The Great World Read online

She tried to find something in them, stunned to immobility as they were by the occasion, that would explain why every one of their children had gone off without a backward glance, or, so far as she could see, a twinge of regret. What brutality was it in the father? What empty-headedness or ignorance or dull indifference in the mother? What failure to hang on to things, or even to see, if Pete and Billy were an example, that there was anything to be held.

  ‘Yairs,’ he said. ‘That’s dad.’

  He frowned, rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand, sounding resentful.

  He took the photograph and peered at it. ‘Yairs,’ he said, ‘that’s me mother,’ as if what she had been demanding of him was the identity of the woman at his father’s side, rather than some living detail of her. ‘When she was young.’

  It was all he had to say, and she looked at him now and wondered what it was that had bruised all feeling out of him. Or had he never had any?

  She had thought at first that he was simply lackadaisical, unwilling to be bothered, and had put this down to his youth. But the truth was that he did not care and wondered why she did. He looked at her in genuine puzzlement and was hurt, then irritated, but a moment later was all brightness and affection, whisking her about on the scrubbing boards, full of fun and boyish roughness and urging her to go to bed when it was still daylight.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked when they did lie down together. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come. I thought you liked it here.’

  ‘That’s your father’s family,’ she would tell Digger and Jenny. There was a vehemence to her voice that amounted to savagery, though she tried to hide it.

  ‘This is your grandma. And this is your father’s dad, your grandpa,’ and so on for each of the uncles and aunts. She was determined that they should have a family and was giving them all she had to show. It infuriated her that she had never seen any one of these people except Pete.

  They might have dropped out of the world the moment their likeness was taken, for all the evidence they had left in the house, or anywhere else for that matter. No toys ever turned up. Not even a peg-doll or a home-made top. Even in the yard when she broke the soil for her garden. Not one of them had ever carved his name on a bit of furniture, or scribbled drawings on a wall, or left height marks on a door. Billy, unless urged, never mentioned any one of them, and had no tales of his childhood to tell. He might never have had one. He was born with the war.

  Her own family, she was convinced, would not have given in so easily to extinction. She sent letter after letter to the orphanage in an attempt to find Bert.

  It was in defiance of this almost criminal indifference in their father’s people that she began to inculcate in Digger, and in Jenny too so far as she was capable of it, her own view of things, which was fanatical. She had been famished all her life for what these people, these Keens – Billy among them – tossed away like the merest trash. She wouldn’t let her kids grow up like that.

  The Crossing first: Keen’s Crossing.

  They belonged here for all time now, it was marked with their name. They could see it on a map if they liked: a dotted line leading away from the highway; at the end of it a dot marking the store; beside that, in italics, Keen’s Crossing. To turn your back and walk away from it was a crime. Against yourself first of all. Then against what had been trusted to you. Then against the place itself, and if you didn’t know what that was, then just open your eyes and look around you.

  Family next. That too was a kind of place, a place in time. Turn your back and walk away from that and you lost all hold on the line of things. The line was blood. Turn your back on your family and you drained the blood from your heart.

  She painted a fierce picture, and Digger at least was terrified of her. It was a religion she was preaching, her own, and she was its implacable embodiment.

  One more thing. At the orphanage they had got a good dose of preaching. She had been unimpressed by most of it, but one thing struck her and she had incorporated it into her own system. It was this: what you got in the next life was neither more nor less than what you had gathered and made something of in this one. So if you went through life with nothing, nothing was what you got in the next life as well. It was a harsh law but it chimed with something in her nature and she had taken it literally.

  Her vision was of a room with curtains, furniture, the smiling faces of children round a table piled high with food (including pineapples), and with good cutlery laid out and glass and plates such as she had seen in the houses she worked in. A German roller in a cage would be trilling away and ducking its head in a bath and shaking off brilliant drops. In drawers, if you opened them, would be aprons, teatowels, napkins, all neatly folded, and silver serviette rings with initials; plus sugar tongs and grape scissors, embossed.

  She saw all this very clearly, though as yet she possessed not a single one of these things. She had nothing at all. Every least bit of it however was already there, just waiting to be gathered, and would go to the making of her life; and when she was dead she would sit grandly content and justified in the midst of it, her children and grandchildren about her and each item at last in its place, even the meanest redeemed out of ordinariness and alive again in the eternal, yet recognisably and tangibly itself.

  She tried to pass this vision on to Digger and Jenny as a way of explaining to them why it was that she hung on to things. She did succeed with Digger, but he took the idea and interpreted it in his own way. His vision too was literal, and it was a good while before she saw that it was not at all like her own. She had made him a priest all right, but of his own religion.

  It was in this spirit of making and gathering, this dedication to the religion of getting, that she set about reviving the store.

  She had a head for figures, orders, invoices and such, and took no more nonsense from the travellers who turned up with samples than she had from the drinkers at the pub she had worked in. When the store was ready she got to work on the house. From the David Jones catalogue she chose curtains and wallpaper; then later, a utility set for them to eat off, Wood’s Ware, not cheap Japanese, and a set of celluloid serviette rings with initials.

