Landscape of Farewell Read online

  A ground mist hovered like a softly levitating bed sheet above the open field beyond the hen run, the abandoned bulldozers a looming family of dreaming pachyderms. All was silent, except for the distant throbbing of the mine. Dougald and I were at the back fence. He had fed the hens and I had collected seven warm brown eggs from their boxes.

  ‘We’d better shift her peg,’ he said. His voice caressed the words, as if he spoke in order to listen to himself, in order to hear a human voice in this place. Lifting his hand, he pointed at the freckle-faced nanny-goat. She had cropped almost to the earth the growth of weeds and grasses within the compass of her tether.

  Dougald’s pace was unhurried and the sun was well up and the day already warm by the time we returned to the house. While he cooked breakfast, I sat at the kitchen table leafing through a collection of old newspapers and magazines. He had set his mobile phone down among a confusion of documents and a laptop computer which occupied the end of the table nearest the door. I wondered what business it was that occupied him here in this out-of-the-way place on the edge of the wilderness. He set down a plate of eggs, bacon and toast on the table in front of me, then brought his own and sat down. We were seated side by side facing the open door, as if we were twins or old brothers, the view of the patch of concrete and the antique gum tree before us, the sunlit yard and outbuildings beyond, the goat grazing her new range contentedly.

  We ate our breakfast in silence, as if we were about to embark upon some hazardous enterprise. During breakfast Dougald received two calls on his mobile telephone. He rose from the table each time with a soft apology and took the phone and stood with it at the back door, murmuring into it in such a low voice he might have been conversing with the dead. He said nothing to me of these calls but set the telephone aside when he was done and resumed his breakfast. I was sensitive of my status as a newly arrived guest in his house and did not feel at liberty to question him about his situation. I was curious, nevertheless, to know why he had remained in this town, since it had been abandoned by most of its other inhabitants. Had he stayed on from an attachment to his ancestral country?

  From his self-enclosed manner I took it that he had no particular wish to speak about himself. He seemed content with the silence between us. It was not in the least an awkward silence. In fact I do not recall ever being so at ease with a new acquaintance in such a close domestic situation as I was in those early days with Dougald. His silence was a contrast to Vita’s unceasing flow of conversation, which I had found tiring after a few days with her in Sydney. Everything Vita felt, she felt intensely. There were no half-measures with her. At the end of each day with her at the conference I had retired to my hotel room with a headache. She had promised to return to Mount Nebo for me in a week or two, and had repeated her assurance that her uncle would take me to see his country.

  His dog, a pale-eyed wolf-like bitch, waited in attendance at the side of his chair, and every so often he offered her a morsel of bacon, which she nipped delicately from between his fingers with her bared front teeth, her ears laid back along her narrow skull. She did not beg or demand these favours, but was fastidious and correct, waiting patiently, her tail sweeping from side to side, her gaze steady on his right hand. She was satisfied with her master’s generosity and confident it would not arbitrarily be withdrawn. The two brown dogs, her offspring and members of her tribe, made no attempt to enter the house, but stood in the open doorway looking in enviously at their privileged mother, lifting their snouts and sniffing the air. When I finished my breakfast I went over to them and gave them the fat from my bacon, which they greatly appreciated.

  I took my own and Dougald’s plates to the sink and set about washing the accumulation of dirty dishes and pans that had obviously been piled there for some time. There were old scraps of food and half-eaten pieces of mouldy toast among the dishes. While I did the washing-up, Dougald made several phone calls. As he talked he walked back and forth across the small space of the kitchen, from the cupboards to the open doorway then back again, looking down at his feet all the while, and might have been a prisoner measuring the confines of his cell. He was observed closely all the while by his grey bitch. She stood forward on her trembling forelegs, eager for a sign from him, her pale eyes never leaving his face. The two brown dogs lost interest in the goings-on in the kitchen once they saw there was no more food to be had. They sat at their ease out in the yard in the shade of the great broken gum tree, their forepaws crossed, their attention on the goat, which had managed to force its head through the wire fence and was attempting to reach a tall blue thistle growing just beyond the range of its tether rope. The larger of the two dogs gave a low woof every now and then and glanced towards the kitchen, wishing to reassure us that it was not just idling but was on duty. Dougald had not named his dogs and asked nothing of them, not issuing them with either commands or reprimands.

  The day was warm and still outside, and in the kitchen there was the domestic clatter of the dishes as I set them aside on the draining board, behind me the low murmur of Dougald’s voice as he spoke into his telephone. The plain white dishes in my hands and the feel of the warm suds on my fingers insisted upon an intimate acknowledgment of homeliness and familiarity. Scrubbing at the remains of burned food that clung to the insides of the pots, I found it difficult to recall with any certainty the conditions of my former life. I turned from the sink and looked towards Dougald. He caught my look and smiled. It was a slow, gracious, kindly, amused smile that drew up the loose folds of his cheeks and formed deep recesses and wrinkles around his eyes. There was much in his smile of understanding, and much was communicated to me of a sensitive response in him to our situation together in his home. I returned his smile. It was surely our amusement that we acknowledged, this vision of ourselves as two old men together at the end of their days. We might indeed have been brothers who had never married but had remained in the modest family home long after the deaths of our parents, I assuming the role of housekeeper, and he that of breadwinner.

