Spirit of Progress (5 page)

K
atherine (for she
is
Katherine, even if it is only her sisters who call her that, and even if it rings strangely in her ears on those rare occasions she hears her name) has had the oil lamp for over half her life now. It throws out a good, mellow light. Not too bright, harsh or dull. Soft is the word that comes to mind. She is a woman, however hard the years may have made her, who likes soft things. And this light is the softest thing she has ever owned. Soft enough to touch. Not in the way you can touch an object but in the way you can touch a shower of rain or a heavy fog. And she’s found more comfort in that light over the years than she’s found in people. Or animals, for that matter. She’s not sentimental about them either. But she is about this light. And for that reason she’ll never give it up. Not even when her sleep-out is built on the space that the tent now occupies. Certainly not for electric bulbs. She can turn it low to rest or turn it up to read, as she does now. For she has read all
her life. She can barely remember not reading and one of the few concessions she has made to the passing of the years is a pair of reading glasses. The glasses and a small kerosene heater that currently warms her.

But as much as she draws comfort from the lamp and as much as she is warmed by it whenever she lights it, she is not dwelling on the quality of its light at the moment. She is brooding on the disruption to her morning.

How did it unfold? What precisely was the sequence of events? She was reading. She had a warm cup of tea beside her. The heater was lit. She had her book, she had her solitude, she had her quiet. Happy, the way she has always been, happy to be alone. Then there was a sound. From out there. Intrusive. A voice. Someone was calling out. And she had no idea how long they had been calling or to whom. Then the voice and the calling became louder and she realised it was calling for her. Furthermore, from the clarity and the volume, she knew that whoever was calling was quite near. On her property, in fact. And that was when she rose, threw down the book and marched outside to find a cheery young man and a glum-looking older one standing no more than ten yards away in front of her.

Intruders. Why do they always act cheerily? But he lost the cheery look, the young one, and backed off pretty smartly when he saw she wasn’t in any mood for cheery intruders. So did the glum-looking one with the camera in his hand. Then she was shouting, or was she? She was issuing orders. She was telling them to get off her property, and they backed off onto the road. At first she
thought they might have been selling things, the things that hawkers all over the country sell. Then she saw their car. A fancy car that might be full of all sorts of fancy things that people never use, but buy anyway because they like the way they sparkle.

She soon realised they weren’t selling anything. They were from the newspaper, they said, which explained the fancy car. And they wanted to talk to her. A minute before that she had everything she needed. Her book, her solitude. Then two strangers wanted to talk to her. She knew why. It was the tent. It was her age. She was a curiosity. Oh, they didn’t say as much. But that was why they were here. And suddenly she’d felt like one of those stuffed figures in a museum. There were words. There was talk. Then the glum one raised his camera and took a photograph without asking. And that was that. She might have spoken to them. But not from that moment on. The cheek. The damned cheek. He may even have taken a second photograph before she turned and disappeared into her tent. And they were left on the road.

Yes, that was the sequence of events. She was reading. It was quiet. Then somebody called. Later, inside the tent, everything had become quiet again, apart from the sound of their motor car starting up, quite a long time afterwards, and she’d wondered what they’d been up to out there.

Now, at the end of the day, she has returned to her book. This lamp, which has been with her for most of her travels (and Katherine has travelled on coaches, trains, buses and on foot all over the country, not just for work,
although there was always some sort of work to be found, but to see things), throws out an even, warm glow and continues to give her the comfort it always has.

But now she is tired. She removes her reading glasses and places them on a small table beside her fold-up bed. There is a dark wooden crucifix above the bed, a porcelain Jesus, yellowed with age, nailed to the cross. Katherine, as she has done every night of her life since she was a girl in a room she shared with her three sisters, sinks to her knees, brings her palms together and closes her eyes in prayer. For the day could never close until she knelt and prayed. Her lips move in the glowing, quiet tent, and there is the faintest sound of whispering.

Her prayer done, she rises and reaches out to the lamp beside her bed, and dims it. And it is precisely at this moment that Skinner, observing the dimming of the light from across the other side of the paddocks, turns back into the house. Katherine lies back, drifting into a doze, little realising that her light has been noted. More than noted — that her light has given comfort beyond the confines of her tent, out there, where the solitary figure of Skinner stood gazing upon it across the silvery long grass.

