Spirit of Progress (20 page)

T
his is not his usual watering hole. This is not The Railway. This is what some people might call a famous pub, Vic snorts, if famous is the word. It’s old. Maybe that’s it. And the Americans drank here. The Americans drank everywhere, but especially here. Soldiers from everywhere drank here. Maybe that’s it too. But still, it’s quite a rundown pub to be so well known. For people to go out of their way to be here.

Vic is not on his bicycle today. After his shift he took the train from the yards to Flinders Street Station, from where he would take the train back to Rita and the baby, Michael. But standing on the platform in the mid-afternoon heat, he thought of dropping in for a pot. Just the one. And so here he is standing at the bar of a pub into which he rarely steps.

And it is as he is about to finish the pot of beer and keep his promise to himself to leave that he turns his attention to the figure beside him at the bar. He has been
faintly aware of someone beside him but is in no mood for conversation. As he puts his empty glass down on the counter he glances at the figure and realises he knows him. But from where? He also knows that there is no time for conversation, that he must leave, and so decides not to dwell on where or when they might have met and is about to leave when the figure beside him turns and looks at Vic. And, immediately, Vic knows there is recognition in that look. And as Vic steps from the bar, the man, whose face, Vic notes, is thin and whose eyes bulge, speaks his name.

‘Vic.’

Vic stops. It is the sudden combination of face and voice that tells Vic who it is. The voice is shaky but still recognisable. The face, although it, too, is recognisable, is no longer the same. It bears only a resemblance to what it was. But enough. And without noticing, without being conscious of the move, Vic steps back to the bar and pronounces the man’s name in return greeting.

‘Alan.’

As the name meets the face, Vic’s memory reconstructs it as it was only six years before. For this is one of the damaged. One of those who bring their damage back with them because they can’t help it. This Alan (and already their pots have been refilled and Vic has no memory of ordering them) is one of the old mob. His old mob. One of those with whom he spent his time in the army, before being called back to the world of engines and troop trains and supply trains. And in the public bar, which is quiet now but which will fill quickly near five o’clock when the office workers finish for the day, they
raise a glass to the old mob. This is the life that could have been Vic’s. And this is the face that could have been Vic’s. Thin, eyes bulging. Lips that seem to be muttering even when silent. And as much as Vic wants to leave, he knows he can’t. Not yet. The time they shared will not allow it. Furthermore, this Alan has a story to tell (and Vic saw this from the start), just as he knew immediately that he has no choice but to listen until it is finished. And so they raise a glass to the old mob and Alan falls silent, eyes on the counter. And it is during this silence that their pots are refilled, and, once more, Vic has no idea who ordered them or if anybody did. But he pays, waiting for the silence to break, knowing that he should leave, but can’t. Not yet. Not until the story is told. And this silence, it occurs to Vic, is part of the story.

Finally, Alan lifts his head, almost as if having forgotten Vic is there and only now remembering. ‘You keeping well?’

It occurs to Vic that this is an odd question. One of those things you say because you feel you ought to at times such as these. One of those courtesies that are observed because that is the way things are. Certain things haven’t been lost. Certain things have stayed in place. Not everything has been blown away. And, in the same spirit, Vic nods, indicating that he is keeping well, then responds. ‘And you?’

Alan raises his eyebrows and turns the glass round on the counter. ‘I’m alive.’ And then silence. And it is during this particular silence, as the pub begins to fill, that Vic notes Alan’s index finger rise and fall. A gesture directed
at the barman and which brings the response of two refilled pots.

For a while they talk about the people they knew back then, with whom they shared that time. Names. And with the names, faces and stories come back to Vic as the last of the afternoon slips away and the pots are emptied and refilled once more. And again, as much as he wants to rise and leave, he knows he can’t. Not yet. For the time they shared must be marked with due respect.

It is during one of the silences, the pub now quite crowded, that Alan turns to Vic and asks: ‘Do you know where we ended up?’

Vic knows, but he says nothing, leaving Alan (whom Vic now remembers had a flair for birdcalls and once reduced a parade-ground march to laughter, and the march to a sort of stroll) to answer his own question. And amid the orders and shouts and the clatter of the public bar (all of which has an air of urgency because of the dwindling time) he turns to Vic, and, so it can be heard, almost shouts the answer.

‘Singapore.’ A brief snort that could be a laugh accompanies the utterance. A brief snort that says, what a joke. Singapore.