  I turned back to the sink and went on scrubbing contentedly at the frying pan. I was thinking about an incident far in my past. It must have been 1943 when I met her, a few months before the destruction of Hamburg by Allied bombing. I was a child, but in my daydreams then I thought myself a man—that ideal condition to which all boys aspire. My father was away at the front, and with the growing threat of bombing my mother had taken me out of Hamburg to stay with her older brother on his farm. I do not know why my mother did not take my sister to the farm also, but can only suppose she did not think it suitable for a girl to be left alone there. One evening, when I was returning to the farmhouse through the hazel coppice from the ploughed field where my uncle was working, a gipsy girl stepped into my path from the concealment of the hazels. She laughed to see my fear, her bright headscarf lifting in the evening breeze. I knew myself to be at once in her power. In that moment, charged with fear and intuition, she might have appeared before me to deliver a prophecy of my death. Or perhaps, if she were to find me worthy of it, to present me with a gift that would empower me to alter the course of my history. But she only asked me for bread. Give me bread! she demanded. But I had no bread and was not yet man enough to invite her to accompany me to the farmhouse, where I might have found bread and sausage for her in the larder. So instead of going to her aid, I stood dumbfounded by her beauty and by the strange power over me which she seemed to possess, my gaze fixed on her, my hands clasped behind my back.

  Her family had been murdered, she told me, and she laughed a strange unnerving laugh as she told it. It was as if she spoke of people she had known long ago, almost in another life, and whose reality she had already begun to forget. Their brutal slaughter, she said, and there was a calm in her eyes and in her voice as she said it that terrified me, their brutal slaughter had taken place before her in the early hours of that very morning. She was alone and on the run. That is how I have remembered her, as if she knew no other existence than to be alone and on
the run. When she laughed it seemed to me then, just as it seems to me now, that it was not she but I who was the lost one. Although she can have been little older than I was, within the glowing shadows of the hazel coppice that evening she seemed to me ageless and wise and deeper in her experience of life than I could ever hope to be, and I felt that nothing of my inner life, my past or my future, was hidden from her, but was hidden only from myself. Indeed I knew it to be so, with that deep intuition of knowing that is the private truth of such things for each of us, and which we cannot share with another without forfeiting its mysterious power to compel our imagination.

  Standing at the sink in Dougald’s kitchen that morning, my hands in the warm washing-up water, my heart contracted at the remembrance of the gipsy girl. Had she escaped? Or had she been caught and suffered a hideous death? I still longed to know, all those years later, that she had made her escape. I still longed to be reassured that her meeting with me that evening had been for her a saving moment in her hazardous journey alone through the hostile world. More than half a century after my meeting with her, I wanted to believe that she had lived and had known happiness and contentment in life. I still regretted not giving her bread and shelter that evening. I still regretted not offering her the means to live while the precious opportunity to do so had been mine. The passage of years and decades is nothing to such memories. One lifetime is not long enough to forget these things. For me the gipsy girl still smiled her enigmatic smile, knowing something she did not disclose to me that evening in the hazel coppice of our childhood. Guilt, I discovered that evening, was not the experience only of the heartless perpetrator of a crime, but was a complex and pervasive condition of the human soul, as intractable and as mysterious as love.

  When I finished drying the dishes and found places for them on the shelves of the cupboard, we drove into the town in Dougald’s old red pick-up truck to collect the stores and mail. The only store in the town was at the Shell service station. It was also the only bank and served as the post office. Three times a week, unless there had been heavy rains and the road had been washed out, stores and medicines and other necessities of life were brought by the carrier from the coast. This enterprise was cheerfully conducted by a handsome woman in her early fifties. She was the wife of a miner who had been injured some years before in an accident at the coal mine and since then had been confined to a wheelchair. She and her crippled husband purchased the business with his compensation payout. I observed that Dougald and she exchanged a certain light and agreeable banter with each other which was suggestive of the enjoyment of a deeper intimacy than either of them was prepared to acknowledge openly in my presence. When we were driving home Dougald cleared his throat and said, as if he felt the need to offer me an explanation, ‘Whenever I have to go down to the coast for a few days on business, Esmé looks after the place for me.’

  I said, ‘She seems to be a very capable woman.’

  I saw his house from the road as we approached it, and recognised the small square uncurtained window of my own room. He turned into the driveway and the two brown dogs ran out to meet us.

