Spirit of Progress (18 page)

She follows his departure, contemplating all of this, until he is gone. She then turns back to the gathering, observing the elderly woman she bumped into just a few minutes before and noting that she has found who she was looking for. And as Tess stares at the young man standing beside her, she realises that he is oddly familiar. She recalls him from the previous day. And suddenly she is looking at the elderly woman in the Victorian dress in the light of this recollection. This young man had visited the gallery on behalf (if awkwardly) of his aunt. Could she really, she whom Tess had seen as just anybody’s grandmother, be the same woman who now dominates the far wall of the gallery? But as soon as the thought occurs to her, the elderly woman and the young man leave. They are no sooner in front of her than they are gone.

Again, there is that feeling of being surrounded by a freak-show, and, what’s more, being one of the freaks. Strange pictures. The sort of things bad dreams throw up, and that stay with you throughout the day when you wish
they wouldn’t. Perhaps that’s it, that it’s like being in a room full of bad dreams. Your own, and everybody else’s.

Vic doesn’t like these paintings. Besides, paintings aren’t his go. And he still can’t shake off the feeling that whoever did them (and there seem to be as many artists as there are paintings — although, in other ways, they could all be the one artist) doesn’t really like people all that much. Not people like Vic, anyway. In fact, he gets the feeling, just looking at the paintings, that they see people like Vic or Paddy Ryan as a sort of enemy. Or, at least, hostile. But he’s got to admit that they stay with you, these pictures. That they just don’t go away. And that takes something.

And, once again, the way they talk, of paints and brushes, boards and canvas (for he has been listening to conversations here and there as he walks round the room) reminds him in an odd way of the talk in the sheds when drivers get together. The comparing of notes, the different styles of driving. And so even though he imagines he could easily be one of the freaks in the show, and even though he imagines that these artists don’t particularly care for the Vics of this world, might even see them as hostile, they might not be all that different after all.

The idea of doing something again and again until you’re doing it as well as anybody can, until it becomes a kind of art, returns to him. The thought that perhaps his art was there, right under his nose all the time, but he never noticed it because it was just his job. Maybe, it just took the chance of mixing with the likes of this crowd to see it. And suddenly you’re not just going to work any
more but
doing
something, something that allows you to look up at the sky and the planets and the stars and not feel small. And perhaps he never saw that something for what it was until now.

It’s a thought that, depending on his mood and depending on the day, can make sense or just be plain silly. Something he could treat with utter seriousness (especially here, tonight, in this room) or something that, on another day, he could laugh at. Like those bright ideas you get when you wake in the middle of the night but which aren’t all that flash when the sun comes up. At the moment, though, he sees no harm in thinking like these painters all around him. Tonight, Vic is not laughing at the idea that engine driving could be an art. Tonight it is a perfectly reasonable proposition. And he sips his beer, content that it is
not
one of those bright ideas you get when you wake in the middle of the night and which don’t survive the sunrise.

It is while he is swilling these thoughts around with the beer that he hears Aunt Katherine’s voice behind him, and returns to the noise of the crowd from which he’d been sealed off by his thoughts. She has seen enough, she is telling him. She wants to go. She’s seen what she came for. And it is neither a question nor a command. It is simply assumed that, having announced her wishes, they will now leave. For the hand that held the hand will always retain certain rights.

And it is then, as they edge their way through the crowd, that Vic catches the eye of the woman he met the previous day. The woman who organised all of this and
who gave him the invitations to this night. She is looking from Vic to Katherine and back to Vic. And while it is clear that she recognises Vic, she also appears to be asking: is that her? And did I miss her because I only saw somebody’s grandmother?

Then they are gone, for Katherine cuts her way through the crowd in the same way that she cuts through nonsense, and they are soon standing on the footpath outside the gallery, Tess’s question left floating in the air with the gathering clouds of cigarette smoke.

