Spirit of Progress Page 8

The Day Ends

  Skinner retires to the room that was once his parents’, switches on a small plastic wireless beside the bed and hears soft music, the sort of music that people listened to before the war when they were all younger and stronger, with the productive years still in front of them. But this is now yesterday’s music, just as the walls around him contain yesterday’s portraits and faces. And with yesterday’s music playing in his ears, he sits on the edge of the bed and contemplates the light in Miss Carroll’s tent. If he goes too close to that light, will it lose its glow? This is Skinner’s dilemma, and this is the dilemma that he takes to bed with him as Katherine lies back in her fold-out cot and goes over, once again, the sequence of the day’s events. There was a sound, somebody called out.

  Rita, her feet hitting the hallway floor like the webbed feet of a mother duck, approaches her bed and a night of broken sleep, for the moment lifted by the thought that the roundness of her body might just bring more of the laughter that is both loud and big that she heard tonight and that the future she and Vic are about to enter will be the clean start they’re looking for. And Vic, in the kitchen, raises a pot and pours tea in the same casual manner that the absent father he has never met may very well be doing at this moment, indifferent to the fact of Vic’s being in the world. The sound of Rita’s feet fade in the hallway, taking the weight and roundness of the future with her, while Vic lingers on the image of stick-figure soldiers, the past that might have been his and the future that Rita carries with her that might never have happened.

  In the café with the odd Russian name, the journalist and the painter sit, the newspaper with Katherine’s photograph and the article the journalist wrote today open on the table. The two have been talking for some time, the conversation beginning with Miss Carroll, straying from her to talk of foreign places and that elsewhere that they all long for, then returning, again and again, to the strangely haunting image of the old woman and her tent. Before they step into whatever it is that awaits them in that elsewhere they long for, this painter has resolved that he will catch, on canvas or board or whatever comes to hand, with or without the subject’s consent, an image of the world that they are so intent upon leaving. A lasting image that will be there in years to come when the old lady and her tent have long since given way to houses and streets and factories and shops. Just one image upon which they can all look back and say, ‘That is what we were.’

  And all the time, while the journalist and the painter talk long into the night, and while Webster contemplates a map of the place that will contain his world, the blue streamlined engine, with the bold yellow stripe down the side and the yellow crest at the front like a bird about to take flight, travels through the night in air-conditioned ease. For the Spirit of Progress does not stop for sleep, nor is the Spirit of Progress ever tired. It is out there, it is always out there, speeding through the night where nobody sees it, from sunset to sunrise, covering the distance between here and elsewhere on shiny rails that converge but never meet and never end.

  Part Two

  Wednesday, 17 July 1946

  13.

  Skinner’s Gift

  Skinner has been up since four. He milks his cows twice a day by hand. He is down to a dozen now, and they line up at the gate in the paddock waiting to be let into the milking shed. A lifetime’s habit brings both the cows and Skinner to the gate every morning at this hour when everything is in darkness, even in summer.

  It is light now and he feels the effects of a bad night’s sleep. Skinner has always been a good sleeper, has always slept the sleep of those who rise early and labour through the day. It is Skinner’s dilemma that has kept him awake at night lately and he has made his decision. He will approach that light. At least, he will go to Miss Carroll’s tent and he will present her with a small gift. They have spoken before when she comes for her water, but only briefly. The gift, he imagines, will bring them more to say. Perhaps. A start at least.

