by Gregory Day
He was forlorn, there was no doubt, and obviously needed to talk. The two men smoked FB’s Dunhills and watched the Domburgians gliding by, as the professor of mathematics tried to find words for his despair. Strangely, FB, who aside from the death of his own parents had had little experience of grief, didn’t feel uncomfortable or even inadequate as he sat and listened to the grieving Englishman. Occasionally he would laugh with Coulthard as he recalled anecdotes from his and Fiona’s years together, and when Coulthard grew increasingly inconsolable and explained how marooned he felt there on the Dutch coast without her, the tears in the Englishman’s eyes, rather than alarming FB or making him nervous, only brought tears to his own.
John Coulthard obviously sensed the undivided nature of FB’s presence across the table, his readiness to listen to and even understand the sorrows of a stranger. More than once, in the course of that three hours they spent together under the pub awning, he thanked FB and apologised for the imposition. But the apology was only offered out of habit. At a more profound and specific level, he could sense that having the opportunity to talk to a sympathetic and intelligent stranger was more than luck. It felt as natural as it was necessary and, as he described Fiona’s last difficult weeks, first in the hospital at Norwich and then at home with John and her sister Mary, who was a nurse and had travelled across from Liverpool to help, his tears began to flow freely.
FB took no fright at the grown man crying across the table from him. He reassured Coulthard, suggesting that his wife did in fact still live in his life, by her example, in the memories he had of their life together, and the way she went about things. These simply expressed realities seemed to help the mathematician, whom FB felt was suffering almost as much from self-doubt as from the loss of his wife. It was as if the Englishman wanted to return to shore but had lost his navigator. The idea that perhaps, despite her physical passing, Fiona’s spirit was still there with him, as a support and guide, seemed to make some sense. FB saw the flicker of relief in his eyes.
They said their goodbyes just before 7 pm, after Coulthard’s catharsis had seemed to complete itself and the talk had turned back to the Deltawerken. As they rose, John Coulthard once again apologised for his upwellings and FB told him, with a smile, to ‘cut it out’. Perhaps they would see each other on the terrace of the Badpaviljoen in the morning. John Coulthard said he hoped so, before saying good evening and walking off in the direction of the canal.
Back in his hotel room, FB sat in front of the window looking out over the dunes onto the water. The sky was almost colourless over the blue ink of the sea. It had been an unusually intense meeting, but he was in no way exhausted or regretful of what had happened. On the contrary, he felt unusually contented and within half an hour he had pulled his chair up to the small painted wooden desk below the window and started to write.
†
What he couldn’t recall in that room overlooking the North Sea in Domburg, he researched and rediscovered on his return to Australia. But he was surprised at what he could remember, and what he did know, from all the years of working on, and thinking about, that strip of sandy and sheer coast where he grew up and along which a few bright men with a sense of practical civic duty and a taste for development had decided there should be a road.
He sat in that window of luminous Domburg light for ten days and put down in writing what he could. There was no mention of Paris, only brief mentions of Arcachon and the Gascony coast, and certainly no mention of opening the door of a canary’s cage and wondering what would happen next. But it was all in there, like a deep moonless night under the daylights of the world. What it was about his interaction with John Coulthard that suddenly cleared the path for him to begin writing the book is hard to say. Perhaps it was as simple, and as Catholic, as him realising that his own loss could be much worse. What if, for instance, Mathilde had not put her political and philosophical ideals above her feelings for him, and they had married and settled on the Bassin d’Arcachon, only for her to die before her time?
To think that the slim history I found so compelling when I was making my songs about the Great Ocean Road was begun, if not wholly written, on the faraway coast of Zeeland, seems plausible to me now. And to think further on how this came to be so, to think about the stories in our hearts and how slowly they travel, is really no different from thinking about sand. Sand that is the most consumed resource in the world after freshwater and air. Sand that makes a grain out of a mountain and a mountain out of grains. Sand that has no passport, and no conventions or manners, except to change, to change again, to keep moving always and to always change. Sand that has no beginning and no end.
25
Accumulation
In 1983 the Country Roads Board ceased to exist – or, rather, was subsumed into a body calling itself the Road Construction Authority. Alwyn Gibbon took this moment as his cue to retire as divisional engineer in Geelong. He had been in the chair for almost the entirety of FB Herschell’s career and one could be forgiven for expecting FB to feel a certain yet somehow indefinite sense of aeration at the prospect of his forthcoming departure. But it seems things were not that simple. He had self-published The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties in 1982, with a dedication to Anna Nielson and a quote from Camus on the opening page. The book took up its place on municipal and university library shelves, and on the shelves of some of his engineering colleagues and correspondents, but apart from that was summarily ignored. It is these days virtually impossible to find. FB did, however, send a copy to Professor Lacombe in Paris, who had himself only recently retired from academic life to devote his time to writing. Professor Lacombe wrote a very enthusiastic letter in return, in which he acknowledged, for the first time, how difficult things must have been for FB while he was in France, and how impressive it was therefore to observe how he had ‘adapted the primitive certainties of the Revolutionary era to the intricacies of the Australian environment. To encase those lessons in a work of wider social history involving the war recovery project that was the construction of the Great Ocean Road shows the innate subtlety of your intelligence, which of course you did not need to come to Paris to learn.’
