Spirit of Progress

by Steven Carroll

  No, Vic would never learn any of this. But the story of Aunt Katherine, nonetheless, would become part of the family story. And every now and then somebody would mention Aunt Katherine and the nosy young man who painted her (and who may or may not have become famous, for nobody in the family could remember his name), and remark upon the possibility of Katherine’s portrait being around somewhere. Or no longer around anywhere. A family story, passed down through the years, the facts, the truth, of which became blurred and eventually became mythology.

  There are no builders today on the site. It is a Sunday, and a hot one. And there is only so long you can stand staring at the wooden frame that will become your home. Michael is hot and bored, and Rita and Vic have seen enough. And so they retrace their steps. Up the dusty street that will one day become their street, Vic pausing to glance back at the golf course, the fairways of which are visible between the lines of pines that mark its boundary. And it is as they are walking back that they notice a snowy-haired farmer in the paddock on the other side of the street, feeding the cows, and Vic concludes that this is Mr Skinner, the farmer who found Aunt Katherine’s body and reported her death. And his impulse is to stop and chat, for he looks an affable type. Trusting, Vic imagines. Possibly too trusting. And, when he walks, an odd-looking construction, but the child is hot and bothered and their chat will have to wait for another time. And as the three of them pass, the old farmer eyes them, as if knowing who they are but keeping his distance, until Vic waves and the farmer, reflexively, waves back, a smile lighting his affable face.

  On the Old Wheat Road, walking back to the station, they remark upon the shops — the butcher’s, the baker’s and the grocer’s. But with no more shops than this, it is, they think, still country. And Rita’s heart sinks as she looks around at the dry paddocks, the scotch thistles, the dusty dirt roads and the stick frames of the houses. For theirs is not the only house frame visible. And as they reach the top of the street they see a factory, next to the station and the flour mill. Out here in the sticks, on cheap land. And the occasional cow wandering around where the cows always have wandered, and, seeing no reason to stop now, chewing on the long grass and the flowers of the gardens, here and there, that have begun to spring up.

  The factory is silent. Nobody is about. But as Vic, Rita and Michael stand on the platform waiting for the city-bound train and staring at the flat paddocks around them that nobody has got around to subdividing yet and at the odd tree here and there on an otherwise treeless horizon, it is clear to them that it will not take long for houses, lawns and gardens to rise from the dry grass and thistles and for a suburb to be born.

  The train will soon take them back into the city but this place is their fate. And the train that today takes them away from the place will one day bring them back. And the wooden frame that provides only the most basic indication of where the various rooms are to be will become their fate. The place in which they will become an unhappy family, in which they will live and grow. And which they will all eventually leave, to go their separate ways. When, like History, they will move on.

  Part Six

  November 1977

  46.

  Woman and Tent

  It’s a new gallery. Not grand. Not large, nor showy. What the city likes to think of as modest. Subtle, even. But the stained-glass ceiling, glowing like the windows of a Gothic cathedral, is grand. At least Michael thinks so, standing beneath it and staring up. The hall is crowded. This is the first night of the exhibition. The figure of Whitlam, standing over the guests like a mountain (and whose time has all but come and gone), has finished his speech, which everybody applauded for longer than applause following a speech normally lasts. He was applauded, Michael cannot help but think, in the manner of a farewell. It was applause that said thank you for being our mountain, for we have few mountains.

  Now, after having given his speech, he stands, a landmark above the crowd, talking with a small group. Removed from where Michael is standing but not distant. For the hall is not so large. Of the group, Michael not only recognises the figure of Whitlam but the tall, slim figure of the artist (tall enough to look down upon Hemingway but not Whitlam) who created the paintings they have all viewed. Michael is here because he has an old university friend who moves in high circles and found an invitation for him.

  Michael has come tonight with a story to tell. For this artist, Sam, has entered family history, has become a part of family mythology, even though he has no knowledge of doing so. The evidence is here, in this new gallery. As he moved about earlier in the evening, catching glimpses of landscapes and outlaws, Michael eventually came to the image he was seeking. Suddenly, there she was. Neither landscape nor outlaw but an old woman standing in front of the tent in which she lives on the edge of the city, waving away with her hand whoever or whatever might be there. For she gives every impression of being the type, Michael had mused, who needs (for whatever reason or for no reason) to shake her fist at the world from time to time. So there she was, her arm raised in protest at an assembly of observers from another world altogether from the one she knew. An assembly of observers dressed in the fashion of another age. And although Michael was familiar with the painting, for it is part of family mythology, he is, nonetheless, struck by its immediacy. Miss Carroll gives every impression of being about to break free of her two-dimensional restraints and step into this three-dimensional hall, with its three-dimensional crowd, and give them all a word or two to go on with for disturbing her.

  It is the first time that Michael has seen the painting, apart from reproductions. And although he has heard of the painter (who is, after all, famous) and is familiar with the photographs of him in the newspapers, he has never met him, for they move in different worlds. Or have until tonight.

