Spirit of Progress (6 page)

She’d almost cried then. Almost. And feared she might at any moment. And so she spoke to take her mind off the crying, or the possibility of crying. And she composed her thoughts as she spoke.

‘It’s right. You’ll always have one eye on the next boat and one eye on me. And I want both of them looking at me.’

Yes, she nods silently to herself, their little balloon world had been on a string, and she knew she held the string, but she’d let it go all the same. Yes, that had been it. And she’d looked around the room, trying to memorise it all, knowing that this was the last time that she would
be his, he would be hers, and they would be theirs. And just as first-time touch is a species of feeling on its own, never to be repeated, so too is last-time touch. As much as they would meet from that point on, even touch with a shake of the hands or a kiss to the cheek, it would always be a different level of meeting and a different species of touch altogether.

She’d mustered one last smile.

‘Now, you just try to be nice when we meet from now on.’

She still doesn’t know why she said that. Just to lighten things, she guesses. Just to make it easier. It was then that he’d moved towards her, his arms out, and at that point she’d stepped back. No, that backward step was saying, ‘This really is it.’ This really is the end. She knew she could only ever say these things once. And so, having said them once and once only, she had fled into the long, arching street that ran down the hill opposite Royal Park.

Yes, she was thinking, now standing at the front of her house, its lights shining in the wintry dark, that was how it ended: the war, Sam and Tess. It all ended with the Dancing Man. He with the regret still in his eyes. They having known the best of each other. The perfect moment.

That was almost a year ago. Another year, another winter. But she knows she will carry that time with her, throughout all the years and winters to come. She will carry it all. Everything that was said and not said. She will remember days as they were, and she will create them as
they never happened. But she will always defer to the wisdom she possessed that afternoon, when she knew that their time was up and the moment of perfect parting was upon them.

A
t the age of twenty-five, Rita is still young but sitting in the kitchen with the weight of the child inside her she is, more than ever, conscious of drawing away from her youth. Conscious of looking back upon herself as she was not so long ago: a young woman, still a girl really, about to be married. Innocent. Extraordinarily innocent. Innocent, she suspects (observing the girls around her who have lived through this war and who have a look in their eyes of knowledge and experience that she never had at their age), in a way that will never come again, for the world is now beyond such innocence. So when she married Vic four years ago, when the times were at their most violent and sad and it seemed (in Rita’s imagination, which her mother always called too fanciful) as if bombs would drop on them at any moment, she was conscious, above all, of handing over her innocence. The marriage was not simply an act of love, of young girlish love, but an act of trust. Vic knew
things she didn’t. He knew the life of the street: paper rounds, odd jobs, bringing money from the moment he could into a house that didn’t have much. And gangs. They all had a gang. From an early age he’d known the life of the street. Too early, she thought. Was he ever a child? Somehow she couldn’t picture it. No, he was born into the life of the street. Made old fast. A rough-nut, he calls himself. Which is why he knew things she didn’t. He knew the grown-up world and he would teach her and from this she would grow out of her innocence (because you can’t stay innocent forever) and into what she might become. And this is what made the marriage not only an act of young, impossibly girlish love, but an act of trust as well. A trust that has been returned and not been returned. An experience that was both worth the acquisition and not worth the acquisition. A knowledge that is worth having but, at the same time, one she would have been better off without, what with all the drinking, the fights, and all those miserable, silent mornings afterwards that were all too common. Still, it is this knowledge and this experience that enables her now to look back on that girl she was and recognise her innocence through the eyes of her older self. This is what distance does, she tells herself. It lets you see things. And by things she means what they were and why they were, and what they both might yet become.

This is also the very distance that the young journalist and the painter, whom she has never met (but who are currently talking in the café with the odd Russian name), wish to acquire when they finally travel far from this
place and have the experience of looking back and seeing things the way distance lets you.

For Rita, distance means looking back and seeing the young girl that she was handing over, like the bud of a spring flower, the bloom that she might become in an act of trust that requires the kind of innocence she doesn’t have any more. And just as the distance enables her to see this, it also raises the question, would she do it again? It is a question she has asked herself often enough now, and the answer is always the same at this stage of her life: no and yes; yes and no. Never again (if she were to go back and start again, as she has in her mind time after time). Always the same.

So as much as she might have been thinking about bombs falling on them at any minute back when the war seemed as though it would never end and her imagination ran away from her the way it always has, she was also looking at the world through the eyes of a young bride asking herself if she will bloom or wither, like all those withered lives around her. Now she is about to become a mother and the question still hangs in the air. At the moment the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ are not so important, for she is about to take the next step. This is the step, she tells herself, that she has been preparing to take all her life.

