EACH AND every perhaps and possibly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, yes but, along with the ifs, the maybes, the not necessarilies, while producing an appearance of tolerance and abstraction, which made him attractive in the eyes of others, had spread and undermined the haphazard foundations of Wesley Antill’s own opinions. Hang on, let me think. (He began talking to himself.) Lack of precision – that is, how to be yourself, as much as possible – tightened its grip; uncertainty was OK, confusion not.
The complications of everyday life added to the confusion, as if Mrs Kentridge in black and the softer but no less demanding intimacy of Rosie Steig had been placed close by in order to occupy and actually deflect his thoughts.
And when Wesley Antill began his wanderings, carrying his mother’s suitcase, and for the first time in his life set foot on foreign soil, he chose as his destination a city not known as a centre for philosophy; in fact, it had hardly made a contribution at all. Antill could have headed straight for Edinburgh, or Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris even, as well as any number of German cities and villages, let alone Athens.
He chose London, not intending to stay long.
In the train from Heathrow, Antill looked at the bright green parks and into the backyards of narrow houses, the traffic slowly moving along the streets – little cars, vans – and people waiting on platforms before entering the carriage on their way to work. Slate and brownish houses folded in behind him. He could get away with murder here. The farther he went in, not knowing a soul, the more anonymous he felt.
The first hotel was almost next door to the British Library. After a restless night he stepped out and noticed he had been trying to sleep in the shadow of hundreds of tons of paper, millions, more like trillions, of printed, never-resting words. Those desperate descriptions, clas-sifications, explanations and rhyming couplets under the one roof. It was not what he wanted just then. Another hotel in W2 he left after experiencing their nylon sheets. Smell of gas in another. These were small discomforts. And he was not one to complain. Wesley marvelled at the utilitarian breakfasts, the fried eggs turned with rare skill, an obvious specialty of the British. He moved from one hotel to the next. It was a way of mastering the enormous mass of the city. He took rooms in boarding houses, Kensington, Golder’s Green, Putney, Clapham, Kensal Rise – and moved on. A succession of landlords – lord, what an exaggeration – and your typical vigilant landlady of the crinkled throat and powdered nose. To them, his worldly possessions appeared to be contained in a medium-size suitcase, its fine leather (Simpson’s of Piccadilly?) spotted by the landladies, and so without being aware of it Antill received extra-attentive service.
He wrote to Lindsey, not to trot out the usual about Eng/London, but knowing his sister, sitting and writing and waiting in the backblocks of New South Wales, was interested in rainfall, wherever it was.
‘Early days, I know, but it hasn’t so much as drizzled yet. I’m looking forward to the cold, and I wouldn’t say it’s been cold yet.’ He didn’t tell her it was bloody freezing.
Sitting in a bus or on a bench outdoors he couldn’t help thinking of Rosie – it was at random, the voice, and the way she positioned herself in the world, the warmth of her body. By leaving Sydney in a rush he had abused her devotion, and he considered getting her to join him. But before long he returned to being firm and went on moving about in this impervious grubby immensity, alone.
It would soon exhaust itself. He was under the flight path. He was too close to the railway line. Through the walls a bus driver berated his passengers in his sleep. Radio and television coming through. The cobbled courtyard in Blackfriars must have once been stables. The baby was crying. Too many married couples next door having their yelling matches. Basement of the Nash terrace house. The mews a stone’s throw from Westminster. Somebody being sick. He wondered where he fitted in. Was that not important? Terrible rising damp. What about the stand-up comedian through the wall in Cleveland Square rehearsing his lines – clearing his throat and beginning again? The mildest people wanted to make friends. And it was hard to avoid the music. The different streets, the many different pale and lumpy faces. More than a year had passed. Moving from one place to the next allowed him to avoid thinking, at least in any sustained, directed way; at the same time he believed he was experiencing the apparent complexity of the place. He was ‘finding his feet by walking’, he informed his sister.
Wesley finally settled for a third-floor flat in a crescent just before Shepherd’s Bush. The house next door had each floor taken up by a painter with an international reputation, whose canvases consisted of stripes, mostly horizontal, of various colours. Much depended on a steady hand. Accordingly, each room on each floor of the painter’s house had fluorescent lighting, the only one in the crescent like it, a sort of lighthouse always glowing at one end.
