by Murray Bail
Although she had declared herself a married woman she took him back to her place. This was a tall white house just down the road, at the left side of a small garden square, the very house – according to the plaque above the burglar alarm – where one of the greatest early Australian explorers had lived, which is what Wesley called himself, or rather made tender reference to, after removing her tracksuit. It was enough to prompt in this stout healthy woman, whose expression normally didn’t vary much, shudderings of almost laughter.
After many afternoons spent in the house, Wesley Antill forgot which hand had been bitten, and at odd moments would examine the palms of each hand and flex the fingers unnecessarily.
Eventually he asked, ‘Did your dog actually take a bite out of me, or not?’
Wesley refrained from asking too many questions. The less he knew about her increased the chance of thinking clearly. And she didn’t seem to mind his apparent lack of curiosity. She knew it would end soon. It was all it was.
One afternoon she sat up and said her husband had come home early, and straight out of an Ealing comedy Antill made his way out the back gate to the lane, where he hobbled into his shoes and trousers. A minor incident really, yet it could have turned nasty. It made Antill ask what he was doing with himself, how was he spending his time – was he being serious?
It was the solitude of a large city. And all he was doing was exploring, or rather, allowing. Antill understood he didn’t need to be with anybody. Aspects of his character he preferred to keep to himself, without always knowing what they really were. In the same way he rarely mentioned his thoughts. So much of talking was for the sake of talking, just because somebody else happened to be talking, of obeying some necessary instinct to fill in the gaps, to add to what already had been said, or wanting to toss in a joke or a related anecdote to bring the house down (since only an infinitesimal amount of what is said is memorable). For hour after hour Antill practised sitting in his room, emptying his mind of all thoughts. Preparing his mind for something: it was beginning to feel like that. To make matters worse, the room had just two sticks of furniture, a chair and a small brown-stained table. A smoker had been the previous tenant, and the pale shape of a crucifix showed where it had been hanging on a nail on the darkened wall.
Lindsey forwarded a letter from Rosie Steig, still at the same address in Sydney. It was soon afterwards on the footpath that Wesley began his conversations with the local postman, who did his rounds on foot, ‘single-handed delivery’, as he put it, if rather ponderously, which became for Wesley necessary daily conversations. Looking out from his window at the crescent he waited for the tall figure in uniform to appear at one end, where he’d go down and join him and walk alongside for the remainder of the round, happy to let the postman do the talking. Wesley had never seen a postman as tall as the one he got to know in London, Lyell, and who not only talked but talked like a fast-dripping tap, when most other postmen were not talkers at all – the very opposite, in fact – despite, or perhaps because of, spending their working days hand-delivering words. Sometimes the pressure showed. There are the regular court cases where a postman of mild appearance has been found guilty of accumulating in his bedroom thousands of unopened letters he was supposed to have delivered. In Sydney, on Macleay Street, the ageing postie, Brian, wore navy shorts in summer and winter, and had a cigarette, even in heavy April rain; a figure sloping forward, listening to the cricket on a transistor hidden in amongst the envelopes. If you were lucky he might give a nod, or ‘morning’, nothing more.
Wesley noticed how Lyell had to concentrate, or enter some sort of mechanical groove, combining numbers with hand movements, as he moved from one address to the next, while his other thinking self continued doing the talking. He was a ‘career postman’, he said, without smiling. ‘Drop these in 23.’ Unlike the specious opinions given all too freely by taxi drivers, which are seized upon as gospel by visiting journalists all over the world, as if the world can ever be seen and summarised through a windscreen, Lyell gave no opinions, except to declare early on he was a lucky man, his job was the best in the world. ‘Here I am,’ passing an aerogramme to Wesley for delivery, ‘under the open sky talking to you. And getting paid for it.’ Coming out with short statements, what appeared to be aphorisms, was the closest he got to giving an opinion, imperfect, unpolished, incomplete. They were descriptions – of what he saw before him, ordinary objects.
