Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

  The Monuments, as they were called, were only visible from the house when the big wheat-paddock was bare, since they stood in the very middle of it. He remembered how, as a child, he had crawled in among the rustling stems to find the place, his lost ancestral city, or had sat on a fence-post while a harvester, moving in wide circles, had gradually revealed it: tall columns standing alone among the flattened grain, already, even in those days, so chipped and stained that they might have been real monuments going back centuries rather than a mere score of years to the first death. He made his way towards them now, through the standing wheat, and sat for a moment with his hat off. Then rode on.

  He saw much that day, though nothing like the whole – that would take weeks, months even. In the evening, after bathing and changing, he sat alone on the verandah and decided he would make the house, once again, a place where people came; he couldn’t keep all this, or his excitement in it, to himself. The smokiness of the hour, the deepening blue of the hills and all the gathering night sounds, were too good not to share, and he was by nature generous.

  Within two months he had done all that. He had visited most places on the property and got a clear view of all its various activities and the men who were in charge or carried them out. When he looked at the manager’s books now he saw real faces behind the names, and behind the figures fenced places and wild, and knew what it all meant in hours worked and distance covered. It had found its way down, painfully at first, then pleasurably, into his wiry muscles, in days of riding or walking or sitting about yarning in the sun.

  The house too had been given a new life. Weekend guests came and were put up in the big verandah rooms with their cedar wardrobes and tiled washstands and basins. They strolled on the verandah in the early morning, having been drawn out by the brightness of the light, and sat in deep squatters’ chairs in the evening to enjoy the dusk, while Ashley, supplementing the music of the landscape itself, played to them on an upright. They ate huge meals under a fan in the dining-room, with a lazy Susan to deal at breakfast with four different sorts of jam and two of honey, one a comb, and at dinner with the sauces and condiments; they took picnics down to the creek. The tennis court was weeded and spread with a reddish-pink hard stuff that was made from smashed anthills, and they played doubles, the ladies in skirts and blouses, the young men in their shirtsleeves. Bert came with his flying-machine. They watched it wobble in over the swamp, then circle the house and touch down, a bit unsteadily, in the home paddock. It sat there in the heat haze like a giant bird or moth while cows flicked their tails among cow-pats, and did not seem out of place. It was a landscape, Ashley thought, that could accommodate a good deal. That was his view of it. It wasn’t so clearly defined as England or Germany; new things could enter and find a place there. It might be old, even very old, but it was more open than Europe to what was still to come.

  He also discovered Jim.

  While he was riding one day in the low scrub along the swamp the young man had simply started up out of the earth at his feet; or rather, had rolled over on his back, where he had been lying in the grass, and then got to his feet cursing. Ashley hadn’t seen the other creature that started up yards off and went flapping into a tree. He was too astonished that some fellow should be lying there on his belly in the middle of nowhere, right under the horse’s hooves, and felt the oath, though he didn’t necessarily attach it to himself, to be on the whole unjustified.

  The young man stood, thin-faced, heavy shouldered, in worn moleskins and a collarless shirt, and made no attempt to explain his presence or to acknowledge any difference between Ashley and himself except that one was mounted and the other had his two feet set firmly on the earth. He brushed grass-seed from his trousers with an old hat and stood his ground. Ashley, oddly, found this less offensive than he ought.

  ‘What were you doing?’ he asked. It was a frank curiosity he expressed. There was nothing of reproach in it.

  ‘Watchin’ that Dollar bird,’ Jim told him. ‘You scared it off.’

  ‘Dollar bird?’

  ‘Oriental,’ Jim said. ‘Come down from the Moluccas.’

  His voice was husky and the accent broad; he drawled. The facts he gave were unnecessary and might have been pedantic. But when he named the bird, and again when he named the island, he made them sound, Ashley thought, extraordinary. He endowed them with some romantic quality that was really in himself. An odd interest revealed itself, the fire of an individual passion.

  Ashley slipped down from the saddle and they stood side by side, the grass almost at thigh level. Jim pointed.

