How did it go? How did it happen? The end of things? The end that was always coming but which came as a surprise all the same. To her, to Sam.
Tess has locked the door of her gallery. It is dark and all she hears is the solitary sound of her footsteps as she departs along the lane. The short trip back to her tram stop takes her past a café, a café that has a touch of Europe about it and which the artists of the city frequent. She slows as she passes it and looks upon the cluttered spectacle inside. She knows most of the regulars and can guess the topics of conversation. Then she notices the journalist, George, whom she sees often enough because he is also the art critic for the paper. He is wearing that distinctive gabardine coat that no doubt his heroes (Graham Greene and whoever else they are) also wear. For George thinks of himself as a writer as much as a journalist. Not that he has ever really said so, but she has noticed there is always a paperback in the pocket of his coat. And he is apt to pull whatever he is reading from his pocket in the course of conversation and share a line or two.
It is a familiar scene. Too familiar. And she is suddenly distracted by the ache of old feelings. Well, not such old feelings. But old enough to make her ache. When she fell in love the previous winter with a painter called Sam she was surprised, almost shocked. But no, not shocked because that carries with it an air of disapproval. And there was nothing to disapprove of, she had told herself, again and again, throughout their winter together. She had simply fallen in love. If anything, it was the fact of falling in love that took her quite by surprise. It happens. Yes, it happens. Every day people fall in and out of love. But it hadn’t happened to Tess since she was nineteen and fallen into marriage the same year she’d fallen in love for the first time.
Something that she’d always thought would only ever happen to other people (and quite possibly silly people at that) had happened to her. And just after it did, just after she’d been swept up and carried away as though she had suddenly lost control of her life, she’d sat in her lounge room one morning before work and watched, at the same time involved and curiously detached, as the car carrying her husband and daughter slipped from the kerb in front of her house and onto the street. Her husband, as he did every morning, drove their daughter to school then continued to work. A bank. Loans. People, she suddenly found herself musing, are like the large terrace she and her husband and daughter lived in — houses with many rooms. And she’d suddenly felt like a character in a novel, probably a nineteenth-century novel, dwelling on a bourgeois marriage that is not all it seems. A portrait of a house with many rooms. And retribution (as it would in the pages of Flaubert or Zola, whom she read in French at her school in Switzerland) just waiting to fall upon the heroine for the crime of falling in love when she had no right to. But it did not, in the end, fall upon her, and the affair ended — as she always knew it would — as abruptly as it began. And she knew it would end like that because it had to. But how did it end?
One day, towards the end of their winter, he proposed that they run away together. She said it was impossible. Because it was. Best to let things stay as they were. For as long as their time allowed. She had said this knowing that they could not stay as they were, that their time was borrowed or stolen and had been dwindling from the start, that they had more than likely stayed as they were for as long as affairs allow, and that soon everybody would scatter anyway. With this in mind, she had silently resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting. This much, at least, she would be able to control. Although she never breathed a word of this to Sam. They hibernated that winter. Then, with the hint of spring in the air, they parted. Or did they both simply bow to the inevitable, and did she merely make the first move?
She leaves the front of the café (to which she sometimes went with Sam), follows the dark lane, turns at St Paul’s and is soon standing at her stop waiting for the tram home, the evening crowds of office workers disappearing into the gaping mouth of Flinders Street Station. It’s that time of day when her thoughts always turn to the previous winter. That time of day when she had always just come from seeing Sam, but doesn’t any more. That empty time of day that she fills with memories, with conversations that took place and those that never did, but perhaps should have. A year ago, this time of day, she would have just been returning from being with him. The air would be crisp and clear, or damp and rainy. She rarely noticed. This, a year ago, would have been their time. Now their time is over. And, knowing that she will never again hear him say, ‘C’mon, let’s have a drink’, she feels that rush of old feelings running through her body. It happens every day. And this evening she is thinking of how it all ended. At first she can’t remember. Not clearly. Not who said what, or who said it first. Or how long it took. Ten minutes? Twenty? It’s hard to tell now, it was hard to tell then, because it all passed in a sort of dream. But as her tram approaches, its number glowing in the wintry twilight, she says quietly, ‘Yes, that was it. The Dancing Man.’
At least, that was what they called him, Tess and Sam. And she steps onto the tram with these three words on her lips, oblivious of the crowds disappearing into the station and the passengers around her.
