It is, George knows, one of those moments. Moments that do not come along, he suspects, all that often in life but which may very well determine how that life will be lived. It is the first time such a moment has come into George’s life, but he recognises it immediately. Which is why he’s come to this park, the Kings Domain, on the other side of the railway lines, next to the river, where the sad, transplanted palms struggle against the cold and the windblown soot from the engines. Away from the hammering of typewriters and the cigarette smoke and the talk.
The course of his life had always seemed simple. Now this. And it’s not the voice of the writer in George to which he is listening at the moment but the voice of the journalist who stands on footpaths, the crowd all around him clutching the newspapers that he has helped write, feeling not just the power of words but the freshness of them, written at midday and in the hands of readers by five. This voice is telling him, and it’s news to George, that he would miss it, more than he knows, if he lost it. And he is suddenly reminded of the wet, shining paint on Sam’s portrait of the old woman and her tent, the painting fresh, not yet dried, the old woman still stomping forward, determined on striding right off the composition itself and looking as though she just might. No sooner painted than viewed. No sooner written than read. He likes that. Everything still as new and exciting to the painter and the writer as it is to the viewer and the reader. And the thrill of standing in the midst of the newspaper’s readers, feeling not just the crowd flowing all around him but that current of communication that newspapers generate, conversations between people who have never met and, in all likelihood will never meet, but who, nonetheless, know one another or feel as though they do.
It is, at this important moment, this voice that George is listening to. It is the sensations of this George, who stands on footpaths, who sits in trains and trams, or just leans on lamp-posts at street corners reading his newspaper, that he is registering. And as much as he might have sat at the feet of Mr Hemingway and Mr Fitzgerald, he does not feel, when sitting at his writing desk at home, close to Heaven at midnight (as, indeed, a character from Mr Fitzgerald does), writing the stories no one has yet read and may never be read. Rather, when he thinks of that current of newspaper communication he feels close to Life.
And so, thinking over the editor’s offer, he does not, as he suspected he might, feel the deadening weight of comfort or the locked door of security. Nor does he feel himself being (as those friends at university who called themselves Marxists might have phrased it) dragged into the world of bourgeois conformity, at the expense of the writer. He feels none of this. Instead he feels a kind of calling. For what he feels is not the lure of Heaven but of Life. And this is the importance of this moment, for he knows it calls upon him to choose between Heaven and Earth. And he may already have decided. For what he is realising is that it is not, as he always thought, the solitary world of the story-teller at his desk that calls — but the hammering of typewriters, the smoke, the noise and the daily production of the words that make up the continuing conversation that goes on every day, all around him, on the footpaths and trams and in the trains of the city. Before he even rises from his bench in this sodden park with its suffocated palms (and he wonders if he would simply be like a transplanted palm too, should he leave the country like everyone else), George knows he has made his decision. The moment has come to him, a decision has been made, and the course of a lifetime has been determined. Of this much, at least, he is certain.
George will become, in fact (and he has no inkling of this at the moment, on his bench, in the cold park, wrapped in his gabardine coat), one of the most famous newspaper editors in the country. His face will lose its youthfulness as faces do. And, in time, it will become a wise face. Even a worn one. Craggy. A face that readers will trust. He will rise to become the editor (sit in the same chair as the current editor, who spoke to George only an hour ago) of the newspaper he has been with for less than a year. But this will not happen until the distant days of the 1960s: when his friend Sam is famous throughout the painting world, when the old lady who lives in a tent has long since died, when Skinner has, indeed, taken his name to the grave, and all that open country and farmland has been transformed into a suburb with all the suburban noises of children, cars and Webster’s factory. George will die suddenly in the mid-1970s (leaving behind a wife and a daughter, and a leafy house in a bourgeois suburb), in the basement of the newspaper offices — and he can have no inkling of this either on this sodden, mid-winter morning — watching the printing presses, and thrilling, as he will each and every day of his working life, to the production of the words that will make up the continuing conversation between strangers familiar with one another.
His decision made (and happily so), his moment met, George rises from the park bench and makes his way back, a lingering part of him wondering if he will ever know if the Place de la Concorde (as viewed by the solitary writer from the back seat of a taxi) really does glide by in pink majesty. And the George who rises from the bench, with that last lingering thought, suddenly feels older than the George who sat down just a short while before.