Emerald Blue

In the Gippsland Forest

For most of his lifetime, he had kept in his mind certain details from pictures he had seen, but he had hardly ever been interested in art. He had never gone voluntarily into an art gallery and he felt no regret that he had never seen the art of Europe. One day when he was aged more than forty and was walking past the National Gallery of Victoria, he asked himself what images, if any, he could call to mind from the few occasions when he had been obliged to accompany someone through that building. He recalled two images: a distant view of a winding river in a painting called, so he thought, Still Flows the Stream and Shall For Ever Flow, by an Australian painter whose name he had never learned; and in the foreground of a crowded painting called, so he believed, Cleopatra’s Banquet, a dog resembling one of the whippets that had contested a race reserved for their kind on each of the weekly programmes of races for greyhounds at the track called Napier Park, which had been covered over for nearly thirty years by certain streets of houses in the suburb of Strathmore in the north-west of Melbourne.

In his last year at secondary school, some of his teachers had told him that he should go to university. At the end of that year he passed the matriculation examination, but then he joined the state public service as a clerical officer of a lowly grade. He was afraid of the university. He had looked into the handbook for the faculty of arts – the only faculty he was qualified for – and had been repelled by the lists of books to be read. He did not want to read the same books that were read and discussed by all the other students and by the lecturers and tutors. There was much that he wanted to learn, but he could not believe that he would learn it as other people learned what they learned. He believed in something that he called to himself precious knowledge. As a child, he had hoped to find some of that knowledge in some discarded or forgotten book. Later, he came to understand that such knowledge as he was looking for was not readily passed from one person to another. Sometimes he thought of precious knowledge as lying on the other side of the pages of one or another book whose title and author he had yet to hear of. In order to obtain the precious knowledge, he would have had to get inside the book itself and to live in the places where the characters lived. Looking out from those places, he would see such things (knowledge being to him always something visible) as only the characters in the book were privileged to see, whereas readers and even the author of the book could only speculate about them.

In the first year after he left school, he bought and began to read many blue-and-white-covered Pelican books: histories of places and periods not studied at the University of Melbourne; summaries of the works of certain philosophers; books of popular psychology. At some time during that year, he bought the Pelican book Landscape into Art, by Kenneth Clark, first published in 1949 and published as a Pelican Book in 1956. If the title had been The Art of the Landscape or Landscape as Art, he might not have bought the book, but he was taken by the force of the preposition into. The phrase landscape into art seemed to promise him precious knowledge. He was going to see, perhaps, into the mind of some man who had landscapes passing through him. Green fields and blue or grey skies drifted into him from the one side; mysterious things happened in the depths of him; and then a painted landscape of vistas and perspectives drifted out of the other side of him.

Before he had begun to read the text of Landscape into Art, he looked at the series of black-and-white illustrations in the middle pages. Of the landscapes or details of landscapes reproduced in those pages, one image lodged in his mind and was never afterwards dislodged. More than thirty years later, he could still see in his mind an image of certain ruts filled with water beside a road in the painted landscape February Fill Dyke, by B.W. Leader, whereas he could remember no detail of any of the other illustrations in Landscape into Art. The first pages that he read in the book were the pages listed in the index beside the entry Leader, B.W. He learned from these pages that the painting that had so impressed him had been included in the book only as an example of the least praiseworthy sort of painted landscape. February Fill Dyke was, according to Kenneth Clark, by far the worst painting of all those illustrated.

The image of the water-filled ruts had been in his mind for thirty-three years before he began to understand how that image had come to be there. He had never learned where or when the painter Leader had lived. He had never read any other reference to Leader apart from the disparaging passage in Clark’s book. In the first few years after he had first taken the image of the ruts to heart, he regretted sometimes that he still knew nothing about the person who had painted the ruts or about the place where certain water-filled ruts beside a country road in England (if it was England) had been changed into a painted image of water-filled ruts. When he was aged in his twenties and thirties and keeping a journal with long entries explaining what he called his world-view, he would have said that the so-called original ruts and country road existed only in his imagination, while the real ruts and road existed only in the illustration that he had seen long ago in a book. In his fifties, he could have said no more than that an endless series of images of water-filled ruts beside country roads existed in a part of himself. He had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind.

The image most often visible of the images of water-filled ruts, so he discovered one day in his early fifties, was connected with an image of a road in a picture called In the Gippsland Forest. All of the images just mentioned were connected also with certain images that he had seen more than forty years before the day just mentioned but had not seen since.

When he was seven years old, someone had passed on to him a small collection of foreign postage stamps in an album. He read the names of the countries named on the stamps. He knew where some of those countries were in the image that he had of the world. No one in his house had an atlas, but he understood that the world was in the shape of a globe and that England and America, as he called the USA, were the two most important countries in the world and were, appropriately, on the upper half of the globe and far away from his own country. One stamp was from Helvetia. The stamp was blue-grey, and the image on the stamp was of the head and shoulders of a man with a high collar and thick, dark hair and a hint of sorrow in his looks. He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name.

More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. He had seen some of the citizens of Helvetia going about their business. He had even watched for a few minutes the man with the high collar and the dark hair and had learned something that might have explained the hint of sorrow about the man. He, the owner of the stamp collection, asked his teachers and a few other adults from time to time where Helvetia was, but no one could tell him. As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things. He soon explained the mystery to himself by supposing that Helvetia was the former name of a country now named differently, and in time he met a boy whose stamp album included pages of information including the equivalent names in the English language for Suomi, Sverige, Helvetia, and a long list of many other names that he, the chief character of this story might have used all his life instead of Helvetia to denote a certain place in his mind if he had seen any of them on the first few of his postage stamps.

As a young man, he had sometimes regretted that he had never seen again the country that had appeared in answer to his need. Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion. Sometimes, while he read a certain letter or answered a certain telephone call, the writer or the caller would become surrounded by rooms and gardens and streets that were doomed to disappear. Whenever he read a work of fiction, he looked past the characters in his mind to the landscapes that reached far back in the direction of Helvetia.

He had proved to his own satisfaction that his sighting unfamiliar rooms and vistas was not merely an inferior sort of remembering: that his imagining – to use that word – was not merely a calling to mind of details he had previously seen but had then forgotten (and would forget again). He had never been able to believe in something called his unconscious mind. The term unconscious mind seemed to him self-contradictory. Words such as imagination and memory and person and self and even real and unreal he found vague and misleading, and all the theories of psychology that he had read about as a young man begged the question of where the mind was. For him, the first of all premises was that his mind was a place or, rather, a vast arrangement of places. Everything he had ever seen in his mind was in a particular place. He did not know how far in any direction the places extended in his mind. He could not even deny that some of the furthest places in his mind might have adjoined the furthest places in some other mind. He had no wish to deny that the furthest places in his mind or in the furthest mind from his mind might have adjoined the furthest places in a Place of Places, which term denoted for him what is denoted for some other persons by the word God.

Between the ages of about four and fourteen, he visited often with his mother and his younger brother a certain house in an eastern suburb of Melbourne. On one of the walls of that house was a picture with the title In the Gippsland Forest. If he had ever mentioned the picture to anyone in his lifetime, he would have been able to use no more precise word than picture for the object whose details were still in his mind forty years after he had last looked at them. The object may have been an oil painting or a pastel drawing or a water colour or a reproduction or one or another of those three or one of a series of prints or, what he thought more likely, one of an unnumbered series of reproductions of an illustration by an unnamed person who drew or painted subjects suitable for framing behind glass and for being sold during the 1920s and the 1930s in shops in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to young married couples who were furnishing their newly bought houses in those suburbs during those years. If he had stopped to think about the matter, he would have had to admit that the pictures sold to young married couples in the 1920s and the 1930s would have been the same in most suburbs of Melbourne, but whenever he thought of a young couple choosing In the Gippsland Forest for a wall in their new house, he thought of them as being in a shop in an eastern suburb with a view of the blue-black ridge of Mount Dandenong visible from the street outside the shop.

He had been born in a western suburb of Melbourne and had lived in that suburb with his parents and his younger brother until his thirteenth year. In that year, the family moved to a house that the father had bought in an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. He, the chief character of this story, lived in the house just mentioned until his twenty-ninth year, when he married a young woman who will be mentioned later in this story and moved with her into a rented flat in an inner-northern suburb of Melbourne. In his thirty-third year, he and his wife moved to a house that he and she had bought in an outer northern suburb of Melbourne.

The house where the picture hung on a wall belonged to one of his mother’s sisters and her husband. These two lived in the house with their three daughters and their son. The youngest of the daughters was five years older than the chief character of this story, but the boy, their brother, was nearly five years younger than the chief character. In the early years of his visiting the house, the girls would sometimes lend him some of their comics to look through, but in later years the girls seemed to be always out of the house, and the doors to their rooms were kept shut. He seldom played with his boy-cousin and in later years would bring a book with him to the house and would sit reading it in the front room. After he had turned fourteen and was allowed to choose not to accompany his mother on her visits, he no longer visited his aunt’s and his uncle’s house. On the day of his uncle’s funeral in the mid-1980s, he spent an hour in the house, which had been enlarged and redecorated. He did not see the picture on any wall.

During the years when he no longer visited the house in the eastern suburb, whenever he remembered the picture he remembered one or more of the following details: a man is walking alone on a narrow road of red gravel or closely-packed red soil; on either side of the road, tussocks of grass grow and long, narrow puddles of water lie and blackened stumps of trees stand; on either side of the tussocks and stumps, tall trees grow closely together with thick scrub between their trunks; the man is walking towards the background of the picture; ahead of the man, the road turns aside and out of his view, but no detail in the picture suggests that the man will see ahead of him, when he reaches the place where the road turns aside, a different sight from the sight he now sees ahead; the light is dull, as though the time is early evening and as though some of the upper branches of the trees meet above the road and the man walking.

During the years when he sometimes remembered one or more of the details mentioned above, he would sometimes remember also one or more of the following.

In the years when he lived in the western suburb and visited the house in the eastern suburb, the street where the house stood was the easternmost place he had ever visited. During those years, the easternmost place he had ever seen was the summit of Mount Dandenong, which he saw against the sky whenever he looked eastwards from any of the hills in the eastern suburb. He had believed as a boy that the word Gippsland denoted all that part of Victoria east and south-east of Mount Dandenong. He had believed as a boy that the region of Gippsland had been from the time of the creation of the world until the year in the nineteenth century when the first persons from England or Ireland or Scotland arrived in the region wholly forest; that most of Gippsland had been turned from forest into green paddocks and towns and roads and railway lines during the hundred years between the year just mentioned and the year when he himself had been born; that the few patches of forest still standing in Gippsland had burned away during the week before his birth when, so his father had often told him, the worst bushfires in the history of their country had been burning and the suburbs all around Melbourne had been overhung by smoke; that one of the chief reasons for the picture’s having stayed in his mind was the article the in the title of the picture, which word caused him to think of the one forest that had formerly covered all of Gippsland as appearing still in the mind of the man who was walking between the puddles and the stumps and in the mind of the man who had painted the picture; that the man in the picture was walking in an easterly direction, with Mount Dandenong and much of Gippsland behind him; that the man walking from Mount Dandenong towards the far side of Gippsland had lived for most of his life alone.

Sometimes, when he remembered the house where In the Gippsland Forest had hung, he supposed that he might never have noticed the picture if he had found during his early visits to the house one or another book of fiction that he could have read. His father had once told his mother in a mocking tone that her sister in the western suburb lived in a house without books. (The man who said this owned no books himself, although he borrowed and read three books of fiction each week from a circulating library.) He, the son, always believed his father’s dislike of his wife’s relatives was the result of their being Protestants. The son himself always preferred his father’s relatives and thought of his mother as being less than a true Catholic because she had only been converted shortly before her marriage. During most of his first visits to the house in the eastern suburb, the son had been left to stare at the plants in the garden or at the ornaments in the lounge-room, but he had once heard words from a book and had remembered them for long afterwards.

The time had been late afternoon. He and his mother and his brother had been about to leave on their long trip by tram and suburban train to the western suburb where they lived. One of his female cousins had brought a girlfriend to the house, and the two girls were amusing the young boy-cousin of the chief character of this story. The girls would have been about thirteen years of age, and the boy about four. The girl-visitor was reading to the boy. The chief character of this story had been listening through a half-closed door but had heard only a few of the words being read. Then, while his mother was saying goodbye to her sister and while he was expecting to be urged at any moment out of the house, the girl who was reading began to raise her voice and to speak with overmuch expression. At the time, he had supposed that the story being read was approaching its climax. Whenever he remembered the voice of the girl during the forty and more years afterwards, he supposed that she had become aware that he was listening to her from behind the door. Before he left the house, he heard words that he remembered afterwards as ‘…and then he saw the river winding far away into the distance like a blue ribbon through the green hills…’ Having spoken these words, the girl-reader paused as though she was showing to her boy-listener the picture that accompanied the words.

In the firs by the lattice

When he first read the book of fiction Wuthering Heights, he was in his eighteenth year and living with his parents and his younger brother in the house mentioned previously in the outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. At that time he had been travelling for four years and more in suburban electric trains on weekdays to and from an inner south-eastern suburb, where he attended a secondary school for boys on a hillside with a distant view of Mount Dandenong. On each afternoon when he travelled from his school towards his home, the train that he travelled in displayed at its front the word DANDENONG. When he first read Wuthering Heights, he had never travelled to the place denoted by the word on the front of the train. He understood, however, that the place was not the blue-black mountain that he looked at through the windows of his schoolroom but a town built on mostly level land ten miles south-west of the mountain.

At some time ten years or more after he had first read Wuthering Heights, he understood that the place named Dandenong had become an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, but during the year when he first read the book, he thought of Dandenong as the nearest to Melbourne of the towns of Gippsland. During that year, he had been no nearer to Gippsland than in the suburb where he then lived, but he was reminded of Gippsland every day whenever a country passenger train pulled by a blue and gold diesel-electric locomotive sped along the suburban line, running express through station after station on its way to Warragul or Sale or Bairnsdale. His father had told him more than once, and without smiling, that the people of Gippsland were inbred and degenerate and that the girls and women of Gippsland had goitres hanging out from under their chins because the soil of Gippsland was lacking in essential minerals. The man who said these things had been no nearer to Gippsland than his son had been. The man had been born in the south-west of Victoria, had moved to Melbourne during what he always called the Great Oppression, had married a young woman who was also from the south-west, had lived during the first fifteen years of his marriage in rented houses in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and had then moved to the house mentioned previously in an outer south-eastern suburb, having chosen that suburb only because a certain man who was a racecourse acquaintance and who was on his way to making a fortune from what was then called spec-building had offered to arrange for him a loan through what was called a private building society so that he could begin to buy, without having paid any deposit, a weatherboard house on an unfenced rectangle of scrub beside a street consisting of two wheel-ruts, often deep under water, winding among tussocks of grass and outcrops of scrub.

Whenever the chief character of this story had begun to read any book of fiction in all the time before he had begun to read Wuthering Heights for the first time, he had hoped that the book he was beginning to read would be the last book of fiction that he would have to read. He had hoped of each book that it would cause to appear in his mind an image of a certain young woman and an image of a certain place, after which event in his mind he would need to read no more books of fiction. While he was reading the early chapters of Wuthering Heights, certain sentences caused him to suppose that he was reading the last book of fiction that he would have to read. The first of those sentences is this from Chapter 6: But it was one of their chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at. Other such sentences are the following from Chapter 12. ‘This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot – we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he’d never shoot a lapwing, after that, and he didn’t.’ The remainder of the sentences are the following from Chapter 12: ‘Oh, if I were but in my own bed in the old house!’ she went on bitterly, wringing her hands. ‘And that wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel it – it comes straight down the moor – do let me have one breath!’

After he had finished reading Wuthering Heights for the first time, and while he was reading for the first time the next of the list of books that he was obliged to read as a student of the subject English Literature in the syllabus for the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne, he began to notice often in his mind an image of the face of one of the young women in school uniform who travelled on weekday afternoons on the train that ran through the outer eastern suburbs to the place that he thought of as the nearest of the towns of Gippsland. He understood from this that he was about to go through once again a series of states of feeling such as he had gone through many times before.

Whenever, as an adult, he heard people recalling their childhood or he read the first chapters of an autobiography or passages about childhood in a convincing piece of fiction, he supposed that he had been an extraordinary oddity as a child. Throughout his life, he could remember clearly occasions from as early as his fifth year when he saw in his mind an image of a woman or of a girl and felt for that image a feeling for which he knew no better name than love. The word occasions in the previous sentence applies only to the first two or three years of his falling in love. From about his eighth year, one or another image was continually in his mind for weeks at a time.

At some time during the year in the late 1960s which was the last year before he became a married man, he read in the Times Literary Supplement, in a short review of a certain book of autobiography, that the author of the book had been an extraordinary oddity as a child in that he had felt, from his very early years, a passionate affection for numbers of girls and young women. He, the chief character of this story, believed he was about to learn at last that he was not the only man of his kind. He placed a special order with his bookseller for the book, which was Monsieur Nicolas, or The Human Heart Laid Bare, by Restif de la Bretonne, translated by Robert Baldick and published in London by Barrie and Rockliff, but when his copy had arrived he learned from the first chapter that the narrator and he had little in common and he went back to believing that he had grown up differently from all other men.

The narrator of Monsieur Nicolas had been strongly attracted to girls and young women from about his tenth year, but they were persons from his neighbourhood, some of whom actually kissed and petted him, and he felt towards them a sexual desire that seemed to the chief character of this story undistinguished, especially after he had read of how the narrator of the book had been taught by a young woman how to satisfy that desire. This lesson had taken place when the narrator was still not twelve years of age and was reported on page 27 of the book. The remaining four hundred and more pages of the book contained mostly reports of the narrator’s first desiring and soon afterwards enjoying one after another girl or young woman or woman. The chief character of this story, from the age of four, would often find in his mind when he was alone, and especially when he was in sight of paddocks of grass or stands of trees or even a corner of a garden, an image of the face of a woman or a girl. Some of the faces were of images of persons in photographs or other illustrations; a few of the faces were of images of persons from films he had seen; and sometimes a face appeared to him, so far as he could surmise, from the same source that had given rise to the images of Helvetia.

The faces of this last sort interested him more than the others whenever during his later life he studied his memories of what he had come to call the female presences. Each face was never less than beautiful, according to his notion of beauty, but a presence would often appear at first with an expression of sternness or aloofness. He got much pleasure from knowing that this expression was only to keep secret from outsiders the warmth of the feelings that he felt continually from the presence. He understood that each presence was eager for him to confide in her, even though he suspected at the same time that she knew already what he most wanted to confide. He understood also that if he were to report to any presence some of the worst and most shameful things that he had done or said or thought – things that he knew to be sins according to his religion – she would be no more than curious to learn what his motives had been or what queerer things he could get up to.

Usually, the female presence seemed to be his wife or the person who would become his wife in the future. The man who remembered these matters up to fifty years afterwards did not find it strange that the boy from the age of four had talked to a wife-in-his-mind rather than to a friend-in-his-mind of either sex. Until he was nine years old and able to read passages from the books of popular fiction that his parents read, the boy believed that the only persons who took part in sexual behaviour were husbands with their wives, and for many years after that he believed that he himself could never so much as speak about sexual matters with any female person who was not his wife or his betrothed. He spoke about such matters often with the female presences in his mind and he did with them in his mind certain things, but only after having warned the presences of what to expect. No matter how perceptive and knowledgeable a female presence might be and how much about him she knew without his having to tell her, she would always be quite innocent in sexual matters and would wait to learn from him.

