David Malouf: The Great World

In fact he was wrong. It wasn’t that that did it. She could take with a good deal of salt the sort of swagger, of inexperience too, that made him feel she could be caught (girls are easy) just like that. ‘Not me, m’lad,’ she told him with a look of her own, and set her jaw.

But she too was eager to get out of her present life and be settled. It was what she had come all these miles for. And something he had said, just in passing, had caught her ear. The place he came from bore his name. Back home in England that meant something, an ancestral house or manor, or a sizeable farm at least. Family names on a map were solid; they rooted you in things that could be measured, so many acres. So what, she wondered, was Keen’s Crossing? It wouldn’t be a manor of course. She knew what country she was in; she wasn’t quite a fool. But it must be something . She was a practical girl and added it to the immediate and more touching fact of his ears.

It would have surprised Billy Keen, and might have reduced him a little, if he had realised that what had fetched her was not the line he ran, not at all, but the giveaway reddening of his ears. What he had awakened in her, though she didn’t know it yet, was the mother she would be in less than a year if she took him. His ears made such perfect shells.

In fact they were deceived, both of them. What she took for boyishness in him was a lightness he would not outgrow. He was strong-willed and stubborn, in fact. He would not be led. As for what amused him so much, her competence — the ease with which she managed men and change and glasses and all sorts of daring backchat — he did not like it much when it was applied daily to him . She was competent all right. Ambitious too. And when she got hold of a thing she hung on to it.

She would remember the journey to Keen’s Crossing for the rest of her life, perhaps because she was to make it just the once. Every detail of it remained new for her.

Years later, towards the end, on a windy day in August, she would climb the bluff behind the Crossing and be astonished to see that Sydney, a place she thought of as worlds away, further even in some ways than England, had all the time been visible, just thirty miles from where she was. She could have gone up there and looked at it any day of her life. Its outer suburbs by then were already climbing the far side of the ridge.

But it wasn’t in fact the same city she had come to and left more than thirty years ago. That had been a big country town with arms of the harbour breaking into it at every turn, open trams bucketing about and sparking on their poles, wagons with heavy carthorses loaded with barrels and barefoot boys shouting headlines at every corner; a shabby place, all steep hills and with ships of one sort or another, or masts at least, at the bottom of every street. What she saw now, from a distance of half a lifetime, was skyscrapers.

The thirty-mile journey by train, and then sulky, had taken all day. At first through suburbs that were all new brick bungalows and gardens dense with pin oaks and rhododendron; then, with the last of the streetlamps, market gardens tended by Chinese. At last they had come out on to a plateau under a scud of clouds. Stretches of low flowering scrub lay on either side, broken by platforms of rock. When they left the little isolated station and made their way down to the river, the Hawkesbury, the road (a highway they called it) took bend after bend, and the trees, which were both above and below them, were of a kind she had never seen before, giants with feathery tops in bunches, and trunks and limbs of a naked pink or white, incredibly twisted and deeply creased at the joints with folds like fat. Ridged outcropping ledges tilted and thrust out at angles, and there was a smell of animal droppings, dark and heavy, mixed with the crush of ferns. She soon saw how different it was from England, and how wrong, how romantic, her expectations had been.

They turned off the highway, took a less frequented road which was also a highway, and came down to where the store occupied its elbow of dust in an arc of the river. The ferry was idling at the bank.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is it. Waddaya think?’

She didn’t. She had given up thinking miles back and had sworn then that she would never come this way again. Whatever it was, she would accept and make the most of. Thirteen thousand miles, plus thirty, was enough.

The road they were on came to a halt at the ferry, then took up again on the other side, where it went all the way, he told her, to Gosford, Woy Woy, Maitland: he spoke these names as if they offered the possibility of escape. But she had never heard of any of them, and told herself she could do without them. Sydney, too. She would stick to what she had got.

It wasn’t much. Whatever modest grandeur or continuity she had imagined, and had hoped in her ignorance to find in a settled-looking house and garden, had to be taken up from the landscape. It was wild, but once she stopped thinking in the old terms and opened her eyes and let it work on her, she was struck by the stillness of it, the space it gave you to breathe.

It wasn’t what she had wanted — how could it be when she hadn’t even known such a place could exist? — and she wasn’t sure, either, that she had the qualities to deal with it, since she had been preparing most of her life for something else. But something in her wanted it, now that it was here. Something new in her, that the place itself would deal with.

She committed herself immediately, come what might, to that , and made a mission of it.

Newly come home and not too happy about it, Billy watched her closely, seated on a log and sweating, knocking away flies. ‘You’re not disappointed?’ he asked.

She was the one who had wanted to come here. If only to take a look. He had banked on her being put off by the dreariness of the place. They would look and go back to town. Sydney was what he wanted.

Her look of fierce resignation was the first indication he got that she might not be what he had taken her for. She strode about looking, asking questions. He fell deeper into gloom. She liked it. She was making plans.

The river was wide between granite bluffs that were all yellow-orange in the sunset and forested with the same weird, fleshy trees they had come down through. But there was a pepper tree in front of the store and, behind, Scotch firs. Very gloomy they looked too, compared with the lightness and airiness of the bush trees; familiar, yes, but that was just what she didn’t like about them. Still, it was through them that she saw what the others might be.

No sign of a garden. Not even a geranium in a tub.

Not much of a house either. Just the gabled store, all weatherboard, unpainted for ages she thought and a lot of it gone to ruin, with, at the back, three pokey rooms.

What Billy couldn’t know, following behind her and feeling more and more uneasy, was that it was more than she had ever had in her life before. It was all to be made , and what she made would be hers.

The store was boarded up. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘we can reopen it.’ The house was filled with rubbish except for one room. Billy’s brother Pete lived there, or rather, camped in a space he had made by pushing the rubbish it contained into the corners of it. He immediately offered to give the place up to them, and his job at the ferry to Billy if he wanted it. He couldn’t wait to get away.

She had looked forward to this brother, hoping to learn from him some of the things that Billy didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to tell. Having got a relation at last she was determined to make the most of him. She had seen herself making meals, looking after his clothes, in exchange for which there would be confidences.