That they had, anyway, moved closer, was proved a little later, when they settled for the first time on the seat beside the chessboard, and he took off his jacket, then drew the apple from one pocket and a little penknife from the other. What he spoke of, as she watched him cut and lift out a neat wedge, was his grandson, Willie, who ten months before had been killed in France. The penknife was his. It was of yellowed ivory, with a silver-framed portrait on one side of King Edward, on the other of Alexandra. He had had it as a boy, and it had been with him, still a boy, when he fell, among the contents of his pocket along with Woodbines, a box of matches, and a hard little apple he must have picked in an abandoned orchard, with a single sliver cut from it.
She knew what he was telling and wanted her to see. The boy must just have had time to shut the knife and slip it, along with the apple, into his pocket. Cutting into the hard little foreign fruit, inwards like that, to the core, was the last thing he had done, very solemnly as his grandfather was doing it, before they were called forward. The sour-sweet wafer might still have been in his mouth when he was hit — his last taste of the world, its greenness, along with his warm breath expelled to meet the larger, colder one of the autumn morning, then the rush of blood. She watched the scabbed hands cut another thin slice, watched him chew and swallow.
Each time, after that, she had provided the apple. Nothing was said, except for his surprised ‘ah’ and the slow appraisal. So now, on this fifth occasion, she watched him eat and he told her: ‘It’s to be on Wednesday. I wanted you to know beforehand. They’ll give the usual reasons, poor health, you know, as if I were fair worn oot —’ He smiled at the bit of old Scots. ‘Actually,’ — he looked at her and laughed — ‘I’ve never been fitter.’
He cut another slice of apple. It went into his mouth. He chewed. Then looking up: ‘You know, I wish I’d come ten years ago.’
She caught his eye and was puzzled a moment, then saw what he was thinking. Now how was that? He meant he might have had Willie with him. She would have seen the boy.
But not more clearly, she might have told him, than I see him now.
What he wanted in her mouth was the boy’s name; to hear it spoken aloud, in the world, on another’s lips. Now how did she know that?
What a thing Love is, she thought. And that was the word on her lips, though she did not speak it. Love. What she said was ‘Lachlan’ and took his large paw in her own equally scabbed and freckled one.
He looked startled, she released it, and he sat, his hands in his lap, with the half-eaten apple in one hand and in the other the little knife. There was the sound of his breathing, a little broken, and further off the low, continuous humming of her bees, a note she was always aware of, somewhere, not too far off.
They had moved a long way back now, to a moment that more than once in these last weeks had risen up between them and declared itself, and been turned away. A scorching summer afternoon when the whole landscape around had been in shimmering motion, dissolving, re-forming, and they had stood together, he, Meg and herself — he a little in front, being a boy, a man — while the creature, unrecognised and unnamed as yet, that had launched itself out of the unknown world towards them, that the landscape itself had hurled into their midst, a ragged fragment of itself, or of its history or their own, some part of it that was still to come, had hung there against the pulsing sky as if undecided as yet which way to move, upward in flight into the sun or, as some imbalance in its own body, its heart perhaps, drew it, or the earth, or the power of their gazing, downward to where they stood rooted, its toes meanwhile hooked over the peeled bark of the fence rail, the muscles of its stringy feet tensed, its stick-like arms flailing.
She stood there again and found herself saying: ‘I sometimes think that that was all I ever knew of him: what struck me in that moment before I knew him at all. When he was up there’ (she saw the hooked toes again, dusty and misshapen, the muscles of his scraggy neck where the head was thrown back), ‘before he fell, poor fellow, and became just — there’s nothing clear in my head of what he might have been before that, and afterwards he was just Gemmy, someone we loved.’
Loved. The word, which she had used as if there was nothing problematical in naming thus such a tumult of feelings, released a weight in him that he felt shift and fall away.
‘And while he was up there?’
‘I don’t know. Except that I have never seen anyone clearer in all my life. All that he was. All.’
He looked at her with his watery blue eyes, red-rimmed now in the blotched flesh, but the same eyes that had looked up, bold and fearful, at what was in the sights of the make-believe gun he had raised, the dry stick fallen from some ringbarked tree that had lain on the earth a season, dead, and which he had picked up out of its tree-life and refashioned, in their world, into a weapon with all the power of safety in it, of death too, and had pointed at the creature’s heart, and yes, he thought, hit it, and brought him down, and that was the start of it, and so long as the image had life in his head, it was not ended.
She knew the end, such as it was, of the story.
Nine years after Gemmy’s disappearance, Lachlan Beattie had been one of a Government road gang that was surveying the country to the north, preparing the way for a highway that would run, a thread of dust, through all the little burgeoning leap-frog settlements, sleepy harbour towns, goldmining camps, scattered dwellings round a railhead or timber- or sugar-mill, between Brisbane and, fifteen hundred miles further on into the tropics, the last of Governor Bowen’s little far-flung struggling ports; across canelands sickly sweet with molasses, rainforests, dried-out, sparsely-forested cattle country with nine-foot anthills, and a hundred flash-flooding creeks and wide mangrove-fringed streams. He knew the country up there. He knew a little of the native languages. He had been working for the past three years, first as a labourer, then as a foreman, on road gangs all up and down the coast; work of an animal kind that would burn away, he believed, the last of boyhood in him, and his exorbitant dreams.
In each place they came to, from odd natives who came out of the scrub to watch them set up their surveying gear, and peg and measure, and lend a hand at times if it amused them, and the straggling groups they met who were trooping, miserably now, from one camping site to the next, he made enquiries. Only he would know, she thought, with what emotion, what excitement at the possibility of coming face to face again with someone he had once been fond of; what dread too, since his conscience was not clear. She had known nothing in those days of what he was feeling. They were no longer close.
He did hear something at last, though there was no certainty in it. The clan it involved might not have been the one he was seeking. He had only a few words of their language, picked up from Gemmy and poorly learned, and the place was further north than he had estimated.
It involved a ‘dispersal’ six years before by a group of cattlemen and two native troopers, too slight an affair to be called a massacre, and no newspaper had got hold of it. The blacks had been ridden down and brought to earth by blows from a stirrup iron at the end of a stirrup leather — an effective weapon, when used at a gallop, for smashing skulls. The remnants of the clan, including the young woman who gave him his facts, had scattered and been absorbed into a larger group. The bones of the victims, eight or nine in all, men, women, two small children, they had carried with them and disposed of in the usual way, in parcels in the forks of trees.
The story already had elements in common with others he had heard up here, which when he tried to track them down had proved elusive. Perhaps they were all one story. Whether this one had happened, as the woman claimed, six years ago in her own lifetime, or in her mother’s, or last year, it had been gathered now into the dreamtime of the land itself, a shadowy realm where the bones of facts had already drawn around them the skin of rocks, of beasts, of air.