Whenever he saw himself with his wife-in-his-mind, he and she were in a particular place. Husband and wife lived together without children in a house set far back from the road on a farm of several hundred acres. The details of the farmhouse changed as often as he saw in one of the women’s magazines that his mother read an illustration of one or another house described as ultra-modern or luxurious, but the farm always appeared in his mind as a rectangle of green paddocks with a road of red gravel at its front and with thick forest at its sides and its rear. The boy who saw this farm in his mind did not learn until he was a man aged more than fifty years which farm in the place that is called for convenience the real world most nearly resembled the farm with forest on three sides. For most of his life, he had taken pleasure from seeing in his mind images of grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. These images resembled, as he well knew, landscapes that he had seen when he had looked from the windows of country trains between the western suburbs of Melbourne and the district in the south-west of Victoria where the parents of his parents lived. This district was mostly grassy countryside, but in certain parts of the district a line of trees was visible in the distance, and for most of his life the chief character of this story would have said that a broad expanse of grass and a distant line of trees was his ideal landscape except that he sometimes remembered that he and his wife-in-his-mind had always lived in a place where the grassy paddocks seemed no more than a large clearing in a far-reaching forest.

Late in his life, the man discovered that certain details of certain images in his mind would begin to flicker or waver while he looked at them and that this flickering or wavering was often a sign that a surprising image or cluster of images would soon appear from behind the wavering or flickering detail or details. One of the first details that had wavered or flickered in this way was the line in his mind where the green paddocks of the farm mentioned in the previous paragraph came to an end and the thick forest surrounding the farm began. The man remembered many years afterwards that the boy would sometimes want to see himself and his wife-in-his-mind as talking together or being naked together in their modern and luxurious house but would find himself instead looking at the wavering or flickering boundaries of his and her farm.

After his eighth year, the female that he considered his wife-in-his-mind was sometimes a version of a girl of his own age from his own school or neighbourhood. Each of these girls had what he considered a beautiful face and kept herself aloof from himself and other boys. He never deliberately chose one or another of these girls. One day when he found himself growing tired of the face of his wife-in-his-mind, he would notice that her face had become in a moment a version of the face of a girl that he knew. At first he might protest to himself (knowing that the female presence was listening, even though she was faceless for the time being) that he had never considered the girl’s face beautiful. But he would be gradually won over. Against the background of the farm with the forest around its boundaries, the face would become the face of his wife. He would become impatient to be in his schoolroom again or on a certain street in his neighbourhood, so that he could see the face-in-his-mind as it had now been revealed to him.

When the appearance of a girl from his school had settled in his mind in this way, he was not at first eager to have the girl know that he and she were now connected. He preferred to watch the girl when he thought she was unaware of him. His watching was meant only to make more vivid in his mind afterwards the face of the female presence. When the details of a face were quite clear in his mind, so he had learned long before, the female presence was more likely to surprise him by what she said and did and so to reassure him that she existed apart from himself. At such times, the husband of the female presence seemed not the boy as he might have become in the future but the boy as he might have been at that moment if only he could have been living in the world where one of the countries was Helvetia. Soon, however, the man and the woman in his mind would become almost wholly himself and the girl in the future, and soon after that, the face-in-his-mind would have become the face of the schoolgirl that he saw each day, and he would have begun to be unhappy.

The man read the book of fiction Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from the French of Marcel Proust and published in London in 1969 by Chatto and Windus, when he was a few more than thirty years old. The passages reporting the unhappiness of Swann over Odette and of the Narrator over Gilberte and Albertine were the first accounts he had read of a state of mind similar to his own whenever during the years from his ninth year to his twenty-ninth year he felt towards a female person what is most conveniently denoted by the word love. (Until he had read those passages, the most nearly accurate accounts that he had read of his state of mind when in love had been accounts of the states of mind of female characters in fiction.) During much of the period of twenty years just mentioned, he would be continually unhappy while he was out of sight of the girl whose face was in his mind, but no less unhappy when he was in sight of her. Away from her, he was unhappy to think of her talking or laughing among people he had never met and doing a thousand small things that he would never know about. But at such times, he could at least talk with her image in his mind. When he was in sight of her, he was made aware that she was not thinking continually and anxiously about him. He was able to remember forty years afterwards what he had seen and felt one Monday morning in his tenth year when he had turned in his seat in a classroom and had looked for the first time in three days at a girl whose image had been in his mind for much of that time and had been almost certain that she was aware of him looking at her but had seen her looking deliberately past him at the blackboard and copying one after another of the details there into her exercise book.

Sometimes his looking so often at a particular girl led some female friend of the girl to challenge him to deny that the girl he looked at so often was his girlfriend. He would have liked to make this denial and so to save himself from being teased in the schoolground, but he was always aware that the girl he so often looked at might herself have caused him to be questioned and might be hurt if he denied that he was interested in her, and so he would admit that he considered the girl in question his girlfriend. The end of the matter would follow after a few days. Now that he had confessed, he was no longer free to look at the girl. Whatever the girl might have felt towards him, she and he had to make a show of disliking the mere sight of one another for a few days before the other children would leave off tormenting them. Sometimes, his few days of having to avoid the girl would cure him of thinking about her. At other times, he would go on loving her in secret for months, and her face would continue to be the face of his wife-in-his-mind.

At some time during his ninth year, when he was trying to remove from his mind the image of the face of one or another schoolgirl and so to be free from his latest mood of unhappiness, he found a way of breaking out of the cycle of feelings reported in the previous paragraphs. Two of his father’s brothers and four of his father’s sisters had never married. One of the unmarried sisters had died, and one of the unmarried brothers had gone to live in Queensland, but the other four unmarried persons had gone on living in their parents’ house in a large town in the south-west of Victoria. Each of the three women had a room or a sleepout in the house, but the man – called from now on the bachelor-uncle of the chief character – lived mostly in the garden behind the house, in what was always called the bungalow: a small room with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, a bookshelf, a chair for sitting at the desk, and a chair for a visitor. The bachelor-uncle ate most of his meals in the house and sat for a half-hour each evening with his parents and sisters (and with his sisters alone after their parents had died), but he spent most evenings and many afternoons in the bungalow, sitting at his desk or lying on his back on his bed while he read from books or listened to radio programmes on the ABC or to broadcasts of horse-races. He earned his living by breeding and fattening cattle in a few paddocks of grazing land that he leased in the countryside that surrounded the town where he lived. He spent only three or four mornings each week with his cattle. Every Saturday he drove his car to the nearest race meeting. Every Sunday he went to Mass in his Catholic parish church. The chief character of this story had heard as a boy that his bachelor-uncle had had as a young man several girlfriends who would have made excellent wives, but he, the chief character, hoped as a boy that his parents and others were predicting rightly when they said that his uncle would always be a bachelor. And at some time during his ninth year, the boy decided that he himself would be a bachelor and not a husband when he became a man.

He could not remember, years afterwards, the first occasion when he turned away from the wife-in-his-mind and became a bachelor in his mind, but he remembered later occasions when he had felt suddenly relieved that he would never again be preoccupied with girls or young women whose faces had become fixed in his mind: that he would never have to find a wife in the future. As soon as he had become a bachelor in his mind, he would see himself in the future not on the farm with the forest at three sides but in a bachelor’s bungalow or looking out across grazing land or arriving alone at a race meeting. Years later, when he came across the word heartwhole in his reading, that word seemed especially apt for describing the feeling of strength and soundness that he had got from thinking of himself as a boy-bachelor. And yet, he had never thoroughly rid his mind of female presences in his bachelor-days; nor did he try to do so. He would sometimes feel as a bachelor that he was being watched from a distance by one or another female presence: someone who resembled no girl he had ever seen; someone who was almost a stranger to him. She was, perhaps, the wife he would never know: the woman he might have married if he had not been a lifelong bachelor. He would never have behaved cruelly towards her, but her quiet sadness did not move him.

During each of his bachelor-moods, he would become interested again in things he had ignored while he was preoccupied with women- or girls-in-his-mind. As a boy-bachelor, he took pains with his schoolwork and with his prayers in church, and he helped his mother with housework and his father with gardening. After a few weeks, however, he would find himself again thinking often of a female person watching him, and then the cycle would begin again.

Quite apart from all the female persons mentioned so far in this story is another group that the chief character sometimes called in his mind the women of the scrub.

During the first few years when the chief character lived with his parents and his younger brother in the south-eastern suburb, he, the chief character, knew of no other young person of his own age who lived within walking distance of his house in any direction. Every house that he knew of among the sandy tracks and the clumps of scrub contained a young married couple and as many as three or four small children. A few of the wives-in-his-mind in earlier years had had the faces of young married women that he had seen outside his mind, but as from this thirteenth year the young married women of his neighbourhood in the south-eastern suburb did in his mind what no wife had ever done or would ever do there.

On a very hot day in January in his thirteenth year, he decided to endure for no longer a sensation that he had endured at intervals on every hot day of that summer. He walked in among the grey-green scrub that had not yet been cleared from behind his house. Because the land around the house had not yet been fenced, he was able to continue walking in an easterly or south-easterly direction through the scrub until he was out of sight of his house. In a thick part of the scrub, he knelt and set about relieving himself of the sensation that had been troubling him. The scrub grew so closely around him that his forearms and his thighs were prickled continually. When he had still not yet fully relieved himself but had almost done so, he began to imagine that a certain few young women of his neighbourhood had followed him into the scrub and were watching him. While they watched, they jeered at him or rebuked him or commanded him to stop what he was doing.

In his eighteenth year, when he first noticed in his mind an image of the young woman in school uniform mentioned earlier, the scrub had for long been cleared away from his neighbourhood, and the land was covered over by houses and fences and backyards. One day, soon after the scrub had been cleared, he had supposed that if tracts of scrub had still been growing in all the outlying parts of all the suburbs between his suburb and Dandenong during the year when he had first come to live in his suburb, then he could think of himself and his family as having lived for a short while at the westernmost edge of an outlying district of Gippsland. After the very hot day mentioned in the previous paragraph, he had gone into the scrub once in about every week and had relieved himself in the same way until the hot weather had ended in late March and he was no longer wearing summer clothes and able to feel the scrub prickling his bare skin. From that time onwards, he relieved himself from time to time in his bed. Before the following summer had begun his house had been fenced and much of the scrub cleared. He relieved himself less often during the following years, and sometimes not for a month or more while he was in love with an image of a face in his mind. But his way of relieving himself was almost always the same. He would have gone alone into scrub or forest in his mind in order to relieve himself but he would have been followed in his mind by young married women. As he grew older, the behaviour of the young married women in the scrub in his mind became more subtly provoking, but the sting of their taunting and teasing always felt in his mind like the prickling on his bare skin of the scrub that had grown in the past almost to the walls of his parents’ house.

His school uniform was mostly grey, with trimmings of royal blue and gold. Her uniform had white and pale-blue trimmings on a colour that seemed to him at first black but proved to be a dark navy-blue. He had been in love for some weeks with the image of her face in his mind and had looked often at her face of an afternoon when they were travelling in the same compartment of a train in the direction of Dandenong and had satisfied himself that she was aware of his looking at her before he first spoke to her. Her voice when he first heard it seemed to have a faint English accent, and he learned during the many afternoons when they talked to each other in the train that she had been born and had spent her first five years in a south-western county of England before her parents had moved with her and her two older sisters from England to Australia and had settled in a newly built house in an outlying street of Dandenong.

During the weeks when he talked with the young woman in the blue-black uniform, he had cause for believing that she was pleased to be talking with him and even that she might have seen an image of himself in her mind from time to time before he had first spoken to her. And yet, he sometimes regretted that he had spoken to the girl so soon. During the first weeks after he had first read Wuthering Heights and when the image of her face had first appeared in his mind, she had seemed, more than any previous wife-in-his-mind, to be as full of images of him as he was of her. If he had not spoken so soon to the girl on the train, so he sometimes thought, he would have begun to live, with the image of her in his mind, a life more rich and complicated than any life he had yet lived in his mind. He would have lived that life among landscapes more varied and inviting than any view he had yet had of the farm in the forest. But those landscapes were now, so he understood, where Helvetia was in his mind, and the people who lived among those landscapes were with the grey-blue man of the slightly sorrowful look.

He had first seen her image in his mind late in the summer and had first spoken to her in mid-autumn. One afternoon in the first week of winter, after having given much thought to the matter and having prepared his words beforehand, he asked her whether she would like to go with him to a football match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on a certain Saturday afternoon in the near future. She answered that she had been preparing for some time to ask him whether he would like to have afternoon tea with her at her parents’ house on a certain Sunday afternoon in the near future. After she had talked to her parents, it was decided that he should meet her family over afternoon tea before he and she went to a football match or on any other outing together.

During the days before the Sunday of the afternoon tea, he felt at times proud to have acquired a girlfriend in whose house he was welcome but he felt at other times unhappy. He had already imagined himself leaving school at the end of the year and joining the state public service. She was two years younger than he, but she too would be leaving school at the end of the year, so she had told him, and would go to work in a bank, as her parents had advised her to do. He had already imagined himself going with her to a picture theatre or a party every Saturday night and calling on her at her parents’ house every Sunday afternoon for several years until he had saved enough money to buy a small second-hand car, after which time he and she would travel in the car every Sunday afternoon around the outer south-eastern suburbs in search of a block of land to buy. He had already imagined the house that would be built in time on the block of land and details of the life that he and she would live in the house as husband and wife. What made him unhappy was that he could not imagine what images he would have in his mind during all the years that he had already imagined.

Of the events of the Sunday afternoon when he visited her house for afternoon tea, only the following belong in this story.

While he walked from Dandenong railway station to her house, he saw often a view of Mount Dandenong so unlike the only view that he had previously seen that he sometimes lost his bearings and supposed that he was looking at the mountain from a position on what had always previously been to him the far side of the mountain and had therefore travelled a considerable distance into the region of Gippsland.

About half an hour after he had arrived at the house, and while he and his girlfriend were sitting together in the living-room, someone let into the house one of the two or three dogs that the family owned. These dogs were of a breed that was very rare in the suburbs of Melbourne: the bull-terrier breed. The dog that had been let into the house had come at once into the living-room and before he had even learned its name or its sex it had risen on to its hind legs, had clasped its forelegs around one of his knees, and had thrust its haunches again and again at the lower part of his leg. In the first moments after the dog had mounted his leg, he could think only of pretending to be unaware of what was happening. Then his girlfriend reached out and slapped at the dog and drove it away from him.

At some time while he and all her family were taking afternoon tea, he became aware that he and his girlfriend were the youngest persons at the table and he became concerned that her parents and even her older sisters might be alarmed or angry or even merely amused if they surmised that he had already imagined himself buying a block of land and marrying this girlfriend in the future. In order to prevent them from so surmising, he told her family, when the conversation had next turned to him, that he often foresaw himself living as a bachelor all his life and buying and racing horses with the money that he would have saved by not having married.

After someone had mentioned the family photograph album, and after he had begged to be allowed to look at it, and after his girlfriend had sat beside him and had shown him what she said were the only pages he would be interested in and had closed the book and had put it aside, he had watched for an opportunity to pick up the book as though idly and to find again without anyone’s noticing his eagerness the page with the photographs of the house where his girlfriend had lived during all the time she had lived in England, which was a house of two storeys at the edge of a village, and to stare without anyone’s noticing his concern at the background of each photograph in turn in order to see more clearly what he had previously taken to be clumps of woodland.

In far-off, smoke-hued hills

The words just above were written by the chief character of this story on a line near the foot of a page of ruled paper while he sat in his room in his parents’ house on a certain evening early in the winter of the first year after he had finished his last year of secondary school. At the time when the words were written, no other words had yet been written on the page. During the first hour after the words had been written, the writer of the words wrote and then crossed out many other words on many of the lines above the first words. Soon after the end of that hour, the writer of the words put the sheet of paper in a manila folder containing a number of sheets of ruled paper with no words written on them and then placed the folder under a pile of books and magazines on the floor beside the small table where he sat. At the time when the folder was put away, the words at the head of this paragraph were the only words that had not been crossed out on the page that the writer of the words had been writing on.

At the beginning of that year, he had started work as a clerical officer in a department of the state government. His first job was to check the details of the application forms filled out by persons wanting to be granted in return for a small fee the right to set up beehives or to distil eucalyptus oil from the branches of gum trees in forests on public lands in the north of Victoria, which was a region where he had never been. Before he started work, he had imagined the north of Victoria as a district of arid paddocks and of mullock heaps left behind by gold-miners, with a few pockets of stunted trees at intervals along the trickling creeks that flowed towards the inland from the Great Dividing Range. But each day at his desk, as he read one after another of the applications from apiarists and eucalyptus distillers, the north of Victoria in his mind became more of a forest and less of a parched grassland.

From the time when he began to work as a public servant until the evening mentioned in the first section of this story, he travelled in the morning of each weekday by suburban train from the south-eastern suburb where he lived with his parents into the central city. In the late afternoon of every weekday he travelled out of the city in a train with the word DANDENONG at its front. One of the many stations that he passed on his way to and from the city was the station where he had formerly left the train each weekday morning to walk to his secondary school and where he had formerly waited each afternoon for the train with the word DANDENONG at its front. During the evenings of weekdays, he stayed in his room and read books or magazines or listened to what he called classical music on his radio. Each Saturday, he went to the races. Each Sunday morning, he went to Mass. On three Saturday evenings out of every four, he travelled to his girlfriend’s house in an outlying street of Dandenong. During the previous year, her parents had allowed him to take their daughter only twice to a football match and to visit her only once each month at their house. Now, he was allowed to visit her more often.

On two of the three Saturday evenings mentioned above, he travelled with his girlfriend in the so-called picture bus from her home to the main street of Dandenong, where they attended a cinema before returning to her home in the same bus. On the third Saturday evening of those three, he had a meal with his girlfriend and her family and afterwards went with her and one of her sisters and the boyfriend of that sister to the dance that was held once a month in the hall beside his girlfriend’s parish church. (On this Saturday evening and on many others, his girlfriend’s other sister stayed at home and watched television with her parents and her fiancé in order to save money for the house that he and she intended to build on a block of land that they were buying by instalments in a grassy paddock that they said would be the next part of Dandenong to go ahead.) On the Sunday following the one Saturday in each four when he did not visit his girlfriend, he visited her home in the afternoon, sometimes walking with her through the streets around her home, sometimes attending with her the ceremony of benediction in her parish church, and sometimes having afternoon tea in her home with her parents. He travelled to and from his own home and his girlfriend’s home mostly by bicycle. Even when the weather was cold, he had to pedal slowly on his way from his home to Dandenong so as not to sweat. If the weather was in the least warm, he carried a small towel in a haversack on his back so that he could wash his face and his underarms when he arrived. On most of his journeys to Dandenong, he carried in his haversack what his mother called a respectable shirt and a tie and a jacket.

He was pleased to mention his girlfriend to his workmates or to any of his former schoolfellows that he met in the city, but he never spoke of her as his girlfriend or of himself as her boyfriend when he was speaking to her or to any of her family. He suspected that her parents thought he was much too serious about their youngest daughter, who had only recently turned sixteen and left school. And he suspected that her parents and her sisters thought he was somewhat crazy.

He supposed that his girlfriend’s family thought him odd because he talked too much. He talked continually when he was in their house, and not only to his girlfriend but often to her parents and sisters. Someone in the family would sometimes comment on his talking, but he always assumed the comment was made in fun. He talked, so he understood many years later, because he mistook his girlfriend for the person with the same face who had been his wife-in-his-mind since the days soon after he had first read Wuthering Heights. He did not make the opposite mistake. At least once in every waking hour when he was away from his girlfriend, he confided one or more matters to the female presence in his mind who was clearly not his girlfriend, the sixteen-year-old bank clerk, even though the two faces were almost identical. And he did not expect that the young woman he talked to for a few hours each week in her home or in the picture bus or on the way to the parish dance would give any sign of her having been entrusted with his confidences for days past. But during the few hours each week when he was with his girlfriend, he talked to her as though she had been listening to him for years past and as though she would go on listening until he had told her every word that he could tell about himself and would then interpret for him the whole of what he had told her.