He went wandering at night too, as he did in Sydney – the philosopher of the streets.
He bought water-resistant tan shoes, and an expensive, spring-loaded umbrella.
On Holland Park Avenue, opposite the Russian Consulate, Wesley reached out to pat a dalmatian, and was bitten by it. A short wide woman in a black tracksuit came forward, very confident. Shaped like a cello, and taking small steps, she had querulous eyes. Wesley also saw her black hair, which fell like a horse’s tail down to the small of her back, where Wesley, coming off the farm, expected it abruptly to swish, as it would at an annoying insect.
‘She can be enthusiastic, too much. Have you lost your hand?’
As Wesley wrapped his handkerchief around it, some blood showed through. Between them the dog leaned forward panting, its tongue hanging out.
To Wesley, there was not a problem here. He looked at her. ‘Who are you?’
Serbian, Greek or even Russian; a long way from English, in every sense. And then there was her voice.
‘This is my dog.’
‘I mean, are you – who?’
What? It wasn’t clear even to him what he wanted to know. It was as if they both expected him to say something offhand and amusing – about rabies, for example; he could always try a mock fainting fit, going cross-eyed before collapsing in a heap on the footpath. But he wasn’t much given to performance, seeing the funny side, coming out with one-liners; it had never become established in him. ‘You have an open relationship with blood,’ it occurred to him. ‘Whereas the men, we haven’t.’ Something along those lines.
She’d given hardly a glance at his hand.
‘I don’t think you need to call an ambulance,’ he said, without meaning to be funny.
They had coffee and another one in a café. Those slightly dissatisfied eyes were a bit of a worry. Wesley thought she was in her late thirties. Afterwards, he went into the post office, which meant he had to explain to her the airmail envelopes. It allowed him to describe the working dogs on their sheep station. While he was at it he mentioned his sister, and that their mother had recently died.
Although she had declared herself a married woman she took him back to her place. This was a tall white house just down the road, at the left side of a small garden square, the very house – according to the plaque above the burglar alarm – where one of the greatest early Australian explorers had lived, which is what Wesley called himself, or rather made tender reference to, after removing her tracksuit. It was enough to prompt in this stout healthy woman, whose expression normally didn’t vary much, shudderings of almost laughter.
After many afternoons spent in the house, Wesley Antill forgot which hand had been bitten, and at odd moments would examine the palms of each hand and flex the fingers unnecessarily.
Eventually he asked, ‘Did your dog actually take a bite out of me, or not?’
Wesley refrained from asking too many questions. The less he knew about her increased the chance of thinking clearly. And she didn’t seem to mind his apparent lack of curiosity. She knew it would end soon. It was all it was.
One afternoon she sat up and said her husband had come home early, and straight out of an Ealing comedy Antill made his way out the back gate to the lane, where he hobbled into his shoes and trousers. A minor incident really, yet it could have turned nasty. It made Antill ask what he was doing with himself, how was he spending his time – was he being serious?
It was the solitude of a large city. And all he was doing was exploring, or rather, allowing. Antill understood he didn’t need to be with anybody. Aspects of his character he preferred to keep to himself, without always knowing what they really were. In the same way he rarely mentioned his thoughts. So much of talking was for the sake of talking, just because somebody else happened to be talking, of obeying some necessary instinct to fill in the gaps, to add to what already had been said, or wanting to toss in a joke or a related anecdote to bring the house down (since only an infinitesimal amount of what is said is memorable). For hour after hour Antill practised sitting in his room, emptying his mind of all thoughts. Preparing his mind for something: it was beginning to feel like that. To make matters worse, the room had just two sticks of furniture, a chair and a small brown-stained table. A smoker had been the previous tenant, and the pale shape of a crucifix showed where it had been hanging on a nail on the darkened wall.
