The Pages (6 page)

‘What are you smiling at?' woman, in black, cut in from the left. ‘You're thinking about some poor girl?'

A small tanned woman, Virginia Kentridge had a thin neck with prominent sinews sweeping up from her shoulders like a Moreton Bay Fig, enough to stretch her credibility, for when activated, which was often, they gave a neurotic force to any ideas she may have had. And this neck – those sinews – also suggested emotional adventure, just below the surface.

Wesley's mother had told him about her.

To commiserate he said, ‘Your husband couldn't have been so old.'

What actually happened? (Why think, let alone ask? Why was he talking?)

‘He was with his poxy girlfriend,' Mrs Kentridge smiled. ‘A clear day, a perfectly straight road, and he was driving. The rest I leave up to you.'

‘Was she killed too?'

The widow shrugged. In broad daylight at any given moment there was always somewhere a head-on collision taking place, especially on the road to Cooma. There were so many solid trees in Australia. Far better to lean forward, which she did, allowing him to glimpse the softness of her neglected breasts.

The following night he spent at her house. Photos of the husband in silver frames were still on the shelves – a man entirely frank with the camera, nothing to hide. Stacks of hair, the strong wiry stuff, and in silver eruption above his teeth like a burst water main. By looking straight at the camera he was looking straight at her.

Until Virginia Kentridge, Wesley had fumbled around with the willing experimenters from the nearby towns – on the slippery seats of locally made cars, he was the awkward skater on pale green ice. But this energetic woman who exercised a tennis player's sinews in many parts of her body was only a few years younger than his own mother. No sooner had he begun that night to linger in her bed than she placed an extreme, restless importance on his feelings for her, and became different, making herself singular to him. So specific was the change, he wondered whether it could be true. He didn't know that her anxiety was close to momentary happiness.

Mrs Kentridge reached out to him. Oddly she complained he wasn't talking to her, yet when he did she looked away and fidgeted, sometimes getting up and putting something in a slightly different position, as if she wasn't interested.

Taking him shopping gave her pleasure. Shirts in boxes, woollen tie, diamond socks, a rust-brown herringbone jacket, gave form to the idea she had of him. He appeared more sure of himself than he actually was.

By now he no longer looked like a hick, which therefore you would think an improvement, but it caught the eye of his cosmopolitan mother – narrowed her glance, well-practised at isolating a situation. And when the happy and bold Mrs Virginia Kentridge insisted they go to hear a Russian pianist giving one and only one recital at the Opera House, which happened to be a Thursday evening, Wesley casually went along and didn't go to his mother's or get around to telling her.

The following morning she phoned early.

‘What have you been doing? I sat here and I added two and two together. The poor thing, that's all I can say. We don't know what's the matter with Virginia. Why does she have to carry on the way she does? The fresh widow. She's trouble. Listen to your mother. Are you listening? I know women like her. You have to be careful.' The bridge club at Double Bay and the tennis group were full of them – and not only widows and divorcees – tanned, gaunt, large-eyed, fierce women. ‘Find someone younger. They're around. I saw some lovely young things on the street yesterday.'

The way she spoke rapidly as if to herself, his mother didn't sound like a mother at all; to his surprise he saw the younger, single part was still there.

Now she said, ‘I've got to go now. I'm going out.'

He took ferries too, cream and green ones looking like nineteen fifties kitchen cabinets, and bus and train journeys – to Parramatta, more than once – stopping at the regular intervals – across to the North Shore – as far as Palm Beach. He preferred the buses where he could gaze at the haphazard mess of streets and the people on them, and glance at the passengers as they made their way to seats near him. Old ladies wearing coats on hot days and women clumsy with children he helped on or off. He began to wonder what he was doing with himself.

On a noisy night the students next door invited him in, where he entered the source of the music, steady, blurry, blood-pumping, and the rising and falling laughter and shouting. He was dragged in. Men and women his age stood in the one spot and made pronouncements from what they had learnt that very day in the lecture hall. It was not possible to remain silent; Wesley was expected to agree or not.

