Spirit of Progress (22 page)

T
he diagrams, sketches and plans have acquired bricks, mortar and wood. The old mansion, built in the 1860s by one of the city’s founders, has now been given a second life. Sheds and a garage have been built, bushes and flowers and trees have been planted, which, along with the plane trees and the oaks that were already there, will become a private wood. Gravel paths have been scooped out of the earth and a six-foot-high wall, which encompasses the two-acre property, has just been completed. It is all exactly as envisaged by Webster years before. A world unto itself. With its forest, its mansion and its defining walls it is the medieval castle Webster always imagined as Webster’s world.

It is a late spring Sunday afternoon. Webster has been strolling along the network of paths that thread through his grounds. He has strolled through sunshine and shadow, listened to the birds hidden in the leaves of the bushes and trees calling to one another, and observed
the windows and the rooftop tiles glittering in the Sunday sun. Even the overarching blue sky is now his square of the heavens.

But to call his walk a stroll is not quite accurate. A stroll is the walk of the contented. As is an amble. There is not necessarily a destination in mind when strolling. No anticipated point of arrival. One is simply strolling, immersed in birdsong, sunshine and shadow. Webster, on the other hand, throughout most of the morning, has been aware of an unaccountable restlessness. A dissatisfaction with all this ambling, as though there ought to be a destination. Something at the end of it all. And he can’t imagine what. And so when a brilliantly coloured bird, deep blues and greens, flies across his field of vision, he wonders for a moment why he can’t, as some do, simply stop and draw pleasure from the sight of the bird before it springs from its branch and continues on its journey. Does a bird have a destination in mind? Probably. It certainly sprang from the branch as if it did. And he can’t conceive of a bird in mid-flight or in the midst of hunting and gathering pausing to reflect upon the sight of a human being standing in the grounds below. So why should he? No, nature is instinctively productive. Always has been. Foxes, rabbits and eagles don’t lounge about in the midday sun reflecting upon the change of seasons or the wonder of creation. No, they’re looking for something to kill and eat or materials with which to build a nest or whatnot. And so Webster is not strolling. Or ambling. His walk is accompanied by this unaccountable restlessness. A restlessness that he chooses to call the lack of a destination. But what could it be?

Webster’s world is complete. The architect’s plans, the sketches and diagrams have now become the reality through which he strolls, or would stroll if it were not for this restlessness that will not amble.

On the steps of the house he turns back and faces the grounds, surveying the gently swaying bushes and shrubs as if sensing an intruder. He shrugs his shoulders and goes inside.

Mrs Webster is in the lounge room with a novel. A large novel. She is the reader of the house and will happily sit in the armchair (as she will for most of this day) turning the pages. Webster likes books. He likes having them around. Like witty guests at a party. But he could never spend the afternoon with a book, which, as Mrs Webster frequently reminds him, makes him more of a browser than a reader. A description he is happy enough to accept.

She asks where he has been and he answers that he has been strolling, then inwardly corrects himself. He slumps into an armchair and picks up a newspaper magazine. It is one of those magazines that are, Webster imagines, made to be flicked through. Ideal for a browser. And so he flicks through it. It is, in fact, the magazine for which George is the editor, and as Webster flicks through its pages he pauses briefly at an article, an interview with an art-gallery owner who, it seems, is something of an institution in the art world. Then he turns the page and there it is.

Why it should strike such a chord is a puzzle. But he is drawn into a full-page advertisement for a sports car. A famous sports car. Even Webster, who knows little of
such things, recognises this. It is black. Sleek. And although parked (in the grounds of some public park), it gives every impression of being impatient to move. To be set free. To ignite the eight cylinders that the wonders of the modern production process have given it, and spring upon the world. He stares at the advertisement but remains, nonetheless, puzzled at being drawn to it. For the Bentley, now parked in the driveway at the front of the house, has always been sufficient for his needs — a fitting vehicle for a factory owner.

