I crossed the road and pushed at the gate in the garden fence. I think that for a moment I expected to find a transformation inside, great rectangles and trellises of vivid green; but it was as sad as ever, as drab and dusty, and the high fence kept off the inspiring breeze. Even so, the exaltation of the morning did not leave me; and Rock and Jack Speed, who were standing inside, were in the same frame of mind as I.
‘Ah, what a day,’ I said, pushing the gate, which scraped along the ground. ‘I hope I die on a morning like this.’
‘Why?’ asked Jack, grinning. ‘You want to spoil it for us?’
He has the kindest heart.
‘I want to die happy,’ I said. ‘It might be important.’
‘And hopeful,’ Rock said. ‘Well, you can’t be happy without that, I guess.’
‘I can,’ Jack said. ‘I have been.’
‘So have I,’ I said; thinking back, so many years, to a time when I was in love and not loved in return, and what joy there can be in an accidental touching of hands, or in the lines of a face turned away. Hope did not enter into that. ‘But it takes resignation.’
Rock said: ‘Maybe there’s been too much resignation round here.’
‘Something’s been missing in us,’ I agreed. ‘But not now.’
‘I’m alive,’ Jack said. ‘I’m glad it’s happening now, before I start getting old.’
‘Old?’ I said. ‘You’re a baby, Jack.’
‘That’s the trouble, in this place. You get old without growing up.’
Rock said to me: ‘Is he having a go at us, d’you reckon?’
And Jack thought he meant it, and started to protest. ‘I don’t mean you. But Byrnie and Deborah and me—we don’t remember anything else.’
‘I don’t, either,’ Rock said. ‘Not really. It’s like it always was, only more so.’
‘Like it always was,’ I echoed him. And they must have realized from my tone that it was a very grave admission I was making, and they looked at me with interest.
‘This is a change of opinion,’ said Rock.
‘I know. That’s what he’s done for us.’
No need for them to ask, or me to say, who ‘he’ was.
‘But the past,’ Jack said, ‘all you tell us——’
‘The present’s the same. Only more so.’
‘I dunno,’ Jack said, with his blue eyes earnest and disconcerted. ‘If you take the past away, it makes the future kind of mysterious.’
With no self-pity: ‘I may be the oldest man now living,’ I said.
‘You’re looking younger today,’ Rock said, courteously.
‘And I can see now it was never much better. Only, I have this faint memory, more like a dream, of the old garden at home, among the figs and the oranges, with a swing under the olives and a little pool full of frogs and lilies, and those other lilies, the pink ones, that come for a few weeks, before the rain. That’s the only complete happiness I can remember, if it
is
a memory and not a dream. And that’s what he’s always made me think of, from the time I first saw him.’
‘I can only remember the dry stumps of orange trees,’ Rock said. ‘Over there, against the fence.’
‘I can’t remember anything,’ Jack said, ‘except what I can see all round.’
‘We’ll make a garden,’ I said, ‘for Jack.’
‘Sure, we will,’ said Rock. ‘For Jack and Byrnie and Deborah.’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘let me do the spadework.’
And I was suddenly touched almost to tears. By the beauty of the morning, for one thing; but more by a vision, an angel’s eye view, of three men in rough clothes, one grey, one greying, one with hair like straw, alone and united in all that desolation, building, for one another, their faultless garden.
I went up the path to the church, full of love and agreeable melancholy, like a man revisiting scenes he has known with his absent and dearest one, knowing she will soon be back. On the hillside the breeze was cooler than ever. Years dropped from me as I trod the sharp-edged rocks.
The pews sat outside the church still, staring in. The bonfire had turned to a neat pile of ash, warm even then, retaining here and there the shapes of pieces of bark and slender twigs, though the wind was at work to shatter them. The morning sun, shining through gaps in the church roof, lit up the altar with its mass of foliage and wilting flowers.
I went in. It had that clean bitter tang of acacia leaves in the heat.
Inside the doorway old Gloria was sitting, and looked up at me with wary eyes.
‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘You again.’
She was a woman of few words.
‘Are you waiting for something?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I thought he might be coming.’
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he coming. He stop coming now.’
‘Where does he stay all day?’