E
verybody now dispersed, the mob that might have been his gone, ferried by trams out to the homes they left years before, Vic leaves the quiet city intersection and makes his way back into the rail yards, that part of the vast railway world of twisting tracks and idle engines called North Melbourne Loco. This is where he has left his bicycle. Even if there was petrol to be had, Vic, like practically everyone else in the city, could never afford a car. So Vic gets about on a bicycle. And with so little traffic around at this time of night (and it is not yet nine o’clock) it’s not difficult.

A whole chain of events has occurred since Vic sat down in the driver’s seat earlier that afternoon and brought his train and its sad cargo into the city. While he was travelling south, the photographer and the journalist drove north of the city to Katherine’s tent, Katherine suffered their intrusion, the article appeared in the evening newspaper, a painter was stirred by the story,
and a short time ago, while Vic stood in the street contemplating this new world they were all about to enter, and the mob and the life that might have been his, Skinner stood gazing upon Katherine’s light, comforted by the simple fact that it was there.

But Vic is unaware of any of this as he cycles back through the dark western suburbs of the city and down to the wharves, to the bayside suburb of Newport where he and Rita rent a small house. Even if he were aware of his connection to the day’s events, his part in the chain, he wouldn’t give it too much thought. Vic has other things on his mind. For it is not just the great world that is about to change. Vic’s world is about to change too.

In the night, all across the city, and out there in the greater world, young men become fathers. Possibly at this very moment. And they enter this world of fatherhood (Vic has been watching this world of fathers and their children more keenly lately) with a casual ease that he can’t comprehend. And this is because it has always been something that other people did. But now he is about to become one of those people, and he knows he will not step into that part with the casual, almost practised air of those who were surely born to be fathers because he knows he wasn’t born to be a father. He wasn’t even born to be married. But there you are, he tells himself. He is married, he is about to become a father and his small world is about to change utterly, just as the greater world out there is already becoming something else, something vastly different from the one everyone’s known up until now.

Father — the word sits well on other people. But the thought of anyone calling him ‘Dad’ is difficult to imagine. And this is because Vic has rarely used the word. Even as a child. He never knew his father. His father was never there and so words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ were never spoken because there was no one to speak them to. Unless, that is, in reference to somebody else’s father or dad. This is not because his father died tragically years before, succumbing to an unlikely accident, war or disease. No, his father simply didn’t think it was necessary to be present. Wasn’t sufficiently persuaded that there was reason enough to be there. In short, didn’t care. And so Vic learnt to live without a father, without using the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’, which is why they don’t come naturally to him. And he contemplates this, all the time knowing that his father is, more than likely, still alive. That he is not dead. That in all likelihood he is out there, doing something incidental like pouring a cup of tea right now. But Vic has never met his father and would not know him if he were to pass him on the street or sit beside him on a tram or in a train. He is convinced his father is still out there, somewhere in the Western District countryside, in a large house on a farm, indifferent to the fact of Vic existing in the world. For Vic’s mother was a domestic on his farm and was silly enough to get herself knocked up. Silly enough to give in to the feeling that somebody might care for her. Or — and late in life (for she was forty-one when she had Vic) — silly enough to give herself leave to take a chance, to live, and to have
something to look back upon apart from work and a life of what the world calls spinsterhood. Silly enough to try. What did she expect, he hears this absent father’s voice asking her, what did she expect, after all, apart from the fifty quid he gave her? He already had a farmer’s wife and children, thank you very much. He needed neither another wife nor another child. That was an impossibility. She and he had had their time. Their time was brief and now it was time she ceased to exist. And that was what the fifty quid was for. It wasn’t to provide help or comfort, nor was it even a sign of care. It was to make her go away. To make the child inside her go away and likewise cease to exist. And this is why when Vic tries to imagine a father doing something at this moment, as he cycles home from work, he sees only a vague shape, who a long time ago paid his mother a lot of money to go away. To vanish. For if something doesn’t exist it’s impossible for it to be on anybody’s mind, in a good or a bad way. No doubt he told her that there were places, institutions, for the child to be turned over to when it was born. And if she was wise, she would do exactly that and then just get on with her life. Everybody told her to farm the baby out: the father, her sisters and the priests. But she kept her boy, so that even though words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from his lips, the words ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’ come as naturally as breathing because they are the first words he ever learnt.