  He is standing on the back veranda, where he has nightly gazed upon her light, looking out across his paddocks where his cows munch happily, their udders drained. He holds his gift. Or, rather, three gifts. In one hand is a small metal container of fresh milk, in the other a block of butter and some cheese. His milk, his butter, his cheese. He thought long and hard about what his gift should be, and these items, the product of his labour, are the result of deep consideration. A gift, he thinks, must be carefully chosen because it can mean many and varied things. It can be a welcome, the kind of welcome that anybody who has lived in a community for a long time extends to a newcomer. An act of generosity that is likely not to be repeated. But it might also be the way a small community such as theirs draws others into its circle, making it stronger. There, it says, we have given you this; now you are one of us. Now we have you. For with this kind of gift comes obligation. And those who do not wish to be drawn into the circle of the community (and Miss Carroll gives every indication of being one of those), who have always lived on the edges of a community, are faced with a choice when presented with such a gift: to accept or refuse. It is an awkward moment, for such a gift is an invitation, albeit an intrusive one to the likes of Miss Carroll, and a refusal of it a snub. And snubs are never forgotten. A gift may also be a way of saying thank you in such a way as to close the book, a way of seeing off a debt or an obligation for those who feel the obligation of such communal courtesies. A service has been rendered, it says. A payment made. Book closed. We need not bother each other again. But, and this is the gift that Skinner brings to Miss Carroll, a gift can also simply be an expression of care. A way of saying, I have watched you carrying your bucket to and from my farm; I have watched you walking to and from the butcher’s, baker’s and grocer’s. You have entered my world, you and your light, and my world welcomes you into it.

  This is the way he would like his gift to be received. And with this intention in mind he opens the gate at which the cows line up in darkness and closes it behind him before walking across his paddock towards Miss Carroll’s tent.

  Soon he is standing on the road where the journalist and the photographer stood the previous day, contemplating her tent. It is light, still early, but she will be up. It is, he suspects, both her habit and her pride. It has been her habit, he imagines, to rise early all her life. She has that look. And in age it is pride that keeps her rising early, for it demonstrates both to herself and the world that she is still active and still of use to herself and that world. And confident of all this he calls out a simple hello. But even as he inwardly pronounces it a simple hello, he knows it isn’t. For although they have talked before, this, he knows, is different. This time he has come to her. She has not come for water; they have not passed, as they sometimes have, on the Old Wheat Road. He has come to her. Furthermore, he has come with a gift. This, in short, is a visit.

  Moments after he calls, the flap of the tent opens and she pops her head out. She is wary and at first the look on her face does not speak of welcome, but as soon as she sees it is Skinner the look softens and Skinner draws confidence from this change of expression. He is, all the same, stiff and rigid, his toes pointed slightly inward, leaning to one side, a faint smile spread awkwardly across his face. A manner that says, I am here but if you wish I can go. The manner of someone unused to calling, to making a visit.

  ‘Mr Skinner,’ she says, stepping from the tent.

  ‘Miss Carroll,’ he returns.

  It is their way. Whenever their paths cross, whenever they meet, on the Old Wheat Road or when she comes for water, this is the way they address each other. They do not use Christian names. Always Miss Carroll and Mr Skinner. To use first names, it is tacitly agreed and has been from the start, would be presumptuous. Would be to assume a familiarity that they have not yet earned the right to assume, but which one day they might. It is also a way of establishing a common identity. That they are Old World. That this is the way things were always done in the world they knew. One was formal; one did not assume. One did not play
fast and loose with people’s names either, for to play fast and loose with the names indicated a talent (and talent is a questionable quality in this case) for playing fast and loose with the people who bear those names.

  And so as Katherine approaches Skinner and they begin their conversation, it is as Miss Carroll and Mr Skinner.

  ‘Good morning,’ he says, nodding.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Skinner.’ She glances at the gifts, then adds, ‘I heard you this morning, talking to the cows.’

  What she doesn’t go on to say is that she listens for him every morning, that she has, over the months she has been on the land, become attached to the sound of Skinner bringing in the cows for milking. It is, in the same way that her light is for Skinner, a comfort. What’s more, a comfort that neither of them is aware of providing the other. So the sounds of Skinner at dawn and the sounds of the cows have now become synonymous with her mornings and ease her into the day.

  He looks down at his gift. ‘I thought you might need these,’ and he holds out the milk in one hand and the butter and cheese in the other. He does not say he thought she might ‘like’ his gift, for liking something does not make it necessary. But if something is needed it adds weight to the gift. Makes it appear considered, not a mere fancy.

