Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  While I stood on the last section of the cement path, I thought of the place ahead as having been designed for the exclusive enjoyment of privileged persons unknown to me but almost certainly female. And yet the place was part of a garden and was marked off by no barrier. Its stern female proprietors had surely allowed for the possibility that more than one curious visitor, even an ignorant male child such as I, would approach the place from time to time and might even decide, in his ignorance, that he was free to enter.

  My speculations led me to no decision. I thought of falling back on the ploy that had sometimes seemed to keep adults from suspecting that I spied on them. I thought of stepping into the place ahead and, if I was later challenged or questioned, of playing the part of the guileless child who wanted no more than to look into a far corner of a mere garden: a child who saw only surfaces and was never driven to learn their connotations.

  In the event, no decision was required of me. A tall girl, almost a young woman, stepped from behind me, took my hand, and led me forward, treading lightly on the mossy ground so that I could walk on the flagstones. I supposed her to be the daughter of the household, the only child of her parents. I had not previously seen her. When my family had arrived at the house, she was in her room with the door closed – studying, so we were told. While she led me towards the shaded pond, I had still not looked her in the face; I had learnt from a sidelong glance only that the skin around her cheekbone had a sort of lustre and that she looked at things intently.

  She seemed to have supposed that I was curious to see the fishpond but afraid of trampling the plants surrounding it. I said nothing to prevent her from thinking she was correct. I stood where she directed me to stand, and I found the words to persuade her that the sight of the scarlet fish in the dark-green water was the reward I had hoped for when she first took my hand. How could I have begun to tell what I truly felt when even today, more than sixty years later, I labour over these sentences, trying to report what was more an intimation of a state of mind than an actual experience? I was pleased and flattered to be in the company of the girl-woman, and yet I wished she had asked me to give an account of myself before she led me in among the ferns and the irises. As grateful as I was for her patronage, I wished she could have been made to understand that I had hoped for more than could be disclosed to me even in that pleasant place and even with her as my guide.

  Later on that same day, the mother of the girl-woman took me to a room that she called her sewing-room. While I watched, she sewed on her treadle-driven machine a small cloth bag with draw-strings at the top. Then, while I held open the bag, she poured into it from her cupped hands more than twenty glass marbles that she had taken from a vase of a stuff that I knew as crystal in a piece of furniture that I knew as a crystal cabinet the doors of which comprised many small panes of glass, some of them frosted. I was told by the woman that the bag was a reward. I supposed her daughter had spoken of me favourably, and I longed to know what about me had so impressed her.

  I had never owned any marbles, although I had seen and admired many in the possession of older boys. Those given me by the woman became the foundation of my own collection, and many of them remain with me today. If this piece of writing were a work of fiction, I might report hereabouts that one of the most prized of my first marbles is of translucent glass of a shade of red such that whenever I hold the marble between my eye and a source of bright light, I seem to recall the colour of the leaves on the ornamental grape-vine mentioned earlier and some at least of what I felt while I stood at the place where the path ended and before the tall girl, almost a young woman, led me into the place that had seemed to give rise to my feelings. Or, I might likewise have reported that another marble that I have owned for more than sixty years is of mostly transparent glass with a core consisting of several coloured vanes radiating outwards from a central axis. These vanes are of a shade of green such that when I rotate the marble slowly at the end of my small kaleidoscope the most predominant of the shades in the symmetrical patterns thus produced brings to mind the term ice-green.

  After having written the previous paragraph, I spent several days in the suburbs of the capital city where I lived for most of my life. I travelled there and back by car. For more than nine hours, I was alone with empty-seeming countryside around me. I listened occasionally to a radio broadcast of some or another horse-race, but for most of the time I travelled in silence except for the sound of the tyres on the road and of the air swirling around the car.