But as he dwells upon the photograph he is increasingly aware of being drawn to a sense of movement. He glances out at the Bentley, visible through the lounge-room window, then back to the photograph and no longer calls that thing to which he is drawn ‘movement’. No, a glacier moves, as does a Bentley or a bishop on a chessboard. Rather, he now calls that thing to which he is drawn ‘speed’. And within a minute, possibly less, speed has entered his world. A minute before he was contemplating the gardens and the grounds and the stroll that was not a stroll, then he had turned the page of a magazine to find speed waiting, impatient to spring upon him. And as the day progresses, the notion will occur to him (and it will not go away) that his unaccountable feeling of restlessness might well be cast off behind the wheel of this sports car. Might well dissolve in the midst of speed. And that it is in speed, and speed alone, that he might discover the stillness that comes to others while strolling. That somewhere between the twin possibilities of accelerating into life or accelerating into death, he
might cast off that feeling of restlessness that followed him around the grounds. A restlessness born of — yes, he nods as he stares at the magazine — boredom. A puzzling sense of boredom. Puzzling because Webster has never been bored in his life. There has always been too much to do. But it was there today, this restlessness born of boredom, as he toured the completed grounds of his world which had now acquired bricks and mortar and wood.

He drops the magazine onto the table beside the armchair and walks to the lounge-room window, surveying his domain. Mrs Webster has not moved. The room is calm and quiet. Webster is stationary. The very house itself is Sunday-still, but the bushes and shrubs of the grounds around it have been stirred by the intruder of speed, and with it, Webster’s world.

H
ere a suburb will be born. Vic, Rita and Michael are standing on a dirt track that will soon become their street, in front of the timber frame of what will become their house.

In the end Rita’s body may or may not have had a memory that went back a million years but the weight that was Michael, and which caused her to walk like a duck for a short while, left her when the time came and he now stands between her and Vic. Once they were two, now they are three. And they have come to inspect the rectangle of land and the wooden frame that will become their house, in which they will live, in which the boy will grow, and from which they will all eventually part and go their separate ways.

This is, in fact, the land upon which Aunt Katherine pitched her tent. Where she lived while she waited for her sleep-out to be built. But it never was. For the war was only just over and material and builders were hard to find.
Unless, of course, your name was Webster. In which case you were not only given materials and builders but such rarities as bulldozers as well. But Aunt Katherine’s name was not Webster, and her sleep-out was never built, and she had died in her tent the previous winter. She died, the report said, somewhere between the fifteenth and seventeenth of June. Nobody is sure for the body was not discovered until the third day. And so she lay either dead or dying for days inside the tent and nobody came. The cause of death, Vic and Rita have discovered from the report, was probably pneumonia. A cold winter, a tatty tent, an old woman alone, worn down and weakened by the years, combined to produce, in the end, a cold death. And a mysterious one for nobody is sure just when she died. And that, to Rita and Vic, doesn’t seem right. Death, like birth, ought to be marked. But whereas Aunt Katherine has a birth date, one morning seventy-three years before in another century and another country, she has no exact date of death. Only a guess. An approximation.

Her death, the doctor who signed the certificate told them (a Doctor Black, who will become their family doctor) was reported to him by a Mr Skinner, a local farmer whose property is opposite the block of land upon which Aunt Katherine’s tent once sat. Mr Skinner, who had not seen Miss Carroll for some time, became concerned.

And it was a few days later, after the funeral, that Vic and Rita learnt that the land upon which the tent had been pitched had been passed on to Vic. Which is why they are currently standing in front of a wooden frame
that will become their home because the land that was once Aunt Katherine’s is now theirs. And, at some point during the days after her death, Vic discovered, going through her few possessions, that there were no photographs of Aunt Katherine. No images; nothing to remember her by. Nothing to show that she once lived. Nothing, it finally occurred to him, except the newspaper photograph and the painting by a young man who had the cheek to disturb her solitude, and whom Vic (from the one and only time he ever saw the painting) judged to have caught Katherine in one go. The newspaper photograph and the painting. The only surviving images of Miss Katherine Carroll. And as Vic thought about this, part of him — that part that registers the sensation of the world becoming wide and expansive on the fairways of golf courses or when driving into the glow of a new day (and which, in someone else, might be called a religious impulse) — not so much acknowledged as allowed the possibility that there just might be some pattern, some plan to things, after all.

