The Pages (7 page)

‘And?' Sophie prompted. ‘Keep going.'

‘And what?'

‘You were talking about difficult. Do you mean moody, habitually withdrawn?'

In the brown glaze of the teapot the table was reflected as a sphere, spoons and a fork clinging to the underside of the curve. Lindsey tried to think of anyone at all like her brother – especially when he came back after years away, his differences then. If Wesley had a difficult manner it was because he was constantly and unusually different.

‘Going on and on about photography. He could not stand it. Just the sight of a person holding a camera was enough for him to cover his face or bend down to do up a shoelace. He'd only been back here a few weeks when he was accidentally photographed on the main street in town, and it appeared in the local paper, just the back of his head, but recognisable. It wasn't about him at all. He went berserk. The idea of being photographed made Wesley physically ill. His very words. I know you'll think there's vanity in that sort of carry-on. Who can make sense of our many foibles? These ideas, his hatred of photography being one, were necessary for his work. Don't ask me to explain. It made perfect sense to me. And Roger would agree.'

‘Can a photograph be as bad as all that?' Sophie sounded annoyed. In her apartment she had at least a dozen photos of herself, different stages of, arranged on sideboards and small tables.

Lindsey turned to Erica.

A photograph excited curiosity, because it wasn't true enough; a chemical image is at one remove from the original.

But Erica said, ‘Whatever helps in difficult work is what I say. I must admit, though, I would like to see a photo of him. Could a person tell you were brother and sister?'

‘Wesley had biggish ears and they stuck out, not like mine, as you can see. He called them outlandish ears. He didn't like them one bit, until he came back here years later to live, and he convinced himself that his ears made their own separate contributions, as he put it, to the task he was involved in. A philosopher has to look the part, just like a farmer or a priest does. I think he's right, don't you think?'

‘A phobia can begin with an earlier embarrassment. My mother,' Sophie suddenly remembered, ‘she had exceptionally tiny ears and never went without earrings. I think I got my father's.'

Erica felt herself separate – in thought, and almost bodily – from the two other women. Tomorrow morning after breakfast she'd embark on her appraisal. She'd open the door, enter the room where everything was still in its place. According to Lindsey, not a single piece of paper had been touched. Erica would sit at his desk. It was a problem – up to her to solve. With a careful anticipation she would reach out and pick up the page, and begin reading the first sentences of what he had to say, his life's work. ‘Let us think about grey, which means thinking about non-grey.' Something along those lines. Or else a startling new theory of the emotions.

‘I hope he gets run over by a truck!' Sophie was saying. ‘Him and his English shoes and socks, and his stupid fat wife at home. I'd like the worst things to happen to him in his life, for what he's done to me.' Here she paused and shook her head. ‘Of course I don't mean that.'

The sudden spilling out with hands and arms waving was accepted as normal by the other two women, the way a tropical island consisting of lush rounded hills, shadows and a single river produces its own weather, rain and wind to be soon followed by slanting sunlight.

At the end of the long driveway was a silver-painted mailbox cut from a petrol drum, and as they walked back to the house they appeared as three women advancing in a row, each with their own views of optimism. One sorted through the mail, the one in linen and raised heels talking to the smaller plainer one, who was glancing up at the tops of trees. The air was thick with the smell of sunlit grass, and like the heat which surrounds a railway line the earth made hot any bits of metal in touch with it, the fencing wire, gates, spanner in the dust, the corrugated iron sheds.

Lindsey said something and turned.

A light truck which had a flat tray where two tan sheep dogs were balanced on tight legs had turned in from the road, and soon enough drew level.

‘I've been to the funeral.'

‘Oh yes, that's where you were,' said Lindsey.

This was the missing brother, Roger Antill, in cream shirt and tie. When introduced to the two women he somehow leaned his head and hat out of the window.

‘Which one is the philosopher?'

