The Time We Have Taken (16 page)

I
t’s the socks in the variety-store window that catch his eye. White, knee-high and good quality. Golf socks. And going for a song. Vic rarely stops here, but he needs new socks. And so, while Michael begins his last class of the day before going home and witnessing the final, sad scene in the adventures of Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit, Vic is entering the front door of the variety shop. At first he takes only one pair, but, on his way to the counter, he goes back and picks up a second, because that is his way. If something’s worth getting once, it’s worth getting twice.

An hour later he’s out on the fairway, his feet snug inside the new socks. And it’s odd how a little thing like a new pair of socks can make you feel good and lift your whole day (it’s not often, after all, you think about
your feet). So, when Vic tees off he’s got socks on his mind, and congratulating himself that he had the foresight to buy the second pair. And when the ball is sent skyward (a sweet meeting of club and ball, not one against the other but a pleasing result achieved by their collaboration), Vic puts it down to the firmness of his stance, the good feeling in his feet, and the socks that made it all possible. As he watches the ball arc across the fairway, he feels part of a sweet, continuous act that will end only when the ball finally plops down onto the grass. And, for those few seconds, he is aware of that small touch of what he can only call the sublime.

It’s while this sudden intake of wonder is flowing through his veins, alerting him to the sparkle of the moment, that he feels a familiar shortness of breath coming on as his chest tightens up and a cold, dramatic sweat breaks out across his forehead. He drops his club, taking in short, sharp mouthfuls of air, while he reaches for the pills he always carries in his pocket. And as he drops one into his mouth and chews on it, he feels, almost straight away, the magic pill performing its little miracle once again and in a few minutes his breathing is better and he wipes the sweat from his forehead before bending down carefully to retrieve his club from the ground. His playing companions, having already set off as soon as Vic’s ball was launched, have their backs to Vic and have not
noticed anything, being so caught up in the tasks at hand, walking to their balls, finding them, and deciding what to do with them. Though they play together often, the four of them (different types united by the game), they rarely have anything to do with each other outside the golf course.

As he drops the club back into the bag, he leans against the buggy, exhausted, dwelling upon this all-too-familiar intrusion. Vic has mixed with various types all his life. He likes to mix, likes to move among people — not only to feel their variety, but because he likes to find the best in them. And that can take some finding, for, when you mix, you come up against rough company from time to time. As much as you don’t want to. But they’re out there, rough company, and they will intrude. Even when you’re happy. Especially then. They don’t like to see you happy. And just when you are, just when you’re watching a harmless white ball doing all the things you’ve ever wanted it to do, this rough type intrudes and tells you he doesn’t like the happy look on your face. And you could tell him why he doesn’t but you’d be wasting your breath. There’s only one response, and that’s to ignore him. To turn your back and walk away. But, even as Vic takes the handle of his buggy and walks quietly away from the tee (the rest of the foursome by now turning to see where he is), he knows there comes a time, and
will always come a time, when the rough company that life throws up won’t let you go that easily, won’t cop the insult of your turned back. There are times when it wants action, for no good reason. Vic waves the rest of the foursome on, indicating that he’ll catch up. The thug of Death there on the tee lets him be for now, but he’ll be back.

As he strolls onto the fairway, the world opens up again, as it always does out here, and the horizon looks good: the long, sweeping fairways, the distant view of the coast, and, running alongside it, the black stitching of the railway line.

He knows the sun will shine and that the surf will be good on the day that he dies. Or, if it is at night, or in the early morning, he knows that the air will be balmy. Sweet even. And he knows that the pain will be more than he can bear. And he will know the moment is upon him when he can see no way through the pain, and that the only way to ease it is to submit to it. And so, in sunshine or in balmy night, he can picture this world of his on the day he leaves it. And the very predictability of the occasion, during this quiet, reflective break on the golf course, has the effect of making Death just something else he will do that day.

What he doesn’t know about are the black plastic rubbish bags. How they will be sitting outside his flat by mid-afternoon waiting to be collected so that the
next tenant can move in (Progress having not yet done its job, and small, cheap flats such as Vic’s being at a premium). How they will contain the few things he needed to kick on from day to day — the hairbrush with his grey curls still caught in its teeth, the shaver with his whiskers still wedged in between the twin razors, and the new, unwrapped pair of knee-length golf socks that he never got around to opening because he still hadn’t worn out the first pair.

