I was, to tell the truth, glad to be rid of Bullen for a while, and I sensed that Preece felt much the same. His manner became more confiding, his matter more directly personal, and I, for my part, was sufficiently intrigued to encourage his disclosures. I don’t mean to imply that there was anything culpably indiscreet about his conversation, but it seemed to me that I was being offered privileged access to his life, and I was flattered by the thought. His childhood, I gathered, had been a happy one, and he had been considered something of a scholar in the small-town school he had attended, but he had chosen to follow his father into the mines, moving westward in his early twenties as the industry expanded.
‘It wasn’t what my parents had wanted for me, but I was doing well for myself, earning good wages. My lodgings were cheap and I’d no family to support, nor any vices to speak of, so I was able to put something by. I’d had it in mind from the time I started at the mine that I should work there until I was thirty and then get out and buy myself some property – a few acres, a small herd of cattle. I’d even chosen the spot. There’s a stretch of land along the Hawkesbury river, a little beyond Wise-man’s Ferry, that I used to visit with my parents when I was a child – meadows so fresh and green they seemed to glow with their own light. That was where I thought I’d fetch up, though as you see …’ He leaned back in his chair and spread his calloused hands palm upward.
‘It seems to me, Preece, that you’re very well placed here.’
‘Oh, don’t mistake me. I’m where I belong, and glad of it. But in those days I thought a man – any strong-willed man – could choose his path through life, and I had to learn through suffering that that’s not so. I had a notion that by bending my body to my will I could bend the world, and the closer I drew to my thirtieth birthday, the harder I drove myself. In the end I was working all the hours I could keep myself upright, sometimes two shifts back to back. I won’t say no one questioned it, but no one stopped me. There was an understanding: they needed the labour – and when I was whole there wasn’t a man in the company could match me load for load – and I wanted the money. And though I’d begun by imagining a small-holding, I came to think – well, it was a kind of madness, Mr Redbourne, dreaming of myself as a big landowner in a fancy house. Thoroughbred, servants, society wife, the lot. I’d got it all mapped out in my head, that other life, so different from the one I was leading. And though I knew it for a dream, I couldn’t rid myself of it.’
‘Young men are bound to dream,’ I said. ‘It’s natural. And there’s no telling how their visions may inform the pattern of their future lives.’ I was thinking, in fact, of my own case, of the strange, late flowering of my youthful ambitions in a land as extraordinary as any I had ever dared to imagine.
‘True enough. But I think this was a dream gone wrong, like clear spring water souring where it pools. And what I was about to tell you is that it came near to destroying me. It was a sweltering evening in early January, and I rolled up for the night shift half dead on my feet with weariness. My mates could see at once that I wasn’t fit for work. “You go home,” they said, “go home and get some sleep.” It was good advice, but I wouldn’t heed it. And that was the night the dream came to an end.’
There was a crash from outside, the echoing report of a rifle-shot. Preece eased himself to his feet and stepped over to the doorway, squinting into the sunlight. ‘It sounds as though your friend is starting as he means to go on,’ he said drily. There was, I thought, a hint of reproof in the observation, but I didn’t respond. After a moment, he returned to his chair and picked up the thread of his tale.
‘I was working, I remember, in a kind of daze, keeping at it by sheer force of will. I was hunkered down when it happened, reaching for my pick, my cheek up close against the coalface so I couldn’t see clearly. I heard it all right, though – a hard, tearing sound as the lump split from the seam – and if I’d had my wits about me I might have got clear in time, but I was slow on the uptake and slow on my feet. I remember one of my mates crying out, but I think I was already under it by then, pinned by the legs and twisting from side to side like a crushed snake.
‘I was lucky to be alive, I see that now, but that’s not the way it seemed then. I was screaming fit to wake the dead as they lifted the fallen coal, moaning and crying out as they stretchered me down to my lodgings. When Dr Milner told me the left leg would be fine, I knew at once what he was going to tell me about the other, and I began to blubber like a baby. He’d have had it off there and then, but I wouldn’t let him. “You think it over,” he said at last, “and I’ll call by again first thing.” I let him dress it as best he could, but I wouldn’t take the morphine he gave me, for fear of weakening my resolve.
