Spirit of Progress Read online

  It was one thing that united them both before they ever married, this business of fathers and absence. For Vic’s mother, who lives in a country town not too far away, had come to visit Rita’s mother before they married to unburden herself of her shame. The shame that nobody spoke of, but which was unburdened that Sunday afternoon. And Rita’s mother had told her that she was not alone, that Rita’s father, too, had one day stepped out the front gate of their house in a cloud of pipe smoke and never come back. The two women had nodded to each other in a way that suggested there is a lot of that about. But what Rita’s mother didn’t add was that this absent father never returned because she told him not to. Life, she decided long ago, would be simpler without a drunk drinking all their money away, and so he was dispatched into the realm of the ‘absent father’. It was one of the things they discovered about each other and which drew Rita closer to a ‘yes’ rather than a ‘no’ whenever she posed herself the question of whether she would do it all again. That and the feeling that the past, with all its secret guilt and shame, might now end with them, and that the child and this world they were creating could be the clean start for which they were all searching.

  And although these thoughts occupy her mind, it seems to her, every moment, every tick of the day, she is, nonetheless, happy to be distracted this evening. For there, spread out on the kitchen table in the afternoon newspaper, is a photograph of Vic’s Aunt Katherine. Her left arm is raised. Whoever it is — some journalist — that has come to visit, for whatever reason, Aunt Katherine is having none of it.

  Aunt Katherine frightens Rita. She has always frightened her, from the night she’d told Rita she was a fool to be marrying Vic because Vic was a drunk who would let her down the way drunks always do, and that her life would be a misery because Vic, for all his looks and his charm and his big laugh, was one of those who carried his misery about with him wherever he went and made his misery your misery. And even though this was all given to her in the manner of good advice, it was also frightening in the way that words from priests and nuns are frightening. ‘You’ll rue the day,’ Aunt Katherine had said, and waved her umbrella at Rita, who sat up for hours in her best dress, waiting for Vic to take her out on pay night. Yes, right from the start she was frightened of Aunt Katherine. Just as she was frightened of them all, the whole bunch, the four sisters. They were scary women. And it wasn’t just the look they got in their eyes, and they all had it (as did Vic), that wild Irish look that said ‘Don’t cross me’, although, she concedes, Vic’s mother, Mary-Anne, was gentler with her than the other sisters (and Rita couldn’t help but wonder if this gentleness had entered her nature when Vic entered her life). No, it wasn’t just the look. It was the way they spoke too. They could command whole rooms, these women. Strong women, from another age altogether. Stronger, Rita was sure, than she could ever be. They had words at their fingertips. One moment playing with them like toys, another firing them off like weapons. And when their words didn’t put you in your place, the look that said ‘Don’t cross me’ did. And so Rita has no trouble imagining the journalist who wrote the story (and for some reason she pictures him as young) stepping back pretty smartly when confronted with that look in Katherine’s eyes and a few well-chosen words.

  But as much as she is frightened by Aunt Katherine, Vic isn’t. Aunt Katherine has been around him all his life. His mother’s wacky sister, dropping in at odd times, then disappearing for months, travelling by herself around the country. And while there might have been moments when Vic wondered what she got up to while she was gone, those moments would have been few and brief. For she was always wacky Aunt Katherine, a sort of family embarrassment. A strange old lady with strange ways that she ought to have given up years before. The sort of old lady who turns heads in a crowd for all the wrong reasons. The sort of old lady who embarrasses Vic all too often, especially, Rita muses, when she goes around getting her picture in the evening newspaper so that everybody will know she lives in a tent.

  Rita, who is happy to have her mind taken off the roundness of her body, her body that she is quite sure does not have a million-year-old memory, can imagine Vic’s face when she shows him the paper and the photograph of Aunt Katherine standing at the front of her tent. Vic, who is currently turning his bicycle into their street, will lift his face to the ceiling and roll his eyes in acknowledgment that Aunt Katherine is at it again. And that even now, when she is old and he is grown, her ability to embarrass him is as strong as ever. She could be dying and still do it, leave him embarrassed at her death bed, leave him turning his face to the ceiling and rolling his eyes as she fades away into family legend, as she surely will.

  Rita leaves the paper spread out on the table, Aunt Katherine, the cranky, unnerving Aunt Katherine, commanding the kitchen the way these sisters command whole rooms with their words and their warning looks.

  10.

  Webster Imagines His World

  Webster has neither seen nor met Katherine, Vic, Rita or Skinner, and if he did they would only be significant insofar as they happened to fall within the perimeters of his world. Worthy of notice only because of that. Moving parts in a world of Webster’s making. And even though his world does not yet exist, it does in his mind. He has imagined it, conceived of it, and in that sense it exists. It is sufficient for Webster to imagine something for the rest to follow. A rare quality, and Webster has it. Or so everybody tells him. But, even so, Webster doesn’t need anybody to tell him. He knows he has vision, and has always known. And it is the same quality that his wife first saw on the tennis court years before, a way of playing that never once entertained the idea of defeat and caused her to inwardly proclaim that this man will have what he wants. He is one of those who go out and create something out of nothing, no matter the cost. Factories will be built on barren land. Estates will rise from the dust. Blank spaces on a map will be filled, and all at Webster’s command. Never mind who might have lived there for thousands of years, never mind the farms and the farmhouses that have been there for generations; they are nothing. Spaces on a map, waiting to be filled by someone with vision.

  Webster stands in his study, the map of the area rolled out on the desk in front of him. He is a tall man, broad shouldered, strong, in the prime of life, the hint of grey in his hair (and his head of hair will never leave him, or so his barber constantly tells him with marvel in his Italian voice) his only concession to mortality.

  Smoke from his cigarette rises in the air but he does not notice. Nor does he seem to notice the air going into and out of his lungs, if, indeed, he is breathing at all. For he is concentrating, to the exclusion of everything else (his study, his house, his wife in another room), on the map in front of him. He is both here, and not here. He is, for all the world, not even thinking. Not thinking, but receiving. Did Caesar stand like this in front of his maps before a battle, not thinking but receiving? His plans coming to him whole, complete and flawless? Did Michelangelo lounge on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, inert, inspiration having travelled to him from the stars, the interior of the chapel complete in his mind before he even lifted a brush? Webster thinks so. For Webster has read about the great lives. Those few who come along every now and then and have the power to nudge History in this direction or that, those few who stand before battlefields, chapel walls or blank spaces on a map, receiving their visions so that battles may be won, masterworks completed and blank spaces filled. That’s what vision does. Not that Webster is thinking at the moment, for he is deep in his imagined world and beyond thought.

  For some time this has been his favourite moment of the day. When the work is done (Webster owns a factory in one of the more established suburbs just north of the city), the evening meal is completed and he can go to his study, unroll the map and imagine his world into being. Here he feels like one of those old-world hikers on a hilltop, walking stick in hand, one foot planted firmly on a rock, gazing over a landscape that, for the Websters of this world, has never been gazed upon before. />
  And as he stares at the map he idly notes the name Skinner and other such inconsequential designations that denote farms or vacant property. He sees shaded squares indicating the occasional house or construction grandly titled ‘mansion’. He sees the station, he sees the railway lines, and the baker, butcher and grocer on what is labelled the Old Wheat Road. But above all he sees blank, open spaces waiting to be transformed from nothing into something by Webster’s vision. Neither Katherine’s tent nor the light from it that Skinner is currently observing from his back veranda appear on the map. Even if they did, they would be as inconsequential as everything else.

  For this is where Webster will create his world. He has a nose for the spirit of the times, and it is the spirit of the times that he draws into him like cigarette tobacco when he contemplates his vision. For this world they are all about to step into, this post-war world (a phrase he first heard halfway through the war when people first dared to think that there might, after all, be an end to this endless war, and a phrase that he hears more frequently now), is buzzing with energy just waiting to be channelled by those attuned to the times, by those more attuned to the times than the times themselves. Everywhere he looks there are mothers round with children, children who, like this new world, will need space in which to let loose their energy. And it is to blank spaces like those on the map in front of him that they will take all that energy. And he, Webster, will bring a factory to the place, the people will bring their energy, and together they will create the noise of production. For the suburb that he will create will be young and in need of noise.

  The construction of all of this will begin in just a few days. Tomorrow he will take his pre-war Bentley and drive to the north of the city where his world awaits him. The plans complete, architect’s drawings done, he rolls up the map, secures it with string and leaves it on the desk, rolled up but ready to spring into life at any moment, before turning out the lights of his study where the vision came to him in the first place. From out there, where stars sparkle, planets spin, comets blaze and visions fall to earth for those destined to receive them.

  11.

  Vic Reads the Evening Newspaper

  Vic slows his bicycle and hops off at his front gate. He wheels the bicycle through, his Gladstone bag carrying his tea and soap and swabs propped neatly between the handlebars, and removes the clips from his trousers. Inside, Rita sits and waits, her round body bearing the weight of the child who will become Michael. And even though she doesn’t know it yet (nobody will for some years to come), when the child does arrive and opens its eyes upon the world, she will not just be giving birth to the child alone; she will also, she will later discover, be giving birth to a generation. For just as the world that they are all stepping into will become the post-war world, and just as the phrase itself does not yet come so easily to her mind and to everyday talk, so too the name of this generation, like the child, has not yet been born and not yet been uttered. Eventually, economists and historians, or whoever it is who puts other people’s lives in order and in perspective, will inform her that she was actually part of something much larger than she knew at the time, and that when she saw round women with bodies that had memories that went back a million years all around her wherever she looked, it wasn’t just her imagination. She will not just be giving birth to a child: she will be giving birth to a generation, the Baby Boom. Just as economies have booms (and busts), when the noise of production is everywhere, so too do populations. And sometimes those generations are given a name, as this one will. It will not simply be because their prams and faces will be everywhere; it will also be because of the confidence with which this generation will stride into life, for Michael and his kind will inherit a world of plenty that their parents only ever dreamt about. And the swagger they will adopt will be the swagger that comes with the assumption of plenty. The assumption of a future. The assumption, in short, of eternal Progress. Baby Boomers: a strange phrase, both Rita and Vic will think when they finally hear it, the sort of phrase invented by people who work in suits, in their spare moments when they put their feet up, to amuse themselves.