And there, not more than ten feet away (and whom Katherine does not notice because she has seen enough and is eager to leave), is the painter who presented Katherine to the world as a wacky old woman and got it all wrong, or, depending on who you are, got it right and caught Katherine and her tent in one go; the painter who is reading a letter and who, in turn, has not looked up and not noticed Katherine, so absorbed is he in the letter that he seems to have withdrawn from this world altogether and into another. Katherine and the painter do not notice each other. Their paths have crossed once and will never cross again. All that will remain will be the painting.

No, no. Sam is repeating the sentiment over and again. No, he never thought such things. It is the nature of this town, of those who know or think they know of their affair. And the times. People will say things, and for the slightest of reasons and for the worst of reasons other people will choose to believe them and pass their beliefs on to other people as though passing on fact. That — and
Sam is already composing, as he reads, the letter he will write to her in response — is how rumours begin.

This is what he will say to her: that he never doubted her. That is what he will write. But it is a lie. The
right
lie. For the fact is he knows he did doubt her, briefly, and he is ashamed of it. He is ashamed because there was never any reason to and because part of him had succumbed to the pettiness of rumour and the pettiness of this town. But he always maintained his silence and whatever his thoughts may have been nobody ever heard them because he never spoke of them. And so, mentally composing the letter he will write to her, he tells her, ‘No, no. I never thought such things,’ even though he knows it is not all of the truth.

But it will come to be the truth. The messy bits will be lost and forgotten in the years to come. Years that will be crowded years, in which the details of their days together will fade, and what was once partly true will become wholly true.

What he doesn’t realise as he is mentally composing this letter is that it will be the first of many letters they will exchange over the years. And, although they will meet, from time to time, at social and official functions, it will be the letters that will remain their link and maintain their connection with these days, their memories of which will discard the messy bits and what was once partly true will become wholly true. The right lies will prevail.

The ‘ifs’ have ceased to mount for George. Whatever vague romantic thoughts he may have had about Tess, the
woman who has gathered all of this together into a record of a place and a time, and however playful they may have been, he doesn’t entertain such thoughts any more. And not just because he observed, across the room, from a distance, Tess pass an envelope to Sam: quickly, furtively, when nobody was watching, so nobody would see. But somebody did. It was the exchange of two lovers, or two people who were once but aren’t any more. All the same, the exchange of two people who know each other sufficiently well for exchanges between them to require speed and secrecy. For the exchange to be urgent. All of which George observed, unobserved himself, from a safe distance. And what was most interesting to George was that, for a moment, during the swift exchange, the fortress of Tess’s face fell, the cool detachment that he always imagined only Swiss schools and money could buy gave way, and for a moment she risked being spotted as just another woman in love. For at the heart of the risk was the danger of being spotted, and the danger of being spotted brings with it the possibility of a knowing smile on the faces of those who see. And, written into the smile, ridicule. There is no shortage of spying eyes that would take satisfaction in seeing the lady fall victim to ridicule. It is that kind of town, and Tess just their kind of sport. But they missed their chance. George was quick to scrutinise the surrounding groups, and nobody, he is convinced, saw it. Their secret is safe. And as he watched Sam leave and as he watched Tess’s lingering eyes upon his departing form, he was filled with more admiration for her than he had ever been. The lady had risked it. You
can’t hide love, George is thinking. You just can’t. And the romantic in George (which is a considerable part of him) is suddenly seeing love as a giant storm that scatters all before it. A force, indifferent to the damage it does. A force that affects everybody in equal measure, even the very rich who are meant to be different from you and I. A force that is, in the end, the great leveller.