‘When he arrived next morning, I told him I wanted more time. “More time for what?” he said angrily, and then, a little more gently: “You must believe me, Owen, the leg’s too badly smashed to mend.” There were moments I thought so myself, but there was a kind of stubbornness in me kept me going, though the pain gave me no rest. “You’re putting your life in danger”, Dr Milner told me when he called again that evening. “If you won’t let me amputate, I’ll take no further responsibility for you.” Even then I wouldn’t let him. I was waiting. I can see that now.’
‘Waiting? For what?’
‘For her. The third morning after the accident she turned up at the door. Let herself in as though she’d been summoned, though I know for a fact that no one had sent for her. I’d had a terrible night, I remember, the pain a little dulled by that time but lodged close, if you take my meaning, as if it had moved deeper into my body and meant to stay. And I can see it now, how she steps in – yes, with the shine from outside making a path from the doorway to the foot of my bed so that she seems to be walking on light – and unslings a small basket from her shoulder. And though she comes towards me so softly—’
‘Who is this, Preece? Who are you talking about?’
‘My wife. I mean the woman who was to bear my child, though at the time I’m speaking of, I’d no more idea of that than – but that’s not quite right. Because what I was going to say was that as she approached the bed, I began to tremble, and my heart banged away at my ribcage like a steam-hammer.’
‘Love at first sight,’ I suggested, smiling.
There was no answering smile. He was staring out through the open door, his eyes glittering in his thin face.
‘Love didn’t come into it,’ he said. ‘Not then. Just the certainty that she was there by way of answer to some cry or prayer I’d been too proud to utter. And it was fear I felt – no doubt of it – but something else too: a sense of being visited by a power that wasn’t my own. Not hers either – not exactly – but streaming from her like sunlight off a looking-glass. I’d been a chapel-goer all my life and I’d often thought about those early Methodists, the way they’d known the call when it came. Well, this was my call, Mr Redbourne, only it came from a quarter I’d no knowledge of – had barely thought about. And perhaps that’s the nub of the matter: we know it’s the real thing because it’s like nothing we could ever have invented for ourselves.’
‘So this was some kind of religious conversion?’
He seemed to consider the phrase. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it,’ he said at last. ‘What I do know is that from the moment she walked through the door I understood that my life was set to change, bottom to top.’
‘And your leg?’
‘I was coming to that. She set her basket on the floor and pulled the coverings down to the bed-end. And it might have been because of the pain and fever, but I felt no shame at that, nor when she lifted my nightshirt and pushed it back. And she, for her part, didn’t flinch, though knee to ankle looked like something you’d find on a butcher’s slab. Everything was strange, yet nothing seemed out of place, if you see what I mean. I remember her holding the leg, just above the damage – her hands very cool against my skin. And with that, the pain drew off, and the fear with it, and I found myself watching her with a kind of curiosity, as though her actions had nothing to do with me. She reached down and took a little knife from the basket – not a steel knife, but one of the chipped stone blades they make. And even though I thought at first she was going to cut me, I wasn’t remotely troubled by the idea.’
‘But she didn’t?’
‘Cut me? No. She stretched out her arm and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. Then she nicked the flesh’ – he tapped the spot on his own arm – ‘just here, on the inside of her elbow, and began sucking at it.’
I said nothing, but my expression must have given me away. ‘Maybe we’re the unnatural ones,’ he said, looking hard at me. ‘Anyhow, you can’t judge this until you’ve heard the upshot. After a while she spat the blood into her palms and rubbed it over the upper part of my leg, very gently at first and then with firmer movements. And as she worked – I can’t explain this, Mr Redbourne, I can only tell you what happened – as she ran her hands back and forth, my leg began to throb and twitch, and the life flooded back into it like water through a lifted sluicegate. I don’t want to call it a miracle – it was weeks before I was able to walk again and, as you see, I’m still slow on my feet – but the point is, the leg was saved. And that’s not the whole of it, either, because whatever happened on that morning set my mind off in new directions. I had plenty of time for reflection in the days that followed, of course, and little by little I came to see what a fool I’d been, reaching out for a dream while the life I’d been given slipped by without my noticing. She showed me what I’d almost lost, and made it all real to me again. Just ordinary things, you might say – the sound of rain beating on the panes or the doorsill, the smell of hot bread, her footfall as she crossed the floor to tend to me – but coming at me so sharp and sweet they brought the tears to my eyes … Does this make sense to you, Mr Redbourne?’