The white caps in the distance tumble and crash into one another, and somewhere out there on the wide, rolling fairways of the golf course, voices are calling. As his eyes leave the horizon and he turns in their direction, he realises they are calling his name. And, as he turns to them, the rest of the foursome now gathered on the green and waving him on up the fairway, he observes the group, this once-or-twice-a-week order of friendship, with distant eyes.

T
here is an odd calm surrounding Mrs Webster. She sits at the kitchen table looking out over the front path and the gardens (ignited by the mid-winter spring) of her domain. She sees it all, and she does not see it. The sway of the eucalypts, the shimmer of the shrubs, the quiet industry of the gardener are all perfectly visible to her. But the world they inhabit does not impinge upon hers. Mrs Webster has the quiet calm of someone who has been away, and never quite come back. The abstracted air of someone who has been somewhere mysterious and never wholly returned, the air of someone over whom a question mark hovers. She knows full well that if she were to walk out into the garden she would feel upon her face the breeze that
ruffles the shrubbery, smell the air and hear the distant rattle of a suburban train if one were to pass. But, for all this, the world does not touch her. She’s been somewhere, and not wholly come back.

Earlier in the morning, and it is a work day, the gardener had spoken to her about a clump of winter flowers he had recently introduced to the gardens and had invited her to inspect his handiwork. And she had accepted his invitation and followed him, all the time knowing that the gardener and his handiwork belonged to another earlier dispensation. She has begun to understand the temptation of speed, the lure of utter obliteration, and with that has acquired a glimpse of Webster that Webster himself had never offered her. And she has begun to know why. He had been somewhere and never wholly come back. And each time he went, less and less of him returned. Until, finally, he never came back at all.

In those last days, before Webster left forever, she remembered waking in the early morning as he slept, remembered staring at the strangely alien figure of Webster beside her, and for the first time in her life asking consciously, ‘Who are you?’ It was, she knew, not an uncommon question for couples to ask. But it was one that, until now, others had asked. Not her. Or — and of this she felt sure — him. She had then rolled over and returned to sleep. Although hardly apparent at the time, she now thinks of it as an intimation. As
though some part of her sensed that she didn’t really know him at all, not where it mattered, and something was out of whack. But what?

In the months that followed his death, she went through all his possessions — papers, photographs, letters, notes, cards (no diary, he never kept one) — repeating again and again the same question she had posed herself in the early morning while he’d slept beside her, only now it was couched in the past tense: ‘Who was he?’ And the more she looked, the more she realised that there was nothing to be found in all of it that might even provide a glimpse of an answer. Most disturbing, most striking of all, was the realisation that in the personal papers of Webster, there was no hint, not even the slightest trace, of something revealing. Nothing that was utterly personal. No sign that might foretell what was to happen. Nothing that could conceivably be the source of some deep unhappiness, loss or shame, were it to be discovered. No irrelevant, sentimental observations. Nothing. And all of these papers and notes and cards and letters (the carbon copies of which he had retained) that should have been personal were utterly impersonal. Could have been written by anyone. Did not need the hand of Webster to be written. And the source of that emptiness — which she knows must surely have existed — which only speed could fill was nowhere in evidence. No sign of its source to be revealed in any of
his papers, all of which read like the public records of a public figure whom she knew to be Webster.

The fashionably dressed figure of Rita (too fashionable for this suburb) glides by the wide windows of the lounge room, to which Mrs Webster has moved. This woman with a flair for rearranging things, as she is currently doing with the old Games Room, seems to drift across the gravel pathway like someone, it occurs to Mrs Webster, used to living in the retreat of the imagination; like someone who is also hovering between two lives — what
is
and what can be dreamt, what she has known and what she doesn’t yet know. And what Rita doesn’t yet know, and which Mrs Webster suspects, is that she is leaving the past behind faster than she realises. It is, Mrs Webster notes, the kind of intimation that friends have of each other. Rita drifts across the pathway unaware that she is being observed. Soon she will arrive at the front door, ring the bell, and Mrs Webster will be required to talk. But, as much as she has the sneaking feeling that this woman could become her friend, she is also in no mood to talk. She continues to wear the look of someone who has been somewhere, and not quite returned.