They were at the pictures. A matinee, of course, since theirs was a daytime affair. The picture theatre with the ceiling, the famous ceiling. The same theatre that the Americans had filled every night of the week, the air always thick with the smell of chewing gum. Yes, that was it. They were at the pictures. Sitting in the dark. Neither of them speaking. Just staring up at the screen when this newsreel came on. Peace, this voice was saying. Peace at last. And a street in Sydney (they later discovered) was suddenly spread out across the screen in front of them. Although it could have been any city that day. For the scene was the same across the country. Crowded streets. Never so crowded before, and never so crowded again. Or so it seemed to her then. Streets filled with all of those who had come through the war and now just wanted to live. Faces laughing for the camera, waving to the camera, waving to Tess and Sam, and everybody else sitting in the dark. And, all the time, shredded bits of paper falling through the air and landing on the ground already carpeted with the paper scraps of the time that felt as though it would never end and that finally did, and suddenly, because that’s the way time works. Endless one minute and all over the next. Among those laughing for the camera there was the occasional steady, still pair of eyes that were too tired to laugh for the camera, but thought they ought to be there to take in the scene, because, well, it was History.
Then the crowd retreated. Except for a lone figure in a suit and a hat, and a few revellers in the background looking on. This figure, standing in the street strewn with the last scraps of the sad and violent years, smiling at the camera. And then he tipped his hat, greeting the new day (and it occurs to Tess, staring blankly about the tram, that it possibly was morning — the city in the newsreel had that look), and suddenly started this funny little dance with quick, light steps, all the time with his eyes on the camera and the audience out there in the dark. And then this skip to finish. Did he click his heels? She can’t remember. Then he was gone. Back into the anonymity from which he came. The anonymous Dancing Man. Leaving the street empty, except for the few stragglers and the paper scraps of a time that had finally been blown away.
And the moment it was finished, this little dance of his, Tess knew that this would be the image, above all others, that they would recall, all of them, everybody, when they thought about the way the war ended. The anonymous Dancing Man, who appears and disappears. Doing all the things the moment requires. He tipped his hat because at such moments one ought to tip one’s hat. There is a protocol, either consciously or unconsciously recognised, that ought to be followed, at such moments. Or so Tess reasons. And so he tipped his hat. And so he danced, because the moment required something like a dance. A little comedy, even. And it wasn’t a jubilantly triumphant dance, but a light quickstep. No, not triumphant, just the dance of someone giving himself leave to be carefree again. And then a little skip, because the moment required a skip. Like someone breaking out into a flourish or clicking his heels at an appropriate moment, not because the movement comes spontaneously but because it is expected and the moment wouldn’t be complete without it.
As Tess pieces this all together (whether accurately or not, she’s not sure, for it has been a year), vaguely aware that the tram is nearing her stop, she concludes once more, as she did in the picture theatre sitting next to Sam, that that five or ten seconds of newsreel footage would have taken infinitely longer to film. That it was too good. Too apt. That these things don’t just happen. But, then again, maybe they did. Maybe the Dancing Man just popped up and disappeared in the time it took to film and watch it. But she suspects not. The lifting of the hat, the dance, the little skip, the snappy exit back into anonymity would have been performed again and again, she suspects, so that all the component movements were just as they ought to be, each one flowing into the other to create the choreographed spontaneity that the moment required.
And afterwards, out on the street and squinting in the late winter light (that carried with it a hint of the coming spring), a street like the one in which the Dancing Man had performed his little jig, something else ended. The end that was always coming but which surprised them anyway. As they walked along the street it was the urgency in Sam’s steps that she noted. At first she couldn’t understand why she so noticed this urgency, or why she chose to call it urgency, until she realised that it was the step of someone who was walking away. Impatient to get away. Someone who was walking into a future that, for reasons that could never be changed, did not include her. She wanted the impossible. For everything to go on the way it always had. And as long as the war continued, as long as they lived in a closed city and nobody could leave, everything would go on as it always had. But the war was over now and everything would change. The Dancing Man told them so. It was over now and soon they would all scatter, and the impossible would give way to the inevitable. That, at least, was how she read and understood the urgency in Sam’s steps. And she remained convinced that she was right. The end of the affair was upon them. Its time had come. The world called to him and he was eager, impatient, to join it. And while his steps, she was convinced, were moving urgently forward, hers longed to turn back. And it wasn’t so much the differences in their natures, this looking forward and looking back, but the nature of the circumstances. Until then the possibility of leaving existed only in a world of speculation. But all that had changed. He was marching forward, she was looking back. He was leaving and she was never going to leave with him. Her life was here. Theirs was an affair, a love affair, but an affair, and while the war was on they had managed to give fate the slip. But not any more. The fact of the end would have to be faced. And for Tess, who had already resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting and control at least this much in an uncontrollable world, the sooner the better. And this was not, as she now sees it, a callous or cold-hearted decision, but a necessary one. She simply could not go on with the shadow of the end always hanging over them.