So the ‘ifs’, as playful as they only ever were, have ceased to mount and been replaced by admiration. But not without a certain sadness. For there is a part of George that has always conceived of his life in terms of one single, pure, all-consuming love, the making of him and the destruction of him — and there is another part of George that is sure he was never born to receive such love. And it is this part that prevails. So the ‘ifs’ have been replaced by admiration. That and the protective impulse of a friend. Which is odd because he has never counted her a friend before. But maybe he does now. Her secret is with him, and her secret is safe. And, in fact, they will, over the years, become friends. Not close friends. Not close enough to share any more secrets than the one he now possesses. But friends. For just as he will rise through the newspaper world, she will become the grande dame of the city’s artistic life. Young men and women will visit her. They, eager to impress; she the accommodating hostess at the centre of her salon with an eye for the real thing and the knowledge to guide the untutored eyes of those she gathers into her circle. In this way their paths will cross frequently. And friendship, of a kind, will follow. Indeed, there will come a time, in
the distant days of the 1970s, when he will observe her at an exhibition such as this, aged, but in the unmistakably stately way that the Tesses of this world age, surrounded by young artists eager to impress, and he will remember the night she pressed, furtively and urgently, an envelope into the hands of a young man, who, at that time, was no older than the young people who will surround her. And he will be happy that the list of ‘ifs’ (if ever so playfully compiled) never amounted to anything, for if it had he might never have received her friendship. For, and this he will learn in time, the transition from lover to friend is rarely accomplished.

He will be, with Tess, the last to leave this evening. And together they will shut up shop. Together they will close the doors on the gallery and the exhibition that is a record, a kind of composite picture, of the place they’ve all been stuck in (and which the likes of Sam can’t wait to leave) and of the sad and violent years that locked them all in.

W
henever he imagined his day of departure, Sam inevitably asked himself who would be there directly below him on the docks when he looked down from the ship’s railing. Now he knows. Nobody and everybody.

It is the departure he imagined to be the most fitting, the most appropriate manner of taking his leave of the place that made him and turned on him, that nurtured him and suffocated him, and which would have killed him bit by bit, day by day. A small world, yes, in all the meanings of things small … and yet the most significant thing he will ever know. It is a complex farewell. An act best performed without words. Without the need of conversation or gesture. No distracting chat or small talk. No embraces, no waving of the hand. Just the fact of going. Of leaving everything you fought against for so long, but the experience of which you wouldn’t and couldn’t have done without. A fact that needs to be understood and felt in silence. A solitary departure.

But all around him there is the usual sound of departure: music, which he can’t place, coming from somewhere; those leaving calling out to those being left below, words of farewell being thrown upwards and words of farewell being tossed down — all mingling into an incomprehensible humming sound somewhere in between. And, it seems to Sam, that among all this noise and movement he is the only still and silent figure. And this is as it should be. A solitary departure. The wayfarer setting forth.

But he’s not alone. For when he looks down he sees them all there. Tess, as she might be, either waving or just staring. George, calling out something that is lost in the swirling hum of farewell. And the others. The whole bunch. Those who’d stuck it out in this city during the war along with Sam, and who have either already left or soon will. The best of the place, those who will discover in time that they were better than they knew. Artists and friends, faces that will come back to him randomly over the years, faces that will live long or die young but which will always remain exactly as they are now in Sam’s mind. For he will never meet most of them again and although he will visit this city he has reluctantly called home for just on a quarter of a century, it will cease to be the home it was. And the elsewhere to which he is going will both replace that home and never replace it. And home itself, the very idea of it, will become something that requires thought and reflection, whereas until now he has always taken it for granted.

So, they are there, the whole bunch of them — and
they are not there. There is conversation and small talk, and there isn’t. What might have been said is just as much a fact, a state of affairs, as that which has been said. Like Sam’s invisible wave, the ghostly hand that is raised in farewell to the phantom assembly below, amid the now frantic waving all around him, and the kisses blown and yet to be blown. Whether he likes it or not, this is both a solitary farewell and a crowded one.

And, while he was involved in speculative goodbyes, somewhere in between waving his phantom hand in farewell and receiving phantom farewells, he has missed the moment of severance, when the last of the visitors left the ship, when the gangplanks were lowered and the cord was cut. That moment when the streamers snapped because the ship is now moving, and what
was
begins to recede, and what will
be
begins to loom.

And so the dock begins to recede, as, from the dock, does the ship. For, if they were there, that phantom farewell party of Sam’s, they would see how quickly a ship disappears. This is always the way it seemed to Sam on those many mornings he strolled the docks watching the ships depart. The size of a block of flats one moment and out in the bay the next, the morning sun turning the furrow silver and white as the ship cuts through the still, blue water like a farmer’s plough. Barely moving one minute and gone the next. Stillness giving way to motion. Slow motion giving way to speed, the sort of speed, like that of the age itself, that creeps up on you.