But as much as she tells herself that her body was born to be round, and as much as everybody tells her — the doctors, the young wives of the street, the old women whose children have long gone from them — that her body was born to be round, and as much as they tell her
that this body of hers has a memory that goes back a million years and knows exactly what it’s doing, there is also a part of her that is convinced that her body is different, that it was not born to be round, that it does not have a memory that goes back a million years, and, unlike all the other bodies of all the other young wives, this one doesn’t really know what it’s doing after all. For just as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from Vic’s lips, the feeling of being round and heavy and the idea of being a mother do not come naturally to Rita. Her body, she is sure, has a poor memory. And, unlike all the young wives she sees (and she sees round young wives everywhere now), she is convinced that she will have to learn to be a mother more than the rest. That it will not come naturally and that the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Mama’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, will ring strangely in her ears as will ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ in Vic’s.

It was one thing that united them both before they ever married, this business of fathers and absence. For Vic’s mother, who lives in a country town not too far away, had come to visit Rita’s mother before they married to unburden herself of her shame. The shame that nobody spoke of, but which was unburdened that Sunday afternoon. And Rita’s mother had told her that she was not alone, that Rita’s father, too, had one day stepped out the front gate of their house in a cloud of pipe smoke and never come back. The two women had nodded to each other in a way that suggested there is a lot of that about. But what Rita’s mother didn’t add was that this absent father never returned because she told him not to. Life,
she decided long ago, would be simpler without a drunk drinking all their money away, and so he was dispatched into the realm of the ‘absent father’. It was one of the things they discovered about each other and which drew Rita closer to a ‘yes’ rather than a ‘no’ whenever she posed herself the question of whether she would do it all again. That and the feeling that the past, with all its secret guilt and shame, might now end with them, and that the child and this world they were creating could be the clean start for which they were all searching.

And although these thoughts occupy her mind, it seems to her, every moment, every tick of the day, she is, nonetheless, happy to be distracted this evening. For there, spread out on the kitchen table in the afternoon newspaper, is a photograph of Vic’s Aunt Katherine. Her left arm is raised. Whoever it is — some journalist — that has come to visit, for whatever reason, Aunt Katherine is having none of it.

Aunt Katherine frightens Rita. She has always frightened her, from the night she’d told Rita she was a fool to be marrying Vic because Vic was a drunk who would let her down the way drunks always do, and that her life would be a misery because Vic, for all his looks and his charm and his big laugh, was one of those who carried his misery about with him wherever he went and made
his
misery
your
misery. And even though this was all given to her in the manner of good advice, it was also frightening in the way that words from priests and nuns are frightening. ‘You’ll rue the day,’ Aunt Katherine had said, and waved her umbrella at Rita, who sat up for hours
in her best dress, waiting for Vic to take her out on pay night. Yes, right from the start she was frightened of Aunt Katherine. Just as she was frightened of them all, the whole bunch, the four sisters. They were scary women. And it wasn’t just the look they got in their eyes, and they all had it (as did Vic), that wild Irish look that said ‘Don’t cross me’, although, she concedes, Vic’s mother, Mary-Anne, was gentler with her than the other sisters (and Rita couldn’t help but wonder if this gentleness had entered her nature when Vic entered her life). No, it wasn’t just the look. It was the way they spoke too. They could command whole rooms, these women. Strong women, from another age altogether. Stronger, Rita was sure, than she could ever be. They had words at their fingertips. One moment playing with them like toys, another firing them off like weapons. And when their words didn’t put you in your place, the look that said ‘Don’t cross me’ did. And so Rita has no trouble imagining the journalist who wrote the story (and for some reason she pictures him as young) stepping back pretty smartly when confronted with that look in Katherine’s eyes and a few well-chosen words.

But as much as she is frightened by Aunt Katherine, Vic isn’t. Aunt Katherine has been around him all his life. His mother’s wacky sister, dropping in at odd times, then disappearing for months, travelling by herself around the country. And while there might have been moments when Vic wondered what she got up to while she was gone, those moments would have been few and brief. For she was always wacky Aunt Katherine, a sort of family
embarrassment. A strange old lady with strange ways that she ought to have given up years before. The sort of old lady who turns heads in a crowd for all the wrong reasons. The sort of old lady who embarrasses Vic all too often, especially, Rita muses, when she goes around getting her picture in the evening newspaper so that everybody will know she lives in a tent.

Rita, who is happy to have her mind taken off the roundness of her body, her body that she is quite sure does not have a million-year-old memory, can imagine Vic’s face when she shows him the paper and the photograph of Aunt Katherine standing at the front of her tent. Vic, who is currently turning his bicycle into their street, will lift his face to the ceiling and roll his eyes in acknowledgment that Aunt Katherine is at it again. And that even now, when she is old and he is grown, her ability to embarrass him is as strong as ever. She could be dying and still do it, leave him embarrassed at her death bed, leave him turning his face to the ceiling and rolling his eyes as she fades away into family legend, as she surely will.

