by Murray Bail
In the far north, avoid swimming in the lagoons – crocodiles. This country also has the most dangerous spiders and snakes in the world. Every year reports tell of snakes accidentally trodden on claiming another victim.
Hot barren countries – alive with natural hazards – discourage the formation of long sentences, and encourage instead the laconic manner. The heat and the distances between objects seem to drain the will to add words to what is already there. What exactly can be added? ‘Seeds falling on barren ground’ – where do you think that well-polished saying came from?
It is the green smaller countries in the northern parts of the world, cold, dark, complex places, local places, with settled populations, where thoughts and sentences (where the printing press was invented!) have the hidden urge to continue, to make an addition, a correction, to take an active part in the layering. And not only producing a fertile ground for philosophical thought; it was of course an hysterical landlocked country, of just that description, where psychoanalysis was born and spread.
It would appear that a cold climate assists in the process. The cold sharp air and the path alongside the rushing river.
14
UNACCUSTOMED TO silence, Erica had woken early. She brushed her hair, looked at herself and went down to the kitchen. Lindsey wasn’t there. Roger Antill was spreading butter and apricot jam on a slab of burnt white toast. Next to his plate, like a small warm animal that followed him everywhere, was his khaki hat.
After smiling she said, ‘Is Lindsey not up yet?’
‘She should be by now.’
‘I’ve been feeling quite spoilt. Lindsey’s been serving me breakfast in bed.’
‘That’d be right.’
Before realising he was acknowledging his sister’s kindness, Erica said firmly, ‘I think she’s a kind woman.’
To consider this, Roger Antill looked out the window. It allowed Erica to see again his straight combed hair and now, below his ear, the early morning razor snick.
‘Kindness…’ he was saying. ‘That’s a thought I’ve never had before. She’s my sister, I hardly think about her. We’re both of us part of the furniture. We’ve been in the house the two of us here I don’t know how many years.’
Wasn’t it Lindsey who had said her brother kept his thoughts to himself ? There was nothing stopping him.
‘I’m racking my brains trying to think of someone I’d call kind. Would you call yourself a kind person?’
Erica shook her head. Definitions of goodness, truth, kindness – and their opposites – were best considered in philosophical terms, at arm’s length. With resignation she saw how others took an interest in people more than in austere principles which over the centuries had been erected around people. There was this rush towards the subjective, which had – part of the attraction – no firm basis. If Sophie were at the table she would have tilted this attempt at conversation towards her methods, the psychoanalytical. By asking question after question she would reach him. She would then surround him.
As she got up to make tea, Erica spoke over her shoulder, ‘It bucketed down last night. You went out in it?’ Erica poured his tea. ‘Milk?’
Facing this man with a reputation for wordlessness, Erica found herself talking more than usual. He was sitting there in his faded blue work-shirt sipping the tea the colour of wood stain she’d made for him. He had his hand wrapped around the fine china cup the way he would hold a beer glass.
‘This morning,’ she announced, ‘I fully intend to start.’
At the very thought, Roger Antill, who’d barely glanced in her direction, blew out his cheeks.
‘I’m very much looking forward to going through your brother’s papers,’ she said.
For a while he remained nodding. Then he closed his eyes. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’
He’d give her a conducted tour over the place, the bulging paddocks, the eucalypts at mid-distance, the dams, the old yards, the flocks of sheep – the works. They’d bounce around in his dented ute, the two dogs keeping balance on the back.
‘Should we wait for Sophie?’
‘Let’s go.’ Already he had his hat on. ‘I’m not going to bite you.’
15
THERE WERE men past sixty who had seen a lot – their interestingly mangled appearances. Some had been through hell in Europe or up in the islands, and God knows how many marriage break-ups. Others had endured economic hardship, rural and urban. Did experience of strange and difficult countries make a difference? Some had fled for their lives. Men otherwise living quietly had lost wives, children, brothers before their own parents. Surely they’d have news.
Being a witness to death, or almost death, or to suffering – at least to be in the vicinity of extremes – would perhaps reveal the occasional truth not available in ordinary life.
These were Wesley’s thoughts, obscurely felt, back then.
At St Vincent’s Hospital he got a job as a porter. It was not hard work. The doctors and nurses took their rapid strides. Brown lino shining. His job was to deliver crutches, and wheel patients along corridors and into cavernous lifts to be x-rayed or operated on. In these circumstances, women were willing and easier to talk to than the horizontal men, who all looked as if they were severely wounded in battle and reaching out for the cigarette.
Between shifts the porters sat outside on the concrete, white coats undone, and smoked and drank tea, and stared down at their shoes. In broad daylight they were a pale, blotchy, weary-looking bunch. One of them might announce the price of a haircut had gone up. No reply, just the faint sound of cigarettes being dragged on. Opinions on politicians and football results were delivered without pity, without expecting a reply. A heavy unsmiling man did most of the talking. His name sounded like Sheldrake. Early on, he turned to Wesley, sitting on one side. ‘What have you got to say for yourself ?’ A heavy presence, bald, except for a ring of yellowish hair, the way corn soup has overflowed a saucepan – as if his head could keep only a certain amount of information. He introduced topics. That very morning he was pushing into a lift and a wheel fell off his trolley, almost tipping out an old woman, which hardly rated a nod, since it had happened at one time to each of them. Did you know there was not one but two conspiracies to shoot President Kennedy? In the Navy they’ve now got women going down in submarines. Have you ever heard anything so fucking ludicrous? When it came to the nurses, the Irish ones, and from there to women in general, the tone was detailed, vehement and dismissive, the idea being to gain wry agreement.
Seated on his bar stool like a tennis umpire, this man Sheldrake waited for them to bat a conversation back and forth. The strong suggestion was they were not fulfilling their potential. As he stared at one, then another, they in turn leaned back on their assorted cane, tubular steel or perforated plastic chairs, and if one of them did say something it was usually an entirely fresh topic.
Wesley’s chair was a wooden one. It had an uncomfortable dark-stained ordinariness, a nineteen fifties kitchen chair, and with it the memories of a certain Australian childhood, which didn’t concern Wesley but apparently put off some of the others. The day he arrived it had been the only one left, and he sat on it; he grew accustomed to the cobwebbed concrete and putting his feet up, always taking a position against the wall near a dripping tap. It was a lapse, a space. Traffic along Barcom Avenue, and farther away Oxford Street, rose and fell in a blurry regularity, as waves come forward and dissolve on a beach. And voices, faint.
It was while half-listening to the others there in the sun that Wesley decided to begin thinking in a less pedantic manner. And he should begin now before it was too late. He thought of his father and his stamps. By following Clive Renmark’s recommendation and first concentrating on the Greeks, he had moved on in regular stages to the Moderns, soaking up everything he could lay his hands on. The discoveries of each philosopher allowed each subsequent philosopher to climb up onto their shoulders, as if philosophy was a form of gymnastics, from where they could climb
still higher, or at any rate lean out at an angle while still holding on. All his available time spent scaling the tremendous peaks of western thought had left Wesley with the uncomfortable feeling his own mind was dutiful, pedantic, unoriginal. Clearly it was because his studies had followed a chronological path. In his apartment the books and journals piled on shelves, on the floor, on his unmade bed pointed to a free-ranging, seriously unconventional mind at work. This was the harbour city where cars rust and pages of books fox. Wesley had taken to underlining and scribbling comments in the margins, and made ‘copious’, as Rosie next door liked to joke, notes. Already he had formed the habit of writing statements on scraps of paper and sticking them on walls and mirrors, so he could reconsider them.
Rosie Steig was impressed with his industry. Now and then Wesley would pause and rub his eyes in wonder. Other times he’d say, aloud, ‘I don’t think so.’ (‘All swans are white.’ Not where I come from!) It was enough for Rosie to lift her head. They were friends. If a book he required was out of print, and if he couldn’t pick up an old copy at one of the shops in Glebe, she happily borrowed for him at the Fisher Library.
Wesley was finding a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject, and the softer, unavoidable intrusions of everyday life.
Rosie Steig often came in and lay on the sofa and studied one of her many subjects, while he sat at his desk studying one subject, his cheeks pressed between his palms, like a stone face on the corner of an old building. Not even her ostentatious yawns broke his concentration.
From the sofa and hidden from him, Rosie called out, ‘What is her name? Mrs Something – what do you see in her?’
Virginia Kentridge was old enough to be his mother.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. Maybe next week.’
‘I want to know now.’
‘What is it you want to know exactly?’
Virginia Kentridge had none of Rosie’s casual generosity; hers was anxious. There was a restlessness in Virginia Kentridge, her impatient widow’s body, and the way she thought and spoke, different from his mother, or his sister even, more of a series of blinks – becoming for him a complicating factor. Sometimes he noticed when she spoke she appeared not to be talking to him at all.
Standing before him, she pointed out how her skin was smooth, look, stomach nicely flattish, and – ‘Don’t you like them?’ Because of his studies he had become solemn, silent, single-minded. He was always somewhere else. As a consequence, she didn’t want him working in the hospital, especially since he didn’t need to work at all. ‘Have you washed your hands? I don’t want you coming near me, if you haven’t.’
In the bathroom one night, Wesley found Virginia weeping. She had noticed the first grey pubic hair; no amount of reasonable words comforted her. When he later told Rosie she looked up and said, ‘Poor Virginia.’
Working in the hospital he could think about the philosophical problems he had encountered that very morning. But the wards and the corridors, the chirpy, red-nosed nurses, and the patients in their helplessness, represented the close-by world, only more so. It wasn’t only the regular sight of stoicism.
On a Thursday he arrived as usual with his mug of tea at the concrete courtyard to see the heavy talkative one had taken his chair – not just sitting on it, sitting in that fat-arsed, over-casual way. Antill went across and while the man was talking pulled the chair out from under him. In the struggle Sheldrake fell onto the concrete and getting up was about to spring at Antill.
‘Whoa! Take it easy!’ – they were holding him back, as if he was a horse. ‘Here we are, slaving our guts out to save lives, and you two are trying to kill each other.’
It was a fight over a wooden chair, which Antill would later use to describe his struggle for a new philosophy.
16
ERICA WHO was holding onto the door – just his thumb and forefinger keeping them on track – hand closest often changing down to first – saw how his way of conversing, which had plenty more stops and starts and false trails than actual words, followed the contours of the meandering landscape. Having to negotiate the unevenness on a daily basis had infected his speech. And when coming out with a sentence of more than three words he closed his eyes, the eyelids fluttering slightly as he spoke. The last person she had seen with this visual stammer (if that is what it is) was a Methodist minister with ginger eyelashes who visited her mother in Adelaide, and so remained fixed in her memory seated in the lounge room with cup of tea balanced on a floral saucer in one hand, while taking a bite out of a piece of sponge cake.
As for Roger Antill, he just then wasn’t about to look across at this woman from Sydney. After getting her out of the house he began to ask himself if it had been a good idea. For one thing, he wondered whether she wanted to see land and more land, and hear about the never-ending tasks of a grazier. City people had their own interests, own areas of expertise. He didn’t want to bore or confuse her, even though boring another person could sometimes become interesting.
Roger Antill stopped. Looking down over the steering wheel he indicated with his chin the original property. Chimney the only thing left of a hut, ironbark posts as grey as newsprint, lines of fence wire here and there – signs barely decipherable, as if under water.
These were the traces left by his ancestors. Roger A. mentioned some of their solid English names, and how they died – headfirst over horses, diphtheria, as cannon fodder in Belgium and France. Daughters who went to Sydney, then onto London, came back only for visits, if at all.
Turning off the track, the homestead well behind them, he swerved over the bare ground which fell away to the left, where there was an overflowing creek, rattling and frothing, clotted with wet-black sticks, leaves, branches of trees. At one point he banged into a waterlogged burrow and swore. ‘Now what do you make of that?’ Still steering with one hand, ‘By myself I wouldn’t have said anything, not a word.’
How nature erases the previous day. After rain it returns changed, but basically the same.
Sheep stood about in the paddocks on either side. Many lambs, pale.
It was a curvaceous part of the earth, displaying the most natural declivities, casual harmony over gradual distances. Erica allowed herself to blend into gullies, where the same land allowed itself to rise into a nicotine-stained hill spotted with white-trunked trees.
‘Amazing what you see when you look at something long enough. We have hills here that look like a woman’s bum, and what-not. That gully over there. What does it look like?’ For some reason Erica felt respected, and she smiled. ‘The knees, elbows. I pointed to these…eye associations…pointed them out to my brother, Wesley, not long after he came back. He said to me, “Yes, all right. The trouble is you’re not the first in the world to notice this. It follows that as an idea it becomes reduced to the ordinary.”’
To lighten the conversation, Roger put on a stifled yawn.
‘After that,’ he said in an extra loud voice, ‘I thought it best to leave the fancy thinking to him.’
Erica was laughing.
‘I decided to stick to what I know – whatever that is. Opening gates! I can do that.’
He got out, opened it, drove through, closed it and got going again. At the next, Erica leapt out – ‘I’m going to do this’ – to give him a hand.
The irritating gate, it was being difficult. As she struggled she imagined his eyes wandering over her waist and hips. He had nowhere else to look. Joining her at the gate he was patient and jokey as he demonstrated the slight twist to ease the chain and washer over the bolt.
‘I never got to ask Wesley how it was philosophy got the better of him. There’s no other sign of it in the family.’
It was as if philosophy was a disease. Erica asked if his brother had worked on his papers all day.
For a while the remaining brother said nothing. It looked as if he had gone back to hardly-talking.
‘I suppose you could say Prodigal Son. There were aspects of that. I was…fif
teen when our brother shot off to Sydney. I didn’t see much of him after that. We’d get postcards, snow on mountains, little houses, that sort of thing. He was in Europe, you know. With the death of our father, he telegrammed to say it was time to come back. Fair enough.’ As if his memory was attached to a well-oiled spring, his eyelids began fluttering. ‘The day he stepped off the train…I walked straight past him. I couldn’t fit a face to him. It also had something to do with the hair. It had turned white.’
Stopping and starting – fading too – these sentences drew Erica into listening carefully, which she did while noticing the many new shapes, objects and compositions appearing mid-distant and far, on all sides. There were long puddles and stretches of mud.
Here Erica pointed across the driver to a bend in the same overflowing creek, to where a ewe was stuck, just its head showing.
Before Roger stopped she was out onto the muddy ground. She rolled up her trousers, and waded out to the animal. The cold rush of water made her feel determined. It was a demonstration. All around her was brown swirling.
‘She’ll weigh a ton,’ he called out. ‘Leave her for me.’
Taking one more step – an animal was life – its bulging eyes – the weight of water shifted her foot off a slippery rock. She fell forward onto the net of wet branches trapping the ewe, and the animal sank under her weight. As Roger took her by the arm and pulled her out she saw the sheep floating away, rolling in the current.