‘In his house,’ she said. ‘Or sometime he walking about there’ (waving her finger towards Lake Tourmaline and all the country behind it) ‘looking for things.’
I said: ‘So you watch him.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Always I watch him.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Nothing.’
I squatted on my heels in the bright rhombus of light at the doorway, facing her. ‘Do you love him?’
‘Yes,’ she said, without surprise or hesitation.
‘Is he Mongga?’
‘I dunno. I think: maybe.’
‘Charlie’s sure of it.’
‘Charlie di’n’t see him,’ she said, ‘after he find that gold.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘He was here,’ she said, ‘cursing and praying. And making me pray for him. He was wild. I got scared.’
It was the first I had heard of it, and I said: ‘Tell me.’
So she did, haltingly, groping for words while I watched her. An old dark woman with her hair tied in a rag, her legs bent under her as she sat, hands plucking now and again at folds in her worn skirt. Very grave, very circumspect; and, like her granddaughter, tending towards invisibility. Now that I had noticed her I began to wonder about her, and could come to no conclusion regarding the person behind the deepset eyes.
‘Then I went away,’ she said. ‘But I could hear him. Praying, like, only it sound more like cursing.’
‘But he came other days?’
‘He come often. Sometimes he talk to me and sometimes he don’t. But I never seen him like that first time again.’
‘He’s changed,’ I said.
‘Still changing,’ said Gloria. ‘All the time.’
The dark luminosity of her eyes, meeting mine for a second, seemed to call me on to explore her, to establish our kinship in this matter. ‘What does he mean to you?’ I presumed to ask.
‘I got,’ she said, watching her fingers and the pleated cloth between them, ‘no son.’
‘Nor have I.’ This deficiency I realized for the first time.
‘And he,’ she said, ‘ah, full of light.’
Full of light. How clearly I saw him.
‘And God don’t talk to everybody. God don’t talk to me. But to him—yes, I believe that. Because I never seen a man before that look so much like God been talking to him.’
Yes. Yes—burning.
‘That’s why I love him,’ she said. ‘And everybody love him, even young fellas like Charlie. Because he full of light, and like burning.’
I felt, suddenly, so close to that ancient woman (less ancient, certainly, than I) that it was like a seizure: a seizure of love.
I reached out, and took her hand. And she let me have it, and raised her deep eyes; which were no longer wary, but candid and trustful, like a bride’s.
On the path from the church, descending, I met Deborah coming up.
She was beautiful, on that day. She was full of light: her eyes, her skin. The small wind tangled her hair, and the sun found glints of gold and copper in it.
‘It’s you,’ she said, looking a little disappointed, but smiling all the same. ‘I saw you from the store, on the hill there, but I didn’t know who it was.’
‘You thought it was him,’ I said.
She admitted it. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
‘Your grandmother is up there, in the church. I’ve been talking to her.’
‘She doesn’t talk much,’ said Deborah, ‘does she?’
‘She did today. About him.’
‘She loves him,’ Deborah said.
‘So do you.’
She turned in the path to look back over Tourmaline, a movement like a dance-step, expressing energy and happiness. ‘So I do,’ she said, with a laugh which was connected with nothing but her own high spirits. ‘Oh yes.’
‘What does he mean to you?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘Not half of it. Not a quarter.’
‘But some,’ I said. ‘Something.’
‘Oh, being young. And starting—starting again. Joy: that’s what he means.’
‘Poor child,’ I said. ‘That’s new to you.’
As I spoke she grew graver. But the light was still in her.
‘Kes is gone,’ she said. ‘Cast out of me, like the devils in the Bible. He can’t win again.’
‘And yet he was right,’ I said. ‘He told you you’d fall in love.’
‘He was wrong,’ she said. ‘When he said “love” he was talking…This love’s something he’s never heard of.’
‘Do you hate him?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s nothing. Nothing.’
‘Poor Kes.’
‘I think that too,’ she said, ‘now. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never see him again.’
‘You’re sure, are you?’
‘No one’s ever come back.’
‘No one’s ever gone, in your lifetime.’ I forgot Byrne’s mother.
‘Still,’ she said, a bit bored with the subject, ‘why should he be different?’
‘Because he is different, and always has been.’
