The Passage of Love

by Alex Miller

  He carried the saucepan of water back up to the barn and filled the billy they’d used for tea the previous night. He gathered dry gum leaves and sticks and lit a fire beside the barn on the spot where he’d heated their beans, and set the billy on the sticks. He squatted and watched the flames catching at the wood, shifting a stick here and there to adjust the heat. The deeply familiar smell of the smoke in the morning air and the billy set among the flames convinced him he had returned into his past. He knew himself to be at home there and wondered if this peculiar rural isolation was to be the only reality he would ever know and be at home in.

  Lena came out of the barn and stood close to the fire, her hands held out to the flames. ‘You look the part squatting there,’ she said.

  Ed came out and the three of them squatted around the fire and drank the tea. Robert cooked eggs and bacon. Mary did not put in an appearance. After breakfast the three of them went over to check out the cottage. The rising sun was striking the tops of the farthest hills. Lena said, ‘It’s so beautiful. I can hardly believe we’re really here.’

  The cottage was set into the side of the hill, two stumpy stone- and-brick chimneys jutting from the wall facing the barn. The chimneys had once been painted white, but the paint had flaked and peeled, leaving the stone and old brick mostly bare. The three of them went in under the verandah, round posts supporting the roof, along the front wall of the cottage a square four-paned window and the door. The door was scraped back on its failed hinges, just as they’d left it from their first visit. Inside was one long room the width of the house. Robert stepped into the pantry on the left as Lena and Ed came through the door. The pantry had a three-paned window looking out onto the hill up towards the road. It was probably the oldest part of the house, and was constructed of split slabs, daylight showing through the cracks between the slabs where they had shrunk over the years and the filling between them had fallen out. A handmade cupboard with adzed timber shelves from floor to ceiling. Rat shit scattered over the shelves, the ceiling sagged in and damp-stained, straw and dried grass hanging out the ceiling cavity. The roof tin was still in place over the pantry.

  He went out into the main room. Lena and Ed were standing looking up at the sky. The tin was completely gone from the roof over this part of the house and the room stood open to the elements. A slender black wattle sapling reaching up from under a broken floorboard, spearing into the sunlight above them, where it sprouted leaves and thin branches. The three of them stood admiring the little tree. Ed took a notebook from his shirt pocket and made a rapid sketch of the sapling. Lena said, ‘We couldn’t leave it, I suppose. Could we?’

  Robert walked over and took a look at the iron stove tucked into its stone niche against the end wall, a four-inch square of thick glass mortared into the stone at the back of the niche to shed daylight onto the hotplates. He opened the fire door, a litter of old grey ash, the smell of something stale in the disturbed dust. ‘Let’s light the stove and see how she goes,’ he said. When he turned around he saw that Ed and Lena had gone already along the passage that led from the middle of the kitchen to the rest of the cottage. To the left of the stove was a wide open hearth, a deep stone hob either side, an iron bar across the chimney cavity, two chains with hooks hanging from them, like something from a medieval torture chamber. A blackened log from the last fire still lay among the ashes, white splatters of bird shit patterning its crusted face.

  He followed the others down the passage and looked into the room on the left. It was the room immediately behind the pantry. The roof iron was still intact over this back part of the house, so it was shadowed and darker and seemed more abandoned and even mysterious, as if something had been said and was waiting for a response. The room he stepped into was square, with space enough for a double bed with a foot or two to spare either side. A low black-painted set of shelves sat under the window. Robert decided at once that this room would be his study. He went over to the window and looked out. A view of the side of the hill, looking up towards the road and the heavily timbered slopes above the road. Dense banks of blackberry thickets. He went out and looked into the room across the passage. It was identical to the one he had just been in, except here there was a window that gave onto a closed-in verandah at the back of the house. Through the window he could see Lena and Ed standing at an open door. Both these small square rooms were fitted with a loose sliding door to the passage.

