Читать книгу A Million Windows - Gerald Murnane - Страница 6

The single holland blind in his room was still drawn down in late afternoon, although he would have got out of his bed and would have washed and dressed at first light. At the moment when he became a personage in this work of fiction, I supposed him to be seated at his small desk with his back to the glowing blind and to be reading, by the light of a desk-lamp, a sentence that he had written, perhaps only a few minutes earlier, at the head of a blank page. The sentence was his remembered version of a quotation, so to call it, that he had read long before. He recalls, or so I suppose, that the author of the sentence was a male person from an earlier century but he cannot recall the name of the author. The sentence is as follows: All our troubles arise from our being unwilling to keep to our room.

One of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information. Much faulty fiction seems to derive from its author’s having been overly influenced by films, and yet I have to admit that authors were withholding information from readers long before the first film-scripts were written. Long before cameras could record such scenes, solitary characters were reported as sitting in quiet rooms or trudging across lonely landscapes at the beginnings of works of fiction while the readers of those works looked forward to learning, all in good time, the names of those characters, their histories, and even their motives and deepest feelings. The narrator of this work of fiction wants no reader of the previous paragraph to look forward to learning any such details in connection with the personage mentioned there.

How many years have passed since I last watched a film – since I last walked out of some or other cinema ashamed at having wasted an afternoon or an evening and bothered already by the first of the clusters of false images that would occur to me again and again in coming weeks – false because their source was not my mind but sequences of shapes and colours displayed in the visible world as though objects and surfaces were all? And yet, when young I had hoped for much from films. I had hoped to see, in black-and-white scenery arranged by persons with mostly European names, visible, memorable signs from what I would have called, at that time, the world of imagination, as though it was a place I had yet to discover. One of the European names was a certain Swedish name, and that same name took my eye on the day before I began this work of fiction and while I was turning the pages of a weekly news-magazine from some or another year in the 1980s. One of the pages was headed CINEMA, and I would have turned the page without reading it if the Swedish name had not taken my eye. I gathered from the little I read that the Swede, late in his career, had directed, if that is the correct word, a film set in a castle many a room of which was occupied by one or another chief character from one or another of the many films directed by the Swede in earlier years.

I read once that the writer of fiction Henry James got much enjoyment from hearing from fellow-guests at dinner-parties anecdotes that he later made use of in his fiction. James, however, as soon as he had decided that something he was hearing would later be of use to him, begged his informant not to go further; not to reveal the outcome of what was being recounted. At a certain point, James had seemingly got all the ingredients he needed for a work of fiction and preferred to devise his own outcome rather than merely report the actual. When I closed the pages of the weekly news-magazine as soon as I had learned what is reported in the previous paragraph and without having learned who are the occupants of the castle or what takes place when they meet together, assuming that they do so meet, then I resembled Henry James in my not wanting to learn more than a few ingredients, so to call them, but unlike James I was not yet aware that I had acquired my ingredients. My only reaction at the time was to admire the Swede for what I took to be a considerable achievement and to read no further about him and his film lest I learn that my admiration was misplaced. His achievement, so I supposed, was his having discovered, late in life, that a true work of art in no way depends for its justification on its seeming connections with the place that many call the real world and I call the visible world.

I would have watched several of the Swede’s films during the 1960s, which was the last decade when I still hoped to learn from films. After I had written the previous sentence, I set about recalling whatever images I could recall from those films. I recalled first an image of a white-haired man looking out over a small lake; behind the man is a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys. I then recalled a certain expression on the face of a ragged boy of ten or twelve years. The boy and his two ragged men-companions had completed, moments before, the rape and murder of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, after they had met up with her in a clearing in a forest. Moments after I had seen the face of the ragged boy, he vomited.