Rita leaves the paper spread out on the table, Aunt Katherine, the cranky, unnerving Aunt Katherine, commanding the kitchen the way these sisters command whole rooms with their words and their warning looks.

W
ebster has neither seen nor met Katherine, Vic, Rita or Skinner, and if he did they would only be significant insofar as they happened to fall within the perimeters of his world. Worthy of notice only because of that. Moving parts in a world of Webster’s making. And even though his world does not yet exist, it does in his mind. He has imagined it, conceived of it, and in that sense it exists. It is sufficient for Webster to imagine something for the rest to follow. A rare quality, and Webster has it. Or so everybody tells him. But, even so, Webster doesn’t need anybody to tell him. He knows he has vision, and has always known. And it is the same quality that his wife first saw on the tennis court years before, a way of playing that never once entertained the idea of defeat and caused her to inwardly proclaim that this man will have what he wants. He is one of those who go out and create something out of nothing, no matter the cost. Factories will be built on barren land. Estates
will rise from the dust. Blank spaces on a map will be filled, and all at Webster’s command. Never mind who might have lived there for thousands of years, never mind the farms and the farmhouses that have been there for generations; they are nothing. Spaces on a map, waiting to be filled by someone with vision.

Webster stands in his study, the map of the area rolled out on the desk in front of him. He is a tall man, broad shouldered, strong, in the prime of life, the hint of grey in his hair (and his head of hair will never leave him, or so his barber constantly tells him with marvel in his Italian voice) his only concession to mortality.

Smoke from his cigarette rises in the air but he does not notice. Nor does he seem to notice the air going into and out of his lungs, if, indeed, he is breathing at all. For he is concentrating, to the exclusion of everything else (his study, his house, his wife in another room), on the map in front of him. He is both here, and not here. He is, for all the world, not even thinking. Not thinking, but receiving. Did Caesar stand like this in front of his maps before a battle, not thinking but receiving? His plans coming to him whole, complete and flawless? Did Michelangelo lounge on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, inert, inspiration having travelled to him from the stars, the interior of the chapel complete in his mind before he even lifted a brush? Webster thinks so. For Webster has read about the great lives. Those few who come along every now and then and have the power to nudge History in this direction or that, those few who stand before battlefields, chapel walls or blank spaces on
a map, receiving their visions so that battles may be won, masterworks completed and blank spaces filled. That’s what vision does. Not that Webster is thinking at the moment, for he is deep in his imagined world and beyond thought.

For some time this has been his favourite moment of the day. When the work is done (Webster owns a factory in one of the more established suburbs just north of the city), the evening meal is completed and he can go to his study, unroll the map and imagine his world into being. Here he feels like one of those old-world hikers on a hilltop, walking stick in hand, one foot planted firmly on a rock, gazing over a landscape that, for the Websters of this world, has never been gazed upon before.

And as he stares at the map he idly notes the name Skinner and other such inconsequential designations that denote farms or vacant property. He sees shaded squares indicating the occasional house or construction grandly titled ‘mansion’. He sees the station, he sees the railway lines, and the baker, butcher and grocer on what is labelled the Old Wheat Road. But above all he sees blank, open spaces waiting to be transformed from nothing into something by Webster’s vision. Neither Katherine’s tent nor the light from it that Skinner is currently observing from his back veranda appear on the map. Even if they did, they would be as inconsequential as everything else.

For this is where Webster will create his world. He has a nose for the spirit of the times, and it is the spirit of the times that he draws into him like cigarette tobacco when he contemplates his vision. For this world they are all about
to step into, this post-war world (a phrase he first heard halfway through the war when people first dared to think that there might, after all, be an end to this endless war, and a phrase that he hears more frequently now), is buzzing with energy just waiting to be channelled by those attuned to the times, by those more attuned to the times than the times themselves. Everywhere he looks there are mothers round with children, children who, like this new world, will need space in which to let loose their energy. And it is to blank spaces like those on the map in front of him that they will take all that energy. And he, Webster, will bring a factory to the place, the people will bring their energy, and together they will create the noise of production. For the suburb that he will create will be young and in need of noise.

The construction of all of this will begin in just a few days. Tomorrow he will take his pre-war Bentley and drive to the north of the city where his world awaits him. The plans complete, architect’s drawings done, he rolls up the map, secures it with string and leaves it on the desk, rolled up but ready to spring into life at any moment, before turning out the lights of his study where the vision came to him in the first place. From out there, where stars sparkle, planets spin, comets blaze and visions fall to earth for those destined to receive them.