  ‘It’s in that ironbark, see?’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘There, over to the left. Second branch from the top. Red beak. Purple on the throat and tail-feathers. See?’

  Ashley stared, focused, found the branch; and then, with a little leap of surprise and excitement, the bird – red beak, purple throat, all as the young man had promised.

  ‘I can see it!’ he exclaimed, just like a child, and they both grinned. The young man turned away and sat on a log. He took the makings of a smoke from his pocket. Ashley stumbled forward.

  ‘Have one of mine,’ he insisted. ‘No, really.’ He offered the case, already snapped open, with the gold-tipped tailor-mades under a metal band that worked like a concertina.

  ‘Thanks,’ the young man said, his square fingers making an awkward job of working the band. He turned the cylinder, so utterly smooth and symmetrical, in his fingers, looking at the gold paper round the tip, then put it to his lower lip, struck a wax match, which he cupped in his hand against the breeze, and held it out to Ashley, who dipped his head towards it and blew out smoke. Jim lit his own cigarette and flipped the match with his thumbnail. All this action carried them over a moment of nothing-more-to-say into an easy silence. Ashley led his horse to a stump opposite, and crossing his legs, and with his body hunched forward elbow to knee, fell intensely still, then said abruptly:

  ‘Are you out here often? Watching, I mean?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s something to do, isn’ it?’ He looked about, his grey eyes narrowed, and the land was a flat circle all round, grass-tips, tree-stumps, brush, all of it seemingly still and silent, all of it crowded and alive with eyes, beaks, wing-tips.

  Ashley followed his gaze. The land shifted into a clearer focus, and he might himself have been able, suddenly, to see it in all its detail, the individual eye infinitesimally rolling, the red beak in a spray of gum-flowers, the tiny body at ground level among the roots, one of the seed-eaters, coloured like the earth. He was intensely aware for a moment how much life there might be in any square yard of it. And he owned a thousand acres.

  But even if he looked and saw, he would have no name for it. Dollar bird. This youth had the names.

  ‘Where did you learn?’ he asked, out of where his own thoughts had led him.

  ‘Oh, here ’n there. Some of it from books. Mostly, you know, it’s –’ Jim found it difficult to explain that it was almost a sense he had, inexplicable even to himself. To have said that might have been to claim too much. A gift. Was it a gift? ‘In time,’ he said, ‘you get to know some things and the rest you guess. If you’re any good you guess right. Nine times in a hundred,’ and he gave a laugh. Ashley laughed too. He drew himself tighter together, the knotted legs, the elbows in hard against his body, and the laughter was like an imp he had bottled up in there that suddenly came bubbling out.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘how would you like to work for me? How would you –’

  He stopped, breathless with the excitement of it. The landscape, the whole great circle of it, grass-heads, scrub, water, sky, quite took his breath away. All those millions of lives as they entering what he had just conceived. ‘How would you like,’ he said, ‘to do all this on a proper basis? I mean, make lists. We could turn this’ (it was the notion of time that took his breath away, the years, the decades), ‘into an observing place, a sanctuary. It’s mine, I
can make what I want of it. And you’d be just the man.’

  Smoke trailed from Jim’s lips in a steady stream. He had been waiting for so long for something like this to present itself, and now this Ashley Crowther fellow comes up behind him on a horse and offers it, just like that – not just a job but work, years, a lifetime.

  The young man’s silence threw Ashley off balance.

  ‘I’d make it worth your while, of course.’ He swallowed. The landscape itself, he thought, ought to add its appeal; for it was an appeal more than an offer he was making, and it was on the land’s behalf that it was made. ‘How does it strike you, then?’ he asked lamely.

  Jim nodded. ‘It sounds alright.’

  ‘Well then,’ Ashley said, laughing and jumping to his feet, ‘you’re my man.’ He thrust his hand out, and both standing now, feet on the ground, at the centre, if they could have seen themselves, of a vast circle of grass and low greyish scrub, with beyond them on one side tea-trees then paddocks, and on the other tea-trees then swamp then surf, in a very formal manner, with Ashley stooping slightly since he was so much the taller, and Jim quite square, they shook on it. It was done.

