Spirit of Progress Read online

  One day, towards the end of their winter, he proposed that they run away together. She said it was impossible. Because it was. Best to let things stay as they were. For as long as their time allowed. She had said this knowing that they could not stay as they were, that their time was borrowed or stolen and had been dwindling from the start, that they had more than likely stayed as they were for as long as affairs allow, and that soon everybody would scatter anyway. With this in mind, she had silently resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting. This much, at least, she would be able to control. Although she never breathed a word of this to Sam. They hibernated that winter. Then, with the hint of spring in the air, they parted. Or did they both simply bow to the inevitable, and did she merely make the first move?

  She leaves the front of the café (to which she sometimes went with Sam), follows the dark lane, turns at St Paul’s and is soon standing at her stop waiting for the tram home, the evening crowds of office workers disappearing into the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station. It’s that time of day when her thoughts always turn to the previous winter. That time of day when she had always just come from seeing Sam, but doesn’t any more. That empty time of day that she fills with memories, with conversations that took place and those that never did, but perhaps should have. A year ago, this time of day, she would have just been returning from being with him. The air would be crisp and clear, or damp and rainy. She rarely noticed. This, a year ago, would have been their time. Now their time is over. And, knowing that she will never again hear him say, ‘C’mon, let’s have a drink’, she feels that rush of old feelings running through her body. It happens every day. And this evening she is thinking of how it all ended. At first she can’t remember. Not clearly. Not who said what, or who said it first. Or how long it took. Ten minutes? Twenty? It’s hard to tell now, it was hard to tell then, because it all passed in a sort of dream. But as her tram approaches, its number glowing in the wintry twilight, she says quietly, ‘Yes, that was it. The Dancing Man.’

  At least, that was what they called him, Tess and Sam. And she steps onto the tram with these three words on her lips, oblivious of the crowds disappearing into the station and the passengers around her.

  They were at the pictures. A matinee, of course, since theirs was a daytime affair. The picture theatre with the ceiling, the famous ceiling. The same theatre that the Americans had filled every night of the week, the air always thick with the smell of chewing gum. Yes, that was it. They were at the pictures. Sitting in the dark. Neither of them speaking. Just staring up at the screen when this newsreel came on. Peace, this voice was saying. Peace at last. And a street in Sydney (they later discovered) was suddenly spread out across the screen in front of them. Although it could have been any city that day. For the scene was the same across the country. Crowded streets. Never so crowded before, and never so crowded again. Or so it seemed to her then. Streets filled with all of those who had come through the war and now just wanted to live. Faces laughing for the camera, waving to the camera, waving to Tess and Sam, and everybody else sitting in the dark. And, all the time, shredded bits of paper falling through the air and landing on the ground already carpeted with the paper scraps of the time that felt as though it would never end and that finally did, and suddenly, because that’s the way time works. Endless one minute and all over the next. Among those laughing for the camera there was the occasional steady, still pair of eyes that were too tired to laugh for the camera, but thought they ought to be there to take in the scene, because, well, it was History.

  Then the crowd retreated. Except for a lone figure in a suit and a hat, and a few revellers in the background looking on. This figure, standing in the street strewn with the last scraps of the sad and violent years, smiling at the camera. And then he tipped his hat, greeting the new day (and it occurs to Tess, staring blankly about the tram, that it possibly was morning — the city in the newsreel had that look), and suddenly started this funny little dance with quick, light steps, all the time with his eyes on the camera and the audience out there in the dark. And then this skip to finish. Did he click his heels? She can’t remember. Then he was gone. Back into the anonymity from which he came. The anonymous Dancing Man. Leaving the street empty, except for the few stragglers and the paper scraps of a time that had finally been blown away.

  And the moment it was finished, this little dance of his, Tess knew that this would be the image, above all others, that they would recall, all of them, everybody, when they thought about the way the war ended. The anonymous Dancing Man, who appears and disappears. Doing all the things the moment requires. He tipped his hat because at such moments one ought to tip one’s hat. There is a protocol, either consciously or unconsciously recognised, that ought to be followed, at such moments. Or so Tess reasons. And so he tipped his hat. And so he danced, because the moment required something like a dance. A little comedy, even. And it wasn’t a jubilantly triumphant dance, but a light quickstep. No, not triumphant, just the dance of someone giving himself leave to be carefree again. And then a little skip, because the moment required a skip. Like someone breaking out into a flourish or clicking his heels at an appropriate moment, not because the movement comes spontaneously but because it is expected and the moment wouldn’t be complete without it.

  As Tess pieces this all together (whether accurately or not, she’s not sure, for it has been a year), vaguely aware that the tram is nearing her stop, she concludes once more, as she did in the picture theatre sitting next to Sam, that that five or ten seconds of newsreel footage would have taken infinitely longer to film. That it was too good. Too apt. That these things don’t just happen. But, then again, maybe they did. Maybe the Dancing Man just popped up and disappeared in the time it took to film and watch it. But she suspects not. The lifting of the hat, the dance, the little skip, the snappy exit back into anonymity would have been performed again and again, she suspects, so that all the component movements were just as they ought to be, each one flowing into the other to create the choreographed spontaneity that the moment required.

