Barley Patch (8 page)

They took her lightly back,

Between the night and morrow,

They thought that she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

Whenever my mother recited these lines, I assumed that Bridget had died, even though her abductors had thought otherwise. In my eighth year, however, as reported above, I came upon the text of the whole poem. Staring at the printed words was far more satisfying than listening to my mother’s recitation. With the text safely in front of me, I had time for speculating; for calling into question the seemingly obvious. I was anxious, of course, that Bridget should not have died. Surely I had no choice but to accept the word of the narrator? My one hope lay with the abductors. How could they have mistaken a dead girl-woman for one who merely slept, especially when they must have lifted her in their arms from her bed and later set her down again? (I saw them as carrying her away on a litter.) I seem to recall that I mostly wavered in my understanding of the text, although a few years later I might well have resolved the matter by composing my own version of events: by writing in the rear of a disused exercise-book a few lines of doggerel that would keep alive a fictional personage whose original narrator had declared her dead. Even during my wavering, however, I must sometimes have acted boldly. It would very much suit the pattern of meaning in this work of fiction if I could report here that I decided once at least, when I was a mere child-reader, that a certain narrator was mistaken: that the truth about a fictional personage need not be available to the very personage who was supposed to convey that truth to the reader. It would very much suit my purpose in writing this work of fiction if I could report that I learned in my childhood that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory.

The story of Bridget, so to call it, is told in twelve lines of a poem made up of fifty-six lines. The last lines relating to Bridget are these:

They have kept her ever since,

Deep beneath the lake,

On a bed of flag-leaves,

Watching till she wake.

The verbs in this passage are no longer in the past tense. Often, as a child, I strove to prolong a narrative: to keep it from ending in my mind. I had no need so to strive with the story of Bridget. Nor were the last words of the text of the sort that sometimes sounded cheerfully at the end of a so-called fairy-tale. (“And for all I know, she may be living there still . . .”) The last words relating to Bridget were calm and assured; the narrator spoke with authority. The story of Bridget had still not come to an end when the last word had been written about her. But what could remain of a story when the chief character already lay dead? Again, I could wish to report that I once, as a child-reader, found reason to doubt a narrator of fiction. I could wish to report that I decided that the personages within the text knew more than the personage hovering over the text, as it were; the abductors of Bridget, watching by her bed, knew more about her than the man who had written about her. Or, I could wish to report that I stared at the last four words of the story of Bridget until they seemed to change in meaning; until a hoped-for event became an unexpected event, and, finally, an actual event. If I could report such as this, I could hardly report that Bridget, the fictional personage, finally awoke. The eventual awakening would have taken place outside the boundaries of the text composed by William Allingham. Bridget, by now subtly other than a fictional personage, would have been restored to her new existence in a place where neither reader nor narrator could lay claim to her; in a place on some or another far side of fiction. What sort of life was hers in that place neither William Allingham nor I could know, even if we tried to go on writing or reading about her.

As for Bridget’s being said to lie beneath a lake, I always resisted the notion that she was beneath the
surface
of the lake; that she was underwater. If she were underwater, so I reasoned, then those watching her would have had to be underwater also, and all of them would have long since drowned. (I was never able to learn the rudiments of swimming. Whenever I was told as a child to put my face into water, I closed my eyes and held my breath and supposed that I was drowning. I felt sympathy, years afterwards, for the men that I read about who put to sea off the west coast of Ireland in frail, handmade boats. Those men disdained to learn anything of swimming, believing that to do so would only prolong their death-agony if their boat were to capsize. From my point of view, anyone who ventured beneath the surface of an ocean or a river or a lake was doomed.) I was able to devise a safe place for Bridget because I had followed not long before certain episodes, so to call them, of the comic-strip “Mandrake the Magician.” In those episodes, Princess Narda had been captured by a man who seemed to live with his followers underwater. Whenever they retreated to their hide out, they seemed to disappear among willow-trees at the edge of a certain river, so that they were reputed to be amphibious beings. The author of the comic-strip encouraged this belief in his or her readers by depicting the leader of the abductors of Princess Narda as a man possessing no hair and no eyes and only the rudiments of nostrils and mouth. When the abductors had first brought Princess Narda into the presence of their leader, he, being without eyes, had put his hands on the face and neck and shoulders of his prisoner in order to satisfy himself that she was a good-looking young woman. When I studied the line-drawings of the man whose head and face was a fleshy dome, I was prepared to believe that he could remain for long periods underwater. I learned, however, from later episodes that the hide out of the abductors and their leader was not unlike the burrow of the platypus, which creature I first read about in the School Reader a year after I had first read about Bridget. The lair of the platypus was an underground hollow close to a watercourse. The hollow could be approached through either of two tunnels, one of them leading downwards from among scrub and the other leading upwards from below water-level. The abductor of Princess Narda wanted it thought of him that he lived underwater, but only one of the entrances to his hide-out was beneath the river, and Princess Narda was safe from drowning throughout her captivity. So, too, was Bridget after I had learned to see her as lying on her flag-leaves in a dry, airy cavern like that in which Princess Narda had been held captive. (I mentioned the platypus just above for no other reason than that I admired as a child the layout of its burrows. I read only recently that the eyes of the platypus remain closed during the many hours of each day while the animal is underwater, even while it feeds or copulates.)