  Billy watched all this with suspicion. Her orderliness made him uneasy, and her tendency, as he thought of it, to put on the dog – maintaining a bit of decency was how she would have put it – enraged him. He had married a plump little girl with blonde curls and a bit of colour to her mouth, and had ended up with a woman who could run things. She tried to run him.

  He submitted at first. Anything for a quiet life, that was his motto; women were odd, you had to humour them. But when she tried to rule him he rebelled. He didn’t want to be cleaned up and made respectable, it didn’t suit him. He hated the neat little curtains she hung, the amount of washing she put out and the new poles he had to cut for her lines, the floors he couldn’t walk on in his hobnailed boots, and all the other evidence of what hampered and restricted him, this domestication she expected him to be grateful for.

  Wasn’t she making a home for him? That was the song she sang. Well, he could do without, he didn’t want it. He resented all these little wants she had, that were in fact criticisms of the way he preferred to live. He even resented, at last, the success she made of the store, because of the strength it gave her. It put him in the shade. He could support them. He didn’t need her to do it, and to show him up with how clever she was, and with manners she had picked up from people who were not their kind and that he had no time for and no wish to imitate, and all the palaver as well that went with them. Like serviette rings! She cast a gloom over him with the life she was making. So did the Crossing. He hated it, always had. Her passion for it was exaggerated. He took it as another form of rebuke to him, another criticism. Everything he wanted, everything that gave his spirit scope and made his blood beat, she forbade or cast scorn on.

  He set himself against her. He wouldn’t have done; he was easy-going by nature, and at the start he had been genuinely fond of her, had wanted
her to have whatever it was that made her happy. But she had set herself against him.

  He would sit out on a stump and curse when he was supposed to be chopping firewood for her copper, deliberately dawdled over jobs he could have finished with one hand tied behind his back, not to give her the satisfaction of having him always on call. He stayed out with the boys when she was expecting him on the dot for tea, and complained bitterly to his mates, when he had had a drink or two, of the haste with which he had put himself in harness. What a fool! At twenty-one his life was finished.

  Back there in the trenches, even if you ran the risk of extinction, and maybe most of all then, you were alive. He had known the full power of his own presence, breath and balls and fingers and the small hairs at the back of his neck. It had spoiled him, that glimpse of what a man might be. The life he was living now was nothing. Maybe it would be different if he had someone who knew what he was on about when he wanted to talk.

  Then Digger came along, and he had someone at last that he could be himself with, a mate; an ally too against the world that she was mistress of, that took no account of a man’s world because it had no use for it, only for the dumb, animal side of a man, work, and the bit of pleasure he would be allowed in the getting of a kid. All they wanted beyond that was to make a dummy of you, with a lot of rubbish about clean collars and toenails that didn’t do damage to the sheets, and serviette rings and God knows what other useless lah-de-dah lady’s business.

  These were some of the things he raved about when he had Digger alone. But when the anger left him at last he had other things to pass on to the boy.

  They were inseparable from the start. As a toddler with his nappy sagging and their dog Ralphie at his heels, he trotted in the father’s footsteps or squatted beside him with a toy hammer in his hand, imitating the father’s muttered curses and his way of holding his head to one side and sucking in his cheeks as he got set to belt a nail.

  He was good with his hands, Billy Keen. Everyone knew that. He could knock up anything you liked, a table or a medicine chest, dovetails and all; or hang a door or fix a roof. He was good with machines, too. Machines, people said, would talk to him, start purring and singing the moment he laid a hand on them. It was a gift. Digger had it too, or by intuition had picked it up from him.

  Machines were alive to Digger in the same way Ralphie was; and he was so close to Ralphie that it had taken him ages, when he was little, to see that they were of different species. The mother, who could not always be on the watch – she had Jenny as well as the shop and house to care for – was forever having to snatch Ralphie’s feeding dish from him. ‘Leave that, you little grub,’ she would tell him, ‘that’s Ralphie’s. Here, spit that out right now.’ In a storm once he had crawled into Ralphie’s kennel, out under the pepper tree, while thunder rolled, lightning blasted and the whole yard turned to mud. He had never felt so safe or warm. In dreams sometimes he found himself back in the dark, animal smell of the kennel, with Ralphie’s warmth against him, and felt he had arrived at a place where he knew at last where he really was, had rediscovered, in the individual grains of dirt he was pushing into his mouth, what it meant to be on the earth. It was the same way with machines. He understood the workings of them as if they were continuous in some way with his own nature. They purred for him, they sang, as they did for his father. There were no words for this.

  At barely ten, a scrawny kid, tough and hard-heeled, with a skin so pale you could see sunlight through it, he would relieve his father at the wheel of the ferry, feeling the huge power in his arms as the barge, with its load of vehicles, swung out into midstream. His father, leaning back against the machinery and blowing smoke, would direct him.

  ‘One day,’ he told himself, ‘this job will be mine.’ He had no thought but to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  He watched his father, picking up from him mannerisms he thought of as being essential to the man, and acquiring thus a set of gestures that were not individual to the father at all. Billy Keen, as a lad of fifteen, unsure of himself and eager to be recognised as a man, had picked them up from older fellows in the army in France. So at seven Digger had already the loose slouch that is the soldier’s stance when he is off-duty or between moves. He would sit on one heel and narrow his eyes at the distance before there was any distance much to be seen.