  This painter, who lives in England, returns to his old city, he says in newspaper and magazine interviews (which Michael has read), as often as possible so as not to forget. And so there he stands, at a distance from Michael, but not too removed, talking with the mountain of Whitlam and a late middle-aged woman who, although small in stature compared to the company she keeps, gives every impression of being the grande dame that she is. For Michael knows her face too, from the papers and from television. She is one of those to whom the young and the aspiring gravitate. Although small in stature, she exudes power. And it is not simply her face (a classically made face) or her expression, her stance or her gestures. Or even her clothing, which he barely notices. No, it is something else — what he can only think of as an unshakable sense of who she is. An immovable confidence. There is something, yes, unshakable about her. Someone who, although clearly in the world, seems somehow removed from it too. One who moves in the world but remains untouched by it. As though to be here tonight she descended, not socially (for she is beyond such things) but from her world.

  And it is while Michael is trying to formulate just what he means, for he imagines her world as a sort of Olympia to which she will return when the evening is done, that he remembers he came to this exhibition tonight with the intention of speaking to the painter. Of approaching the painter and informing him that the old woman, with her arm raised in front of her tent on the edge of the city, is part of family mythology, as is the painting itself. But something stops him.

  There is a word he is turning over in his head. It is a popular term that describes the process by which a mysterious object (one seemingly removed from the everyday world) is made familiar; the process by which the object of mystery is stripped of its mystery and stands before the world as unaccommodated fact. It is called ‘demystification’. And as much as Michael understands the idea, and as much as he has applied the idea in his studies and reading in the past, he does not tonight. And the thing that stops him is the desire not to demystify the old woman, the tent, the waving hand and the circumstances under which the young painter captured her in another age altogether, in that world that existed before Michael did. Did this painter and Aunt Katherine ever meet? Did they e
ver speak? Suddenly he doesn’t want to know. He only wants to know what he knows. No more. For his great-aunt (of whom he knows practically nothing), the painting and the painter are all part of a private mythology now. And to introduce himself into that conversation (daunting enough, anyway) would be to lose that private world. Would make it public. It would no longer be his, but theirs as well. Part of that circle’s subject of conversation for a few minutes before it moved on to another subject and before Michael would excuse himself because he would have nothing more to say. And would it be so important afterwards? Would it still have its power? The power that it still retains, this private mythology, which Michael now decides to guard with the same determination with which Great-Aunt Katherine once guarded her privacy. No, to join that circle would be to demystify or, perhaps, just cheapen that which he chooses to leave shrouded in mystery.

  And it is while he decides this that he notices, as a photographer calls for a shot, the circle breaking up. They form a brief tableau, then disperse. He sees the mountain of Whitlam (who will contest, and lose, his last election in a few weeks) turn from the hall, the echo of the applause that said farewell and thank you for being our mountain, for we have few mountains, possibly still in his ears. He observes the painter politely kiss the cheek of the woman with whom they have been talking, before the painter, too, departs, and, keeping his distance, watches the woman joining a new circle of — it seems to Michael — the young and aspiring.

  In less than a minute they have all gone their separate ways. They were there and now they are gone. The circle they formed has dissolved. The moment has passed. And, Michael concludes as he prepares to leave, that particular conjunction of people, place and time would not occur again; that the chance was there and he chose to decline it.

  And as he strolls along the wide, tree-lined expanse of St Kilda Road, trams and cars lit up in the cool spring night, he imagines the figure of Great-Aunt Katherine, back there in the gallery, arm raised in protest about becoming, once again, an object of public curiosity, a wacky old woman, a museum piece, when all she ever wanted was to be left alone. Great-Aunt Katherine, her tent on the very edge of the city, still there, still haunting the family story, still haunting the glittering city itself, still pitched on its fringes and still indifferent to a world that continues to stare at the spectacle of an old woman who has done nothing more than choose to live in a tent, on a block of land, where there ought to be a house.

  47.

  The Survival of the Fittest Memories

  It is midnight. Or just after. Tess cannot sleep. She was the last to leave the opening at the gallery and sits in her study. Her body is tired. Her body wants to sleep. But her mind won’t stop.

  How is it, she asks herself, that something that happened so long ago can come back to her so clearly? Not just the images but the feelings that belong to that time and that time alone. Feelings that were never felt again, except in recollection. As if they happened yesterday. And yet, she calculates, leaning back in the chair of her study and staring out the window on to the street, it has been over thirty years since she stood in Sam’s studio for the last time. Over thirty years since the Dancing Man danced into their lives and told them it was the end, that the moment of perfect parting was upon them and that they would have to live the rest of their lives without each other.

