Free Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller Page B

of them was prepared to acknowledge openly in my presence. When we were drivinghome Dougald cleared his throat and said, as if he felt the need to offer me an explanation, ‘Whenever I have to go down to the coast for a few days on business, Esmé looks after the place for me.’
    I said, ‘She seems to be a very capable woman.’
    I saw his house from the road as we approached it, and recognised the small square uncurtained window of my own room. He turned into the driveway and the two brown dogs ran out to meet us.

6
What men gather
    Dougald seemed to me to be waiting for something, and for now he asked no more of me than he asked of his dogs. One fine still day followed another with little to distinguish them, and it seemed no time at all before two weeks of this measured existence had gone by. I had no desire to bring to an end just yet this peculiar sojourn with Dougald in his little house on the edge of the abandoned township. One day I would be required to go back to my life and to take up once again the problem of how to live it, but for now there was nothing to be done. I was determined to enjoy this leave of absence from the responsibility to live with purpose.
    It was a little after noon and I was standing outside the kitchen on the patch of concrete in the shade of the gum tree.I had been refreshing the water for the hens and the goat and still carried the blue plastic bucket in the crook of my right arm. I enjoyed being out in the open air and found a certain modest satisfaction in the performance of these daily chores. I was aware that my small service left Dougald free to attend to his paperwork and the numerous telephone calls he received throughout each day. Before going in to prepare our lunch, I had paused on the concrete patch outside the kitchen to enjoy the calm beauty of the day. The two brown dogs lay spreadeagled and panting at my feet, waiting to discover what I was to do next, when Dougald came out of the kitchen and handed me his mobile telephone. ‘It’s Vita, old mate,’ he said, and went back inside the kitchen.
    She apologised for not calling sooner. ‘It’s been frantic here,’ she said. Then, without pausing, she asked briskly, ‘So, Max, tell me, how are you and Dougald getting on?’ It was as if she referred to a business arrangement and was expecting a report from me on my progress with our project of
getting on
with her Uncle Dougald.
    I said, ‘We are getting on very well. In fact we are an old domestic couple. I do the chores and leave him free to do his work.’ I waited to hear what she would say to this, but she said nothing. ‘Should I say more?’
    ‘Don’t let him work too hard,’ she said. ‘If you let him, he’ll just work and do nothing else.’
    What did she expect of me? ‘In the evening after dinner,’ I said, ‘once he has abandoned his work for the day and I have washed the dishes and made us a final cup of tea, we drowse in front of the television for an hour. Eventually we bestir ourselves and say goodnight and we go to our separate rooms. Really there is very little else to report.’
    ‘You sound happy?’ she said almost resentfully, and might have been accusing me of a moral lapse.
    ‘Should I not be then?’ I asked her.
    ‘Happily
married
, by the sound of it,’ she said and laughed cheerlessly. ‘How is he?’
    ‘Dougald seems to me to be in fine spirits.’
    ‘He’s not a well man, Max,’ she corrected me. ‘We’ve been worried about him ever since Aunty May died. It’s nearly five years now and he hasn’t moved on.’
    Did she think, I wondered, that
I
had moved on? I considered mentioning to her Dougald’s delicate friendship with Esmé at the service station. I thought of offering this to her as evidence that he had indeed moved on a considerable way from the state of paralysed anguish into which he must have been cast by the death of his wife. But I felt it would have been a betrayal to speak of this to her, and so I said