The Pages

by Murray Bail

  The ‘comings and goings’ of the seasons, the firm statement of geology, above all the absence of voices, can provide a feeling of closeness to the original nature of things, the beginning from where an explanation can begin to be constructed. There – in the mountains especially – philosophy can be seen as a natural force.

  19

  ON THE third or fourth day, Erica entered the small woolshed.

  Already the day was warm.

  Never having stepped inside such a shed before she remained near the door, not sure what to take in first.

  The air was thick with the smell of wool, so thick it surrounded and began caressing her. Erica felt if she stayed here for any length of time her skin would improve.

  A few handfuls of wool had been left on the floor. Light came in through holes in the tin walls, as if the place had been shot up, and ragged gaps here and there let in more, and so the irregular patterns of silver on the floor and opposite walls. Otherwise the space was mostly shadow.

  It took a moment to adjust to the light.

  A wheat bag had been nailed up over the nearest window. Down the far end the other window illuminated a corner, which had a table, a chair and shelves holding stacks of paper. On the table were pages of manuscript and the white of these pages gleamed in patches and brightened the corner almost electrically. Other sheets of paper seemed to flutter white in mid-air.

  Erica took a step forward. Then she strode over to Wesley Antill’s work table. Beneath the window was a horsehair sofa and blanket; through the window, the ground sloped up towards a hill.

  She sat in Antill’s chair. Within reach was a tray of fresh quarto, and next to it pages filled with writing, some in pencil, and a notebook. The black fountain pen, made in Germany; there would have to be an ink bottle somewhere. There was not much else: a pencil sharpener bolted to the table, a saucer containing paper clips and rubber bands, and a small traveller’s clock (Roman numerals) in a leather case. Also on the table was a bottle of tomato sauce, almost finished, the leftovers clinging to the insides, like the remnants of the British Empire on a map. The sauce bottle certainly added to the atmosphere of almost brutal plainness, so much so that Erica couldn’t help imagining the philosopher in his underpants, gaunt, arms tanned up to his elbows, always with an appetite. And she wondered again if, in order to think deeply, it was necessary to live and work in barren surroundings.

  She got up and moved around the table and touched the pages in loose piles on the shelves. These too were filled with his handwriting. Still more were stacked on the floor; no doubt false starts, or faulty ideas, or ideas veering off the chosen path. There must have been many hundreds of pages. Erica noticed she was standing on discarded pages lying on the floor. She went back to the chair again. Strange to be sitting where he sat. She had her elbows on the table. The pages in front of her would be the ones Antill was working on when he died, the Prodigal Son. But she could hardly even glance at them. Before beginning anything she’d have to find the beginning in amongst the papers.

  She leaned back and looked around. The woolshed had the extra stillness of a place where work and well-oiled equipment had been abandoned. Only then did she look closely at the pages pegged onto a length of string, like white handkerchiefs hanging out to dry.

  Antill had written, in his blue ink, statements to spur him on. At his work table, he had only to turn his head slightly to see them.

  Begin with nothing, begin again.

  Next, Not to think, but allow thinking to arrive. These pages were fastened by plastic pegs of various colours, Drought-thoughts.

  A smaller piece torn from his notebook had turned yellow, With no hesitation, none. Otherwise –.

  On the nearest sheet of suspended paper in extra large writing was a line she recognised. Evidently for Wesley Antill it summed up the philosopher’s task: philosophy was a confession on the part of its author, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

  It was the quote Professor Thursk in the lecture hall or in the quadrangle was fond of dismissing with a good-natured chuckle (‘that old chestnut’), as he did with anything German, or almost-German – which had been enough for Erica to think there was perhaps something to it. And now here it was on a piece of paper hanging in a woolshed.

  In considering a philosophy, she would be considering a life.

  Erica didn’t hear Roger Antill arrive.

  ‘Have you made any sense of it yet?’

  ‘Do you mind? I’m thinking.’