I nodded. It crossed my mind that I might tell him something about Eleanor, but before I could speak, he rose stiffly to his feet and pulled open one of the drawers of the dresser. ‘I’d like you to see this,’ he said, handing me a photograph mounted on a dog-eared rectangle of green card. ‘It doesn’t do her justice, but it catches something of the look of her.’
The photograph itself was scarcely larger than a postcard and I had some difficulty in making out the detail, but it seemed at first sight to be a rather conventional studio portrait. Preece’s tale had led me to expect a figure altogether more dramatic than this full-featured housewife, a little beyond the first flush of youth, her hair pulled back from her face in the European fashion and her dark skin set off by a plain white blouse. But peering more closely, I was struck by something in her gaze, some quality of abstraction or inward concentration, as though she’d taken the measure of it all – the photographer and his paraphernalia, the absurd painted backdrop she’d been posed against – and decided that it didn’t concern her. It wasn’t haughtiness exactly, and certainly not contempt, but she had the look of a woman whose mind was on higher or deeper things. I handed back the photograph. ‘Mrs Preece was evidently a woman of character,’ I said.
‘She never took my name. To tell you the truth, we didn’t marry, though that wasn’t for want of asking on my part. “We have what we have,” she used to say. Sometimes I wondered whether she’d already given herself – to one of her own people, I mean – before she came to me, but she never said, and it didn’t seem right to question her. I didn’t even know where she came from – she certainly wasn’t from the mountains – but after a while there seemed no need for questions. She was right: we had what we had, and though I wish she’d been with us for longer, you’ll not hear me complain.’
I sat very still, waiting, watching his face. He seemed to have withdrawn into a state of quiet meditation, and after a while it occurred to me that he had said all he wished to say, and that I should leave him to his thoughts. But as I made to rise, he looked up sharply, as though at some unwarranted interruption, and I realised that there was more to come.
‘They were the best years of my life, no doubt of it, the years I spent with her. Once she had me back on my feet again I found work in the company office, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I was biding my time, Mr Redbourne, waiting for the next thing. Not fretting, just waiting. And one day she looked across at me as we sat at breakfast – and I remember her having to raise her voice a little against the rattle and clank of the freight-wagons going by on the track beyond the back yard – and she said, very simply and firmly, “I don’t want the child to grow up here.” That was how she broke the news to me, and it was the sign I’d been waiting for. Within a fortnight I’d found this plot, and by the time Billy was born the hut was built and furnished, and I’d started to clear the scrub out back. And as I worked, the strength returned to my arms and shoulders, and the hope to my heart – not the mad hope of wealth and power that had led me astray, but a sweet and steady sense of the worth of what I was doing.
‘We weren’t well off – I’d left my job as soon as I was sure that the plot was mine – but I was never worried on that score. And Billy – well, the child was a revelation to me. I mean, I hadn’t known I could feel such tenderness, such patient tenderness. He was just a scrap of a thing at first, so small the midwife doubted he’d survive, but when I cradled him for the first time in the crook of my arm and felt the softness of his skin against mine – do you have children, Mr Redbourne?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not married,’ I said. ‘I’ve only recently begun to consider what I might have missed.’
‘Well,’ he said, manoeuvring with a tact and delicacy that took me by surprise, ‘a child’s no guarantee of happiness, nor a wife neither. But speaking for myself, I felt truly blessed. It was a kind of heaven we lived in then – she and I grown so close for all our differences, and the child drawing us closer still. I remember sitting with them one day in the shade of the back wall, looking down over the ripening crops. And I thought, I want nothing more than this. If that wasn’t heaven, Mr Redbourne, I don’t know what is. And heavenly too because, strange as it sounds, I had no thought of it coming to an end, no thought at all.’
He faltered and broke off, evidently caught off guard by his emotions. I should have liked to be able to respond with greater compassion, but I knew too little about the man and his sorrows, and I simply sat back in respectful silence until he resumed.
