Landscape of Farewell (22 page)

I saw how moved he was to see his country once again, and I envied him this reunion with his past and wondered how I might have felt if such a reunion were possible for me. There was, of course, no place such as this that I might return to. Hamburg today is not the city in which I was born, nor is it the place where I grew up, but is a new construction, and the strange and beautiful countryside where my uncle had his farm, and where I encountered the gipsy girl, is no longer countryside but has been transformed into suburban streets and schools and playgrounds and small, mean strips of parkland that are supposed to have preserved something of the countryside for the new inhabitants but which really are no more than a parody of preservation. The sacred hazel coppice of my childhood has long since been covered by concrete and asphalt.

Seeing the look in Dougald’s eyes as he recognised the place of his own boyhood, I understood what a unique privilege it was for him to experience the reassurance of this return after half a century to a country unaltered by time and war and the developments of the twentieth century. It was still the country of his Old People, as he called his ancestors, the term familiar and intimate, as if they were not remote beings whose individual features had been forgotten long ago, but were known to him, and were a people still in occupation of their lands. It was a
term that seemed to suggest that the entire colonial enterprise might never have taken place, and that the old reality, like the Old People themselves, had not become extinct but had defied our belief in history and had survived. The Old People, indeed, suggested to me another way altogether of looking at reality and the passage of time than my own familiar historical sense of things, in which change and the fragmentation of epochs and experience is the only certainty.

The waterfalls did not reach the ground but joined together and became a pale drift of mist as they descended, riding across the face of the cliffs like clouds of smoke, glowing pink and orange in the late afternoon sun, touched here and there by the delicate hues of rainbows, the whole scene altering as I observed it. As we drew close to the cliffs Dougald slowed and turned off the narrow dirt road. He eased the truck across a cattle grid and drove on in low gear, at little more than a walking pace, following a meander of half-buried wheel ruts through open woodland towards the base of the stone ramparts. We were soon crossing a meadow dotted about with graceful trees, their black trunks and spreading canopies of slender leaves casting a delicate lacework of shadows on the untrodden grass. These stately trees might have been planted to grace the estate of a landowner hundreds of years in the past. Dougald raised his hand and pointed to them. ‘Here’s your ironbarks, old mate.’

‘So this is it then?’ I said, for he clearly meant me to understand that this was the meadow Gnapun had crossed that early morning, striding through the ground mist on his way to meet the messengers. I was about to say more when he laid his hand on my shoulder, silencing me. He brought the truck to a halt and switched off the motor. He sat at the wheel in the silence examining the country to our left, his lips parted and his eyes narrowed, as if he anticipated something. I followed the direction of his gaze. A hundred metres or so in that direction the grassland ended abruptly and a forest of tall cinnamon-coloured trees began. These tall, elegant trees were evidently unrelated to the ironbarks of the open woodland through which we had been passing. The valley had narrowed around us and we were enclosed now by the naked rock of the grand escarpments. The crimson and purple granite of the cliffs stated the dominance of these stone presences in this picturesque valley as confidently as if they had been the fortress walls of a medieval lord. I was reminded of the towering stones of the fortified acropolis at Lindos, beneath whose vertiginous buttresses I stood in awe with my father in 1948, when I was a boy of twelve. It was the first time I had visited an ancient site of human worship and refuge. Indeed it was the moment I discovered history. Those monumental antique walls, which seemed wedded to the native rock, had awoken in me a longing to become familiar with the mysteries of our human story, and after my father and I returned
to our pension that night I told him,
I am going to be a historian when I grow up
. I can still see my father’s joy. Although he was an engineer, no man I have ever met loved to read history more than my father did. Oswald Spengler’s peculiar and now long-forgotten volume,
The Decline of the West
, served my father as his Bible, and remained for him throughout his life a consolation to his private disillusion.

Dougald raised his hand and pointed dramatically towards the trees. ‘Old Wylah!’ There was excitement and relief in his voice. ‘See that old fella?’

