The replay was relentless. Tom was learning that disaster is repetitive: animated, yet inert. Offering neither the release of change nor the serenity of detachment, it was merely always there; always terrible.
His purchases the previous day had included builders’ tape and a pocket knife. Short lengths of bright yellow plastic now flagged his passage through the bush.
There were fugitive smells: humus, rotting wood, the pungent green tang he had already remarked.
Tom would call the dog, then listen, straining to hear a whimper, a rustle. But if he was silent and still for too long, he had the impression that something was listening to him. Very quickly, the feeling grew oppressive. It was necessary to keep moving, keep shouting.
Then he saw it: close to the ground, a patch of white. Tom tore and pushed his way through recalcitrant vegetation; came to a standstill at a sack that had once contained super-phosphate.
The rain held off all morning, then fell in sheets.
The road from the hills coiled tightly down through forest to the highway. For four or five clenched minutes Tom was tailgated by a truck, until the road widened sufficiently for him to pull over. The monster ground its way past, horn blasting. The air shook. Tom crouched in his car, rain and his heart drumming, and saw the cargo of dead trees rock as the truck took the bend. To his left, the abyss inches from his wheels held the towering calm of mountain ash.
The logging traffic had pocked the road into potholes. A second truck with its consignment of giant pencils passed Tom further down the hill. Water swooshed over his windscreen. Friday afternoon: drivers racing to meet their quotas at the sawmill.
The road broadened and improved when it reached the coastal plain. Paddocks came into view; a windbreak of dark pines. The noteless staves of fences, hymning possession. When a driveway appeared, Tom pulled over; dashed out and dropped a flyer into a letterbox. The sodden fields had the pulled-down look of a bitch who has whelped too often.
Here and there, stringy eucalypts had been allowed to live. They ran counter to Tom’s idea of a tree, which was wide as centuries and differently green. These had failed an audition. They loitered, dusty tree-ghosts; bungled sketches signed God or whatever.
He thought of his progress that morning, the hillocks and gullies he had traversed. There was something humbling about uneven, wooded ground. He realised, peering past his laborious wipers, that it came from the absence of vistas. Here, he was a surveyor of horizons: mastery was in his gaze. There, in the hills, vision came up against the palpable folds and pockets of the earth; was obliged to follow the lie of the land.
Forward motion: it was the engine of settler nations, where there was no past and a limitless future, and pioneers were depicted gazing out across distant expanses. The man in the car remembered,
The pleasure of believing what we see / Is
boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
He was a citizen of a country that had entered the modern age with a practical demonstration of the superiority of gunpowder over stone. To be impractical on these shores— tender, visionary—was to question the core of that enterprise. Yet the place itself was hardwired for marvels. What was a platypus if not the product of a cosmic abracadabra? So much that was native to Australia seemed to be the invention of a child or a genius. Minds receptive to its example had grown sumptuous with dreaming.
It was true that local characters and scenes slotted effortlessly into a global script. Muscled teenagers in big shorts crowded the nation’s shopping malls. On neat estates where every house replicated its neighbour, young women pushed strollers containing babies of such plush perfection it was difficult to believe they would grow up to eat McDonald’s and pay to have their flesh tanned orange. There was comfort to be derived from this sense that the nation was keeping up with the great elsewhere. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date?
But a stand of eucalypts in a park or the graffiti on an overpass might call up a vision of what malls and rotary mowers had displaced. Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion.
The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.
N
ELLY HAVING
asked to borrow a copy of
The Turn of the Screw
, Tom lent her an edition that included a selection of critical commentaries. When she returned it, she said, ‘Do you think we create mysteries because we crave explanations?’
She could unsettle him in the way of certain students: seeming to miss an idea, yet leaving the after-impression of striking to its core.
When she asked about his book on James, Tom talked about the novelist’s desire to be modern. ‘He wanted to distance himself from the literary past, from old forms like gothic. But that stuff wafts around his work like a smell he’s too exquisite to mention.’
There was James’s fascination with the supernatural. ‘He tried to contain it by writing ghost stories. Sidelining it, trying to keep it out of the major work, out of the novels. But even in
The Portrait of a Lady
, which everyone agrees is a realist masterpiece, the heroine sees her cousin’s ghost at a crucial moment.’
Over time the monumental
Portrait
itself turned spectral, said Tom. Its presence showed and faded and shimmered again in
The Wings of the Dove
, a novel written when James had grown old; and haunted, like its predecessor, by his memories of his cousin Minny Temple. She had died young, leaving James with the uneasy thought that he had not loved her well enough.
This conversation was taking place in the Preserve. While he was speaking, Tom was conscious of many things, of the sound produced by Nelly’s teeth biting into an apple, for instance, and of the unexpected mildness of the evening. Someone had placed a double row of candles all down the long table on the dais, the only illumination in the cavernous room. Tom’s eyes kept returning to that bright, unstable path. But what he was seeing had no material form. Over the years, as he worked on his book, he had begun to picture James’s oeuvre as a massive, stooped figure, its progress along the passage of time impeded by a dragging shadow. Tom understood that the name of this darkness was history; that it represented unwelcome aspects of the past that blundered into James’s fiction.
Nelly said, ‘But isn’t that the way it works? I mean, doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’
Her almost magical divination of the halting colossus Tom had pictured so astonished him that he couldn’t reply. The lurching figure advanced in his mind again, a grotesque portrait stepping clear of its frame. The vision was central to his argument, and it frightened him. He feared being unable to convey its force in reasoned prose; and of this fear, he said nothing to Nelly.