  And afterwards, out on the street and squinting in the late winter light (that carried with it a hint of the coming spring), a street like the one in which the Dancing Man had performed his little jig, something else ended. The end that was always coming but which surprised them anyway. As they walked along the street it was the urgency in Sam’s steps that she noted. At first she couldn’t understand why she so noticed this urgency, or why she chose to call it urgency, until she realised that it was the step of someone who was walking away. Impatient to get away. Someone who was walking into a future that, for reasons that could never be changed, did not include her. She wanted the impossible. For everything to go on the way it always had. And as long as the war continued, as long as they lived in a closed city and nobody could leave, everything would go on as it always had. But the war was over now and everything would change. The Dancing Man told them so. It was over now and soon they would all scatter, and the impossible would give way to the inevitable. That, at least, was how she read and understood the urgency in Sam’s steps. And she remained convinced that she was right. The end of the affair was upon them. Its time had come. The world called to him and he was eager, impatient, to join it. And while his steps, she was convinced, were moving urgently forward, hers longed to turn back. And it wasn’t so much the differences in their natures, this looking forward and looking back, but the nature of the circumstances. Until then the possibility of leaving existed only in a world of speculation. But all that had changed. He was marching forward, she was looking back. He was leaving and she was never going to leave with him. Her life was here. Theirs was an affair, a love affair, but an affair, and while the war was on they had managed to give fate the slip. But not any more. The fact of the end would have to be faced. And for Tess, who had already resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting and control at least this much in an uncontrollable world, the sooner the better. And this was not, as
she now sees it, a callous or cold-hearted decision, but a necessary one. She simply could not go on with the shadow of the end always hanging over them.

  And later that same afternoon, back in his room, she lay watching him boiling tea, restlessly, she judged, an air of unspoken thoughts hovering round him, and finally said what had to be said.

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’

  He’d looked up from pouring the water, and, she imagined, toyed with asking what this ‘it’ was, but didn’t because it wasn’t necessary. Which was all the confirmation she required. In fact, in the years to come, when Tess recalls this afternoon, she will not be entirely sure who spoke and who said nothing in response. And she will conclude from this that either one of them could have. That they were both thinking it, and that it didn’t really matter in the end who said it.

  ‘The last time, I mean.’

  Again, he had stared back and just when she thought he wouldn’t reply at all, he did.

  ‘Yes, why not? May as well be now as later. No point…’

  ‘…dragging things out.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  They were both talking at the same time. Even thinking the same thoughts. At least, that is the way Tess remembers it. She’d rolled over onto her back, with a vague sensation of September in August and the sad thought that they’d never share the spring, that theirs had been a winter affair and would stay that way.

  The tram shudders to a stop. Darkness swallows a man in an overcoat and hat.

  They were very sensible, in the end.

  ‘I saw it tonight, a glimpse of the end,’ she’d added. ‘You could have walked right onto the nearest boat. If there’d been one. Couldn’t you?’

  To which, and she read this in his eyes, he silently signalled that they could both walk onto the nearest boat. But they’d already gone over that impossibility again and again, and so he never said it.

  ‘So,’ she went on, filling the silence, ‘as you say, may as well. There’s no point hanging about when something is over. Is there? Not when you’ve known the best of things.’

  She said this, she recalls, the tram now slipping into the quiet inner suburb in which she lives, not so much as a statement of fact, not so much as a rhetorical question, but with the faint, residual hope that there might be. A point, that is. At least this is the way she remembers her tone as she finally steps from the tram and walks towards her street. But he had just agreed. And that was that. The impossible bowed to the inevitable. And she can’t even remember now if she spoke or just nodded.

  That was when she’d got out of bed and dressed. And it was while she was dressing that she caught the faint shadow of regret in his eyes, and knew she was right. This was the moment. Best to part with regret in their eyes. Her instincts were true. Had she chosen to stay he would have followed her. But she didn’t.

  She’d almost cried then. Almost. And feared she might at any moment. And so she spoke to take her mind off the crying, or the possibility of crying. And she composed her thoughts as she spoke.

  ‘It’s right. You’ll always have one eye on the next boat and one eye on me. And I want both of them looking at me.’

  Yes, she nods silently to herself, their little balloon world had been on a string, and she knew she held the string, but she’d let it go all the same. Yes, that had been it. And she’d looked around the room, trying to memorise it all, knowing that this was the last time that she would be his, he would be hers, and they would be theirs. And just as first-time touch is a species of feeling on its own, never to be repeated, so too is last-time touch. As much as they would meet from that point on, even touch with a shake of the hands or a kiss to the cheek, it would always be a different level of meeting and a different species of touch altogether.

  She’d mustered one last smile.

  ‘Now, you just try to be nice when we meet from now on.’

  She still doesn’t know why she said that. Just to lighten things, she guesses. Just to make it easier. It was then that he’d moved towards her, his arms out, and at that point she’d stepped back. No, that backward step was saying, ‘This really is it.’ This really is the end. She knew she could only ever say these things once. And so, having said them once and once only, she had fled into the long, arching street that ran down the hill opposite Royal Park.

  Yes, she was thinking, now standing at the front of her house, its lights shining in the wintry dark, that was how it ended: the war, Sam and Tess. It all ended with the Dancing Man. He with the regret still in his eyes. They having known the best of each other. The perfect moment.

  That was almost a year ago. Another year, another winter. But she knows she will carry that time with her, throughout all the years and winters to come. She will carry it all. Everything that was said and not said. She will remember days as they were, and she will create them as they never happened. But she will always defer to the wisdom she possessed that afternoon, when she knew that their time was up and the moment of perfect parting was upon them.

  9.

  Rita at Home

  At the age of twenty-five, Rita is still young but sitting in the kitchen with the weight of the child inside her she is, more than ever, conscious of drawing away from her youth. Conscious of looking back upon herself as she was not so long ago: a young woman, still a girl really, about to be married. Innocent. Extraordinarily innocent. Innocent, she suspects (observing the girls around her who have lived through this war and who have a look in their eyes of knowledge and experience that she never had at their age), in a way that will never come again, for the world is now beyond such innocence. So when she married Vic four years ago, when the times were at their most violent and sad and it seemed (in Rita’s imagination, which her mother always called too fanciful) as if bombs would drop on them at any moment, she was conscious, above all, of handing over her innocence. The marriage was not simply an act of love, of young girlish love, but an act of trust. Vic knew things she didn’t. He knew the life of the street: paper rounds, odd jobs, bringing money from the moment he could into a house that didn’t have much. And gangs. They all had a gang. From an early age he’d known the life of the street. Too early, she thought. Was he ever a child? Somehow she couldn’t picture it. No, he was born into the life of the street. Made old fast. A rough-nut, he calls himself. Which is why he knew things she didn’t. He knew the grown-up world and he would teach her and from this she would grow out of her innocence (because you can’t stay innocent forever) and into what she might become. And this is what made the marriage not only an act of young, impossibly girlish love, but an act of trust as well. A trust that has been returned and not been returned. An experience that was both worth the acquisition and not worth the acquisition. A knowledge that is worth having but, at the same time, one she would have been better off without, what with all the drinking, the fights, and all those miserable, silent mornings afterwards that were all too common. Still, it is this knowledge and this experience that enables her now to look back on that girl she was and recognise her innocence through the eyes of her older self. This is what distance does, she tells herself. It lets you see things. And by things she means what they were and why they were, and what they both might yet become.

  This is also the very distance that the young journalist and the painter, whom she has never met (but who are currently talking in the café with the odd Russian name), wish to acquire when they finally travel far from this place and have the experience of looking back and seeing things the way distance lets you.

  For Rita, distance means looking back and seeing the young girl that she was handing over, like the bud of a spring flower, the bloom that she might become in an act of trust that requires the kind of innocence she doesn’t have any more. And just as the distance enables her to see this, it also raises the question, would she do it again? It is a question she has asked herself often enough now, and the answer is always the same at this stage of her life: no and yes; yes and no. Never again (if she
were to go back and start again, as she has in her mind time after time). Always the same.

  So as much as she might have been thinking about bombs falling on them at any minute back when the war seemed as though it would never end and her imagination ran away from her the way it always has, she was also looking at the world through the eyes of a young bride asking herself if she will bloom or wither, like all those withered lives around her. Now she is about to become a mother and the question still hangs in the air. At the moment the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ are not so important, for she is about to take the next step. This is the step, she tells herself, that she has been preparing to take all her life.

  But as much as she tells herself that her body was born to be round, and as much as everybody tells her — the doctors, the young wives of the street, the old women whose children have long gone from them — that her body was born to be round, and as much as they tell her that this body of hers has a memory that goes back a million years and knows exactly what it’s doing, there is also a part of her that is convinced that her body is different, that it was not born to be round, that it does not have a memory that goes back a million years, and, unlike all the other bodies of all the other young wives, this one doesn’t really know what it’s doing after all. For just as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from Vic’s lips, the feeling of being round and heavy and the idea of being a mother do not come naturally to Rita. Her body, she is sure, has a poor memory. And, unlike all the young wives she sees (and she sees round young wives everywhere now), she is convinced that she will have to learn to be a mother more than the rest. That it will not come naturally and that the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Mama’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, will ring strangely in her ears as will ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ in Vic’s.