Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
Page 11
The painter’s father had been a tramways inspector until he had retired. The painter’s father had since died, but the long green overcoat and the black hat with the glossy peak that the painter’s father had worn as a tramways inspector still hung in a shed behind the house where the painter’s mother lived.
The painter took the long green coat and the hat with the glossy peak to Mont Park Hospital and presented them to the old man known as Webster. He did not tell Webster that the coat and the hat were any sort of uniform. The painter simply presented the coat and the hat to Webster and Webster put them on at once over the clothes he was wearing. The old man known as Webster then told the painter that he was a fireman.
On the day before my brother died, I visited him in his hospital ward. I was his only visitor during that day.
A doctor in the hospital had told me that he was not prepared to say what particular illness had affected my brother, but the doctor believed that my brother was in danger of dying. After I had seen my brother I too believed this.
My brother was able to sit in the chair beside his bed and to walk a few steps and to sip from a glass, but he would not speak to anyone. His eyes were open, but he would not turn his eyes in the direction of anyone who looked at him or spoke to him.
I sat beside my brother for most of the day. I spoke to him and I looked at his face, but he would not speak to me and he would not look in my direction.
For much of the day I sat with my arm around my brother’s shoulders. I believe today that before that day in the hospital I had not put my arm around my brother’s shoulders since the evening in the house of red bricks when I had tried to teach my brother what a brassiere was used for.
From time to time while I sat with my brother, a woman in one or another uniform would come into the room. The uniform would be white or yellow-brown or one or another shade of blue. Whenever one of these women would come into the room I would wait for her to notice that I had my arm around the shoulders of the patient. I wanted to tell the woman in a loud voice that the patient was my brother. But none of the women seemed to notice where my arm was resting while I sat beside the patient.
Late on that day I left my brother and returned to my house in Macleod, which is nearly two hundred kilometres north-east from the hospital where my brother was a patient. My brother was alone when I left him.
On the following night I was told by telephone that my brother had died. My brother had been alone when he died.
At the funeral service for my brother, the priest said that my brother was now content because he had now become what he had been waiting for more than forty years to become.
On the Sunday after I had first thought of giving a pendant as a present to the young woman who was about to become my wife, the married sister of my father arrived at the house where I had sat looking at the jewellery catalogue.
One of my unmarried aunts asked my married aunt to show me her pendant. At that moment I looked at the part of my married aunt’s body that lay between her throat and the place where the top of her evening dress would have been if she had been wearing an evening dress.
My married aunt was wearing not an evening dress but what I would have called an ordinary dress with buttons at the front. Only the top button of the dress was undone, so that I saw when I looked at my married aunt only a small triangle of yellow-brown skin. I saw no part of a pendant anywhere in the yellow-brown triangle.
When my unmarried aunt had told my married aunt that I had been admiring the pictures of pendants in the jewellery catalogue and that I had never seen a pendant, my married aunt moved one of her hands to the lowest part of the triangle of yellow-brown skin below her throat. She rested her hand in that place, and with the ends of her fingers she unfastened the second-top button at the front of her dress.
From the time when I had first heard that my married aunt was the owner of a pendant, I had supposed that the main part of the pendant was in the shape of a heart. When my aunt undid the second-top button of her dress I expected to see, somewhere on the skin between her throat and the place where the top of her evening dress would have been if she had been wearing an evening dress, a tapering golden heart.
When my married aunt had unfastened the second-top button at the front of her dress, she pushed apart with her fingers the two parts of the front of her dress and she found with her fingers two sections of fine golden chain that had been lying out of sight behind the front of her dress. With her fingers my aunt lifted the sections of chain upwards a little and then she scooped into the hollow of her hand the object that had been dangling at the end of the sections of chain. My aunt then lifted her hand out from between the two parts of the front of her dress and turned the hand towards me so that the object at the end of the sections of chain lay in the hollow of her hand where I could see it.
I understand today that the object in the hand of my married aunt was a piece of polished opal whose shape was roughly oval and that the object would have been of several shades of blue and other colours as well. But my aunt showed me for only a few moments what lay in her hand, and while she showed me the object she turned her hand a little so that I saw first what I thought was an object all of pale blue, then what I thought was an object all of dark blue, and then, after my aunt had slipped the object down again behind her dress, only the yellow-brown of part of the skin between my aunt’s throat and the place where the top of her evening dress would have been if she had been wearing an evening dress.
Just before I began to walk this morning from Macleod towards the first house that I remember having lived in and the first view of grasslands that I remember having seen, I read something that brought to my mind the first body of blue water that I remember having seen in my mind.