A woman he had seen once before brushed past him and went into the kitchen.

She put her hands over her ears. ‘I don't know where all these people have come from. And I have this terrible headache.'

He filled a glass of water, and sat across the table.

‘Where do you fit in?' she looked up. ‘What's your story?'

‘Last time I saw you,' he decided, ‘was up on the roof. I think I saw you there.'

‘He only thinks it was me…'

Sturdy thighs, Wesley remembered. Lying face down, reading a book.

She said, ‘Up there, I'm all by myself. All I can hear is the traffic – and the pigeons. I hate pigeons. There's nothing attractive about them. They're both disgusting and boring.'

This was Rosie Steig, close up – a broad forehead, narrow chin, severe eyes, messy black hair to her shoulders. She was studying Old Norse and psychology, among other things. Wesley explained where he came from. Because she had asked, he described his sister. Even with a headache she listened carefully. His mother and father he mentioned with a shrug. Describing his interest in impressions and movement, he realised he didn't make sense, and sounded almost mournful when he said he didn't know what to make of anything much.

And the kitchen became crowded. Although they were in her place, she asked over the noise if they could go next door to his place. There, still talking on his second-hand sofa of muddy roses, he allowed his left arm with its restless fingers and a Swiss watch strapped on, to lengthen towards the first port of call, her shoulder. At the very moment his fingertips touched, he stopped. She seemed to be waiting – but you never can tell.

Later, lying next to her, conscious of the welcome of a woman's body, again Wesley Antill decided to pause, decided to remain separate. He concentrated on the smallest gaps between them – not to remain faithful to the memory of Mrs Kentridge, who he was still seeing, but to experience the difficulty, the austerity of resistance. Was it celibacy? It was close, but not really.

From then an apparent naturalness flowed between them; a pleasant ordinariness, none of the complications.

A few weeks after the party she suggested one afternoon they go up on the roof. It was too ‘stuffy' inside. Chatting away at the bedroom door, she bent forward to let her breasts fall into the floral bikini he had last seen on the roof.

To his sister he wrote, ‘My neighbour next door is like you. I'm trying to work out why exactly. (When I know I'll let you know.) Is about your size. Don't screw your nose up! Name is Rosie. She tells me there's no problem attending lectures at the university. All I do is tag along as if I'm a student too, which of course I am.'

Rosie Steig took him to other parties, where he looked on as she and her friends discussed politics, and names and ideas Wesley had never heard of. He left early, and didn't mind when he heard Rosie arrive next door with another man. It was Rosie who first led him through the gates of Sydney University and into the lecture hall. With Wesley in tow, she liked to arrive late, and take a seat in the front, where she would begin brushing her black hair. To Wesley the descending tiers of seats gave the impression he was stepping down into a volcano, or some sort of excavation where, instead of eruptions, a small vertical figure stood at the microphone and spoke with quiet reasonableness, trying to make sense of it all. It was here that Wesley first heard the main theories of psychology and psychoanalysis, which had been transported in book parcels all the way from Vienna, Zurich, London.

Whenever he looked up one of Rosie's friends waved at him using her little finger.

Nothing before had produced in him such keen anticipation. The process itself of arriving and choosing the best position for learning, then to sit down and wait for the lecturer to arrive, watching and waiting as the papers were shifted, sometimes just a page of notes, before the mouth opened and pronounced the first words. It hardly mattered what the subject was. Theory and information unfolded as one. In this it resembled the way Mrs Kentridge undressed in stages, proud to reveal her nakedness to him – who flew into a rage when he happened to tell her this.

He attended as many lectures as possible. And so he acquired broad knowledge of the histories of the significant parts of the world – really, a history of congestions. Even a bit of Australia was touched upon; he traversed the Spanish lake; listened in on linguistics, the Romance languages; Greeks, the myths; political theory; the Russian novels; utopias; various anthropological subjects. It required study. He filled almost to overflowing the emptiness of his childhood and youth with density – with grey matter. Even at breakfast he had his nose in a book. For eight months every Thursday morning an analysis of a Shakespeare play was given by one man. Beginning with the first, each play was examined in detail, until every play was done. A one-man show. Among the talents of this popular lecturer was the ability to read parts, switching from a la-di-da voice of a king to a high, clearly enunciated woman's whether mother, queen, witch, loyal daughter.