It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that one or another detail should be incongruous, if not inexplicable. At some time after I had begun to see in my mind an image of Bridget lying in her cavern, I began to notice an image of a strand of dark hair lying diagonally across her forehead. What seemed incongruous was that the strand of hair seemed to be lifted from the forehead and then to be carried away and then to drift back towards the forehead. Even though I had found for Bridget a safe, dry cavern in my mind, still she seemed to lie in the path of some or another current underwater. It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that some details of the images seem fixed
in the mind while other details can be altered by the effort of the person in whose mind they appear. In my image of Bridget, the strand of hair seems still to move. However, I learned long ago to see the seeming movement as a trick of light. Long ago, I caused to appear in an upper wall of the cavern a large window. On the other side of the thick glass of the window is part of the lake that Bridget is reported to lie beneath. The currents in the lake, or the drifting from side to side of underwater plants, check the passage through the water of the sunlight from far away, causing a play of light and shade across Bridget’s face. I could wish to change further the detail of the window. I could wish to see instead of a view of water a window of coloured glass showing an image of a trickling stream or of a shallow swamp bordered with clumps of rushes.

I have often wanted to bring forward the story of Bridget. The time when I seemed most likely to do so was a certain year in the late 1980s, when I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing and when I approached my place of employment on four mornings of every week on foot, having walked from the nearest railway-station through certain back-streets of a suburb of Melbourne where the value of the meanest cottage would have been twice that of the house that my wife and I had been paying off for twenty and more years in a suburb on the opposite side of the city. In a certain back-street, I used to walk for some distance beside a high wall of bluestone that was one of the boundaries of a large allotment. I sometimes heard the sound of trickling water from the far side of the wall. I supposed the sound might have come from an arrangement of fish-ponds with a tiny waterfall between them or, what was less probable but more to my liking, from a streamlet issuing out of a grotto wherein stood a statue of a female personage. I was never able to learn what caused the sound of trickling water, but I was one day able to assume that a fernery of some sort was on the other side of the wall. On that day I noticed, as I walked beside the wall, a pale-green button-shape protruding from the grey mortar between two blocks of bluestone. I found that the seeming-button was the uncurled frond of a fern. On the other side of the wall, so I understood, was a fernery so well-watered and so lush that one of the fern-plants there could find no other way of reproducing than by forcing a child-frond into a crevice within the strip of mortar between two blocks of bluestone in a massive wall, as though somewhere, on the far side of the wall, was a place where a new and more spacious fernery might come into being.

On day after day, I observed that the button-shape was developing into a frond and that the pale green was changing to green. My first catching sight from a distance of the single shred of greenery protruding from the dark-blue wall became for me the chief event of each day. I soon understood that the sight of the fern-frond growing out of the wall would become in time the sort of image that would go on troubling me until I had discovered more of the network of images and feelings of which the frond-image was only the most noticeable part.

For as long as I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing, I used to tell my students that my own way of writing fiction was only one of many ways. Even so, I made sure that my students were well aware of how I went about my writing. I told my students of Advanced Fiction Writing during a discussion about the origins of fiction in the year when the fern had appeared that I believed I would write at some future time a work of fiction the central image of which was an image of a fern-frond protruding through a bluestone wall. I told my students further that an image connected with the central image would be an image of a strand of hair lying diagonally across the forehead of a young female person who looked out across an ocean or who lay with closed eyes beneath a lake.

