IT WAS A puzzle to Lindsey that these two women showed no interest in walking around the property. Visitors from the city, for instance, couldn’t resist looking into the shearing shed. The impulse is common to associate an unfamiliar composition with a familiar one; why, some people squint up at the clouds and spot the windswept features of Beethoven or Karl Marx, and even Queen Victoria. The bare ground between the homestead and the scattered sheds had the appearance of a piazza in a dusty, out-of-the-way village in southern Italy. Dog there scratching himself. But these women were happy to sit all day in the kitchen, nibbling biscuits. The brainy one, who was supposed to know all there was to know about philosophy, fiddled with a spoon. She hadn’t been out in the sun, and was not given to saying much. She was somewhere else. Lindsey saw again her attractive matter-of-factness; and in recognising it, although hardly knowing her, she imagined they could like each other.
Meanwhile, the gold-jangling arm and hand movements of her friend, Sophie, expanded the kitchen, which was large to begin with, as she explained how she ended up coming on this trip, for by talking about it she was talking to herself. It had been a telephonic nightmare cancelling her appointments. For some time now she had been turning away new clients, as they were called. People, she said, had become desperate to talk. They talk virtually to anyone who will listen. You see them on television. It’s a matter of have-to. It’s themselves they want to talk about. As a qualified listener I do my best to guide them, Sophie told them. We pick up clues. Invariably what is said has been said by many others before, in slightly different form. It is certainly the age of anxieties. Many pressures today.
‘As you know, Erica was coming here to work. Oblivious of this fact I had gone to see her. One of Erica’s qualities is her subtlety. I had no idea she was coming out here. I was not in good shape. This man – I won’t say who, in case he’s a friend of yours – meant a huge amount to me. I mean, we were at ease together. As well, here’s a man who made me laugh – me, of all people. I realised I was happy. Believe me, stacks of men are dull. They’re all selfish, I know that.’ She turned to Erica. ‘And I have known you for how many years? Have you ever seen me with a man who has suited me better, and who has put up with my less attractive parts?
‘Whatever. This ideal situation collapses. It sent me into a shocking spin. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t know where to turn, what to think.’
Erica stirred, ‘He was married.’ She also wanted to say she had never met the man.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t insurmountable. We were in the midst of discussing that very situation. I don’t understand why he decided to finish with me. It must be something I’ve said or done. I’m trying to think. There was no warning. Do you know he sent me a letter?
‘I am a discarded woman. In coming here I feel I’ve made the correct decision. I definitely needed my mind somewhere else.’
Having heard this in the car, Erica allowed herself to gaze at the cream-enamelled, industrial-strength wood stove. Pots and pans and kettles were larger out here.
‘I am sorry,’ Lindsey said. And she was. A confusion now twisted Sophie’s face as the two women looked on. Perhaps Lindsey should have touched her shoulder. A warm handful of life making a connection, a helping hand; it can sometimes make a difference.
To restore possession of herself, Sophie looked up and asked Lindsey about her two brothers.
Lindsey leaned over to pour the tea and wondered what she could say that would interest them.
‘They were my brothers, yes. And they could hardly be more different. One day I would prefer Wesley, the next day it was Roger. The two of them and their opposite opinions on every subject under the sun, though they never really got into rows. I don’t think Wesley could be bothered, Roger – he should be here in a minute – he has his practical side. He gets on with it. I suppose his common sense, which he has in spades, comes from being on the land. Wesley has been the more difficult one.’
‘And?’ Sophie prompted. ‘Keep going.’
‘And what?’
‘You were talking about difficult. Do you mean moody, habitually withdrawn?’
In the brown glaze of the teapot the table was reflected as a sphere, spoons and a fork clinging to the underside of the curve. Lindsey tried to think of anyone at all like her brother – especially when he came back after years away, his differences then. If Wesley had a difficult manner it was because he was constantly and unusually different.