  The mother saw all this and began to regret the mistake she had made in letting go of him. She had thought then that she could afford to; there would be others. But the others all died on her, and though Jenny was a soft-mouthed, good-natured little thing, you couldn’t depend on her. Digger, in fact, had been her only chance.

  And the miracle was that for all his loyalty to the father she hadn’t lost him after all; that was the sweetness of him. He stuck to the father, but he stuck to her as well. They were bonded. They had their own codes and passwords, that others did not recognise, even when they were at the same table. They talked in silence. And one of the things they talked about was the others, the ones who were gone now, all but Jenny, but whose invisible presence she still clung to because they clung to her. They hung on to her skirts when she was out at the clothesline wrestling with sheets. They moaned and whimpered from corners, spat out mouthfuls of porridge and chewed crusts, sat in the sooty stove-alcove and banged on saucepans with spoons. And Digger, who had barely known them you might have thought, not only saw them there but could speak to them and give you details out of their brief existence that even she had forgotten. He was extraordinary, Digger, in what he saw.

  It was his ability to call up these little ghosts, and so clearly and in such detail that it broke your heart, that constituted the bond between them and made her believe that his memory might go back further still: to the time when, in her loneliness, she had talked to him in the womb.

  So she too had her triumph. Let them be mates, or whatever it is these men are together! Let them! He is bound to me.

  She was hard on him, she had to be. She couldn’t be certain to what extent he had inherited his father’s weakness. She believed he would see this one day and be grateful to her.

  Given the choice (but who has a choice?) she might have let him off. There was a part of her nature in which nothing would have pleased her more than to be one of the serene mothers you read about in books. But what good would that do him, or her either?

  The rages she got into scared her. She did not know at times, when she struck out at him, cuffing his ear or sending a stinging blow across his cheek, what it was in him that made her so angry, except that there were occasions when his simply being there was enough to do it, the soft look he wore, the vagueness of him. She was afraid he would go his father’s way. But she was equally afraid of his brightness, his curiosity. These too might draw him away.

  For all the skill he had with his hands, it was his mind he lived in, and there was no way of fathoming that. There were too many things in there, even if they were facts, that had no weight in the world; that’s what she saw and had to warn him of. If he clung to them he would drift.

  The father wasn’t blind.

  ‘You mustn’ let yer mother put you off, Digger. I mean, women don’t know everything, you know, though they reckon they do. It’s a different world, their world. A hard one, I admit. Yer mother’s got a hard life. That’s me, partly.’ He gave a laugh as if he were in the end quite proud of it. ‘On’y we don’t tell ’em everything we do, you know what I mean? All the bits of fun we have, or what we’re thinkin’ sometimes. They wouldn’t understand. Yer mother now. I don’t want t’ speak badly of ’er, she’s a good woman in most ways. But she’s a worrier. Yer better off – you know – keeping some things t’ yerself, you know what I mean? I mean they got their world, son, and we got ours, an’ the two are chalk an’ cheese, you can’t trade ’em. Yer mother wants to hang on t’ you. She wants to spare you from life. I don’t blame ’er fer that. It’s understandable. She doesn’t want to lose you. On’y you can’t go on tryin’ to live her way
forever, Dig – it’s just not possible. One day, one way ’r another, you’ll have to go out into a man’s world. Believe me, son, yer mother won’t help you then. I seen all that. Fellers cryin’ out fer their mothers in no man’s land, with half their head shot away or their guts spillin’ out. They could cry as long as they liked but I never seen no mother turn up. It was a man’s world you was in. It was other men you had to rely on. Stretcher-bearers, if you were lucky, otherwise just yer mates. That’s the truth, Digger. That’s what yer mother won’t tell yer.’

  These conversations took place on Sunday mornings when Digger and his father, with Ralphie trotting behind, went out with a 202 to get something for the pot.

  Not far from the Crossing was a bit of a branch line that had once served a mining village back in the hills. It ran for twelve miles through cuttings, round sheer hillsides, and was little more now than a playground for kids who liked to walk its rails like a tightrope with outstretched arms, and a scavenging place where men would come with a crowbar to tear up sleepers or gather coals.

  Digger loved the line, as they called it. So did Ralphie, who would leap off down the bank on the scent of something, a feral cat, maybe a rabbit, while they called after him ‘Skitchum, Ralphie. You skitchum!’ The walk, the stopping and starting, the intervals given over to getting a bird and bagging it, imposed a rhythm on these outings that was good for storytelling but also for talk. They were not always so chatty as they were out here. They could work side by side for hours sometimes without exchanging a single word.

  The stories were the same ones over and over, and Digger never tired of them. In their daring close-shaves and feats of bravado he got glimpses, quick ones, into his father’s other nature, the one that was under restraint here, the necessary restraint of the family man. In that other dimension, he was a boy not much older than Digger himself, light-footed, eager for the world, full of energy and pluck. They were of an age there, and here too once the stories got going.