David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

‘Perfect,’ he breathed.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was pleased too.’

They looked at the bird between them, having moved quickly, since yesterday, to where they now stood with just this sheet of paper between them on which the bird’s passage through its own brief huddle of heat and energy had been caught for a moment and fixed, maybe for ever.

‘I must show this,’ Jim said, ‘to Ashley Crowther.’

So they became partners, all three, and a week later Jim told her of the sanctuary, actually using the word out loud for the first time, since he was certain now that there was nothing in her that would scoff at the grandness of it, but blushing just the same; the blood rose right up into the lobes of his ears.

He never uttered the word again. He didn’t have to. When he talked to Miss Harcourt, as when he talked to Ashley Crowther, they spoke only of ‘the birds’.

SOMETIMES, WHEN ASHLEY Crowther had a party of friends down for the weekend, or for the Beaudesert races, Jim would take them out in a flat-bottomed boat, and for an hour or two they would drift between dead white trees over brackish water, its depths the colour of brewed tea, its surface a layer of drowned pollen inches thick in places, a burnished gold. Parting the scum, they would break in among clouds.

Ashley would be in the bow, his knees drawn up hard under his chin, his arms, in shirt-sleeves, propped upon them, like some sort of effigy, Jim thought — an image of whatever god it was that had charge of this place, a waterbird transmuted. The women, and the young men in blazers who shared the centre of the boat with their provisions, a wicker basket, its silver hasp engraved with the name of the house, would be subdued, tense, held on a breath; held on Jim’s breath.

‘That,’ he would whisper, lifting the pole and letting them slide forward in the stillness, ‘is the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’

The name, in Jim’s hushed annunciation of it, immediately wrapped the bird in mystery, beyond even the brilliance of its colouring and the strange light the place touched it with.

‘And over there — see? — those are lotus birds. See? Far over. Aw, now they’ve seen us, they’re off. They’ve got a nest at the edge there, right down at water level. See their feet? Long they are. That’s for walking on the lotus leaves, or on waterlily pads, so they don’t sink.’

He would push his pole into mud again, putting his shoulder into it and watching the birds flock away, and they would ride smoothly in under the boughs. Nobody spoke. It was odd the way the place imposed itself and held them. Even Ashley Crowther, who preferred music, was silent here and didn’t fidget. He sat spell-bound. And maybe , Jim thought, this is music too, this sort of silence.

What he could not know was to how great a degree these trips into the swamp, in something very like a punt, were for Ashley recreations of long, still afternoons on the Cam, but translated here not only to another hemisphere, but back, far back, into some pre-classical, pre-historic, primaeval and haunted world (it was this that accounted for his mood of suspended wonder) in which the birds Jim pointed out, and might almost have been calling up as he named them in a whisper out of the mists before creation, were extravagantly disguised spirits of another order of existence, and the trip itself — despite the picnic hamper and the champagne bottles laid in ice, and the girls, one of whom was the girl he was about to marry — a water journey in another, deeper sense; which is why he occasionally shivered, and might, looking back, have seen Jim, where he leaned on the pole, straining, a slight crease in his brow and his teeth biting into his lower lip, as the ordinary embodiment of a figure already glimpsed in childhood and given a name in mythology, and only now made real.

‘There,’ Jim breathed, ‘white ibis. They’re common enough really. Beautiful, but.’ He lifted his eyes in admiration, and at the end of the sentence, his voice as well, to follow their slow flight as they beat away. They might have been swimming, stroke on stroke, through the heavy air. ‘And that’s a stilt, see? See its blue back? It’s a real beauty!’

They would be stilled in the boat, all wonder, who at other times were inclined to giggle, the girls, and worry about their hair or the sit of their clothes, and the young men to stretch their legs and yawn. They were so graceful, these creatures, turning their slow heads as the boat glided past and doubled where the water was clear: marsh terns, spotted crake, spur-winged plover, Lewin water rails. And Jim’s voice also held them with its low excitement. He was awkward and rough-looking till they got into the boat. Then he too was light, delicately balanced, and when it was a question of the birds, he could be poetic. They looked at him in a new light and with a respect he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to command.

As for Ashley, he liked to show them off: his birds. Or rather, he liked to have Jim show them off, and was pleased at dinner afterwards when his guests praised the ibis, the Sacred Kingfisher, the water rail, as if he had been very clever indeed in deciding that this is what he should collect rather than Meissen figures or Oriental mats.

But in the boat, in the place where the creatures were at home, they passed out of his possession as strangely as they had passed into it, and he might have been afraid then of his temerity in making a claim; they moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands — even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there — and knew nothing of Ashley Crowther. They shocked him each time he came here with the otherness of their being. He could never quite accept that they were, he and these creatures, of the same world. It was as if he had inherited a piece of the next world, or some previous one. That was why he felt such awe when Jim so confidently offered himself as an intermediary and named them: ‘Look, the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’

When they stopped to picnic there was talk at last. They came back to reality.

‘The nightingale,’ a Mrs McNamara informed them, ‘that’s the most beautiful of all songbirds now.’

‘I’ve never heard it,’ a younger woman regretted.

‘Oh it’s beautiful,’ Mrs McNamara assured her. ‘But you have to go to Europe. Alas, my love, it was the nightingale.’

‘When I was in London,’ one of the gentleman told, ‘I went to a party in a big house at Twickenham. It was the dead of winter and all night there was a nightingale twittering away in one of the trees in the garden. I’d never heard anything like it. It was amazing. All the guests went out in troops to listen, it was such a wonder. Only later I found out it was a lark — I mean, some bird-imitator from the music-halls had been hired to sit up there and do it, all rugged up against the cold, poor chap, and blowing on his fingers when he wasn’t being a nightingale. It’s a wonder he didn’t freeze.’

Europe, Jim decided, must be a mad place. And now they said there was to be a war.

He sat apart with his back to a tree and ate the sandwiches he had brought while the others had their spread. Ashley carried a glass of champagne across to him and sat for a bit, with his own glass, but they didn’t speak.

Later, when he handed the ladies down on to the wooden landing stage he had constructed, at the end of a twenty-foot cat-walk, each of them said ‘Thank you Jim,’ and the gentlemen tipped him. Ashley never said thank you, and he pretended not to see the coins that passed, though he wouldn’t have deprived Jim of the extra shillings by forbidding it.

Ashley didn’t have to thank him. And not at all because Jim was only doing what he was employed to do.