Lindsey forwarded a letter from Rosie Steig, still at the same address in Sydney. It was soon afterwards on the footpath that Wesley began his conversations with the local postman, who did his rounds on foot, ‘single-handed delivery’, as he put it, if rather ponderously, which became for Wesley necessary daily conversations. Looking out from his window at the crescent he waited for the tall figure in uniform to appear at one end, where he’d go down and join him and walk alongside for the remainder of the round, happy to let the postman do the talking. Wesley had never seen a postman as tall as the one he got to know in London, Lyell, and who not only talked but talked like a fast-dripping tap, when most other postmen were not talkers at all – the very opposite, in fact – despite, or perhaps because of, spending their working days hand-delivering words. Sometimes the pressure showed. There are the regular court cases where a postman of mild appearance has been found guilty of accumulating in his bedroom thousands of unopened letters he was supposed to have delivered. In Sydney, on Macleay Street, the ageing postie, Brian, wore navy shorts in summer and winter, and had a cigarette, even in heavy April rain; a figure sloping forward, listening to the cricket on a transistor hidden in amongst the envelopes. If you were lucky he might give a nod, or ‘morning’, nothing more.
Wesley noticed how Lyell had to concentrate, or enter some sort of mechanical groove, combining numbers with hand movements, as he moved from one address to the next, while his other thinking self continued doing the talking. He was a ‘career postman’, he said, without smiling. ‘Drop these in 23.’ Unlike the specious opinions given all too freely by taxi drivers, which are seized upon as gospel by visiting journalists all over the world, as if the world can ever be seen and summarised through a windscreen, Lyell gave no opinions, except to declare early on he was a lucky man, his job was the best in the world. ‘Here I am,’ passing an aerogramme to Wesley for delivery, ‘under the open sky talking to you. And getting paid for it.’ Coming out with short statements, what appeared to be aphorisms, was the closest he got to giving an opinion, imperfect, unpolished, incomplete. They were descriptions – of what he saw before him, ordinary objects.
A broken dining chair had been abandoned on the footpath; Lyell recalled in detail the different chairs he had owned, and others he remembered sitting on that he hadn’t owned. His parents’ rose-patterned armchair had a special width. Creaking, sighing, rustling, nothing – the different noises made by chairs. Often he could remember the chair, but not the person sitting on it. Those plump upholstered ones were indented with buttons like his Aunt Sharon’s navel (he had once blundered into her bedroom when she was standing naked). One Easter Friday he saw a street fight in Notting Hill between two West Indians using steel chairs. This soliloquy to the chair lasted for most of the round. The next morning he continued, having remembered a few more. ‘I have fond memories of all chairs.’
People’s different handwriting – another subject. And the names people give their poor children, as shown on the envelope, look. A man coming towards them reminded Lyell of his brother. He described his puffed-out cheeks, his vegetarian pallor, small ears, small hands, his sensitivity to cold, a carpenter who attended the cream-brick church of some sort of sect, married with three sons, the youngest suffering from a helpless stammer. As the postman talked he handed items of mail to Antill for hand-delivery, who still listening took quick strides down to a basement in amongst the cats and rubbish bins, or else up steps three at a time to the horizontal brass slot in a door. Together they finished the round early, and had their cup of tea in the Shepherd’s Bush fish café, the one with the perspiring window.
Lyell talked about the other postmen. According to him, many were philosophers. One in particular could quote from ‘Mister Plato’, almost off by heart, the way devoted Christians can reel off entire chapters from the Bible, and Muslims too, from their book. Another one – thin long hair tied in a ponytail – collected scarce editions of D. H. Lawrence after picking up a copy of The Rainbow in the gutter. Poets were a source of philosophy. A number of postmen were writers of poetry. While making deliveries, they could be seen moving their lips and frowning, so he informed Wesley, which meant they were composing as they walked. Others he had known were experts on the great describers, such as William Wordsworth; a New Zealander had introduced them to James K. Baxter – a poet who had himself been a postman in Wellington!
Although Antill didn’t need to work he gave serious thought to becoming a postman.
Those mornings on the streets, and at his elbow the tall, perspiring, talkative postman handing him letters and small parcels at irregular intervals, in order to continue talking, or rather make his detailed description of things, went on for many months. Wesley was vaguely aware of being attracted to extremists.