  For some years before I moved to this district, I used to spend occasional weekends here. During the hours while I drove from the capital city to this township and back again, I tried to observe as much as possible of my surroundings. I hoped that my constantly glancing at the countryside, especially the long views available from hilltops and plateaus, would enable me later to arrange in my mind an approximation of a topographical map of the terrain between the city where I had lived for nearly sixty years and the township where I intended to spend the last years of my life. I might have enjoyed my task if I had not been interrupted by one after another signpost bearing the name of some or another place further off or of a road leading away from the highway. Words, so it seemed, attracted me more than scenery. When I might have been fixing in my mind a view of park-like grazing paddocks and distant forested mountains, I was instead following a chain of thoughts leading away from a mere inscription in black paint on a white signboard. I was, for example, first noting a word that I had for long supposed was a Scottish place-name although I had never found the word in even the most detailed gazetteer of the British Isles; then seeming to recall that the word had been used each winter during my youth by the principal racing club in this state as the name of a certain handicap race; then supposing that the word had been thus used because it was the name of an extensive grazing property owned by a long-serving member of the committee of the racing club, on a part of which property were stabled thoroughbred horses, some of them the winners of famous races; then recalling and afterwards uttering aloud one after another of the nine surnames that I could recall of families of long standing who had owned during my youth extensive properties in the countryside, mostly in the western part of the state – uttering aloud not only each surname but following it the details of the racing colours of each family. While I recited thus, I seemed to see surnames and sets of colours superimposed on a much simplified topographical map: on a river valley among forested mountains far east of the capital city the surname G— beneath a pink jacket with a white band; on plains beyond the river-border in the north of the state the surname C— below a black jacket with a blue sash; on foothills of the Great Dividing Range north of the capital city the surname C— below a pink jacket with black sleeves and cap; on plains now largely covered by suburbs west of the capital city the surname C— below a blue jacket and sleeves with a black cap; on much more extensive plains much further to the west the surname M— beneath a white jacket and sleeves with orange braces, collar and armbands, all edged in black, and an orange cap; on a plateau forming part of the Great Dividing Range north-west of the capital city the surname F— beneath a jacket and sleeves marked with blue and white squares and a white cap; in the south-west of the state, among lakes and extinct volcanoes, the surname M— beneath a yellow jacket with cardinal sleeves and cap; in the far south-west of the state the surname A— beneath a black jacket with a red band and armbands and a red cap; and, at the end of a road branching away from a highway and superimposed on my mental image of the property with the name that I often read on a signpost, the surname T— beneath a cream jacket with blue sleeves and cap. Often, after I had recited and seen thus, I carried out a similar exercise with a mental image of a topographical map of England, although several of the family names occurring to me were unconnected with any place-name, which led me, for some or another reason, to see names and colours as hovering near the Scottish or the Welsh border. Among the names and colours that I caused to appear to me were thos
e of Lord D— (black jacket, white cap); Lord H— de W— (jacket, sleeves, and cap all of apricot and described in racebooks and elsewhere by the single word Apricot); the Duke of N— (sky-blue jacket and sleeves with a sky-blue and scarlet quartered cap); the Duke of R— and G— (yellow jacket and sleeves with a cap of scarlet velvet); the Duke of N— (Old Gold); and the Duke of D— (Straw). After I had called to mind each image-jacket and image-cap from image-England, I tried to hold the image in my mind in the hope of enjoying the peculiar pleasure that I sometimes derived from such images, especially those able to be described by a single word. The pleasure consisted partly of a certain awe or admiration and partly of a certain hopefulness. I had never been interested in the ways of the English aristocracy. I had never even cared to learn the differences between dukes and earls and lords and their like. But I felt drawn to admire any person who could rely on a single colour or shade to represent him and his family. I knew something of heraldry. I had studied in colour plates in books numerous images of coats-of-arms. But none of those complex patterns had affected me as did the assertion by some or another so-called aristocrat that he needed no chevron or fess nor any quarterings of gules or vert or argent; that he declared himself to the world by means of one colour only; that he challenged any inquirer into the nuances and subtleties of his character or his preferences or his history to read those matters from a jacket and a pair of sleeves and a cap of defiant simplicity. The hopefulness that was part of the pleasure mentioned earlier arose from my daring to suppose that I myself might one day light upon one or another shade or hue that would declare to the world as much I cared to declare of my own invisible attributes. One further strand of the pleasure mentioned arose from my recalling the only detail that had stayed with me from my having read, thirty and more years before, a bulky biography of the writer D.H. Lawrence. As I recalled the matter, someone once asked Lawrence how he supposed persons might occupy themselves if ever they had succeeded, as Lawrence hoped they would succeed, in tearing down the factories and the counting-houses where they presently wasted away their lives. Lawrence replied that the men thus set free to fulfil themselves would first build each a house for himself, would then carve the furniture needed for the house and would afterwards devote himself to designing and painting emblems of himself.

  Or, perhaps, long before I had reached the end of the sequence of thoughts reported above, I saw on a signpost, before the abbreviation Rd, a rare surname. A priest of that name had officiated, more than forty years before, at the wedding of one of my wife’s woman-friends. The number of guests was not large, and the wedding reception was held at the home of the bride’s parents in an inner eastern suburb of the capital city. The bride’s father was a wealthy businessman, and the house was of cream-coloured stone, substantial, and surrounded by a spacious garden. I ate and drank with the other guests until a certain time in mid-afternoon. I then stepped into the wide central passage of the house and walked towards the front door. I was on my way to fetch a transistor radio from my car so that I could listen to a broadcast description of a famous horse-race soon to be run in a neighbouring suburb. Long before I had reached the front door, I noticed on either side of the door a tall pane of what I would have called stained glass. The zones of various colours formed what I would have called an abstract pattern, although I seemed to see in it resemblances of leaves and stems and tendrils. (I had entered through the front door earlier without noticing the glass, but by now the front veranda was in sunshine while the light inside the house was subdued.) I stopped for only a moment inside the door, not wanting to attract the notice of anyone in the passage behind me, but the sight of the coloured panes against the sunlight had already changed my mood. As much as I wanted to learn the outcome of the famous race, I felt as though something of importance might be revealed to me if I left my radio where it was and remained on the veranda, keeping the coloured glass at the edge of my field of vision and observing the series of mental images and states of feeling that seemed likely to occur to me.

  I strolled the length of the veranda and found that it continued along one side of the house. This only heightened my sense of expectancy. A distant sight of a return veranda, as I had heard it called, had sometimes affected me rather as a pane of coloured glass never failed to do. A cane chair stood on the side section of the veranda. I carried the chair to the corner of the veranda and sat down. On a Saturday afternoon in the 1960s, the sound of motor traffic could hardly be heard in the lesser streets of the capital city. The garden around the house of cream-coloured stone was so dense and the cypress hedge at the front was so tall that I could easily suppose myself to be surrounded not by suburbs but by mostly level cattle- or sheep-country marked only by the dark lines of distant cypress plantations or an isolated clump of trees surrounding a homestead and outbuildings. Even then, more than forty years ago, such scenery often appeared near what seemed to me the western border of my mind. For as long as I lived in the capital city, I was reassured by the sight of these mental grasslands. (When I moved here to live, I did not fail to notice that my route led me from one side to the other of a broad zone of actual grasslands. And yet, even in this district the same plains still appear in the west of my mind and would do so no less surely, I suspect, even if I were to move across the border.) During the two minutes and more while the famous horse-race would have been under way in the neighbouring suburb, and while I sat in the cane chair at the corner of the veranda, hearing only the faint sounds of voices from inside the house and watching in my mind one after another possible outcome of the famous race, with one after another set of racing colours foremost, I might have been, so I understood afterwards, the owner of a vast cattle- or sheep-property in the sort of countryside that I would see from the sides of my eyes more than forty years later whenever I travelled between the capital city and the border district where I would finally have settled and whenever I passed a signpost bearing a name that I supposed was a Scottish place-name. The man that I might have been, so I understood afterwards, was the owner of one of the horses contesting a famous race in the capital city. He had been free to travel to the capital city and to watch the famous race but he had chosen to listen to a radio broadcast of the race while he sat on the veranda of his homestead. Perhaps, if the man lived during the decades before horse-races were described in radio broadcasts, he would learn the result of the race only by telephone later in the day. While the man that I might have been sat in sight of the paddocks where his horse had been bred, he might have understood what I could not have put into words as I sat on the veranda of the house of cream-coloured stone feeling as though the conjectured might be sometimes more preferable to the actual or as though renunciation might be sometimes preferable to experience.

  Before I went back to the wedding reception, I recalled a quotation that I had read recently from the writer Franz Kafka to the effect that a person might learn all that was needed for salvation without leaving his or her own room. Keep to your room for long enough, and the world will find its way to you and will writhe on the floor in front of you – this was my remembered version of the quotation, and I got from it on that afternoon the promise that I need only pass in my mind through some or another doorway framed by coloured panes and to wait on some or another shaded veranda in my mind until I should have sight of the finish of race after famous race in the mind of man after man in one after another mostly level district of what I would recognise, late in life, as the setting of the only mythology of value to me.

  While I was still outside the house in the inner eastern suburb, I began to fear that I would later be unable to recall in detail my experience on the return veranda, much less the reassurance that it brought me. (I was a young man, not yet thirty years of age, who would not learn for many years that he could not help but remember most of what he might later have need of.) The time of the year was mid-October. I knew little about garden-plants, but I had noticed as a boy that wisteria was usually in bloom when was run the famous h
orse-race mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Bunches of mauve wisteria blossom hung along the veranda where I had been sitting. I broke off a small bunch and put it into the pocket of my jacket. I seemed to recall that female characters in fiction set in earlier times had sometimes pressed flowers between the pages of books. I intended to ask my wife later to help me preserve the coloured petals, but I was drunk when we reached home and I put away my suit without remembering the wisteria. Weeks later, while I was dressing for a race-meeting, I found in the pocket of my jacket the shrivelled brown remnants of what had been mauve petals.

  I reported in the above paragraphs some of what used to occur to me on my former journeys between the capital city and this district near the border. Last week, I visited the capital city for the second time since my arrival in this district. In keeping with the resolution reported in the very first sentence of this piece of writing, I tried to guard my eyes during the journey. Of course, I had to be alert to my surroundings while driving, but I avoided reading the words on signposts pointing towards places out of sight, and I even tried not to take in the many views of far-reaching countryside that had so often appealed to me. I was still aware of signals from the edges of my field of vision, but with my eyes aimed always ahead I expected to be occupied mostly with memories or reveries.

  I intended to spend two days in the capital city and to stay with a man and his wife who had been my friends since our childhood nearly sixty years before. The man and his wife lived in an inner south-eastern suburb, in the same house that the man had lived in nearly sixty years before when I had first visited him from the outer south-eastern suburb where I then lived. The man’s mother had died when he was a child, and he lived in the house with his older brother, their father, and an unmarried middle-aged woman who was their father’s cousin and who kept house for him and his sons. After my friend had left home as a young adult, I did not visit the house for fifty years, and when I next visited it the house had been thoroughly altered inside, although its outward appearance had not changed, the walls being still of white-painted timber and the return veranda leading still from the front door to the side door.