by Gregory Day
23
Change II
One day, not long after FB had finished on the dunes, he bumped into Anna Nielson outside Wolfgang Schmidt’s rooms on Yarra Street. Anna was on her lunch break from her duties as Schmidt’s secretary and agreed, at FB’s suggestion, to take a stroll down Yarra Street to the water. FB was fully togged up that day, as was his wont, in elegant suit and tie, as he was meeting a surveyor on the foreshore to discuss some plans for new parking arrangements. But not until 2 pm. It was only 12.30 pm at the time, and so they spent a comfortable hour with each other in the sunshine, mostly laughing at how sore Anna had been after that day’s work with the Croatian women, and also sharing jokes about how odd Geelong was in this, that and the other way. Like so many towns of supposedly second-rate character, Geelong often inspired this kind of self-deprecating humour in its inhabitants. It also inspired talk of trips away, to other Australian cities, or overseas – anywhere, really, but Geelong. But as FB and Anna strolled along Yarra Street and then along the foreshore towards the Botanical Gardens he mentioned nothing of his time away. In passing she casually mentioned a trip she had once made to London, but only in passing. It was a gentle hour, full of light touches of mirth and humour and, from FB’s account, it would be fair to say they were shy in each other’s company. They parted, agreeing that they should do it again sometime.
In the following couple of years it was Anna who encouraged FB to sit down and write his book on the Ocean Road. Impressed by the occasional articles he was writing on local bridges, tunnels, aqueducts and the like, she told him she thought he had something even better in him. Why didn’t he produce something on all the work he’d done along the coast – which, after all, had taken him to France? He laughed off her suggestion, it seems, or so she told me, but quite obviously her encouragement was having its effect.
When FB took possession of the Renault Ondine they began taking weekend drives into the landscape to look at the early colonial bridges he was interested in. By this time, he was already arguing for the preservation of these bridges, often proposing to Gibbon that road alignments be updated rather than the bridges be destroyed. FB and Anna would picnic from the boot of the Ondine by the Wilson iron bridge at Shelford, the Chinamans Bridge over the Goulburn at Nagambie, and occasionally, if they could synchronise their time off work, they would venture up into New South Wales to look at the Lennox bridges along the Hume Highway and in the wider Sydney area.
Entirely through happenstance, FB was still occasionally seconded to work along the Great Ocean Road, but not, of course, on anything to do with dunes. He worked on occasional realignment, drainage and retaining projects triggered by destructive weather. But Anna noticed that if she ever suggested that they take the Ondine for a run along the coast he would baulk at the idea. On the weekends the nose of the Renault would always be pointed inland.
Then, quite suddenly, in the autumn of 1980, FB broke off his friendship with Anna. He didn’t explain his reasons other than to say he needed to be alone. He became quite brusque when Anna pressed him on it. She was understandably hurt but also began to worry. She asked Dennis Keating, a mutual friend who was also an engineer in the Geelong division of the CRB, to keep an eye on him. When Dennis Keating phoned Anna in early April to say that FB had taken two weeks off and flown to Holland, she was mystified. In their perpetual banter about ‘daggy old Geelong’ he’d always joked that he had no interest in overseas travel anymore and that for him a quiet life in Victoria was quite sufficient. She’d felt that beneath all the jocularity he was quite serious about this. And yet now he’d quite suddenly shot off to the Netherlands.
That winter Anna Nielson moved across town from East Geelong to Brassey Avenue in Highton. She wouldn’t have said that the break with FB had anything to do with her sudden need for a move, but perhaps it did. She’d heard nothing more from Dennis Keating about FB, nothing about how his trip went or whether he had returned to work refreshed or even come back to work at all. She knew that in a town the size of Geelong it wouldn’t be long before she’d bump into him, or at least sight the Ondine, but she busied herself with the new house and tried to put him out of her mind.
On a Saturday morning in late October she was at home feeling bored and tired after a long week in Schmidt’s rooms when out of the corner of her eye she saw a blue flash through the window. The Ondine had pulled into her driveway.