In Erica's experience, men often resorted to mockery, which was sometimes enjoyable, often not. And it made still more complicated the problem of how to talk to another person, in this case a man. But he held an interested expression. And thinking they might have misunderstood he said, ‘I see you're going for a walk. I'll keep going.'

Using her face, Sophie could produce many different compositions of herself. Now she leaned at a steep angle.

‘Which one do you think it is?'

He looked at them again.

‘I'd better leave that to the experts.'

Erica wondered how the weather-worn face would look on a Sydney street. For all the asphalt hardness of the place she hadn't seen many, at least where she lived. And she applied a recent rule: a face weather-worn can appear more interesting than it actually is. (The monosyllabic horseman squatting to change their tyre.) Roger Antill had a drought-cracked forehead. His hair was combed straight back in furrows, as if he carried around inside his head, even in the moonlight, the Idea of the ploughed paddock.

Then he tilted his hat with a finger.

11

AS HE DEVELOPED ideas and opinions people were attracted to him. He became more and more himself, less and less like everybody else. For a while he was interested in so many subjects, as a consequence had developed so many theories and difficulties, some of them conflicting, it became necessary to sort through and test each one of them. Most he discarded.

Just about everything imagined is of no practical use. Of the many ideas, how many are put to ‘use'?

Almost by chance Antill sat in on the first lecture by Clive Renmark. It was said in the staffroom: ‘Renmark is not remarkable.' He had a pedigree rare enough to excite envy. One Sunday afternoon in Cambridge, 1913, in amongst the deckchairs on a don's back lawn, Ludwig Wittgenstein had patted him on the head when he was a boy still in shorts, which was enough later to land him tenure in philosophy departments in England and North America, and finally at Sydney University.

Renmark went about in nothing but an open-necked shirt, even in the middle of winter, bringing inside to the lecture hall and the corridors the rude good health of the long walk, the heath, the stout walking stick, and all that. Wide open and crisply ironed, the shirt exposed a hungry look. Renmark had a gaunt throat. He was sixty-plus. And he was hungry – forever leaning towards something out of reach.

Here was Renmark at the lectern. Wesley Antill took his seat in the front row. By way of introduction… Philosophy was nothing less than a description of the impossible. If it was close to anything it was close to music. You had to be
porous
to allow it. Therefore, noble – it was a noble
enterprise
. He spoke of the ‘Everest of thinking, the pinnacle'. Approximation, that's all you could expect. It was a climb – towards what exactly? ‘Forget the exactly,' he said, glancing in Antill's direction. It is more in the realm of being ‘precise about imprecision'. Other words he threw at them were ‘maps' and ‘mapping', and ‘blindness', ‘on all fours', ‘the candle flickering and almost going out', ‘stumbling about in the dark'. A common candle, he told them – here Antill underlined – was closer to philosophy than electricity could ever be, the ‘spurious certainty' of the light bulb. ‘What sort of
serious
light is that?'

Philosophy was a by-product of the Northern Hemisphere. Nothing much has happened down here. Why so? Dark forests, the cold, the old walls, the shadows of superstitions worrying the darkened lives, windows closed, all were pushed about by words which joined up into propositions to let in light, a little, a
dark light
. ‘Too much light is fatal for philosophical thought.' But some light is necessary. To leave the dark room led by the faltering light of philosophy. It was the way out ‘to somewhere else'.

After that, Renmark introduced the main western philosophers by describing their lives. Without fail their stories were strangely interesting. He revealed how they managed to earn a living, and drew attention to the rare instances of a philosopher being married. It was up to the philosopher to become a
singular
person, he said more than once. Initially, some had been soldiers, or physicians, or tutors; there was the gardener in the monastery; others would remain disgruntled university workers or public servants; more than one went mad; suicides. With each lecture he summarised an individual's achievements, declaring this man, always a man, seemed to have found the answer, or perhaps half-pointed towards a possible answer. Running his tongue over his front teeth, nodding at the lectern, Renmark then proceeded to dismantle him, or rather his philosophy by introducing his successor. Each philosopher stirred another.