‘It was like a bolt of thunder from a cloudless sky. I’d been out until dusk, splitting wood for the stove, and I came in to find her in her chair, exactly where you’re sitting now, with her head in her hands. And that was strange because there was no food on the table and she wasn’t one for sitting around when there was work to be done. She raised her head as I came close, but slowly, as though it were weighed down in some way, and I could sense then that something was amiss. I dropped the firewood I was carrying and knelt beside her there, reaching for her hand. And as soon as I touched her skin, I felt the chill of it, a chill from somewhere far down in her body. “What is it?” I asked her, and my heart was banging already as though it knew something my head didn’t. “What is it?”
‘It was a gift she had, to be able to tell me what was in her mind without putting it into words – with a look, it might be, or with something less than a look. She just lowered her eyes, and something in the manner of her doing it frightened me horribly – as if she were saying, Enough or It’s over. “I’ll fetch the doctor,” I said, knowing full well she’d no more want to see one of our doctors than plunge her arm in scalding water, but I was in a panic, d’you see, not knowing what to do, and that was all I could think of. Anyway, she shook her head, very slow and sad, and placed her hand over mine, and we just sat there watching as night came on and the stars brightened in the sky. After some time she told me I should go to bed – insisted on it, with a kind of anger I’d not seen in her before, though I sorely wanted to stay – and I left her there, her arms folded across her breast, her body hunched and twisted a little to one side, leaning out into the darkness.
‘It was just getting light when I woke to see her over by the window, kneeling beside the dilly-bag she’d brought with her when she first moved in with me. When I saw that – saw her packing a spare skirt and blouse, her ebony hairbrush, a velvet ribbon – I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood, and that she’d simply decided to go away for a while. But there was something in the set of her face that told me otherwise, and at last she straightened up and said very quietly, “I’m going home.” “This is your home,” I said, and with that I hauled myself out of bed and stepped towards her. But she backed away as though she didn’t know me, as though I might harm her. “To my people’s lands,” she said, and then, very softly: “It’s time.”
‘Of course I was in a terrible state – you can imagine – but not wanting to let on, not wanting to hinder her. “What shall I tell Billy?” I asked. “I’ve spoken to Billy,” she said. Then she picked up her bag and walked out, quite slowly and carefully, the way people do when they’re in pain, but not hesitating at all. I wanted to hurry after her and catch her in my arms, but I could see that wouldn’t be the right thing. She stepped away down the track, very clear at first in the early sunlight, then half lost against the shine and shadow of the trees. I watched her out of sight, but she didn’t once look back.’
He leaned forward in his chair and stared out through the doorway, his mouth clamped tight and his eyes glistening.
‘And you had no word from her?’
‘Never. Nor expected it. But for weeks after she’d gone I dreamed of her, night in, night out. Always in the same flat landscape – very harsh and dry, scattered with boulders. No shadow, the sun beating down on her. I can’t tell you what it was like to see her out there time after time, very small and lost, with the desert stretching as far as you could see on every side. And she was searching, it seemed to me, always searching, so that I found myself desperate to help, but because I wasn’t allowed to be with her – I can’t say exactly how it was, but that much was plain – there was nothing I could do. There was a time I thought it would go on like that for the rest of my life and maybe beyond, the same vision over and over; but one night, a couple of months after she’d left, I saw her walking along very fast, her head up and all her movements firm and certain. No searching now, and her step so light that her feet barely touched the sand. There was no change in the landscape – none that I could see – but I knew she’d found what she was after. And as I looked, her form thinned and dwindled like a scarf of mist when the sun breaks through, and I woke with a cry of joy on my lips or in my ears – her cry or mine, it wasn’t clear, and it didn’t matter – and hurried to the doorway. It was still dark, but with that faint stirring or softening that you sometimes feel in the few moments before dawn. And as I looked out, I knew there was no call to fret about her any more, and my heart – well, I was weeping like a child, but there was no bitterness in the tears. After that—’
He stopped and raised his head. I had heard it too, an inarticulate shout ending on a rising note, half roar, half yelp. A second or two of blank silence followed, and then a string of sharply delivered expletives. ‘Something’s got Mr Bullen’s dander up,’ said Preece grimly, levering himself to his feet. He limped over to the doorway and peered about, one hand lifted to shade his eyes, then stumped down the steps and out on to the track.
