by Alex Miller
She called, ‘Goodnight, Robert.’
He stood by the door listening to her going out and cleaning her teeth then coming back and sliding her door closed. He wondered if maybe he should leave his door open, as a sign to her. He sat on the camp bed and took his boots off. He put his head in his hands. Holy Mother of God! How do you know? How can you tell? Do you just take the risk and say something straight out?
He lay there listening, his blood loud in his ears. He thought he heard her stealthily sliding her door open and held his breath, straining to hear. A low steady snoring was coming from the other room.
He got up and put his clothes on and went outside and fed Tip. There was no sign of Toby. He took a piss behind the dunny. The sun was just coming up over the hill behind the house. A soft summer morning. It was going to be hot later. He came back inside and lit the stove. No sound from her yet. He might have still been on his own in the house. He crouched by the stove, feeding sticks into the fire box, imagining her sleeping in his bed. He would take her a cup of tea in a minute, knock gently on the door, wait for her sleepy voice, then slide the door open. So how did you sleep? You were snoring! The beginning of intimacy. He might sit on the side of the bed while she sat up to drink her tea. He closed the fire box door and set the kettle on the hotplate. He stepped out onto the front verandah and lit a smoke.
Ann was walking towards the house from the creek, the yellow towel he’d given her over her shoulders, Toby stepping along beside her. She was wearing black shorts and a green t-shirt, her tanned thighs catching the morning light. It was years since he had seen a strong healthy young woman walking towards him like this. He thought with shame of Lena’s wasted legs, her knee bones and pelvis sticking out of her tight skin. He pitied Lena and pitied himself. The terrible strangeness of their improbable union—precious beyond words, beyond thinking. How they had cast themselves out into such a bewildering place. Ann was so beautiful and so, so filled with the vigour of her life and her youth. A woman with a purpose about which she seemed to have no doubts. The sun shining on her.
She called, ‘Good morning! Your creek’s magic. I saw a brown snake.’
She came up onto the verandah and stood beside him, looking out onto the hill.
‘There’s plenty of snakes around at this time of the year,’ he said. He caught a delicious whiff of the fresh creek water on her skin and turned to look at her. ‘So how did you sleep?’
‘I had a perfect sleep,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept so well since I was a kid.’ She paused and met his eyes. ‘But then I was sleeping in your bed, wasn’t I?’
He didn’t know what to say to this. Imagine if he were to tell her he’d been toying with the idea of suicide only yesterday. He was not as sane as she was.
She looked at Toby. ‘What a lovely intelligent dog you are.’ She leaned down and ruffled the dog’s ears. ‘He saw the brown snake first and let me know. So we both avoided it.’ She straightened. ‘What have you got for breakfast? I’m famished.’
They went into the kitchen. The kettle was boiling furiously, the lid rattling. He went over and took it off the hotplate and set it aside on the iron hob. With the toe of his boot he closed the damper. Toby stood at the open door looking in at them, his tail going from side to side, his ears half cocked. ‘He’s glad you’re here,’ Robert said. ‘It’s been a bit quiet around this place.’
While he cooked eggs and bacon and made toast, Ann sat at the kitchen table reading his story in the Melbourne literary journal of Martin’s escape through Russia and China. He kept looking over his shoulder at her from his place at the stove, imprinting the image of her on his brain. ‘You don’t have any doubts about your life, do you?’ He said it without thinking.
She looked around at him, frowning. ‘For Christ’s sake, whatever makes you say something like that?’ She didn’t wait for a response but went back to reading the story.
He said, ‘You would love him, Martin, if you met him. He’s been up here. He’s gone to Israel.’ She didn’t look up or say anything. He set down a plate of eggs and bacon beside her and set his own plate across the table from her.
She put the journal aside. ‘God, this smells so good.’