A large black bird, fully the size of an eagle, detached itself from the topmost branch of the tallest of the cinnamon trees and fell towards the ground in a tumbling flight, like a falling umbrella, flashes of yellow from the undersides of its tail feathers semaphoring as it turned this way then that. Its wailing cry reached us through the silence then;
kee-aah, kee-aah
, it went, echoing from the cliffs and lingering in the air after the bird itself had vanished from our sight. With a thrill I knew that I had heard the sound of Gnapun’s signal to his men to strike the death blow against those doomed settlers. I saw the scene that day, the leader’s wife standing by the trellis in the garden looking off towards the clouds that bloomed above the hills, her dark hair shining in the sunlight, the blue ribbon in her hat lifting in the breeze, then settling back and resting on the flowers of her dress. It was Winifred I saw, and she was young and beautiful and in love. I realised Dougald was watching me.
I said, ‘So that was him then?’ I had readily acknowledged the cry of the falling bird as Dougald’s welcome to his country. It was in Dougald that I witnessed the truth of this, not in myself. I began to understand from that moment that he had needed me to be with him there in the country of his Old People in order to bear witness to his truth. I could see in his happiness how his great-grandfather’s welcome offered him the spiritual comfort he had longed for during his years of exile, and how it permitted him to know himself to be truly at home once again. It was a great moment for Dougald. One of those moments in our lives when things turn out exactly as we had hoped they would. Wylah’s cry of welcome restored to Dougald a former state of confidence and wellbeing, and from this moment on his manner was for some time more youthful and more self-assured than I had ever known it to be during my brief acquaintance with him.

‘That was him, old mate,’ he said.

My uncle might have known something of Dougald’s emotion at this moment of his reunion with his country. But no one from the city, no worker with the mind, no one who had dealt in the currency of unbelief as I had all of my adult life, could have known the restoration of wellbeing Dougald knew just then.

We sat for a time, silent with each other, looking through the windscreen of the cabin towards the base of the trees where we had seen the falling bird. At last Dougald started the motor and drove off the trail and through the untracked grass
to the edge of the timber. When he had manoeuvred the truck closely in among the trees, he switched off the motor. ‘Me and Grandfather camped here while we fenced this place,’ he said, as if he imparted the most ordinary kind of information to me, the emotion of his arrival behind him now. ‘We lived here for a year.’ He gestured at the meadow behind us and towards the valley where it slid narrowly between the cliffs. ‘We split fence posts all through here.’ He pointed. ‘See that stump? Me and Grandad sawed that old ironbark one fine morning and split more than a hundred posts out of her before lunch.’ He looked at me and grinned. He seemed capable of splitting a hundred posts before lunch again if he had a mind to do it. ‘We’ll have a drink of tea before we set up camp,’ he said, and he opened his door and stepped down from the cabin. He paused and looked up at me. ‘How’s that ankle holding up?’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. It wasn’t, but I was not going to complain. I looked down at him and thought of how he must have been as a boy here, big and strong and willing, working alongside his grandfather, the violent days of his own father behind him. Setting the knob of my walking stick in the palm of my hand, I opened the door and stepped to the ground. The stick had become a welcome new part of me. I liked it. I liked the feel of it. Once safely down I stood and breathed the sweet cool air and leaned on my stick. There was a sound of water tumbling over stones. As I stood there listening, it seemed to be the very sound,
I swear, of the voices of schoolgirls in a glade confiding secrets to one another. I was moved and astonished to find myself alone with this man in such a place so late in my life. I wanted to know the names of the trees and shrubs and grasses, the flowers and the birds, and it seemed to me just then that it would have been a grand thing to be a familiar of this place. My two brown dogs were making off across Gnapun’s meadow in pursuit of something, their rumps bouncing along. They were happy dogs. I whistled to them and they paused and looked back at me a moment then ran on. There was the sudden intense smell of wood smoke. I turned to see Dougald squatting by a crackling pile of sticks. He was like a boy on holiday. I hoped my ankle would not let us down tomorrow when we were to climb into the escarpment.