I
USED
to be Nelly Atwood
. It had sent Tom to his university library early the next morning. There he learned that sixteen years earlier
,
in
1985,
the disappearance of a man called Felix Atwood had made headlines across Australia. A graduate student in the States at the time, Tom had missed the story. Now he began piecing it together from archived newspapers, leaning over the shining glass of a microfilm reader.
Atwood, aged thirty-three, a trader in bonds at an investment bank that had financed the Napoleonic wars, vanished while spending Easter with his wife and young son at their holiday house in the bush. His wife was reported to have been unconcerned when she woke on Saturday morning and found her husband missing and no car in the drive. Atwood, an early riser, liked to go bushwalking on his own. The property was surrounded by forest. It seemed likely that he had left the car at a trail head, and set off into the bush. Equally, he might have driven down to the coast. He was a keen swimmer, and half an hour away was a beach he favoured.
Mrs Atwood, who suffered from headaches, had woken to familiar symptoms that morning. With an effort she dressed; stumbled with her child to a neighbour’s farm, where she left him. It was not an unusual arrangement; the four-year-old had a pet lamb there and was spoiled by the farmer’s teenage daughters.
Atwood’s wife said she returned to bed. Around noon she woke to find herself still alone in the house, and started to wonder if something had gone wrong. The Atwoods were expecting a visitor from the city later that day, and surely only a mishap could have kept her husband from being there to greet him.
Still the woman did nothing. She was quoted as saying she was
not thinking clearly.
The Atwoods’ friend arrived; and, learning what had happened, went immediately to the farm, where he made the call to the police.
The machinery of process clicked on. In the days that followed, the police interviewed the missing man’s relatives and friends, and began sorting through the reports still coming in from people who claimed to have seen him. Atwood’s BMW was found almost at once, parked in ti-tree scrub by the beach where he liked to swim. His clothes lay folded on the passenger seat. Forensic testing yielded numerous traces, none of them of use in determining what had happened to him.
Then a statement issued by Atwood’s employer revealed that he was under investigation for irregular dealing. While his managers had supposed him to be exploiting low-risk arbitrage opportunities, Felix Atwood had in fact been gambling spectacular sums in directional bets. These unauthorised activities produced substantial profits at first, consolidating Atwood’s reputation as a trading star. What greed, complacency and lax internal controls failed to discover was the secret account he had opened. Here he hid the monumental losses that his high-risk strategies produced, while posting fabricated profits in the account where his performance was evaluated.
Atwood was clever and lucky; just not enough. The bank’s auditors presented their findings within a week of his disappearance, causing a fresh wave of speculation. For as the auditors closed in, Atwood could scarcely have failed to notice the stench blowing his way. It was an old story: a man faced with public ruin walking away from his life. Perhaps literally; for suicide was quickly mooted as a solution, Atwood wading into the sea as his wife and child slept, preferring death to disgrace.
It was discovered that the Atwoods’ house in the city was double-mortgaged. There were personal loans and credit card debts, and irregularities in income tax; the tax office was about to launch an enquiry of its own. Ready-made phrases appeared on the sheet of light under Tom’s eyes:
luxury lifestyle, cocaine
habit, assets seized.
Tom studied the photographs. Felix Atwood: curly hair, an angular, inviting muzzle. He was pictured on a beach with long breakers at his back and a surfboard under his arm; bowtied, with curls slicked down, outside a concert hall. He looked straight into the camera and smiled. He had good, or at least expensive, teeth. Somehow it was clear he did not make the mistake of underestimating his effect.
The Atwoods’ friend from the city was identified, predictably, as Posner: dark hair emphasising his pallor, but for the rest astonishingly unchanged, as if that large, smooth face had repelled even time. Posner was in fact everywhere: escorting Mrs Atwood to a car, at a fundraising dinner with her husband, grave-eyed outside police headquarters in Russell Street.
But it was Nelly who held Tom’s attention. In the early photographs she was anonymous in sunglasses. But as events gathered speed and density, a different set of images prevailed. She appeared in an ugly ruffled dress with jewels at her throat: a photograph taken at the same opening night at which her husband had been snapped, with this crucial difference, that she gazed stonily at the lens. To Tom’s eye she looked—oddly— older than she did now, her cropped hair and frumpish frilled bodice making her seem dated; compounding the rigidity of her stare.
Elsewhere she was pictured in such a way as to bring out the prominence of her jaw. Then a new photograph showed her with her arm raised and mouth wide, screaming at the camera. She might have been trying to hide her face, but the gesture, coupled with that glimpse of her tongue and teeth, suggested a harridan’s attack.
In this way, from multiple images, a single portrait was being composed: of a hard-faced, alien female, operating from unfathomable motives, capable of losing control.
Nelly was never photographed with Rory. He was always pictured alone, and looked, as children do in such circumstances, fearful and exposed.
There would have been other pictures, gleaming and persuasive. But what television had made of Nelly was left to Tom’s imagination.
His university archived most of its newspaper holdings on positive film. However, a two-week period was stored on negatives. Their velvety darkness coincided with the least flattering images of Nelly. Bat-black with silver-foil lips, she hung inverted in the machine’s overhead mirror.
Tom avoided microfilm whenever possible; was thankful for the digital imaging that had replaced it. There was the fiddle of loading the film onto the spools and threading it correctly. Librarians breathed at his shoulder with ostentatious forbearance as his hands thickened into paws. The film jammed or slipped from its reel.
Blurred columns of newsprint rolled towards him, the past advancing with speedy, futuristic menace as he tried to locate what he needed. The jumpy, black-on-white batik of fast-forwarding hurt his eyes and brought on intimations of nausea. As time passed his arm began to ache from rewinding each spool. His body had accommodated itself to the demands of his laptop and was protesting the readjustment. He rotated his head and heard a vertebral click.