Groundley girl, who helped her old man deliver milk.
“Goodness knows where you kids spring from,” she used to tell the boys when they were little. “Only don't go thinking you might be princes. Just as well Audley knows what little sprigs of colonial piety and perfect breeding you are because there's nothing I can tell you. Gypsies, maybe. Tinkers. Malays. Clem could be a Malay, couldn't you, my pet? Take your pick.”
“I was fascinated, you see,” Audley would put it, taking people aside as if offering a deep confidence. “I'd been hearing all my life about my lot—the Tylers and the Woolseys and the Clayton Joneses—made me feel like something in a dog show. Then Madge came along with those blue eyes and big hands that belonged to no one but herself—old Groundley was a little nut of a fellow. In our family everything could be traced back. Long noses, weak chests, a taste for awful Victorian hymns—it could all be shot home to some uncle or aunt, or to a cousin's cousin that only the aunt had heard of. My God, I thought, is there no way out of this? Whereas I can look at one of the boys and say, Now I wonder where he got that from? Can't be my side, must be her lot. The berserkers. The Goths-and-Vandals. It's made life very interesting.”
People who were not used to this sort of thing were embarrassed. But it was true, the boys all took after their mother, except for Clem, who took after no one. They were big-boned, fair-headed, with no physical grace but an abundance of energy and rough good humour. Not a trace of Audley's angular refinement, though they were free as well of his glooms.
As little lads Madge had let them run wild, go unwashed, barely fed—in the upper echelons of the public service where Audley moved it was a kind of scandal—but had been ready at any time to down tools and read them a story or show them how to spin pyjama cord on a cotton-reel or turn milkbottle-tops into bells. She wrote children's books, tall tales for nine-year-olds. Twice a year, regardless of household moves or daily chaos or childhood fevers or spills, she had produced a new title—she was proud of that—using as models first her children, then her grandchildren, all thinly di
“What would you have called Ralph?” Ned asked, interested in catching his father for a moment in a new light.
“I'd have called him—let me see now—Biffer!”
The children went into volleys of giggles. “That's a great name!” Ned yelled. “It really fits him. You should have called him that.”
“I did,” Madge said, "in one of my books, I forget which.”
“I know,” Jenny shouted, " The Really-Truly Bush, I've read it. The boy in that was Biffer.”
“Well, hark at the child, she got it in one.” Madge gave a snort of laughter.
But Ned was affronted. “That's not Ralph,” he insisted; "that's nothing like him. That's not Ralph.”
“No,” Madge agreed, "but that's because a whole lot of different things happened to that boy. If they'd happened to Ralph he'd be just like it.”
“Would he really?” This from Jenny.
Ned, whose idea of the world was very different, was unconvinced.
Madge laughed again. “Really and truly.”
She got letters from her readers, which she answered in the same distracted style as the books and had been looked up to by three generations of children as the mother they most wished for, a cross between a mad aunt and a benign but careless witch.
The boys too had had no complaint, though they had from the beginning to give up all hope of shirts with all the buttons on or matching pyjama tops or even a decently cooked potato. It was Audley who had attended to them, wiping their noses, picking up their toys, dishing up Welsh Rarebit, which he had learned to make at cadet camp when he was a schoolboy and which had remained his only culinary skill. They had had to fend for themselves, shouting one another down in the war for attention and growing up loud and confident. They admired their mother without qualification and were fond of Audley as well—too much so, some would have said. “The true sign of a great soul,” they would have replied, citing Goethe, "is that it takes joy in the greatness of others.” They were quoting their father, of course.