  6

  What men gather

  Dougald seemed to me to be waiting for something, and for now he asked no more of me than he asked of his dogs. One fine still day followed another with little to distinguish them, and it seemed no time at all before two weeks of this measured existence had gone by. I had no desire to bring to an end just yet this peculiar sojourn with Dougald in his little house on the edge of the abandoned township. One day I would be required to go back to my life and to take up once again the problem of how to live it, but for now there was nothing to be done. I was determined to enjoy this leave of absence from the responsibility to live with purpose.

  It was a little after noon and I was standing outside the kitchen on the patch of concrete in the shade of the gum tree. I had been refreshing the water for the hens and the goat and still carried the blue plastic bucket in the crook of my right arm. I enjoyed being out in the open air and found a certain modest satisfaction in the performance of these daily chores. I was aware that my small service left Dougald free to attend to his paperwork and the numerous telephone calls he received throughout each day. Before going in to prepare our lunch, I had paused on the concrete patch outside the kitchen to enjoy the calm beauty of the day. The two brown dogs lay spreadeagled and panting at my feet, waiting to discover what I was to do next, when Dougald came out of the kitchen and handed me his mobile telephone. ‘It’s Vita, old mate,’ he said, and went back inside the kitchen.

  She apologised for not calling sooner. ‘It’s been frantic here,’ she said. Then, without pausing, she asked briskly, ‘So, Max, tell me, how are you and Dougald getting on?’ It was as if she referred to a business arrangement and was expecting a report from me on my progress with our project of getting on with her Uncle Dougald.

  I said, ‘We are getting on very well. In fact we are an old domestic couple. I do the chores and leave him free to do his work.’ I waited to hear what she would say to this, but she said nothing. ‘Should I say more?’

  ‘Don’t let him work too hard,’ she said. ‘If you let him, he’ll just work and do nothing else.’

  What did she expect of me? ‘In the evening after dinner,’ I said, ‘once he has abandoned his work for the day and I have washed the dishes and made us a final cup of tea, we drowse in front of the television for an hour. Eventually we bestir ourselves and say goodnight and we go to our separate rooms. Really there is very little else to report.’

  ‘You sound happy?’ she said almost resentfully, and might have been accusing me of a moral lapse.

  ‘Should I not be then?’ I asked her.

  ‘Happily married, by the sound of it,’ she said and laughed cheerlessly. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Dougald seems to me to be in fine spirits.’

  ‘He’s not a well man, Max,’ she corrected me. ‘We’ve been worried about him ever since Aunty May died. It’s nearly five years now and he hasn’t moved on.’

  Did she think, I wondered, that I had moved on? I considered mentioning to her Dougald’s delicate friendship with Esmé at the service station. I thought of offering this to her as evidence that he had indeed moved on a considerable way from the state of paralysed anguish into which he must have been cast by the death of his wife. But I felt it would have been a betrayal to speak of this to her, and so I said nothing. Had Vita been a man, I would have seen no betrayal in telling her about Esmé. How we are forever adjusting the truth.

  ‘He hasn’t taken a break since he lost Aunty May,’ she said. ‘In a perverse sort of way I think he almost wants to make himself ill.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve seen him, he just slaves away for his people day and night. They use him. He doesn’t know how to say no. It’s sad, Max. It’s wearing him down.’

  Dougald had not spoken to me about his work, but I had gathered a general impression of what it was he did. ‘He seems to be saddled with a great number of reports and submissions,’ I said. ‘His situation reminds me a little of my old situation with the bureaucracy at the university. But he seems very capable of getting on with it.’

  ‘They sit on their arses and let him do everything for them,’ she said. ‘They never think of saying thank you or offering to help him. The minute he settles one issue for them they’re after him for something else. How many times a day does that phone of his ring? It’s his own fault. He hasn’t trained anyone up to replace him. He thinks he’s the only one who can do anything. He treats them as if they’re children. And like children they grumble and do nothing.’ She was silent a moment, then she said, ‘See if you can talk him into taking you out for a trip for a few days. Get him to show you a bit of his country. Get him away from that phone. Tell him you want to see something of the place before you go home. It will do him good to get out into the bush. It’s what he needs. He loves being out in the bush. He’s a changed man out ther
e. Do you think you can do that for me, Max?’

  I said I would do my best, but that I did not consider it to be my place as his guest to offer Dougald advice on how he should conduct himself. She was contemptuous of my reply and accused me of being stuffy and European. ‘For God’s sake, Max, just bloody do it, can’t you?’ she said. ‘It’s not asking the impossible, is it? You two guys understand each other. You’re both in the same boat. You both lost your wives.’

  I stood there for a moment considering what she had said. ‘You planned this,’ I said.

  ‘You’re happy aren’t you? You just said you were happy. What’s the problem?’

  ‘You’re obviously not going to be satisfied with me just doing the household chores for him.’