Spirit of Progress

by Steven Carroll

  Sam, who is currently taking a summer stroll through Soho to his studio flat (while Tess, in winter, is reflecting upon the tolling bell of the word ‘institution’), has just come from an afternoon gathering at a well-known gallery. It had been smoky and crowded and hot, and he had bumped into someone only to realise as he did that he was standing directly opposite the broad but surprisingly not so tall figure of Ernest Hemingway, who nodded and was about to turn back to the conversation that Sam’s bump had interrupted when an influential critic, who had opened the doors of the London art world for Sam, introduced the two. A short conversation followed and they went their separate ways. For Hemingway it was either an interruption or a distraction; for Sam it was a reminder of where he was and that such encounters are common. Or, at least, he now imagined they were. But, more than that, it felt as though his life and all the things he might do with it were just beginning, and everything else until now had been preparation. Not that Sam feels any reverence for this new world of his, far from it. He is no more in awe of this place than he is of those ideas that he at once believes in and does not believe in. They are useful. Just as the excitement of this new world of his is useful. And Sam is a jackdaw. Or is that a spiv? A spiv on a street corner eyeing the world off, from the gutter to the toffy end of town, for what it’s worth. And he had no sooner left the gathering than he thought of George. George, who, like his tutors at university, always spoke of Mr Hemingway, never simply Hemingway. And he resolved to write to George and tell him that he had shaken hands with the author of In Our Time. He immediately slipped into Hemingway-speak as he mentally composed the letter, which would be simple and stark, like a Cézanne, and contain words such as ‘fine’ and ‘swell’ with ironic frequency.

  And it was just when he’d finished mentally composing the letter that the small circle that they’d once been reassembled around him. There and not there. Distant and near: a small circle that he was well out of, and yet, he knew, one he would never be entirely out of, even here at the centre of things. For there are centres and centres, and that little circle and the city they’d inhabited, Sam realises, was once his centre and he will always remember it as that. Even if its gravitational pull would only ever hold him for so long. But as much as he’d expected his new life to be a slog, as much as he’d expected years of anonymity and struggle, nothing of the sort had happened. He had been, from the start, a young man of great expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the words of just a few influential critics, had opened doors that opened only to the few, and Sam, as everybody had always told him, was now poised for fame. Which might also explain that sudden rush of tenderness with which he now viewed that distant first circle of his youth. Yes, Sam was poised for fame. And he knew it. The fame for which he had always been destined, for Sam was always told that he looked famous, even before he was. His last exhibition had been acclaimed and everybody was already talking about his next.

  He can see them all clearly, that first circle of his youth, for the clarity that comes with distance is upon him. And it is a liberating feeling. There is a spring in his step. A bounce to his walk, a dream-like buoyancy to each and every stride that takes him back to his flat, a bed-sit, which is light enough and large enough to live and work in. His mood, too, is buoyant and will stay that way throughout the day. And the week after that. And the year that follows, and the years after that which will witness the arrival of fame, marriage to an English woman (for, by then, he will have acquired distance and clarity on Tess too, who will become a memory) and the arrival of money. Enough money to buy a farm in Kent with a large house and a stable that he will convert into a studio.

  And it will be then, in the mid-1950s, when he has converted the stable into a studio and while he is arranging against a wall the paintings that he brought with him in a large trunk all those years before (which had been stored at a friend’s house and never opened) that he will see it: ‘Woman and Tent’.

  At first he will be pleased with what he sees, the execution, the way the colours have stayed true, and the play between the photograph and the painting. And the old woman, whom he assumes to be dead now, staring at him, striding towards him, her arm raised once more in protest, as if, for all the world, she is about to step right off the surface of the painting. But into what? And it is at this point that he will only be able to see her striding off the surface of the painting and into the stable because, he will realise with alarm, he has forgotten what lies beyond the frame of the painting. How did it go? How did it go again? There was a newspaper photograph, there was an old woman, there was a tent. But what lay beyond the frame? A farm, an old farmer, a dirt road. Yes. But what did they all look like? He will, for a short time, have no clear images of the farmer, the farm or the road. He will have acquired the distance but lost the detail. And the farmer, the farm and the dirt road could be just anyone and anywhere, in that thistle countryside that existed north of the city then. His memories of the painting, for these few minutes, will be general, not specific. In short, he will have forgotten. Then, gradually, the memories will return, and he will breathe a large sigh of relief. The images will still be there, clear and strong, and the old woman will then be able to step off the surface of the painting and on to the very paddocks and streets that she once walked over because he will have regained the world beyond the frame. He will forget, he will remember. It will be lost and then retrieved. But it will, nonetheless, be a moment of concern and he will ask himself for the first time — could it be, could it be that the price of distance is forgetting? That one day he will forget and not remember? That one day it will be lost and not retrieved?

