David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

There was still everything to do — one saw that at a glance. But Ashley saw things differently from his father and grandfather. They had always had in mind a picture they had brought from ‘home’, orderly fields divided by hedgerows, to which the present landscape, by planning and shaping, might one day be made to approximate. But for Ashley this was the first landscape he had known and he did not impose that other, greener one upon it; it was itself. Coming back, he found he liked its mixture of powdery blues and greens, its ragged edges, its sprawl, the sense it gave of being unfinished and of offering no prospect of being finished. These things spoke of space, and of a time in which nature might be left to go its own way and still yield up what it had to yield; there was that sort of abundance. For all his cultivation, he liked what was unmade here and could, without harm, be left that way.

There was more to Ashley Crowther’s image of the world than his formal clothes might have suggested — though he was, in fact, without them at this moment, barefoot on scrubbed boards — or, since he was shy, his formal manners, which were not so easily laid aside.

After breakfast he changed into a cotton shirt, twills, boots and wide-brimmed hat and took a ride round his property, beginning with the little iron fenced enclosure where his parents, his grandparents and several smaller brothers and sisters were interred under sculptured stone.

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?’