Spirit of Progress (4 page)

W
hile George is standing on the footpath at the front of the newspaper offices, a painter, not far away, has the evening paper opened at the same page and is reading the same article about an old woman who lives in a tent, not knowing that it is written by the journalist he sees at exhibition openings and whom he meets at the various cafés and milk bars at which they all gather; one who mixes with the city’s artists, but, being the art critic, one who keeps his distance as well.

This painter, whose name is Sam, is drawn to the photograph for the same reason that George was drawn to the idea of the old woman before he even met her. He has been staring at the photograph for some time. And it seems to him that as much as the old woman is shooing away the journalist, she is also calling. At least, she is calling to this painter, who sees in her the very thing he is always looking for: a subject. And in thinking this, he does not see himself as cold or someone who
feeds off the lives of others. He is simply interested in other people, other people’s lives, as much as he is interested in the ideas he brings to them or with which they come.

This old woman is both life and idea. She looks like a type (and ‘type’ is the word he silently articulates). Like a distant relation in a family album or the type of woman he has read about in historical accounts: like Eliza Fraser and other similar women, photographs of whom can only ever be found in history books or in blurred or faded shots of life as it once was. But this old woman, who lives in a tent only eight or nine miles from where he is (a small studio in a dark lane, like all the lanes of the city), was photographed that very day. While he was painting that morning, this old woman was telling the photographer and the journalist to get off her property. And she would, at this very moment, while he is sitting at a small kitchen table reading the paper, be inside the tent pictured in the photograph. She is, he reasons, both History and alive, myth and fact. A gift. Not a two-dimensional image. But solid. Inhabiting the same world that he does, but calling from another time.

Outside, the light has thickened and soon it will be dark. His studio, an old cottage, is left over from the gold rush days. It is small but all he needs. And, for the moment, he is happy enough to live alone. Besides, like all the others, he is biding his time before he can leave and enter the great world and be rid of this cooped-up, stifling city. Biding his time, and better off alone. For a
year ago this winter, the same cold time of year it is now, he fell in love with a married woman named Tess (Teresa, Tessa, even La Contessa to some when the mood takes them as it often does in this moody town). And the married woman (who runs a gallery, not far from where he is and where she now sits) fell in love with him. They were happy and they were sad: her guilt making her sad in the midst of their happiness, and her sadness as much his as her happiness. She, from a rich family and at ease in rich circles, was everything he wasn’t. Sky-blue eyes to his earth-brown. A perfect match that never fitted. They were content and they were continually restless. They were going to live forever, two hearts on a wall, and they never had a chance. And when he proposed that they run away together, she let his hand go and shook her head. She was married, she had a family (a young daughter) and she could never run away from all that because it would always follow her, haunt her, and they would become an unhappy haunted couple. No, she said, he wanted the impossible. Better to stay as they were. And, in saying this, she also acknowledged that she too wanted the impossible, albeit, a different kind: the impossibility of things staying the same. In the end they were faced with two choices: the impossible and the impossible. And that was that. End of story. But, of course, that is never that. And stories never end neatly. Especially in such a small, crammed city where you are always bumping into your past. Which is, Sam muses, another reason for leaving. For all of them, all the painters and writers and
artists in this pressure cooker of a city, will leave the place, as soon as they can. As soon as the first boats are available. They will all be off. And a good thing too.

He rolls a cigarette and looks at the photograph in the newspaper. He has little time left to produce a painting for an exhibition that opens in two days. He has promised this woman, with whom he was both the happiest and saddest he has ever been, a painting. He was not so much asked as implored. The exhibition will not, she said, be complete without him. For Sam is an artist of great expectations. Everybody says so. Sam will, they say, be a success. If not famous. And it’s not just because Sam has talent. They’ve all got talent, these painters, more or less. No, for a young man, Sam has unusual dedication. He doesn’t just talk about paintings, he does them. Lots of them. And quickly. And they’re all good. This is the bit extra that Sam has. It’s called discipline. That, and something else. Something you can’t put your finger on. For Sam has what the others can only call a look about him. An air. One of those who look famous before they become famous, so when the robes of fame finally fall upon them it is of no surprise to anybody. An air that tells you he won’t stop until he gets what he’s after. And that’s why he’s been called upon to contribute a painting to this exhibition. It’s a group portrait, this exhibition. But it will not be complete without something from Sam, because Sam is the one they’re all looking to. He sometimes wonders (fed by the rumours and whispers he hears from time to time) if this is why Tess fell in love with him, wonders if she was not so much in love with Sam (as she
so often said she was) as in love with what he might become. So that when his time came, and the success that they all knew would be his came with it, she would be able to say she was there. That he was her rough diamond, whom she polished and refined with her love. That she was his eyes, that she taught him to look at the world (
really
look at it), that she guided his undoubted talent when it was young and needed guiding (for she is ten years older and has moved in sophisticated, artistic circles all her life) and that she was, indeed, his muse. For it has always been her boast, if boast is the word, for she never really said as much to Sam, that although she has no artistic talent herself, she knows talent when she sees it. And that if she has any talent at all, it is for spotting it and guiding it. And if so, did she merely spot him and guide him, and fall in love for a time? Indeed, because it is a small city as far as cities go, a town really, and a cooped-up one still, word is filtering back to Sam that, since they parted, she has been going around saying this. That she was his eyes. That she spotted him, and guided him, and now look at him. Her rough diamond, polished and ready to glitter. Words, rumours. Does she say it, does she not?