In a sense, that is the story. And Alan has now told it. It is a one-word story, shouted across the public bar, but, quite possibly, drowned in the hum and heard only by Vic. But there will be details. For every story has details. And Vic now stands and waits for them, while also reminding himself that he must leave. But the details come slowly, and the story-teller cannot be hurried. For the details are
painful ones. Vic hears that they, his old mob, barely fired a shot. About the death of so-and-so and so-and-so. The prison camp. And more death. And it is all told, it seems, in one or two-word sentences. Sometimes shouted. This story that could have been Vic’s, and which is anyway. So it continues, detail piled upon detail. One after the other. One, two and three-word sentences. A snort, a shake of the head here and there. And then the summing up. Singapore. End of story.

Alan doesn’t even notice when Vic leaves. Vic makes his way through the crowd, which will soon be washed out onto the footpaths with the cigarette butts when the pub shuts at six, and pauses at the door, the figure of Alan (and it occurs to him now that he can’t recall his surname, if he ever knew it) in the distance, propped up against the bar, staring down into his pot. He lets the door snap shut.

On the street, walking back to the station, the beer hits him. He was having one pot. Just enough. From the moment Alan had spoken his name though, Vic knew he had no choice but to listen to the story and its details that came slowly, through the late afternoon, every detail delaying his departure.

The afternoon a dreamy blur of recurring words and collapsed time, Vic now sits with his head back against the leather seat of the old red rattler, vaguely aware of a whistled birdsong calling through the haze.

In the kitchen, Rita is rocking the baby back and forth in a pram. Michael. She chose the name for the simple fact that she liked it. It is the name, she thinks, of someone
who quietly goes his own way. Self-assured. Yes, that’s what she wants. Someone who moves through the world but doesn’t let the world get to them. Someone who can stand back. Yes, Michael.

And she rocks the pram, but as much as Michael should be sleeping, he isn’t. His eyes are wide open and they’re watching her. And as much as this should be a moment of contentment, it isn’t. Already the sun is low and Vic should have been home hours ago. And she knows why he isn’t. He’s at The Railway. As much as he said he wouldn’t be, he is. And she is angry, and her anger will speak when he returns. For he has been at The Railway with Paddy Ryan and all the others who call themselves mates when he should be here. Will this always be the way of things?

She doesn’t know how long she’s been mulling over this — and mulling is the word. But when she looks back to Michael, he is asleep. How long had her hand been rocking the pram? Long enough. Eyes closed. He’s asleep. A life just waiting to be lived. That will go its own way. Just where and how she has no idea.

And the weight that she once felt in her belly, the weight that she carried around with her and which made her walk with the flat feet of a duck, has now become a different kind of weight. And this is not a weight that she can carry by herself. This is the weight that never goes, for this is the weight of responsibility. Which is why she is angry, and why her anger will speak when Vic returns.

For the moment though, as Sam, the artist she has never met, prepares for his first night at sea, as Katherine
sits the dutiful servant that is her body down inside her tent, as George works at his desk, the basement world of ink and smoke awaiting him, as Webster contemplates his half-completed domain, and as Vic makes uncertain progress along the street towards her, contemplating the fate that may have been his, Rita rocks the pram back and forth, back and forth. Inside the pram, behind eyes closed to the activities of the world around him, Michael now dozes — Michael, who is simultaneously sleeping in the kitchen, and in the crib of an air-conditioned TGV, speeding through quaint villages and green countryside that are both worlds removed from the one Michael and his kind will soon assume.

But Rita’s anger does not rest, for anger sleeps badly. And as Vic approaches the front door and she hears, and notes with a sinking heart, the heaviness of his steps, the anger that does not rest and which sleeps badly trembles and itches, the pram moving back and forth, back and forth, until it stops when Vic enters the room, and the words that have waited too long to be heard (a pattern that will recur again and again over the years) thunder into life.

T
hese are the doors they walked through, but through which they will not walk any more. It is a late Victorian reflection for a late Victorian moment; a melancholy thought on a crisp winter’s day, the sun low in the sky and the shadows long across the street outside the park nearby through which she will stroll later to her tram stop. She had been sitting at her desk, getting on with her work. Then George had walked through the door, the very door that she had told herself only a few years ago that she would remember as the door they all walked through, that miraculous assembly of artists that has now scattered to various parts of the world. And as much as any one of them may well walk through that door again, it will not be the same them, nor the same city, for that matter. For the city has moved on.