  3

  IF ASHLEY DISCOVERED Jim, it was Jim who discovered Miss Harcourt, Miss Imogen Harcourt.

  He was on his belly again, with a note-pad in his pocket, a stub of pencil behind his ear and the field-glasses Ashley Crowther had provided screwed firmly into his head – they might have been a fixture.

  He was watching a sandpiper in a patch of marshy bank, one of the little wood sandpipers that appear each summer and come, most of them, from Northern Asia or Scandanavia, nesting away at the top of the world on the tundras or in the Norwegian snows and making their long way south.

  It amazed him, this. That he could be watching, on a warm day in November, with the sun scorching his back, the earth pricking below and the whole landscape dazzling and shrilling, a creature that only weeks ago had been on the other side of the earth and had found its way here across all the cities of Asia, across lakes, deserts, valleys between high mountain ranges, across oceans without a single guiding mark, to light on just this bank and enter the round frame of his binoculars; completely contained there in its small life – striped breast and sides, white belly, yellow legs, the long beak investigating a pool for food, occasionally lifting its head to make that peculiar three-note whistle – and completely containing, somewhere invisibly within, that blank white world of the northern ice-cap and the knowledge, laid down deep in the tiny brain, of the air-routes and courses that had brought it here. Did it know where it had arrived on the earth’s surface? Did it retain, in that small eye, some image of the larger world, so that it could say There I was so many darknesses ago and now I am here, and will stay a time, and then go back; seeing clearly the space between the two points, and knowing that the distance, however great, could quite certainly be covered a second time in the opposite direction because the further side was still visible, either there in its head or in the long memory of its kind.

  The idea made Jim dizzy. That, or the sun, or the effort of watching. He raised the glasses to rest a moment, and in doing so caught something unexpected that flashed through the frames and was gone.

  Where?

  He let the glasses travel across, back, up a little, down, making various frames for the landscape, and there it was again: a face under a sun-bonnet. It was lined and brown, and was at the moment intensely fixed upon something, utterly absorbed. He shifted the glasses and found a black box on a tripod. The face ducked down behind it. The composite figure that now filled the frame was of a grey skirt, voluminous and rather bedraggled, topped by the black box wearing a sun-bonnet. The black box was pointing directly towards him. Could it be him that she was photographing?

  It was only after a minute that he realized the truth. What the woman had in her sights was the same sandpiper he had been holding, just a few seconds ago, in his binoculars. For some time, without either of them being aware of it, they had, in all this landscape, and among all its creatures, been fixing their attention from different sides on the same spot and on the same small white-breasted body.

  He wasn’t all that much surprised by the coincidence. It seemed less extraordinary than that this few ounces of feather and bone should have found its way here from Siberia or Norway. That was itself so unlikely that men had preferred to believe, and not so long ago, either, that when the season turned, some birds had simply changed their form as others changed their plumage – that swallows, for example, became toads – and had actually given detailed accounts of the transformation: the birds gathering in such numbers, on reeds, on lake beds, that the stems bent low under their weight, and at the point where the reeds touched the water the swallows were transmuted, drew in their wings and heads, splayed their beaks to a toad-mouth, lowered their shrill cries to a throaty creaking, and went under the surface till it was time for them to be re-born overnight in their old shapes in twittering millions.

  Meanwhile the tripod had transformed itself back into a woman. She was stomping about in her grey skirt; an old girl, he guessed, of more than fifty, with grey curls under the bonnet and boots under the skirt. She lifted the tripod, snapped it shut, set it over her shoulder, and moved off with the rest of her equipment into the scrub.

  Later, at the Anglers’ Arms, he discovered her name and went down river to the weatherboard cottage she had bought and introduced himself.