He’ll never know, because — and this is his way of ending things — they don’t exchange any more than business talk on those rare occasions that they do meet. As if, as the phrase goes, nothing had happened (popular now because they are all reading Kafka: ‘and then he went back to work as if nothing had happened’). But, of course, something had.

He shrugs and stares again at the photograph of the old woman. Most of the paintings that stir him, the great and famous and the not-so-great and not-so-famous, he has never seen because they come from distant places. He has only ever seen photographs of them. Reproductions. But this old woman, who calls from another world while inhabiting the one he lives in, is just out there. A few miles away. And, as much as he resists the phrase ‘living history’, he can’t help but think of her as History that has managed to live on into a time beyond her time, but all the same sufficiently removed and distant to be looked upon as you might look upon an old coin or a dress in a museum.

But she is alive at this very moment, in her tent. He rises from the table, blowing smoke into the air in the manner of the European intellectual (his one affectation, which Tess noted from the start), and rolls up the newspaper, determined to discover where this woman can be found. It is then that his mind turns to one of the few journalists he knows. The young journalist who is also the art critic for the evening newspaper that is currently rolled up under his arm, and who frequents the local artists’ cafés because he likes the company. Likes the company but keeps his distance, which Sam respects.

Sam closes the door of his studio, steps into the laneway and makes his way to the café that has some Russian name he always manages to forget or just gets plain wrong. It is a long shot. But this journalist might know something about the old woman and how to find her. For there is a painting in this old woman. Perhaps
more than one, if only he can meet her and get her to sit still long enough to paint her. But already, just from the photograph and the article, he can tell that she is a woman who sees intruders as trouble. Who has an instinctive distrust of this new world she has somehow lingered on into, who is perfectly aware that this world sees her as something of a curiosity, a dress draped over a mannequin, ready for the museum. And this is the appeal of her. This is why she is a painting. She is both here and there, past and present, and she knows it.

The talk in the café, he guesses, will be of travel and getting out of this place that they have all been in for so long. Now that the Americans have departed, the city seems to him to be especially deserted. Lonely, actually. Then again, perhaps Sam is just looking at the place through lonely eyes. But no, it’s not just him, the city, he is convinced, has the look that things have when something is over. Like a room or a hall after a long party from which the guests have finally departed, the decorations, those ancient hoardings around the city calling for everyone to buy war bonds and to be careful what they say, still pasted to walls, flapping in the wind. The party-makers have departed. Their ships have sailed away. Those who are left behind are already looking back longingly at those sad and violent years which they couldn’t wait to be rid of. At least, that’s the look he sees in people’s eyes at this time of day when, the previous winter, he would have just come from seeing Tess — when time was precious because their minutes were always dwindling, but which has now
become a restless time of day that he never quite knows what to do with.

He pauses at the window of the café. They are all there. And he knows what they will be talking about. And as much as he too longs to be shot of the place, he has also found something that calls to him, just a few miles away, under his nose. Not elsewhere but here. And he suspects that if he’s not careful he could spend his life chasing elsewhere, when all the time it’s here.

But the thought passes, for, all around him, there is an irresistible feeling of movement, of homecoming and of departure, Old world to New and New to Old. Of things never standing still long enough to ever be the same again. For this world that they are all about to step into, and which the old woman has lingered on into, is an age of movement. Movement, he is convinced, as no one has ever known it before. For the restlessness that he sees in people’s eyes, and the cooped-up feeling, will finally give way to the dam-bursting impulse to shoot through. To leave, to return, and to leave again. Chasing elsewhere. For this world will be shifting and moving under your feet even as you stand on it, and will always leave you wondering where the party went, and wondering why the prizes that glittered so brightly from afar always faded as you got nearer. History will be rapid, Speed will out-run itself, and the
Spirit of Progress
, currently sitting at Platform Number 1 of Spencer Street Station, and which brings the air-conditioned future of this new world with it, will cover the distance between here and elsewhere faster than it has ever been done before.

But before that can happen there is time to catch and preserve a piece of the old world. And with that in mind, Sam enters the café, the newspaper containing the image of the old woman in her tent still under his arm.

