The Pages (11 page)

Everybody was trying to be funny, while he wanted to remain serious. Why he had made the visit he wasn't at all sure. He looked around the room. In the corner was a neat selection of news magazines. A bookshelf had on display a concise Oxford and an encyclopaedia held together by a ginger rubber band. Above, in a gilt frame, was a photo-realist scene of a perfectly mirrored lake surrounded by snow and pine trees.

‘Tell me something I don't know.'

Wesley had always liked this aspect of Sheldrake, the large man, now having trouble breathing. Wasn't it Schopenhauer who placed a gold coin on his café table every day, as he ate his lunch, to encourage one of the gawping onlookers to say something – anything – that would be of interest to him? (And any takers? Not one.)

‘Can I make you a cup of tea, or anything?'

Sheldrake shook his head and looked up at the ceiling.

‘How's the pain?'

‘I already know that.'

‘Pain, I haven't had much experience of.' Virginia would have quickly said, ‘Touch wood!'

‘You have something to look forward to.'

Wesley wanted to know if he was afraid. What can it all possibly amount to – being alive, on two feet, and being aware of it, then, after a short time, it coming to an end.

Instead, he stood up to examine the walls which he noticed had been papered over with printed pages, the walls blurring with columns of words, sentences.

‘That's the Holy Scriptures you're looking at,' Sheldrake turned his head. ‘If you're interested.'

He had never thought of Sheldrake being religious.

‘I've glued them on the wall, as an
aide memoire.
Do you know what an
aide memoire
is?'

Wesley said nothing.

‘I don't know what's worse, the Old Testament or the New,' Sheldrake said in a loud voice. ‘I've glued them up in case I forget what a load of baloney it all is. I want to be reminded every day. Pick a verse there, any verse and read it out. Do you see what I'm getting at?'

Now his ring of yellow hair took on the fallen halo look as he became stuck in a convulsion of hacking, spitting and reddening.

‘I'm being punished.' He tried laughing, only to cough still further.

‘I was about to say,' Wesley remained standing, ‘the accumulation of facts doesn't always add up to much.'

Did this man alone under the sheet have a wife somewhere? A few children discarded along the way? What about a black-sheep brother trying to grow coffee in New Guinea? A younger sister out at Bankstown bringing up three kids after the father shot through?

‘You're a thoughtful character, I see that,' Sheldrake searched around with his words. ‘You're probably smarter than me. I didn't mind the hospital. The job was a good one…the sitting around and talking out in the sun. I liked it.'

Wesley waited as the large man closed his eyes.

‘Thank you, thank you. I'll give it a rest now.'

Hendrik Sheldrake would remain a small unravelled knot in Antill's life – unexplained.

The day, shortly afterwards, he died in the hospice was the day Wesley found his mother on the floor by the sofa, the television on. After phoning his father, Wesley sat by the window with its view of the Botanic Gardens, and ransacked the philosophers to explain turmoil, better still to correct it – his first life-shock. Only later would answers be available. Instead of being comforted by Rosie, it was Wesley who held her, as if he was comforting her, and for the first time slipped in, necessarily hectic in their immediate life-producing movements; once, and once more.

Rosie stroked his nose with her little finger.

‘What might you be thinking?'

‘I'm not sure yet.'

He was thinking it was time he hardened himself. Part of the attraction of softness was the enveloping sense of blurriness, while he wanted as much as possible to preserve the outline of his own self. As a result, he thought his understanding of the most serious of all subjects, philosophy, had become more and more out of reach. It was a mish-mash of the thoughts of others. Local complications, responses, confusions were coming in from all directions. It was true that a close-by death introduced a form of hardness. The death of a parent was nothing less than a before/after moment. He was an altered person. Already he looked at the world differently. And it was a long time since he had been forced into attempting to think clearly about what lay not on the page, but directly in life in front of him.

Wesley hadn't been returning Virginia's calls. It was she who had been holding her lean finger on the buzzer to his door. If she'd had a rock she'd have thrown it through the window.

She posted a card. ‘Is this a serious person, or what?'

