by Gregory Day
So it was that FB began employing his knowledge along the ocean coast of the Bellarine Peninsula, which years before the returned World War I soldiers began their work had been the proposed starting point for the building of the Great Ocean Road. On Gibbon’s suggestion, FB was helped by a group of Croatian women from the Nissen huts of East Geelong who, in floral headscarves and wide skirts, planted the marram grass so hard and well that the sand gathered around the grass with an efficiency that even FB couldn’t quite believe. He’d come back from France with revolutionary lessons, with the examples of les landes and Cap Ferret still fresh in his mind, and they were having immediate results. The Gascony palisades he erected, combined with the assiduity of the Croatian women’s planting of the marram, saw the small area he first concentrated on – the sloping dune habitat along the Bluff Road just south-west of the mouth of the Barwon River – steadily changed.
Just as he had with Professor Lacombe on their trip to Arcachon and Cap Ferret, and during those strange and lonely weeks in Paris after their return, when his studies reached their crescendo in inverse proportion to the desolation of his heart, FB managed to mask his emotional turmoil in his dealings with Gibbon. In this way, his sadness came back to Australia as grumpiness, even arrogance. When Gibbon demanded an extended report on his studies in France, FB at first ignored him completely. Then, when Gibbon got shirty (as the saying went in those days), he consented to deliver a thirty-six-page report – but in French! Called in to Gibbon’s high office to explain, FB’s response was curt. When Gibbon pointed to the wad of staple-bound foolscap on the desk in front of him and demanded: ‘What’s the point of giving me this?’, FB replied: ‘You gave me no encouragement in these endeavours. In fact, you actively tried to block my path to Paris. But if I can go to the trouble of making the journey to the other end of the world, and of learning the language which holds the key to a lot of this research, then you can bloody well learn it too!’ And with that FB got up and stormed out of the building.
He sat for the rest of the afternoon at the window of the front bar of the Corio Hotel in Yarra Street, nursing a single glass of stout and trying to calm himself down.
The problem Gibbon had was that, as far as his CRB bosses in Melbourne were concerned, Frank Herschell was a feather in his cap. There had been no-one amongst the engineers in the Melbourne office who’d shown the kind of initiative that Herschell had, and the news of his research trip, including the scholarship he attained to get him over there – which Gibbon had indeed tried to stymie out of pure one-upmanship – rubbed off on the whole of Gibbon’s Geelong branch just as it had made its way up to the CRB hierarchy in Melbourne. It was indeed the case that in FB’s absence, Gibbon and his cohort in McKillop Street had received an official commendation from the governor, which they all knew could be attributed to the official policy of fostering international relations. But Gibbon could no sooner have admitted that to FB than he could have read the report in French. Which meant of course that the defiance of FB initially refusing to submit his report, and then the wilfulness of him finally submitting it in a fashion unintelligible to Gibbon, could logically have been construed as the actions of a man who wanted to be dismissed from his post. At that stage however there was no way that Gibbon could have sacked him, not even for what his military cronies would have termed ‘gross insubordination’. Unbeknowns to him FB’s petulance in fact contained no risk at all, as Gibbon well knew he had to retain the jewel in his crown, even if it meant turning a blind eye to behaviour which enraged him.
It stands to reason, then, that any discussion of the actual technology of sand and its stabilisation was at that stage impossible between Gibbon and FB. And for the time being the work of the Croatian women continued apace with his encouragement out on Bluff Road and on the Thirteenth Beach road. As the introduced tussocks multiplied and grew, any inklings FB had of those hummocks becoming a living embodiment of the heaviness in his heart remained well out on the rim of his professional life. It seems fair though to suggest that he must nevertheless have begun to harbour such oblique correspondences between his anguish and his stabilisation methods from this time on – in the same secret way, perhaps, as he harboured the intuitions he found amongst Proust, Perec, Gracq, Mondrian and Albert Camus.