  Erica flinched at the sound of her sharpness. She was turning into a severe woman, a sharp, methodical, increasingly assertive type – and who could be bothered with them? It went with her face which she considered too small. She wondered why she had developed a hard side – how unnecessary it was. Roger Antill was not a bad man; and he owned the woolshed.

  As if nothing had happened, he went over to the bookshelves.

  ‘He had a brain, all right. Our brother was brainy. He had the means of concentration. Nothing would stand in the way. I’ve seen similar in fine-wool breeders, successful, and the old Hungarian who runs the post office in town – he takes photographs of every bird that lands on his back fence. Single-minded. Except Wes had the extra brains, no doubt about it. Can a person use their brain too much? He never gave his brain a rest. My sister asked me to see if you need anything. There’s a teapot over there.’

  Before she could answer, he moved across to the window, his back to her and, by not talking, silenced her.

  After the way she had spoken, Erica wasn’t sure what to say anyway. She couldn’t stop thinking about herself.

  ‘There used to be eucalypts out here, a nice lot of red gums. He didn’t want to see them when he worked, he told us. He went out and attacked them with a chainsaw. I gave him a hand.

  ‘It wasn’t that he had anything against eucalypts, although they were measly with shade, it was that he wanted no distractions. They reminded him too much of where he was.’

  For a good five minutes neither spoke.

  ‘Wes sure was unlike anyone I had come across.’

  He turned from the window.

  ‘If you’re not careful, you could end up sitting here for the next twenty years trying to work him out. How would that be?’

  A casual, entrenched scepticism had straightened his mouth, not unpleasantly. And out of local habit he bent down and picked up a bit of old wool and measured it between his fingers.

  ‘Can you take this away, please?’ – pointing to the bottle of tomato sauce. ‘It makes me unhappy looking at it.’

  As always he was in his dusty working trousers and boots; and before she could say anything more he had gone.

  The hours passed quietly in the perforated darkness. Of course the philosopher’s chair had to be a hard wooden one. Now and then she went over to the window and contemplated the treeless scene; fresh shoots had erupted from the stumps and in the spaces in between. Around lunchtime Erica stepped out and stood near the veranda. She stretched her arms over her head and squinted into the mid-distance and beyond. Aloud she said, ‘Sweep of landscape.’ As she took in the breadth of it, Erica, from inner-Sydney – a city of verticals – some ragged undulations – blue glitter – tried to see why she felt an affinity to the landscape: ‘gradualness’ was what she decided. The slow rise and roundness. Gradual were the patterns, no limestone outcrops, gorges, river, no patch of green grass; no sharp lines of black, either. Gradualness possessed an endlessness.

  This old dry part of the earth laid out before her was familiar, which seemed to reduce Erica’s apprehension of the pages, enough for her to experience a flow of contentment which reached back to the familiarity of a few people and places in Sydney.

  ‘Look at you,’ said Sophie in the kitchen.

  Seated also at the table, Lindsey gave her the welcome smile which lengthened her face – the shoebox tilting.

  ‘I’ve decided something,’ Erica announced, because she was restless. ‘I’m too analytical. I’
ve now realised this.’

  ‘That’s my department,’ Sophie gave a single clap. ‘That’s exactly what I’m like! I find I’m always making a basic situation more complex than it needs to be. All sorts of side issues come into the equation, which happens to be simple enough and staring me in the face. It causes no end of difficulty.’ The happily married lecturer, of the English woollen socks, being a recent example.

  Erica noticed the tomato sauce bottle on the table. Even there in the kitchen it appeared to be standing for the plain and bleak life, of hunger satisfied, wipe the plate with thumb or crust; her hand involuntarily made to shove it back into the cupboard, out of view.

  ‘I intervene in my mind – and too early,’ Erica insisted. ‘I can’t seem to help it. In reducing the argument, I reduce the person. I can hear myself becoming sharp.’ The last thing she wanted was for it to become permanent. ‘I think your brother,’ she glanced at Lindsey, ‘has found me so.’