  Of course, Rita doesn’t know any of this: that her roundness not only contains a child but a generation that will come as close as any generation in History to getting exactly what it wants. Or that its anthem will be Progress, and it will make History its own because it will write it.

  At the moment, Rita is both waiting to give birth to all of this and waiting for Vic. As the front door opens she looks up the hallway, not enough energy to rise. And as Vic enters the kitchen, the memory of the stick-figure soldiers and the fate that might have been his is still in his mind as he gazes upon Rita’s round body, containing the child that might never have been made had that fate been his.

  Without speaking she points to the newspaper, spread out over the kitchen table, and watches while Vic studies the photograph and quickly reads the article. She smiles inwardly as he finishes, his face turning to the ceiling, his eyes rolling and his eyebrows rising, as she knew they would. He shakes his head quietly as he sits and asks Rita how it feels today, the roundness and the weight.

  ‘I’m walking like a duck,’ she says, then adds that she is too tired to stand and demonstrate the nature of this newly acquired duck walk. But there is just enough for a quack, which she delivers slumped in her chair, observing Vic’s grin and registering the boom of his big laugh that Aunt Katherine had so emphatically, and with that look in her eyes, warned her against. In the years to come, in the place they will go to live, that has open spaces so that the child’s long legs will have paddocks and fields to run across and so that the child will grow as naturally as a tree, one night in those not-too-distant years, she will hear Vic’s laugh in a crowd at a party and note that the boom has gone from it. Note that it is loud but not big any more. And this, and the fact that he will be drunk and saying silly drunken things, will make her sad. And it will not be a passing sadness but the kind of sadness that comes to stay when you finally recognise that something is over, that it never lived up to what it could have been, that Aunt Katherine may well have been right, and that the question she posed to herself just before, whether she would do it all again, will be answered with more of a ‘no’ than a ‘yes’.

  But tonight the boom is there in his laugh and his laugh is still big. Tonight she holds on to the hope that this roundness and its weight will bring laughter to the kitchen and, despite her tiredness, laughter rises from her too as her quack subsides. It is, she notes, the laughter of a happy room, laughter with the boom and the life still in it, and perhaps this is what her roundness and weight will bring more of. Laughter with the boom still in it, even if, at this moment, the only boom she knows about is the boom in Vic’s laugh, not the one to which she is about to give birth.

  And it is then that she looks up to see Vic standing in front of her. With the sound of fading laughter still in the room, he takes both her hands, raises her tired frame, lifts her to her feet, puts his arms around her, starts to hum a tune that seems both familiar and new, and begins to dance. What’s this, she almost says. What’s this? And she can feel that there’s a light in her eyes. A hint of the light that was in her eyes when they first met, and which she was convinced everybody could see. The light that announced to the world that she’d met someone, without need of saying a word. That she was in love. That she had finally passed over the burden of her impossible innocence and was entering the world of experience. Everybody knows, she thought back then. Everybody.

  And she was right. They’d have to have been blind to miss it. Love is a light. And with that light back in her eyes now, she also finds energy that wasn’t there a minute ago. Suddenly she’s dancing. Slowly, smoothly (for Vic, and how could she have possibly forgotten, is a born dancer), they move around the kitchen, circling the table with the newspaper and Katherine’s photograph open on it, swaying to this new tune that Vic half hums, half whistles, all of which swells in her ears until it seems as if ther
e’s a band in the room. Vic, in fact, heard the tune only that day. It was a foreign-sounding song and when it was finished the wireless announcer said the name of it, in a foreign language, but it meant nothing to Vic. And that’s all Vic knows about the song. Although he’s only heard it once, it has stuck with him the way some songs do. So much so that he can hum and whistle it, note perfect. And he always will. Although he will occasionally hear the song again, he will not need to hear it in order to remember it. It will simply stay with him and he will find himself whistling it from time to time through the years, and one day Michael will ask him what that song is and all Vic will be able to say is that it’s a foreign thing about the waves dancing on the sea and that he doesn’t know anything more about it. This song will stay with Vic for different reasons. He’s good with melodies. He can hear something once and repeat it. Note for note. But most of all this song will stay with Vic (and he doesn’t need the words to tell him this) because it is a song about longing. Or that’s how he hears it, for Vic is at heart a sentimentalist and he brings all his longing to the tune when he whistles and hums it, as he is now. And so he and Rita move, swaying and shuffling slowly, until the song fades and he returns her to the kitchen chair from which he had lifted her a few moments ago.

  And with the fading of the music and the end of the dancing they both turn back to the newspaper and the image of Aunt Katherine marching across the sodden grass of her land, arm raised, as if she were, for all the world, about to march right off the page, through the door, down the hallway and into the kitchen.

  12.