Much of his talk was about things he had learned from books. He had told his girlfriend and her family on one of his first visits to their house that he had earned higher marks in his last year at school than some of his former classmates who were now at university; that he was going to teach himself from the books he chose in future to read far more than a person could learn at university; that he read each week three or more books from cover to cover and many other books by looking into various pages that had taken his interest. He had announced during an early visit that he preferred not to read popular or well-known books or books that were regarded as authoritative in a particular subject. He suspected, so he had said at the time, any theories or beliefs subscribed to by large numbers of people. (When he had said this, he had gone on at once to say that he did not question the teachings of the Catholic Church, which, as everyone knew, had millions of followers. But he had sometimes recently thought for a moment that he might one day read some book that would persuade him to become an agnostic or an atheist. He had thought this only for a moment on each occasion and had then felt giddy and afraid. He had glimpsed himself-the-agnostic-or-atheist as a man walking alone in a grey or black borderland far from the places he knew.) He quoted the first two lines of the poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, by John Keats, and then said that he, like Keats, thought of reading as travel. He said that the best sort of books made him feel as though he was exploring the borderlands of the landscape of knowledge.

He talked in his girlfriend’s house about such things as the haunting of Borley Rectory; the experiments in extra-sensory perception by Professor Rhine of Duke University in the United States; the life-story of Shaka Zulu and of Hannibal the Carthaginian; the man Ishi, who had lived for several years alone in the forests of California as the last survivor of his people; the Australians who had settled in Paraguay in the nineteenth century; and many other matters. Her parents asked him sometimes of what use his knowledge was to him. He answered that he would find before long a particular branch of knowledge which interested him more than any other and would study it until he became an expert in it, after which he would write a book on his chosen subject, after which he would be rewarded in some way by some person or some organisation. To keep the parents from thinking him too irresponsible to be the boyfriend of their daughter, he added that he would never give up his job in the public service unless he had first secured a better job and that he would do all his studying and even the writing of his book in the evenings.

When he wondered what his field of expertise would be, he sometimes found himself thinking about his bachelor-uncle in the bungalow in the south-west of Victoria. His uncle had read a great many books and had put together as a result of his reading what his nephew thought of as a private history of the world. Many years later, the nephew looked into the book The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton, and recognised that the uncle had borrowed much from that one book, but even then the nephew admired the uncle’s creation. It seemed like a long, winding pathway that the uncle had followed in and out among the shadows of the cities and the mountains and the forests of the world towards the bungalow, with its single bed and its desk and bookshelf in the backyard of the house in a side street of a country town on the lower side of the world. In the uncle’s view of things, the first human beings had been created by God only a few thousand years before the birth of Jesus. The people that others called cave-men the uncle called pre-Adamites; they were a race of creatures who may or may not have been human but who were not among the people redeemed by the Son of God made Man. The history of the Christian era had been distorted by English Protestant historians. The so-called Dark Ages had actually been the true Golden Age. The Spanish had been far less blameworthy as colonisers than the ruthless English. Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh had committed crimes that cried out to heaven for vengeance. Elizabeth the First of England had been a man in disguise. The Catholic Portuguese had discovered Australia, and one of the first places they had come ashore was in the south-west of Victoria where they must surely have celebrated Mass and taken possession of the land later known as Australia. The people known as the Aborigines had arrived in the land only a few hundred years before the Portuguese. The Aborigines were close relatives of the gypsies and had set out, like the gypsies, from India but at a later date and in a different direction. Among the most misguided of persons had been the Protestant do-gooders of the nineteenth century who had brought into being in England and Australia the cruel and wasteful institution of free, compulsory, and secular education. Most children were better off unschooled. The brightest boy in each parish should be taken in hand by the priest and given the run of his library; the other boys should be apprenticed as tradesmen or farmers or craftsmen. These and many other details made up the view of the world that the bachelor-uncle saw from the bungalow, and the nephew of the bachelor not only thought often about his uncle’s view but reported many details of it and elaborated on those details to the family that he visited in Dandenong and even told them that he, their visitor, considered his uncle an expert of a kind and would be proud if he, the visitor, could become an expert in his own way at some time in the future.

In the past, he had been constantly unhappy not to be able to see the girl whose face was always in his mind and constantly jealous of those who were in sight of her. With his girlfriend from Dandenong (his first true girlfriend, as he called her to himself), matters were reversed. For as long as he was away from her, he felt as though a version of her was watching him in his daily life and smiling at his many odd little ways. When he was with her, however, he was uneasy and, at times, jealous. Being with her reminded him of how little he knew about her. If she said something about her work in the bank, he remembered that he had never once supposed during the previous week that he was looking down through her mind into the Dandenong branch of the English, Scottish, and Australasian Bank and sharing in her moment of perplexity or being touched by her pretty frown as she stood in her green and gold uniform and hesitated over the files she was searching through. (During the rest of his life, whenever he thought of the few months during which he had visited his girlfriend at Dandenong, he felt as though he could have written page after page about his own feelings at the time but no more than a few sentences reporting anything that she had said or done.)

If he was talking to her or to some member of her family and if she seemed to be listening to him, then, at least, he was not unhappy, although he might have been concerned that she had not understood his latest narrative or argument as he had wanted her to understand it. But if he was compelled to be silent with her, as he was when they sat in the cinema nearly every week, or if he and she were merely two young persons among a crowd of young persons, as they were at the parish dance each month, then he would become afraid of seeming to her nothing more than a public service clerk of a lowly grade and he would expect that she would soon grow tired of his company. He believed he was distinguished only by what he saw in his mind. In the eyes of anyone who had been told nothing about the numerous landscapes and vistas that he was continually aware of, he was of no interest. He knew that he dressed drably, even shabbily. He played no sport. He did not listen to rock-and-roll music. He did not go to the beach in summer. He knew nothing about motor cars. Although he sometimes watched television, the images moved too fast for him, or his mind wandered, and he seldom remembered afterwards what he had seen.

He was never able to take in the plots of the films that he and his girlfriend watched each week. Either he was thinking of something he had said to her recently and of how she might have misinterpreted it, or he was thinking of something he would have to say to her when they had left the cinema. Or, again, he was dreading the appearance on the screen of the first scene in which a male character and a female character expressed in words their love for one another or embraced and kissed.

Whenever he and she walked the last few hundred paces from the bus stop to the front gate of her house after they had alighted from the picture bus, and whenever they walked the same distance on their way home from the parish dance, he would hold one of her hands in one of his hands. In all his later life, he never laughed or even smiled at any spoken or written comment that seemed intended to mock or belittle the feelings of young persons for one another. If ever he had become a writer of fiction, he would never have written about any young person as though to suggest that his or her love, as he or she called it, for one or another young person was of any less account than any state of mind of any person who was no longer young. In short, he believed for the rest of his life that his reaching out for his girlfriend’s hand on certain evenings as he and she picked their way along a gravel footpath in an outlying street of Dandenong, which was at that time in the way of changing from being the nearest to Melbourne of the towns of Gippsland to the furthest suburb from Melbourne in the direction of Gippsland, and her letting his hand find her hand and her letting her hand lie in his hand until they reached her front gate were, at the very least, equal in meaning to any other events that occurred in the lives of any other persons in the world during his and her lifetime. While he was sitting beside her in the cinema, he was preparing himself for the moment later that evening when he would reach out for her hand. Their holding hands was one of a few subjects that he would never have spoken about to her, although he did talk to her about other subjects while they walked hand in hand. He would be hoping, in the cinema, that she, while she sat beside him, was looking forward to his taking her hand later that evening and was hoping that he understood that she understood that they had come to the cinema that evening only because a visit to the cinema was one of the few outings possible for a young man who owned no motor car and a young woman whose parents wanted her to be always in a crowd of young persons whenever she went out with her boyfriend on a Saturday evening in a place that was changing from being a town in the countryside to a suburb of a capital city. And while he was so hoping, he would see on the screen in the cinema the first of the scenes that he had been dreading.

Throughout each of the many love scenes that he watched with his girlfriend seated close beside him (he never offered to hold her hand in the cinema), he wished that he could have had the courage to tell her afterwards that he would never expect her to fall into his arms when she had hardly got to know him, as American women were expected to do; that he would not give in to his passions (to use the term favoured by Catholic philosophers and theologians) before he had explained himself to her down to the last detail. He was bothered even by the gestures of the men and women in the love scenes: their sighs, the staring of their eyes, the clutching of their hands. He would have liked the young woman beside him to know that his regard for her was so complex and that he was so distinctive a person that he could never express himself by such means as gasps and moaning sounds.

On the shady side of the house where he sometimes looked at the picture of the man in the Gippsland forest, a treefern grew under a roof of dark-green lattice. At some time during each of his visits to the house, he would stand under the shade of the lattice, touching the fronds of the fern or stroking the hairy trunk. One day he was halfway along the side of the house on his way to the treefern before he saw the oldest of his girl-cousins (she was about nineteen at that time) standing in the shade of the treefern and staring up into the face of the young man who had recently become her fiancé. The year was the last year of the 1940s, and few young men owned motor cars. He had often seen young couples with arms around one another in laneways or in parks but always in darkness. His cousin and her young man were standing only a few paces from him in the light of afternoon, shaded only by the lattice and the fronds of the treefern, and they did not know he was watching them. He stood there, expecting to learn in the next few moments more about the behaviour in private of men and women than he had learned from all his reading and speculating. The two persons in their shady corner then hugged and kissed, but only, so he saw, in imitation of what they had seen in American films, and he tiptoed away, feeling embarrassed for them.

Even a few months after he had seen for the last time the person who had been his girlfriend for a few months, he could remember no more than some of the names of the films they had watched together. He remembered for the rest of his life much of what had passed through his mind in the cinema, but almost everything that had passed in front of his eyes was lost to him. Likewise, from the hours that he spent at the parish dance on one evening each month he recalled for the rest of his life only his feelings of unrelieved misery and embarrassment.

He and his girlfriend, together with her sister who was still unengaged and her boyfriend, would set out from his girlfriend’s house. Her mother would stand at the front door until they were out of the front gate. She would call out to them to have fun and to enjoy themselves. He still hoped, until the moment when she had stepped back inside and closed the door, that she might call out to him that she had noticed during the past hour that he had not looked well; that his girlfriend might say to him that she had noticed the very same thing; and that his girlfriend and her mother might together urge him not to go to the dance that evening but to stay with his girlfriend’s parents in their lounge-room, watching television and talking. Every month, as the date of the dance drew nearer, he rehearsed a speech to his girlfriend in which he told her that he did not want to monopolise her company and to keep her from meeting other young people of her own age; that he intended in the future to take her to the doors of the parish hall on the evening of the dance and to call for her after the dance had finished but to spend the intervening time with her parents. What kept him from delivering this speech was his believing that he did not deserve the exquisite pleasure of walking back to her house with her hand lying in his hand unless he had first endured the torture of attending the dance.

When he and his girlfriend had still been meeting on the train from school and when she had mentioned that she liked dancing, he had quietly begun a course of dancing lessons in a large upstairs room in the shopping centre near his school. He had continued the lessons for nearly six months and had paid much money to the middle-aged woman who taught him for half an hour for week after week. She seemed to be the only teacher in the studio, as she called it, and he seemed to be her only pupil. She did not require him to hold her in the usual dancer’s hold; he and she kept at a little distance from one another with hands on one another’s shoulders. She seemed to be in her forties or fifties, and he was able to relax somewhat with her, although she told him several times that he was a difficult pupil. When he told her at the end of one of his lessons that he was going with his girlfriend to a dance for the first time on the following Saturday evening, she told him to have fun and enjoy himself.

During the first ten minutes at the first parish dance he attended, he understood that his lessons had been a waste of time and money. The press of people left only an oval space for dancing instead of a rectangle, so that he forgot at once all he had been taught about half-turns and quarter-turns. He was even more confused by having to stand so close to his partner and by not being able to look down at his feet or hers. None of the music played by the band had the simple rhythms of the tunes that his teacher had played for him on her portable record-player. On his first night at the dance, he danced only with his girlfriend and her sister and with a friend of each of them, and he danced only one dance with each of those four, and he sensed that each of his partners was doing her best to help him, but he knew that what he was doing did not deserve to be called dancing. He talked ceaselessly to each of his partners to distract her and himself from what was happening below the level of their waists. When the progressive barn dance was announced, and he understood that he would be required to dance with dozens of strange young women, he left the hall and walked in the darkness outside for ten minutes.

He could hardly believe in later years that he had stayed to the end of not only the first dance but five others. At the last dance he attended, he was no less incompetent than he had been at the beginning. He danced nearly always with the same few partners, stumbling or shuffling around in a trance embarrassment and babbling at them all the while. He always went outside before the barn dance began, and he was always grateful to his girlfriend and her sister for never having remarked to him afterwards that they had missed him during the progressive barn dance. Even the long periods that he spent at the side of the hall were of little relief. He felt obliged to look always as though he was quietly contented, in case his girlfriend or her sister should look at him from out of the crowd. When either of them stood or sat with him for a short while, he suspected that she was only feeling sorry for him or he felt guilty at keeping her from the enjoyment that he supposed a person got from being actually able to dance.

At the fifth dance he attended, he danced for the first time with a new partner. In each of the back corners of the hall was one of two groups that he called in his mind the Bachelors and the Spinsters. Members of each group were older than the average person in the hall, some bachelors or spinsters seeming to be in their late twenties. He envied the bachelors, most of whom seemed to know one another and to have much to talk about. Some bachelors seemed never to dance and yet not to be ashamed of this. Even more noticeable than the age of the spinsters was their plainness in appearance. He had thought at first that the spinsters would have been clumsy dancers also, but when one of them was asked to dance, as sometimes happened, she seemed no less skilful than any of the regular dancers. He was often touched by the sight of the spinsters. While he stood watching the dancers, shifting from foot to foot and trying to keep a half-smile on his face for the sake of his girlfriend, he could at least pretend that he did not feel inclined to dance. No one was likely to believe that the spinsters preferred not to dance and had recently declined invitations from would-be partners. Many of them had the same awkward half-smile that he could feel on his own face. He tried not to catch the eye of any spinster. He thought it would have been cruel to give her some hope that he was going to ask her to dance. But at the fifth dance, and again at the sixth, he danced several times with one of the spinsters.

His girlfriend knew many of the persons in the hall. She was talking to a young woman who might have been twenty-five or even older, and he was standing beside the pair of them, when the band began to play and his girlfriend went to dance with someone she had promised to dance with. He and the woman went on standing together. He hoped she would walk back to the spinsters’ corner where he had seen her often, but she asked him to dance and he was too afraid to refuse. Stupid as he was in many matters, he did not suppose that the spinster was interested in any romantic way in an eighteen-year-old boy. She seemed like a youthful aunt, and he understood that she presented herself as a sort of adviser and wise older sister to his girlfriend and a few other young women. He should have felt at ease with her after she had said to him, when they had only just begun to dance, that the hall was much too crowded for dancing proper steps and had thereafter moved her feet in such a way that he was able to move around the floor in whatever gait he chose without so much as touching a toe of her shoes, whereas he had never previously tried more than three or four steps without having trodden on a toe or an instep of his partner. He should have felt at ease, but he did not like her way of calling his girlfriend a sweet young kid; the spinster seemed to be hinting that his girlfriend was too young and sweet to be pestered by such an odd person as himself.

He danced twice with the spinster on the night when she first asked him to dance, and he sat with her for a little while in a seat halfway between the bachelors and the spinsters. At the next dance, a month later, he asked her to dance soon after he had danced the first dance, as he always did, with his girlfriend. He still did not like the spinster. He still believed she was preparing to give him some unpleasant advice. He had even thought several times that his girlfriend might have arranged for the spinster to become friendly with him so that she could deliver to him some message that his girlfriend could not bring herself to deliver. And yet, he was much more comfortable shuffling around the floor with her than standing foolishly at the side of the hall. He had even begun to be silent for short periods while he and the spinster were moving around together. And in the periods of silence, he had even begun to think some of the thoughts about the future such as he usually thought when he was near his girlfriend: such a thought as that he would ask his girlfriend after she had become engaged to him never to require him to attend any place where the chief activity was dancing, or, perhaps, that he would ask her after they had become engaged to spend a few hours alone with him in the lounge-room of her home when no one else was in the house and to teach him the beginnings of the baffling art of dancing.

At every dance he had attended, one or more couples had fallen to the floor. Some subtle change would take place in the slow eddying movement of the dense throng of dancers; two or three young women would cry out; couples would stop dancing all around the hall and would look in the direction of the commotion. Only those nearest the fallen would know how many had gone down or who they were. He, the chief character, since he was hardly ever one of the throng of dancers, had seen only a few couples struggling to their feet or being helped up. When the first fall had taken place at the first dance he attended, he had expected to hear howls of laughter, but onlookers seldom laughed. On the contrary, the people around the fallen were sympathetic and solemn and even, so he believed, rather embarrassed. He himself had always been troubled by the resemblances between dancing and sexual intercourse, and when he first noticed a couple disentangling themselves on the dancefloor and then getting to their feet with flushed faces among onlookers who seemed anxious to put out of their minds what they had just witnessed, he had prayed that he would never be seen lying on top of some young woman on the floor of the crowded hall in his girlfriend’s parish.

He was always sure that the fall had been caused by someone far ahead of him and the spinster, but no one had ever mentioned the matter afterwards, and he never knew whether or not his girlfriend had thought he was in any way responsible for the fall. He had not fallen far. Some other couple already down had broken the fall of the spinster, and she, being his partner and directly in front of him when those ahead fell, in turn broke his own fall. He had seemed to fall a very short distance and to have been soon upright again. And yet, he seemed to remember having leaned forward for a long time with his hands, which, of course, he had flung out in front of him, each neatly in place and cupped a little around the mound of each of the breasts of the spinster.

On the second Saturday evening after the events reported in the previous paragraph, he stayed at home before rising early on the Sunday and riding his bike to his girlfriend’s house in time for eight o’clock Mass. He and his girlfriend and her sister and her boyfriend walked to Mass carrying a picnic hamper and wearing casual clothes with thick sweaters and scarves over their arms. After Mass, they and fifty and more young persons from the parish seated themselves in two buses in the churchyard. The young persons were going on what had been advertised as a picnic to the snow (we hope!!!) at Donna Buang. He, the chief character of this story, had had to learn from a map that Mount Donna Buang was east-north-east of the city of Melbourne whereas Mount Dandenong was almost due east; that Donna Buang was almost exactly twice as far from Melbourne as Mount Dandenong; and that Donna Buang was only fifty feet short of being twice as high as Mount Dandenong.

On either side of the aisle in the bus that he and his girlfriend travelled in were seats that each held two persons. Most of those seats were occupied by established couples, with the girl sitting nearer the window and her boyfriend nearer the aisle. At the rear were several long seats, each with room for half a dozen persons. On these seats sat four or five unattached females and more than twice that number of unattached males. In the bus, as in the parish hall on dance-night, he thought of these groups as spinsters and bachelors.

His girlfriend had sat down at once in one of the window seats, and he sat down beside her, but he believed that this would be the last occasion he could consider the young woman beside him his girlfriend. He was prepared to hear her say when they arrived back at her home from the trip to Donna Buang that he should visit her less often; that he was becoming too serious. He had already heard her say that morning, in the first show of irritation she had ever made towards him, that he sometimes talked too much. He felt sick and foolish as he sat beside her during the first hour of the trip. He was trying to call to mind images that would enable him to see himself once again as a bachelor – not as one of the guffawing bachelors at the rear of the bus who were looking out for the next attractive female who had broken with her boyfriend, but the sort of bachelor he had formerly dreamed of becoming. In the past, whenever he had been sick with anxiety over some girl, he had had a sudden glimpse of himself as a bachelor and had become strong at once.

