Barley Patch (18 page)

I told my uncle the merest summary of what I called my beer-drinking dream, and not only because he was not a drinker. After drinking large amounts of beer, I would usually feel reconciled to my present solitariness and to a life of bachelorhood. I would even count myself lucky not to have to endure the nervous strain and the financial costs of courtship and marriage. Some or another comfortable saloon bar would become for me in later life what his lounge-room was for the average married man, or so I often supposed while I was drinking. But sometimes when I was awake in the early hours and feeling gloomy after an evening of beer-drinking, then what I called my hangover-dream would appear to me. The dream began at some vague time in my future as a beer-drinking bachelor. One or another of my drinking-companions would decide that my bachelor’s way of life was only a posturing: a means of advertising my need for a girlfriend or a wife. This drinking-companion would be a married man with what is called nowadays a large extended family. A certain member of that family would be a young female person of presentable appearance or better who had led a sheltered life and had had few suitors. (I would always spare myself the task of trying to imagine the details of the history of the young female person.) My drinking-companion would have spoken favourably about me to the presentable young person for some time before he had even told me of her existence. Then he would tell me during a few drinking-sessions more about the young person than I might have learned if she and I had gone together for six months. I would then express my admiration for the young person, knowing that she would learn of it through our intermediary. Hints, intimations, even guarded messages would be relayed in each direction. I would be spared many of the anxieties of a conventional courtship. The day when the young female person and I would finally meet would be some sort of family celebration at the home of our go-between. The tub in the bathroom would be three quarters full of bottles and cans of beer and packs of crushed ice. No more would be required of me than to say something witty from time to time to the young person and not to fall over or to be caught urinating or vomiting in the backyard before I went home.

I could never even have hinted to my uncle that I had also what I might have called my dream of last resort, although the men from the group that I had lately joined might have considered my dream little more than a masturbation fantasy. When none of my other dreams seemed of any worth, I sometimes saw in my mind one or another image of one or another of my female cousins as though she was of a mood to relent towards me and as though the image of her mother was far elsewhere in my mind.

When the sun was setting below the cliffs in the distance, my uncle had still not told me anything in return for my confidences. Then a plover flew past, crying its mournful-sounding cry. My uncle told me that none of his farmer-neighbours seemed to know that two distinct species of plover inhabited the coastal district. I myself had not known this, even though plovers were among the birds that especially interested me because they laid and hatched their eggs in mere hollows scratched from the soil. I told my uncle that he was fortunate to be a bachelor who could study his bird books of an evening while his neighbours were dealing with their wives and children. My uncle then told me that he had for long feared he had been made sexually impotent by a kick that he had taken as a schoolboy. When he was ten years of age, so my uncle told me, he had been kicked viciously in the stones by a boy named Stanley Chambers.

Surely some readers of these pages are able to think of the writer of the pages as being no more than the narrator of a work of fiction: a personage supposed by those readers to exist on the far side of their own minds for as long as they go on reading these pages. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I admire unreservedly, I report the following.

I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters, but I never afterwards attended any Sunday morning group. I was no longer willing to listen to the opinions of the would-be psychiatrist and his ignorant patients. I was no longer willing to hear them talk as though a scribbling theorist in some or another gloomy city in central Europe had long before explained away the existence of a far-reaching network of images of swamps below tall cliffs and of racecourses among level grassy landscapes and of paddocks where quails and plovers lay low and of female personages seen from a distance, which far-reaching network was, in fact, no more than an image in my own mind. In short, I behaved as a fictional personage is obliged to behave; I remained true to my belief that no so-called real world could exist among the scene after fictional scene where I was believed to live and to write.

Other readers of these pages may well think of the writer of the pages not as a conjectured personage but as a mere human person hardly different from themselves. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I could never admire, I report the following.

I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters. Before a week had passed, I reported to the Sunday morning group what my uncle had told me about his having been kicked as a boy. I did not expect that the doctor and the members of the group would then advise me as to how my uncle, a man approaching middle-age, might overcome his fear, but I hoped that the doctor and the members of the group might repay my trust in them by suggesting how I might overcome some of my own fears. I listened while they talked at length. Afterwards, I went away disappointed and never returned. At the time, I could not have expressed the matter coherently, but I understood later that the speculations of the group were a sort of inferior fiction. I might even have said that each member of the group exercised a sort of rudimentary imagination. He struggled to explain his imagined world to me, who would later go home to my bachelor’s flat, there to struggle to write my own sort of fiction without even imagination to help me.

Eleven years after my youngest uncle and I had last talked seriously together, my first book of fiction was published. During those eleven years, I had become a husband and later a father while he had remained a bachelor. During those years, I had met with him only occasionally. Soon after I had become a husband, I had taken my wife to meet him. Later, I had paraded my children in front of him. He and I had had little to say to one another during those eleven years. I had expected that my first book might disappoint my uncle, but I could not have predicted that he would react towards it as he did. He sent no message of any sort to me but he wrote to my brother that he, my youngest uncle, had disowned me for ever.