Vic only ever saw the painting once, the night it was first shown. And he never saw any of those people from the gallery again. Their paths had never crossed before (for Aunt Katherine and her tent had been the cause of their crossing in the first place) and they never crossed again. So Vic never knew that when the young painter, Sam, left the country he took Aunt Katherine with him in his trunk. And as Sam became famous (and Vic would occasionally see his famous face in the newspapers and wonder if it was the same painter who had caught Aunt Katherine in
one go), Aunt Katherine was once more put on show in various parts of England — that elsewhere to which Sam eventually fled and where he chose to spend the rest of his days. Nor would Vic ever learn that some of the great names of art, and some of the most famous critics in the country, would write about this mysterious woman and her tent, and wonder who she was, when all the time Vic could have told them that she was just wacky Aunt Katherine who went around embarrassing everybody by living in a tent and getting her photograph in the newspapers. Nor did Vic ever discover that Aunt Katherine eventually came home, to be housed (in those years to come when Vic would live alone in a coastal town to the subtropical north) in a permanent gallery in the country’s capital.

No, Vic would never learn any of this. But the story of Aunt Katherine, nonetheless, would become part of the family story. And every now and then somebody would mention Aunt Katherine and the nosy young man who painted her (and who may or may not have become famous, for nobody in the family could remember his name), and remark upon the possibility of Katherine’s portrait being around somewhere. Or no longer around anywhere. A family story, passed down through the years, the facts, the truth, of which became blurred and eventually became mythology.

There are no builders today on the site. It is a Sunday, and a hot one. And there is only so long you can stand staring at the wooden frame that will become your home. Michael is hot and bored, and Rita and Vic have seen enough. And so they retrace their steps. Up the dusty
street that will one day become their street, Vic pausing to glance back at the golf course, the fairways of which are visible between the lines of pines that mark its boundary. And it is as they are walking back that they notice a snowy-haired farmer in the paddock on the other side of the street, feeding the cows, and Vic concludes that this is Mr Skinner, the farmer who found Aunt Katherine’s body and reported her death. And his impulse is to stop and chat, for he looks an affable type. Trusting, Vic imagines. Possibly too trusting. And, when he walks, an odd-looking construction, but the child is hot and bothered and their chat will have to wait for another time. And as the three of them pass, the old farmer eyes them, as if knowing who they are but keeping his distance, until Vic waves and the farmer, reflexively, waves back, a smile lighting his affable face.

On the Old Wheat Road, walking back to the station, they remark upon the shops — the butcher’s, the baker’s and the grocer’s. But with no more shops than this, it is, they think, still country. And Rita’s heart sinks as she looks around at the dry paddocks, the scotch thistles, the dusty dirt roads and the stick frames of the houses. For theirs is not the only house frame visible. And as they reach the top of the street they see a factory, next to the station and the flour mill. Out here in the sticks, on cheap land. And the occasional cow wandering around where the cows always have wandered, and, seeing no reason to stop now, chewing on the long grass and the flowers of the gardens, here and there, that have begun to spring up.

The factory is silent. Nobody is about. But as Vic, Rita
and Michael stand on the platform waiting for the city-bound train and staring at the flat paddocks around them that nobody has got around to subdividing yet and at the odd tree here and there on an otherwise treeless horizon, it is clear to them that it will not take long for houses, lawns and gardens to rise from the dry grass and thistles and for a suburb to be born.

The train will soon take them back into the city but this place is their fate. And the train that today takes them away from the place will one day bring them back. And the wooden frame that provides only the most basic indication of where the various rooms are to be will become their fate. The place in which they will become an unhappy family, in which they will live and grow. And which they will all eventually leave, to go their separate ways. When, like History, they will move on.