A broken dining chair had been abandoned on the footpath; Lyell recalled in detail the different chairs he had owned, and others he remembered sitting on that he hadn’t owned. His parents’ rose-patterned armchair had a special width. Creaking, sighing, rustling, nothing – the different noises made by chairs. Often he could remember the chair, but not the person sitting on it. Those plump upholstered ones were indented with buttons like his Aunt Sharon’s navel (he had once blundered into her bedroom when she was standing naked). One Easter Friday he saw a street fight in Notting Hill between two West Indians using steel chairs. This soliloquy to the chair lasted for most of the round. The next morning he continued, having remembered a few more. ‘I have fond memories of all chairs.’
People’s different handwriting – another subject. And the names people give their poor children, as shown on the envelope, look. A man coming towards them reminded Lyell of his brother. He described his puffed-out cheeks, his vegetarian pallor, small ears, small hands, his sensitivity to cold, a carpenter who attended the cream-brick church of some sort of sect, married with three sons, the youngest suffering from a helpless stammer. As the postman talked he handed items of mail to Antill for hand-delivery, who still listening took quick strides down to a basement in amongst the cats and rubbish bins, or else up steps three at a time to the horizontal brass slot in a door. Together they finished the round early, and had their cup of tea in the Shepherd’s Bush fish café, the one with the perspiring window.
Lyell talked about the other postmen. According to him, many were philosophers. One in particular could quote from ‘Mister Plato’, almost off by heart, the way devoted Christians can reel off entire chapters from the Bible, and Muslims too, from their book. Another one – thin long hair tied in a ponytail – collected scarce editions of D. H. Lawrence after picking up a copy of The Rainbow in the gutter. Poets were a source of philosophy. A number of postmen were writers of poetry. While making deliveries, they could be seen moving their lips and frowning, so he informed Wesley, which meant they were composing as they walked. Others he had known were experts on the great describers, such as William Wordsworth; a New Zealander had introduced them to James K. Baxter – a poet who had himself been a postman in Wellington!
Although Antill didn’t need to work he gave serious thought to becoming a postman.
Those mornings on the streets, and at his elbow the tall, perspiring, talkative postman handing him letters and small parcels at irregular intervals, in order to continue talking, or rather make his detailed description of things, went on for many months. Wesley was vaguely aware of being attracted to extremists.
The example set daily by the methodical postman encouraged an early return to thinking. Rather than a random searching-around, Wesley saw in the patchwork of descriptions a firm base – fit words only to what can be seen. It was a simple enough edict; one that was always there.
At the window he was anticipating as usual what the postman would kick off talking about. ‘Come on, Lyell.’ He glanced at his watch. His friend was never late.
A smaller figure appeared at the opening of the crescent, bending forward at each address, then jerking back, as if on strings. He had none of Lyell’s unconscious fluency.
Wesley met him in the street – a thin West Indian wearing tan shoes with his uniform.
‘They have sent him packing,’ he explained in a loud voice. ‘He has gone. Someone around here was reported doing his work for him, against all regulations written down. Excuse me now.’
Of the so-called London years, only a few of the many
hundreds of people he encountered had left an impression. He passed through them, as he did situations – passed through, came out from. And it was similar for those passing people. If one of them was told Wesley Antill from Sydney, who they met or slept with on such and such a day, had turned into a philosopher, those who remembered him at all would have been amazed. With men especially he left little or no trace.
His way of ‘thought-making’, own description, was to continue wandering and take in. Remain open and fill in emptiness. On the train to Bath, a young Frenchman with a violin case on his knees spoke of the conversion of nature into art. Art, being human, is imperfect – hence, its power, smiled the Frenchman. Antill enjoyed the conversation, and thought of seeing more of him, perhaps becoming friends, but when it came to it he couldn’t find his address. Women were like small towns: to come upon them, and be surrounded by their neatness, but without the help of directions, before reaching unexpected dead ends; and begin all over again, elsewhere. Beyond the Cotswolds there, she was quieter than a town, and modest, a trim village in white with a curve and a fork in the main street, where the hand came forward requesting an outsider to slow down, or even stop altogether, which is exactly what she did to him. There was confusion all round. Light-hearted women, waiting to laugh; plenty of others not so trusting; men bobbing up with their faulty jokes, quips, football scores and eye-rolls – before going off by themselves.