  At the moment, though, there is a spring to Sam’s walk, buoyancy in each step that leads him to his studio, the door of which will open on to the days of fame. And the life that will come with fame, and the farm and the stable, that will all lead to the moment when he opens the trunk of paintings, like exhuming the body of his past, and finds the old woman and her tent suddenly before him. That moment when he will ask himself: could it be that the price of distance is forgetting?

  44.

  Webster at Home

  The diagrams, sketches and plans have acquired bricks, mortar and wood. The old mansion, built in the 1860s by one of the city’s founders, has now been given a second life. Sheds and a garage have been built, bushes and flowers and trees have been planted, which, along with the plane trees and the oaks that were already there, will become a private wood. Gravel paths have been scooped out of the earth and a six-foot-high wall, which encompasses the two-acre property, has just been completed. It is all exactly as envisaged by Webster years before. A world unto itself. With its forest, its mansion and its defining walls it is the medieval castle Webster always imagined as Webster’s world.

  It is a late spring Sunday afternoon. Webster has been strolling along the network of paths that thread through his grounds. He has strolled through sunshine and shadow, listened to the birds hidden in the leaves of the bushes and trees calling to one another, and observed the windows and the rooftop tiles glittering in the Sunday sun. Even the overarching blue sky is now his square of the heavens.

  But to call his walk a stroll is not quite accurate. A stroll is the walk of the contented. As is an amble. There is not necessarily a destination in mind when strolling. No anticipated point of arrival. One is simply strolling, immersed in birdsong, sunshine and shadow. Webster, on the other hand, throughout most of the morning, has been aware of an unaccountable restlessness. A dissatisfaction with all this ambling, as though there ought to be a destination. Something at the end of it all. And he can’t imagine what. And so when a brilliantly coloured bird, deep blues and greens, flies across his field of vision, he wonders for a moment why he can’t, as some do, simply stop and draw pleasure from the sight of the bird before it springs from its branch and continues on its journey. Does a bird have a destination in mind? Probably. It certainly sprang from the branch as if it did. And he can’t conceive of a bird i
n mid-flight or in the midst of hunting and gathering pausing to reflect upon the sight of a human being standing in the grounds below. So why should he? No, nature is instinctively productive. Always has been. Foxes, rabbits and eagles don’t lounge about in the midday sun reflecting upon the change of seasons or the wonder of creation. No, they’re looking for something to kill and eat or materials with which to build a nest or whatnot. And so Webster is not strolling. Or ambling. His walk is accompanied by this unaccountable restlessness. A restlessness that he chooses to call the lack of a destination. But what could it be?

  Webster’s world is complete. The architect’s plans, the sketches and diagrams have now become the reality through which he strolls, or would stroll if it were not for this restlessness that will not amble.

  On the steps of the house he turns back and faces the grounds, surveying the gently swaying bushes and shrubs as if sensing an intruder. He shrugs his shoulders and goes inside.

  Mrs Webster is in the lounge room with a novel. A large novel. She is the reader of the house and will happily sit in the armchair (as she will for most of this day) turning the pages. Webster likes books. He likes having them around. Like witty guests at a party. But he could never spend the afternoon with a book, which, as Mrs Webster frequently reminds him, makes him more of a browser than a reader. A description he is happy enough to accept.

  She asks where he has been and he answers that he has been strolling, then inwardly corrects himself. He slumps into an armchair and picks up a newspaper magazine. It is one of those magazines that are, Webster imagines, made to be flicked through. Ideal for a browser. And so he flicks through it. It is, in fact, the magazine for which George is the editor, and as Webster flicks through its pages he pauses briefly at an article, an interview with an art-gallery owner who, it seems, is something of an institution in the art world. Then he turns the page and there it is.

  Why it should strike such a chord is a puzzle. But he is drawn into a full-page advertisement for a sports car. A famous sports car. Even Webster, who knows little of such things, recognises this. It is black. Sleek. And although parked (in the grounds of some public park), it gives every impression of being impatient to move. To be set free. To ignite the eight cylinders that the wonders of the modern production process have given it, and spring upon the world. He stares at the advertisement but remains, nonetheless, puzzled at being drawn to it. For the Bentley, now parked in the driveway at the front of the house, has always been sufficient for his needs — a fitting vehicle for a factory owner.