When the child who will become Michael not only opens his eyes upon this world but grows into it, when he goes to school and on to a university (for Michael will be
the first of his family to go to university), he will, in his reading and his study, one day discover the phrase ‘the absent father’. It will pop out of a history book that has not been written yet, in the stuffy library of a university that has not been built yet. And as he reads about it he will also discover that his father’s father was not the only one who was absent. It is, Michael will discover in that sleepy library, a theme. A particularly sad little melody that not only played into the ears of his father but all those children who had been dispatched into non-existence, and who couldn’t trouble anybody’s minds because they weren’t there.

But the phrase ‘absent father’ has never entered Vic’s thoughts because it hasn’t been invented yet, and it hasn’t been invented yet because nobody talks about these things. Such phrases belong to a world of private shame and it will be left to others, more distant from the shame than those upon whom it falls, to invent the phrase. Even if it did wander into Vic’s thoughts (and Vic is currently turning the front wheel of his bicycle into his street), the phrase would not be welcome. The phrase would be shown the door and turned out, a thought not worth dwelling on, one that would be as unwelcome as the blurred, vague, absent figure it describes, who may or may not be, at this very moment as Vic stops at the front of his house, pouring a cup of tea, indifferent to the absence he has created.

And so, as much as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ ring strangely in his ears when he imagines them being spoken to him as they will be one day, this much he resolves, and
it is a pledge offered to open sky and which the open sky takes in: the flaws of the absent father will not be visited upon his children, the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ will not ring strangely in their ears, and absence will not be repeated. No, he decides, the sad little melody of absence will fade and cease to play from this very moment, as he nudges his bicycle through the front gate of his lighted house. However imperfectly he may be there, he will be a presence, not an absence.

H
ow did it go? How did it happen? The end of things? The end that was always coming but which came as a surprise all the same. To her, to Sam.

Tess has locked the door of her gallery. It is dark and all she hears is the solitary sound of her footsteps as she departs along the lane. The short trip back to her tram stop takes her past a café, a café that has a touch of Europe about it and which the artists of the city frequent. She slows as she passes it and looks upon the cluttered spectacle inside. She knows most of the regulars and can guess the topics of conversation. Then she notices the journalist, George, whom she sees often enough because he is also the art critic for the paper. He is wearing that distinctive gabardine coat that no doubt his heroes (Graham Greene and whoever else they are) also wear. For George thinks of himself as a writer as much as a journalist. Not that he has ever really said so, but she has noticed there is always a paperback in the pocket of his
coat. And he is apt to pull whatever he is reading from his pocket in the course of conversation and share a line or two.

It is a familiar scene. Too familiar. And she is suddenly distracted by the ache of old feelings. Well, not such old feelings. But old enough to make her ache. When she fell in love the previous winter with a painter called Sam she was surprised, almost shocked. But no, not shocked because that carries with it an air of disapproval. And there was nothing to disapprove of, she had told herself, again and again, throughout their winter together. She had simply fallen in love. If anything, it was the fact of falling in love that took her quite by surprise. It happens. Yes, it happens. Every day people fall in and out of love. But it hadn’t happened to Tess since she was nineteen and fallen into marriage the same year she’d fallen in love for the first time.

Something that she’d always thought would only ever happen to other people (and quite possibly silly people at that) had happened to her. And just after it did, just after she’d been swept up and carried away as though she had suddenly lost control of her life, she’d sat in her lounge room one morning before work and watched, at the same time involved and curiously detached, as the car carrying her husband and daughter slipped from the kerb in front of her house and onto the street. Her husband, as he did every morning, drove their daughter to school then continued to work. A bank. Loans. People, she suddenly found herself musing, are like the large terrace she and her husband and daughter lived in — houses
with many rooms. And she’d suddenly felt like a character in a novel, probably a nineteenth-century novel, dwelling on a bourgeois marriage that is not all it seems. A portrait of a house with many rooms. And retribution (as it would in the pages of Flaubert or Zola, whom she read in French at her school in Switzerland) just waiting to fall upon the heroine for the crime of falling in love when she had no right to. But it did not, in the end, fall upon
her
, and the affair ended — as she always knew it would — as abruptly as it began. And she knew it would end like that because it had to. But how did it end?

One day, towards the end of
their
winter, he proposed that they run away together. She said it was impossible. Because it was. Best to let things stay as they were. For as long as their time allowed. She had said this knowing that they could not stay as they were, that their time was borrowed or stolen and had been dwindling from the start, that they had more than likely stayed as they were for as long as affairs allow, and that soon everybody would scatter anyway. With this in mind, she had silently resolved that
she
would choose the moment of their parting. This much, at least, she would be able to control. Although she never breathed a word of this to Sam. They hibernated that winter. Then, with the hint of spring in the air, they parted. Or did they both simply bow to the inevitable, and did she merely make the first move?

