The Watch Tower (31 page)
Scepticism was all over him.
‘Really. It made me recognise things as they were. And that—I was supported by a sort of faith. I’m not sure in what. But I thought I saw bits of the true, if not of the good and the beautiful. That made most things bearable. That was my retreat. There was the external world—office, friends, amusements—And then there was
home—
so
real it seemed to have six dimensions,
fundamental as the floor of the world. Nothing at all from the outside could penetrate. The outside was a place of coloured tissue paper where people went about
not knowing about reality
.’
She added, ‘So you see—it was all—as they say—in a way—pure gain.’
‘Yes.’ Bernard blinked once or twice, and thought. ‘Yes, I see that.’ And he began to smile as people do in the instant of hearing very good news.
The train worked its way through the geometry of moving tracks, poles, overhead wires, cubes and squares of corrugated iron, black rotting terraces, narrow walls and fences leaning askew. Dismal relics of clothing blew damply on clotheslines. The outer suburbs marched up, crowded, formal and hard as nineteenth-century cemeteries.
More outer suburbs and more time: hills and valleys of roofs, grey-blue gravelled streets, blue-black tarred roads, square miles of brick, corrugated iron, gravel, concrete, hard dry substances, hard shapes, graveyard architecture and landscape. Still time and suburbs passed.
Abruptly the road by the train lines changed colour and character: it was a bush track—bright clay. And there were trees suddenly, swift-moving past—blossoming eucalyptus, pines. Alone in the compartment, Clare jerked the window up and leaned out into the day. The light was wonderful. Waves of air beat against
her face, and it smelled of grass, or clover, or honey.
Whatever it is, I remember it, she thought, breathing in. Her eyes paused here on a line of willows as they glided past, and the willows were familiar, too. She remembered it all.
Yet it was funny that she should think so; for it did occur to her that she had only just arrived.
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