I was about to ask the questions why am I able to call to mind only those two images from the many thousands of images that would have appeared to me while I watched the Swede’s films during the 1960s? Do those images have for me any seeming connection with the place that I call the visible world? And, if the images seem to have no such connection, what connection, if any, do they have with the place that I call the invisible world or, sometimes for convenience, my mind? First, however, I had better reassure the discerning reader that I am well aware of the many falsehoods in the previous paragraph – falsehoods that I allowed into the text for the sake of the undiscerning reader, who might have found tedious a strictly accurate account of what is reported there. I reported, accurately enough, that I had recalled an image of a white-haired man but thereafter I fell into everyday language, so to call it, such as probably caused many an undiscerning reader to see in mind images of an actual-seeming ragged boy and actual-seeming ragged men and to forget that what were, in fact, denoted were mental images, or memories, as some would call them, of images projected through film onto a screen fifty years before their recall. At the risk of trying the patience of the discerning reader, I shall add that much else denoted by my everyday language in the previous paragraph has no existence in the world where I sit writing these words. The image of a man looking out over a lake with a tall house behind him was an image of an image of a man pretending so to look. No young woman, hardly more than a girl, was raped and murdered. No ragged boy actually vomited. Even so, I have kept in mind for fifty years images of these nullities. As for the questions that I was about to ask when I began to write this paragraph, I can best answer them figuratively. If ever I should choose to locate those images and many others of their kind at one particular site, as the Swede, late in life, chose to locate the chief characters of his many films, then the site would be at the centre of some mental landscape of mostly level grassy countryside and would comprise a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys and who knows how many windows.

I would not brand as undiscerning any reader of the previous paragraph who might look forward to reading in this present paragraph what he or she would probably call a description of the house mentioned above. I would expect, however, that any such reader, after a little reflection, would agree that what he or she wanted from me was that I should report not the appearance of a particular house but the detail that first alerted me to the existence of the house in what I call the invisible world, which detail would surely have seemed likely to fufill some or another long-held hope or expectation of mine. I would expect also that any such reader, after having read my report, would see in mind just such a house as he or she had for long hoped or expected to see while reading some or another passage of fiction.

In the year when I became married, in the mid-1960s, I read the first volume of the autobiography of a male writer who was almost thirty years older than I and who had died fifteen years later after having been struck by a car when walking drunkenly across the street in a provincial city of this state. I remember my observing while I read his autobiography that the author used the present tense throughout the book and my deciding soon afterwards that I ought myself to use that tense throughout the work of fiction that I had been trying for several years to write. After having begun to write this paragraph, I remembered several details from my experience as a reader, nearly fifty years ago, of the autobiography mentioned, but the only one of those details that I was able to remember before I began to write the paragraph was my seeming to see dazzling points of light on a distant hillside during moments while I read that the author claimed to remember his having seen often as a child, while he watched from a balcony in the late afternoon, and when the light from the declining sun fell at a certain angle, what he called sumless distant windows like spots of golden oil.

Given that the book in my hands was an autobiography, I surely supposed, when I first read the report of the glowing widows, that the author himself had seen several times during his childhood just such windows as he claimed to have seen. Today, having read and written much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing. Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant. Given that what I read was in the present tense, and recalling now how young I was at the time and how little I had read, I can hardly doubt that I supposed also, when I first read the report of the glowing windows, that what I was then experiencing as a reader was the nearest equivalent that I could hope to experience to whatever it was that the author would have experienced, nearly thirty years before my birth, when he sometimes saw from a balcony in the late afternoon reflected sunlight in distant windows. Today, having read and written and supposed much during nearly fifty years since, I suppose no such thing.

