by David Brooks
***
… impossible, since her hands were so young. But it was Margaret’s hand, Margaret’s, after all, lying on the pillow beside him. One thing had reminded him of another that had reminded him of that thing in the first place.
***
‘Sinners are beloved of God,’ he was agreeing at last, though speaking so softly that you could barely see him, ‘The repentant only especially so, because the repentant ones, the shocked ones, recover the realities of our agreements about things, the true edges. They and only they can confirm where they really are. And since the edges keep changing the sinning must go on.’
Like workers in a mine, he might have answered, doing a work that the rest, on the surface, seeing nothing, do not want to know about. This truth, trapped down there with all the rest.
***
‘And incomplete. There is something about incompleteness. Gaudi died when it was only part done. But if he had lived another twenty years, another thirty, he would not have seen it complete. Now some of that first part has been destroyed and will have to be done again. And I would have it always, perpetually so. A cathedral, once complete, becomes also a monument, and the faith wavers, changes. It is the building, the process, that is testimony … ’
‘I never finished my essay’ – laughing – ‘or my opera house, But how do you complete an incompleteness?’
***
The strange thing about the coming and the going of love is that it can come again. He was thinking of Margaret. How the blackness had driven it out – hers, or his own – so that he had had to learn again when at last the blackness left. And had. As perhaps she too. Yes, had. For this companionship, this quiet coming and going, was one of the forms. As when someone might say Yes, I have been to that country, I know it a little.
***
‘All the impulse sidetracked, somehow, into a woman, so that instead of dreaming in stone – instead of dreaming of dreaming in stone …’ – he was lost in the dream of the real flesh, or had come back (is that what it was?) to where the dreaming in the stone began …
***
It was Gaudi, they said – he was weeping under the pines, watching a boy on the beach running back and forth from the waves, building a castle with the wet sand – they had dug him up when they desecrated the temple, and the children were dragging him about, in his pauper’s rags, by a rope that was tied around his neck.
***
She came to him, urgent, in a sunlit room, wearing a collar-less white shirt he had lost somewhere, the white of it burning about her, and he was moving slowly down her body, slipping the shirt from her shoulders, breathing her deeply, every taut place … And would look at his face in the morning, after such dreams: the skin wrinkled about the eyes, leathern brown disappearing into the white. An old man should not think like that, when there is nothing to be done but irritate the spent flesh. An old man should not dream like that.
***
She was showing him the forest. In a cream-coloured gown, carrying a parasol. The different places. He had not known there were so many. This place is Desire, she said, and this place is Loneliness, and that place, pointing to a group of stunted saplings, is Anger at the Body’s Desertion. That place, she said, pointing to a half-dried pool where he could see the tiny larvae of mosquitoes wriggling, is the Fear that you have Never Loved. And that place, over there, under the giant trees, is Grief, and the bewilderment of it, but it is so thickly overgrown you might have to cut a path through.
***
‘I have found the desire for intimacy to be akin to the paradoxes of Zeno.’ – This was Angus Anderson – ‘Total and lasting intimacy – the intimacy which we so desire – is possible only to angels, and in my understanding of them they should be the last to need it. What is intimacy but confession, at least at its core? And what would angels have to confess? In learning all of someone, one learns also the pain of knowing and exposing all to that person, and unless one is a Sadist, one then guards the other against that pain, and every guarding ploy is a lie, a retreat from intimacy.’
‘And how do we feel about the person who will accept us utterly, for what we really are?’
‘That will depend upon how we feel about ourselves. What does it mean, anyway, “to know yourself”? Does it change anything? Does it change why?’
***
All buildings cover us, clutch us down, because we are poor, timid creatures, afraid of the cold. They fold themselves over us, hold us beneath. But there are some that don’t need to – he was speaking to the class, with the body of Gaudi before him on the beach, where the children had left it – but before the architects of stone there have to be so many architects. I tried to change my life, but something – the stone – was not ready.
***
The two gentlemen at a party – he was sometimes lordly drunk – had been asking about his opera house, and he had told them, stupidly, but also eloquent as an angel. About Utzon’s sails, and what they could do, in response to the gravities he had tried to deny with his bowers. So that now he could see them, there amongst the sails, like a choice, an alternate story. It was the sails, there, today, that had made him think of them, the white sails, of a yacht, far out on the blue of the bay.
***
‘Everything is so simple, so simple in the end. Even the saddest things, and the most horrid. It is we who entangle them, with all our conflicting desires, wanting three, four, five things at once, having to tangle everything to get them. Weeds. And weeds clump, are pulled down by gravity.’
***
All of us are double – it was Angus Anderson – It is a madness in the world that tries to make us One, that insists upon it. All of us are double, he was saying, and some of us more, even, than that, some of us are crowds.
18
The Valley
(1953)
There had been something she had needed to tell him, and hadn’t, a hard thing. Perhaps that was why she had spoken about the dreams instead, to deflect it, try to bring about something that might determine a course for her without her ever having to say, though right now it was hard to imagine what such a course might be. But it might resolve itself. It might be nothing at all.