Dougald picked up his haversack and shrugged into it, his head to one side as he adjusted the straps. In the darkness he looked like a woman adjusting the straps of her brassiere. It was one of those old khaki packs sold in army surplus stores the world over. ‘It will be light soon,’ he said, and with that he set off. I lurched after him.

We crossed the river where the water ran shallowly over a wide stretch of stones. This morning it did not gossip but murmured privately to itself—of secret things, perhaps, or even prayers to strange gods. It was the ghostly form of his bitch I followed, not him. He had quickly merged with the deep shadows of the far bank. My old town shoes were soaked at once, and I slipped and tottered on the smooth stones, flailing his mother’s stick
wildly in the air as I struggled to keep myself from falling into the water. I came out of the river behind the bitch and started up the sandy incline. The stick was more use to me here. I planted it in the resistant sand and it took my weight loyally as I heaved myself upward, my shoes squelching and filling with sand. By the time I made it to the top of the bank Dougald had already disappeared in among the solid shadows of the trees, his shape there a moment then gone. I stumbled forward into the trees, trusting I was still on the right path, brushing aside the small branches and ducking under the large ones. A moment later I came out of the trees and there he was ahead of me, standing looking up at the escarpment. I was breathing heavily and wondering at my chances of staying the distance. The way forward was barred by a sheer rock face of grey stone.

‘We’re not climbing
that
,’ I said as I came up to him. We might have been pilgrims arrived at the wall of a fortress. Was this as far as we would go? I asked myself, did Dougald really remember his way about this country, or had he already taken a wrong turn?

He murmured something that I did not catch and began picking his way with care along the base of the cliff. Great tumbled rocks lay about everywhere. I followed him with difficulty, greatly concerned that I would utterly destroy my injured ankle at any moment. I would have liked to stop to empty the water and sand from my socks and shoes, but I was afraid to pause in case I lost sight of him.

As I struggled along behind him through the violet shadows of that dawn, I found myself, for some reason, thinking angrily of my visit to Katriona in London before I flew out to Sydney to attend Vita’s conference. I had taken Vita’s advice and gone over to England to spend Christmas with my grandchildren. It was a mistake. Reginald, Katriona’s husband, was strict with the children and the first night I was with them he packed them off to bed without a story, so that we three adults might eat a small roast leg of New Zealand lamb in peace together in the living room of their grim little flat in Hampstead. The evening was not going well. I had brought an expensive bottle of seven-year-old Montrachet with me but it had not appeared at the table. The man—I mean Reginald, my daughter’s husband—was so dismissive of his children I wondered why he had bothered to have them.

When I mentioned that I would be visiting Australia he said disdainfully, not addressing me directly but chewing on a mouthful of meat and apparently addressing a wider audience whose sympathies he was certain of, ‘There’s nothing interesting in Australia. You’ll hate it.’ I considered him, then ventured that I hoped this would not prove to be the case. He snorted and fed himself another forkful of meat. Feeling a little provoked by his manner, I asked him if he had visited Australia himself, and was it from this experience that he knew the country to be not worth visiting?

He laughed scornfully, as if such a question insulted his intelligence, and said he would not waste his time going there. ‘There are better places than Australia to go if you want to travel. You and Winifred were always talking about spending a year in Venice after you retired.’ At this point he paused in his eating and did finally look at me, not meeting my eyes exactly, but casting his supercilious glance
over
me, while at the same time picking with his fingernail at a shred of meat that was lodged between his teeth. ‘Why don’t you join a tour to Venice?’ he said. ‘You might meet someone.’

To my dismay Katriona urged me to do as he suggested, claiming that a female companion would help me to recover my spirits. I wondered at Katriona’s betrayal of her mother’s memory. We speak in order to be understood, and I felt that if I spoke of my private feelings at that moment I was certain to be misunderstood, so I said nothing. I experienced, however, a strong protective impulse towards Australia on Vita’s behalf.