And later that same afternoon, back in his room, she lay watching him boiling tea, restlessly, she judged, an air of unspoken thoughts hovering round him, and finally said what had to be said.
‘This is it, isn’t it?’
He’d looked up from pouring the water, and, she imagined, toyed with asking what this ‘it’ was, but didn’t because it wasn’t necessary. Which was all the confirmation she required. In fact, in the years to come, when Tess recalls this afternoon, she will not be entirely sure who spoke and who said nothing in response. And she will conclude from this that either one of them could have. That they were both thinking it, and that it didn’t really matter in the end who said it.
‘The last time, I mean.’
Again, he had stared back and just when she thought he wouldn’t reply at all, he did.
‘Yes, why not? May as well be now as later. No point…’
‘…dragging things out.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
They were both talking at the same time. Even thinking the same thoughts. At least, that is the way Tess remembers it. She’d rolled over onto her back, with a vague sensation of September in August and the sad thought that they’d never share the spring, that theirs had been a winter affair and would stay that way.
The tram shudders to a stop. Darkness swallows a man in an overcoat and hat.
They were very sensible, in the end.
‘I saw it tonight, a glimpse of the end,’ she’d added. ‘You could have walked right onto the nearest boat. If there’d been one. Couldn’t you?’
To which, and she read this in his eyes, he silently signalled that they could both walk onto the nearest boat. But they’d already gone over that impossibility again and again, and so he never said it.
‘So,’ she went on, filling the silence, ‘as you say, may as well. There’s no point hanging about when something is over. Is there? Not when you’ve known the best of things.’
She said this, she recalls, the tram now slipping into the quiet inner suburb in which she lives, not so much as a statement of fact, not so much as a rhetorical question, but with the faint, residual hope that there might be. A point, that is. At least this is the way she remembers her tone as she finally steps from the tram and walks towards her street. But he had just agreed. And that was that. The impossible bowed to the inevitable. And she can’t even remember now if she spoke or just nodded.
That was when she’d got out of bed and dressed. And it was while she was dressing that she caught the faint shadow of regret in his eyes, and knew she was right. This was the moment. Best to part with regret in their eyes. Her instincts were true. Had she chosen to stay he would have followed her. But she didn’t.
She’d almost cried then. Almost. And feared she might at any moment. And so she spoke to take her mind off the crying, or the possibility of crying. And she composed her thoughts as she spoke.
‘It’s right. You’ll always have one eye on the next boat and one eye on me. And I want both of them looking at me.’
Yes, she nods silently to herself, their little balloon world had been on a string, and she knew she held the string, but she’d let it go all the same. Yes, that had been it. And she’d looked around the room, trying to memorise it all, knowing that this was the last time that she would be his, he would be hers, and they would be theirs. And just as first-time touch is a species of feeling on its own, never to be repeated, so too is last-time touch. As much as they would meet from that point on, even touch with a shake of the hands or a kiss to the cheek, it would always be a different level of meeting and a different species of touch altogether.
She’d mustered one last smile.
‘Now, you just try to be nice when we meet from now on.’
She still doesn’t know why she said that. Just to lighten things, she guesses. Just to make it easier. It was then that he’d moved towards her, his arms out, and at that point she’d stepped back. No, that backward step was saying, ‘This really is it.’ This really is the end. She knew she could only ever say these things once. And so, having said them once and once only, she had fled into the long, arching street that ran down the hill opposite Royal Park.
Yes, she was thinking, now standing at the front of her house, its lights shining in the wintry dark, that was how it ended: the war, Sam and Tess. It all ended with the Dancing Man. He with the regret still in his eyes. They having known the best of each other. The perfect moment.
That was almost a year ago. Another year, another winter. But she knows she will carry that time with her, throughout all the years and winters to come. She will carry it all. Everything that was said and not said. She will remember days as they were, and she will create them as they never happened. But she will always defer to the wisdom she possessed that afternoon, when she knew that their time was up and the moment of perfect parting was upon them.