As Sam looks back, still leaning on the same part of the railing, the crowd becomes distant, the people small,
like those smudges of colour and shade on a painting that don’t make any sense until you step back, until you get distance on them. And at this point he steps back from the railing. But it is not the quickly receding crowd that he’s noting. Rather, it is this view of the city he has never seen before. On one side the inner suburbs he grew up in, where his parents lived and worked all their lives, the boundaries of which they have rarely crossed and who even today are working and not on the docks to see him off. And, on the other side, the dock and wharves, and beyond them the open country to the north of the city where the old woman’s tent is pitched and in which she may be sitting at this moment. And, directly behind, the few city buildings that are tall enough to stand out. For, above all, what he sees now is the flatness of coastal plain. At the same time, something utterly unexpected hits him. It is almost physical. He is moved. And it hurts. There is a pain somewhere in his chest. A sweet pain, but a pain nevertheless. For this arc, from one side of the bay to the other, from the streets that he grew up in to the flat city and out towards the open thistle country to the old woman’s tent and where that angular construction, the snowy-haired farmer, may well be wandering over his paddocks, that arc of land and sea has, until now, been his entire world: the place he couldn’t wait to be shot of but which now hurts to leave. And it may well be that the pain that has suddenly overcome him is the result of realising that you only ever really leave home once, and that he will never see this view the same way again. They are parting, this place and Sam. And it is a parting that
will never be repeated. The moment will never come again and it is the force of this realisation that has rocked Sam. Perhaps it was the effect of watching everything grow small, and so quickly. Like noting one day that your parents have grown old. Perhaps it was that moment of surprise that was always waiting to pounce, and which you don’t realise is there until it pounces.

Then he can’t see the dock any more and that arc of flat land that was his entire world begins to slip from him. As it does, the pain subsides. He was just saying goodbye, that’s all it was. And with that thought images of Tess, the letter she wrote and the letter he posted back (the first of their letters over the years), the doorways that will now become the doorways they all once stood in, old rooms, old streets and dusty trams, all blow over him, carried on the sea breeze.

But before he even has time to dwell upon these images, they are passing the holiday beaches to which the city emigrates every summer. Soon, all too soon, he is staring at the township of Sorrento on the one side and the township of Queenscliff on the other. The beaches on both sides of the bay are populated with the January crowds. For those ritualised summer pilgrimages that the war interrupted have resumed and families that would have spent summers together before will now be reuniting, holidaying again, in whatever changed form they may now have assumed. But it is not the January and February summer beaches that he is thinking of. Rather, it is the mid-winter beaches that he always preferred and along which he walked with Tess, gathering shells and odd
bits of wood, and the plans, the talk of a future that was never going to happen. As he closes his eyes and the magician of memory conjures up the scene, an invisible hand rises once more and waves goodbye to it all.

And then, knowing what is ahead, he walks to the bow of the ship, now moving directly towards that point where the twin pincers of land almost meet, that three-quarter-mile-wide opening through which the bay empties itself and through which the ocean daily flows: The Rip. If it is possible to be proud of a geographical formation, Sam is proud of The Rip. That, and the name itself. You have to respect this bit, he’s thinking, for this is where the bay meets the open sea. And the remains of ships and boats that didn’t respect it are still scattered underwater. If you could run on water you could cover the distance between one land point and the other in five minutes or so. At least, Sam could. You have to respect this bit, and that’s why the ship has slowed and the pilot boat has come alongside.

This is it. As they cut through The Rip, Sam knows this is the moment of before and after. And he breathes the moment in. Behind him, the city, the docks, the suburbs, the thistle country and the dry inland towns all constitute what was. What will now become the old life. The old days. The old crew.

They burst into the open sea, the world becomes wide, and elsewhere, which has been waiting for Sam all these years, is suddenly upon him in a rush of wind and gull cries.