It is midnight. Or just after. Tess cannot sleep. She was the last to leave the opening at the gallery and sits in her study. Her body is tired. Her body wants to sleep. But her mind won’t stop.
How is it, she asks herself, that something that happened so long ago can come back to her so clearly? Not just the images but the feelings that belong to that time and that time alone. Feelings that were never felt again, except in recollection. As if they happened yesterday. And yet, she calculates, leaning back in the chair of her study and staring out the window on to the street, it has been over thirty years since she stood in Sam’s studio for the last time. Over thirty years since the Dancing Man danced into their lives and told them it was the end, that the moment of perfect parting was upon them and that they would have to live the rest of their lives without each other.
Thirty years. Thirty years of what? Of working, of becoming an institution, of watching her husband (now retired and sleeping upstairs) drive to and from work and watching her daughter grow. Her daughter. Who has now lived in London for some years. An artist, of course. Thirty years of all that. And yet when she thinks of the day the Dancing Man danced into their lives it comes to her with a clarity that still surprises her. How does that happen? How is it that she can see herself so clearly, standing in Sam’s studio all those years before — the musty smell of the old stable as well as paints and oil and turpentine — and feel once again the effort that it took to hold back the tears until she was in the dark street where nobody would see. Nobody that mattered, that is. How does this happen? These intensities that come into our lives and never go away because they’re too intense to fade. They are, she concludes, the fittest of memories and so they survive. Their desire to live on is greater than all the other memories we gather as we go through the years — ten years, twenty, thirty — and so they become the ones that live on long after others have died out.
It is not simply seeing Sam again this evening that has brought these things back, or noting, once again, the way he expels his cigarette smoke into the air in the manner of the European intellectual of another era, which was once an affectation but now comes naturally — and which left her wondering at what point the affectation became natural. No, it was not that. For Tess (contrary to those who think of her as a grande dame above looking back) is one of those who have long and continuing dialogues with the past. One of those who relives old conversations word for word. Plays with them. Rewrites them. As they were and as they never were. Drafts, she imagines, of a work in progress. A life being lived, and unlived, and lived again. And it is while she is absorbed in these speculations that give way to dialogues, which give way to further speculations, that the phone rings. It is loud and seems to ring throughout the entire house and she snatches at the receiver to silence it more than anything, one part of her still inhabiting that world of speculation and the fittest of memories, the other wondering who on earth could be phoning after midnight.
As soon as she hears the voice at the other end of the line she knows it is bad news and reminds herself that when a telephone rings after midnight it is always bad news.
‘Tess,’ the voice on the other end is saying, and it is a voice she knows from the newspaper, an acquaintance of sorts. His voice is tired. It is tense. ‘I know it’s late. But look, it’s George. He’s dead.’
At first Tess says nothing, and an inevitable silence follows the news.
‘I know it’s late,’ the voice says again, ‘but you two go back. I thought of you. Knew you would want to know.’
‘When?’ says Tess, softly, so as not to disturb the house.
‘An hour ago. Bit more.’
And so, her voice hushed, she learns the time, the place and the cause of George’s death. It was in the basement of the newspaper offices. George was watching the first of the morning papers coming off the giant presses downstairs. It was something he never tired of, like reading the newspaper in the street in his old gabardine coat, the paper that he had helped to create and which amounted to nothing less than an immediate and continuing dialogue between writers and readers, between people who have never met and who do not know one another, but who feel as though they do. Tonight George had stayed at work because Mr Whitlam was in town and there was an election soon so he was not at the opening where he would have seen Sam’s paintings, seen once again the old woman and her tent, and seen once again his old friend Sam, with whom he had stayed in touch over the years. Instead of all this he chose the paper.
He had been standing in the basement, smoking too much and staring at the machines, waiting for the front page to materialise, when he suddenly fell. Nobody saw if he clutched his heart, which had just burst, only that he fell, and that he was, the doctor said afterwards, most certainly dead before he hit the floor.
It is a short phone call, for the caller has more to make and will, no doubt, tell the same story over and again throughout the early hours of the morning. And when Tess puts down the phone, one part of her is asking just where she was before the call and what train of thought she was travelling, the other part now dwelling on the society of those who were there. The society that is constituted of the likes of George and Sam and Tess — who hold these things together. And as much as she knows that all such societies pass, it is still a shock to learn that one of their number is gone and they are now fewer. A surprise even, for a part of her will always see George the way he was when she first met him: a young journalist who fancied himself as a writer (and who, she could tell, fancied her back then as well), who, like all the others, couldn’t wait to leave this pressure cooker of a city as it was then, but who was, nonetheless, one of those who chose to stay.
And so it is the memory of this George, not the institution he became, that returns to her now. George, strolling round her old gallery with her, asking questions, taking notes, that miraculous assembly of artists that would only ever assemble once on the walls all around them, and the city — their city — as it was, out there beyond the door through which they all walked but would never walk again. As she stares on to the dark inner-suburban street it is this George who returns to her; clear, immediate. Like yesterday.
It is long after midnight when she mounts the stairs and prepares for bed. For sleep. Knowing that when she wakes in the morning she will read about George in the newspapers, and the notices will officially confirm that the society of those who were there will have lost one of their number, and is now fewer. And so it will go, until one by one their numbers will disappear altogether and they will fade like old photographs. Like old photographs in history textbooks that document the passing of an Age. Figures assuming odd poses, attired in the clothes that nobody wears any more, and faces distant enough to look as though they are History.
Yes, those who were there will pass into History, and even the fittest of memories will pass away with them because there will be no one left to remember. But, she nods firmly to herself (and to the memory of George), their moment, those few, frantic years when they were better than they knew, that will not pass away with them. For it is not, she knows full well, Time that decides which works last, from one Age into another, but people. Tess is, and has always been, the keeper of their moment. And it will be her mission, which will require all her power and influence, to ensure that they will not be forgotten. No, it is not the kindly, bearded figure of Time that decides, Tess once more nods to herself, but people.