His world, the suburb in which he grew up, travels with him. A living organism, evolving and growing as it travels. Still alive. Still expanding. A day doesn’t pass when he’s not back there, however briefly.
And in the three-and-a-half hours it has taken to get from Paris to this small town in the west of the country, that world has travelled with him. As he looked at the view from the carriage window there were two landscapes, external and internal. And while it doesn’t seem so long since he left Paris, the distance makes it seem as though he departed yesterday, or the day before, or last week or last year, not this morning. And the young woman who sat upon her suitcase, and who, oblivious of everything around her, observed her morning ritual of pastry and coffee — where is she now? He didn’t see her get on the train and he didn’t notice when she got off. She was there and then she wasn’t. But she will always be there now. Part of that travelling world he carries around with him, the young woman who marked the passage of time while he contemplated the engines of his youth.
The Paris train has departed. The platform is left to the few travellers who have alighted, and Michael picks up his bags and goes in search of the bus that will take him to the coastal town where rooms over the town hall wait for him. And as he makes inquiries, an expensively dressed, middle-aged couple whom the train has deposited here too inform him that the bus will not run again until the evening, that they are going his way and will drive him there. And so, within minutes, he is sitting in the back of a speeding sports car, racing through country lanes — postcard lanes — but not, he remarks to himself, the countryside of his youth. No, he was not made by a countryside such as this, but by wide paddocks of dry swaying grass and scotch thistles. And he no sooner thinks this than he sees it all again. The three of them, Vic, Rita and Michael, once more standing before the wooden frame of what will become their house, on the dusty dirt road that will become their street, in the rectangle of land that will become their world.
Here, a voice begins (a voice that is both here and now, and there and then) as he speeds through the country lanes, here will be your home. Here, it says, is the place where you will grow. And here are the paddocks across which your legs will run and where they will become long from running all through the morning and all through the afternoon. And here is the house you will return to when the day and its games are done. Here will be the kitchen, here the lounge room where you will watch television when television comes to the suburb, just as one day you will hear the ringing of the telephone in this room, the telephone that will ring for good reasons and bad. And here will be your bedroom, where you will sleep and wake and from which you will run eagerly into each day because your legs will be long and in need of running. This is the wooden frame of fate that will be home, and which will never really be home but to which, nonetheless, you will run at the end of each day. Here, where you will hear things and see things that you were never meant to hear and never meant to see. Here, where the expanding universe of memory, which you will take with you wherever you go, will be born. And here, where thoughts will come and go and collide in the night as you sleep, your unconscious will release dreams of dazzling luminescence or moments of quiet and unquiet reflection. For the unconscious, this voice that is both here and now and there and then, the unconscious and all that living world it contains has a clock, and the clock is ticking. And, as time gathers and life becomes long, the clock of the unconscious will be prompted by this or that scent, sight, sound or sensation, the ticking will become louder, the clock will ring, and the magician of memory will pronounce the magic words that will release it all.
And then, as the sports car weaves through the wintry green countryside, Michael is silently humming a tune, a foreign thing (as Vic called it) about the sea, about waves dancing in the Gulf de Lyon or somewhere far away, and he is wondering how on earth it entered their lives. For it always seemed to be around. Radio? Record? He is also contemplating the repercussions of such little accidents: the French windows of the old house and French songs, as the town, and one of its nineteen windmills, looms in front of him.
When the speeding car stops outside the town hall, Michael jumps onto the footpath, gathers his luggage, farewells the couple (the local doctor and his wife, he has learnt), and watches as they speed away.
He lifts his suitcase and looks up at the town hall, above which he will live for a short while. The place to which he has brought that living, expanding world. The place where he can bring those remembered days and nights, and, at the same time, have the distance to look upon them as if they were other people’s days and other people’s nights. And where he can see that world of flat, dry paddocks and scotch thistle, as others might see it.
It is an old theory. And a simple one. And, armed with it, he pushes open the giant wooden door of the town hall and enters the foyer, where he receives the keys that will unlock the rooms that he will fill with books and paper and where there is a desk (a painter’s table, actually, in a painter’s studio) upon which he will sit his typewriter.
As he mounts the stairs, on the other side of the world, where it is already night, the Spirit of Progress begins its run. No longer gleaming deep blue and bright yellow the way Hope should gleam, nor looking, for all the world as if it is moving even as it is standing still, this train has become an old train. For History has moved on, as History will, and, in an age of gathering speed, the Spirit of Progress itself has been overtaken. And soon it will no longer run along shiny rails that converge but never meet and never end. Progress will reinvent itself and new trains will run along those shiny rails until Progress itself is once more overtaken and everything begins again. History will move on, leaving, as it does, just visible from its observation carriage, those whom it found useful for a time. And among them, a white-haired old woman in front of her tent — her arm raised in protest, her tent pitched at the very edge of Progress, at the very edge of this world and all the bright, shiny new worlds that will be, and have ever been — indifferent to it all.