FB also received a letter from one Mrs N. Considine of Wishart Street, Port Fairy, who fondly recalled the day in 1965 when she and her husband Pat, who at the time was divisional engineer for the Warrnambool district, enjoyed a round of golf with FB on the links at Port Fairy. ‘Do you remember that visit, Mr Herschell?’ she wrote. ‘I for one remember you as handsome young Frank and I also remember a little conversation we had about France and the dunes. As a result, I enjoyed your erudite book on the Ocean Road immensely.’
The publication of the book had once again attracted the attention of head engineers in the Melbourne office who, in the midst of plans for the restructuring of the department, began to consider FB not as Gibbon’s direct replacement – for there would be no such replacement in the new Road Construction Authority – but as a candidate for the correspondingly senior role in the Geelong and wider Barwon area. FB was called one day to a friendly meeting over lunch and sounded out about his attitude to such an arrangement. According to Anna Nielson, he was flattered, and he even spoke to her about potential projects, including the phasing out of Ammophila arenaria, which may finally have a chance to fly.
Three months later, after a curious silence from Melbourne, which FB put down to the vagaries of the kind of centralised bureaucracy he had read about in the novels of Kafka, the senior positions of the new authority were announced. He, like Kafka, was not on the list. No explanation was given, no apology offered, and thus any prospect of FB returning to his main vocational pathway was over. In Victoria, marram grass, like asbestos, was still perceived as a key ingredient of the state’s apparatus, which was well evidenced in the ensuing months and years when, in response to the severe bushfires of 16 February 1983, or Ash Wednesday as it has become known, the planting of ma
rram grass was ramped up and redoubled all along the fire-affected littoral.
I often wonder what I would have asked FB Herschell about first, when I sat opposite him at the wool-classing table in the cafe in James Street, if I’d known then what I know now. Would I have asked about environmental weeds, unrequited love, or how to write so well about one thing when you’re actually writing about another? Curiously, I find myself also thinking about the existence of God when I think about FB Herschell. I can only put this down to the fact that so much of what I admire in him went unnoticed or unseen in this world. He is far from being a martyr in my mind, but when I think about all the programs these days to remove the marram grass and other exotic vegetation in our area, to restore our coastlines to something better resembling a balance between nature and culture, I can’t help but feel melancholy on his behalf.
He must have watched that slow progression in the decades after his return from Domburg and felt a mixture of emotions. He continued with the work required of him by the new Road Construction Authority (which in 1989 morphed again into the Roads Corporation and subsequently became known as VicRoads) without once being asked to contribute the expertise that was so evident in his book. Slowly, as the 1990s approached the millennium, the rusty wheels of the governing bodies turned towards unavoidable ecological imperatives, just as Australians of all ethnic backgrounds came ever so slowly to understand what Aboriginal people had always been trying to tell them about the delicate beauty of the soils, rocks and sands of antiquity in which they lived. When the shires along the Victorian west coast, and even VicRoads itself, began commissioning detailed environmental studies prior to installing new infrastructure, FB would occasionally send laconic, dry-humoured or positively caustic letters, in which he’d annotate the increasingly corporatised double-speak, thereby pointing out the relative inconsistencies and often shallow intent of the newly fashionable measures being recommended. I have read over some of these letters of annotation in the Correspondence file of his archive, and caught a new happiness in his tone. But would I really call it happiness? Is that the right word? Or is it actually a new and improved version of the insouciance displayed by Danny the Red and the other students in Paris in 1968, and which FB himself displayed to Gibbon when he submitted his report in French? There is a sense of confidence in these letters, even of certainty, both in his own hard-won experience with dunes and in the fact that even as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones.
I remember then that shining in his eyes when he would come into the bookshop, the flesh-and-blood man and not just his words. There we’d stand, amongst the greatest thinkers and artists, scientists and poets in the history of the world, amidst thousands of bound reckonings – yet it was still the same wonky old world. You could see it in his eyes, it was always there: all the beauty, the wisdom, and our perpetual inability to attain it.
Whenever Anna Nielson speaks to me of FB these days, she does so with a smile. Even in the weeks immediately after his death, when the memory of his demise in the hospital must have been fresh, and the loss of his companionship palpable, she would grin at the mention of his name. I take this as a great tonic proof against his life being viewed as a failure, or somehow unfulfilled. He lives on not only in his book and in the papers of his archive but in the spirit of his best friend’s recollection.
†
It was during those weeks immediately after his death that Anna offered to show me through FB’s house. She was concerned, she said, about what would and wouldn’t be noticed by the book auctioneers, the antique dealers, even the people from St Vincent de Paul. ‘Plus,’ she said, with her own twinkle in the eye, ‘you might just enjoy having a look around.’