As he got out of the car FB looked sheepish and felt sheepish, if his own words are anything to go by.
The great comfort and fun of our connection means she’ll probably open the door, when I know I deserve to have it slammed shut. But all this – no, everything – is bigger than both of us. The sand must drift – so we take the longue durée view.
And so it was.
†
They were kindred spirits in a sleepy hollow. The population of Geelong at that time was less than a hundred and fifty-thousand people, and amongst that number there was not one other person whose companionship either of them could have enjoyed so much, or grown so fond of. They were both quiet, strong-willed people with deep interests. The ongoing stimulation of dealing with and transcribing Wolfgang Schmidt’s psychoanalytic cases gave Anna a stimulating professional life without ever being able to talk about it. While she no longer played the piano seriously, as a younger woman she had graduated from the Conservatorium of Music in Melbourne, and of course FB was accomplished on the violin. They shared a quiet but jet black sense of humour, and took little interest in the football or the Grammar School, the twin obsessions of the town. They read, they liked to drive west when the wattle was out, and neither of them particularly enjoyed the stereotypical Australian summers. They had nothing against either Aboriginals or ‘New Australians’, and they both enjoyed chocolate, mussels from the bay, and well-bletted medlars. In short, they felt almost at home with each other.
†
As he got out of the Ondine in Brassey Avenue, FB had brought one important secret with him to help engineer his soft return. He held it under his arm as he came up the driveway.
Anna straightened her skirt and blouse and opened the door even before he had reached it. She put her hand on her hip and glowered at him.
When she finally asked, ‘Who told you where to find me?’ FB could already see the amusement in her eyes. What would her Dr Schmidt have to say about me? he wondered.
They sat at Anna’s kitchen table, FB’s tweed jacket draped over a captain’s chair, Anna leaning forward with her slender hands clasped on the formica. His secret lay between them, a tattered manila folder the colour of wet sand, tied up in a cross with his mother’s kitchen string.
24
Dunes in Themselves
He’d flown to Amsterdam, taken a train south to Middelburg in the province of Zeeland, and then a bus to the coast at Domburg. When he got off the bus the day was pale grey and still, but even without wind he could immediately smell the salt, the marram grass and the sand. He retrieved his luggage and walked the short mile along a pleasant canal to his hotel overlooking the beach. He had booked a second-floor room to make sure he had a good view of what he had come there to think about.
He was still tired from the flight, but he could not sleep, not now that he’d arrived. The room was small but comfortable, and he was happy with the view. He took a shower, smoked his first cigarette in twelve years, and then immediately ventured out onto the dunes.
Piet Mondrian was concerned with a harmony not of the human and his natural environment, but of nature working through the senses into the human’s spiritual environment. ‘The power of the harmony inherent in existing things,’ he wrote, ‘must be attributed to the living beauty of nature that acts upon all our senses simultaneously. For nature does not move us through visual appearance alone.’
That is a difficult admission for a painter to make and one that eventually led Mondrian to abandon figurative representation entirely in favour
of his famous horizontal and vertical grids of primary colours. But it had been the dunes, and never those colourful grids, that had resonated with FB. It had been another comment of Mondrian’s, which had kept resonating through the years, to such an extent that as his memories of Mathilde and 1968 began slowly to granulate, to disperse into the person he’d become, he decided to disrupt what had become his undramatic local life and make his sudden journey to Domburg.
‘We are no longer natural enough to be quite one with nature,’ Mondrian had written, ‘but not yet sufficiently spiritual to be quite free of nature.’
†
As he stepped out from the porch of the Domburg hotel into the miraculous sea light of the Zeeland coast, FB felt an almost overwhelming anxiety rising in his throat. It had been with him for some months now, this feeling of being caught between. He could barely distinguish Mathilde’s outline anymore, yet she remained the defining figure of his life. He had become increasingly fearful that what he had experienced with her, and through her, was slowly dwindling into the mundane. Being banned from the dunes he felt exiled from his vision, and now, as the years passed, he had begun to question whether he even cared anymore. About anything. About Anna, about his work, or his memories. This terrified him, and in the workaday routine of his life in Geelong he began to realise that something had to be done to stay in touch.