He sat opposite her and they both ate. He loved the pleasure with which she was eating the breakfast he’d cooked for her. She was so physical and so robust and so filled with a need to deal with her hunger. To see her eating with such an appetite satisfied something in him. No picking and poking around at the food, no nudging it to the side of the plate. Her plate was empty and she was wiping it clean with the last piece of toast. She took a drink of tea then set the mug down on the table. ‘So how long is it since Lena left?’ she asked, looking up at him, her wonderful Jeanne Moreau lips shiny with bacon grease.
‘She’s been gone a while,’ he said. ‘Lena’s got her life sorted out, thank God.’
‘Will she be coming back?’
‘Just for visits, like I said. How about you and Phil? Will you two be getting back together?’
She said, ‘We should go outside in the sun. It’s such a beautiful day now. Phil’s happy being an academic in Boston and having affairs with his students. I was in his way. Anyway, my place is in Paris. We’re not enemies. There’s been no hostility. We just don’t need to make the kinds of compromises any longer that living together has required us to make for years.’ She stood up and started clearing away the dishes. ‘I liked your story about your friend Martin. Can I read your Exmoor manuscript?’
‘I don’t have the manuscript of the Exmoor book,’ he said. ‘The publisher didn’t send it back.’
She said severely, ‘Well, you must get it back from them. You didn’t keep a copy? That was a bit silly.’ She was standing looking into the sink, the dirty plates in her hands. ‘Where do you do the dishes? Not in here by the look of it.’
‘Leave them there.’ He got up and they went out onto the verandah and stood looking up the hill. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was in her green t-shirt and black shorts, but he didn’t trust himself. He had a dread of spoiling things between them, upsetting the delicate balance of this careful friendship. She gave the impression of being relaxed and sure of what was going on between them. He had no way of deciding if she thought of him as her potential lover or just a friend. He did know that it was beyond him to take any kind of initiative. Whatever it was to be, it would be up to her to decide. He told himself to calm down and let it play out.
She said, ‘This lower part of the valley intrigued us when we were kids. We heard stories about it. Lower Araluen…It always sounded like it was a place where old-fashioned people still lived in their old secret ways, the lower ways that we didn’t understand. I imagined the women wearing bonnets and long skirts that swept the dust. I wanted to wear a long skirt and to walk in the dusk in my imaginary Lower Araluen. The Nomchongs had friends down here. Descendants of their ancestors who’d helped to build the water race for the goldminers a hundred years ago. They talked about your barn. It must have been your barn. I don’t imagine there’s another one like it anywhere in the valley. We were always begging Uncle Bob to bring us down here so we could explore, and he always said he’d bring us next time. And of course next time never came.’ She looked at him. ‘Now it has come and I’m here with you.’ She studied him for a long moment. ‘How strange is that? Me and the Nomchongs all those years ago. And then you found your way here ahead of me. As if you’d come down here to wait for me.’ She laughed.
He said, ‘Maybe some things are meant to be.’ He felt foolish at once for saying it.
‘What did the publishers say about your Exmoor book?’
‘You can have a look at their letter if you like.’ He made the offer readily and without thinking. It seemed natural, even a relief to share his humiliation with her. He’d kept that from Lena, and Lena had in the end, it seemed, forgotten to ask what had happened with his book.
They went back inside. Ann fetched her glasses from the kitchen a
nd came into his study. The glasses made her look serious and even more beautiful. He had set the camp bed against the back wall. She stood looking out the window at the sunlit hill, waiting for him to produce the letter. The native grasses on the side of the hill had seeded, a pale carpet of faintly stirring buff. He found the publisher’s letter and the green reader’s report and handed them to her. ‘I felt too depressed by this nonsense to write back to them,’ he said.
He watched her reading the letter. When she had read the letter she turned to the reader’s report. He was impressed by the way she’d become focused and serious the minute she was doing something she understood to be important. He could imagine her in some grand library in Harvard, standing among the stacks, a book open in her hands. Except she wouldn’t have been wearing that faded green t-shirt and those black shorts. He wanted to stop time and keep her there forever.