In London, at Kentish Town, he took a job at night cleaning schools, not for the money. He felt like using his hands. Out of the textbook, alongside ‘ferryman’, he became a gardener for a large dark-stoned church and its manse, a good twenty miles from Ledbury. Weeds had taken over the church cemetery. After two world wars the spread of gravestones had almost surrounded the church. As he weeded, he saw the short, slow movements of remembrance. Old people and their neat hats, the small bunch of flowers. His other duties included sitting in the front pew and listening as the minister rehearsed Sunday’s sermon. ‘Tell me, yes. And don’t spare the horses. Feedback is what I require.’ Followed by tea.
The theological discussions were not satisfactory. Between taking calls the good distracted Presbyterian had no curiosity beyond the domination of one idea. A full schedule of small events may have helped. Wesley felt pity for his silent wife.
In work clothes Antill felt clumsy. Not only his hands, his thoughts – they were becoming blunt. And he was trying to make sense of it all, of what came towards him, of what he was part of. One difficulty was his separateness from nearby people. Everybody had this in different degrees; he knew that love can reduce the gap, almost to nothing. As he grew older he felt his separateness widen, slightly, but enough, as if the irreducible spaces between things in the wide-open landscape he grew up in had infected him, which he saw as a source of strength. In women, he sought – he wasn’t sure what.
A movement somewhere was hardly possible without an alteration somewhere else. Do as little as possible? To his sister and Rosie Steig he described his various careers. In London, he volunteered for a soup kitchen operating near one of the arches of Charing Cross. Museum attendant: another possibility.
Both women, separately, rebuked him; he was wasting himself, as he surely could see. In consecutive postcards illustrating local characteristics (Tudor cladding, young lass holding basket of apples, Blackpool on a sunny day), he explained to Rosie he could no longer think constantly, even if he wanted to; and since he couldn’t, he might as well work with his hands. He had avoided cities renowned for their philosophers, he told Rosie. In London, ordinary people on the street were philosophers without knowing it. Perhaps they pointed to a way, he told her. He made promises, then broke them.
21
ERICA HAD breakfast alone, a ‘thoughtful breakfast’. Roger Antill had already gone. His breakfast things were in the sink. Off to see his girlfriend in town, was Erica’s thought, without first considering the nearby and distant tasks awaiting the grazier that allow him to get out of the house. Erica wondered how anyone could have such casual unconcern for the condition of their face. (In contrast to his orderly hair.) With a countryman, the radiations of kindliness spread-eagling from the eyes, known as ‘crow’s feet’, are more likely to come from squinting daily into the sun, wind and rain than laughing, let alone smiling all the time. And this Roger’s relaxed manner with women might have to do with not actually caring about them much. Be polite; that was about it.
Like her brother, Lindsey rose early. She could be heard moving about; yet she rarely made an appearance before seven thirty. Sophie was the late riser, a ‘night-person’ often missing breakfast altogether, just coffee.
Erica headed for the woolshed. There it stood, grey iron, shining moisture. And clean cold air smoothed her skin. She turned. Before her was the trouser-khaki dryness stained with trees, with shadows ink spilt, a general elongation, rising and falling to the horizon, where it blurred to mauve, one part lit up by sunlight. The women were in the house soft in their early morning warmth; Mr Roger Antill out and about somewhere would be back for lunch or tea. And she had all morning in the quiet shed to immerse herself in the pages of philosophy. From every direction, even from faraway Sydney, she felt a flow of anticipatory happiness, so unusual, faint yet strong, she stopped everything and opened her mouth to preserve it.
When she pushed open the door to the shed, the draught fluttered some of the pages. Erica went forward and sat at the table where Antill sat, surrounded by papers. This time she noticed more pages cascading from the horsehair sofa. She felt others underfoot and bent down and gathered them up. It was a matter of where to begin. Unless Antill’s philosophical investigations consisted of nothing but lengthy hesitations, or digressions coming to a grinding halt, or scraps, or notes. To stumble across a full-blown, assembled dissertation, complete in its sweep and conclusions, if such a thing was ever possible, would make the journey from Sydney and the time spent well worthwhile. Here it all was – in front of her. As far as Erica was concerned, there was an honourable history of uncompleted philosophical works, not to mention complete U-turns. She could not avoid thinking of her own work.
Antill’s writing was large, plain and tilted, with many additions, crossings out, circles, arrows, asterisks. Ink was added to pencil, and vice versa. It was hard to read. And while the other pages on the shelves were in rectangular piles of different heights, like an architect’s model for a dream city consisting entirely of skyscrapers, these pages half stacked and scattered on the table suggested Antill had been working on them the day he died. They were dog-eared from constant handling, with a splash on one of the pages Erica assumed was tomato sauce.
She went over to the shelves and turned over other pages to see if the writing was any better. These were in blue ink – and had just as many scratched-out lines and altered paragraphs, additions, circles, ‘a real dog’s breakfast’, Roger Antill would say. So far as she could tell the rest were also in ink.
Back in the chair, Erica glanced up at the notes Antill had written to himself and pegged on the length of string, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir, yes, and priest of nature. Next to it was a quote she didn’t recognise, To Be There and To Wonder. Perhaps it was Antill’s own.
She spread out the pages, and settled down to read his words.
Erica saw in ‘To Be There and To Wonder’ a personal statement. It was experience turned into a proposition, certainly worth consideration, to recognise further, but not now.
She returned to the page.
‘I realised in Germany with R, or even before in my London years, when I avoided all thinking – and following the visit to Amsterdam, where I deliberately placed myself in a philosophical city, I realised after the visit of R, and the unwanted experience of tragedy, it was necessary to –’
Here Erica frowned. Where was the philosophy? Skipping ahead, all she found was the continuing story of his life – evidently Antill believed it to be more important than philosophy – unless he was following Descartes’ m
omentous example, snowbound in Germany. Or else the hardcore philosophy Erica had been hired to appraise was in the blue-ink pages on the horsehair sofa, the shelves, and even scattered on the floor.
Sophie came into the shed, holding a mug of coffee.
‘I need to talk to you.’
If Erica had turned she would have noticed her friend without make-up, and irregular red patches on her cheeks.
‘Look at this.’ Erica waved an arm which took in the pages on the table, and the rest fluttering on the shelves and floor. ‘It’s going to take many moons before I make the slightest headway.’
‘How long has it gone on for?’
‘What do you mean?’
Sophie put her mug on the table which allowed her to pace backwards and forwards.
‘Do you think I’m blind? Think I’m completely stupid? I saw the way you talked on the telephone. He wanted to talk to you, not me. Just tell me. I’d really like to know. Tell me.’
Erica turned.
‘Of the available men in Sydney, you have to sleep with him. He is my father, in case you’ve forgotten. How long for? Who seduced who?’
‘Since before Christmas,’ Erica murmured.
‘Thank you very much. That’s all I need.’
Sophie had her face turned from Erica, then she looked up at the ceiling.
‘I don’t know why I am talking to you. Do you have any idea what this is going to do to me?’
As Erica went to touch her arm, Sophie reared back, knocking the coffee over. In a fast wave it engulfed the handwritten pages arranged for Erica’s scrutiny.
Erica stood up. ‘Look what you’ve done!’
‘What you’ve done,’ Sophie turned away.
Erica could only stare at the spreading mess.
‘A handkerchief, or something, quick.’
There was nothing handy. Removing her blouse, Sophie threw it on the pages, already saturated pale brown.
