A Million Windows (23 page)

The second matter on which we all agree is that our implied readers are utterly to be trusted.

The following paragraphs will report much of what will surely go into the making of the piece of fiction the beginnings of which were reported in the section before the previous section.

The chief character had never learned the correct sequence of the places where his mother had lived before her marriage. He knew that she had been born in a small town on the plains that occupy much of the south-west of his and her native state and that her father had died before her birth. He knew that she and his father had been living in rented rooms in a western suburb of the capital city when he, their eldest child, had been born. At some time during the eighteen years between, she had lived at several addresses in the largest provincial city in the south-west of the state; she had even lived at some time in the largest forest in the south-west, a forest that was later destroyed almost wholly. She was the youngest of nine siblings, most of them females, and by the time when she was aged in her teens, most of the siblings had left home.

At some time early in his mother's childhood, her widowed mother had remarried. Her new husband was a man who had been previously unmarried. The chief character had often, as a child, been taken to visit this man and his wife and had called him, for convenience, Grandfather although his, the child's mother, had explained that the man was not his true grandfather. He, the child, had neither liked nor disliked the man, although the child's mother had told the child that the man had often been drunk in earlier times and had sometimes locked her and the younger of her siblings out of their house and had threatened them with violence.

All except two of the persons mentioned in the previous three paragraphs were long dead when the chief character was visited by a man from a far northern state who told him that they two were half-brothers. The man from the north had with him papers proving that he and the chief character had had the same mother. They had been born in different hospitals in the same capital city, the man from the north about a year before the chief character. The man from the north had been placed in the care of a so-called babies' home a week after his birth. He had later been adopted and had been given the surname of his adopting parents. He had been told as a young man that he had been adopted but had not been able until many years later to learn the name of his mother. After having learned her name, he went to much trouble to discover her address, which was in the south-western provincial city mentioned earlier. He then wrote to her, asking politely whether she could help in his search
for his true mother. She, his true mother, had a solicitor write a letter beneath his letterhead telling the man from the north that she was unable to help him in his search and warning him that if he tried again to make contact with her she would take legal action against him. After he had received this letter, the man from the north had had what he described to his half-brother as a nervous breakdown.

The chief character had felt sorry for the man from the north and had answered patiently the many questions that he asked about their mother. One of the few questions that the chief character could not answer was the question why their mother had repudiated her eldest son.

The man from the north was, of course, curious as to who had been his father. He showed the chief character a copy of his, the older man's birth certificate. The father was named by his surname only. The surname told the chief character nothing.

After his half-brother had gone back to the north, the chief character visited the other of the two surviving persons mentioned above. This was a woman aged in her nineties and the last survivor of his mother's siblings. She had left her family home before the time when the half-brother, so to call him, would have been conceived and she had not learned of his existence until some years later, but she was willing to tell what she knew. She claimed that the father of the child had not been the person named as the father on the birth certificate.

According to the surviving sister, her youngest sister had been living, at the time when she conceived, with her mother and her
stepfather on a small farm, a so-called soldier-settler's block, far inside the forest mentioned often in previous paragraphs. The youngest sister was the only one of the nine siblings who had not already left home. Several of the younger girls had left home in order to avoid their stepfather, who had sometimes exposed himself to them and had seemed often likely to make sexual advances to them. The surviving sister had no doubt that the father of her youngest sister's first child was her stepfather. The surname identifying the child's father on the birth certificate was the surname of a young man, hardly more than a boy, who had sometimes done labouring work for the stepfather, and the survivor believed that her youngest sister had been induced to name him as the father in order to conceal the true identity of the father. The person who had induced her, according to the surviving sister, was her mother.

The surviving sister spoke harshly of the mother, who had been, of course, her own mother. The survivor claimed that the mother had known why the younger sisters had left home but had pretended not to know. The survivor even claimed to remember the circumstances that led to her younger sister's conceiving her first child. She, the survivor, had visited her mother regularly after having left home and had learned during one of her visits that the mother intended to be away from home for several days while she visited her own mother, who lived in a small town on the plains that occupy much of the south-west of the state where these events are reported to have taken place. The chief character had concluded from this last
piece of information that his mother as a young woman had not been able to trust her own mother or, that if she had trusted her mother, the trust had been misplaced.

A well-known writer of fiction in this country, once, as part of a discussion about one of his books, which could fairly be called a work of historical fiction, said or, perhaps, wrote words to the effect that he insisted on his right to imagine the past. I have often wondered at his statement. If I assume that he was not making the preposterous claim that he was somehow better qualified than other living persons to suppose what one or another person thought or felt, say, a hundred years ago, then what was he claiming? Perhaps his emphasis was on the word
imagining
, as though he had other means at his disposal for discovering what this or that person felt a hundred years ago but chose to use his imagination. And yet, what other means could he or anyone possibly call on for such a task?

Reader, we are all of us, whether writers or readers, surely obliged to imagine the past, although I, who dislike the word
imagine
, would prefer to use such an expression as
speculate about
. And surely each of us in this wing of this building, given the nature of our subject-matter, so to call it, might be called a writer of historical fiction, if not an interpreter of history. A certain one of us might learn, if he so wished, when was built the house of stone where his father's father lived throughout his life and, after him, throughout their lives four of his children, all of them unmarried. Another of us might learn, if he so wished, where stood formerly a certain cottage of timber in a clearing in a forest
long since destroyed – the cottage whence his mother's mother once set out to visit her own mother in a township surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. But in order to learn what we most desire to learn about the persons in that house or that cottage, we would have to be enabled to be readers of works of fiction with those persons for their implied authors and with narrators wholly to be trusted: works of fiction which drew, perhaps, on the experience of their authors.

The narrator of this present work of fiction is unable to end the work other than by reporting of the chief character of the work of fiction mentioned often in the final pages of this work that he seems only to see and to feel when he might have been expected to speculate and to imagine. He seems to see the flashing of sunlight on the blue and silver-grey plumage of a bird and he seems to feel a prickling in his hands from certain foliage and a pain in his fingers after certain sharp-sided leaves had drawn blood.

The single holland blind in his room is still drawn down, even though the time is early evening and a traveller looking hither from far away in the mostly level grassy countryside surrounding this building might see the window as a drop of golden oil among sumless such drops. I walked in the grounds a short while ago and looked up at his room. (We know better than to knock at his door.) I looked up and saw a dull pane of glass rather than a drop of golden oil. I saw a window and
behind it a drawn blind. In short, I learned nothing. But what could I have been hoping to learn about the flesh-and-blood author, the breathing author of these and who knows how many other pages of true fiction?

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.