He could not bring himself to return to France, but lying alone in his bed one night in Milipi Avenue, he’d figured out this alternative. It didn’t for one second occur to him that it was in any way pathetic. He would go not back to Paris, nor to La Teste-de-Buch or Cap Ferret, but to where the dunes that had brought them together in the Galerie Sarcon were painted. He had no need to see the actual paintings again, but he did now have the need to see the real things, the dunes in themselves.
Was this some predestined self-confrontation, I ask myself, or a belated pursuit for a self that was no longer singular? Was it FB himself who had become the distant figure on the flat horizon? Or was it just a middle-aged man’s holiday from a life that had disappointingly slipped towards the careless and automatic?
†
He walked the dunes that first jetlagged day in Domburg, and over the three days following. He looked at the marram tufts shining sleek in the glare, and pictured his younger self standing with Mathilde in front of the Mondrian dunes in the Galerie Sarcon in the Rue des Quatre-Vents. The Enlightenment and Romantic era aristocrats had holidayed at Domburg, as they had at Arcachon, but Mondrian belonged to neither of those crowds. He was a theosophist, a kind of artist-priest, and it was in the clear atmosphere of the Zeeland coast during the summers of 1907, ’08 and ’09 that he began to move from what he called an ‘unconscious naturalistic vision’ to a ‘universal’ or ‘pure plastic vision’. It was as if, in the unusually luminous Domburg light, he had developed X-ray vision and had begun to ‘see through things’, as he put it. Little by little, during those three Domburg summers, the outer recognisable form of the world began to fall away from his pictures, and it was in the very dunes where FB now walked that this had begun to happen.
The paintings FB and Mathilde had seen in Paris had certainly still been recognisable as dunes, but they also, quite literally in their infra-colour fields, resembled X-rays of the known coastal environment. For a theosophist, who aspires to a non-material life of the spirit, this perhaps could be an expected progression. But who would have imagined that it would propel Mondrian from the dunes of Zeeland to the urbanist geometric colour grids for which he has ultimately become known? Life and art are nothing if not unforeseen, and when Mondrian made the incredible claim in 1919 that ‘eventually natural appearance will cease to exist’, he was not referring to any generic annihilation or apocalypse to come. What was driving him on his path towards the ‘pure plastic vision’ that would ‘see through things’ was a yearning to somehow transcend or, as he said, to ‘neutralise’ the tragic element of life. In other words, he was trying to avoid the pain of living on earth.
As FB walked the dunes he did not walk alone. As a civil engineer he walked with the knowledge of the extraordinary feats of land reclamation that had been achieved in that part of Holland, and his mind could not help but survey the rhythm of the regular timber groynes running down from the dunes along the beach to the water, and consequently to compute accumulation and subsidence, projective wind vectors and their gradient effects, even a putative deep botanical past of the now marram-dominated hummocks. All this as he also walked as a lonely lover. Twelve years earlier in Paris, she had stood beside him in front of the paintings of the dunes, but now she was nowhere but inside him, as he stood in those dunes themselves.
Thus, if you were to paint an Australian man standing in the dunes of Domburg sometime in April 1980, you would have to paint more than just the figure in the landscape for your picture to be true.
Eventually, on that first day, he retraced his steps along the dune path and made his way back towards the town. That night he dined in the hotel restaurant and went up early to his room. He was exhausted and washed out from the long flight and then the walk, and he slept soundly until just before the dawn, when he was woken by the sound of rain.