She leaves the front of the café (to which she sometimes went with Sam), follows the dark lane, turns at St Paul’s and is soon standing at her stop waiting for the
tram home, the evening crowds of office workers disappearing into the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station. It’s that time of day when her thoughts always turn to the previous winter. That time of day when she had always just come from seeing Sam, but doesn’t any more. That empty time of day that she fills with memories, with conversations that took place and those that never did, but perhaps should have. A year ago, this time of day, she would have just been returning from being with him. The air would be crisp and clear, or damp and rainy. She rarely noticed. This, a year ago, would have been their time. Now their time is over. And, knowing that she will never again hear him say, ‘C’mon, let’s have a drink’, she feels that rush of old feelings running through her body. It happens every day. And this evening she is thinking of how it all ended. At first she can’t remember. Not clearly. Not who said what, or who said it first. Or how long it took. Ten minutes? Twenty? It’s hard to tell now, it was hard to tell then, because it all passed in a sort of dream. But as her tram approaches, its number glowing in the wintry twilight, she says quietly, ‘Yes, that was it. The Dancing Man.’

At least, that was what they called him, Tess and Sam. And she steps onto the tram with these three words on her lips, oblivious of the crowds disappearing into the station and the passengers around her.

They were at the pictures. A matinee, of course, since theirs was a daytime affair. The picture theatre with the ceiling, the famous ceiling. The same theatre that the Americans had filled every night of the week, the air always thick with the smell of chewing gum. Yes, that was
it. They were at the pictures. Sitting in the dark. Neither of them speaking. Just staring up at the screen when this newsreel came on. Peace, this voice was saying. Peace at last. And a street in Sydney (they later discovered) was suddenly spread out across the screen in front of them. Although it could have been any city that day. For the scene was the same across the country. Crowded streets. Never so crowded before, and never so crowded again. Or so it seemed to her then. Streets filled with all of those who had come through the war and now just wanted to live. Faces laughing for the camera, waving to the camera, waving to Tess and Sam, and everybody else sitting in the dark. And, all the time, shredded bits of paper falling through the air and landing on the ground already carpeted with the paper scraps of the time that felt as though it would never end and that finally did, and suddenly, because that’s the way time works. Endless one minute and all over the next. Among those laughing for the camera there was the occasional steady, still pair of eyes that were too tired to laugh for the camera, but thought they ought to be there to take in the scene, because, well, it was History.

Then the crowd retreated. Except for a lone figure in a suit and a hat, and a few revellers in the background looking on. This figure, standing in the street strewn with the last scraps of the sad and violent years, smiling at the camera. And then he tipped his hat, greeting the new day (and it occurs to Tess, staring blankly about the tram, that it possibly was morning — the city in the newsreel had that look), and suddenly started this funny little dance with
quick, light steps, all the time with his eyes on the camera and the audience out there in the dark. And then this skip to finish. Did he click his heels? She can’t remember. Then he was gone. Back into the anonymity from which he came. The anonymous Dancing Man. Leaving the street empty, except for the few stragglers and the paper scraps of a time that had finally been blown away.

And the moment it was finished, this little dance of his, Tess knew that this would be the image, above all others, that they would recall, all of them, everybody, when they thought about the way the war ended. The anonymous Dancing Man, who appears and disappears. Doing all the things the moment requires. He tipped his hat because at such moments one ought to tip one’s hat. There is a protocol, either consciously or unconsciously recognised, that ought to be followed, at such moments. Or so Tess reasons. And so he tipped his hat. And so he danced, because the moment required something like a dance. A little comedy, even. And it wasn’t a jubilantly triumphant dance, but a light quickstep. No, not triumphant, just the dance of someone giving himself leave to be carefree again. And then a little skip, because the moment required a skip. Like someone breaking out into a flourish or clicking his heels at an appropriate moment, not because the movement comes spontaneously but because it is expected and the moment wouldn’t be complete without it.