She was late. Three weeks. Her period. It had happened once before, but that had been only ten days. This time it was already twice that and she was worried. And now shocked, numbed all the more by what they had just done – by the way they had so abruptly, unexpectedly ended it. As if they had been driving along perfectly happily, on a fine, clear day, and swerved suddenly into a tree, and she now found herself coming back to consciousness, inexplicably alone in the wreckage.
She would have to see him again somehow, or at least be in contact, if her period did not arrive. Force the issue if she had to, although the thought dismayed her, and although so much about the issue was not clear at all. But for now there was calm, after a weekend of sometimes almost wild grief – calm, even if only an exhausted calm, and steadiness, as much as she could manage, fighting back the insistent idea that this was all punishment, the beginning of punishment, for both of them, cast out of an Eden they hadn’t really known they were in.
Ironically it was Michael who determined the course, in the short term and the long. She had been wanting to see him, imagining – strangely, but there was no one else – falling upon his neck, as a place to sob, but he had been in Victoria in army training, out of reach. She could have had no idea that it would be he would come to her. The sight of his distress as she opened the door at seven in the morning took her mind from her own. He had just arrived by the night train from Melbourne. His regiment was to leave for Korea in ten days’ time. He’d known for a week already, but hadn’t written to his parents. He had five days’ leave and knew he had to go down to the farm, to tell them – his dad didn’t read the papers – but it was going to be awful: would she come? Please. For support. There was a train to Canberra at eight that evening. Assuming it would be late, as it usually was, it would get into
Bungendore around four or five in the morning and they could get a ride with the mail truck to Braidwood. It would take a night to get there, a day to get back, but at least that meant they would not have to spend more than the two days there. It would be cold in the train on the way down. Did she have a thermos? Could she bring a rug? He’d been freezing on the way up.
‘They don’t know you’re coming?’
‘No. Like I said, there hasn’t been time for a letter, and even if there had been I don’t know what to write. I could send them a telegram, I guess, but I’ve left that too late too. We’d be there before it was. We’ll have to get up to the valley by ourselves somehow. I’ve got a mate at the sawmill in Braid-wood. He’s got a car, or maybe we could go up with the mail, if it’s one of their days to deliver up there –
‘Please. … You have to come. … Please.’
She wanted to go. She was, suddenly, keen to go.
She went in to see her supervisor that morning, not knowing what she would do if he did not let her. Halfway though her explanation she burst into tears. It was clear to him, whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t, that there was more to the story than she was saying, and that if he didn’t let her go he might find out what that was, and have to deal with it. He let her go.
They met at Central Station at six-thirty, bought their tickets, then ate lukewarm meat pies, limp chips and gravy at the café. The carriage was full and, much as each of them wanted to talk with the other, conversation was difficult. They sat in silence as the mis-named express rocked its way through the suburbs and into the dark countryside, stopping at sidings and ill-lit country stations to pick up milk-cans, mailbags, boxes and passengers bound for Canberra or Melbourne or any of the places between. Michael, exhausted from the travel the night before, fell asleep on her shoulder and she stared out into the dark, trying to work out from the sound of the train whether they were going through open fields or through cuttings, tunnels, bush. They arrived in Goulburn at one in the morning, changed trains, and sat at the platform for nearly two hours for no apparent reason before the new train moved off – to deposit them, bleary eyed, at the deserted Bungendore station a good hour and a half before the Apollo Café opened and they could warm themselves with tea. It was almost four hours until, at nine-thirty, the mail-truck passed through on its way to Braidwood and the coast.
The driver, new on the run, was reluctant to take them, but found himself virtually ordered to do so by the woman who ran the post office, and warmed to the idea rapidly enough when he heard Michael’s reason for trying to get home. They stopped at roadside mailboxes all the way to Braidwood, where, dropped in the main street just after midday, they telephoned Michael’s friend at the mill. His car had broken down – if they looked across the road they would see it outside the garage where it was awaiting parts from Sydney – and he could not borrow another, but he had an idea and would call back in twenty minutes or so. Why didn’t they go up the street to the pub and have a counter lunch? – he would telephone them there.
He phoned half an hour later. Still he could borrow no car, but a log-truck was going back to the other side of the valley shortly, as soon as the driver had come back from his midday break. It would be too hard to turn down the road to the farm, but he could drop them at the turnoff. If they carried their bags to the crossroad at the top of the main street the truck would pick them up there in about an hour. It did so, and for the next hour and a half the empty truck ground up the twenty miles through the foothills of the Great Dividing Range to the head of the valley – the chain-smoking driver speaking hardly a word but mesmerising Jennifer with his ability to roll cigarettes one-handed while negotiating the most difficult of bends and gear-changes – and deposited them at a side-road which seemed to plunge from the top of the ridge precipitously down toward a river above which they had been driving for the last mile or two. They put their bags behind a tree to be picked up later and set out to walk the two and a half miles to the farm.