  ‘They are yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nods, emphatic. ‘The milk’s as fresh as the dew,’ he says, handing them to her. ‘And the butter and cheese are tastier than anything you’ll buy from the grocer.’

  It is then that she smiles, Skinner’s gifts in her hand and arms, a large smile. The kind of smile that does not just come from the lips but the eyes as well. And it occurs to Skinner that she has not received many gifts. That she is not the kind of woman upon whom gifts are often bestowed. And it just might be that she is also acknowledging the care and consideration that have gone into the gift. It is with this smile that Skinner imagines he can also glimpse the previous Miss Carrolls, the Miss Carrolls who eventually lead you back to the girl. All still there, like those dolls that sit inside one another. For Skinner has noticed this in people — how an unexpected pleasure not only lights up people’s faces, but gives you a glimpse of what they were. Releases the child in them. Gifts can also do that.

  ‘Well…’ His hands now empty, Skinner is not sure what to do with them or with himself. For to stay, after the giving of the gift, might be to imply that the gift was merely an excuse to talk. And idle talk, like the use of first names, would cheapen the exchange. So Skinner looks back to his farm as if to imply that work awaits him, when, in fact, the work of the morning has already been completed. Of course, he could find things but the truth is he doesn’t have to leave. But now that his hands are empty and the gift is given, he can find no just reason to stay. ‘Well then…’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Skinner,’ Miss Carroll says, Skinner noting that the smile is still on her face and in her eyes — that glimpse, that shadow of what she once was, the child, the girl, the young woman all still hovering about her.

  But before he leaves, and he is distrustful of the impulse because it was not part of his intention as he walked across his paddock, but all the same, before he leaves he suggests (and it is more in the manner of a suggestion than an open invitation) that when she next comes for her water that she might like tea, adding that he also makes his own cream, creating, as he does, a picture of bread and jam and cream.

  She nods and Skinner notes that there might also be trust in that nod; that if his gift has established anything it has established that. Trust. And so he leaves her standing by the road, one hand holding the pail of milk, her other arm clasping the butter and cheese to her chest.

  She turns as Skinner walks back. A gift has been given, a gift has been received. Trust, quite possibly, has been won. And, he observes as he trudges back to his farm, hope has entered his heart. He has come nearer to the source of the light that draws him out onto his back veranda each night, and upon which he will gaze again tonight, knowing that Miss Carroll has nodded in response to his suggestion and that, having nodded, Miss Carroll, when she next comes for water, will stay for tea and he will create a table of fresh cream, jam and bread when she does. He has come nearer to the source of the light. And the glow of the light, like the petal of a rose, has not been bruised by closer inspection.

  14.

  Webster’s Ground

  On Webster’s ground the scotch thistle and long grass will succumb to the bulldozer. The row of pines that runs alongside the railway lines, which had a reason for being there once, possibly before the lines were laid, a logic that has long since deserted them and left them vulnerable, will tumble. The shrubs and bushes will be swept away. All will bend to the will of Webster.

  Flat ground will follow. The bumps will be smoothed, the hollows that in winter and spring fill with muddy water and which are home to tadpoles and frogs will be levelled. A factory, Webster’s Engineering, will sit upon the flattened ground as soon as the obstacles of nature and the remnants of somebody or other’s farm have been removed.

  It is mid-morning and Webster is standing on his ground, legs wide apart, with the architect’s plans under his arm. The plans have been finished for some time and he waits, ready to supervise the imposition of his will. A bulldozer will soon arrive and Webster is here to greet it.

  Work would have begun earlier. The war has only just finished, however, and bulldozers are hard to find. But Webster has contacts — his other factory in a nearby suburb having been converted to wartime production and Webster having made a tidy sum from manufacturing the bullets for the Owen machine gun, which stopped the Imperial Japanese Army in its tracks in the jungles of New Guinea, dead on the ground, riddled with Webster’s bullets. The Imperial Japanese Army was marching directly towards them all and seemed, in the most uncertain of the sad and violent years, to be unstoppable. But Webster’s bullets, manufactured in the West Essendon plant in the summer of 1942, had other ideas. And Webster is quite proud of that. And frequently reminds his contacts in government and army administration of his contribution and of their debt. And so a bulldozer, at a time when bulldozers are hard to come by, is on the way to where Webster stands, architect’s plans rolled up under his arm, in readiness to meet it.