  ‘Is that why we’re like this, sitting here, all three of us?’ Sophie laughed. She had spoken scarcely six words to what’s-his-name, the brother. Where was he now?

  Lindsey had remained looking at Erica. ‘Roger? He wouldn’t notice. In this area he’s as blind as a bat. Hopeless.’

  The way sisters dismiss (affectionately) their poor brothers, and vice versa.

  ‘I’m going to improve,’ Erica said, more to herself. Again she checked if she had sounded severe, speaking through the gritted teeth et cetera.

  Sophie enquired about the philosopher’s papers.

  ‘It’s going to take more than a few hours.’ More like weeks, Erica thought, and wasn’t displeased.

  Sophie frowned. ‘Haven’t you actually looked at them yet? I’m going to have to get back soon.’

  ‘We’ve only just arrived, have we not?’

  At this point a phone rang which had Sophie rushing to her large handbag and swearing as she tried to find it.

  ‘Hello, Daddy? Are you all right?’

  She went out onto the veranda to talk. It allowed Erica to turn to Lindsey with careful questions about her brothers, hoping to anticipate the soon to be seen ‘unconscious memoir’ of the philosopher, if that’s what it was. The smallest bits of information added, or gave flesh, to the picture. Apparently for lunch Wesley ate a boiled egg and a piece of ham, and had green tea in small packets posted on the first of each month from Chinatown in Sydney. He sipped his tea from a small cup; anyone would think he’d been to China. Erica then asked about Roger. As they chatted she noticed Sophie glancing at her through the window.

  With a puzzled face, Sophie came in and handed Erica her phone. ‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. He wants to talk to you.’

  20

  EACH AND every perhaps and possibly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, yes but, along with the ifs, the maybes, the not necessarilies, while producing an appearance of tolerance and abstraction, which made him attractive in the eyes of others, had spread and undermined the haphazard foundations of Wesley Antill’s own opinions. Hang on, let me think. (He began talking to himself.) Lack of precision – that is, how to be yourself, as much as possible – tightened its grip; uncertainty was OK, confusion not.

  The complications of everyday life added to the confusion, as if Mrs Kentridge in black and the softer but no less demanding intimacy of Rosie Steig had been placed close by in order to occupy and actually deflect his thoughts.

  And when Wesley Antill began his wanderings, carrying his mother’s suitcase, and for the first time in his life set foot on foreign soil, he chose as his destination a city not known as a centre for philosophy; in fact, it had hardly made a contribution at all. Antill could have headed straight for Edinburgh, or Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris even, as well as any number of German cities and villages, let alone Athens.

  He chose London, not intending to stay long.

  In the train from Heathrow, Antill looked at the bright green parks and into the backyards of narrow houses, the traffic slowly moving along the streets – little cars, vans – and people waiting on platforms before entering the carriage on their way to work. Slate and brownish houses folded in behind him. He could get away with murder here. The farther he went in, not knowing a soul, the more anonymous he felt.

  The first hotel was almost next door to the British Library. After a restless night he stepped out and noticed he had been trying to sleep in the shadow of hundreds of tons of paper, millions, more like trillions, of printed, never-resting words. Those desperate descriptions, clas-sifications, explanations and rhyming couplets under the one roof. It was not what he wanted just then. Another hotel in W2 he left after experiencing their nylon sheets. Smell of gas in another. These were small discomforts. And he was not one to complain. Wesley marvelled at the utilitarian breakfasts, the fried eggs turned with rare skill, an obvious specialty of the British. He moved from one hotel to the next. It was a way of mastering the enormous mass of the city. He took rooms in boarding houses, Kensington, Golder’s Green, Putney, Clapham, Kensal Rise – and moved on. A succession of landlords – lord, what an exaggeration – and your typical vigilant landlady of the crinkled throat and powdered nose. To them, his worldly possessions appeared to be contained in a medium-size suitcase, its fine leather (Simpson’s of Piccadilly?) spotted by the landladies, and so without being aware of it Antill received extra-attentive service.

  He wrote to Lindsey, not to trot out the usual about Eng/London, but knowing his sister, sitting and writing and waiting in the backblocks of New South Wales, was interested in rainfall, wherever it was.

  ‘Early days, I know, but it hasn’t so much as drizzled yet. I’m looking forward to the cold, and I wouldn’t say it’s been cold yet.’ He didn’t tell her it was bloody freezing.

  Sitting in a bus or on a bench outdoors he couldn’t help thinking of Rosie – it was at random, the voice, and the way she positioned herself in the world, the warmth of her body. By leaving Sydney in a rush he had abused her devotion, and he considered getting her to join him. But before long he returned to being firm and went on moving about in this impervious grubby immensity, alone.

  It would soon exhaust itself. He was under the flight path. He was too close to the railway line. Through the walls a bus driver berated his passengers in his sleep. Radio and television coming through. The cobbled courtyard in Blackfriars must have once been stables. The baby was crying. Too many married couples next door having their yelling matches. Basement of the Nash terrace house. The mews a stone’s throw from Westminster. Somebody being sick. He wondered where he fitted in. Was that not important? Terrible rising damp. What about the stand-up comedian through the wall in Cleveland Square rehearsing his lines – clearing his throat and beginning again? The mildest people wanted to make friends. And it was hard to avoid the music. The different streets, the many different pale and lumpy faces. More than a year had passed. Moving from one place to the next allowed him to avoid thinking, at least in any sustained, directed way; at the same time he believed he was experiencing the apparent complexity of the place. He was ‘finding his feet by walking’, he informed his sister.

  Wesley finally settled for a third-floor flat in a crescent just before Shepherd’s Bush. The house next door had each floor taken up by a painter with an international reputation, whose canvases consisted of stripes, mostly horizontal, of various colours. Much depended on a steady hand. Accordingly, each room on each floor of the painter’s house had fluorescent lighting, the only one in the crescent like it, a sort of lighthouse always glowing at one end.

  He went wandering at night too, as he did in Sydney – the philosopher of the streets.

  He bought water-resistant tan shoes, and an expensive, spring-loaded umbrella.

  On Holland Park Avenue, opposite the Russian Consulate, Wesley reached out to pat a dalmatian, and was bitten by it. A short wide woman in a black tracksuit came forward, very confident. Shaped like a cello, and taking small steps, she had querulous eyes. Wesley also saw her
black hair, which fell like a horse’s tail down to the small of her back, where Wesley, coming off the farm, expected it abruptly to swish, as it would at an annoying insect.

  ‘She can be enthusiastic, too much. Have you lost your hand?’

  As Wesley wrapped his handkerchief around it, some blood showed through. Between them the dog leaned forward panting, its tongue hanging out.

  To Wesley, there was not a problem here. He looked at her. ‘Who are you?’

  Serbian, Greek or even Russian; a long way from English, in every sense. And then there was her voice.

  ‘This is my dog.’

  ‘I mean, are you – who?’

  What? It wasn’t clear even to him what he wanted to know. It was as if they both expected him to say something offhand and amusing – about rabies, for example; he could always try a mock fainting fit, going cross-eyed before collapsing in a heap on the footpath. But he wasn’t much given to performance, seeing the funny side, coming out with one-liners; it had never become established in him. ‘You have an open relationship with blood,’ it occurred to him. ‘Whereas the men, we haven’t.’ Something along those lines.

  She’d given hardly a glance at his hand.

  ‘I don’t think you need to call an ambulance,’ he said, without meaning to be funny.

  They had coffee and another one in a café. Those slightly dissatisfied eyes were a bit of a worry. Wesley thought she was in her late thirties. Afterwards, he went into the post office, which meant he had to explain to her the airmail envelopes. It allowed him to describe the working dogs on their sheep station. While he was at it he mentioned his sister, and that their mother had recently died.