When I arrived at the house on a sweltering hot day the following week, the first thing I noticed, apart from the complete ordinariness of the treeless working-class street, was the absence of the Renault Ondine. It wasn’t in the garage and it wasn’t parked out the front. So where was it? I felt almost as if the stylish car had, along with its driver, gone to its own stylish afterlife. Subsequently I learnt that I was right about this – the Ondine had been bought by a retired female High Court judge, who lived on the Yarra River in Melbourne and was on the board of the ANZ Bank, the Victorian Racing Club, the Alliance Française and also the steering committee of Melbourne’s annual French Film Festival. She had known FB through the Alliance Française, where from time to time through the years he attended classes. At his encouragement, she was apparently spending her retirement years attempting to translate La Littérature à l’estomac, the seminal 1951 essay by perhaps FB’s favourite of all French authors, Julien Gracq.
The second thing that struck me about my visit to the house in Milipi Avenue was the single bed. In a house bursting at the seams with books both old and new, FB’s original bed, where he had slept both as a child and as an old man, remained wedged into the shadowy corner of his bedroom. It was the constancy of the scene that struck me. The man of sand, who first worked to keep it in its place and then to understand the deeper logic behind its natural propensity to drift and shift about, had stayed put himself for the long duration of his life. The infant, the boy, the young musician, the brilliant engineer with international horizons, the writer, the man of quiet defeat and a broken heart, the jocular interloper, the reader, the regretter, the scholar, the sage, all those facets of him had shifted, interchanged, subsided, slackened, heaped up and stabilised themselves in that one small room. Once the Ondine was parked of an evening, once the fish or steak or quiche was eaten and the current book was read, this was where he’d survey his feeling heart and thinking head. This was his Wenceslas Square, his Eccles Street, his Pequod. His workstation and dreamhouse.
I stood for some time alone in that room, a little confused and unable to comprehend the feeling that he was only partially absent. I felt like an intruder, almost an idolater in a sacred space, staring at his green pillow, his tartan blankets, the built-in shelving still full of papers and notebooks, his little desk with scratchings in the timber he most probably made when he was a child. It was not the room of a famous man, a man for whom everything he had to offer found its rightful and grateful recipients, but nevertheless I had the strong sense as I stood there that the living FB Herschell, the man who had dwelt and dreamed in this room, the man who had lain awake, laughed, and listened to the birds at dawn, was at that very moment being transferred into a character of my imagination. Had death stripped him of any control of his future destiny, just as it had made space for such a deep and abiding resonance? As I stepped between the desk and bed to peer at the contents of his shelves, I sensed again the voiding of space behind me that I had felt by the river when I had first learnt of his death. This time, though, the voiding was not in the shape of a lizard’s tail but seemed instead a bigger, wider, more open form of light. Conscious of this change, I felt then that I was standing on the shore between a life and whatever came after it. Everything was mixed, there was no division, no beginning or end.
When the moment passed I was left again with the ordinary furniture of his room. I had a sudden desire – no, a need – to find out more. I knew then that I would somehow bear testimony, as much to the beautiful quality of solitude I felt in that room as to the man who had lived there.
Anna had left me alone in the bedroom but now, quietly overwhelmed, I re-emerged to greet her in the hallway. She showed me through the other rooms, into the galley kitchen, down the hallway to the little back porch and through an idiosyncratic old screen door to the garden. The garden was the only space that was not full of pages. Instead: a white Geelong sky, a bare patch of sunburnt lawn, a birdbath. We stood in silence for a time looking at that birdbath before turning and going back inside.
Despite the treasure trove of knowledge the house contained – the first editions, the rare ephemera, not to mention the extensive cache of musical scores – there was only one book I was really interested
in that day. I had hoped that perhaps there might be a few copies left over, multiple copies, in a box somewhere, perhaps even under that single bed. But no, he had only ever kept one copy, Anna said, and she assured me it had already been taken away amongst six boxes of especially valuable material by Australian Book Auctions, who had come through the previous week. There were three piles of books still on the living room floor, set aside for the auctioneers to pick up on their final visit the next day, but The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties was not amongst them.
I left Milipi Avenue in the early afternoon, sweaty and moved. All the subtlety, all the deep feeling and close attention I had sensed in his book on the Ocean Road, was somehow contained in that house. His papers were to be collected, an archive was apparently going to be assembled at the university, and I resolved to investigate that when it became available. I also resolved to find my way to the auction of FB’s books when it came up in Melbourne. I had a little money set aside, and now I knew what for. There was that one book, which in the early years of this century had been a portal for me into a whole other way of seeing and writing about the world. It was only one book, a slim self-published volume from a quiet life, in which nearly all the most important things had been left unsaid.
About Gregory Day
Gregory Day is a novelist, poet and musician. His work has won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and the Manly Artist Book Award. He lives in south-west Victoria, Australia.
Also by Gregory Day
The Black Tower: Songs from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats