Spirit of Progress

by Steven Carroll

  The newspaper photograph has been pasted onto the wall beside the painting and she can see immediately that the artist has copied the photograph. At least, that is her first impression. But as she compares them she notices the differences, especially the patch of blue sky that isn’t in the photograph that the cheeky — no, rude — photographer took without asking that morning, just a couple of days before, when her peace was first disturbed. As she further studies it she comes to the conclusion that the differences between the photograph and the painting go deeper than that. This young painter has done things to the scene. Things you can’t quite put your finger on, but which are there all the same. And although she doesn’t really have much time for these new-fangled paintings, with people’s faces all over the place as they never are in life, she is beginning to think that this nosy young man, who disturbed her peace and trampled all over the trust of Mr Skinner as he did Mr Skinner’s paddock (and for which she will never forgive him), just might be very good at what he does. For he has done things that make the painting different from the photograph, and it’s not just the blue sky.

  And as she stands before it, as the subject gazes upon the subject, she gradually concludes that the woman in the painting (whom she sees as herself, yet not herself) is not so much striding across her land, as she remembers she did that morning, but seems almost to be floating over her land. Not quite on it, or even of it. And soon she is deep in thought, to the extent that she wouldn’t even notice if someone was staring at her, pursuing this question of floating — of the old woman (who is both her and not her) floating over her land the way … what does? And it is then, when she asks herself what floats the way she imagines the old woman is floating, she answers: a ghost. That’s it. For as much as Katherine might look solid and there, as if she might keep striding right off the painting and into the room, there is also a touch of the ghost about her. That is what this young man has done. And she looks quickly at the photograph to see if there are any ghosts there, and she can’t see any. No, but there’s a touch of the ghost in the painting, even if she can’t put her finger on it and even if nobody else sees it. It’s there all right. This is what Katherine sees. And she doesn’t have to wonder too long why she finds this, well, disturbing. No, more than that. Creepy. Chilling. And she is suddenly seized by the impulse to shiver, the way people are said to do when somebody walks over their grave. That’s it. He’s painted her as though she’s already dead. No, not already dead but soon will be. That’s what he’s done. She doesn’t just look old, he’s painted her as though she has entered that hazy zone between living and dying, and in which the ghost that she will become and which will be released upon death is preparing itself to float, weightless, through eternity. Yes, he has painted her as though she is about to leave this sodden, solid world that gave birth to her and made her, and float away, just as that world, too, is about to float away into the ether of the past — and what once was will be no more, except in portraits such as these.

  As she is about to turn from the painting, she also ponders the old woman in it and wonders if this is the way the world sees her. Wacky and wild. A curiosity. It is odd seeing yourself the way others do. But why, she’s asking, why should it be true just because others see you like that? Just as she has never really seen herself as old, for she has been active all her life (and yet she looks old on the wall), she’s never seen herself as wild and wacky. Or a curiosity. But simply as who she is: Katherine. The Katherine, who, even as a child, went her own way. Who didn’t require other people to go there with her. The Katherine who, when she was young, was said to have ‘go’, and — what was the phrase? — an independent spirit. Now that she’s old though, she’s wacky. And just because she doesn’t like her peace being disturbed, does that make her wild? A difficult woman? Even cranky? Or hard of heart? When she knows — as the last few days have reminded her — that her heart is too easily moved. By books and life. But she’s learnt, over the years, not to show her heart to the world. For she’s lived through a world and a time in which displays of the heart were displays of weakness, and so she learnt not to show her heart to it. She thinks she might have shown it to Mr Skinner given the chance — an old woman ready to display her weakness. And she knows that she has always answered when her sister called, when she was needed, and that when his mother wasn’t there for Vic it was Katherine who was. Days that she recalls with complete clarity, even now, and which, when recalled, swell her heart like a touch of poetry before sleep. The same heart of which (unlike the ghost) there is no hint in the painting. Only, she muses, the crank and the old woman.

  And the tent. If it weren’t for the tent, nobody would have come for her. And if she weren’t, in their eyes, old. But the combination of age and tent, is, it seems, worth coming for. Worth disturbing someone’s peace. And they did come, one after the other. Until she felt like a curiosity. And now there she is on the wall. The way the world sees her and how future worlds will see her — a cranky old woman in a tent. Cold of hands, feet and heart. And it will never cross their minds that she was once a young woman, pitching her tent for the first time, drinking tea and looking out over a farmer’s fields, eyeing the horizon, in the days when her world was wide and her life was all before her. No, that will not cross their minds. All they will see is a cranky old woman. Wild. Beyond the pale. A pioneer in an age when her kind of pioneer has all but disappeared. History found her useful for a time. But History has moved on as History does, and left her an old woman in a tent. And a battered tent at that. One that looks as though it could be blown away in the next wind. Unsubstantial. Ready to float away, like the hint of a ghost that hovers around her in the painting.

  With this thought, Katherine turns quietly from the painting, for she’s seen enough, the curiosity of the curiosity has been satisfied, and she is ready to leave. As she turns, her eyes straining round the room for Vic, she bumps into a woman standing behind her. Katherine offers a brief apology and receives a brief response in return. Then this woman turns her attention back to the painting, to the woman and her tent.

  Tess pays little attention to the elderly woman who has just bumped into her. The woman apologises, Tess nods. She could be anybody’s grandmother. Tonight it is not simply the paintings that occupy Tess’s thoughts but also the letter she wrote that morning, which she decided not to post and which is in her coat pocket right now, ready to be pressed into Sam’s hand if only she could find him. At some stage during the day she decided not to post it. Decided that posting was too impersonal. Sort of official. Even bureaucratic. A dispatch. No, she wanted none of that. It is the kind of communication that must be delivered by hand. And Sam must see her eyes (which will always have a hint of regret in them) as she passes the envelope to him, must see, written in her eyes, as surely as it is written in the letter, that she means every word she says. And she must have the satisfaction of knowing that he sees this. And this meeting of the eyes, like the letter, will be a communication. But it is a risk. For although there is talk and although this talk is finding its way into Sam’s ears, it is, she suspects, only the talk of a few at the moment. And although some may be aware of their affair and some may be suspicious, it is another thing to be spotted and announce it all to a crowded gallery. To confirm what the wagging tongues of the town may merely suspect. But, even more important, there is the risk of being condemned as, well … a desperate woman. Driven to furtive exchanges. So she must be quick. She must be decisive. And nobody must see. If only she could find him. The gallery is not so large that somebody could lose themselves in it or not be found, and she is rapidly concluding that he is not here. That he has either not bothered to come or is deliberately avoiding the place. By which she means deliberately avoiding her. Then she sees him, on the far side of the gallery, talking to the painter with the goatee who looks like Toulouse-Lautrec, and with whom he gets on well enough, depending on the day and depending on the mood. But tonight they seem to be getting on well. At least, they’re laughing. Wh
ich could mean anything.

  She manoeuvres her way through the crowd towards him, and as she does she catches his eye and she could swear that there to be read in his eyes (and no doubt hers) is the old longing that brings with it the old feelings. Not so old that they can’t be seen in a look, as now. But still distant enough to be recognised as old feelings. Familiar enough to bring back a world of urgent meetings (for everything was urgent then) as well as the hours (which are all they ever had, never a night) and the urgent minutes that were always so valuable because there were always so few of them. And which always went, as a consequence, so much more quickly than the minutes of ordinary living. Familiar enough to bring all of that back.

  And suddenly she is seeing herself completely naked, strolling easily through his studio one afternoon (easily, because this moment the memory has triggered was well after the affair started), eyeing his paintings, while Sam watched, holding two cups of something or other. And, for a second, she is convinced that this is precisely the memory that Sam, too, is reliving as he watches her approach; that they are two people with precisely the same memories of the same time to the extent that they could be one person. And, at the same instant, like those dreams that leave the dreamer naked in a city street, she suddenly feels as naked as she did that afternoon in Sam’s studio as she moves through the crowded gallery. Such is the power of old feelings, and of the memories, crisp and clear and as urgent as the days in which they were lived that these old feelings bring back with them. Yes, she muses, familiar enough to do all that. But also distant enough to be somebody else’s feelings now. Old ones.

  For in being old (and old, in this sense, can be yesterday’s feelings as much as last year’s), she is also acknowledging that she no longer has the right to feel them. For feelings can become old within hours, and the love affairs that give those feelings validity because there is someone to share them with can end in a flash and be lost in minutes. The line that separates what is from what was can be that thin. The past, she tells herself, is a completed act, whether it be five minutes or five years ago. This is the grammar of old feelings. So it is not so much that she doesn’t have the right to those feelings any more but rather that those feelings were once valid (in other rooms, other times) but aren’t any more.

  Nonetheless, the look, which she is convinced is as much on her face as on his, brings back these feelings, at once familiar and distant, lost and suddenly retrieved, and all in the few crowded seconds it takes Tess to cross the floor of the gallery and to find herself standing next to Sam. But how to press the letter into his hand and how to tell him with her eyes that she means every word, without being observed? The letter that she wrote this morning, the letter that, above all, will put things right. For you can’t part thinking the wrong things about each other, otherwise all those feelings that are both familiar and distant, lost and retrieved by a look, will be soured. And she won’t have that. These feelings, which are all that are left to them, are too important. Which is why this letter is in her pocket, and why she is distracted even as she talks, because she is looking for the right moment to press it into Sam’s hands without being observed.

  And just as she imagines the opportunity will never arise, the painter with the goatee is called away, and she is, for a second, alone with Sam. And, quick as a bird, her hand flies from her pocket to the nest of Sam’s hand and delivers its message. Then she is gone and Sam is left holding the letter, looking down at the object and then up at the retreating figure of Tess.

  He pushes the envelope into his coat pocket and places the remains of his drink on a nearby table. And she watches as he leaves, knowing that he is either going back to his studio or just outside, to read the letter. And when he has, everything will be put right and all will be well. And those feelings, both familiar and distant, and which are all that is left to them, will not be soured. And will remain with her forever.

  She follows his departure, contemplating all of this, until he is gone. She then turns back to the gathering, observing the elderly woman she bumped into just a few minutes before and noting that she has found who she was looking for. And as Tess stares at the young man standing beside her, she realises that he is oddly familiar. She recalls him from the previous day. And suddenly she is looking at the elderly woman in the Victorian dress in the light of this recollection. This young man had visited the gallery on behalf (if awkwardly) of his aunt. Could she really, she whom Tess had seen as just anybody’s grandmother, be the same woman who now dominates the far wall of the gallery? But as soon as the thought occurs to her, the elderly woman and the young man leave. They are no sooner in front of her than they are gone.

  Again, there is that feeling of being surrounded by a freak-show, and, what’s more, being one of the freaks. Strange pictures. The sort of things bad dreams throw up, and that stay with you throughout the day when you wish they wouldn’t. Perhaps that’s it, that it’s like being in a room full of bad dreams. Your own, and everybody else’s.

  Vic doesn’t like these paintings. Besides, paintings aren’t his go. And he still can’t shake off the feeling that whoever did them (and there seem to be as many artists as there are paintings — although, in other ways, they could all be the one artist) doesn’t really like people all that much. Not people like Vic, anyway. In fact, he gets the feeling, just looking at the paintings, that they see people like Vic or Paddy Ryan as a sort of enemy. Or, at least, hostile. But he’s got to admit that they stay with you, these pictures. That they just don’t go away. And that takes something.

  And, once again, the way they talk, of paints and brushes, boards and canvas (for he has been listening to conversations here and there as he walks round the room) reminds him in an odd way of the talk in the sheds when drivers get together. The comparing of notes, the different styles of driving. And so even though he imagines he could easily be one of the freaks in the show, and even though he imagines that these artists don’t particularly care for the Vics of this world, might even see them as hostile, they might not be all that different after all.

  The idea of doing something again and again until you’re doing it as well as anybody can, until it becomes a kind of art, returns to him. The thought that perhaps his art was there, right under his nose all the time, but he never noticed it because it was just his job. Maybe, it just took the chance of mixing with the likes of this crowd to see it. And suddenly you’re not just going to work any more but doing something, something that allows you to look up at the sky and the planets and the stars and not feel small. And perhaps he never saw that something for what it was until now.

  It’s a thought that, depending on his mood and depending on the day, can make sense or just be plain silly. Something he could treat with utter seriousness (especially here, tonight, in this room) or something that, on another day, he could laugh at. Like those bright ideas you get when you wake in the middle of the night but which aren’t all that flash when the sun comes up. At the moment, though, he sees no harm in thinking like these painters all around him. Tonight, Vic is not laughing at the idea that engine driving could be an art. Tonight it is a perfectly reasonable proposition. And he sips his beer, content that it is not one of those bright ideas you get when you wake in the middle of the night and which don’t survive the sunrise.

  It is while he is swilling these thoughts around with the beer that he hears Aunt Katherine’s voice behind him, and returns to the noise of the crowd from which he’d been sealed off by his thoughts. She has seen enough, she is telling him. She wants to go. She’s seen what she came for. And it is neither a question nor a command. It is simply assumed that, having announced her wishes, they will now leave. For the hand that held the hand will always retain certain rights.

  And it is then, as they edge their way through the crowd, that Vic catches the eye of the woman he met the previous day. The woman who organised all of this and who gave him the invitations to this night. She is looking from Vic to Katherine and back to Vic. And while it is cl
ear that she recognises Vic, she also appears to be asking: is that her? And did I miss her because I only saw somebody’s grandmother?

  Then they are gone, for Katherine cuts her way through the crowd in the same way that she cuts through nonsense, and they are soon standing on the footpath outside the gallery, Tess’s question left floating in the air with the gathering clouds of cigarette smoke.

  And there, not more than ten feet away (and whom Katherine does not notice because she has seen enough and is eager to leave), is the painter who presented Katherine to the world as a wacky old woman and got it all wrong, or, depending on who you are, got it right and caught Katherine and her tent in one go; the painter who is reading a letter and who, in turn, has not looked up and not noticed Katherine, so absorbed is he in the letter that he seems to have withdrawn from this world altogether and into another. Katherine and the painter do not notice each other. Their paths have crossed once and will never cross again. All that will remain will be the painting.

  No, no. Sam is repeating the sentiment over and again. No, he never thought such things. It is the nature of this town, of those who know or think they know of their affair. And the times. People will say things, and for the slightest of reasons and for the worst of reasons other people will choose to believe them and pass their beliefs on to other people as though passing on fact. That — and Sam is already composing, as he reads, the letter he will write to her in response — is how rumours begin.

  This is what he will say to her: that he never doubted her. That is what he will write. But it is a lie. The right lie. For the fact is he knows he did doubt her, briefly, and he is ashamed of it. He is ashamed because there was never any reason to and because part of him had succumbed to the pettiness of rumour and the pettiness of this town. But he always maintained his silence and whatever his thoughts may have been nobody ever heard them because he never spoke of them. And so, mentally composing the letter he will write to her, he tells her, ‘No, no. I never thought such things,’ even though he knows it is not all of the truth.