Even at the risk of irritating her, he wanted to tell her one last thing about himself. When the bus had left the outer suburbs behind, and the road ran between farms with forested hills in the background, he set out to tell her that he was now further east than he had ever been and that he was now entering a region that he had often seen in his mind since his mother had told him as a child about the fires that had burned in the week before he had been born.

She half-turned towards him several times and nodded, but mostly she stared out of the window or looked over her shoulder, waiting for a chance to join in talking with the couple in the seat behind. He soon stopped talking.

He had wanted to tell her that his father and mother had been born in the far south-west of Victoria, in the region that he always thought of as consisting of grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. Even when they had moved to Melbourne, they had stayed on the western side, which was mostly treeless and grassy, as distinct from the eastern side, where forests and scrub still grew in places. In the week before he was born, his mother had been afraid that the world would end before she had given birth to her first child.

The department where he was employed, he might have told his girlfriend as the bus carried them further in among the mountains of the Upper Yarra district, was concerned with Crown lands, whether grassy or forested. In the library of the department, he had gone looking for and had found the report of the Royal Commission into the causes of the bushfires and other matters. He might have impressed her, if he had not already repelled her with all his talking, by quoting to her in the bus some of the passages that he had copied out and memorised from the introduction to the report. Seventy-one lives were lost. Sixty-nine mills were burned. Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged. Townships were obliterated in a few minutes. On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday in many places it was dark as night. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished… These and several other passages he might have quoted to her, but even while he was thinking of what he might have said to her, he was noticing the thick forests on either side of the road. In his mind, he had always thought of the eastern half of Victoria as blackened by fire. He had known that the image in his mind was a child’s simple image, but he had expected to see on the trip to Donna Buang some evidence still remaining of the day, fewer than twenty years before, when the whole of Victoria had appeared to be alight.

His girlfriend and the couple behind were playing a version of the child’s game of Bags. Each person in turn would call out that she or he bagged some desirable object or person through the windows. When his girlfriend took her first turn, she bagged a whole farm. She said she would love to live in the white-painted farmhouse that they were passing and to own the green paddocks around it for as far back as the forest in the background. The young woman in the seat behind told his girlfriend that she could hardly live in the house alone. No one spoke for a moment, and then they went on with their game.

The bus stopped at a place that the driver called the turntable. More than twenty other buses were stopped nearby, some with groups of young persons gathered around. Those from his own bus who had been to Donna Buang in previous years explained that lunch was to be eaten at the turntable, after which everyone was free to climb to the summit.

His girlfriend and her sister had packed a large hamper for their boyfriends and themselves. He forced himself to eat a sandwich and a cake while the others ate the rest of the lunch, saying how hungry they felt in the cold air.

On the way to the summit, the bachelors from the rear seats of the bus began to make snowballs from the few patches of hard snow lying about. With the snowballs in their hands, the bachelors changed from being the awkward outcasts of the parish dance or the rear of the bus. A pair of them would single out a pretty young woman – even though her boyfriend might have been beside her – and would try to drag the collar of her pullover away from the back of her neck and to force snow down against her bare skin. Some unspoken rule prevented the boyfriend from trying seriously to protect the girl. He would smile while his girlfriend was squealing and struggling against the bachelors, but the only help he would offer her would be to shake the snow from her clothing afterwards or to wipe her neck with his scarf. Other girls might leave their boyfriends and try to help a threatened girl, but this would only bring the whole pack of bachelors, and the outnumbered girls would all go back to their boyfriends squirming and squealing and dragging at the snow under their clothing.

He knew what was coming, and his girlfriend seemed also to know. The whole pack approached her. She shrugged and looked at her sister and tried to hold her collar close around her neck. They had something different in mind for her, as he had known they would. They hardly bothered to force any snow down the neck of her clothing. Instead, two of the bachelors leaned towards each other and locked hands to make a seat for her. Two others hoisted her onto this seat. She teetered and had to fling an arm around the shoulders of each of the bachelors whose hands she was sitting on. When she was seated securely, the pack of bachelors escorted her to the side of the track. They stopped a few paces short of a patch of deep snow. When she saw the snow, she began to squeal. While she squealed, the two bachelors who were carrying her began to swing her backwards and forwards and to count aloud. Several times they counted down to zero, and each time she shrieked and pleaded, but each time they went on swinging while she kept her grip around their shoulders.

Even he, watching from a distance and grinning, had not expected the bachelors to throw her into the snow. He foresaw that they would release her in their own good time and that she would come back to the group where he was standing and would smile at her sister and her boyfriend but not at himself. But he foresaw more than this. While the bachelors had been seizing her and carrying her off, he had noticed something in the way that a certain bachelor had behaved towards her. He, watching, had been surprised and stung, but she, so he had noticed, seemed not to have been even surprised.

The bachelor mentioned in the previous paragraph had been one of the two who had made a seat for her with his hands. He, the chief character, had thought while he watched the bachelors of how they had become emboldened as soon as they had set foot on the mountain. On Donna Buang, the bachelors had taken liberties that they would never have attempted at any dance or party or even in the bus on the way to the mountain, and the boyfriends had deferred to the bachelors. He had watched especially his girlfriend’s hand clutching at the shoulder and the neck of the bachelor who had behaved in a certain way towards her. He, the chief character, had watched even more the hands of the bachelor taking through a mere layer of the grey cloth of her slacks the weight of her thighs and buttocks.

While he watched, he foresaw a number of events, most of which later took place as he had foreseen. He foresaw himself moving gradually away from his girlfriend and her sister and her boyfriend as they approached the summit of Donna Buang – not to join the pack of bachelors but to walk as a solitary bachelor and to stand conspicuously alone looking out at the view from the summit. He foresaw himself joining up with his girlfriend’s party again for a few minutes when they arrived back at the turntable. The vacuum-flasks in the hamper would still have enough warm tea for all four in the party to take a last drink together, and he would thank his girlfriend and her sister for all the trouble they had taken in preparing lunch. (The bachelor who had behaved in a certain way towards his girlfriend would have been by her side when her party had reached the summit, but he would have broken away as they approached the turntable again and would have stood with the pack of bachelors while he took the last drink that he would take with them as a bachelor.) As the various parties filed into the bus for the trip homewards, he, the chief character, would walk down the aisle and would choose a seat at the very edge of the bachelors’ seats. His girlfriend, who would be by then no longer his girlfriend, would sit in the same window-seat that she had sat in on the way to Donna Buang, and the bachelor who had looked at her in a certain way while they were climbing the mountain, and who would be by then no longer a bachelor, would sit beside her. He, the chief character, would not talk to the bachelors and certainly not to the spinsters on the return journey but would look out through the window towards the dark shapes of mountains and forests and the lights of farmhouses and townships beside the road leading back to Melbourne from the easternmost place that he had yet visited. He foresaw himself getting down from the bus in the churchyard and then walking to the house of the young woman who had formerly been his girlfriend in the company of that young woman and her sister. While they walked, he would carry the empty hamper and would talk cheerfully with the young women. He would not be merely pretending to be cheerful. He would be a bachelor again and would no longer have to endure the misery and the anxiety that he had endured while he had been in love. He would be somewhat proud of himself for having conducted himself with dignity while he had been changing earlier that day from a boyfriend to a bachelor. While he prepared to say goodbye politely to the young women outside their house and then to ride away on the bicycle that he had left in the morning in their backyard, so he foresaw, he foresaw that he would live as a bachelor for several months, after which he would fall in love with one image after another in his mind until the next occasion when he noticed that the image in his mind was an image of a person from outside his mind. At the same time, he foresaw that he would see by chance from time to time in the future on some train travelling between Melbourne and Dandenong the young woman from Dandenong who had once been his girlfriend and would talk with her easily as a bachelor to a woman content with her boyfriend or fiancé or husband. He did not foresee that he would remain a bachelor for most of the next ten years; that he would not have seen the young woman or have heard of her for more than thirty-five years on a certain afternoon in the future when he learned from a woman who had formerly lived in Dandenong that the young woman had married many years before and was by then a grandmother and that she had lived for much of her life in a place that had been when she first lived there one of the nearer towns of Gippsland but had later become one of the outermost south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He did not foresee that he would learn also from the same woman who had told him these things that the mother of his girlfriend of more than thirty-five years before had died while her daughters were still young married women and that the father of those women, after he had been a widower for several years, had become a lay-brother in the monastery of the Cistercian order between Yarra Glen and Healesville, which monastery he, the chief character, had once visited and which he remembered afterwards as a pale-coloured building surrounded first by green paddocks through some of which the Yarra River wound and then, on three sides, by mountains covered with forest.

When he had first got down from the bus and for almost all the time while he and the others had climbed towards the summit of Donna Buang, they had been surrounded by what they thought was mist or fog, but just as they approached the summit they saw blue sky above them and they stepped into bright sunshine. He stood alone, just as he had foreseen, while he looked out at the view from the summit. The summit was a grassy and mostly level place, and he walked at once to what he judged to be the eastern side of the summit. He had not foreseen the view that he saw to the east of the summit.

The poems that had interested him most at school had been those that brought to his mind images of places. When he took out a sheet of ruled paper and prepared to write on it during an evening in the week after the events reported in the previous paragraphs, he had never previously tried to write a poem but he supposed that a poem was the sort of writing that would most clearly record the details of the place that had been in his mind for much of the time since he had come down from the summit of Mount Donna Buang on the previous Sunday. At some time before he sat down in front of the sheet of ruled paper, he had begun to hear in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story, and at some time soon afterwards he had decided that the words should be the last line of his poem.

If he had been able to write the earlier lines of his poem, those lines would have reported first the details of the place that he had seen in his mind whenever during the years before he had first travelled to Mount Donna Buang he had imagined the eastern half of Victoria, which details would have included a large area of green in the foreground being the region of Gippsland and a narrow zone of blue-black at the left-hand side being the mountains, many of them damaged by fire, at the northern edge of Gippsland. The lines would have reported next the details he had seen in his mind whenever during the days since he had travelled to Mount Donna Buang he had imagined himself as putting his face close to the narrow zone of blue-black as though it was a detail in a picture in his mind, which details would have included a large area of blue in the foreground being ranges of mountains covered with forests that had grown in place of the forests burned in the past and a narrow zone of the colour of smoke at the horizon, which zone he was not yet able to imagine as being close to his face.

In the Blue Dandenongs

The words above were the caption of a coloured illustration on a calendar that his mother received from one or another shopkeeper in one or another year during the late 1940s when she and her husband and their two sons were living in a rented house in a western suburb of Melbourne. The calendar hung for a year in the kitchen of the rented house and was designed so that the numbered spaces denoting the days of one or another month were torn away at the end of that month while the illustration above the numbered spaces remained visible throughout the year. After he had looked several times at the illustration on the calendar during the first days after it had been hung, he resolved not to look again at the illustration during the remainder of the year, but he went against his resolution many times.

In later years, whenever he remembered the illustration on the calendar, he remembered the following details. In the foreground, two children are standing in green grass that reaches halfway to their knees. Near the children, a horse has lifted its head from the grass and is looking towards them. The girl holds out a hand towards the horse. In her hand is a carrot with the green top still growing from the red root. From where the children and the horse are standing, the grassy paddock slopes downwards through the middle ground of the illustration towards a fence. On the other side of the fence, a mountain rises from an unseen gully. The side of the mountain is covered with forest. Behind this mountain, in the far background, is part of another mountain. The forest on this mountain is blue-grey. The mellow light suggests that the time of day is late afternoon.

The children had at first reminded him of children in illustrations in the books for English boys and girls that his unmarried aunts lent to him to read during his summer holidays. Those books, so his aunts would remind him, had belonged to his father and his brothers when they were boys. The girls in those illustrations were as tall as women but had the innocent faces and the hips and chests of children of nine or ten. The boys had the chests and shoulders of men, but they wore short trousers and had the guileless faces and tousled hair of choir-boys on a Christmas card. The boys and girls in the books that he read from his aunts’ collections defended themselves against burglars and spies and smugglers and were spoken to respectfully by detectives but were never troubled by even the thought that they might fall in love.

The children on the calendar had reminded him at first of child-men and child-women in English storybooks, but the illustration on the calendar was a photograph, and so the children were not distortions or caricatures. He was able to estimate from the bodies and the faces that the children were about eleven years of age. But he tried for most of the time not to look at the children. Their air of innocence annoyed him.

He was not so angry with the girl. She was trying to coax the horse towards her and could have been excused for her look of preoccupation.If he could have seen more than her profile, he might even have found that her face was of the sort that appeared in his mind from time to time and caused him to fall in love. The boy might have been looking at the face of the girl or at the carrot in her hand or at the horse or even at something that had distracted him from beyond the range of the camera. His curly hair and his vacant grin seemed meant to make adults think of him as a likeable young rascal who was preparing, even while he posed for the photographer, to put a caterpillar on the girl’s skirt in order to make her squeal.

If, in spite of himself, he looked at the picture on the calendar, he tried to look past the boy and the girl who had never fallen in love or felt jealous or anxious in connection with a person whose image stayed in his or her mind. He tried to see, behind the forested mountain in the background, one of the many other pairs of children who would have been in the Dandenongs on the day when the photograph was taken.

That boy and that girl lived in the same neighbourhood in an eastern suburb of Melbourne, and their parents often visited one another and arranged family outings together. Each family owned a motor car, and at least once in each month the two cars followed each other through the outer eastern suburbs and then through grassy countryside and then into the foothills of the Dandenongs and then along the red-gravel roads through the forested gullies and between the mountainsides. On hot days in summer, the children paddled among mossy stones in creeks with treeferns on their banks. Late in summer, they picked blackberries. In autumn, they scooped up armfuls of coloured leaves among stands of European trees. In the coldest days of winter, when the fathers had fixed chains to the car-tyres, the children played in shallow drifts of snow. In late winter, they picked sprays of wattle-bloom. In spring, they visited the camellia and rhododendron gardens. On wet days in any season, they drank soft drinks in cafés while their parents were served Devonshire teas. At a certain hour late on many a Sunday afternoon, he had felt, even as a child in his first years at school, that some other male person of exactly his own age was living, perhaps only a few miles away, the life that he himself ought to have been living. When he had felt this on certain Sundays as he was waiting with his mother and his younger brother at a tramstop near the home of his aunt who lived in an inner eastern suburb, before returning to his home in a western suburb, he had sometimes seen in the rear seat of a motor car passing the tramstop a young person returning with his family from a place that must surely have been in the Dandenong Ranges, so he, the chief character, supposed on some day during the year when he looked for pairs of children in the background of the picture on the calendar.

Something else about the children on the calendar unsettled him. Some detail such as the bagginess of the boy’s trousers or the shapes of the bows in the ribbons in the girl’s hair made him, the chief character, often suppose that the photograph had been taken ten or more years earlier. He was not unfamiliar with what had been worn in the late 1930s. He had once found under sheets of linoleum torn up from the floors of the rented house many sheets of newspapers from the year before he had been born and had studied the drawings in the advertisements, especially the drawings of children. He had been curious about the children who had seen the sky over Melbourne dark with smoke on the day when his mother had thought the world was about to end but whose lives had not then ended. He could hardly blame the grinning boy or the girl whose eyes were on the horse if they were unaware that the place where they were playing would be soon destroyed by fire. But he expected that one at least of those couples outside the boundaries of the illustration on the calendar – one of those couples who had fallen in love, although their parents had never suspected it – would sometimes imagine a blue-grey mountain on the horizon to be smoke moving towards them.

On a certain Saturday afternoon in the early autumn in his twenty-third year, the chief character of this story sat for several hours beside a young woman in one of a number of enclosures of green canvas in the upper deck of the public grandstand at the racecourse in Caulfield, a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. Each of the enclosures of green canvas was described in advertisements authorised by the club that conducted race meetings at Caulfield Racecourse as a luxuriously appointed private box, with drink waiters in attendance, available for hire to members of the public on race days. He, the chief character, had paid for the hire of a box for two persons a sum of money equal to one quarter of his weekly earnings after tax.

From time to time during the past three years, he had fallen in love with one or another face in his mind, but he had always gone back to thinking of himself as a bachelor before he had begun to feel unduly anxious or unhappy about the person whose face kept appearing in his mind. During his twenty-first year, he had enrolled in a subject for which evening classes were offered at the university and had obtained a pass as his final result. He had become somewhat tired of reading out-of-the-way books in his room by night but having to spend his days among persons who had not opened a book since they had left school. On a few evenings, he had tried to write poetry but had given up and instead had read some of the poems that had most impressed him at school, especially ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, by Tennyson, and ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, by Matthew Arnold. While he read certain lines of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and watched images of places drifting into his mind, he would feel as he believed he would have felt when he had formerly looked at landscapes of Helvetia in his mind. While he read certain lines of ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, he felt as he supposed his bachelor-uncle must sometimes have felt in his bungalow.

At the time of his outing with the young woman to Caulfield Racecourse, he had begun to study a second subject at university and had been promoted at work to a more responsible position in which he was required to proofread some of the contents of booklets and leaflets informing the public about certain forests and foreshores and parks. When he had taken up this position, he had moved to a higher floor of the building. The face of one of the young women that he met on the higher floor had entered his mind at once. She was only a few months younger than he. She was well-mannered and popular, but she was quick-witted and was not afraid to join in the debates that began among several men in her office – all of them senior to her – whenever one or the other man made a comment on something he had read in the morning newspaper. He, the chief character, understood from her arguments at these times that she was a fervent Catholic. He himself no longer went to church, but the face of the young woman in his mind persuaded him to believe that he could live as a Catholic in the future with her as his wife. As a Catholic, she would not want to practise what she would call artificial birth control, and he and she might become the parents of four or five or six children. He could accept this, but he could not foresee himself providing for such a number of children and also buying a house in an outer suburb of Melbourne. He foresaw himself instead settling with her in the future in one of the large country towns where his department had branch offices. In each of those towns, the senior officers paid a small rent for modest but comfortable houses built by the Housing Commission of Victoria. When he tried to foresee which large country town he and his wife would settle in, he understood that the town would not be in Gippsland. He had learned from maps published by his department that the word Gippsland denoted a region larger than he had once supposed and that the region contained much forest. But ever since the day when he had looked eastwards from the summit of Mount Donna Buang, he had seen Gippsland in his mind as a narrow green margin along one side of an extensive zone that appeared sometimes blue-black and sometimes blue-grey and sometimes pure blue. The town where he and she settled would not be in the south-west of the state. He believed that the young woman was the ideal Catholic wife that his bachelor-uncle had never found, and he, the chief character, who had so often thought of becoming himself a bachelor in a place like a bungalow, did not want to seem to be boasting in front of his uncle. The town would have to be in the north of the state, in the region where he had never been: the region of old goldfields and box-tree forests that he had never yet visited.

He did not own a car, and he called in a taxi at the address that she had given him. She lived in her parents’ house in an eastern suburb of the sort that journalists called comfortable or middle-class, in a street of the sort that they called leafy or tree-lined, but the house was built of weatherboards, and when he was approaching the front porch he thought that her house was no more spacious and solid than his own parents’ house, except that it had been built in an outer suburb with few trees and with many of its streets still rutted and swampy. She answered his ring at the doorbell. She was dressed for the races, with her handbag on her arm, and she stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

She was as much a talker as himself. On the way from her home to the racecourse, he told her that he had always envied the people of the eastern suburbs for having lived ordered lives among pleasant surroundings. She then asked him to name the particular families that he envied. He then told her that he had visited an aunt in a house with paintings on the wall in an inner eastern suburb for many years when he was a boy, but he knew while he told her this that he had never envied his aunt and her family in their house without books. He then told the young woman that he had grown up in a suburb with no persons of his own age. She then told him that every Catholic parish in the suburbs of Melbourne had at least one organisation for young persons to meet one another.

A few miles short of the racecourse, she pointed out her old school. It was a cluster of brick buildings no larger than his own school, but the hill where her school stood seemed to offer a wider view around. She reminded him that his and her schools were in neighbouring suburbs and that senior boys from his school had sometimes been invited to social evenings at her school. He then told her that he had been anti-social and eccentric when he was at school.