  But as he dwells upon the photograph he is increasingly aware of being drawn to a sense of movement. He glances out at the Bentley, visible through the lounge-room window, then back to the photograph and no longer calls that thing to which he is drawn ‘movement’. No, a glacier moves, as does a Bentley or a bishop on a chessboard. Rather, he now calls that thing to which he is drawn ‘speed’. And within a minute, possibly less, speed has entered his world. A minute before he was contemplating the gardens and the grounds and the stroll that was not a stroll, then he had turned the page of a magazine to find speed waiting, impatient to spring upon him. And as the day progresses, the notion will occur to him (and it will not go away) that his unaccountable feeling of restlessness might well be cast off behind the wheel of this sports car. Might well dissolve in the midst of speed. And that it is in speed, and speed alone, that he might discover the stillness that comes to others while strolling. That somewhere between the twin possibilities of accelerating into life or accelerating into death, he might cast off that feeling of restlessness that followed him around the grounds. A restlessness born of — yes, he nods as he stares at the magazine — boredom. A puzzling sense of boredom. Puzzling because Webster has never been bored in his life. There has always been too much to do. But it was there today, this restlessness born of boredom, as he toured the completed grounds of his world which had now acquired bricks and mortar and wood.

  He drops the magazine onto the table beside the armchair and walks to the lounge-room window, surveying his domain. Mrs Webster has not moved. The room is calm and quiet. Webster is stationary. The very house itself is Sunday-still, but the bushes and shrubs of the grounds around it have been stirred by the intruder of speed, and with it, Webster’s world.

  45.

  The Wooden Frame of Fate

  Here a suburb will be born. Vic, Rita and Michael are standing on a dirt track that will soon become their street, in front of the timber frame of what will become their house.

  In the end Rita’s body may or may not have had a memory that went back a million years but the weight that was Michael, and which caused her to walk like a duck for a short while, left her when the time came and he now stands between her and Vic. Once they were two, now they are three. And they have come to inspect the rectangle of land and the wooden frame that will become their house, in which they will live, in which the boy will grow, and from which they will all eventually part and go their separate ways.

  This is, in fact, the land upon which Aunt Katherine pitched her tent. Where she lived while she waited for her sleep-out to be built. But it never was. For the war was only just over and material and builders were hard to find. Unless, of course, your name was Webster. In which case you were not only given materials and builders but such rarities as bulldozers as well. But Aunt Katherine’s name was not Webster, and her sleep-out was never built, and she had died in her tent the previous winter. She died, the report said, somewhere between the fifteenth and seventeenth of June. Nobody is sure for the body was not discovered until the third day. And so she lay either dead or dying for days inside the tent and nobody came. The cause of death, Vic and Rita have discovered from the report, was probably pneumonia. A cold winter, a tatty tent, an old woman alone, worn down and weakened by the years, combined to produce, in the end, a cold death. And a mysterious one for nobody is sure just when she died. And that, to Rita and Vic, doesn’t seem right. Death, like birth, ought to be marked. But whereas Aunt Katherine has a birth date, one morning seventy-three years before in another century and another country, she has no exact date of death. Only a guess. An approximation.

  Her death, the doctor who signed the certificate told them (a Doctor Black, who will become their family doctor) was reported to him by a Mr Skinner, a local farmer whose property is opposite the block of land upon which Aunt Katherine’s tent once sat. Mr Skinner, who had not seen Miss Carroll for some time, became concerned.

  And it was a few days later, after the funeral, that Vic and Rita learnt that the land upon which the tent had been pitched had been passed on to Vic. Which is why they are currently standing in front of a wooden frame that will become their home because the land that was once Aunt Katherine’s is now theirs. And, at some point during the days after her death, Vic discovered, going through her few possessions, that there were no photographs of Aunt Katherine. No images; nothing to remember her by. Nothing to show that she once lived. Nothing, it finally occurred to him, except the newspaper photograph and the painting by a young man who had the cheek to disturb her solitude, and whom Vic (from the one and only time he ever saw the painting) judged to have caught Katherine in one go. The newspaper photograph and the painting. The only surviving images of Miss Katherine Carroll. And as Vic thought about this, part of him — that part that registers the sensation of the world becoming wide and expansive on the fairways of golf courses or when driving into the glow of a new day (and which, in someone else, might be called a religious impulse) — not so much acknowledged as allowed the possibility that there just might be some pattern, some plan to things, after all.

  Vic only ever saw the painting once, the night it was first shown. And he never saw any of those people from the gallery again. Their paths had never crossed before (for Aunt Katherine and her tent had been the cause of their crossing in the first place) and they never crossed again. So Vic never knew that when the young painter, Sam, left the country he took Aunt Katherine with him in his trun
k. And as Sam became famous (and Vic would occasionally see his famous face in the newspapers and wonder if it was the same painter who had caught Aunt Katherine in one go), Aunt Katherine was once more put on show in various parts of England — that elsewhere to which Sam eventually fled and where he chose to spend the rest of his days. Nor would Vic ever learn that some of the great names of art, and some of the most famous critics in the country, would write about this mysterious woman and her tent, and wonder who she was, when all the time Vic could have told them that she was just wacky Aunt Katherine who went around embarrassing everybody by living in a tent and getting her photograph in the newspapers. Nor did Vic ever discover that Aunt Katherine eventually came home, to be housed (in those years to come when Vic would live alone in a coastal town to the subtropical north) in a permanent gallery in the country’s capital.