‘Going on and on about photography. He could not stand it. Just the sight of a person holding a camera was enough for him to cover his face or bend down to do up a shoelace. He’d only been back here a few weeks when he was accidentally photographed on the main street in town, and it appeared in the local paper, just the back of his head, but recognisable. It wasn’t about him at all. He went berserk. The idea of being photographed made Wesley physically ill. His very words. I know you’ll think there’s vanity in that sort of carry-on. Who can make sense of our many foibles? These ideas, his hatred of photography being one, were necessary for his work. Don’t ask me to explain. It made perfect sense to me. And Roger would agree.’
‘Can a photograph be as bad as all that?’ Sophie sounded annoyed. In her apartment she had at least a dozen photos of herself, different stages of, arranged on sideboards and small tables.
Lindsey turned to Erica.
A photograph excited curiosity, because it wasn’t true enough; a chemical image is at one remove from the original.
But Erica said, ‘Whatever helps in difficult work is what I say. I must admit, though, I would like to see a photo of him. Could a person tell you were brother and sister?’
‘Wesley had biggish ears and they stuck out, not like mine, as you can see. He called them outlandish ears. He didn’t like them one bit, until he came back here years later to live, and he convinced himself that his ears made their own separate contributions, as he put it, to the task he was involved in. A philosopher has to look the part, just like a farmer or a priest does. I think he’s right, don’t you think?’
‘A phobia can begin with an earlier embarrassment. My mother,’ Sophie suddenly remembered, ‘she had exceptionally tiny ears and never went without earrings. I think I got my father’s.’
Erica felt herself separate – in thought, and almost bodily – from the two other women. Tomorrow morning after breakfast she’d embark on her appraisal. She’d open the door, enter the room where everything was still in its place. According to Lindsey, not a single piece of paper had been touched. Erica would sit at his desk. It was a problem – up to her to solve. With a careful anticipation she would reach out and pick up the page, and begin reading the first sentences of what he had to say, his life’s work. ‘Let us think about grey, which means thinking about non-grey.’ Something along those lines. Or else a startling new theory of the emotions.
‘I hope he gets run over by a truck!’ Sophie was saying. ‘Him and his English shoes and socks, and his stupid fat wife at home. I’d like the worst things to happen to him in his life, for what he’s done to me.’ Here she paused and shook her head. ‘Of course I don’t mean that.’
The sudden spilling out with hands and arms waving was accepted as normal by the other two women, the way a tropical island consisting of lush rounded hills, shadows and a single river produces its own weather, rain and wind to be soon followed by slanting sunlight.
At the end of the long driveway was a silver-painted mailbox cut from a petrol drum, and as they walked back to the house they appeared as three women advancing in a row, each with their own views of optimism. One sorted through the mail, the one in linen and raised heels talking to the smaller plainer one, who was glancing up at the tops of trees. The air was thick with the smell of sunlit grass, and like the heat which surrounds a railway line the earth made hot any bits of metal in touch with it, the fencing wire, gates, spanner in the dust, the corrugated iron sheds.
Lindsey said something and turned.
A light truck which had a flat tray where two tan sheep dogs were balanced on tight legs had turned in from the road, and soon enough drew level.
‘I’ve been to the funeral.’
‘Oh yes, that’s where you were,’ said Lindsey.
This was the missing brother, Roger Antill, in cream shirt and tie. When introduced to the two women he somehow leaned his head and hat out of the window.
‘Which one is the philosopher?’
In Erica’s experience, men often resorted to mockery, which was sometimes enjoyable, often not. And it made still more complicated the problem of how to talk to another person, in this case a man. But he held an interested expression. And thinking they might have misunderstood he said, ‘I see you’re going for a walk. I’ll keep going.’
Using her face, Sophie could produce many different compositions of herself. Now she leaned at a steep angle.
‘Which one do you think it is?’
He looked at them again.
‘I’d better leave that to the experts.’
Erica wondered how the weather-worn face would look on a Sydney street. For all the asphalt hardness of the place she hadn’t seen many, at least where she lived. And she applied a recent rule: a face weather-worn can appear more interesting than it actually is. (The monosyllabic horseman squatting to change their tyre.) Roger Antill had a drought-cracked forehead. His hair was combed straight back in furrows, as if he carried around inside his head, even in the moonlight, the Idea of the ploughed paddock.
Then he tilted his hat with a finger.