She put the reader’s report under the publisher’s letter and read through the letter again, then turned to him. ‘Well, I can’t understand why you felt humiliated by this. A rejection letter reassuring you that you’ve written a fine book in their opinion is a reason for celebration.’ A frown was furrowing her forehead, her eyes large and questioning through the lenses of her spectacles. ‘The story’s set in England, isn’t it? And you were English yourself. It’s obvious. You must send your book out to English publishers.’ She tapped the Melbourne publisher’s letter with her finger. ‘These people can’t publish it because they don’t have the right distribution for it here. They tell you this.’ She waited for him to say something.
She was a schoolteacher now, kindly, caring, considerate of his future, but unwilling to compromise her authority; she was someone in the know, changed, not deeper but more definite. He was about to speak, say something inconsequential, when she said, ‘Why don’t you write to the editor of the journal that published your story about Martin? You could send him a copy of this reader’s report and he’d know you were serious. He’ll know people. He might be able to make some suggestions. Phil’s had fifty rejection letters, none of them as encouraging as this one. He’d be over the moon if he got this. These people had no need to send you the reader’s report. It was kind of them to do it. They wanted to encourage you. You should write to them too, and thank them and ask them for your manuscript back.’
She set the letter and the reader’s report on the trestle beside his typewriter. ‘You can’t let things like this depress you. It’s unrealistic.’ She put her hand on the manuscript beside the typewriter. ‘So what’s this one about? Publishers always want to know what you’re working on next.’
‘It’s about my time working up in the Gulf with Aboriginal stockmen. I haven’t got the right feel for it. I don’t know whether I’m writing a book about myself and my friend or a book about injustice. It’s got all tangled up for me. I’ve got to step back and sort it out. I haven’t been able to face it for a while.’
Her tone wasn’t exactly severe, but there was an element of reprimand in it, a sense of disapproval, a wish to correct him, to penetrate his ignorance of such things, to defuse the pointlessness of his isolation. ‘You’re working with cattle and horses again now, here. Of course it’s confusing for you. You wrote freely about England from here. Now you need to get away from working with cattle to write freely about your time in the Gulf.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s what I think.’
‘You’re probably right.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘I want to see the Deua River while I’m here. Uncle Bob used to tell us how beautiful it was. It can’t be far. And it’s such a perfect day. Will you take me to see it?’ She took her hand off his arm. She stared at him for a moment. ‘You frightened me that night. The first time we met. The intense way you stared at me when you came into the room. I was scared of you. Then, at our farewell party, we lay down out in the paddock and looked up at the stars and you reached for my hand. You didn’t say anything. You didn’t make any demand. I felt sad. I understood something about you. You seemed incredibly solitary. When your fingers lay quietly in mine that night I knew how vulnerable and alone you were under all that intensity you were projecting.’ She smiled.
‘I’ve wondered if you’ve ever thought about that night.’
‘I think about it all the time. Don’t you?’
‘Pretty much every day, I guess.’ They stood looking into each other’s eyes—it was the moment in the Hollywood movie when the man in the white tuxedo with the thin moustache and the irresistible crooked grin takes the woman boldly in his arms and kisses her and she responds hungrily to his manly embrace, while in the background the jazz band begins to play something soft and sweet. Robert swallowed noisily. ‘I’ll take you down to the junction,’ he said huskily. He cleared his throat. ‘We should go before it gets too hot.’
In the kitchen he handed her a straw hat. ‘You’d better take this.’ She took it and stood looking at it. ‘It was Lena’s gardening hat,’ he said.
She set it back on the table. ‘We never wore hats when we were kids.’ She ran her fingers over the surface of the table. ‘I love these old pieces of furniture. They’ve seen the days of our forebears.’ She looked up. ‘Was it here?’
‘I bought it in Braidwood.’
‘It was somewhere like here. You must leave it behind when you go. It belongs here more than you or I ever will.’
‘When I go?’
‘Well, you can’t stay here forever.’
They went out and the dogs got up and stretched and went along with them, Toby going ahead in the hope of surprising a rabbit, Tip sloping along at their heels. They went down into the casuarinas and walked along the bank of the creek.