  The materials and workmanship at this end of the cottage were cheap—thin fibro-cement sheeting on the walls, and the thin material of the doors, their panels not fashioned from solid timber like the front door and the door to the pantry. The kitchen and the front of the cottage were meant to last, the walls of stone and weatherboard fitted with quality timber window frames and solid doors from the previous century. He saw the construction of the cottage told a story of declining fortunes and a gradual abandonment of traditional values and materials. Time and skills had been lost, and the last people who had lived here had turned from the old ways entirely to a more makeshift way of life. Then they had left, leaving behind them the signs of their own decline. It was a narrow neck of marginal country, offering no one a fortune but only a living to be scraped together. The history he’d seen written into the cottage gave him the impression it was unlikely any young people remained in the neighbourhood. What future could there be here for them?

  Ed and Lena were looking out from the back door into the fenced garden, beyond which there was a small paddock of five or six acres, and beyond that a section of humpy broken ground, mostly covered in blackberries. The garden fence was made of split timber posts and rabbit netting. The garden was around forty metres square. Through the tall dried-out docks, thistles and slender grass heads, he could see that the garden had once been divided into beds, some of which had been ridged as if the gardener might have been growing potatoes. There was a three-foot drop from the back door to the garden. There were no steps. A claw hammer lay on the floor of the verandah beside the door. Where Ed had kicked it aside it had left its hammer shape. Robert leaned out of the door and looked down. A wooden box with a collection of rusted tools rested against the stump immediately under the door. Lengths of sawn timber among the couch grass, white-ant tunnels along their surfaces. Here the look was not only of something unfinished and temporary, but a sign that the occupants had thrown down their tools and left in a hurry, almost as if someone had shouted to them to get out at once. Ray McFadden would surely know the story of what had happened here. Cheap glass louvres, a number of them broken, ran the length of the verandah at chest height.

  Lena turned to him. ‘We’ll need to get the electricity and the phone reconnected straight away.’

  Ed said, ‘There’s a couple of oil lamps in the shed. They’ve still got oil in them.’

  ‘We’ll need electricity for the fridge,’ Lena said. She sounded just a little impatient with Ed’s idea of the oil lamps. None of them had slept well in the barn the previous night.

  Robert stood with them looking out at the dense weed growth in the garden, sheets of roofing iron lying where they had been blown up against the fence, twisted and bent by the force of the wind. The morning was still, the sun warming the air. Distant bird calls and that faint familiar rustling and shifting in the air that is the peculiar summer silence of the bush. The shimmering haze of millions of tiny insects going about their business for the day. Robert knew the others were waiting for him to set the direction of how things were to go.

  He said to Ed, ‘Let’s make a start and get the tin on.’ He jumped down to the ground and dragged the box of tools out, freeing it from the weave and tangle of the couch grass. ‘We’ll build these steps when we get the chance. We’ll need to get some new timber. This stuff’s had the dick.’

  Ed and Robert collected the twisted sheets of roofing iron from the garden and the paddock and stomped on them to straighten them out. They worked steadily side by side all through the day, coming off the roof only for a ham and salad sand
wich and cup of tea at noon. It was dusk and nearly too dark to see by the time they hammered the last piece of iron onto the trusses over the front section of the cottage. Lena had spent the day sweeping out the rooms. She looked grey and exhausted, her clothes clotted with dust and sweat. They were all tired and dusty, their limbs aching and their skin tense with dried sweat. Ed went over to the barn and called Mary and the four of them went down to the creek and stripped off. Robert let himself sink into the cool water. The moon was coming up over the hills.

  Afterwards, he lit a fire beside the barn and cooked sausages. Ed and Lena and Mary stood watching him. Ed said, ‘Can I have a potato in the ashes?’

  They stood around the fire watching the food cook and drinking wine in cups from Ed’s cask. Lena said to Robert, ‘I need to sleep in our bed. Can we take the bed over to the cottage after we’ve eaten?’ He said it was too late and they’d shift their stuff over to the cottage in the morning when they were fresh. She didn’t have the energy to insist. There was a look of utter weariness in her eyes. She had eaten only half a potato and drunk a cup of black tea. Her hair was still damp from the creek water. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her against him. She rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Do you think it’s going to be all right?’ she said. He said, ‘We’ll be in the cottage this time tomorrow with the stove lit and a proper meal inside us. It’s all going to be fine.’

