The Pages (12 page)

This old dry part of the earth laid out before her was familiar, which seemed to reduce Erica's apprehension of the pages, enough for her to experience a flow of contentment which reached back to the familiarity of a few people and places in Sydney.

‘Look at you,' said Sophie in the kitchen.

Seated also at the table, Lindsey gave her the welcome smile which lengthened her face – the shoebox tilting.

‘I've decided something,' Erica announced, because she was restless. ‘I'm too analytical. I've now realised this.'

‘That's my department,' Sophie gave a single clap. ‘That's exactly what I'm like! I find I'm always making a basic situation more complex than it needs to be. All sorts of side issues come into the equation, which happens to be simple enough and staring me in the face. It causes no end of difficulty.' The happily married lecturer, of the English woollen socks, being a recent example.

Erica noticed the tomato sauce bottle on the table. Even there in the kitchen it appeared to be standing for the plain and bleak life, of hunger satisfied, wipe the plate with thumb or crust; her hand involuntarily made to shove it back into the cupboard, out of view.

‘I intervene in my mind – and too early,' Erica insisted. ‘I can't seem to help it. In reducing the argument, I reduce the person. I can hear myself becoming sharp.' The last thing she wanted was for it to become permanent. ‘I think your brother,' she glanced at Lindsey, ‘has found me so.'

‘Is that why we're like this, sitting here, all three of us?' Sophie laughed. She had spoken scarcely six words to what's-his-name, the brother. Where was he now?

Lindsey had remained looking at Erica. ‘Roger? He wouldn't notice. In this area he's as blind as a bat. Hopeless.'

The way sisters dismiss (affectionately) their poor brothers, and vice versa.

‘I'm going to improve,' Erica said, more to herself. Again she checked if she had sounded severe, speaking through the gritted teeth et cetera.

Sophie enquired about the philosopher's papers.

‘It's going to take more than a few hours.' More like weeks, Erica thought, and wasn't displeased.

Sophie frowned. ‘Haven't you actually looked at them yet? I'm going to have to get back soon.'

‘We've only just arrived, have we not?'

At this point a phone rang which had Sophie rushing to her large handbag and swearing as she tried to find it.

‘Hello, Daddy? Are you all right?'

She went out onto the veranda to talk. It allowed Erica to turn to Lindsey with careful questions about her brothers, hoping to anticipate the soon to be seen ‘unconscious memoir' of the philosopher, if that's what it was. The smallest bits of information added, or gave flesh, to the picture. Apparently for lunch Wesley ate a boiled egg and a piece of ham, and had green tea in small packets posted on the first of each month from Chinatown in Sydney. He sipped his tea from a small cup; anyone would think he'd been to China. Erica then asked about Roger. As they chatted she noticed Sophie glancing at her through the window.

With a puzzled face, Sophie came in and handed Erica her phone. ‘He doesn't want to talk to me. He wants to talk to you.'

20

EACH AND every perhaps and possibly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, yes but, along with the ifs, the maybes, the not necessarilies, while producing an appearance of tolerance and abstraction, which made him attractive in the eyes of others, had spread and undermined the haphazard foundations of Wesley Antill's own opinions. Hang on, let me think. (He began talking to himself.) Lack of precision – that is, how to be yourself,
as much as possible
– tightened its grip; uncertainty was OK, confusion not.

The complications of everyday life added to the confusion, as if Mrs Kentridge in black and the softer but no less demanding intimacy of Rosie Steig had been placed close by in order to occupy and actually deflect his thoughts.

And when Wesley Antill began his wanderings, carrying his mother's suitcase, and for the first time in his life set foot on foreign soil, he chose as his destination a city not known as a centre for philosophy; in fact, it had hardly made a contribution at all. Antill could have headed straight for Edinburgh, or Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris even, as well as any number of German cities and villages, let alone Athens.

He chose London, not intending to stay long.

In the train from Heathrow, Antill looked at the bright green parks and into the backyards of narrow houses, the traffic slowly moving along the streets – little cars, vans – and people waiting on platforms before entering the carriage on their way to work. Slate and brownish houses folded in behind him. He could get away with murder here. The farther he went in, not knowing a soul, the more anonymous he felt.

The first hotel was almost next door to the British Library. After a restless night he stepped out and noticed he had been trying to sleep in the shadow of hundreds of tons of paper, millions, more like trillions, of printed, never-resting words. Those desperate descriptions, clas-sifications, explanations and rhyming couplets under the one roof. It was not what he wanted just then. Another hotel in W2 he left after experiencing their nylon sheets. Smell of gas in another. These were small discomforts. And he was not one to complain. Wesley marvelled at the utilitarian breakfasts, the fried eggs turned with rare skill, an obvious specialty of the British. He moved from one hotel to the next. It was a way of mastering the enormous mass of the city. He took rooms in boarding houses, Kensington, Golder's Green, Putney, Clapham, Kensal Rise – and moved on. A succession of landlords – lord, what an exaggeration – and your typical vigilant landlady of the crinkled throat and powdered nose. To them, his worldly possessions appeared to be contained in a medium-size suitcase, its fine leather (Simpson's of Piccadilly?) spotted by the landladies, and so without being aware of it Antill received extra-attentive service.

He wrote to Lindsey, not to trot out the usual about Eng/London, but knowing his sister, sitting and writing and waiting in the backblocks of New South Wales, was interested in rainfall, wherever it was.

‘Early days, I know, but it hasn't so much as drizzled yet. I'm looking forward to the cold, and I wouldn't say it's been cold yet.' He didn't tell her it was bloody freezing.

Sitting in a bus or on a bench outdoors he couldn't help thinking of Rosie – it was at random, the voice, and the way she positioned herself in the world, the warmth of her body. By leaving Sydney in a rush he had abused her devotion, and he considered getting her to join him. But before long he returned to being firm and went on moving about in this impervious grubby immensity, alone.

It would soon exhaust itself. He was under the flight path. He was too close to the railway line. Through the walls a bus driver berated his passengers in his sleep. Radio and television coming through. The cobbled courtyard in Blackfriars must have once been stables. The baby was crying. Too many married couples next door having their yelling matches. Basement of the Nash terrace house. The mews a stone's throw from Westminster. Somebody being sick. He wondered where he fitted in. Was that not important? Terrible rising damp. What about the stand-up comedian through the wall in Cleveland Square rehearsing his lines – clearing his throat and beginning again? The mildest people wanted to make friends. And it was hard to avoid the music. The different streets, the many different pale and lumpy faces. More than a year had passed. Moving from one place to the next allowed him to avoid thinking, at least in any sustained, directed way; at the same time he believed he was experiencing the apparent complexity of the place. He was ‘finding his feet by walking', he informed his sister.

Wesley finally settled for a third-floor flat in a crescent just before Shepherd's Bush. The house next door had each floor taken up by a painter with an international reputation, whose canvases consisted of stripes, mostly horizontal, of various colours. Much depended on a steady hand. Accordingly, each room on each floor of the painter's house had fluorescent lighting, the only one in the crescent like it, a sort of lighthouse always glowing at one end.

He went wandering at night too, as he did in Sydney – the philosopher of the streets.

He bought water-resistant tan shoes, and an expensive, spring-loaded umbrella.

On Holland Park Avenue, opposite the Russian Consulate, Wesley reached out to pat a dalmatian, and was bitten by it. A short wide woman in a black tracksuit came forward, very confident. Shaped like a cello, and taking small steps, she had querulous eyes. Wesley also saw her black hair, which fell like a horse's tail down to the small of her back, where Wesley, coming off the farm, expected it abruptly to swish, as it would at an annoying insect.

‘She can be enthusiastic, too much. Have you lost your hand?'

As Wesley wrapped his handkerchief around it, some blood showed through. Between them the dog leaned forward panting, its tongue hanging out.

To Wesley, there was not a problem here. He looked at her. ‘Who are you?'

Serbian, Greek or even Russian; a long way from English, in every sense. And then there was her voice.

‘This is my dog.'

‘I mean, are you – who?'

What? It wasn't clear even to him what he wanted to know. It was as if they both expected him to say something offhand and amusing – about rabies, for example; he could always try a mock fainting fit, going cross-eyed before collapsing in a heap on the footpath. But he wasn't much given to performance, seeing the funny side, coming out with one-liners; it had never become established in him. ‘You have an open relationship with blood,' it occurred to him. ‘Whereas the men, we haven't.' Something along those lines.

She'd given hardly a glance at his hand.

‘I don't think you need to call an ambulance,' he said, without meaning to be funny.

They had coffee and another one in a café. Those slightly dissatisfied eyes were a bit of a worry. Wesley thought she was in her late thirties. Afterwards, he went into the post office, which meant he had to explain to her the airmail envelopes. It allowed him to describe the working dogs on their sheep station. While he was at it he mentioned his sister, and that their mother had recently died.

Although she had declared herself a married woman she took him back to her place. This was a tall white house just down the road, at the left side of a small garden square, the very house – according to the plaque above the burglar alarm – where one of the greatest early Australian explorers had lived, which is what Wesley called himself, or rather made tender reference to, after removing her tracksuit. It was enough to prompt in this stout healthy woman, whose expression normally didn't vary much, shudderings of almost laughter.

After many afternoons spent in the house, Wesley Antill forgot which hand had been bitten, and at odd moments would examine the palms of each hand and flex the fingers unnecessarily.

Eventually he asked, ‘Did your dog actually take a bite out of me, or not?'

Wesley refrained from asking too many questions. The less he knew about her increased the chance of thinking clearly. And she didn't seem to mind his apparent lack of curiosity. She knew it would end soon. It was all it was.

One afternoon she sat up and said her husband had come home early, and straight out of an Ealing comedy Antill made his way out the back gate to the lane, where he hobbled into his shoes and trousers. A minor incident really, yet it could have turned nasty. It made Antill ask what he was doing with himself, how was he spending his time – was he being serious?

It was the solitude of a large city. And all he was doing was exploring, or rather, allowing. Antill understood he didn't need to be with anybody. Aspects of his character he preferred to keep to himself, without always knowing what they really were. In the same way he rarely mentioned his thoughts. So much of talking was for the sake of talking, just because somebody else happened to be talking, of obeying some necessary instinct to fill in the gaps, to add to what already had been said, or wanting to toss in a joke or a related anecdote to bring the house down (since only an infinitesimal amount of what is said is memorable). For hour after hour Antill practised sitting in his room, emptying his mind of all thoughts. Preparing his mind for something: it was beginning to feel like that. To make matters worse, the room had just two sticks of furniture, a chair and a small brown-stained table. A smoker had been the previous tenant, and the pale shape of a crucifix showed where it had been hanging on a nail on the darkened wall.

Lindsey forwarded a letter from Rosie Steig, still at the same address in Sydney. It was soon afterwards on the footpath that Wesley began his conversations with the local postman, who did his rounds on foot, ‘single-handed delivery', as he put it, if rather ponderously, which became for Wesley necessary daily conversations. Looking out from his window at the crescent he waited for the tall figure in uniform to appear at one end, where he'd go down and join him and walk alongside for the remainder of the round, happy to let the postman do the talking. Wesley had never seen a postman as tall as the one he got to know in London, Lyell, and who not only talked but talked like a fast-dripping tap, when most other postmen were not talkers at all – the very opposite, in fact – despite, or perhaps because of, spending their working days hand-delivering words. Sometimes the pressure showed. There are the regular court cases where a postman of mild appearance has been found guilty of accumulating in his bedroom thousands of unopened letters he was supposed to have delivered. In Sydney, on Macleay Street, the ageing postie, Brian, wore navy shorts in summer and winter, and had a cigarette, even in heavy April rain; a figure sloping forward, listening to the cricket on a transistor hidden in amongst the envelopes. If you were lucky he might give a nod, or ‘morning', nothing more.