The example set daily by the methodical postman encouraged an early return to thinking. Rather than a random searching-around, Wesley saw in the patchwork of descriptions a firm base – fit words only to what can be seen. It was a simple enough edict; one that was always there.
At the window he was anticipating as usual what the postman would kick off talking about. ‘Come on, Lyell.’ He glanced at his watch. His friend was never late.
A smaller figure appeared at the opening of the crescent, bending forward at each address, then jerking back, as if on strings. He had none of Lyell’s unconscious fluency.
Wesley met him in the street – a thin West Indian wearing tan shoes with his uniform.
‘They have sent him packing,’ he explained in a loud voice. ‘He has gone. Someone around here was reported doing his work for him, against all regulations written down. Excuse me now.’
Of the so-called London years, only a few of the many hundreds of people he encountered had left an impression. He passed through them, as he did situations – passed through, came out from. And it was similar for those passing people. If one of them was told Wesley Antill from Sydney, who they met or slept with on such and such a day, had turned into a philosopher, those who remembered him at all would have been amazed. With men especially he left little or no trace.
His way of ‘thought-making’, own description, was to continue wandering and take in. Remain open and fill in emptiness. On the train to Bath, a young Frenchman with a violin case on his knees spoke of the conversion of nature into art. Art, being human, is imperfect – hence, its power, smiled the Frenchman. Antill enjoyed the conversation, and thought of seeing more of him, perhaps becoming friends, but when it came to it he couldn’t find his address. Women were like small towns: to come upon them, and be surrounded by their neatness, but without the help of directions, before reaching unexpected dead ends; and begin all over again, elsewhere. Beyond the Cotswolds there, she was quieter than a town, and modest, a trim village in white with a curve and a fork in the main street, where the hand came forward requesting an outsider to slow down, or even stop altogether, which is exactly what she did to him. There was confusion all round. Light-hearted women, waiting to laugh; plenty of others not so trusting; men bobbing up with their faulty jokes, quips, football scores and eye-rolls – before going off by themselves.
In London, at Kentish Town, he took a job at night cleaning schools, not for the money. He felt like using his hands. Out of the textbook, alongside ‘ferryman’, he became a gardener for a large dark-stoned church and its manse, a good twenty miles from Ledbury. Weeds had taken over the church cemetery. After two world wars the spread of gravestones had almost surrounded the church. As he weeded, he saw the short, slow movements of remembrance. Old people and their neat hats, the small bunch of flowers. His other duties included sitting in the front pew and listening as the minister rehearsed Sunday’s sermon. ‘Tell me, yes. And don’t spare the horses. Feedback is what I require.’ Followed by tea.
The theological discussions were not satisfactory. Between taking calls the good distracted Presbyterian had no curiosity beyond the domination of one idea. A full schedule of small events may have helped. Wesley felt pity for his silent wife.
In work clothes Antill felt clumsy. Not only his hands, his thoughts – they were becoming blunt. And he was trying to make sense of it all, of what came towards him, of what he was part of. One difficulty was his separateness from nearby people. Everybody had this in different degrees; he knew that love can reduce the gap, almost to nothing. As he grew older he felt his separateness widen, slightly, but enough, as if the irreducible spaces between things in the wide-open landscape he grew up in had infected him, which he saw as a source of strength. In women, he sought – he wasn’t sure what.
A movement somewhere was hardly possible without an alteration somewhere else. Do as little as possible? To his sister and Rosie Steig he described his various careers. In London, he volunteered for a soup kitchen operating near one of the arches of Charing Cross. Museum attendant: another possibility.
Both women, separately, rebuked him; he was wasting himself, as he surely could see. In consecutive postcards illustrating local characteristics (Tudor cladding, young lass holding basket of apples, Blackpool on a sunny day), he explained to Rosie he could no longer think constantly, even if he wanted to; and since he couldn’t, he might as well work with his hands. He had avoided cities renowned for their philosophers, he told Rosie. In London, ordinary people on the street were philosophers without knowing it. Perhaps they pointed to a way, he told her. He made promises, then broke them.