David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

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 they 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.

‘Birds,’ Jim specified.

‘Not always. But yes, often enough. That sandpiper took my fancy because it was one of my favourites at home — they come down from the north, you know, and winter among us. In Norfolk, I mean.’

‘And here.’

‘Yes, here too. It’s odd, isn’t it? To come halfway across the world and find —. It made me feel homesick. So I set up quickly, got a good shot, and there it is. Homesickness dealt with. Stuffed into the box.’

He found he understood almost everything she said straight off, and this was unusual.

‘Could I see it? The photo?’

‘Why not?’

She led him into the hallway, past what must have been a bedroom, and into the darkness at the end of the hall.

It was the best room in the house; orderly, well set-up, with two sinks, a lamp, black cloth to cover the windows. He understood that too. When he stepped into the place it wasn’t just the narrowness of the space they stood in, among all the apparatus of a hobby, or trade, that made him feel they had moved closer. He saw, because she allowed him to see, a whole stretch of her life, wider, even here in a darkroom, than anything he could have guessed from what she had already told — Norfolk, her brother, the tent city at Mount Morgan. He liked the order, the professionalism, the grasp all this special equipment suggested of a competence. There were racks for her plates, bottles of chemicals all neatly labelled, rubber gloves, a smell of something more than lavender.

‘So this is it,’ he said admiringly as he might have spoken to any man. ‘Where you work.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘here and out there.’

As he was to discover, she often made these distinctions, putting things clearer, moving them into a sharper focus.

‘The light, and then the dark.’

She took a sheet of paper and offered it to him, and looked anxious as he subjected it to scrutiny.

It was the sandpiper. Perfect. Every speckle, every stripe on the side where it faded off into the white of the underbelly, the keen eye in the lifted head — he felt oddly moved to see the same bird in this other dimension. Moved too at the trouble it must have taken, and the quick choices, to get just that stance, which was so perfectly characteristic; her own keen eye measuring the bird’s and discovering the creature’s taut, springlike alertness. Did she know so much about birds? Or did some intuition guide her? This is it; this is the moment when we see into the creature’s unique life. That too might be a gift.

The sandpiper was in sharp focus against a blur of earth and grass-stems, as if two sets of binoculars had been brought to bear on the same spot, and he knew that if the second pair could now be shifted so that the landscape came up as clear as the bird, he too might be visible, lying there with a pair of glasses screwed into his head. He was there but invisible; only he and Miss Harcourt might ever know that he too had been in the frame, hidden among those soft rods of light that were grass-stems and the softer sunbursts that were grass-heads or tiny flowers. To the unenlightened eye there was just the central image of the sandpiper with its head attentively cocked. And that was as it should be. It was the sandpiper’s picture.