The Germans, he added mysteriously, were not always guilty.

Among the faces before him, Renmark had noticed Wesley Antill in the front row. While the others remained more or less motionless this one's head kept going up and down, from the lecturer to his notebook. He wrote more sentences at a faster rate than anybody else. To have at least one person hanging on your every word like a stenographer gave pleasure to Renmark, and he slowed his delivery, at one point pausing to blow his nose, and to look thoughtfully up at the ceiling, only to watch as Antill scribbled still more in the same time.

He never missed a lecture, and always had the same seat – front row, centre aisle. Renmark noticed he was the first to get to his feet and leave when it was finished, no interest in coming up to him, as others did, with questions or to ear-bash him with their own obtuse arguments. At his age the regularity of Antill's habits was unusual; it was conservative. Out of respect, he had taken to wearing one of Mrs Kentridge's expensive knitted ties, which didn't always match his bottle-green V-neck.

Stoicism, Cynics, the Thomists (the reasons behind these names). The foundations laid by the Ancients, their dialogues, the one who took poison, Logic, the endless difficulties of Ethics, to St Augustine, for theology has to enter, and so forth, towards the Moderns; Renmark found himself more and more speaking directly to the one in the front, his most attentive listener, as if the rest of the seats were empty. If Antill noticed, he gave no sign. He listened with expressionless concentration, oblivious to any whisperings and movements around him.

On this morning, Renmark had left the Continentals and was progressing smoothly up the Thames towards the deepest English thinkers.

As always, Renmark had for breakfast yoghurt and a green apple. He proceeded to explain language and falsehoods. There were theories of knowledge. How the empirical tradition formed. A Scottish philosopher was for a time tutor to a lunatic. Gathering up everything he knew, Renmark arranged it in reasonable order and gave it back to them – these students, now. The instability of sensations was an area he had become especially interested in. Speaking without notes, he was enjoying himself. What did it all mean?

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Antill pause and lower his pen. Still talking, Renmark looked at him openly. It was then Antill did the most startling thing of all. He began shaking his head at what was being said.

The following week Renmark took the rare step of leaving a note. He suggested Antill visit him in his office. Antill was seen to read it, but left before the lecture began. It didn't occur to Renmark that his most promising student was not really a student at all.

Those deep thinkers wearing the obligatory whiskers and who clearly practised the austere life had a lasting effect on Antill. Before he encountered their example he had been one person; after, he was an entirely different person. ‘I was only half-alive – or, not fully awake,' he explained to Rosie, sounding more like Clive Renmark. ‘It was a before/after situation.'

He would often wonder where this sudden all-powerful interest came from.

The true philosophers were possessed of an ambition to erect an intricate word-model of the world, an explanation, parallel to the real world. Antill looked up to them and then became more composed. Between each lecture he had studied further, reading everything available, and so began weeding out the philosophers he found incomprehensible, and others who were all too comprehensible. Models that simply didn't stack up. The dead words – accumulated, overlapped. Of no use, the way old battleships were left to rust. Later, he would describe it as wearing someone else's heavy coat. It was a matter of casting off. The few philosophers he allowed (Germans), he set about examining and dismantling – their letters, notebooks – the details of their lives – conversations, scraps – until without actually discarding he placed them in the back of his mind somewhere, for possible reference, along with the memory of Renmark, the open-necked moist-lipped messenger.

Two times they saw each other again, both on Darlinghurst Road.

Near the fountain one afternoon Antill was standing on one foot as an older woman smart in a black dress, low neckline, argued with him. She could have been his mother, except her unhappiness was specific. A bachelor, Renmark probably lived nearby. Months later, down the seedier end, Antill saw Renmark talking to a bottle-blonde, small, but with a large handbag. They were negotiating; and the lanky lecturer of philosophy followed her up some stairs. Although they never spoke, Antill felt a flood of affection for the determined shape of Clive Renmark going forward, always forward.