Soon after they had been shown to their private box at the racecourse, he told her that Caulfield Racecourse had been called many years before the Heath, and that the grassy racecourse in their view had been cleared from an expanse of dense scrub. She then told him that the racecourse had been used during the Second World War as an army camp and that her father had spent much time in a tent somewhere in the grassy expanse in front of them.

He had brought with him the pair of powerful binoculars that he always took to the races, and he began to point out to her what he called his landmarks and then to invite her to look at the landmarks through the binoculars. He showed her first the roof of his parish church, four miles away to the south-east. He then showed her the treetops on the golf course where he had worked as a caddy while he was at secondary school. His own street, he told her, was somewhere just beyond the far side of those trees. She then said that the trees made it seem as though he lived in a clearing in a forest. He would have liked to let her look through his binoculars at Mount Dandenong, but the grandstand at the racecourse faced south, and the mountain was somewhat to their rear and out of view. He showed her instead the dark-blue ridges of the Lysterfield Hills, which were halfway between Dandenong and Mount Dandenong and which he had thought were the southern aspect of Mount Dandenong itself on his first few visits to his girlfriend at Dandenong. The young woman beside him at the racecourse said she had lived all her life in Melbourne, but she still thought it strange that Mount Dandenong and Dandenong were two quite separate places far apart. He asked her how often she and her family had been to the Dandenong Ranges during her childhood. He wanted her to say that hardly a Sunday had passed without their going deep among the mountain-ash forests and the treefern-gullies and the waterfalls and all the sights he had never seen, but she only answered that she had been there often enough.

She aimed his binoculars to the south and asked him what was the low blue ridge far away in that direction. He told her it was Mount Eliza, with all of the Mornington Peninsula lying behind it. He wanted her to say that she and her family had gone for three weeks during every Christmas holidays to the camping-ground beside the beach at Rosebud or Rye or Dromana on the peninsula, but she only recited to herself the names Rosebud, Rye, and several other names of places where families from the suburbs spent their summer holidays.

He had wanted to hear that she had gone often to the Dandenongs or to the beaches on the Mornington Peninsula. He believed already that he had been deluded to suppose that the young woman was interested in him in the way that he was interested in her. He intended to ask her, when he said goodbye to her outside her house later that afternoon, to go with him to a cinema on the following Friday or Saturday evening, but he believed already, while they sat together in their private box before the first race at Caulfield, that she would politely decline to go with him on any further outing. He expected that he and she would go on talking pleasantly for the rest of the afternoon, but he had become again a bachelor in his mind before the first race had been run, and he expected to remain a bachelor for longer than he had ever previously been. He wanted to remember as a bachelor that the last young woman who had allowed him to keep her company had been one of the many persons who had spent their childhood dreaming of places no further than the Dandenong Ranges or the Mornington Peninsula.

He did not consider himself superior to such persons. He had always seen Melbourne and its suburbs as a resting-place that his father had found on his way from the grassy countryside of the south-west of Victoria to some place much further afield. He, the son, had never supposed that his father had been travelling eastwards with only the map of Victoria in mind, so that his goal was no further than Gippsland in his mind. He, the son, had sometimes supposed that his father was travelling from west to east in his mind on a map of Helvetia in his mind. Whenever the son tried to imagine the place that his father supposed he was travelling towards, he, the son, saw the place as peopled by the tall girl-women and boy-men from the books that his aunts had kept all their lives. When he had thought of these personages only as characters in his aunts’ books, he had been angered by the innocence of the personages, but when they appeared to him as the inhabitants of the eastern region of Helvetia, with their untroubled faces and their sexless bodies, he would have liked to stand with them on the verandas of their farmhouses or at the edges of their small townships in that region where no one fell in love or married in his or her mind and to look out across the grassy countryside that reached to the horizon in every direction.

At the time when the chief character sat with the young woman overlooking Caulfield Racecourse, his father had travelled as far to the east as he would travel, although he, the chief character, did not know this. (His father died in the south-west of Victoria only a few months after his elder son had married and had gone to live in a northern suburb of Melbourne.) At the time when the chief character sat at the racecourse, his father had been for as long as the chief character could remember what most people would have called a good father, but the chief character decided soon after his father had died that he ought not to have married and become a father. His father, so the chief character believed in the last part of his life, had been better fitted to live as a bachelor than as a husband and father and ought never to have left the district of grassy countryside where he had been born and ought to have lived there as a bachelor throughout his life.

He, the chief character, had been born in a suburb of a city that had been built on a bank of a river near its entrance into a large bay, but throughout his life he seldom noticed the river and he always avoided the bay. He always thought of Melbourne as an inland city with one or another range of mountains or hills visible from every suburb. In his later life, he looked out for published accounts of the childhoods of persons who had been born in the suburbs of Melbourne and had lived there during the ten years and more before his own birth. When he was nearly forty years old, he found and read the books Goodbye Melbourne Town and The Road to Gundagai, both by Graham McInnes and both published in London during the 1960s by Hamish Hamilton. The author of the books had been born in England, had arrived in Melbourne as a boy, had lived there during the 1920s and part of the 1930s, his home for much of that time being in an eastern suburb with views of Mount Dandenong (the same suburb in which the chief character of this story attended secondary school), had left for Canada as a young man just out of university, and had written the books mentioned while he remembered Melbourne from far away and thirty years later. Somewhere in one of those books, he, the chief character of this story, read a passage in which the author named all the mountains or hills that he always remembered as having appeared in the distance around Melbourne.

He, the young man sitting beside the young woman in the grandstand at Caulfield Racecourse, was far from despising anyone who remembered as the sites of their falling in love with certain faces in their minds places with views of mountains or hills to the south-east or the east or the north-east or the north. He believed that he himself would have been such a person if he had not been born and had not spent his early years on the level and grassy side of Melbourne and if he had not thought of that place as the eastern edge of the countryside where his father had been born and where he, the father, ought to have lived as a bachelor throughout his life.

At some time in mid-afternoon, when he had assured himself that the young woman beside him in the enclosure of green canvas would fall in love at some time in the future with one or another young man who had spent many a Sunday afternoon in the Dandenong Ranges and would later marry that man and would live with him after their marriage in one or another outer eastern suburb of Melbourne, he, the chief character of this story, having decided that he would be a bachelor for the remainder of his life, began to relax and to tell the young woman things that he would not have told her if he had still been in love with the image of her face in his mind.

He told her that he had sometimes dreamed of owning a racehorse. Being a public servant on a modest salary, he could not afford to be the sole owner of a horse during the foreseeable future, so he told her, but after about his fortieth year, when he had been promoted several times, as he could reasonably expect to be, he should be able to spend on a racehorse what another man of his age would spend on his wife and children. He spoke as though she did not need to be told that he was going to be a bachelor for the remainder of his life, and she did not interject that he should have been married and a father by his fortieth year. He supposed that she was as well aware as he was of the unspoken rule binding young persons of the suburbs of Melbourne at that time while they were together on outings as a result of the young man’s having, in the words used at the time, asked out the young woman: the rule that neither young person should use the word marriage except in such a way as to suggest that the speaker had never once in his or her lifetime entertained the least possibility that he or she would, in the words used at the time, become serious about another person (least of all the person he or she was, in the words used at the time, going out with), much less consider marrying. He told her that he often foresaw an afternoon far into the future when he would stand in the mounting yard of a racecourse in a suburb of Melbourne and would watch his horse walking or cantering on to the course proper ten minutes before the start of a certain race. He did not name the racecourse when he told her this. None of the three racecourses then in use in the suburbs of Melbourne had ever seemed to him to be the racecourse that was the site in his mind of the race far into the future. That race had always seemed to be about to take place on one of the racecourses at which his father had attended meetings during the years before his, the chief character’s, birth, but which had long since closed. The racecourse was Sandown Park, which had been halfway between the suburb where he had lived from his thirteenth year to his twenty-ninth year, and Dandenong, the place that had for long been a town at the western edge of Gippsland but had later become an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. The old Sandown Park racecourse, so his father had told him, had seemed to be surrounded by scrub, and from the grandstand a person could look out at the Dandenong Ranges. He, the chief character, told the young woman at Caulfield Racecourse that the sunlight on the afternoon that he foresaw had a peculiar mellowness such as he noticed each year in the light over the suburbs of Melbourne on certain afternoons in the last week of February or the first weeks of March. (The day when he told her this was a day in early March, but the sky was cloudy and a breeze was blowing from the south-west.) He told her that the sight of this mellow light each year caused him to forget for a few moments that he was in one or another suburb of Melbourne and to suppose that he was in one or another region of a country that he had imagined as the boy-owner of a collection of stamps from places whose whereabouts he did not know. (He did not name Helvetia when he told her this.) He told the young woman that the first occasion when he had seen the peculiar mellowness in the sunlight had been, so he believed, in midsummer rather than in autumn. This occasion had been one or another of the afternoons during the first weeks of his life when his mother had lain him in a bassinette in a shaded part of the backyard of the boarding house in the western suburb where his parents had lived when he had been born. He told the young woman that he had been born while the smoke still hung in the upper atmosphere after the terrible Black Friday bushfires that she must surely have heard about from her own parents; that he had seen a photograph of himself lying in his bassinette between two trees with the back door of a weatherboard house in the background but that the photograph was, of course, in black and white although the date in his mother’s handwriting on the back was a date only three weeks after Black Friday. He told the young woman that the sight of the peculiar mellowness in the sunlight caused him sometimes as a young man to suppose not that he was in an imagined country but that fires were burning throughout some region far away and that the smoke from the fires still hung in the upper atmosphere.

He told the young woman that the owner of a racehorse could know that his horse was supremely fit before a particular race and could bet large sums of money on his horse but could never be sure that his horse would not be narrowly beaten in the race by a horse whose owner had known about his horse and had bet as the first owner had known and bet. He told her that on the afternoon far into the future, the owner that he would be at that time would have known several times in the recent past that his horse had been supremely fit and would have bet several times large sums of money on the horse but would have seen the horse narrowly beaten. But on the afternoon that he foresaw, so he told her, with a certain mellow light in the air and a view of the Dandenong Ranges on the far side of the racecourse, his run of losses would come to an end at last. He did not tell the young woman that he always foresaw that he would understand on that afternoon in the far future that a certain woman of a few years less than his own age would be among the crowd who would watch him standing beside the winner’s stall in the mounting yard as his horse returned to scale; that he would not know the name of the woman or any detail of her history, although he would have recognised the woman at once if he had happened to see her face at any time during the afternoon; that the woman would have wondered for a few moments about him when she saw him standing with no wife or child beside him and only the trainer of his horse for company but would not have known what he would have known if ever he had seen her face, namely, that she was the woman he would have met and married if his life had taken the course it would have taken if he had not decided as a young man to be in the future a bachelor and the owner of a racehorse.

At some time during the afternoon while they sat together in the canvas enclosure, he told the young woman that the colours carried by the horse that he had foreseen himself as owning would be one or another combination of pale green and dark blue. When the young woman had asked him why he had named those particular colours, he did not answer truthfully. He told her that his chosen colours were the most striking of the many colours in the main window of stained glass above the altar in the Catholic church in the large town in the south-west of Victoria where he had often spent his summer holidays. This much of what he told her was true. One Sunday morning during his summer holidays five years before, while he had been kneeling in the church beside one of his unmarried aunts, he had noticed the prominence in the window above the altar of the colours that he had already adopted as his racing colours: the dark blue in the mantle of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the pale green in what he supposed to be a shower of divine grace or some other spiritual emanation reaching down to the Virgin from on high. But he had decided on his colours at some time during the previous year while he had been in his room in his parents’ house one evening. He wanted colours that were seldom used by other owners, and he wanted his colours to suggest what was most distinctive about him. He knew already that he would never be able to become the owner of a racehorse unless he remained a bachelor throughout his life, and he believed that his bachelorhood would be what most clearly defined him. When he asked himself what colours best suggested bachelorhood, he thought at once of his bachelor-uncle in his paddocks in the south-west of Victoria. He, the chief character, then saw those paddocks as pale green and the line of trees that seemed always in the distance as dark blue. Even while those colours were occurring to him, he was aware that the combination of pale green and dark blue hardly ever appeared on the racecourses of Melbourne or the country districts of Victoria.

Few sentences in this piece of fiction are of the kind that might be verified by reference to other publications in the world where the book containing this piece of fiction will later be published, but the sentences in this paragraph are of that kind. On almost every Saturday during the years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the racebook containing, among many other details, the details of the colours worn by the riders of all the horses entered at the race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne on that day contained no details of any jacket and cap of only pale green and dark blue. On some Saturdays, the colours green, blue spots, red cap were listed in the racebook. One of the few horses that raced under those colours, the green of which appeared as pale green on the silk of the actual jacket so that the colours could be imagined as consisting only of pale green and dark blue when the jockey wearing the colours stood in the mounting yard with his cap not yet on his head, was named Grassland, and the sire of this horse was a horse imported from England with the name Black Pampas.

After the race meeting at Caulfield, the young woman insisted that the chief character of this story must not go to the expense of taking her to her home in a taxi, even though he and she would otherwise have to travel by train and then by tram to the end of her street. He was pleased to travel by train and tram because this would give him much more time for talking to her, but the train was too crowded for talking privately, and as soon as they were alone together at the tram stop, she began talking to him. She told him that she had very much enjoyed his company but that she would very probably not be able to go out with him again. She told him that she had been going out regularly for some time with a man who had proposed marriage to her; that if she were to accept the man’s proposal, he and she would have to be engaged for several years at least, since the man had taken on certain financial commitments that would not allow him to marry at present; that she sometimes seriously doubted whether it would be morally advisable for herself and the man to enter into such a long engagement as they would have to enter into; that she had gone out with him, the chief character, because he was an interesting person, because the man who wanted to marry her was often unable to get to Melbourne from the country district where he lived, and because she did not consider in any case that she should go out exclusively with him until they had become engaged, if that should happen; but that he, the chief character, should understand that she could not consider becoming interested in anyone else until she had made up her mind about the man she had told him about.

Having become a confirmed bachelor in his mind some hours before, he was not made unhappy or anxious by her speech, but he was curious to know what commitments the man mentioned had entered into and what the young woman had been thinking of when she said that a long engagement might not be morally advisable. He, the chief character, assumed that the man who had proposed marriage must have been at least as fervent a Catholic as the young woman. He, the chief character, found himself thinking of the man as being a member of one of a few Catholic cooperative settlements that he, the chief character, knew about. One of the settlements was in remote mountain country in the north-east of Victoria, which was a region that he could only imagine as a blue haze of mountains. Another settlement was in the foothills of the mountains to the north of Gippsland, which settlement he imagined as a clearing in a forest, with log cabins for houses. The third settlement that he knew of, and the one where he imagined the proposer of marriage to be living, was in the next range of mountains on the far side of the Dandenong Ranges. He, the chief character, had heard that these cooperative settlements, which had been founded ten or fifteen years previously when many Catholics from Melbourne had wanted to live a simple life away from the evils of city life, were struggling to survive. He supposed that the man who wanted to marry the young woman beside him at the tram stop in an eastern suburb in the late afternoon of a day in the early autumn was at that moment milking cows by hand or weeding a potato paddock or felling a tree with a crosscut saw in order to add to the meagre wealth of the cooperative so that it could pay him back in cash for the cash that he had invested in it some years previously, which cash had been his life-savings. But then he, the chief character, supposed that the man was toiling at the cooperative not because he wanted to leave it and return to Melbourne but because he wanted to earn enough units of credit according to the system of exchange that operated in the cooperative so that the other members would help him at some time in the future to clear and to fence a small area and to build a simple cottage in the area and so to be able to provide a home for his bride after their marriage.

As for the question why a young Catholic woman would wonder whether a long engagement was morally advisable, he, the chief character, had tried to answer this to himself from the moment when the young woman had used the words that had caused the question to occur to him, even postulating answers in his mind while he and the young woman went on talking about trivial matters in the tram that would take them to the end of her street. What seemed to him the most likely answer was as follows. The proposer of marriage had somehow conveyed to the young woman by hints and murmurings that he would be likely to commit regular if not frequent mortal sins alone and in both thought and deed if his and the young woman’s engagement should be unduly prolonged. He, the chief character of this story, supposed that the young woman was unable to imagine in any detail how such sins might be committed, but he imagined the sinner as being compelled from time to time to walk alone into the forest surrounding the cooperative settlement and to relieve himself there while the undergrowth prickled his bare forearms and while he imagined certain young married women of the cooperative rebuking him or commanding him to stop.

After he and she had got down from the tram, she took his hand and squeezed it for a moment and thanked him for a very pleasant day and asked him not to bother to walk with her to her house. He said goodbye to her and stood waiting for a tram to take him back the way he had come. The place where he stood was on the western side of a slight hill, so that he could not see Mount Dandenong, but he could see, on the next hillside towards the city, what he believed to be part of one of the buildings of her old school, and he wished that he had asked her whether she had been able to see Mount Dandenong from any of her classrooms when she had been a schoolgirl. A few more than thirty years later, he would be passing her school one day and would notice an estate agent’s noticeboard stating that a large number of apartments would soon be for sale on the site, most with splendid views of the Blue Dandenongs.

In the Bois de Boulogne

The words just above came into his mind one day during the mid-1980s when he was trying to remember from the English translation of the book of fiction À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust, which he had read ten years earlier, a certain phrase that he believed had first brought to his mind when he read it in the book an image that had occurred to him often during the following ten years, which image seemed sometimes connected with his feelings when he remembered certain events on a certain afternoon in the autumn of a certain year in the mid-1960s and also with his feelings when he remembered a certain passage at the beginning of the section of the book with the title ‘Cities of the Plain’.

During much of his life, whenever he heard or read another person’s account of his or her having read one or another book of fiction, he supposed that he was the only person who remembered having read fiction in the way that he remembered it. Whenever he remembered his having read one or another passage in one or another book, he remembered not the words of the passage but the weather during the hour when he had read the passage, the sights or sounds that he had seen or heard around him from time to time while he read, the textures of the cushions or curtains or walls or grasses or leaves that he had reached for and had touched from time to time while he read, the look of the cover of the book containing the passage and of the page or pages where the passage had been printed, and especially the images that had appeared in his mind while he had read the passage and the feelings that he had felt while he had read.

Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned in the first paragraph of this section of this story, he remembered himself as sitting on a patch of green lawn among green shrubs in the yard behind the house in the outer northern suburb of Melbourne where he lived with his wife and their two children and as seeing in his mind among many other images an image of grey-blue roofs of houses, each of several storeys, which image he understood to be an image of a certain suburb of the city of Paris, which he had never visited, and an image of a margin of green around part of the area of grey-blue, which image he understood to be an image of part of the forest that surrounded part of the suburb of Paris. Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction just mentioned, he remembered himself as believing, while he read the passage that the insect that was needed to bring to the flower of the rare plant exposed in a certain courtyard in the suburb just mentioned a certain grain of pollen kept mostly to the forest just mentioned but would bring the grain of pollen on some day in the future from deep inside the forest and so would cause to be fertilised the plant that had remained for so long unfertilised.

(The writer of this piece of fiction has just now looked through the early pages of the section with the title ‘Cities of the Plain’ in each of the two English translations that he has read of À la recherche du temps perdu but has found no reference to any view of any part of any forest seen or remembered or imagined by the narrator of the section.) Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having seen in his mind soon after he had seen the margin of green an image of a photograph he had once seen of part of the green grass and the white railings of the racecourse of Longchamps and a caption explaining among other things that the racecourse was in the Bois de Boulogne.

Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered whenever he read in that passage the references to the character mostly referred to as M. de Charlus the notions that he, the chief character, had had as a boy and later as a young man about the men referred to as bachelors. One of these notions was that each of these men had wanted as a young man to marry a certain young woman but that she had not wanted to marry him and that this had brought so much unhappiness to the young man that he had never afterwards approached a young woman. Another of these notions was that each of these men had fallen in love as a young man with an image of a young woman in his mind but had never met an actual young woman who was sufficiently like the young woman in his mind for him to want to approach her.

Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered while he read that he had often supposed as a boy and as a young man that he would be a bachelor throughout his life.

Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered while he read certain events that had led to his learning on a certain afternoon in a certain clearing on a hillside covered with forest that he would not be a bachelor in the future, which events may be summarised as follows.

During his twenty-seventh year, when he had passed more than half of the subjects of a degree of bachelor of arts, he was promoted in the department where he worked to an editorial position on a publication with the title Our Forests. His duties were wholly editorial; he was not required to visit any of the places that were the subjects of articles or illustrations in Our Forests. However, he now worked on a higher floor of the building where he had worked for nearly ten years, and his desk was near a window with a view to the north and the north-west, and on clear days he could see the blue-black ridge of Mount Macedon.

During one of the first mornings that he spent at his new workplace, he overheard a young woman he had never previously seen explaining to a young woman at a desk near his desk that she, the young woman he had never previously seen, would not be able to attend a party she had been invited to on the forthcoming Saturday evening because she would be doing during the following weekend what she did on many another weekend, which was to travel by train to the district in Gippsland where she had formerly lived and to spend the weekend on the dairy farm in that district where her parents lived with her three younger sisters.

During the days following the morning just mentioned, he learned the name of the young woman just mentioned and the whereabouts of the desk where she worked and he found opportunities for observing her and for listening to her conversations with other young women. The young woman did not resemble any image of any young woman that he had fallen in love with in his mind during his lifetime, but an image of her face had begun to appear in his mind soon after he had first seen her, and he supposed that he was about to experience once again the series of states of feeling that he had not experienced during the four years and more since he had gone with the young woman mentioned previously to a race-meeting at Caulfield.

He was no longer interested in his studies at the university but he intended to finish his degree for the sake of his career, as he had begun to call what he had previously called his job. When he had joined the state public service fewer than ten years before, most of his seniors had seemed to be grey-haired men, but younger men and even a few women had lately been promoted to responsible positions. Some of these people dressed and conducted themselves as though they wanted to be mistaken for persons in private enterprise, which was the name that public servants used for the world outside their office buildings. He, the chief character, knew he would never want to go along with anything that his workmates considered fashionable – he was already known among them as an eccentric – but he was confident that his degree and his thoroughness with paperwork would earn him promotions up to a certain level. He did not want to reach a position in which, to use the language of his place of work, he would be expected to formulate policy; he wanted to make his career at the highest level at which, to use the same language, policy was implemented. In his most frequent daydream of himself in his mid-thirties and later, he was the editor of publications in the department where he had worked for six of his eight years as a public servant. In that position, he would choose and edit for publication reports and articles and photographs and diagrams from foresters and technical officers and scientists all over Victoria. He would commission staff from his own office sometimes to travel far from Melbourne. He himself would hardly ever leave Melbourne. Years would pass, and the glass display case in his office would be filled with sample copies of the issues he had edited of Our Forests, each cover showing an aerial view of forested hills or mountains or a glade or a clearing or a track or a road in a forest or, sometimes, a single tree. One cover would surely show blackened trees after a fire. He would enjoy correcting a visitor sometimes when the visitor had said that he, the editor, must have seen a good few forests in his time. He would take pride in being the sort of expert who understood his subject from a distance.

One reason for his not wanting to be a formulator of policy was that he supposed such a person would use by day the energy that he, the chief character, used of an evening and wanted to go on using. Whenever he was not reading or writing in order to achieve a safe pass in the subject he was currently studying at the university, he was trying to be a Helvetian, which task he expected would take up most of his time away from work during the rest of his working life. Even as a child, he had ceased to hope that he would see again in his mind the scenery of the place that he afterwards thought of as True Helvetia, and he had still been a child when he learned in which country of the actual world a postage stamp had once been issued with the word Helvetia on it. Yet, the word Helvetia was often in his mind during his later life. Even though he sometimes saw behind the word a vague outline of steep, forested mountains with grassy valleys deep among them, he meant by Helvetia at different times many other kinds of place. Until a certain evening, which will be mentioned in the following paragraph, his trying to be a Helvetian was no more than his going on with his search for what he had earlier called precious knowledge. He carried on this search mostly by looking into books but sometimes by trying to write poems.

During the evening mentioned above, he had reached, as he often did, the point of admitting that he would never write a poem likely to be found suitable for publication in any of the periodicals that he sometimes sent a poem to. The words in which he admitted this to himself included an expression to the effect that there was no place where his poems might be published. The word place stayed in his mind for a few moments, and its staying there seemed to him afterwards the nearest thing to an explanation for his deciding at the end of those few moments that he would have been a published poet if he had lived in Helvetia.

Soon after he had made the decision just mentioned, he decided that he was an inhabitant of Helvetia (and, of course, a published poet of that country) for as long as he was at his desk and writing poetry. Soon afterwards again, he decided that he was a Helvetian for as long as he happened to be thinking of himself as a writer of poems or thinking of any word or phrase from his poetry. Soon afterwards again, he decided that any image appearing in his mind while he wrote any word or phrase of a poem or while he read afterwards any such word or phrase was an image of a person or a place or a thing in Helvetia.

He began to write poetry every evening. He took even more care with his poems than previously, being aware that every line, as soon as he had thought of it as finished, became part of the latest volume from one of the foremost poets in Helvetia.

He was writing his Helvetian poetry during the evenings of the days when he was observing the young woman mentioned earlier, but he sometimes put aside his poetry to study maps borrowed from the collection in the library of the department where he worked. The maps were detailed maps of the district where the parents of the young woman lived, so she had told him one day when he had spoken to her as one workmate to another. The district seemed to consist of plains, with hills to the south – the same hills that covered much of Gippsland – and to the north the first of the mountains that covered most of eastern and north-eastern Victoria.

On a certain Saturday afternoon in the winter of his twenty-seventh year, he sat with the young woman mentioned in the previous paragraph in an enclosure of green canvas called a private box at Moonee Valley Racecourse. From where they sat, he and she could see across a wide valley through which the Monee Ponds Creek flowed, although it was out of their sight at the far side of the racecourse. Except for the large green rectangle of the racecourse, most of the floor of the valley and all that they could see of its sides were closely covered by the older sorts of houses of the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. When he and the young woman looked out across the racecourse from their private box, they were looking in the direction of Mount Dandenong, far to the east, but they could see no further in that direction than the far side of the valley where the creek flowed and the racecourse lay.

For several weeks past, he had been sitting or walking with her for a few minutes on each fine day in the gardens near their office building. He was puzzled at how calm he was in her company. He thought this might have been because he himself had grown older by five years since he had last approached a young woman. But he thought of other possible reasons: he had not yet fallen in love with the image of her face in his mind, although he often saw the image in his mind; she was five years younger than he; he thought of himself from time to time as a poet of Helvetia.

He had at first asked her to go with him to a race meeting at Sandown Racecourse, which had recently been built on a site near the site of the racecourse of the same name mentioned earlier, but she had told him that she was already obliged to return to her parents’ house on the weekend of the meeting at Sandown. He had not been troubled at having to put off their first outing. Her returning so often to her parents’ farm told him that she had no boyfriend in Melbourne, and he imagined her spending her weekends on the dairy-farm in Gippsland with only her parents and sisters for company.

More than six months later, she told him that she had, in her words, gone out with a man nearly ten years older than herself on some of the weekends when she was staying in Gippsland. The man was managing and would later inherit his father’s farm. The man and his parents had been friends of her parents for many years. The man had been interested in her since she had left school four years previously and had asked her out whenever he had broken off with a girlfriend. She, the young woman who told this later to the chief character, had never been seriously interested in the farmer. She had always hoped that she would meet in Melbourne a man who could talk to her about many more things than a farmer could talk about. She had stopped going out with the farmer as soon as she had been sure that he, the chief character, had been seriously interested in her. When she had told the farmer that she would not be going out with him again, he had told her that he had been preparing to ask her in the near future to marry him, but this had not changed her mind.

During the afternoon in the private box at Moonee Valley, he told her that his father and his mother had both been the children of farmers in the district of mostly level grassy paddocks that covered most of the south-west of Victoria and reached all the way to some places where the western suburbs of Melbourne had long since been built and might be said to have reached as far as the Moonee Ponds Creek, so that he, the chief character, and she, the young woman, might have been sitting at that moment at the easternmost extremity of his native plains and looking towards the creek where they finally ended. She told him that the district of Gippsland where her father owned a dairy farm was mostly level and grassy but that she could remember having lived as a young child among steep and bare green hills in a district in the south of Gippsland, which district had been covered in forests until the first settlers had arrived and had cut down every tree. She told him further that her father had settled in the mostly level district where he now lived in the early 1950s, when that district had been turned into what was then called a soldier-settlement area, with large estates being divided into small farms watered by irrigation channels.

During the six months following the afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, he and the young woman went together to a number of restaurants and cinemas and theatres and race meetings and football matches and cricket matches on Saturday afternoons or evenings and afterwards sat alone together in the front seat of the late-model Chrysler Valiant that he had recently bought, which was the first motor car that he had owned. When they sat alone together in the car just mentioned, it was parked in the street outside the block of flats where the young woman shared with three other young women from country districts of Victoria a flat with two bedrooms. The flat was in the eastern suburb of Melbourne that was mentioned in the first section of this piece of fiction and was only a few blocks to the west of a house mentioned earlier: the house where an aunt and an uncle of the chief character had a certain picture hanging on one of the walls of their house. During the six months mentioned above, he took the young woman several times to visit his parents on a Sunday afternoon, but he did not take her to visit his mother’s sister in the house that he himself had visited on many Sundays between the ages of about four and fourteen. As he had grown older, he had felt more sure that he was the son of his father and of his father’s people rather than of his mother and her people. Even though he no longer considered himself a Catholic and stayed in his room on Sunday mornings while his parents and his younger brother went to Mass, he still spent a week of his holidays each year in the south-western town where his unmarried aunts and his bachelor-uncle lived and he called on them every day during that week. His aunts and his uncle were Catholics, not so much from intellectual conviction, so he thought, as from their concern for the past. Their parents had died before he, the chief character, was twenty years of age, but the house was still furnished as the parents had furnished it, and most of the books and ornaments had either belonged to the parents or been acquired by the aunts and the uncle when they were children. He, the chief character, found all of this interesting, whenever he visited the house, but he never forgot that the house was only a sort of reconstruction of what was always spoken of as the old house. They had left the old house and had moved to the house in the town when he was only five years old, but he had several clear memories from his visits to the old place. He often remembered part of an afternoon when he had sat beside one of his aunts while she read to him extracts from the book Bevis, by Richard Jefferies. He and his aunt sat on a cane couch on the side veranda of the house. Beyond the veranda was a lawn of buffalo grass with a mauve-flowered veronica bush in a circular bed. Beyond the lawn was a hedge of wormwood. While he sat beside his aunt he was unable to see over the hedge, but from time to time he had stood on the seat of the couch and had looked again across the mostly level grassy paddocks towards the line of trees in the distance. And yet, he would not have felt comfortable visiting his uncle and his aunts with the young woman. In the past, he had not felt comfortable in their house whenever he was in love, even if only with an image in his mind.

On each evening when he sat alone with the young woman in the parked car outside her flat, he had asked her beforehand how many of the young women she called her flatmates were at that time in the flat and he had always been told that one or more of the young women was there. Towards the end of the six months mentioned in the previous paragraph, when he believed that he was in love with the young woman and when he suspected that the young woman was in love with him, and when he had become more bold with the young woman than he had previously become or had expected to become with any young woman, and when he wanted to be alone with her in a place more private and comfortable than a parked car in a street of an inner suburb, he asked her whether he and she could visit her family in Gippsland at some weekend in the future and whether he and she could go together on an outing on the Saturday or the Sunday of the weekend to some clearing in a forest.

At the desk where he worked during each week, he had looked over large-scale maps of every district of Victoria; had noted the areas covered by forest in each district; and had even noted the roads and tracks leading into those forests and the places beside the roads and tracks where persons were permitted to light fires for picnics or to camp overnight. He had even, as mentioned earlier in this section of this story, studied on a map the part of Gippsland where the parents of the young woman lived on their dairy farm. And yet, whenever he talked to the young woman during the six months mentioned above, he saw again in his mind one or another of the images that he had seen in his mind as a boy whenever he had tried to see Gippsland in his mind. And whether he saw Gippsland as the one forest with only a few tracks or roads leading into it or whether he saw it as bare green hills with isolated stands of blackened trunks of trees, he still sometimes saw as part of the image in his mind a few blue-grey ridges of mountains in the far background.

On a certain Friday evening in his twenty-seventh year, he drove his Chrysler Valiant with the young woman sitting beside him through the outer south-eastern suburb of Dandenong and into Gippsland, which he had never previously entered. The sun was already going down when he saw the first green countryside between Hallam and Narre Warren, and the sky was dark before he had reached Drouin, but he learned during his first hour in the region that Gippsland contained among its green hills many more stands of timber and patches of forest than he had supposed. He arrived at the young woman’s home long after dark. Her parents were wary of him. She whispered to him afterwards that they would have preferred him to be a farmer rather than an office worker. He wished that he could have stood on his dignity with her parents – perhaps by reminding himself that he was one of the outstanding young poets of Helvetia – but he smiled and spoke politely in their presence before they went in to the front room to watch television and left him and the young woman to have a late meal in the kitchen.

He slept in the tiny bedroom that belonged to the young woman, while she slept in the room that was shared by her younger sisters, one of whom was away from home while she trained to become a nursing sister. He woke up early, at the time when the young woman’s father was moving around before he went out to do the milking. He, the chief character, stepped to the window and saw in the distance a line of mountains still grey-black in the light before sunrise. He supposed that he was looking north-west and that the mountains were among the many folds of mountains that had been out of his sight in the far distance when he had looked eastwards from Mount Donna Buang nearly ten years before.

On that Saturday and on several of the remaining Saturdays before the end of his twenty-seventh year, he and the young woman set out in his motor car late in the morning on what she told her parents and her sisters was a picnic. On each of those Saturdays, he and she travelled during the middle of the day across mostly level grassy countryside and then between farms bordered by stands of timber or even by what seemed the edges of the same forest that covered the mountains far ahead of them. On each of those Saturdays he steered his motor car to one or another place that she had described to him beforehand as a peaceful and unfrequented place on the outskirts of the mountains, and he and she ate and drank and were alone together and surrounded by thick stands of timber on land that sloped upwards on either side, but he did not seem afterwards to have travelled into the blue-grey mountains that were visible from all over the mostly level and grassy district where the young woman lived and also, so she told him, from certain other districts of Gippsland.

During much of the time while he and she travelled to and from the places mentioned in the previous paragraph and while they were alone together in those places, he told her such things as that he had once tried to write a poem as a result of his having seen from a great distance certain blue-grey mountains in a district that he had believed at the time to be a part of Gippsland, which mountains, so he now understood, were among the folds of mountains that would surely have been visible from a great distance if he and she were able to stand on the summit of the tallest of the blue-grey mountains visible from her district and to look in the direction of the mountains visible from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. During much of the time mentioned in the previous sentence, she told him such things as that she had written a number of poems and stories when she was in her thirteenth year, which poems and stories were intended to report and to interpret certain events in the lives of certain husbands and wives and children whom she imagined as living for the most part contentedly among the folds of bare green hills that she imagined as extending far away in every direction from the bare green hills of the district of Gippsland where she lived at that time.

On a certain Saturday soon after the beginning of his twenty-eighth year, when the weather was so dry and so hot that the newspapers and the news bulletins on radio and television contained warnings that bushfires might break out in any district of Victoria, he and she set out in his motor car in mid-morning along a route that he had chosen without consulting her, which route had seemed likely, when he had studied it previously on a large-scale map used by the senior officers at his place of work, to lead him far into a district that was unquestionably part of the mountains that seemed always blue-grey from a distance. At about midday, he steered his motor car away from a certain red-gravel road that he had already followed for some distance away from a certain main road and began to steer the motor car along a track marked only by two wheel-ruts leading in among dense forest. At a certain point along the track just mentioned, he stopped his motor car a little to one side of the track, in the clearing that was mentioned in the eighth paragraph of this section of this story. The land was so steep on either side of the clearing and the trees around were so dense and so tall and he had travelled for such a distance from the nearest main road that he could not doubt that he was in a place that would have appeared from a distance as part of a range of blue-grey mountains. He and she ate and drank in that place and were alone together there, but the writer of this story will report no more of what passed between them than the writer of the book of fiction mentioned earlier in this section of this story would have reported of what passed between the characters known mostly as M. de Charlus and M. Jupien if he, the writer, had not contrived a means for himself, in the person of the narrator, to listen through a wall of the room where they were alone together in rooms opening off the courtyard where the orchid mentioned previously had been for so long exposed, which courtyard appeared in the mind of the chief character of this story, whenever he remembered his having read the first paragraphs of ‘Cities of the Plain’, as a clearing surrounded by ridges and slopes and valleys of blue-grey partly surrounded by a margin of green.

On a certain Saturday morning in the autumn of the year mentioned in the previous paragraph, he and she went together into a jewellery shop in a city in the region of Gippsland and were met by appointment by a young woman who called herself the manageress and who was a stranger to him, the chief character, but who had been a schoolfriend of the young woman beside him. While she and he were in the jewellery shop, they accepted the congratulations of the manageress on having become engaged to be married and then chose one of the rings from a tray of engagement rings that the manageress had put in front of them, which rings she said she had set aside for the young woman because the stone in each ring was an emerald and because she, the manageress, had always considered that the young woman’s special gem should have been the emerald.

More than twenty years after the events reported in the previous paragraph, when he was employed in a position such as he had looked forward as a young man to occupying, although he was in a different building and in a different department from those in which he had expected to remain and spent his days supervising publications to do with the restoring of salty soils by means including the planting of many thousands of trees in parts of inland Victoria, and when he went to a race meeting every Saturday and tidied the garden around his house every Sunday morning, he would spend most Sunday afternoons sitting in front of his bookshelves and trying to see in his mind the titles and the authors’ names and even some of the contents of the books that would have comprised his library if he had been sitting at that moment in his home on the grasslands of Helvetia. He was not an unhappy or a disappointed man, but he believed his wife, who often went with him to the races and who always worked with him in the garden, and their son and daughter, who were successful as students and seemed stable and contented persons, would have been surprised to know what he thought about on Sunday afternoons.

Even to his wife and children he had sometimes said that Sunday afternoon was the saddest time of the week: the time when you had to admit that you were no more than the person you were. To himself he would have added that Sunday afternoon was the time when he tried to understand how he had come to be who he was and where he was rather than someone else in some other place. And to himself he might have added further that Sunday afternoon was the time when he was sometimes for a moment, and despite everything that had happened to him in the course of what he called his life, a much published and much renowned poet in Helvetia.

Many a child had learned the trick, so he supposed, of saying his name aloud again and again until it seemed no longer his and he wondered what his true name was. The same child had surely also stared at his image in a mirror in order to confuse himself, he thought. And he believed he was only one of many who could hardly recognise their own drab backyards when they looked at the ordered greenery in a corner of the backyard of some family snapshot. But not so many people, he thought, might have learned his trick of bringing to the foreground of his mind an image that had been for long in the background of his mind but had often taken his notice and of then watching the image until it became another image, which other image was often of something Helvetian and might have been for long in the foreground of his mind if he had lived in Helvetia. One of the first images that he watched in this way was the image in his mind of the green stone in the engagement ring that his wife sometimes wore and sometimes kept in her wardrobe, which image would always become, as it approached the foreground of his mind, an image of a zone of green surrounded by a broad margin of grey-blue.