After the first year, Wesley concentrated on subjects he was interested in – discarding, for example, colonial and post-colonial fiction, yes, and the slide-shows that represented the history of European painting and architecture – and law, and Old Norse – until, after some hesitation, he turned to philosophy, a subject he had avoided, where he immediately caught the attention of one lecturer.

10

IT WAS A puzzle to Lindsey that these two women showed no interest in walking around the property. Visitors from the city, for instance, couldn't resist looking into the shearing shed. The impulse is common to associate an unfamiliar composition with a familiar one; why, some people squint up at the clouds and spot the windswept features of Beethoven or Karl Marx, and even Queen Victoria. The bare ground between the homestead and the scattered sheds had the appearance of a piazza in a dusty, out-of-the-way village in southern Italy. Dog there scratching himself. But these women were happy to sit all day in the kitchen, nibbling biscuits. The brainy one, who was supposed to know all there was to know about philosophy, fiddled with a spoon. She hadn't been out in the sun, and was not given to saying much. She was somewhere else. Lindsey saw again her attractive matter-of-factness; and in recognising it, although hardly knowing her, she imagined they could like each other.

Meanwhile, the gold-jangling arm and hand movements of her friend, Sophie, expanded the kitchen, which was large to begin with, as she explained how she ended up coming on this trip, for by talking about it she was talking to herself. It had been a telephonic nightmare cancelling her appointments. For some time now she had been turning away new clients, as they were called. People, she said, had become desperate to talk. They talk virtually to anyone who will listen. You see them on television. It's a matter of have-to. It's themselves they want to talk about. As a qualified listener I do my best to guide them, Sophie told them. We pick up clues. Invariably what is said has been said by many others before, in slightly different form. It is certainly the age of anxieties. Many pressures today.

‘As you know, Erica was coming here to work. Oblivious of this fact I had gone to see her. One of Erica's qualities is her subtlety. I had no idea she was coming out here. I was not in good shape. This man – I won't say who, in case he's a friend of yours – meant a huge amount to me. I mean, we were at ease together. As well, here's a man who made me laugh – me, of all people. I realised I was happy. Believe me, stacks of men are dull. They're all selfish, I know that.' She turned to Erica. ‘And I have known you for how many years? Have you ever seen me with a man who has suited me better, and who has put up with my less attractive parts?

‘Whatever. This ideal situation collapses. It sent me into a shocking spin. I wasn't prepared. I didn't know where to turn, what to think.'

Erica stirred, ‘He was married.' She also wanted to say she had never met the man.

‘Yes, but it wasn't insurmountable. We were in the midst of discussing that very situation. I don't understand why he decided to finish with me. It must be something I've said or done. I'm trying to think. There was no warning. Do you know he sent me a letter?

‘I am a discarded woman. In coming here I feel I've made the correct decision. I definitely needed my mind somewhere else.'

Having heard this in the car, Erica allowed herself to gaze at the cream-enamelled, industrial-strength wood stove. Pots and pans and kettles were larger out here.

‘I am sorry,' Lindsey said. And she was. A confusion now twisted Sophie's face as the two women looked on. Perhaps Lindsey should have touched her shoulder. A warm handful of life making a connection, a helping hand; it can sometimes make a difference.

To restore possession of herself, Sophie looked up and asked Lindsey about her two brothers.

Lindsey leaned over to pour the tea and wondered what she could say that would interest them.

‘They were my brothers, yes. And they could hardly be more different. One day I would prefer Wesley, the next day it was Roger. The two of them and their opposite opinions on every subject under the sun, though they never really got into rows. I don't think Wesley could be bothered, Roger – he should be here in a minute – he has his practical side. He gets on with it. I suppose his common sense, which he has in spades, comes from being on the land. Wesley has been the more difficult one.'