I read in the pages of a newspaper that a famous stallion will soon arrive in this district. The stallion will arrive, according to what I read, from a famous breeding stud in the Vale of Tipperary, which is the part of Ireland where the father of my father’s father arrived from when he arrived in this country.
The famous stallion will be used for serving more than fifty mares at the Mornmoot Stud, which is at Whittlesea, on the road between Preston and Kinglake. The name of the famous stallion is Kings Lake.
The only married woman from among my father’s five sisters was the wife of a primary teacher. As a married woman she lived in many districts of Victoria. At the time when my aunt showed me her piece of polished opal of roughly oval shape, she and her husband were living about four miles inland from the place where I often sat with my back to the Southern Ocean and looked at the pages of a jewellery catalogue or of the Saturday Evening Post. The name of the place where my aunt and her husband lived is Mepunga East. In the same district is a place named Mepunga West. In maps of that district the word Mepunga appears only in the names of those two places.
Much of the text of The Plains was formerly part of the text of a much larger book. The larger book was the story of a man who had lived as a child in a place named Sedgewick North. If any map had been drawn of the district around that place, the map would have shown a place named Sedgewick East a few miles south-east of Sedgewick North. The word Sedgewick would have appeared only in the names of those two places.
The man who had lived as a child in the place named Sedgewick North had believed as a child that his district lacked what he called a true centre. Sometimes he used instead of the words true centre the word heart.
For some of the time while I was writing about the district around Sedgewick North, I saw in my mind some of the places around Mepunga East.
For most of his life my brother was said to be backward, but he was able to do some things that I have never been able to do.
Many times during his life my brother was able to travel in an aeroplane, which is something that I have never been able to do. My brother was able to travel in aeroplanes of different sizes. The smallest aeroplane that my brother travelled in contained only my brother and the pilot. My brother pai
d the pilot to take him through the air above part of the southern boundary of the mainland of Australia. While my brother was in the air he recorded by means of a camera and a roll of colour-film some of what he saw around him. I did not know that my brother had been in that air until after he had died. After my brother had died, the prints from that roll of colour-film were given to me.
Whenever I look nowadays at those prints I wonder whether my brother had become confused while he was in the air above the southern boundary of the grasslands of Australia, or whether the pilot of the aeroplane had tried to amuse or to frighten my brother by causing the aeroplane to travel sideways or even upside down through the air, or whether my brother had simply pointed his camera at what any man would see if he stood at the place in the air where the grasslands of Australia obviously have a mind to go.
When I look at those prints I seem sometimes to be looking at a place all of pale blue and sometimes to be looking at a place all of dark blue and sometimes to be looking at a place all of yellow-brown. But sometimes I seem to be looking from an impossible vantage-point at dark-blue water and, on the far side of the dark-blue water, the endless yellow-brown grasslands and the endless pale-blue sky of America.
(Age Monthly Review 8, no. 9,
December 1988–January 1989)
* * *
*‘Stream System’ was written to be read aloud at a gathering in the Department of English at La Trobe University in 1988.
Secret Writing
Thirty years ago, in 1962, I was in my early twenties and living alone in a rented flat in the Olivers Hill district of Frankston. I was living in Frankston because I was a teacher at Overport Primary School in Towerhill Road. I was teaching at Overport because I had previously applied for my position there. I had applied for my position there and for fifty and more positions in other schools in other suburbs of Melbourne, because I had no wish to teach in any one-teacher school in any country district of Victoria. I had no wish to teach in any one-teacher school because I wanted my evenings and weekends for myself.
In 1962 I taught a class of forty-eight fourth-grade children. They were well-mannered children, and I looked forward to being with them each day. (The only day when I was reluctant to set out for school was the day when President Kennedy of the United States of America warned Mr Khrushchev of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to turn back his ships from Cuba or be blown up along with half the human race.) I owned no car at that time, and I used to walk from my flat to school before eight each morning. Many of those mornings must have been cold and rainy, but as I write these words I remember only fine mornings when I looked at the birds in the gardens that I passed in Kars Street or Jasper Terrace or when I looked up through trees towards The Crest and The Spur and The Ridge and wondered how anyone could earn enough money to be able to live in the houses I glimpsed there.
I looked forward not only to meeting my class each day but also to being at the school itself. Overport School is on a hill overlooking Frankston, and the room where I taught in 1962 had a view of a wide segment of Port Phillip Bay. From my desk I could see as far as Ricketts Point in the north and far out past the shipping lanes in the west. At one side of the playground was a last patch of what might have been the original scrub of the Mornington Peninsula, where a few echidnas still lived.