18
Subsidence
Before FB left Paris, it had been in response to his final submitted essay on Brémontier’s work of the late 1700s that Professor Lacombe had finally showed his hand on the creation of the largest forest in Europe along the previously squelchy and unproductive magnificence of les landes on the Atlantic coast. Despite a fascination with the long-gone stilt-walking inhabitants of the marshes, and the fact that the Gascony coast was now a site of some personal loss and despair for him, FB sang the praises in the essay of Brémontier’s grand project of planting out two hundred kilometres of coastal wetlands with the Pinus pinaster and the coastal dune with gourbet.
When he was summoned to Professor Lacombe’s office after being awarded top marks he, understandably enough, presumed it was so that the professor could offer him his congratulations. But that was only part of the reason. By this stage, FB had been back from the Atlantic coast for many weeks. After the protests culminated in students setting fire to the Bourse, or Paris Stock Exchange, on 24 May, de Gaulle had been returned with a record-breaking majority in the elections of 23 and 30 June, and the dramatic events of May seemed almost as distant as Australia. On the very morning that FB was summoned to Lacombe’s office he had risen at 5 am to go walking, after yet another restless night, and stood at the bar of the all-night tabac on Rue Gay-Lussac as the paving machinery of the municipality of the Île de France proceeded stealthily through the first light. These were the bitumen trucks come on de Gaulle’s orders to seal the fate of history. For centuries the people of Paris had used the streets’ cobblestones as their weapons against what they considered to be oppressive or unjust regimes. Only now did the machinery exist to remove the problem once and for all. FB, the tabac owner and one or two other early risers watched through freshly washed glass as the noisy machines began the process which would result in a thick black treacle of tar being layed over the pattern of the old stones.
A heavy silence inverted the tabac amid the noise of the dawn machines. FB was conscious of what he was looking at. This was quite literally the machinery of the state, everything the protests of May had been up against. The tabac owner and the two men cradling their coffees obviously felt the significance of what they were watching also. They did not need to ask for each other’s precise thoughts in the moment. No-one said a word.
Nor did Professor Lacombe when his tired-looking protégé entered his room. Lacombe gestured for FB to take a seat. Then the two sat in silence for what seemed to FB like a very long time.
Eventually Lacombe asked, ‘Do you ever wonder how the shepherds would have felt?’
FB’s mind was weary, his whole being exhausted. He thought he must have missed something.
‘When they drained les landes,’ Lacombe explained. ‘When they transformed their homes, their sheep pastures, their way of life.’
It was phrased as a question but FB was feeling too slow. Though something was beginning to dawn.
‘Do you know in 1948 there was a forest fire in les landes that killed fifty-two people?’
‘No,’ said the bewildered student. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Your assignment was well researched, well executed, as is evidenced by your results.’
Silence.
‘Thank you,’ FB managed finally.
Lacombe dismissed this with a wave of his hand.
‘But I wonder what the consequences will ultimately be if we drain every similar landscape of its moisture in the name of commercial productivity.’
FB frowned.
‘A world without stilts, perhaps,’ Lacombe said with a smile.
FB managed a weak s
mile too.
And then, quite unexpectedly, the professor asked: ‘How is Mathilde?’
FB was shocked. Of the three questions he’d been asked so far this was easily the hardest to answer.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Professor Lacombe nodded. ‘I thought as much.’
‘I haven’t seen her since our time in Arcachon,’ FB admitted.
‘Yes. Well, yesterday I received this envelope, enclosed in a letter addressed to me. She did not know your address?’
FB looked confused.
‘Well, whatever the case, I have been asked to hand this on to you.’
Lacombe passed the small white envelope across the desk. It was addressed simply to ‘Francis Herschell’. Turning it over FB saw that on the back there was an address in Munich.
‘It seems from her letter to me that she has joined a student delegation to discuss the situation internationally. Prague, Vietnam, Greece, Chicago. But I’m sure she will let you know all that.’
‘Thank you,’ FB said again in a quiet voice.