George is sitting opposite Tess’s desk in the gallery. He’s come to interview her for the magazine he edits. He’s lost that undergraduate look, she remarks to herself,
and is fuller in the face, which she attributes to family life, for George is married now, with a daughter. Even this becomes a measure of change, by which she really means loss. For there will always be a part of Tess that wanted, and continues to want, the impossible.

He’s come to interview her because her gallery is now famous, not just in this city but throughout the entire country. And it’s famous because of those war years when she brought together that assembly of artists. It is becoming, George tells her, a sort of institution. And it was his use of the word ‘institution’ that prompted that late Victorian response, one of those moments of Tennysonian longing to which she succumbs from time to time. For if her gallery is now seen as an institution or on the way to becoming one, so too is she. But George is unaware of this implication as he poses the first of his questions.

‘You must,’ he says, as he opens his notepad, ‘be feeling quite satisfied.’

She doesn’t reply at first. She looks about the gallery, abstracted, suggesting that she is giving the question deep consideration. In fact, she’s not thinking about the question at all. She’s still thinking about his use of the word ‘institution’. If her gallery is an institution, so too is she. And when did this happen? For if she is synonymous with the gallery and no longer simply thought of as Tess, what does that make her?

And it is then that the word ‘dame’ comes to mind, quickly followed by ‘grande’, then capitalised as ‘Grande Dame’, and she realises that this is her fate. That if she has not already become such a figure, she is on the way to
becoming one. Or, at least, this must be the way people are beginning to see her. Like those Grandes Dames of the nineteenth century, with their salons and their followers, who launch careers the way royalty launches ships, and who are sought after not because they are themselves but because they have become institutions. Is this her fate? It’s a disturbing thought because she is too young to be an institution. In fact, she will always be too young to be an institution. Will always be too young to be old, even when she is. But, clearly, those who see her like this don’t think of her as too young. Or even as young or old. For an institution, by definition, is ageless. And what of friends? If you have acquired the capacity to launch careers the way royalty launches ships, then what of friends? Who are they? And this question is accompanied by the speculation that George, sitting opposite her and waiting patiently for an answer to his question may well be a friend of sorts. One of those who were there when she was just Tess and had not become synonymous with her gallery. For they meet regularly at functions and openings, and when they do, and they talk, there is an unstated but shared assumption of belonging to a separate society from those around them. The society of those who were there and who are now joined by that common experience. But outside of the small circle of her husband and daughter, who, she asks herself, do you look to when you become an institution?

More than this, that brief Tennysonian moment tells her that she is no longer the woman who fell in love in that last winter of the war only four years ago. Not in the eyes of
those who would pronounce her an institution, for institutions are bloodless, their passions long extinguished. And would Sam see her like this now? Not just distant and removed, not just someone from the past, but formalised, transformed into something beyond past, present and future — and beyond earthly, everyday living. Sort of above it all. That’s what an institution is.

But she doesn’t say any of this, after the ten or so seconds it has taken to gaze about the gallery and contemplate not the question but the tolling bell of the word ‘institution’.

‘Yes,’ she finally answers, ‘there is satisfaction in this. But not complacency. We’ve got a long way to travel, as a country, I mean. It’s no wonder our artists leave as soon as they can. The wonder is that they ever come back.’ She says this knowing that it will look and sound good, for the emerging institution of Tess knows, and has always known, what is required of such questions. And, of course, there is satisfaction in all that has been accomplished. And she is, and always was, never one to be complacent. And so they pass the next hour, George posing questions and Tess finding answers that, if not quite right, are not wrong either.

And when the photographer arrives she is aware of adopting the attitudes and expressions of what is called a ‘public face’. Even as the private Tess dwells upon and contemplates the door and all the doors through which they will not walk again, that miraculous assembly, she inwardly remarks that she is wearing what they call a public face and that it is this face she is showing the camera, as though her fate is already determined and all
the life will be drained from her and she will become the institution that society demands. Ageless and above earthly living. As she feels the weight of this inevitability slowly falling upon her, she knows that the struggle will be to retain the memory of that lost domain of the last winter of the war and the younger Tess who yearned for the impossible, before the impossible bowed to the inevitable.

As George departs the gallery with the photographer, his farewell is that of someone who was there. Someone in whose company she can recognise the shared society of the lost domain. But the photographer, a young woman (unusual, Tess remarks to herself, but confirmation that the war
has
changed everything) looks at Tess through the eyes of someone who was
not
there. Through the eyes of someone who has just photographed and who only sees the public face of her subject. And this, Tess concludes, as she watches them exit the gallery door, is the way institutions are not so much born as called into being.