There was a kind of perfection in the day for him now, walking along the bank of the creek in the dappled shade of the casuarinas with Ann beside him, their little journey together to the junction. He felt sad and happy. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘All of it. I suppose.’ How had Ray survived? That good man’s sane endurance had been a deep mystery to him. Ray would have been as incapable of seducing a woman as he was himself. He smiled to think of Ray struggling to find something to say to a woman he was attracted to. It would not have been in him to find the words. He and Ray were the same in that. Only a bold invitation from the woman herself would have moved Ray to speak his heart. The confident seduction of girls and women was Ed’s territory. Ann hadn’t responded to Ed’s charms.
They emerged from the casuarinas and the Araluen Creek opened out ahead of them into a wide sandbar, the clear waters running into the cloudy flow of the Deua River, the two waters keeping to their own course for fifty metres before merging in a deep hole along the far bank of the river, like strangers meeting and keeping clear of each other till something draws them together.
He stood with Ann in the shade of an enormous blue gum whose vast canopy hung out over the river, hanging there for hundreds of years before they came along and stood in its broken shade. The sun was well up now. Ann said, ‘I’m going in.’ She stripped off her t-shirt and shorts and set them beside each other on the sand and she took off her bra and pants and put them down on her clothes. Then she took off her glasses and put them under her pants, and without looking at him she walked away from him across the sand in the sunlight. He stood watching her, on her naked back the shadows of the great blue gum’s patterning. Toby ran out after her but stopped at the water’s edge and dug a hole for himself, pretending he had found something valuable. Tip lay back behind Robert in the shade on the cool sand, her chin on her paws.
Robert stood on the bank watching, enthralled by Ann’s beauty. His fear was that she saw him as only a dear friend and brother, while he longed to be her lover—that familiar tormented play of thought around the erotic filaments of his mind, nothing real, nothing of flesh and blood, no firm thing to grasp except himself, and the hollow futility of the discharge, the emptiness of that emotion. He knew it too well—the masturbating monk in his
wintry cell had known all about the sadness of that game. And here she was, not the lusted-after fantasy of his lonely winter nights, but the real woman stalking naked across the sand for him to admire.
When she reached the end of the sandbar she waded in a couple of steps then dived, the ripples spreading out into the slow ease of the current. She stayed down for a long time until he began to worry she might have hit her head on a rock. She surfaced against the far bank, where the water was deepest, the bottom scoured to bedrock by the force of countless floods. She seemed distant now, small in the vastness of that landscape of river and ancient trees and forested hills rising in the distance against the shimmer and glare of the summer sky.
He heard the cry and looked up. A pair of wedge-tailed eagles riding the thermals high above her, their cries remote, the high-tuned cry of an unearthly freedom. He thought then of Ray and how he was gone from this place, his deep familiarity and love for it; he would have passed this pool on his horse so often. Robert longed to hold to something permanent and strong and good. He feared to be alone again and wanted to be in love with Ann. And he wanted her to be in love with him. And he feared it would not happen as he longed for it to happen and that soon he would be here alone again with another winter.
She waved and called to him. He took his clothes off and walked across the sandy beach, dived in and swam through the sunlit water to her side. They swam in the big waterhole together, yelling out to each other like children. ‘I’m here at last!’ she shouted. ‘It’s so beautiful, Robert.’
He kept a careful distance between them. He didn’t want to risk scaring her with his weird, inarticulate intensities ever again. If she wished him to be more than a friend, she would tell him so in a very direct way. Or the possibility of such a thing would fade into their past lives forever, the regret of lost possibilities. Back then, at that party, when they had lain out there on the grass and looked up at the stars, neither she nor he had been free to think of being lovers. They had left it there, that brief touch of their hands in the dark, that certain look in their eyes. And they had each kept that moment, cherishing it in their memory, their intimate moment together among the stars, either the promise of something great and lasting, or a passing thing of no moment.