In the Heytesbury Forest

All around the large town in the south-west of Victoria where his unmarried aunts and his bachelor-uncle lived and where he visited them every year as a boy and as a young man and occasionally during later years before the last of them had died, the countryside was mostly level and grassy. In any view of paddocks or farms from a road or a railway line, one or more plantations of cypress would appear as a green-black stripe or stripes against the yellow-green of the grass, but he often travelled for several miles without seeing a gum tree. All through his childhood, he supposed that the countryside where his father claimed to belong had been hardly less bare of trees when the first Europeans had arrived there a hundred and a few more years before. His father often said that he preferred his native district to all others, but he never spoke as though the grassiness or the levelness had sometimes moved him; he seemed to be attached to that district only because his grandfather had chosen to settle there in the 1870s. He, the chief character, from the first years that he could remember until he was almost in his middle age, felt attached to his father’s district, but he, the chief character, believed he had loved the sight of the level and mostly grassy countryside since the time when he had visited as a small child the so-called old house, which had been on a treeless plain with the cliffs of the Southern Ocean as one horizon and a horizon of grass in every other direction except for a quarter in the south-east, where a distant line of trees was visible.

First his father and then his mother died while he was still not fifty years of age. He felt as though he knew much about his father’s childhood from having seen the house surrounded by grassy paddocks where his father had lived until he was twenty years of age and from hearing from his, the chief character’s, unmarried aunts and bachelor-uncle accounts of his father as a boy. But after his, the chief character’s, mother had died, he began to reflect on how little he knew of her early years. He knew that she had been born and had spent her first twelve years in a small town surrounded by grassy countryside on the main road leading inland from the large town mentioned several times previously in this story. She had occasionally told him, when he was a child himself, of something that had happened to her at home or at school in the small town, and even though he had only once travelled through the small town in his bachelor-uncle’s utility truck, he, the chief character, had easily imagined the small town in the wide, bare countryside while his mother was talking to him. But whenever he tried to think of his mother from the age of twelve onwards, he became aware of a strange fault in the image that he had in his mind of the south-west of Victoria.

In every image in his mind of the grassy countryside that extended far around the large town mentioned earlier, he saw the countryside as a topographical map with the viewer looking from west to east, or from the vicinity of the large town towards Melbourne, which was, however, some 250 kilometres away. In every such image, the grassy countryside ended in the far background at a line of trees, and these trees seemed always as far away from the viewer as the line of trees had seemed far away from him, the chief character, in the view that he remembered having seen from the so-called old house of his father’s family. He understood that these trees were the nearest to view of the trees of a huge expanse of forest. He understood that he had heard this forest talked about often when he had visited his father’s relatives – they called it mostly the Bush, although his father sometimes called it the Heytesbury. He, the chief character, understood that the forest was far larger than the expanse of grassy countryside that he considered to be the surroundings of the large town mentioned previously or to be his father’s native district. He, the chief character, understood that he had often seen in his mind an image of the western half of Victoria as though he was looking at it from a point in the upper air above Bass Strait, and that the forest in this image was a huge zone of a blue-black colour whereas the grassy countryside was a narrow margin of yellow-green on the far side of the blue-black. He understood that he had visited several places in the forest on several different occasions while he was a boy and that he had kept in his mind ever since a number of images of meaning. He understood all these matters, but he could never remember anything of the several journeys that he must have made from the grassy countryside into the forest. He would have been interested to remember how the forest had appeared from the nearest grassy paddocks or how he had felt as he passed from countryside into forest or out again from the forest afterwards but he could only remember being far inside the forest or far out in the grassy countryside. And in his memories of being far inside the forest, he seemed unaware that the forest gave way in certain quarters to grassy countryside, just as in his memories of being out in the grassy countryside the forest was no more than a line of trees on the horizon.

In his middle age, and at a time later than the last of the events that will be reported in this section of this story, he remembered that he had seen, while he travelled through the forest, paddocks and whole farms cleared of trees and scrub and sown with grass and that he had passed through several small towns in the forest but that he had always remembered the farms and the towns afterwards as mere glades. He remembered likewise that he had sometimes seen in the grassy countryside a patch of scrub along a roadside or a stand of trees in a corner of a paddock, but that he had never thought of these as remnants of larger areas, preferring to suppose that seeds from the forest were sometimes spread by the wind or by birds. At the time when he remembered that he had thought thus, he remembered also one of the few remarks that his bachelor-uncle had ever made to him on the subject of sexual morality. His uncle had said something such as that if he had not been lucky enough to have had a Catholic upbringing, he would have dashed into the nearest scrub with one or another young woman as soon as he had become old enough, just as the other young men of the district were doing. When he, the chief character, remembered this remark at the time mentioned in the previous sentence, he wondered why he had not wondered at the time of his hearing the remark why his uncle had spoken as though a patch of scrub grew conveniently close to the homes of each young couple who wanted to dash into it whereas according to his, the chief character’s, image of the countryside, any such couple might have had to travel for many miles in search of the scrub they needed unless they had used for their purposes what he had always supposed were used for such purposes, namely the places where the grass of the countryside grew longest.

From the age of twelve, his mother had lived in the forest. Her father, who had been until then a share-farmer or a farm labourer, had obtained in the year 1930 a block, as it was called, of several hundred acres from the Government of Victoria, together with a grant of money to buy stock and tools and a simple house as soon as he had cleared the first of his land, which had at first been covered by scrub and timber. He was expected to pay for the land and to pay back in the future the grant of money, but no repayments were due for the first ten years. He, the chief character, learned none of these details from his mother. All that she had told him was that she had lived for some years from the age of twelve on a bush block at a place that she named, which place he had learned from a map was deep inside the forest mentioned earlier. He did not learn the details of the obtaining of the block until he read a few months after the death of his mother a book that he had bought fifteen years earlier but had only looked into during those fifteen years, which book will be mentioned again before the end of this story.

He had never known how long his mother had lived in the forest. He had never learned where or when his parents had first met. This event could have taken place in the forest, since his father had sometimes worked there as a young man, as will be mentioned later in this story. Or, they could have met in the large town surrounded by grassy countryside, where both his father and his mother stayed from time to time as young persons with uncles and aunts. Or, his mother and his father might not have met until two or three years before he was born, in which event they would have met in a certain inner-western suburb of Melbourne where each of them worked in one or more factories during the late 1930s.

One or another reader may have been surprised not to read any reference in the previous sentence to the marriage of the parents of the chief character of this story. The wife of the chief character and one or another of his friends had sometimes been surprised when he told them that he had never been told by either of his parents when or where they had met or any details of their courtship or when or where they had been married. He had never doubted for a moment that his parents, who had been faithful Catholics for as long as he had known them, had been married in a Catholic church. And he had understood for most of his life that he could have obtained from the appropriate office of the Government of Victoria a copy of his parents’ certificate of marriage. But he had decided as a young man that he was not going to pay a group of strangers to impart to him information that his parents should have been able to impart to him free of charge. He had decided further that he was not going to ask either of his parents to impart to him information that most parents, so he believed, would have been pleased to impart to a child without having first to be asked. And so, he was able to say after he had seen to the burial of both his parents before he had reached his fiftieth year, that he had still not learned how those two had become his parents and that he expected to know no more of the matter before one or both of his own children or his widow, as she would then be, saw to his own burial.

He had sometimes speculated that his parents might have been ashamed of the poverty of their wedding, but his mother had not been reluctant to talk about her poverty as a young woman: about how she had bought second-hand shoes and dresses during the first years after she had arrived in the inner-western suburb from the south-west. His father had told him, the chief character, of how he, the father, had worked for two years without pay on his father’s farm when the price of butter fell to sixpence per pound during the Depression and of how the trousers of his only suit of clothes had been so short around his ankles and the sleeves of his jacket so short around his wrists at that time that he had kept away from the dances in his district and had slunk into the back seat of the church each Sunday. Both parents had told him, the chief character, that they had been renting a room with a double bed in a boarding house when he had been born and for six months afterwards. After his parents had died, he thought of their silence about their courtship and marriage as something he would never be able to explain to himself any more than he could explain why he could never remember having approached the forest from the grassy countryside or the grassy countryside from the forest or having passed from one into the other.

His mother had told him a few things about her life in the Bush, as she had called it. She had been taken away from school at the age of thirteen, even though she was required by law to attend until she had turned fourteen. The school had been so remote and the teacher so careless of his duties that several children had left early to work on their parents’ blocks. His mother had worked for six days each week and for some years doing what was regarded by the settlers on the blocks as the lighter clearing tasks; her job was to search the cleared paddocks for seedlings of trees or for young shrubs and the outer margins of those paddocks for roots of bracken that had crept through from the forest on the other side and then to grub out the intruding plants with a pick and to make heaps of them in certain places and later, when the heaps had dried, to set fire to them. His mother’s only recreation as a girl and a young woman, so it seemed to him from the little that she told him, was to attend a dance that was held on many a Saturday evening in the school that she had formerly attended. On the evening of a dance, she and her brothers and sisters would walk together to the school, which was three miles from their home. They would take turns to carry a lantern and a sack containing each person’s shoes and socks and some rags. They walked barefoot along the roads, some of which were mere ruts filled sometimes with dust and at other times with water. Outside the school, they would wipe their feet with the rags and would then put on their socks and shoes for the dance. What troubled the young persons most on their way to and from the dance were leeches and prickly Moses. Sometimes the lantern would be blown out by the wind, or the person holding the lantern would hold it so that it failed to shine on the road. At such times his mother had more than once cut her feet on the sharp vine that they called prickly Moses or had stepped into a rut filled with water and had had a leech fasten itself to her skin without her knowing it.

He had never seen the farm that his mother had helped to clear in the forest. Since her father had worked in later years as a labourer in the large town mentioned often previously, he, the chief character, had supposed that his mother’s father had given up after a time his effort to clear his block in the forest. He, the chief character, had further supposed that some other person had later undertaken to clear, with the help of his family, the same block and to meet the conditions laid down by the Government of Victoria. But despite his supposing this, he, the chief character, had throughout his life imagined the bracken that his mother had grubbed out of the edges of paddocks as having later spread unchecked and the scrub as having taken the place of the grass in the paddocks, and saplings as having grown up among the scrub, and the whole of the so-called block that was required to have been cleared as having become again forest before the end of his mother’s life.

He had never seen the place that his mother had helped to clear in the forest, but he had seen as a child two other partly cleared blocks in the forest. One of his mother’s married sisters lived for a few years in the 1940s with her husband and their children on a small farm in the forest. He, the chief character of this story, remembered this farm for the first time in many years on a certain day in the early 1990s, which day will be mentioned before the end of this section of this story. On many a day after the day just mentioned, he remembered many details of the farm and of the persons who lived there, but he could not remember his having travelled to the farm from the grassy countryside further south-west, as he knew he must have travelled; nor could he remember his having travelled from the farm back to the grassy countryside, as he knew he must have travelled. The farm was surrounded by forest, but he could not remember in the early 1990s whether his uncle, the husband of his mother’s sister, was renting the farm or on his way to owning the farm. What he chiefly remembered in the early 1990s are the details listed in the following four paragraphs.

The farm had been surrounded by forest. He had asked his cousins several times to take him a short distance into the forest, but none of them had been willing to do so. This and other matters had confirmed him in his thinking that his mother’s relatives were dull by comparison with his father’s people. One of the other matters just mentioned was the bareness of the house in the forest. He understood, of course, in the 1990s that his mother’s sister and her husband had been too poor even to furnish their house, which lacked such things as window-blinds and floor-coverings, but when he had visited their house as a child, he had been annoyed to find no books or toys such as he always found in the home of his father’s unmarried sisters and brother. He found, however, in the shabby house in the forest one thing that kept his interest for much of the time of his visit. He never learned from where his cousin had got the thing, but his girl-cousins kept on the front veranda a two-storey doll’s house. He seemed to remember forty and more years afterwards that the exterior was somewhat damaged and that some of the fittings were missing from outside the house, but he remembered in the 1990s the upper bedrooms that he had peered into and a certain single bed in one of the upper rooms. He had complained to his girl-cousins that a young female doll should have been sleeping in the bed, and he had even come back to the toy house several times during the day of his visit, hoping to see through the tiny unglazed windows that a girl-doll had turned back the quilt on the bed and had lain her head on the smooth, white pillow and was resting in safety.

At some time during the day of his visit to the farm in the forest, his uncle had invited him to watch while he, the uncle, fired his rifle at a small flock of eastern rosellas that he had seen in a tree at the edge of the forest. The birds were waiting, so his uncle had said, to fly down into the few fruit trees beside the house and to eat the fruit from the trees. He, the chief character, had watched while his uncle had fired the rifle. The uncle had announced that he had brought down a bird, although the chief character had not seen any bird fall from any tree. The uncle had then led him across the narrow paddock between the fruit trees and the edge of the forest. As he walked across the paddock the uncle had kicked at ankle-high clusters of green growth that was clearly not grass. He had explained to the chief character that the farm would never be properly cleared for as long as seeds and suckers from the forest could get into the paddock. He, the chief character, thought of the clusters of shoots and suckers and seedlings as stands of regrowth forest or of tall scrub in grassy countryside in the eyes of persons small enough to live in the house of two-storeys whose upper windows he had looked through.

The rosellas had been perched in a tree that grew just outside the boundary of the farm, but the body of the dead bird had fallen just inside the boundary-fence. His uncle had turned the body over with the toe of his boot. When his uncle was looking elsewhere, he, the chief character, had crouched beside the body and had stroked with a fingertip the place low on the belly of the bird where a zone of bright green feathers adjoined a zone of dark-blue feathers.

One of his girl-cousins had a face of the kind that he had fallen in love with often in the later years of his childhood, but he understood, even as a young child, that he ought not to think of a first-cousin as even a wife-in-his-mind. And even if he had not understood this, he would have supposed that he could not have seen the face of his cousin in his mind for long before he perceived about her the dullness that he found in most of the people of his mother’s family.

The second of the two partly cleared blocks mentioned earlier he had seen when he was so young that he was never able in later years to connect his memories of the place. He could not remember how he got to the block or how he left the block. He could not remember any sequence of events from the time while he was at the block, which time he suspected to have been about a week. After his father and his mother had died, he recalled that he had never asked them to explain to him why they and he and his younger brother had lived for a week on the partly cleared block in the forest. One day after both their parents had died, he asked his younger brother whether he remembered having lived for a week in a hut with walls and roof of corrugated iron on a partly cleared block in a certain forest. His brother had thought that he, the chief character, was joking, but the brother was three years younger and presumably remembered nothing of their stay in the forest. After he had spoken to his brother, the chief character understood that he, the chief character, was the only person alive who remembered the partly cleared block in the forest as it had appeared during the few days nearly fifty years before when he had lived there.

The family had lived in the hut during a week of mostly hot weather in January. Every year, they spent a week of holidays with his father’s parents and unmarried sisters and brother. His, the chief character’s, few memories of the so-called old house were of an early holiday there, but later holidays were always spent in the house in the large town. Since his father had never owned a motor car, he, the chief character, saw the countryside only occasionally, when his bachelor-uncle drove one or two of the family out of the town in his utility truck. And yet, in one or another year of the 1940s, someone had driven him and his brother and his parents and, surely, some bedding and a suitcase of clothes and a few days’ supply of food away from the old house and across the grassy countryside towards the line of trees in the distance and then among the trees of the forest and then to the partly cleared block far inside the forest. (He supposed they had travelled from the old house. Since he remembered little of the trip and only a few details from the week in the forest, he supposed he was remembering a time before his grandfather had died and the old house was sold. If so, then he, the chief character, might have travelled to the block in the forest in the back seat of the huge Dodge sedan owned by his grandfather, with the gas-producer attached to the back to provide fuel during the years of petrol rationing.)

He did not know why his parents had chosen to spend their holiday in a hut with a dirt floor, hessian screens for windows, an open fireplace for cooking and no sink or wash-trough or bath or ice-chest or radio. He remembered that the block had belonged to his father’s father, but this explained nothing. Seemingly, the block had not been bought under the same conditions that applied to purchasers such as his mother’s father in 1930; the hut had been built, and the trees had been cleared for fifty yards around the hut, but no pasture had been sown, no animals grazed, and no fences had been built. And yet, his father had worked from early morning until late afternoon on every day of his stay, felling trees in the farthest part of the block, sawing the trunks and trimming the branches away, and then dragging and manhandling the logs into stacks as tall as himself. Perhaps, so the chief character supposed, his father had done all this work in the heat of January merely for the love of it. In later years, his father had seldom talked about the bush, but he, the chief character, was always able to remember the sound of his father’s voice on the day when they had been driven into the forest. His father had been pointing out to the driver or to his, the chief character’s, mother, or to both the stretches of the red gravel roads that he remembered having worked on during the year when he had worked as a young man with one of the gangs making roads through the forest. Perhaps, so the chief character supposed, his father had often dreamed of going back to the forest again. Perhaps the forest was the place where his, the chief character’s, father had met the young woman who later became his wife, he being at the time a farmer’s son working on a road gang and she being the daughter of a settler on a block in the forest.

Any of the preceding explanations was possible, he sometimes thought, but the most likely explanation had to do with the debts that his father owed throughout his life. He, the chief character, had never understood the details of his father’s loans from his father and some of his brothers and sisters but he, the chief character, knew that his father had paid back during his lifetime little of the money that he had borrowed. He had got into debt even before he was married. The western suburb where he lived when he first came to Melbourne was near Flemington Racecourse, and he had got to know several track-work riders and strappers and even a man who made his living as a commission agent for several trainers. He, the father, told little to his wife and children, but his son, the chief character, understood that his father had always bet beyond his means, that he had often bet on credit, that he had several times borrowed large sums against his share of his father’s estate, and that he had paid back none of this money before his father’s death. He, the chief character, supposed as the most likely explanation for his father’s cutting timber for a week on his own father’s block in the forest that he, the man who had got into debt, wanted to show his father that he was not an idler and, at the same time, to remit through his unpaid woodcutting and clearing some of the interest on his debts.

He, the chief character, sometimes entertained another possible explanation for his father’s having chopped wood for a week. His father, throughout his life, had devised impractical schemes for starting afresh. Even in his fifties, he made enquiries about a scheme for establishing farmers on a so-called land reclamation project near Esperance, in Western Australia. When he remembered his father standing beside the stacks of timber he had built and looking around the large clearing he had made in the forest, he, the chief character, supposed his father might have intended to turn the whole block into a farm and to settle there with his wife and his sons.

Each morning while they lived in the hut, his father left soon after breakfast. He walked away between the trees in the direction of the rear of the block, following a track that was wide enough for a motor vehicle. He, the chief character, understood that a truck had been driven into the forest from time to time in the past in order to collect timber from trees that had been felled. He was not allowed to walk along the track into the trees. On the one day when he had seen his father at work and the stacks of timber, he and his brother had been led along the track by their mother. He, the chief character, spent much of his time laying out a network of toy farms on the outer edge of the clearing around the hut. In order to make the ground smooth for his toy roads and fences and farmhouses, he had to pull out of the ground some of the smaller grasses, but he left in the soil the larger clumps. He had learned on his first day on the block that one at least of the common plants there could slice through the skin of his hand and could draw blood.

Whenever he remembered his games during the years when he remembered the hut in the forest often after having seldom remembered it for many years, which years – the years of his remembering – followed an event that will be reported in the paragraph following the next paragraph, he supposed that he imagined himself during all of his games as living with one or another wife-in-his-mind on one of the toy farms that he had cleared near the toy forests that he had left uncleared. At some time during one of the years mentioned in the previous sentence, the chief character remembered having seen for a moment of the one day mentioned in the fifth sentence of the previous paragraph some of the blue or green feathers on the breast of a bird that flew through a shaft of sunlight in a place of dense timber and undergrowth beyond the clearing that his father had made in the forest. He, the chief character remembered his father telling him that the bird was one or another kind of kingfisher. After he had remembered these matters, the chief character sometimes saw in his mind as though they were details that he remembered images of a stream of water flowing through parts of the forest where his father had not yet gone.