As Tess pieces this all together (whether accurately or not, she’s not sure, for it has been a year), vaguely aware that the tram is nearing her stop, she concludes once more, as she did in the picture theatre sitting next to Sam, that
that five or ten seconds of newsreel footage would have taken infinitely longer to film. That it was too good. Too apt. That these things don’t just happen. But, then again, maybe they did. Maybe the Dancing Man just popped up and disappeared in the time it took to film and watch it. But she suspects not. The lifting of the hat, the dance, the little skip, the snappy exit back into anonymity would have been performed again and again, she suspects, so that all the component movements were just as they ought to be, each one flowing into the other to create the choreographed spontaneity that the moment required.

And afterwards, out on the street and squinting in the late winter light (that carried with it a hint of the coming spring), a street like the one in which the Dancing Man had performed his little jig, something else ended. The end that was always coming but which surprised them anyway. As they walked along the street it was the urgency in Sam’s steps that she noted. At first she couldn’t understand why she so noticed this urgency, or why she chose to call it urgency, until she realised that it was the step of someone who was walking away. Impatient to get away. Someone who was walking into a future that, for reasons that could never be changed, did not include her. She wanted the impossible. For everything to go on the way it always had. And as long as the war continued, as long as they lived in a closed city and nobody could leave, everything would go on as it always had. But the war was over now and everything would change. The Dancing Man told them so. It was over now and soon they would all scatter, and the impossible would give way to the
inevitable. That, at least, was how she read and understood the urgency in Sam’s steps. And she remained convinced that she was right. The end of the affair was upon them. Its time had come. The world called to him and he was eager, impatient, to join it. And while his steps, she was convinced, were moving urgently forward, hers longed to turn back. And it wasn’t so much the differences in their natures, this looking forward and looking back, but the nature of the circumstances. Until then the possibility of leaving existed only in a world of speculation. But all that had changed. He was marching forward, she was looking back. He was leaving and she was never going to leave with him. Her life was here. Theirs was an affair, a love affair, but an affair, and while the war was on they had managed to give fate the slip. But not any more. The fact of the end would have to be faced. And for Tess, who had already resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting and control at least this much in an uncontrollable world, the sooner the better. And this was not, as she now sees it, a callous or cold-hearted decision, but a necessary one. She simply could not go on with the shadow of the end always hanging over them.

And later that same afternoon, back in his room, she lay watching him boiling tea, restlessly, she judged, an air of unspoken thoughts hovering round him, and finally said what had to be said.

‘This is it, isn’t it?’

He’d looked up from pouring the water, and, she imagined, toyed with asking what this ‘it’ was, but didn’t
because it wasn’t necessary. Which was all the confirmation she required. In fact, in the years to come, when Tess recalls this afternoon, she will not be entirely sure who spoke and who said nothing in response. And she will conclude from this that either one of them could have. That they were both thinking it, and that it didn’t really matter in the end who said it.

‘The last time, I mean.’

Again, he had stared back and just when she thought he wouldn’t reply at all, he did.

‘Yes, why not? May as well be now as later. No point…’

‘…dragging things out.’

‘No.’

‘No.’

They were both talking at the same time. Even thinking the same thoughts. At least, that is the way Tess remembers it. She’d rolled over onto her back, with a vague sensation of September in August and the sad thought that they’d never share the spring, that theirs had been a winter affair and would stay that way.

The tram shudders to a stop. Darkness swallows a man in an overcoat and hat.

They were very sensible, in the end.

‘I saw it tonight, a glimpse of the end,’ she’d added. ‘You could have walked right onto the nearest boat. If there’d been one. Couldn’t you?’

To which, and she read this in his eyes, he silently signalled that they could both walk onto the nearest boat. But they’d already gone over that impossibility again and again, and so he never said it.

‘So,’ she went on, filling the silence, ‘as you say, may as well. There’s no point hanging about when something is over. Is there? Not when you’ve known the best of things.’

She said this, she recalls, the tram now slipping into the quiet inner suburb in which she lives, not so much as a statement of fact, not so much as a rhetorical question, but with the faint, residual hope that there might be. A point, that is. At least this is the way she remembers her tone as she finally steps from the tram and walks towards her street. But he had just agreed. And that was that. The impossible bowed to the inevitable. And she can’t even remember now if she spoke or just nodded.

That was when she’d got out of bed and dressed. And it was while she was dressing that she caught the faint shadow of regret in his eyes, and knew she was right. This
was
the moment. Best to part with regret in their eyes. Her instincts were true. Had she chosen to stay he would have followed her. But she didn’t.