Only a year or two after I had told my students what is reported above, I gave up writing fiction. The work of fiction that I talked about in front of my students will never be written. And yet, the simple network of images that would have given rise to that work remains in my mind and has become more complex in recent years.

Nowadays, the south-west coast of Victoria is often described as a popular tourist destination. At a certain point on that coast, the local government authority, hoping perhaps to reassure the persons known as tourists that the place whereat they have arrived is of historical importance, has erected a sign on which appear two words. The second word is
Bay
. The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by the possessive apostrophe. The surname on the sign is, of course, the surname of the author of this sentence and of all the other sentences in this work of fiction. I have been told that many tourists, so to call them, visit the place where the sign has been erected and admire the high cliffs thereabouts and even descend the steep stairway to the small bay named on the sign. I myself have not visited that part of the coast for twenty-nine years and will not visit it again. When I last visited the place, long before anyone would have wanted to erect a sign on it, I did so for the purpose of showing to my wife and my three young children a district that stayed in my mind even though I had turned away from it. I showed them the red-roofed sandstone farmhouse built by my father’s father on the site of the earlier wooden house built by that man’s father, who was the first owner of the nearest farm to the coast and the man for whom the steep bay was named. I photographed my children standing on the edge of a cliff with the bay visible below them and beyond the bay the Southern Ocean. I told my children of how my parents had taken me often to the farm beside the coast while my father’s father was still alive during the 1940s. During those years, the steep bay was so seldom visited that the sand would be littered with driftwood during winter and spring. Only in the hottest weeks of summer did visitors arrive, and they were mostly local farming families bringing picnic-lunches. I told the children that my parents and my brother and I sometimes picnicked in the steep bay. I told the children of how I had hated and feared the sea since the time when my mother had taken me onto the beach at Port Campbell before my first birthday and when I, a quiet and docile baby, had screamed until she took me away from all sight and sound of the waves. I told the children of how I used to plead with my parents not to take me down the path from the cliff-top into the steep bay; of how I used to stand on the cliff-top and to turn my back on the sea and to look northwards across the first few of the hundred and more miles of the so-called Western District and to yearn to belong to one of the families who lived there and who looked out all day from their windows and verandahs onto views of seemingly endless grassy countryside with intervening lines of trees marking the courses of creeks that trickled towards some far-away river that flowed sluggishly towards some farther-away ocean. I told the children of how I was always compelled to go down with my brother and my parents into the steep bay but of how I often avoided having to paddle and to splash among the incoming waves and to pretend that I was enjoying myself or even learning to swim. I often avoided these hateful rituals by creeping, with my parents’ reluctant permission, in among the piles of boulders at either side of the bay. The boulders were pieces of cliff that had fallen during past centuries. The waves from the ocean had so eroded the boulders as to create a complicated system of tunnels and sluices and pools. If I crept far out among the boulders, I was able to hear the crash of each ocean-wave against the outermost boulders and afterwards the long succession of hissing- and gurgling- and sucking-noises that marked the flowing of the water from the wave inwards among the boulders. I could sit in safety by some or another rock-pool while the force of the ocean-swell shook the boulders all around me but barely troubled the water of the pool. The sides of the pool would have been overgrown with bunches of the plant that I called sea-lettuce and with fronds and ribbons of plants that I had no name for. Currents in the pool caused the plants to sway continually. The currents were surely caused by the waves that struck the outer boulders, and yet the swaying of the plants seemed unconnected with any inrush of water from the ocean. The water from each wave took so long to travel through the heaps of boulders to the furthest pools (the nearest to the beach) that a second wave would sometimes arrive before the water in those pools had begun to recede. The plants attached to the sides of the rock-pools moved unpredictably, although always gracefully. Many years after my last visit to the heaps of boulders beside the bay named after my father’s grandfather, at a time when I supposed that I might soon begin to write a piece of fiction in which one of the central images was of a fern protruding through a wall of bluestone and another central image was of a strand of hair lying across the forehead of a female person, I began to understand that a further central image was of green bunches or fronds moving under water at unpredictable intervals, which further central image might require me to report in my piece of fiction that a certain young female personage on a balcony, or a certain young female personage presumed by other personages to have died, seemed sometimes to move her head from side to side as though she wondered at, or as though she disbelieved, or as though she could wish not to have seen some or another image that appeared in her mind.