†
It would have come as no surprise to any of FB’s engineering colleagues that he had chosen this part of the world to visit on his first overseas trip in so long. Zeeland, which translates into English as ‘sea land’, was home to the Deltawerken, or Delta Works, a vast post-World War II reclamation project that had barred estuaries, joined isolated islands and ultimately shortened the coastline of Holland by seven hundred kilometres. The Eastern Scheldt, a storm surge barrier across the Scheldt River, involving sixty-two sluice gates, each forty metres wide, was mid-construction at the time of FB’s visit and would have been reason enough for him to visit Zeeland. But while the Deltawerken was his perfect camouflage, the Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier was the last thing on his mind.
He walked the dunes, ate his meals either in the hotel or on the terrace of the stately Badpaviljoen, he smoked cigarettes, and he wrote in his journal. While breakfasting on the Badpaviljoen terrace on his third day in the town, he struck up conversation with an Englishman at the next table, a mathematics professor from the University of East Anglia holidaying alone after the recent death of his wife. Professor John Coulthard had made a comment in passing about FB’s penchant for a breakfast cigarette, whereupon FB had promptly stubbed out his filtered Dunhill, presuming that the Englishman didn’t like the smell. They got to talking then, and FB learnt that Coulthard, far from being averse to smoking, was actually attempting, in the most reserved English manner, to cadge a smoke from his neighbour. They both laughed at the misunderstanding, which then led to FB’s admission that he was smoking himself for the first time in many years, simply because he was on holiday. Two Dunhills were subsequently lit and the two middle-aged men sat talking on the sunlit terrace until midday.
The next day they breakfasted together again, without being so forward as to make any formal arrangement. But FB agreed to meet John Coulthard that same afternoon on the Ooststraat, Domburg’s main shopping street, to share a beer and then take a stroll along the beach.
At 4 pm they met in a small pub along the Ooststraat, a block back from the water. They sat outside under an awning, at a heavy timber outdoor dining table from where they could watch Domburgians of all ages going about their business on bicycles.
John Coulthard was tall and heavy-boned, with curly but receding salt-and-pepper hair and smooth olive skin. He had a kind smile, though one that seemed to squeeze itself up as if from a long way down in his quiet and studious personality. They shared a bowl of peanuts and resumed where they’d left off in the morning, talking about Coulthard’s world at the university, also about Margaret Thatcher, Malcolm Fraser, test cricket and the Deltawerken. Before long, however – before they’d finished their first beers, in fact – John Coulthard began talkin
g about his wife, about her slow demise from breast cancer, and eventually about how much he was struggling without her.
Coulthard’s wife Fiona had been Irish, from Dublin, and they’d met when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge. ‘She was the spark I needed,’ Coulthard told FB. ‘She was doing a history major, she was full of ideas, politically headstrong, while I was just a shy little maths guy, I suppose. God knows what she saw in me, but I couldn’t really believe my good fortune. We started going out together and, well, she seemed to like me. I took her home to Norfolk to meet my parents, which I was nervous about, because she was Irish, but she charmed them as well. She was a very capable person and introduced me to pubs, to travel, to thinking seriously about where England, Ireland and the rest of Europe was going. Before that I’d not thought too much about anything but my own grades, and hockey and cricket, my own achievements.’
He paused then, closed his eyes ever so briefly and began shaking his head. ‘And now, you see,’ he said, looking at FB with a slightly bewildered expression, ‘here I am on my own again.’
FB let John Coulthard talk. They ordered more beers and he listened as the grieving mathematician described a blissful married life, how he and Fiona both became members of the British Socialists and then the International Marxist Group, where they became friendly with Tariq Ali, amongst others. ‘All this was Fiona’s doing,’ John Coulthard explained. ‘She had a heart, you know, and it wasn’t ever cancelled out by her mind or her involvement with academia. As you probably remember, the late sixties was a complicated time, both sexually and politically, not to say philosophically, but Fiona steered us both through all that so that even I developed a kind of certitude that really wasn’t in my nature – and still isn’t.’
The Coulthards had been unable to have children and, after toying with the idea of fostering and adoption, eventually decided against it. But really, John told FB, ‘We were so busy that we just didn’t get around to it. I wish we had now.’