On a certain warm morning in 1962 I had taken my class out into the playground for a period of what was described on the timetable as phys. ed. The children were divided into four teams, and every child wore either a red or a blue or a green or a gold sash. My class was as fond as I was of competitive games and the statistics they gave rise to: tables of premiership points, votes for best players, record times… On the certain morning, the four teams were playing tunnel ball. We were far away from the school building, and the children were free to yell as they pleased. At a certain moment during the game of tunnel ball on that certain morning, the yelling of the children and the closeness of their competition and the warmth of the sunshine and the distant view of the blue bay and of the purplish haze over the inner suburbs made me feel as though I had found already, young as I was, the life I was going to lead for the next forty years.
At the moment just mentioned, and for a few moments afterwards, I thought of myself as someone who would be a teacher in primary schools for the rest of his working life. The schools where I would teach would all be in suburbs of Melbourne, and not drab inner suburbs but older suburbs with trees in their streets or outer suburbs with views of mountains in the distance. On warm spring mornings I would dream in the sunshine while my class romped or competed. On rainy afternoons I would be dry indoors while my class worked quietly at their desks. At the end of each year, and twice during each year, I would take a longish holiday. I would never enrol in any courses to improve my qualifications or my career prospects. I would never aspire to be a head teacher. I would remain until the end of my working life a humble classroom teacher in the last room along the corridor or the farthest room around the corner in a wing of the main building, watching the seasons change and the years pass outside my windows.
I have not yet mentioned the chief item in the vision that came to me on that certain morning in 1962.
I had decided early in 1962 that I was going to spend most of my evenings and my Sundays during the rest of my life writing prose fiction. If a young man made that decision in 1992, he might well have read dozens of books of fiction by contemporary Australian writers. A young would-be writer of 1992 might well have heard dozens of Australian writers of fiction reading from their works. The young would-be writer might have met some of those writers and spoken to them at writers’ festivals. The young would-be writer would certainly have read many published accounts of interviews with Australian writers. The young man who decided while he was living in Frankston in 1962 that he was going to write fiction for the rest of his life could have named no more than four or five living Australian writers – not because he was ignorant of Australian writing but because very few books of Australian fiction were published in the early 1960s. The young man at Frankston had never heard a writer read in public and had never attended a writers’ festival because no writer read in public in those days and no writers’ festivals were held.
If I were a young writer starting out in 1992, I would sometimes be tempted to despair when I thought of how many other writers are already being published. In 1962, what tempted me sometimes to despair was the thought of how few Australians seemed to be writing fiction or getting it published. I felt in 1962 that writing fiction was almost an un-Australian thing to be doing. And even if, so I thought, Hal Porter and John Morrison and George Turner were scratching or tapping somewhere far away, surely no one else but myself was trying to write fiction in Frankston or in any of the suburbs I could see around the curve of the Bay. In 1962 I thought of the writing of fiction as more European or even more American than Australian. I could more easily imagine someone doing what I was doing in a suburb of Leeds or Wichita than in a suburb of Melbourne.
When I started to write fiction I was a secret writer, and I expected to be a secret writer even after my first book had been published. I expected that I would never earn an adequate income from my writing (how right I was!) and that I would have to go on working as a teacher until my retirement. The Education Department of Victoria had in those days a regulation forbidding teachers from undertaking other forms of regular paid employment. I did not know in 1962 whether the writing of fiction – even unpublished fiction – would be regarded as breaking this regulation, but I had no wish to make my case a test case. If ever I were published, it would be under a pseudonym.
I had other reasons for wanting to be a secret writer. I had met many fine men and women among my fellow primary teachers but hardly any I would have cared to discuss my secret writing with. (I believe today that the difficulty lay as much with me as with my colleagues. I have never enjoyed talking about my writing to any but a handful of people.)
I got my degree by studying part-time for five years. During one of those years I became married to the young woman who had not been impressed by my secret writing. During each of those years I added a few pages to my secret writing in the summer holidays. Then, only a few days after my last university exam, I was offered a job that would take me away from the classroom, and I accepted.
The new job was in the Publications Branch of the Education Department, which produced technical publications and lighter reading for teachers and students. Now, my job required me to write and edit by day, and I worked alongside other writers, even if they were not writers of fiction. Yet I went on with my secret writing by night and on Sundays, and on a certain evening in 1970, nearly nine years after I had begun to write fiction in secret, I finished the final draft of a book-length piece of fiction that I believed would be publishable.
Then I did what is surely the most secretive thing a secret writer can do: instead of trying to get my hundreds of pages of fiction published, I hid them away and told no one about them. Why I did this I never understood, but it was my last secretive act as a secret writer. After a year had passed, I showed my writing to another secret writer. He had heard from some non-secret writer that a certain publisher was interested in publishing Australian fiction, and he urged me to stop being a secret writer and to take my writing to the certain publisher. This was in 1973, more than ten years after I had begun my career as a secret writer.