She was right. But in some areas he couldn't do much better. He wrote, ‘I'm sorry.' Quickly added, ‘It's time I left.'

Later, with Rosie, he could hear himself sounding furtive. His words were not accurate enough. And yet in trying to be true to himself he considered he had the best of intentions – even though he wasn't sure where he was going. Several times he said very firmly, carefully, he would keep in touch.

18

THE GREATEST of the great philosophers followed the solitary life, a life of relative simplicity, living alone, in that sense a hard life, just the candle on the table, whereas the founder of psychoanalysis and his disciples and rivals enjoyed married lives, children and gardens which provided the warmth and intimacy of the softer life. The philosopher is interested in silence. The psychoanalyst is drawn to the other person, to words strung out; they're prepared to encourage the horizontal halting sentences, faint noise of traffic outside, someone on the street shouting. Spare a thought for these conduits in comfortable clothing: after listening at regular set intervals to a procession of people one by one thinking aloud about themselves, they return home in the evening to encounter more words, more cries for attention, where they are expected to apply not ordinary everyday understanding, but unusual additional understanding.

More and more Sydney has come to resemble a word-factory the way it produces extra, spoken words.

Psychoanalysts have not seen the need to set up rooms away from the city (Sydney). An overlay of voices and other distractions has separated city dwellers from their natural selves, in turn aggravating all manner of obstructions, confusions, the specifically named phobias, which cry out for treatment. It is the philosophers who have shown a penchant for pastoral areas, often up in the mountains. There's been quite a history of it; many distinguished names hiding themselves away. And then what happened? The remoteness of the places the philosophers chose as their ‘work worlds' drew curiosity and respect from the city dwellers who couldn't help embroidering the distant uncomfortable huts, towers, the forests and lakes, until they became further isolated and frozen in the aura of myth.

The ‘comings and goings' of the seasons, the firm statement of geology, above all the absence of voices, can provide a feeling of closeness to the original nature of things, the beginning from where an explanation can begin to be constructed. There – in the mountains especially – philosophy can be seen as a natural force.

19

ON THE third or fourth day, Erica entered the small woolshed.

Already the day was warm.

Never having stepped inside such a shed before she remained near the door, not sure what to take in first.

The air was thick with the smell of wool, so thick it surrounded and began caressing her. Erica felt if she stayed here for any length of time her skin would improve.

A few handfuls of wool had been left on the floor. Light came in through holes in the tin walls, as if the place had been shot up, and ragged gaps here and there let in more, and so the irregular patterns of silver on the floor and opposite walls. Otherwise the space was mostly shadow.

It took a moment to adjust to the light.

A wheat bag had been nailed up over the nearest window. Down the far end the other window illuminated a corner, which had a table, a chair and shelves holding stacks of paper. On the table were pages of manuscript and the white of these pages gleamed in patches and brightened the corner almost electrically. Other sheets of paper seemed to flutter white in mid-air.

Erica took a step forward. Then she strode over to Wesley Antill's work table. Beneath the window was a horsehair sofa and blanket; through the window, the ground sloped up towards a hill.

She sat in Antill's chair. Within reach was a tray of fresh quarto, and next to it pages filled with writing, some in pencil, and a notebook. The black fountain pen, made in Germany; there would have to be an ink bottle somewhere. There was not much else: a pencil sharpener bolted to the table, a saucer containing paper clips and rubber bands, and a small traveller's clock (Roman numerals) in a leather case. Also on the table was a bottle of tomato sauce, almost finished, the leftovers clinging to the insides, like the remnants of the British Empire on a map. The sauce bottle certainly added to the atmosphere of almost brutal plainness, so much so that Erica couldn't help imagining the philosopher in his underpants, gaunt, arms tanned up to his elbows, always with an appetite. And she wondered again if, in order to think deeply, it was necessary to live and work in barren surroundings.

She got up and moved around the table and touched the pages in loose piles on the shelves. These too were filled with his handwriting. Still more were stacked on the floor; no doubt false starts, or faulty ideas, or ideas veering off the chosen path. There must have been many hundreds of pages. Erica noticed she was standing on discarded pages lying on the floor. She went back to the chair again. Strange to be sitting where he sat. She had her elbows on the table. The pages in front of her would be the ones Antill was working on when he died, the Prodigal Son. But she could hardly even glance at them. Before beginning anything she'd have to find the beginning in amongst the papers.