Rita rings the doorbell, and from the moment the front door opens and sunshine fans the doorway, she notices. Mrs Webster is different. Not obviously or dramatically so. But it’s there, this difference. And Rita sees it, although she is not sure in what manner
or in what gesture this difference reveals itself. But it is immediately apparent, and, as they talk about the Games Room and the appropriate colours for the exhibition, Rita is distracted by this air of difference and the need to locate its source, place a finger upon it. But it is difficult. She only knows that there is a question mark above Mrs Webster’s head.

Mrs Webster is always respectful in her manner, and enthusiastic in the way she engages Rita in conversation. But although they are talking the way they normally would, Rita splashing a palette of possibilities before her, something isn’t there. And Rita’s not sure just what it is for some time, until she finally realises it’s the enthusiasm that’s missing. Mrs Webster is talking like a woman who would really rather not be talking at all. And it’s not just the nature of the words that she does muster; it’s that strange calm that surrounds her in the silences between sentences — the calm of someone who’s not really there. She may be in the room, right in front of you, yet somewhere else altogether.

It is a question that will preoccupy Rita throughout the remainder of the conversation, but which she will forget about upon returning to the old Games Room and experiencing a surge of excitement lift her like a wave, the way, she imagines, some of the old painters must have been lifted when shown a blank wall and told to fill it.

Rita is left alone to contemplate her task. But the question returns to her when she takes a break later and strolls around the gardens. She has never done so before, but her employment at the place tells her that she now has the licence to amble through those parts of the estate she previously felt she couldn’t. And as she wanders about (convinced that she has the place to herself, that Mrs Webster is at work), thinking about the job at hand and vaguely contemplating the strange but absurdly real possibility of getting lost in these gardens, she comes to a halt in a far corner of the grounds. The estate, as the suburb calls it, is still. Except for a sudden, disruptive movement at the edge of her vision. Perhaps if the scene had not been so still she would not have noticed. As she turns she gives an involuntary gasp, surprised by the figure of Mrs Webster, no more than a cricket pitch away, about to close the double doors of the shed — or garage. And, as Rita takes in the figure of Mrs Webster, she also takes in the shining, black snout of the thing parked inside.

When Mrs Webster realises she has been spotted, she behaves, for a split second, like someone who would prefer not to be noticed, indeed, like someone intent on pretending she hasn’t been noticed. This is followed by the slightest shrug of annoyance, a glance that might well have been accompanied by an inaudible ‘Damn’. Then a smile and the slamming of the garage door.

‘Out for a stroll?’

Rita nods.

‘It’s a good day for it.’

And with that she walks off to the famous old Bentley parked in the driveway.

Over the next few weeks a report will be passed on from the chemist (who lives in a new, spacious suburb to the north where it is now fashionable to build large, double-storey houses on cheap land) to Rita of a car in the night, travelling at great speed along that narrow strip of bitumen that calls itself a highway. The frontier might have shifted, but the suburb is still the suburb, and nothing stays secret for long.

The portrait Mrs Webster stands beneath that evening in the study — part of her still cursing Rita’s prying suburban eyes, convinced now that she could never be a friend — this portrait, she concludes, could have been painted any time in the last hundred years and could really be a portrait of just about anybody. It is, in fact, a portrait of Webster, commissioned at the peak of his productivity. Four factories, over a thousand workers, and the brand of his name, Webster’s Engineering, written in cast-iron over the doorways of his plants, a constant reminder to all who entered or passed by that Webster the factory was in residence and that their lives, no matter how tangentially, were touched by his.

