Spirit of Progress (15 page)

I
t is not the first time that George has heard the phrase ‘post-war’. It had been used throughout the war, especially when people began to think that they might actually win and that the war, which some predicted might go on for years, if not decades, might actually end. He hears the phrase dropped often around the office now, especially by journalists who not so much pride themselves on, as define themselves by, the ready use of such phrases. They slip from their tongues with ease, these phrases. As though … and George is staring at the face of the newspaper’s editor (leaning back in his chair, eyes briefly on the ceiling) … as though certain people are custodians (however chosen) of the new phrases that are continually entering the language, and it is through them that phrases such as ‘post-war’ reach people such as George, and through George enter the talk of the general population until soon everybody is using them as though they always were. All of which is leading George to
speculate upon the origin of the phrase, for it must have been first used by somebody, sometime. But as the questions of who, why, where and when pass through his mind, George tells himself to concentrate because the editor is talking to him.

He is outlining plans for a new weekly magazine that the paper will soon publish. An old, weekly magazine for country readers has died a natural death and this will replace it. He has used the phrase ‘post-war’ because the magazine will capture the spirit of this new world. All its excitement, its sense of possibility. New horizons. Change. And here the editor looks directly at George. For the world has changed. The bombs and shells of the war didn’t just blow away old buildings, they blew away the old ways too. And, whether we like it or not, we’re entering a new world, with new ways, new phrases and new magazines. Magazines such as this one, the plans for which he is outlining to George. It will, he suggests, be called something in keeping with the spirit of the times. Something like, and his eyes roll back towards the ceiling, ‘Horizon’. And the editor ponders this for a moment as though he has just spoken it for the first time (which he probably has) and gives a satisfied grunt.

It is a confirmation, and an indication to George (who is wondering why he has been called in), of how things do and will continue to work in this place. On the hop. Someone gazes briefly upward for inspiration, the word ‘Horizon’ appears, and a title is born for a magazine that may very well have been dreamt up in the same way. And while George is contemplating all of this, he is still no
clearer in his mind as to why he has been called into the editor’s office and why the editor should take so long telling him of the plans for this magazine that will be the face of the new world.

It is then that the editor tells George in a casual but calculated way that he wants him to be the editor of this new magazine. George, who has been at the paper for less than a year and couldn’t even type when he arrived. Not everybody agreed with the choice, he adds, but what’s an editor if he’s not going to follow his instincts? Yes, he says, presumably summarising objections that have already been aired by others, George is young. He is new to the job. And he’s never edited anything in his brief newspaper life. But it is precisely because he is young that the editor has chosen him. The rest, he informs George, will follow. It can be learnt. But you can’t learn youth. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. And George has it. And this post-war world will be a young world. What’s more, George reads. Has a university degree. And there is a large part of this editor — in his early fifties — that is sufficiently old world, old fashioned enough to respect this (although George, in his brief time at the paper, has learnt to keep quiet about that, as, indeed, he has learnt to keep quiet about his ambitions to become a writer).

The editor, looking at his watch, tells George that he doesn’t have to decide right away. Adds that George quite possibly has plans to leave the country as soon as he can, like everybody else (which is possibly another reason why George has been asked because there is a mounting feeling that a whole generation will emigrate and slip
through the country’s fingers the moment there are boats to sail in), but if he wants it the job is his, just let him know in a few days.

And with that, and with George saying very little, the meeting is over. George returns to his desk, and, with the hammering of typewriter keys all around him, tries to concentrate on what he was doing before his appointment with the editor. A hardback publication, Mr Hemingway’s short stories, sits face up on the desk. There are new books on the desk as well, by new writers, for this new world. They constitute the future he has always imagined for himself. And whenever he imagined himself in the future it was always as the solitary writer. Now this, which he had never imagined or considered a possibility, for the newspaper was always just something along the way. Part of his plans, but only part. And so that small pile of books stares back at him inquiringly, and a silent question now hangs in the air, which he would contemplate if only the noise of the place would let him.

I
t is the golf course that draws Vic. He has always been drawn to golf courses and this will remain the case all his life. The golf course, to Vic, with its rolling fairways and distant greens, is where the world becomes wide. There are only two occasions in the regular round of Vic’s life — stepping out onto the first tee of a golf course and being in the cabin of an engine just as it leaves the city and he enters either country darkness or a blue horizon — when the world acquires width. When space enters his life and he becomes expansive with it. Vic is not a religious person. He is, in fact (although baptised into the Catholic Church, and his aunt a nun) determinedly unreligious. But this feeling of expansiveness, when the world becomes wide, for someone without a religion, is almost a religious feeling.

And this is why Vic has walked right past Aunt Katherine’s tent, even though he has come specifically to see her. He had leaned his bicycle against a paddock
fence and was turning towards Aunt Katherine’s block of land when he noticed the long row of tall pines and gums and saw, in between the trunks, what he instantly knew was a long, rolling fairway. Out here? And while part of him was wondering what on earth it was doing there, the other part was drawn to it. He stops at the fence and gazes upon the domain that brings with it that feeling of expansiveness.

And as he stands there, occasionally looking back to Aunt Katherine’s land and taking in the paddocks, farmland, scattered houses and distant flour mills, the thought occurs to him that he could live in a place like this. And it is not simply the golf course but that sense of things opening up, as when he drives into the sunset or the sunrise. And it’s a feeling he doesn’t have in the inner-city suburb where he and Rita and the child who will be born in a few months live. A cluttered suburb, he now thinks, not far from where he was born and where he did most of his growing up. No, he doesn’t have this feeling there as he does here. And it’s all something of an intriguing surprise. A discovery. And what Vic can’t know at the moment as he stands by the golf-course fence (because it has not happened yet) is that what he is feeling, this impulse, this intimation that he could live in a place like this, is not his alone. That it is, in fact, characteristic of the time they are all entering. All the Vics and all the Ritas and all the children they will bring into the world will come to places such as this. It will be a fresh start. They will leave the old world behind, as well as old times, those sad and violent years, and they will
strike out to cheap, open country such as this place, where the children they are bringing into the world can run all day and acquire long legs. No, Vic’s is not a singular impulse. It is a collective one. But he doesn’t know this yet because the movement out, from the old to the new, from the inner suburbs to the fringes of the city, hasn’t happened yet.

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.

S
o 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 echoing 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.