A
lthough his farm will one day be sold and divided up into housing lots, it is not yet part of a suburb. It is still a farm. And in the middle of July it is country cold. Skinner feels that cold more keenly now than he ever did as a younger man, as he stands on the back veranda of the farmhouse and contemplates the paddocks that have remained unchanged, more or less, all his life, and that have been in the family now for three generations, but which, nonetheless, will inevitably pass from him into local history. Instead of talking about Skinner’s farm and pointing to it, they will point to where it once was.

Skinner is the last of the family line. The last living branch of an old, dead tree. There is no one to pass the farm on to, and he has for a long time now felt the strength and energy that it takes to run a farm gradually
draining from him. The strength that was once there in abundance, and which he took for granted, has gone. He has known this for some time now, just as he knows that the productive years of his life, if not completely gone, are coming to an end. And quickly. All the things that he brought to the community (milk, butter and cheddar cheese), and which the community needed and looked to him to provide, no matter what the weather, will soon be provided by someone else, somewhere else. Not here, where it always came from. Not from these paddocks across which his cows still roam.

He saw this in the eyes of the young newspaper man this morning. The young man had turned as he left, solely to look back upon him, Skinner, as he stood at his gate, watching the only bit of conversation he would be likely to have that day leave with the energy and purpose that he immediately recognised as the energy and the purpose of the young. And he knew precisely what the young man saw as he left, what caused him to turn around. He saw, this young man … what is the phrase? … ‘yesterday’s man’. Standing at the gate of change. But the young man didn’t see it with smugness or without care. He saw it with what Skinner registered at the time was respect. And that is why Skinner had nodded. It was a thank you. I don’t require much, the nod said. Just a thank you, and not a grand one either. Just an acknowledgment that the productive years, the best years, the years that had strength and energy have been noted. The productive years of someone’s life deserve at least that. For with the acknowledgment comes the respect that he saw in the
young man’s eyes, and with the respect, the satisfaction that, in the end, it all mattered.

While Skinner is rolling this round in his mind, the way his father would have rolled the makings of a cigarette in his palm (Skinner never having acquired the taste for tobacco nor taken up the habit), he scans the paddocks and sees the light from Miss Carroll’s tent glowing in the dark. He can’t be sure when that light first arrived. He only remembers that one night it was there.

Before it came, the paddocks, from this vantage point at the back veranda, were country dark at night, just as they are now country cold. The only light came from the moon and stars, and that was a frosty, silver light that could be weak or strong, depending on the fullness of the moon and the brightness of the stars. Then one night Miss Carroll’s light was there. And although they are only nine miles from the city, and although the baker, grocer and butcher are within easy walking distance, and although there are a few scattered houses around the farm, the effect of the light appearing was extraordinary. And its light wasn’t frosty or silver but yellow. Golden, he now corrects himself. And it didn’t shine — it glowed. Someone was out there.

For most of his life, since the death of his parents, who worked themselves into an early grave, and the loss of his brother in the Great War, Skinner had thought of himself as alone. Never mind that there were people around to whom he could talk and visitors from time to time. They were not part of his life, nor were they part of the family
he had known before it was blown apart by the sad and violent years of another age. No, since then his life had become, in his mind, a solitary one. And this was the effect of Miss Carroll’s light. That first time he became aware of it, it felt like company. And with the possibility of company came a sense of comfort and with that thought his life didn’t seem so solitary. One light in the dark can do that.

This is why Skinner is standing on the back veranda of his house. And although he is feeling the winter cold more than he ever did as a young man, he is also feeling the glow of comfort and registering the sensation that this life need not be solitary because there is now someone out there. This is what brings him here every night, this feeling of connection, of having made first contact with a world beyond his own, of having discovered a way of being in the world that wasn’t there before Miss Carroll’s light appeared. And when he thinks of it like this, part of him suspects that he might have spent too many years living alone and that those solitary years in which he, Skinner, likely as not, spoke only to Skinner about the things that mattered have done this to him. Made him imagine things, and just a bit too dramatically. Perhaps.

And so the light in Miss Carroll’s old canvas tent brings him back every night. As it has for months now. Brings him back here to the back veranda, where he stands, an inexplicable connection between him and the light in Miss Carroll’s tent bringing comfort, unfailingly, at the end of each day.

But if he goes too close to the light in the tent, if he responds to it as if it were an announcement, even an invitation (as a solitary light in the dark night is), and is not invited in, will the light lose its power to comfort because it will have lost its potential? And will this time that he has come to look forward to at the end of each day be lost to him?

It is then that the light dims. With this thought still in his mind, and which he has mulled over now for some time without resolution, he steps back into the house, no longer able to ignore the cold because the energy and the strength that resisted the weather and gave him his productive years are now gone and will not be back.