The valley had been opened up a hundred years before by prospectors looking for gold. They found dust in the river and enough, or so they thought, of the real thing when they explored one of the gullies along it, to justify setting up a mine. If there ever was a seam to follow, however – and people were dubious – they lost track of it soon thereafter and never found it again, though the mere presence of the mine was sufficient to keep prospectors in the area for a good fifteen years after the grass had begun to grow back over the mouth of the abandoned shaft. Farmers had come, or would-be farmers, people with no other choice, and a different kind of gold was discovered. The soil and the climate – for the valleys of the Great Dividing Range very often have climates of their own – were ideal for the growing of peaches. Peaches, and apricots, apples, pears, plums, nectarines, quinces: the small valley was now full of orchards, the fruit of which, the valley people firmly believed, was the best in the state and perhaps even in the country. Some of it went to Canberra, some stayed in Braidwood, some was trucked to the fishing towns on the coast; some found its way out over the plains north- and westward; some, now and again, caught the train to Sydney; some, primarily because the quality of the fruit, high as it was, had not yet managed to overcome the isolation of the place, lay on the ground, to enrich the lives of the wasps and worms. By the time they had walked half a mile along the Monga road, past the first two farms, Jennifer had eaten the two best peaches of her life, picked from trees heavy with fruit, standing in grass so long and so littered with windfall that it looked as if they had been untended for years.
By the time they had passed the first two farms, too, she had all but forgotten the taste of the fruit in the face of three of the strangest people she had yet encountered. She and Michael had been walking some way in silence, he heavy with his own thought and she wide-eyed with afternoon light and the silence and magical greenness of the place. The dust on the road had perhaps muffled their footsteps, so they had surprised the young boys with the saucer-like eyes and shaved, misshapen, scabbed heads, and the old blue heeler which rushed at them barking fiercely, though it seemed less to attack than to keep them at bay. Michael tried to calm it, holding out an open hand, and the boys – they had to be twins – simply stared, interrupted in what they had been doing with a knife to a large blue-tongue lizard. Jennifer, seeing the cut stump and the welling blood, had cried out in dismay and begun to move towards them. But Michael, with his other hand, stopped her, nodding in the direction of the trees to the right of them where a third figure stood, an older man, tall, with a gaunt face and short blond beard, whose eyes appeared to have rolled back in his head so that only thin slits of white showed, as if he were blind, or in supplication, or suffering a kind of standing fit. With a soft pressure on her elbow Michael guided her past them and on, out of sight, around the bend.
‘What was wrong with him?’ she asked when it seemed safe to speak. ‘And the boys! What were they doing? That poor lizard! Did you see that? Do you know them?’
‘I’ve seen him before, but never like that. He owns the farm. But I’ve never seen the boys. I heard that he had kids but you hardly ever see anyone from that place. I went there once when there was a cow out on the road here and I thought it might be theirs. I couldn’t find anyone. But I had that feeling, you know? – that I was being watched all the time.’
‘Strange eyes, as if they aren’t all there. They gave me the creeps.’
‘Maybe it’s inbreeding. There’s a lot of it in the valley, or talk of it, anyway.’
‘Inbreeding?’
‘Yes, you know: cousins marrying cousins, brothers marrying sisters, fathers having kids with their own daughters. It’s an isolated place and people keep to themselves. All sorts of things go on and you wouldn’t know half of them. You could live a whole lifetime here and only three or four people need know about you. A young bloke a few years back, on the other side of the valley, got his stepmother pregnant while his dad’s back was turned, and now he’s his own brother’s father
. Though I suppose that’s only technical. It’d be a lot worse if it was your real mother.’
‘No one would ever go that far, surely … ’
‘You don’t know. You just don’t know.’
They walked on a while longer in silence. Perhaps he, like she, was still thinking of the boys. A ball of shining red gum had fallen from a tree onto a hard patch on the road in front of them. For one horrid moment she thought it was an eye.
You could hear traffic on the road from some way off, although because of the bends you couldn’t always tell how close it was. Then an old green ute was upon them before they knew it, blasting them from behind with its horn. They scrambled aside, Michael swearing as he hit his elbow on a tree-trunk, but instead of passing, the vehicle was coming to a stop. She hadn’t recognised it – how could she? – but Michael had known it as soon as he had turned. And was standing confusedly, not knowing whether to go over to it or to wait for his father to get out, which was, before you could think about it, the way it happened.
‘Dad’ / ‘Michael!’ – simultaneously – and then, ‘I knew you’d come before you shipped out. I told your mother that. But where are your bags? You’re not as you are?’
‘No, they’re back at the turn-off. We came on the mail truck. I was going to get you to go back for them when I got home. Dad, this is Jennifer.’
‘Yes, of course. Who else would it be? Let’s go then, let’s go,’ almost pushing Michael up into the cabin then more ceremoniously helping her, and executing, on the narrow road, a five-point turn. She watched for the spot where they had seen the boys only minutes before, but couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was that the shadows were getting longer, or that the situation had so rapidly defused itself, and the buoyant talk was distracting.
‘Before I shipped out? You mean you know?’