Spirit of Progress Read online

  Vic turns from the fence, from the fairway viewed between the pines and the gums, and walks back towards Katherine’s tent. He had set out on the journey an hour ago (while George sat in the editor’s office) annoyed and heavy with a sense of duty (for the hands that held yours and made the world child-sized while you were growing never really let go), but notes as he approaches the tent that his steps are light. That he is surprisingly happy.

  Then he examines the tent, for the first time, as he stands before it, and slowly shakes his head. It is bad enough that she is in a tent at all. And, well, embarrassing. He has an aunt who lives in a tent, perched on the edge of the city, and who goes around getting her picture in the newspaper so that everybody knows. But this tent, which she has chosen to live in, is old and weathered. Thin in parts. Tattered and patched. It does not look strong enough to keep out the wind and the rain, and, with this thought, embarrassment gives way to concern.

  He calls and Katherine’s head pops out, wary and annoyed at being disturbed, then she realises it is Vic. She does not invite him inside (and Vic is relieved not to be invited), but knowing that it is a clear, bright day (for Katherine has been up since early morning) she steps out and greets him, surprise and pleasure lighting her eyes.

  There is, Vic tells her (and quickly, for he is eager to return home on his day off), no money to be earned in sitting for the painter because he has no money. Besides, the painting is finished. And, Vic could add but he doesn’t, he’s caught you in one go. She nods and shrugs. It’s no great matter. There is a pause, and then, the invitations still in his coat pocket, Vic adds that they did give him these, and he shows her the passes. He adds this almost as an afterthought because he is convinced that she would not be interested in the slightest. That the passes will be viewed not so much as an invitation but (like the painter, the journalist and the photographer) an intrusion. And it is for this reason that he is not simply surprised but stunned when she says yes. She would like to go. And when the feeling of being stunned passes, annoyance returns (concern evaporates) and once again he is heavy with a sense of duty because he knows he will have to take her, and there goes his night off. Whatever he may have had planned he can scrub it. And while they are standing there she agrees to make her own way to Vic’s house later in the day, and that, together (her accompanying comment ‘Won’t that be nice?’ is delivered with knowing innocence) they can travel to the exhibition, at which, and Vic doesn’t tell her this either, the painting of Katherine has been given the most prominent place in the room.

  She disappears back into her tent, and Vic, eager to enjoy as much of his day as possible, climbs back onto his bicycle and cycles home. And as he goes, he looks briefly over his shoulder at the golf course, the line of pines and gums along the dirt road and the rolling green fairway in between, from which, if you stepped onto it, you would tee off into a world made suddenly wide.

  30.

  Sam on the Docks

  So many boats. All leaving, or soon to leave, for foreign places. To elsewhere. That elsewhere to which they all yearn and which calls to Sam from the other side of the horizon. Boats, tankers and great liners, either coming from or going to that elsewhere. But all taken. All full. And this is the problem.

  Sam is strolling along the wharves, watching the boats. An eye always out for the great liners when they’re in — and one is. And even though he has no sketching pad with him (unusual for Sam) he still sees patterns and forms and compositions wherever he looks. The cranes, like the long necks of prehistoric beasts, the masts on the tankers and the liners, the smoke from their funnels, signalling either recent arrival or departure. And the labourers and passengers, either coming or going.

  The war (and when he thinks of the war he thinks mostly of the Pacific War) has been over for eleven months now and you’d think that everybody would be back. But it takes a long time to bring an army home, to bring an army back to a place that will be both home and not home any more. And so there is still the occasional sad ship arriving at these wharves, and sad train at the railway stations. Although not today. And Sam knows this because he strolls along these wharves regularly. If he can’t leave the country just yet, he can, at least, come to the place from which they will leave and feel the excitement of departure — even if it is other people’s.

  Today, further along the dock, he sees one of the great liners taking on passengers. Many of them women, quite possibly, he muses, war brides. War brides, bound for America. You wouldn’t think there’d be that many but week after week the boats take them to … where? His mind plays with possibilities: Butte, Montana; Chicago; New York; Flagstaff, Arizona; Concord, Massachusetts; St Louis, Missouri (Eliot’s birthplace); and more. Sam likes the sound of American towns and cities. He has memorised them without meaning to and consequently has a store of names to draw upon, so could play this game for quite some time.

  But as he nears the liner he is distracted by the many emotions written into the faces around him, there to be read in the bright winter sunshine. That woman — who waves back at her mother (no father in sight) and, presumably, her sister (for they look alike) — whose eyes look, well, frightened. A war bride? He doesn’t know but guesses she is. And he makes up a little story around those frightened eyes. Almost as though, he imagines, some part of her is just beginning to realise that in the hothouse, in the pressure cooker that the city became during the war, she married a stranger and must now go to live with him in the strange land he calls home and which she may eventually call home too — but which she may not. For the fact is, and the years will bear this out, that many of those brides who leave on the boats, which week after week transport them to their new homes in America, will come back. These will be the ones who married strangers, and who never learnt to call the country home to which their impulsive infatuations transported them. Like, possibly, that woman leaning over the railing, her hair piled high in the wartime style. And suddenly he wishes he had his pad and pencils with him. For she is a study in herself. A portrait of apprehension. For every time he comes to the dock he finds in the faces of those arriving and departing a portrait. Today this woman with the frightened eyes is his portrait. But with no pad or pencil he will have to memorise her. And, to this end, he stares long and hard at her. And she doesn’t notice because she has eyes only for that part of the world’s population (which is in a constant state of movement at the moment) standing on the wharf directly beneath her.

  He is suddenly struck by the thought, a speculation really, on just who will be standing on the dock directly beneath him the day that he departs. And does he want anybody to be there? For when he pictures the scene he sometimes sees people there and sometimes nobody. Tess will be there one time. And he asks himself if that is the last face he wants to look upon before he slips over the horizon and into that elsewhere for which he has yearned throughout the years. Perhaps it will provide that sense of goodbye that he feels you ought to have on such occasions, for there will always be a part of him that will find it difficult to wave farewell to Tess, but no part that will find it difficult to farewell this city and this country. For he knows in his restless bones that he is done with them both.

  Then again, perhaps he’d just like to slip out of the city and the country unobserved. No one to wave to. No one to look upon. Yes. That, he thinks, is the way to leave. A solitary departure. Sam, the solitary figure at the railings, waving to no one. A mystery. The wayfarer. The explorer, nose pointed towards new worlds. A shadow, almost, slipping over the horizon into the elsewhere that awaits him.

  And so when Sam imagines the day of his departure at this particular moment, he imagines a solitary departure. No one there to farewell him because all his ties, like the ribbons that link the dock to the boats, will have been broken. Snapped. And, in this way, a shadow and a mystery even to himself, he will feel most fully the adventure of a new beginning.

  So, his stroll complete, Sam leaves the docks, the gangplanks, the trolleys, tankers and liners echoi
ng with the sounds of departure and arrival, and walks back towards the studio and the city that will lay claim to him, and hold him there, for only a little while longer.

  31.

  George’s Moment

  It is, George knows, one of those moments. Moments that do not come along, he suspects, all that often in life but which may very well determine how that life will be lived. It is the first time such a moment has come into George’s life, but he recognises it immediately. Which is why he’s come to this park, the Kings Domain, on the other side of the railway lines, next to the river, where the sad, transplanted palms struggle against the cold and the windblown soot from the engines. Away from the hammering of typewriters and the cigarette smoke and the talk.

  The course of his life had always seemed simple. Now this. And it’s not the voice of the writer in George to which he is listening at the moment but the voice of the journalist who stands on footpaths, the crowd all around him clutching the newspapers that he has helped write, feeling not just the power of words but the freshness of them, written at midday and in the hands of readers by five. This voice is telling him, and it’s news to George, that he would miss it, more than he knows, if he lost it. And he is suddenly reminded of the wet, shining paint on Sam’s portrait of the old woman and her tent, the painting fresh, not yet dried, the old woman still stomping forward, determined on striding right off the composition itself and looking as though she just might. No sooner painted than viewed. No sooner written than read. He likes that. Everything still as new and exciting to the painter and the writer as it is to the viewer and the reader. And the thrill of standing in the midst of the newspaper’s readers, feeling not just the crowd flowing all around him but that current of communication that newspapers generate, conversations between people who have never met and, in all likelihood will never meet, but who, nonetheless, know one another or feel as though they do.

  It is, at this important moment, this voice that George is listening to. It is the sensations of this George, who stands on footpaths, who sits in trains and trams, or just leans on lamp-posts at street corners reading his newspaper, that he is registering. And as much as he might have sat at the feet of Mr Hemingway and Mr Fitzgerald, he does not feel, when sitting at his writing desk at home, close to Heaven at midnight (as, indeed, a character from Mr Fitzgerald does), writing the stories no one has yet read and may never be read. Rather, when he thinks of that current of newspaper communication he feels close to Life.

  And so, thinking over the editor’s offer, he does not, as he suspected he might, feel the deadening weight of comfort or the locked door of security. Nor does he feel himself being (as those friends at university who called themselves Marxists might have phrased it) dragged into the world of bourgeois conformity, at the expense of the writer. He feels none of this. Instead he feels a kind of calling. For what he feels is not the lure of Heaven but of Life. And this is the importance of this moment, for he knows it calls upon him to choose between Heaven and Earth. And he may already have decided. For what he is realising is that it is not, as he always thought, the solitary world of the story-teller at his desk that calls — but the hammering of typewriters, the smoke, the noise and the daily production of the words that make up the continuing conversation that goes on every day, all around him, on the footpaths and trams and in the trains of the city. Before he even rises from his bench in this sodden park with its suffocated palms (and he wonders if he would simply be like a transplanted palm too, should he leave the country like everyone else), George knows he has made his decision. The moment has come to him, a decision has been made, and the course of a lifetime has been determined. Of this much, at least, he is certain.

  George will become, in fact (and he has no inkling of this at the moment, on his bench, in the cold park, wrapped in his gabardine coat), one of the most famous newspaper editors in the country. His face will lose its youthfulness as faces do. And, in time, it will become a wise face. Even a worn one. Craggy. A face that readers will trust. He will rise to become the editor (sit in the same chair as the current editor, who spoke to George only an hour ago) of the newspaper he has been with for less than a year. But this will not happen until the distant days of the 1960s: when his friend Sam is famous throughout the painting world, when the old lady who lives in a tent has long since died, when Skinner has, indeed, taken his name to the grave, and all that open country and farmland has been transformed into a suburb with all the suburban noises of children, cars and Webster’s factory. George will die suddenly in the mid-1970s (leaving behind a wife and a daughter, and a leafy house in a bourgeois suburb), in the basement of the newspaper offices — and he can have no inkling of this either on this sodden, mid-winter morning — watching the printing presses, and thrilling, as he will each and every day of his working life, to the production of the words that will make up the continuing conversation between strangers familiar with one another.

  His decision made (and happily so), his moment met, George rises from the park bench and makes his way back, a lingering part of him wondering if he will ever know if the Place de la Concorde (as viewed by the solitary writer from the back seat of a taxi) really does glide by in pink majesty. And the George who rises from the bench, with that last lingering thought, suddenly feels older than the George who sat down just a short while before.

  32.

  The Kitchen Sink

  Rita is staring down into the kitchen sink. This spot, this room. This is where she spends most of her days and nights. It is the centre of things — of the activities of the morning, afternoon and evening. The table, the stove and the kitchen sink.

  The stories of whole days of effort and labour are written into these plates as they pass from one side of the kitchen sink smeared with the remains of meals, pass through the water, and emerge on the other, clean and shiny and ready for the whole process to begin again, and again, and again. And, depending on the day and the mood, this can be either an uplifting thought or a depressing one. For it never ceases, the whole process: from the icebox (for, like most houses, this one does not possess a refrigerator; that will come later), from the cupboards and the pantry, to the chopping board, oven, table and back to the kitchen sink for the story of one day to be wiped clean in preparation for another to begin.

  And here, right here where she is standing, is the still point around which it all turns. Where the stories of the day come to be wiped clean in readiness for new stories. For Rita can look at frying pans, layered with tales and memories, and saucepans and the pressure cooker (the one in which the stews and soups are prepared that last for days and which get better with time), and read them as you might a book. She can look at all these things, these implements, these tools of the trade, and she can calculate when they came into the house, how long they have been part of their lives and the dinners that have been cooked on them. The nights, good or bad, or neither good nor bad, but just nights. And suddenly this room is humming, rattling with memories, stacked one upon the other, memories that are all little stories. Stories that, sometimes, she is happy to wipe clean from the plate as she would from her memory, if she could. And others that carry the left-overs of contentment, even happiness. It all passes through here.

  She wonders if anybody else thinks of this place, the kitchen sink and everything around it, in quite the same way. For it wasn’t until recently when a neighbour dropped by, looked around and complimented Rita on the nature of the kitchen, that she did. A kitchen, her neighbour remarked with gravity, is the window onto the house. You don’t see the rest of the house unless you’re invited into it, but the kitchen is where most of the house’s days and evenings are spent, and the nature of the kitchen tells you a lot about the nature of the house.

  She left Rita with that thought, and a nod, and the thought lingered as some thoughts do. And from that point on, Rita started to think of this place differently. As the centre of the house, through which stories come and go. A stage. To most people though, it’s just the k
itchen. No grand stories here. You sit, you eat, you rise and you go. A place where the small talk of the day is exchanged. Nothing more. But following this line of thought, walking from the sink to the table to take the weight off her feet, she tells herself that there’s no reason that the talk should be thought of as small, and the stories as being so little, so insignificant, that they’re not really worth remembering, let alone recording.

  How many times has this room been witness to words that couldn’t wait to be spoken, and words that wish they never had been? The place to which aunts bring their requests in full expectation of them being carried out, where drunks slump and unfamiliar affection dances. These and all the little things that fill your days. And isn’t that enough? Enough to make the talk uttered here and the occasions enacted here, which never seem like much at the time because they’re just the small talk and the unremarkable stuff of unremarkable life, worth looking at a second time? And a third?