  43

  Robert stood looking out the door of the barn. The sharp brightness of yesterday’s sky was gone out of the air and there were clouds low over the high hills to the west, the rising sun touching the peaks with pink. Robert said, ‘It looks like rain.’

  After breakfast they stood looking at the piano. Ed said, ‘I reckon I can get her into the cottage no worries.’ They watched him back the Rover up to the loading door of the barn. The Rover’s tray was a couple of inches below the bottom of the door. They pushed the piano across the floor and eased it onto the tray. The Rover sank and groaned and settled under the load. Robert stood on the tray steadying the beast while Ed put the Rover in low-low and drove over to the cottage, easing slowly across the uneven ground. He crept over the cattle grid that protected the garden from stock and backed up to the door-without-steps. The tailgate of the Rover was level with the floor of the verandah. Together they edged the Rönisch onto the bare boards. Robert saw Mary watching them from the entrance to the barn. He waved but she didn’t wave back. She had a blanket around her shoulders and was clutching the ball of her stomach. She stood there looking like a figure in an old photograph. Lena turned and looked at him. ‘Now we’re really here,’ she said. Robert thought she was going to say more, but she didn’t. They pushed the piano up against the wall and Lena lifted the lid and stood looking at the keys.

  Seeing her standing at the piano like that, undecided and on the point of striking the keys, Robert hoped she was going to play a few bars of something familiar; a Chopin nocturne would have been ideal. Just a few bars, to give the moment its completion. To make their presence real.

  Slowly, she lowered the lid and turned away.

  By lunchtime they had all the furniture and their belongings in the cottage. Lena hung the portrait of Ed’s mother over the hearth in the kitchen. The painting immediately looked as if it had always been there, the cat’s yellow eyes following them around the room. Robert stacked the cartons of books in the small square room with its view up the hill towards the road, and set up his desk and swivel chair. The Helvetia sitting there in its green case, an intact ream of foolscap typing paper beside it, a shaft of sunlight striking the wall, the air filled with a light disturbance of dust, the faint smell of rats—the real owners of the house. There was space enough beside the desk for the pine shelves and the black-painted shelves.

  In the front kitchen the old farmhouse table he’d bought in Braidwood filled the centre of the room. Like Ed’s painting of his mother, the table looked as if it had always been there. There was a stack of old building timber in the barn, hardwood slabs and pit-sawn planks that had lain there seasoning for maybe a generation or more, materials for plans that had never come to anything. Robert and Ed put together a couple of benches for sitting around the table. Mrs Soren’s floral easy chairs and the sofa looked far less elegant than they had in the sitting room of the Red Bluff house. Here in the cottage they might have been given as charity to a family of poor people—squatters in an abandoned cottage. The chairs and the sofa made the kitchen look squalid. Lena took one look at them and said, ‘Put them out of sight on the back verandah, for God’s sake.’ Robert said he’d move them later. But he didn’t. Other, more urgent tasks got in the way, and in the end they got used to them being there.

  Ed set up a temporary encampment for himself and Mary at the far end of the back verandah, the piano forming a buttress. He said he and Mary would sooner sleep with bedding on the floor than use the single bed Lena and Robert had bought for the guest room when Martin visited Canberra. So they left the single bed in the barn. Robert saw that the barn was as much a depository of the history of the area as was the construction of the house. The future confidently envisaged by the people who had accumulated the things in the barn had never arrived but had become their past.