Yet, for all this, it could be a portrait of just about anybody. Oh yes, she confesses to the empty room, it looks like Webster all right; the fired eyes are there, the self-made brow and the head of hair of a man with years of productive life left in him (the wisps of grey notwithstanding). But it was a portrait of anybody, all the same. The kind of portrait that hangs in council chambers, boardrooms, town halls and the dining rooms of houses such as this all over the country. The artist could be the same, the subject the same. The individual subject is, more or less, unimportant. Irrelevant. For these portraits are never portraits of individuals (no matter how much the times might prize the idea of the individual); they are portraits of Progress. And the people who make Progress. But they are not portraits of people. They are portraits of the same, the one thing — portraits of the belief that drives the pistons, that drive the machines, that drive the Age. The incidentals, those individual agents of Progress, change from sitting to sitting, as do the commissioned artists, but the portrait remains the same. Short, squat, tall, thin, bald, thick with hair, young, old, at the peak of their industrial powers or with a sunset glaze across their eyes — it doesn’t matter. The individual sitters are only there because somebody has to be, and the signature at the bottom of the canvas may as well be one artist as another. The subject is always Progress, in its many and changing
suits, its many attitudes, in its many faces — be they bald, round or lean.

And it is this, above all, that Mrs Webster notices as she studies the image. And the more she stares at the thing, the less she feels herself to be in the presence of Webster. The Webster she first saw on a tennis court not far from the suburb when she was a young woman. Webster in his mid-twenties. The Webster who won his matches not so much out of talent, but through sheer will. It was the serve she noticed: direct, uncompromising, and fuelled by a cast-iron belief in the inevitability of a triumphal outcome. He ground opponents down with his will, and got what he wanted the same way. And she now has to concede the definite possibility that she may well have chosen Webster while watching him play tennis.
This man will have whatever he sets his mind on
. It is a sentiment that was never, to the best of her recollections, uttered, but it is a sentiment that she unquestionably felt and which may well have determined the course of her life.

And it also occurs to her at the same time that she may well not have chosen the man himself, but what he embodied. Did she merely choose, Mrs Webster is seriously asking herself as she stands beneath the portrait, did she choose the Spirit of the Age and was Webster simply the name it went by when she met it? Another day, another place, and she may well have met
the Spirit of the Age in one of its many other guises — short, squat, tall or lean.

There is, she knows, no point standing beneath the portrait demanding
Why? Why? Why
of it. Webster the man isn’t there, and he never was.

The attributes that had been conferred upon him by the Age — the vision to see factories on plains of thistle, a steady hand that could just as easily operate a machine as calculate profit and loss, and a cast-iron faith in the Spirit of the Age as unbreakable as his cast-iron name above the factory door — became the attributes by which the suburb and everybody eventually knew him. And through which he knew himself: Webster the factory.

But somewhere along the way, she imagines in the emptiness of the wide dining room, something odd happened. That cast-iron faith either snapped one morning or afternoon, or just gradually rusted away, and that agglomeration of attributes that was Webster fell apart. And, somewhere along the way he became a man without attributes. And when that happened, she once more imagines (the whisky in her glass gone, and the thought of another passing through her mind simultaneous to her contemplations of Webster’s portrait), when the attributes had all fallen away and he stood without them, he must also have discovered for the first time that there was nothing left that he could happily call himself — nothing, at least, that he could
put his finger on. Nothing ready to hand that he could point to and say, ‘That is Webster.’ Webster, it must have seemed to him, independent of the Age that fell upon him with all its attributes, didn’t exist. And she realises also that this must have puzzled him deeply. At first. And later, this deeply puzzling fact of life would have become something more than puzzling, and the quietly astonished remains of Webster might well have turned to something to occupy his mind or obliterate it.

But she never noticed any of this. Nor did he ever inform her or let on. He gave her, in the end, nothing more than he gave everybody else. And this, until now, was her most disturbing discovery. But another was now dawning upon her. Is it possible, she asks herself (at first not even sure if she wants to give the thought the air of being uttered, if only to herself), is it just possible that Webster had never informed her of all that had quietly astonished him because he had also made the deeply disturbing discovery that she too was another of his attributes? That the marriage was the mirror image of his world of production and exchange, and they were no more a portrait of a modern marriage than the painting on the wall above was a portrait of Webster? And a man who, for whatever reasons (if reasons even need be sought), has shed all those qualities that he acquired through being born into an age that saw History as a soon-to-be-concluded journey to Perfection does not tell a
discarded attribute that she is no longer required; that the accumulation of qualities and attributes that had combined to be Him, Her and Them had fallen apart, like machinery that had finally given up the ghost. And as for the question ‘Who was he?’ — well, she concludes, gazing about the wide room that will keep her confidences, that question was answered, after all, years before by the suburb. He was Webster the factory.