‘It is no trouble.’
The professor stood up then, signalling the end of the meeting. ‘So, you will return home now that your studies here are over?’
‘Yes,’ FB replied, also getting up.
Lacombe walked his student to the door. ‘And of course we will stay in touch, Francis.’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you, Professor.’
The two men shook hands and the Australian scholarship student left through the door.
†
FB’s papers do not include the exact contents of the letter Mathilde sent from Munich, but they do hint at some of its ingredients. It seems certain enough that she mentioned Herbert Marcuse, Mario Savio, Bobby Kennedy, Alexander Dubček, Rudi Dutschke. She also alluded to her possible involvement in the events of 24 May, when the Bourse was set on fire. Whether or not the letter became any more personal than that is unclear, although given the fact that FB would make cryptic allusions to it in his private papers for many years to come it seems that it might have. If nothing else, it’s clear that Mathilde felt the need to demonstrate to FB that leaving La Teste-de-Buch to return to the fray was not a decision she took lightly, and would not be a decision she would recoil from, or waste.
The morning after his final meeting with Lacombe, FB was back at the all-night tabac on Rue Gay-Lussac, having been sleepless once again as he digested the letter’s contents. Once again the paving crew were there, tamping down the concrete over which they would smear the top layer of oily black asphalt. An acrid smell was in the air, struggling for control over the scent of cigarettes, coffee and almonds. FB sat in the window, alone at one of only three tables, watching the method of the paving crews, their discussions, the angles of their Gitanes, the smears on their overalls, the cohesion of the machinery which nevertheless clanked and roared primitively in the birdless dawn.
She also seems to have mentioned Mexico in the letter; the possibility that she might go there for a meeting potentially more effective and purposeful than the one she was attending in Munich. It seems as if she was letting FB know that she did not underestimate the price he had paid. That she would not waste his pain. He records having flinched at 3 am in his room, and then that he sat bolt upright in the dark, panting, as it occurred to him that somehow he was being martyred for the cause. Was he supposed to be proud of her engagement, proud that somehow his suffering had made its own contribution to the flames licking the Bourse, to the creation of a new world? Momentarily the letter not only saddened him, but panicked and disgusted him. By 4 am he was dressed and out on the puce-coloured streets again.
As he sat looking out the window of the tabac, it was obvious the machinery of the state was still very much in control, despite what she might think. Already the regulars at the bar were growing used to the sound of the machines, resigned to the idea. Was this what it was like when the Nazi tanks rolled into the boulevards in 1940? he wondered. Was it just a matter of acclimatisation? Millions on the streets one minute, silent coffees and Armagnacs the next. Let’s just talk football, shall we? Or about the Jew who lives on the corner. Take our ticket in the Loterie Nationale, talk taxes, food prices, blind ourselves with particulars to avoid staring into the bigger picture, the deeper river. In her courtesy, she had written to inform him, if only by implication, that he was back there in the ruck, and that she was a topmost apple on the tree. Was she thanking him for that? He suspected so.
With the new light the day began to warm up, but FB sat frozen in his seat in the tabac, amidst the grinding, screaming apparatus of the road gang. Perhaps Gilles had let her know how desperate he was? Was that what had made her write?
Two nuns walked past on the other side of the window, one with a soccer ball in her arms, the other with a green ukulele. They stopped briefly as one pointed out the paving crew to the other. They began to discuss what was going on, the covering over of the cobblestones. Then suddenly the ball spilt from the nun’s arms and rolled out onto the half-constructed tarmac. FB watched as a lightly built man in his twenties deftly flicked the ball up to himself, wiped it against his blue overalls and returned it to the nun. They had a brief exchange, at the end of which the young worker shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands, as if to absolve himself of any responsibility. The nuns frowned at him, and continued on into the morning.