While I was writing my second book of fiction, I thought hardly at all about my uncle who had disowned me. While I was writing that book, my uncle’s mother and two of his sisters died. When the book was published, only a few survived of my father’s eight siblings. Two of these were my bachelor-uncle and his youngest sister, my unmarried aunt: she who might have looked out from a second- or third-storey window in a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne on many a day during the year when I was born. Again, my uncle sent no message of any sort to me, but again he wrote to my brother. My uncle wrote that he had been far more disgusted by my second book than by my first. But his own disgust, so my uncle wrote, was a small matter by comparison with his most urgent concern. His youngest sister, the only one still alive of my four unmarried aunts, she who often referred to me as her first and favourite nephew, was eager to read my second book. He had persuaded her with some trouble that my first book could not possibly be of interest to her, and she had still not read it. Now, however, she could hardly be put off; she was pressing him to allow her to read my second book of fiction, which he considered not so much a book of fiction as an accumulation of filth. I have never heard from my brother what he wrote in reply to these complaints from my uncle.

I know, even today, no more about the ailments liable to affect the human body than I knew, more than forty years ago, when I ceased to attend the Sunday morning group, about the ailments affecting the mind. What little time I have had for learning during my adult life has been given to the study of what I call for convenience patterns of images in a place that I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of. Even so, I read or hear sometimes about theories that I myself would never have had the wit to devise. One such theory, which I heard for the first time a few years after the early death of my youngest uncle, asserts that a person subjected to prolonged emotional stress, so to call it, is more likely than the average person to be afflicted by the disease of cancer.

Seven months after the publication of my second book of fiction, I heard that my youngest uncle had been found to have can
cer of the liver. He was aged fifty-five and had been in good health throughout his life. He had never smoked and had never drunk alcohol. According to his older brothers, no member of their parents’ families had been known to have any sort of cancer. (When I mentioned these matters to my mother at the time, she told me without smiling that my uncle’s cancer would have been caused by his sister’s cooking. This was the sister who had lived
for a time in the convent of three storeys and who kept house for my uncle for some years before his illness became known. According to my mother, my youngest aunt had learned in the convent to be mean with food: to reheat leftovers and to bake cheap, doughy puddings.)

My uncle had been told that he would live for no more than six months. During the first four of those months, I told myself that my uncle was obliged to make the first move towards reconciliation, given that I had not written my books of fiction with the intention of offending him. At some time during the fifth of those months, when I had still received no message from my uncle, I telephoned him and asked if he would care to have me visit him. He told me that he would be pleased to see me.

I drove my motor-car from Melbourne to the coastal city that has been mentioned several times already in these pages. The time of year was late winter, and I remembered that the time of year had been late winter also when I had travelled by railway-train to visit my uncle fourteen years before and had talked with him about plovers and other matters. The hospital where I met with him was on the northern side of the coastal city, far from any view of the Southern Ocean; the view from his room was of mostly level grassy paddocks with lines of trees in the distance.

I spoke with my youngest uncle for nearly an hour. He was weak and haggard, and his skin was yellow, but he seemed no less cheerful than of old. We spoke about his father’s farm, of the tall cliffs visible from every paddock of the farm, and of the sounds of the ocean that were heard from every paddock except on the few days of the year when the north wind blew from the plains inland. We spoke about the birds that he and I had observed, and I reminded him about the white-fronted chat, the bird that lived the life of a species from the inland plains even though gales from the Southern Ocean would sometimes bend sideways the clumps of rushes where its nest was hung. We spoke mostly, however, about horse-racing: about successful or unlucky bets we had made; about champion horses we had seen; about racing colours we had admired or about racehorse-names we had thought witty or inspired. As I prepared to leave him, I suggested to my youngest uncle that he should not have been surprised if my interests, in later years, had been different from his own, given that Boy Charlton had had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself. In all the time while we were together, that was the nearest we came to referring to my books of fiction.

We were still outwardly cheerful as I prepared to leave, although we both surely knew that we would never meet again in the place that is sometimes called
this world
, as though to suggest that at least one other world may exist. When we came to shake hands, my youngest uncle thanked me for what he called my wonderful companionship during our earlier years together. I was so surprised that I was able to grasp his hand and to look him in the eye and then to stride to the door of his room and for some little distance along the corridor of the hospital before I began to weep.

While I drove back to Melbourne, I came to understand that the hour while my uncle and I had talked together in the hospital might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read. While I had talked with my uncle, he and I had behaved as though I had never written any book of fiction and as though I had no intention of writing any book of fiction in the future. We had restricted ourselves to talking about views of ocean and of mostly level grassy countryside, about birds, and about horse-racing, as though none of those topics had ever found its way into a book of fiction. I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction. I might have said that that life would not have been impossible to lead if only I could have accepted its chief hardship: if only I could have accepted that I would never be able to suggest to another person what I truly felt towards him or her.

I have reported in the previous seventy-eight paragraphs numerous events, few of them seeming to be connected with my conception. Admittedly, my father and my mother have been referred to, but surely I could conjecture, postulate, speculate more boldly as to how those two came together?

No, I could not. Whatever I might have hoped to achieve when I began this piece of fiction, I am not going to be able to explain how I came to be conceived.