  Thirty years. Thirty years of what? Of working, of becoming an institution, of watching her husband (now retired and sleeping upstairs) drive to and from work and watching her daughter grow. Her daughter. Who has now lived in London for some years. An artist, of course. Thirty years of all that. And yet when she thinks of the day the Dancing Man danced into their lives it comes to her with a clarity that still surprises her. How does that happen? How is it that she can see herself so clearly, standing in Sam’s studio all those years before — the musty smell of the old stable as well as paints and oil and turpentine — and feel once again the effort that it took to hold back the tears until she was in the dark street where nobody would see. Nobody that mattered, that is. How does this happen? These intensities that come into our lives and never go away because they’re too intense to fade. They are, she concludes, the fittest of memories and so they survive. Their desire to live on is greater than all the other memories we gather as we go through the years — ten years, twenty, thirty — and so they become the ones that live on long after others have died out.

  It is not simply seeing Sam again this evening that has brought these things back, or noting, once again, the way he expels his cigarette smoke into the air in the manner of the European intellectual of another era, which was once an affectation but now comes naturally — and which left her wondering at what point the affectation became natural. No, it was not that. For Tess (contrary to those who think of her as a grande dame above looking back) is one of those who have long and continuing dialogues with the past. One of those who relives old conversations word for word. Plays with them. Rewrites them. As they were and as they never were. Drafts, she imagines, of a work in progress. A life being lived, and unlived, and lived again. And it is while she is absorbed in these speculations that give way to dialogues, which give way to further speculations, that the phone rings. It is loud and seems to ring throughout the entire house and she snatches at the receiver to silence it more than anything, one part of her still inhabiting that world of speculation and the fittest of memories, the other wondering who on earth could be phoning after midnight.

  As soon as she hears the voice at the other end of the line she knows it is bad news and reminds herself that when a telephone rings after midnight it is always bad news.

  ‘Tess,’ the voice on the other end is saying, and it is a voice she knows from the newspaper, an acquaintance of sorts. His voice is tired. It is tense. ‘I know it’s late. But look, it’s George. He’s dead.’

  At first Tess says nothing, and an inevitable silence follows the news.

  ‘I know it’s late,’ the voice says again, ‘but you two go back. I thought of you. Knew you would want to know.’

  ‘When?’ says Tess, softly, so as not to disturb the house.

  ‘An hour ago. Bit more.’

  And so, her voice hushed, she learns the time, the place and the cause of George’s death. It was in the basement of the newspaper offices. George was watching the first of the morning papers coming off the giant presses downstairs. It was something he never tired of, like reading the newspaper in the street in his old gabardine coat, the paper that he had helped to create and which amounted to nothing less than an immediate and continuing dialogue between writers and readers, between people who have never met and who do not know one another, but who feel as though they do. Tonight George had stayed at work because Mr Whitlam was in town and there was an election soon so he was not at the opening where he would have seen Sam’s paintings, seen once again the old woman and her tent, and seen once again his old friend Sam, with whom he had stayed in touch over the years. Instead of all this he chose the paper.

  He had been standing in the basement, smoking too much and staring at the machines, waiting for the front page to materialise, when he suddenly fell. Nobody saw if he clutched his heart, which had just burst, only that he fell, and that he was, the doctor said afterwards, most certainly dead before he hit the floor.

  It is a short phone call, for the caller has more to make and will, no doubt, tell the same story over and again throughout the early hours of the morning. And when Tess puts down the phone, one part of her is asking just where she was before the call and what train of thought she was travelling, the other part now dwelling on the society of those who were there. The society that is constituted of the likes of George and Sam and Tess — who hold these things together. And as much as she knows that all such societies pass, it is still a shock to learn that one of their number is gone and they are now fewer. A surprise even, for a part of her will always see George the way he was when she first met him: a young journalist who fancied himself as a writer (a
nd who, she could tell, fancied her back then as well), who, like all the others, couldn’t wait to leave this pressure cooker of a city as it was then, but who was, nonetheless, one of those who chose to stay.

  And so it is the memory of this George, not the institution he became, that returns to her now. George, strolling round her old gallery with her, asking questions, taking notes, that miraculous assembly of artists that would only ever assemble once on the walls all around them, and the city — their city — as it was, out there beyond the door through which they all walked but would never walk again. As she stares on to the dark inner-suburban street it is this George who returns to her; clear, immediate. Like yesterday.

  It is long after midnight when she mounts the stairs and prepares for bed. For sleep. Knowing that when she wakes in the morning she will read about George in the newspapers, and the notices will officially confirm that the society of those who were there will have lost one of their number, and is now fewer. And so it will go, until one by one their numbers will disappear altogether and they will fade like old photographs. Like old photographs in history textbooks that document the passing of an Age. Figures assuming odd poses, attired in the clothes that nobody wears any more, and faces distant enough to look as though they are History.

  Yes, those who were there will pass into History, and even the fittest of memories will pass away with them because there will be no one left to remember. But, she nods firmly to herself (and to the memory of George), their moment, those few, frantic years when they were better than they knew, that will not pass away with them. For it is not, she knows full well, Time that decides which works last, from one Age into another, but people. Tess is, and has always been, the keeper of their moment. And it will be her mission, which will require all her power and influence, to ensure that they will not be forgotten. No, it is not the kindly, bearded figure of Time that decides, Tess once more nods to herself, but people.