It was another layer being installed between nature and culture. The cobbles were made by hand, and they fitted in the hand. Mathilde had hurled them herself, on this very street, on the night of the barricades. But now she was away at a meeting in Munich. And then she would be off to another one in Mexico. FB drained his cup. The future, it seemed, was sealed.
†
On the flight home, perhaps because he was in mid-air, beholden to no ground, hardly even to gravity, he found himself feeling differently. The May demonstrations had ultimately achieved a thirty-five percent wage rise, and he was obviously still in her thoughts. Could the plane do a U-turn, he wondered, right there above the Aegean Sea? He would wait for her, in Paris, under the florist’s awning opposite 40 Rue Monge, with his integrity intact. He would propose a new beginning for them both in Australia, where more than half the roads had not even been cobbled yet, let alone sealed in hot asphalt. There was an openness there, he would tell her, the sand was free to blow itself about, there was not such a stubborn edifice to remove. Things were moving, progressing, blooming even. A bird had room to fly.
He checked himself. Who was he kidding? The jumbo jet was hurtling south and would not be turning back. And here was the hostess, with the cold beer he’d ordered, as if to confirm that this was so.
19
Backshore
FB had developed a reputation as both a gentleman and a bit of a clown amongst the Croatian women he had recruited to plant the marram grass out on Bluff Road. This was largely because he was comfortable in their company. At home on Milipi Avenue with his mother, however, his mind was full of murderous thoughts and other dark flights of the imagination. His mother was glad to have him home again, but he cast her as an overweight pigeon who, once stuck in the depth of the backyard birdbath, would not be able to extricate herself. He imagined her feathers growing dark and heavy until she became leaden in the water. And there she drowned. His mother-pigeon. But that was not all. Upon finding her dead he proceeded to wring her neck and cooked her just as Elizabeth David recommended in her book French Provincial Cooking.
It was in this kind of volatile atmosphere that books became more of a saviour than ever. He read The Lucky Country by Donald Horne in those first months of his return and copied the following quote into his journal: ‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.’ Such, he felt, was his life at the CRB, where Gibbon and he ground against each other like tectonic plates, thereby causing any amount of shudders and shockwaves in the depar
tment. Amid all this the Croatian women were a fond relief. He got on well with them, enjoying their directness, their practical intelligence and unassuming air. Because of his time in France he felt his horizons had widened, and the women certainly allowed for that worldliness, given their non-Australian origins. A couple of them had visited France themselves before migrating to Victoria, and so it was the case that he could find himself fixing up string-lines for the palisades beside Bluff Road while discussing the merits of the SNCF with a bent-over mother of four called Maria, or the steeping methods required for the cooking of snails with a compassionate beauty called Vera Kaloper. He would share jokes with the women, too, sometimes even at the expense of the French, but generally the butt of their humour had more in common with the wryness of Donald Horne than the seriously slippery slopes of Vichy. The women enjoyed FB’s capacity for irreverence and grew fond enough of him to rib him from time to time about little personal things, like the forever bobbling pom-poms on his outlandish tam-o’-shanter, or even bigger things like the fact that he still remained unmarried.
These were his handsome years, after all, there seems little doubt of that. Recently returned from Europe, he carried himself with confidence and sophistication in public and dressed with a more subtle flair than he had before he’d left Geelong. Internally, of course, he felt anything but dapper but this deeper discrepancy would lessen while he worked with the women on the dunes. Around Gibbon, however, as is evidenced by his stunt of submitting the report in French, he quite often allowed the tension to come to the fore.
The task out at Barwon Heads was nothing on the scale of what Brémontier had done by planting the pines of les landes, but as the marram grass so successfully took over the dunes just south of the Barwon River mouth, and as his graphs and measurements altered accordingly, something about the process began to unnerve him. It is hard to tell whether his eventual change of mind on the planting of marram grass had as much to do with upsetting his superior as it did with his newly awakened longue durée view of history. Or whether indeed – and this truly is perhaps the key enigma at the heart of his quiet life – it came about as a product of first his flourishing with, then his rejection by, Mathilde.