  Robert had just lit the fire in the iron stove when there was the distant sound of an engine. He straightened and went out onto the front verandah. It sounded like a tank was approaching up the road, the belching roar of an open throttle. Ed and Lena came out and stood with him. Mary stayed inside on the couch, her blanket spread over her, her eyes dreamy and filled with wonder and an infinite sense of absence from their preoccupations, already more with her child than with her old self. An ancient black Standard Vanguard with no number plates and no muffler came down the road towards the cottage trailing a pall of smoke in the still air. The car pulled up outside the garden grid and fell silent after a long shudder. Ray McFadden stepped out. He was carrying a pup in his arms. Robert was struck once again by what a handsome old man he was, his white hair down to his broad shoulders, the amused intelligence in his blue eyes, the quiet confidence of his walk as he came over and presented Lena with the pup. Lena took the warm bundle in her arms and looked into its eyes. It gazed back at her with a look of perfect trust. ‘He’s one of Tip’s new litter,’ Ray said. ‘I kept two of them. You fellers need a dog. There’s a dozen rabbit traps and two short-handled tomahawks in the boot.’

  Lena looked at Robert and said, ‘Can we call him Toby? I had a dog called Toby when I was a little girl.’ She cradled the pup against her t-shirt.

  Ray said, ‘He’ll be a good working dog, Lena. You don’t want to fuss over him or you’ll spoil him.’

  Robert introduced Ray to Ed. Ray narrowed his eyes and looked long and hard at Ed’s beaded headband and his long sun-bleached hair, then he nodded and reached out to shake Ed’s hand. ‘How are you, Ed?’ He raised his voice when he said this, as if unsure whether Ed would speak his language. Ed smiled and said, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ray.’

  Robert thanked Ray for the traps and the tomahawks. Ray said, ‘Don’t let me forget them.’

  Lena set the pup down beside the door and invited Ray in for a cup of tea. The pup leaned against the wall and watched the feet going by into the kitchen. Robert paused before going in and bent down and ruffled his ears. ‘You on guard there?’

  Ray walked over to the armchair on the left-hand side of the hearth and took off his hat and set it on the floor beside the chair and sat in the chair. He said, ‘Just as well you got the tin on her. We’re getting rain in a day or two.’ He hadn’t seen Mary. She was still curled up on the couch.

  Robert checked the fire in the stove and set the kettle on the front hotplate.

  Ray said, ‘There’s three horses belong to this place. They’ve been running up the river on my country. You’ll be needing them, Robert.’

  Mary sat up. Ray turned and smiled at her. ‘Did I wake you up, dear?’

  She said, ‘I wasn’t sle
eping. Who are you?’

  Robert said, ‘Mary, this is our neighbour, Ray McFadden. Ray, this is Mary.’

  Ray said, ‘You haven’t got long to go, my dear.’

  She looked down at herself and made a smoothing motion over the ball of her stomach with both hands. ‘He’s moving around.’ She looked up and smiled at Ray. ‘He’s a boy.’

  Ray said, ‘You know that for sure?’

  Ed was sitting on a box at the table, sketching Ray’s profile.

  Mary said with confidence, ‘Oh yes. I do, Ray.’ She looked down at her stomach again. She spoke softly, her voice filled with a dreamy love for her unborn child.

  ‘You have a name for the little feller?’

  Ed got up and moved onto the couch beside her. He leaned down and pressed his ear to her stomach. Mary covered Ed’s head with her hands, as if she was blessing him. He said, ‘He’s going to be our little Wild.’

  Lena said, ‘You’re calling him Wild?’

  Ed laughed. ‘Wild and free. Like the wind.’ He sat up and kissed Mary on the mouth. ‘That’s our boy, eh?’

  They snuggled together, Ray sitting there smiling at them.

  The kettle was boiling. Robert wrapped a tea towel over his hand, picked up the hot kettle and carried it over to the table, where he poured the boiling water onto the leaves in the teapot. He went back and set the kettle on the side of the stove. He could feel the heat coming off the iron—the old familiar smell of wood smoke and hot iron, something of the memory of home in it, an image in his mind of the kitchen on the Exmoor farm on dark winter mornings, Morris’s wife moving about in her apron by the light of the kerosene lamp.