It was Billy, I saw, as I followed Preece out, who had aroused Bullen’s wrath. The boy stood between the two ponies, his head thrown back in sulky defiance, while Bullen berated him in a vicious undertone. ‘Damned fool of a boy’, I heard as we approached. ‘Cack-handed incompetent’. The reaction might have been excessive and the language uncalled-for, but the reason for Bullen’s rage was immediately apparent: the ground was strewn with cartridges, evidently spilled from the open ammunition box that Billy was clutching in his left hand.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Preece.
‘You can see what’s going on. The lad’s been scattering our ammunition about like seed-corn.’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Billy. ‘The box fell open as I was unloading it. Look.’ He held up the object and shook it, making the hinged lid clack and swing. ‘If it had been properly fastened—’
‘That’s enough, Billy,’ said Preece, leaning forward and laying a hand on the boy’s arm. ‘There’s stew for you in the pot. You go on in and leave us to attend to the baggage.’ He eased the box from the boy’s hand, dropped awkwardly to one knee and began to gather up the spilled ammunition.
‘It’s as well I arrived back when I did,’ said Bullen, turning to me as Billy stalked off. ‘There’s no knowing what damage he might have done.’
Preece looked up over his shoulder. ‘It was an accident, Mr Bullen,’ he said. ‘Just an accident.’ Bullen opened his mouth as though to reply, but seemed to think better of it. He stepped over to the nearer of the two ponies and began to unfasten the luggage-straps.
By the time we had the luggage indoors the sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky outside was fading to a softer blue. I should have liked to sit and rest, but with Preece wordlessly tidying the room around us and Billy huddled over a book in the corner, pointedly refusing to acknowledge our presence, it seemed sensible to get out of the hut and to take Bullen with me.
A light breeze was springing up as we left, stirring the eucalyptus leaves into whispering life. Bullen strode off at an unnecessarily brisk pace, still visibly angry and showing no sign of wanting either my company or my conversation. We had travelled a good half-mile along the track before he slowed and turned to address me. ‘What a pair of fools we’ve been landed with,’ he said. ‘I’ve been badly let down over this business, Redbourne, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘It’s too early to make a judgement. Give the boy a chance to prove his mettle.’
‘And each as bad as the other,’ he went on, ignoring my intervention. ‘The son incapable of carrying out the simplest task and the father a fount of nonsense. And you should know better, Redbourne – it’s no kindness to encourage a man of his sort by listening to his ramblings.’
‘It seemed to me,’ I said cautiously, ‘that some of his views were worthy of serious consideration.’
‘Preece is a fool and his views are balderdash. What kind of progress do you think we’d have made in a country like this if we’d been guided by such views?
Make no mistake about it, Redbourne, the wilderness doesn’t want us here. We’re engaged in a war, an unending battle with a heartless enemy, and men like Preece, with their crackbrain dreams of harmony, are a menace to us all.’
‘Yet there’s something persuasive in his arguments. Listening to him, I had some notion of a better future – for myself certainly, maybe for all of us.’
‘But look at the man, Redbourne, look at the way he’s living. He’s a throwback, barely one rung up from the savages he evidently consorts with. If I believed that the future of humankind rested in the hands of men like that, I’d cut my throat.’
I wasn’t inclined to let him have the last word on the subject, but as I meditated my reply I became aware of a clamour in the air overhead. I looked up. ‘Ravens,’ said Bullen, lifting an imaginary rifle and drawing a bead on the flock. They were calling as they flew, not in the guttural tones of our own ravens, but high and clear, a disconsolate wailing sound. I watched them cross the pale strip of sky above us, drifting over like flakes of soot, and as I stood gazing, something in their sombre progress and the melancholy music of their cries stirred me so deeply that, just for the barest instant, I imagined myself in uncorrupted communion with the wilderness and the luminous skies above it.
Perhaps Bullen felt something too. As the cries died away, I saw him shiver and clutch his jacket more tightly about his body. Then we turned, moving in unison as though at some inaudible word of command, and made our way slowly back to the hut.