  He sees the ground as it is and as it will be. Here — and he knows the plans by heart, his photographic memory for such things having snapped the plans in all their detail — will be the factory floor, where the giant crushing machines will sit in rows, where workers will pull on giant levers (between eight-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon, with forty minutes for lunch and ten-minute morning and afternoon smokos) so that the crushing can begin and the noise of production be brought to the suburb that is about to be born. And here, where the pines that have lost their logic and which will soon tumble, will be the offices where the accountants will sit and calculate the worth of the noise. And above it all will rest the mezzanine office where Webster himself will sit overlooking the whole complex, noisy process. Where each day he will thrill to the noise of production until one distant day, inexplicably, the thrill will be gone and Webster will be conscious only of a deep hollowness, a vacancy where the thrill once was.

  But that day, in November 1959, is a long way ahead of him. This morning he is young and his faith in the laws of production, distribution and exchange is strong, and it is still thrilling to watch all of the moving parts come together, and not just the machines on the factory floor but the whole process. A whole world operating by the invisible laws of supply and demand that govern it. As basic as the laws of gravity that hold the planets and stars in their places up there in the sky. For it is this, the production process, that makes a society a society. It is this that puts you on the straight line of History, this that converts scrub into frontier suburbs where lawns and gardens spring up while you watch, this that causes houses to pop up overnight like cardboard cut-outs until it’s not a frontier suburb any more, and the frontier, like lengthening summer-afternoon shadow
s, moves further inland and new frontiers burst into being. It is production that does this. All the rest — song, books, dance and sponge cakes — simply follows. And this is why the ground upon which Webster stands must, this mid-winter morning, bend to his will.

  It is at this moment that the groan of a giant lorry, bearing the promised bulldozer, straining up the very incline that the Spirit of Progress, later that evening with Paddy Ryan in the cabin, will take in one extended, smooth progression, catches Webster’s attention, and he turns from his land to the road. Then it appears, the nose of the lorry and its load, the yellow bulldozer, with, Webster knows, the curious name of Caterpillar stamped on its side. Slowly, the lorry crests the incline, turns off the road at Webster’s corner and comes to a stop, the machine ready to burst free of its restraining chains and eagerly commence its work.

  A team of five workers materialises and Webster walks towards them, his plans rolled up under his arm. Now, he thinks, a dream, years in the planning, a dream that not only includes Webster’s factory site but the land and the mansion of an old farm nearby that will soon become Webster’s estate and from which he will travel every working day through the suburb in his chauffeur-driven Bentley to and from the factory, now this dream that envisions a whole world unto itself can begin.

  15.

  George Is Adrift

  If. The list of ifs gathers in number as George walks with Tess, the woman who owns the gallery, round the large space that will house the exhibition. As she often does, because she is very good at what the times now call public relations, she talks to the newspapers so that notices will appear in the press and people will know that the exhibition is soon to open and will know all about it when it does. And because he is the art critic for the paper, the largest in the city, she is speaking to him. They have met and spoken frequently in his time as critic and every time he meets her it is impossible not to notice that she is from and was obviously born into a world of money, sophistication and social ease. A woman the like of whom George has never met before. She doesn’t parade wealth and all the things that the money she was born into have given her. She doesn’t need to. It is unmistakably there. No jewels, no expensive clothes, just this — and it is the only way George can describe it — this … unassailable self. And the ease of manner. The aura that nothing can touch her because, George imagines, nothing ever has. The very rich, the wise mid-western voice of Mr Fitzgerald is telling him, are different from you and me (the same Mr Fitzgerald who Tess would dearly love to correct if he were still alive). And although she has the gift of speaking to him as if he were a kind of friend or just the likeable type that she would want to talk to anyway, George knows perfectly well that she is only spending her time with him because he is the critic.