Immediately she brightened. ‘Then he’ll like it, and he’ll stay there.’ And she looked so happy and cool and young, scoring this small point, that I forgot what we were talking about in the pleasure of watching her. She looked virginal; and for a perilous moment I was on the edge of saying so.
I told her instead: ‘You look reborn.’
And she laughed, the full lips pressing against her perfect teeth.
‘It’s like that,’ she said. ‘It is.’
‘What could he have said, to do this for you?’
As soon as I had spoken I knew I was a fool, and wished the words back again. All the joy went out of her, and she would no longer look at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That was a stupid question—a prying question——’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. Anyone can know.’
‘No, I don’t want——’
‘We’re not to have secrets any more, he says. We’re to confess everything.’
‘To him, perhaps. But not to me.’
‘To everyone,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you.’
And she did, looking away over Tourmaline while she spoke. She told of her two visits to him at his hut, and of his denunciation at the church. Her voice was made unsteady by her quick breathing.
It was hard for me, when she had finished, to think of anything to say. Although by that time my faith in him was complete, although I could see he had brought her happiness in the end, it was difficult not to feel that she had been brutally humiliated. And was still, underneath her happiness. Standing there, gazing away from me across country, she was not far from tears.
‘Poor child,’ I murmured, at a loss to comfort her. All other griefs can be softened by sympathy; but the humiliated suffer alone, unreachable. ‘Poor child.’
‘But it’s all come right,’ she said, turning back to me, and smiling, though with full eyes. ‘It’s all so happy. And hopeful.’
‘Blessings on him,’ I said. And: ‘Amen,’ she replied, with a shaky laugh that tried to make light of her passion. It did no such thing, of course.
From the other side of the war memorial, as I walked towards it, came sounds of Byrne’s guitar. No voice today, but the instrument only: sometimes jaunty and twanging, sometimes fading into plaintive songs without chords. I came round to where he was, and sat beside him. He glanced at me, and nodded, but went on playing.
Kestrel’s dog was lying at his feet. It was his dog now.
I reached down and fondled the black ears.
‘He’ll bite you,’ Byrne said. But nothing happened.
I looked sideways at him as he strummed away. A ruined face, dark and scarred; a face that had been through fire. A memory stirred in me of my grandfather, on a Sunday afternoon, reaching between the Bible and
Pilgrim’s Progress
for his father’s battered copy of
Paradise Lost
and dutifully reading aloud, while I, dutifully, listened, half-comprehending. ‘Why did God spoil the look of him, granddad, if he was all that beautiful?’ ‘Because he was evil.’ ‘Then why did God make him, and why did he make him beautiful to start with? And will he get back to heaven in the end?’
No, said my grandfather. Not in the foreseeable future.
I grieved for Byrne as I grieved for Lucifer. Surely, under that distinguished ugliness, the marred beauty still showed.
‘Why did God make you, Byrnie?’
‘I dunno,’ he said, still playing. ‘You tell me.’
‘I can’t. Can
he
?’
‘What do you think?’
‘How can I tell? You know him better than I do.’
‘Nobody knows him,’ Byrne said.
‘But he must have talked to you. He has to all the others. Even me.’
‘He didn’t need to. Not to me.’
‘Because you believed in him, was it? From the beginning?’
‘Yair,’ said Byrne. ‘Something like that.’
He listened to a fading chord, then he put the guitar down on the step beside him. Coming into contact with the stone it made a faint stir in the air, a reverberation divorced from its sound.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why did you?’
The dog had sat up when he moved, and was shaking its ears. Byrne made a clucking sound from the side of his mouth. For a moment the dog looked at him, enquiringly. Then it leaped on him, and began to lick his face.
‘Get down,’ Byrne said, laughing. He sprawled on the step of the war memorial, clasping the dog to his chest.
‘Why?’ I persisted.
‘He likes me fine,’ Byrne said, with his face against the dog’s coat. ‘But if Kes comes back he’ll leave me like a shot.’
‘Why did you?’
‘A dog’s got to have a master. If the one he’s had walks out on him he just has to go and look for another. So—I was lucky. I found one to take me on.’
For a moment I rebelled. Ah, I thought, let me hear no talk of humility, of abnegation. This self-disgust is spitting in the face of God.
But the heretical thought passed. He was right, after all. He was marred, and knew it.