She leaned back and looked around. The woolshed had the extra stillness of a place where work and well-oiled equipment had been abandoned. Only then did she look closely at the pages pegged onto a length of string, like white handkerchiefs hanging out to dry.

Antill had written, in his blue ink, statements to spur him on. At his work table, he had only to turn his head slightly to see them.

Begin with nothing, begin again
.

Next,
Not to think
,
but allow thinking to arrive
. These pages were fastened by plastic pegs of various colours,
Drought-thoughts
.

A smaller piece torn from his notebook had turned yellow,
With no hesitation
,
none. Otherwise
–.

On the nearest sheet of suspended paper in extra large writing was a line she recognised. Evidently for Wesley Antill it summed up the philosopher's task: philosophy was
a confession on the part of its author
,
a kind of
involuntary and unconscious memoir
.

It was the quote Professor Thursk in the lecture hall or in the quadrangle was fond of dismissing with a good-natured chuckle (‘that old chestnut'), as he did with anything German, or almost-German – which had been enough for Erica to think there was perhaps something to it. And now here it was on a piece of paper hanging in a woolshed.

In considering a philosophy, she would be considering a life.

Erica didn't hear Roger Antill arrive.

‘Have you made any sense of it yet?'

‘Do you mind? I'm thinking.'

Erica flinched at the sound of her sharpness. She was turning into a severe woman, a sharp, methodical, increasingly assertive type – and who could be bothered with them? It went with her face which she considered too small. She wondered why she had developed a hard side – how unnecessary it was. Roger Antill was not a bad man; and he owned the woolshed.

As if nothing had happened, he went over to the bookshelves.

‘He had a brain, all right. Our brother was brainy. He had the means of concentration. Nothing would stand in the way. I've seen similar in fine-wool breeders, successful, and the old Hungarian who runs the post office in town – he takes photographs of every bird that lands on his back fence. Single-minded. Except Wes had the extra brains, no doubt about it. Can a person use their brain too much? He never gave his brain a rest. My sister asked me to see if you need anything. There's a teapot over there.'

Before she could answer, he moved across to the window, his back to her and, by not talking, silenced her.

After the way she had spoken, Erica wasn't sure what to say anyway. She couldn't stop thinking about herself.

‘There used to be eucalypts out here, a nice lot of red gums. He didn't want to see them when he worked, he told us. He went out and attacked them with a chainsaw. I gave him a hand.

‘It wasn't that he had anything against eucalypts, although they were measly with shade, it was that he wanted no distractions. They reminded him too much of where he was.'

For a good five minutes neither spoke.

‘Wes sure was unlike anyone I had come across.'

He turned from the window.

‘If you're not careful, you could end up sitting here for the next twenty years trying to work him out. How would that be?'

A casual, entrenched scepticism had straightened his mouth, not unpleasantly. And out of local habit he bent down and picked up a bit of old wool and measured it between his fingers.

‘Can you take this away, please?' – pointing to the bottle of tomato sauce. ‘It makes me unhappy looking at it.'

As always he was in his dusty working trousers and boots; and before she could say anything more he had gone.

The hours passed quietly in the perforated darkness. Of course the philosopher's chair had to be a hard wooden one. Now and then she went over to the window and contemplated the treeless scene; fresh shoots had erupted from the stumps and in the spaces in between. Around lunchtime Erica stepped out and stood near the veranda. She stretched her arms over her head and squinted into the mid-distance and beyond. Aloud she said, ‘Sweep of landscape.' As she took in the breadth of it, Erica, from inner-Sydney – a city of verticals – some ragged undulations – blue glitter – tried to see why she felt an affinity to the landscape: ‘gradualness' was what she decided. The slow rise and roundness. Gradual were the patterns, no limestone outcrops, gorges, river, no patch of green grass; no sharp lines of black, either. Gradualness possessed an endlessness.