On one of his last days in the hut, the weather was so hot that his mother told his father before he left that she was afraid a bushfire might break out somewhere in the forest that day. He, the chief character, watched the sky all day. In mid-afternoon, the sky to the south-east became filled with dark-grey clouds, but they were the clouds of a thunderstorm that broke over the forest soon afterwards. The sky was dark for half an hour during the storm, and the rain was so loud on the iron roof of the hut that he and his mother had to shout their words. He was afraid for his father, who was still out in the forest, and who might have been struck by lightning. But the storm ended suddenly, and the sky became a clear pale blue, and his mother led him and his brother a short way along the track while they looked out for their father. They saw him before he saw them. He looked old and dejected, but only because his hat and his clothes were wet and dripping and because he was looking downwards to avoid stepping into the pools of water in the wheel-ruts on the track between the trees.

At some time during the mid-1980s, he, the chief character, calculated that thirty years had passed since he had left school. He had never joined any organisation for old boys of his school, nor had he made any effort to stay in touch with any of his schoolfellows, but at the time just mentioned he decided that he would begin reading each day in the newspaper the column headed DEATHS, keeping his eye out for the first one or two of his contemporaries to have died in their early middle age. On a certain morning soon after the time just mentioned, his eyes were drawn towards a certain entry in one of the columns headed DEATHS, which entry had brought to his mind an impression first of what he called to himself afterwards prickliness and second of what he called to himself afterwards blackness. Each of these impressions was caused by a cluster of full points and upper-case letters in the entry. Both the full points and the upper-case letters had been used in the abbreviations placed after the names of members of religious orders of the Catholic Church. The entry was a report of the death of a man whose four sons had all become members of one or another religious order. The surname at the head of the entry was a most unusual surname, and he, the chief character, had suspected at once what he verified a moment later when he read through the whole text of the entry. The man who had died had been the father of four sons and two daughters. Each of the sons had become a member of a religious order of the Catholic Church, but each of the daughters had married and had become the mother of at least four children. One of the daughters had been, more than twenty-five years before, the young woman who had sat with the chief character in a private box at Caulfield Racecourse, as was reported in the section of this story headed with the words In the Blue Dandenongs.

After he had said goodbye to the young woman just mentioned, on a hillside in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne on a day in autumn more than twenty-five years before he would read the notice in the newspaper of the death of her father and in the circumstances reported earlier in this story, he and she merely nodded or murmured to one another if they happened to pass in the building where they both worked. Some months after they had gone together to Caulfield Racecourse, she was transferred to another department on another floor of the building where they both worked. A year or more later, he read in the publication that reported appointments and vacancies and such matters that she had resigned from the State Public Service. He learned soon afterwards from one of the young women in his office that the young woman who had resigned had done so because she had been recently married and because her husband was a farmer in a country district of Victoria. The young woman who gave him this information did not know which country district the married couple were now living in. However, the compiler of the notice of death mentioned earlier had followed the custom of inserting in parentheses after the given name of each of the daughters of the dead person both the married name of the daughter and the place where the daughter lived.

The married woman in early middle age who was the mother of at least four children but who had once been a young woman whose face had been the face of one of the wives-in-his-mind lived in a small town in the south-west of Victoria. He had never seen the small town. During the first fifteen years and more of his life, when he and his family used to travel each year to the south-west of Victoria for a week of holidays, the small town just mentioned did not exist. At that time, the place where the small town later stood was part of what he had thought of during his childhood as the forest – the only forest that he had known and the only forest that he had ever lived in.

At a certain moment on the day when he had been with his father in the place on the bush block where his father was felling trees, his father had looked all around him and had said that they were surrounded by miles of virgin forest. He, the chief character, had not known what his father had been thinking at that moment, and his father had soon afterwards begun to fell the next tree that he wanted to fell, but he, the chief character, had sometimes remembered during the following forty years and more of his life that he had only twice been in a place surrounded by virgin forest.

At different times during the years from the early 1960s onwards, he had read in newspapers or magazines or he had learned by other means that almost all of the Heytesbury Forest had been cleared and that grassy countryside and small towns had taken the place of what he had called as a child the forest or the bush. He had taken promotions in the State Public Service to branches unconnected with forests and Crown lands, and so he had nothing officially to do with the work of the Rural Finance and Settlement Commission. When he learned during the years mentioned above some further detail of the changing of the forest into grassy countryside, he had tried to remember the few details that he could remember of the forest, as he called it, and he had felt, while he had tried to remember those details, just as he had felt many times during his life whenever he had tried to see in his mind some detail of a landscape in Helvetia.

On a certain day in the early 1990s, several years after the latest event reported in this section or in any other section of this story, he attended the funeral of a cousin: the man who had been the boy-cousin mentioned in the first section of this story. During the 1980s and the 1990s, he, the chief character, had almost given up visiting his relatives on both his mother’s and his father’s side and had failed to attend the funeral of many an aunt or uncle or cousin. If anyone had asked him the reason for his seeming thus to have turned away from his relatives, he would have answered that he had become unable to travel. He could have justified this answer by pointing out that he had never travelled further than to Sydney and Adelaide, each of which cities he had visited only twice and many years ago; that he had never been in an aeroplane or a sea-going vessel; that he had not owned a motor car for many years; and that he had not left the suburbs of Melbourne since he had attended his mother’s funeral in the far south-west of Victoria and that he did not expect to leave them again. He kept to the suburbs of Melbourne, however, because he chose to do so. He was hoping to take early retirement from the State Public Service and afterwards to spend his days in writing the book that would confirm his reputation as the leading man of letters in Helvetia. He had come to recognise that the only subject he was able to write about was his own mind – and only in such a way that the only place where his writing might be found suitable for publication was Helvetia. In that country of paradoxes and enigmas and lacunae was his true readership. He had been preparing for many years to write the definitive work on his mind. At the time of the funeral mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph, what he called his notes filled several hanging files in a filing cabinet. The notes did not consist of consecutive paragraphs or pages of prose. He had done much writing, but it was all in the form of labels or detailed annotations for a series of more than a hundred maps. Each of these maps was itself an enlargement of one or another detail on an earlier map in the series, and the first map, from which all the other maps and all the text arose, was a simple representation looking more like a coat of arms than a map of any place on earth. The first map was an area of land roughly square in shape and divided per bend sinister into two triangles. The upper triangle was coloured a light green and the lower triangle was coloured a dark blue. Later maps were almost covered with paragraph after paragraph of his handwriting, but on the first map only four words were written. Beside the area of light green were the words GRASSY COUNTRYSIDE, and beside the area of dark blue were the words VIRGIN FOREST. He expected the literary critics of Helvetia to place many interpretations on his book and to find many themes running through it, but no reader could fail to understand, so he thought, that the chief character of the book often thought of his father’s family as being, among other things, bachelors and spinsters in their minds if not in their lives whereas he often thought of his mother’s family as being, among other things, early marriers and prolific breeders. He attended the funeral mentioned earlier in this paragraph because the church and the cemetery were both in an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne and because he had visited his cousin’s home often as a child.

After the funeral, he spent an hour in his cousin’s house in the outer eastern suburb mentioned above, which was in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges. The house was filled with mourners, but he recognised few of them. Some of the middle-aged persons around him, he knew, would have been among the many first cousins on his mother’s side that he had not seen for forty and more years. He was able to identify the men and women who had been the boys and girls when he had visited the farm in the forest mentioned earlier in this section of this story. The cousins recognised him, and each of them spoke a few polite words to him, but only one of them was willing to talk at length with him. He, the chief character, learned from this cousin, who had been a boy of about his own age on the day in the 1940s when he had visited the farm in the forest, that he, the cousin, could remember that his father had shot many rosellas and other birds that had come out of the forest and had eaten the fruit on his trees although he, the cousin, could not remember any doll’s house that his sisters had played with on the veranda of their house. In answer to a question from the chief character, the cousin said he and all but one of his brothers and sisters had married and had become the parents of at least four children each, although several of those who had married had since become separated or divorced. The exception was one of his sisters, a woman of about the same age as the chief character, who had never married or had a child but had lived with her parents while they were alive and now lived alone in the house where they had lived during their last years, which house was in a small town not previously mentioned in this story, which town was in the south-west of Victoria and far inland from the large town mentioned often previously.

In the Plenty Ranges

In a certain year in the late 1980s, the bachelor-uncle of the chief character died in a hospital in the large town where he had lived for the last forty years and more of his life. The chief character of this story did not attend the funeral of his uncle, which began in the Catholic church with the stained glass window containing the areas of blue and green mentioned earlier, but he had travelled by train to and from the large town two weeks before his uncle had died and had visited his uncle for an hour and more in the hospital where he was dying. During his visit, his uncle said that he, the chief character, had seemed like a son to him years earlier, when they had sat together in the bungalow and had talked about racing.

During the year after his bachelor-uncle had died, he, the chief character, received a legacy of several thousand dollars from his uncle’s estate. He, the chief character, paid half of this money into his and his wife’s joint account at the branch of a certain bank in their nearest shopping centre, which branch was the place where he and she had all of their bank accounts, after having told his wife that the value of his uncle’s legacy was half of the sum mentioned above. The other half of the legacy he hid as cash between the pages of one of the books on his shelves before he did with it what he is reported in the next paragraph as having done.

For many years, he and his fellow-workers in the State Public Service had been working according to a system whereby a person might work, for example, long hours on four days and then be free to work for only half of the fifth day. This was what he himself did every week. On his free half-day he was often alone in his house while his wife was at work and his children were at school. At such times he would sit in the room that he used as his office and would pull down the blinds and would put on a pair of earmuffs and would stare at the spine of some book the title of which he could not make out in the dim light and would try to think of himself as sitting in the library of his country estate in Helvetia. Soon after the events reported in the previous paragraph, he began to take his free half-day on each Friday afternoon. On the first such afternoon, he took the bank-notes mentioned earlier out of his book, put the notes in his pocket, and walked eastwards for two kilometres to the shopping centre in the suburb adjoining his own suburb. There, he went into the branch of the same bank that he had used for their own banking. He stood at the counter under the sign NEW ACCOUNTS. On the other side of the counter, a young woman wearing the grey-blue uniform of the bank got to her feet from behind her desk and walked towards him. What he thought when he saw the young woman’s face will be reported in the next paragraph. What happened between him and the young woman at the counter just mentioned was that he opened a new savings account, using his correct name and address and paying into the account all but a few hundred dollars of the cash from his uncle’s legacy, which he took out from his pocket in front of the young woman and counted in front of her. When the young woman asked him whether or not he had any other account with that bank, he told her the details of an account in his name alone at the branch in the suburb where he lived, but he did not tell her that he had two joint accounts with his wife at that branch.

He had kept up his interest in horse-racing, although he had stopped betting during his son’s and his daughter’s schooldays, when the family had often been short of money. During those years, he had devised a way of betting that he believed would return him a regular profit if ever he could acquire the thousand dollars and more that he needed for a betting bank. On the Friday afternoon when he walked to his neighbouring suburb, he intended only to use his uncle’s money to test the way of betting just mentioned without his wife’s protesting that the money could be put to a better use. Any profit that he made he intended to put back into his betting bank so that he could increase his stakes. If he continued to make a profit and to increase his stakes in this way, he would reveal to his wife what he had been doing and would retire early from the public service, using his income from racing to supplement his superannuation pension. When he saw the young woman who came to attend to him in the bank, he fell in love with her face at once and hoped while she was setting up his new account that she had taken him for a bachelor who had recently moved to that suburb, perhaps to live with his ageing parents, and whose chief interest was horse-racing. He watched her from under his eyebrows while she leaned forward to write and he decided that if she was working as a teller on any Friday afternoon when he came into the bank he would withdraw a large amount so that she would think of him as a fearless punter. He foresaw himself as keeping always in his pocket when he left for the bank on each Friday afternoon a large sum from his household account – not that he would use his or his wife’s salary for betting but so that he could deposit a large sum in his private account if he happened to find himself at the teller’s window where the young woman in front of him was working, and so that she would think of him as having won that money from betting. The things that he foresaw at the time just mentioned and the things that he decided at the same time to do in the future – these things he did from time to time during the next two years until he had failed to see the young woman mentioned above on so many consecutive Fridays that he had to conclude that she could not be merely on leave but must have left that branch. (He did not think of her as having transferred to another branch. He had not failed to notice that she had been promoted during the two years while he had watched her; he supposed that she had gone into the head office of the bank in Melbourne.) His way of betting proved neither profitable nor unprofitable; he would win for several weeks and would then lose what he had won before the cycle began again. But on the day in every month or more when he happened to meet at the teller’s station the young woman whose face he was in love with, he made either a large withdrawal or a large deposit. He had always assumed that a young female bank employee of ambition would never have set foot on any racecourse, and so he assumed that the racecourses where she sometimes saw him in her mind were imaginary. He felt entitled, therefore, whenever he was in her presence, to consider himself a professional punter of Helvetia.

He had never intended that the young woman mentioned in the previous two paragraphs should be in the least aware of any thought that he entertained in connection with her. When he first saw her and fell in love with her face, he felt as though he was no older than she and perhaps even a few years younger, but when he had recollected himself a few moments later, he was well aware that he was a man of almost fifty years while she was in her early twenties and not much older than his own daughter. During all the times when he was within sight of her, he tried never to have her catch him looking at her, but she sometimes seemed to know what he was about. He was afraid at first that her knowing he admired her would make her angry or embarrassed, but she seemed always calm when he was near her and watching her surreptitiously. Sometimes, when she was the teller who happened to serve him, she seemed to go out of her way to give him some extra piece of information about the symbols in the entry in his passbook or to explain to him some recent change in the routine of the bank. While she told him such things, she would look him in the eye and he would look at her as though this was one more dull moment in the business of his day, but in his mind he would be in Helvetia and listening to his wife-to-be while she declared herself to him.

Even when he was approaching the main street of the neighbouring suburb on the Friday afternoon mentioned previously, he had felt alert. He had travelled by motor car through the neighbouring suburb a few times previously, but he had never approached the suburb on foot. Both his suburb and the suburb he was approaching were filled with streets of houses and would have looked to many people indistinguishable. But as he walked he was aware that the land was rising. And when he reached the main street mentioned above, he saw that the street followed a slight ridge running from north to south. He stopped and looked around. He was still very much in a northern suburb of Melbourne, but when he faced north he seemed to be on the dividing line between two sorts of country. All around him to his right were valleys and hills, and even though suburbs whose names he knew covered both hills and valleys, the trees in the streets and the gardens of those suburbs and on the still unoccupied land were so thick that the whole landscape seemed more forest than suburbs. Across the horizon ahead of him was a steep blue line of mountains and hills that he had seen on nearly every day since he had come to live in the northern suburbs more than twenty years before – the Kinglake Ranges. Away to his right he saw a mountain that he had hardly ever seen from the suburbs of Melbourne. He had not known it was so clear to view from so near to his own home. Mount Dandenong was also clearly visible almost behind him to his right, but the mountain to his right was longer and higher and more impressive than Mount Dandenong, even though it was further away and its colour more grey-blue than the rich, dark blue of Mount Dandenong. The mountain to his right was Donna Buang. When he had looked all around him from the main street in his neighbouring suburb, he said in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story.

The four words just mentioned are from a note by the author at the front of the book An Afternoon of Time, by D.E. Charlwood, first published in 1966 by Angus and Robertson. He, the chief character of this story, had read the book soon after it was first published but had forgotten soon afterwards all of the experience of reading it except that he remembered for long afterwards that certain passages in the book had described the forests of the Otway Ranges and the countryside of the far west of Victoria. The forests of the Otway Ranges are the continuation of the east of the Heytesbury Forest, and the countryside of the far west of Victoria is the continuation to the west of the countryside in the south-west of Victoria. The only other words that the chief character of this story remembered afterwards from the book mentioned above are the four words quoted at the head of this section of this story. Soon after he had first read the words, the chief character looked at a number of maps of Victoria but could not see in any of those maps the words just mentioned. For many years afterwards, the chief character would look into any map of Victoria that he had not previously seen and would try to find the words just mentioned but would never find them. And yet, he remembered those words on the afternoon in the late 1980s when he stood for the first time in the main street of his neighbouring suburb and looked all around him.

In the note at the front of the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, the author of that book explains that he began to think of writing that book on a day in the mid-1950s when the temperature was 108 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale and when he was playing cricket in the Plenty Ranges. The heat of the day together with other circumstances reminded the author, so he explained, of other days in the 1930s when he had lived in the far west of Victoria. When the chief character of this story said in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story, he supposed, among other things, that the cricket ground where the author of the book mentioned above had been reminded of his earlier life must have seemed in the 1950s to be a clearing in a vast forest.

While he stood on the Friday afternoon mentioned previously in the main street mentioned previously, he, the chief character, saw that he had been living for the past twenty years in the northern suburb that was the easternmost part of the grassy countryside that might be thought of as covering most of the western and south-western parts of Victoria. He saw also that he had been living for the past twenty years in the northern suburb that was the nearest place to the forest that might be thought of as covering most of the eastern and south-eastern parts of Victoria.

After he had stepped out for the first time from the branch of the bank where he had seen for the first time the young woman mentioned above, he, the chief character, saw that the face of the young woman, which face was then in his mind, resembled most of the faces of the young women mentioned previously in this story. When he tried to find a word or words to denote or to suggest the most obvious quality of those faces, he could think only of the words sharpness and prickliness.

We had first smelled the acrid smoke from a great distance

The words just above are from Chapter 8 of the book Death of a Forest, by Rosamund Duruz, published in 1974 by Lowden Publishing Company, Kilmore. The town of Kilmore is described on the dust-jacket of the book as being Victoria’s oldest inland town.

The chief character of this story had understood for many years before he read the book mentioned above what he should have been told by his father when he first showed his son, the chief character, the farm where he, the father, had been a boy and the grassy countryside all around the farm: that the farm and the grassy countryside around it and the district of mostly level grasslands that comprised much of the south-west of Victoria had previously been covered by forest.

The chief character of this story had learned at some time before he began to read the book mentioned above that the village or town of Heytesbury in England is in the south-west of that country and is at the edge of the Salisbury Plain. He has never seen the Salisbury Plain, but he imagines it as mostly level grassland.

The book mentioned above is one of many books that he, the chief character of this story, bought during the 1970s but did not read until many years afterwards, if at all. When he finally read the book in the late 1980s, he learned that the author was an English woman who had arrived with her husband in the Heytesbury Forest in the early 1950s, in the very year when he had moved with his family from the western suburbs of Melbourne to an outer south-eastern suburb which was mostly scrub. Much of the book was a history of the Heytesbury Forest, which history was of some interest to him, although he never read it a second time. The chapter of the book that he read a number of times after he had first read it was Chapter 8, which was headed ‘Forest Memories: 1950–60’. From that section he learned, among other things, that the farmers who lived in clearings of the Heytesbury Forest or at the edges of the forest used to burn large parts of the forests in the 1950s on the pretext that they were preventing the spread of bushfires in the future.

Of the sections of the book mentioned above that he read only once, the section that he most often remembered was Chapter 7, which was headed ‘Progress and Destruction: Modern Times’. Much of this section reported the work of the Rural Finance and Settlement Commission from 1954 until the mid-1960s.

Of the illustrations in the book mentioned above, all of them reproductions of black-and-white photographs, the illustration that he most often looked at afterwards was the illustration facing page 17 of the text. Part of the caption beneath the illustration reads: This land was all forest-clad twenty-five years ago. The illustration is of grassy countryside with what seems to be a line of trees in the distance and in the foreground what seem to be scattered outgrowths of scrub in a paddock of grass.