  The house was in bad shape. Sheets of iron were lifting from the roof, making the whole thing look as if it had grown wings and were about to rise out of this patch of scrub and settle in another on the far side of the hill. The weatherboard was grey, there were gaps in the verandah rails, and one window that had lost its glass was stuffed with yellowish newspaper. Stumps of what might once have been a paling fence stuck up here and there in a wilderness of briars, and beyond them, in the yard, a lemon tree had gone back to the wild state, with big lumpy fruit among inch-long thorns. On one side of the concrete step to the verandah was a washing tub, all pitted and crumbling with rust. It contained a skeletal fern. On the other two kerosene tins packed with dry earth put forth miraculous carnations, pink and white.

  ‘Anyone home?’ he called.

  There was a voice from somewhere within, but so far off that it seemed to be replying from the depths of a house several times larger than this one, a deep hallway leading to cool, richly furnished rooms.

  ‘Who is it?’ An English voice.

  ‘Me,’ he replied foolishly, as a child would; then added in a deeper voice, ‘Jim Saddler. I work for Mr Crowther.’

  ‘Come on in,’ the voice invited, ‘I’ll be with you in just a moment. I’m in the dark room.’

  He stepped across a broken board, pushed the door and went in. It was clean enough, the kitchen, but bare: a scrubbed table and one chair, cups on hooks, a wood stove in a corrugated iron alcove. Wood-chunks, newspapers, a coloured calender.

  ‘I can’t come for a bit,’ the voice called. ‘Take a seat.’

  The voice, he thought, might not have belonged to the woman he had seen out there in the swamp. It sounded younger, like that of someone who keeps up a running conversation while sitting in close conference with a chip-heater and six inches of soapy water; the voice of a woman engaged on something private, intimate, who lets you just close enough, with talk, to feel uncomfortable about what you cannot see. He didn’t have much idea what happened in dark-rooms; photography was a mystery.

  He examined the calendar. Pictures of English countryside. Turning the leaves back to January, then forward again through the year. Minutes passed.

  ‘There!’ she said, and came out pinning a little gold watch to the tucked bodice of her blouse. She was a big, round-faced woman, and the grey curls now that he saw them without the bonnet looked woollen, they might have been a wig.

  ‘Jim Saddler,’ he said again, rising.

  She offered her hand, which was still damp where she had just dried it, and th
ey shook. Her handshake, he thought, was firmer than his. At least, it was to begin with.

  ‘Imogen Harcourt. Would you like tea?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘if it’s no trouble.’

  He wondered about the one chair.

  ‘I’ve come about that sandpiper,’ he said straight out. ‘I seen you taking a picture of it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes I did. I work for Ashley Crowther, Mister Crowther, I’m his bird man. I keep lists –.’ He was shy of making too much of it and made too little. He could never bring himself to say the word that might have properly explained.

  ‘I know,’ she admitted, swinging back to face him with the filled kettle in her hand. ‘I’ve seen you. I saw you yesterday.’

  ‘Did you?’ he said foolishly, not being used to that; to being seen. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we’re more or less on terms.’

  She laughed. ‘More or less. Do you take milk?’

  She couldn’t tell for the moment whether they would be friends or not; whether he had come here to share something or to protect a right. He was awkward, he had dignities. His pale hair stuck out straw-like where it was unevenly but closely cropped, and he stood too much at attention, as if defending narrow ground.

  Jim too was puzzled. It was mostly younger women who spoke straight up at you like that, out of the centre of their own lives. Pretty women. Wives, mothers, unmarried aunts had generally settled more comfortably into the conventions than Miss Imogen Harcourt had; they tried harder to please. Though she wasn’t what his father would have called a character. She was independent but not odd.

  They drank their tea. There was, after all, no trouble about the chair. She half-sat, half-leaned on the window-ledge, and told him at once, without prompting, what there was to tell of her story. She had come here from Norfolk, six years ago, with a brother who’d had a mind to try gold-mining and gone to Mount Morgan but had failed to make a fortune and gone home again. She had decided to stay. She offered no explanation of that. What her intention had been in first following her brother to the other side of the world and then failing to follow him home again was not revealed. She had a small income and was supplementing it by taking nature photographs for a London magazine.