While I was reading the report of the richly lit distant windows, I would probably have counted myself fortunate to know the approximate location, in the world where I then sat reading, of the actual balcony where the author of the autobiography was reported to have watched often as a child and of the distant hillside where the windows were strangely lit. Earlier in the text, the author had named the street where he had lived during certain years of his childhood. I happened to know that same street and was even able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the distant hillside where the windows had sometimes reflected the late sunlight. I suspect that I would have paused soon after I had read the passage in which the windows were compared to drops of golden oil and would have speculated as follows. Given that I know the very street where the autobiographer lived during certain years of his childhood, and given further that I am able to visualise, while I read, an approximation of the actual hillside that he sometimes saw in the distance, I am more fortunate than the many readers who do not know the street and are unable to visualise the hillside. I am more fortunate because I am able, if I choose, to visit nowadays the very street from which the autobiographer looked out sometimes at least twenty years before my birth, to wait in the street until a certain moment on a certain sort of late afternoon, and then to assess the aptness of the autobiographer’s comparing a number of distant windows to sumless spots of golden oil. Today, having read and written and speculated much during nearly fifty years since, I could never thus speculate.

Once, or it may have been more than once, during the mid-1940s, I travelled with my parents and my siblings by road from a large provincial city in the north of this state to a smaller city in the south-west. We stopped for our midday meal in a large city in the inner west of the state – the same city, as it happens, where the autobiographer, more than thirty years later, would be struck and killed while drunkenly crossing a street. Travel by road was far slower then than now, and we spent most of the afternoon travelling further towards the smaller city, our destination. When the sun was low in the sky, we were still crossing the extensive plains that occupy much of the south-west of this state. If this paragraph were part of an autobiography or of a conventional work of fiction, then I might well report at this point that I saw at least once, and far across the extensive plains mentioned, a sight that I surmised was a reflection of the light from the declining sun in one or more upper windows of a house of at least two storeys. I might even go on to report that my reading, twenty years later, a certain autobiographical passage in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil was in some way connected with my reporting, in the next-to-last paragraph of my first published work of fiction, that the chief character of that work, while travelling with his parents across the extensive plains mentioned, is enabled to see in mind certain details that he has previously been unable so to see. This present work being neither autobiography nor fiction of the same order as the work that I began to write, in the present tense, in the mid-1960s, I need report here only the detail first mentioned in the seventh paragraph of this present work. I need report here only that the window first mentioned in the first paragraph of this present work of fiction might have seemed, at the moment when it was first mentioned, as a distant window might have seemed on an extensive plain to a narrator of an autobiography or to a chief character of a work of fiction – might have seemed like a spot of golden oil, even though I myself have never seen any window with such an appearance.

One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense. I myself have written several works of fiction in the present tense. Soon after I had read the autobiography in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil, I began yet another of the drafts that I had already begun of a work of fiction that I had for long had in mind. The draft then begun was in the present tense, and when I had completed the draft, five years later, it remained so. Had I simply imitated the technique, so to call it, of the autobiographer? Had I supposed that my using the present tense would cause my reader sometimes to pause, as I had once paused after having read that certain distant windows resembled spots of golden oil? Had I further supposed that my having paused at that moment was the result of my having observed that the windows mentioned in the text seemed at that moment as clearly visible and their effect on me as palpable as if I had been observing actual windows from an actual distance? If I had thus supposed, then I might well have believed that the reading of a work of fiction resembles the watching of a film and even that the text of a work of fiction ought to resemble a film-script. I prefer to suppose that my using the present tense was in some way connected with my having reported in the first paragraph of my first work of fiction that the chief character, a boy of nine years, is looking at a page of a calendar published by a religious order of the Catholic church in which calendar each of the twelve pages has in its lower half a grid of black lines on a background of yellow. For the chief character, the black and the yellow represent not a sequence of days but a map of remembered experiences in the provincial city where he lives; the black suggests the narrow strips of bitumen on the streets in the suburbs of the city while the yellow suggests the broad margins of those streets and the mostly unpaved footpaths, all of which are strewn with bright gravel from the former goldfields of the district. And just as he is able to follow any number of routes through the black and the yellow, so the boy, when he remembers, takes no account of any fixed temporal boundaries or sequences. As for the upper half of each page of the calendar, which is occupied by a coloured reproduction of some or another painting of Biblical scenes or characters, the boy has learned from his parents and his teachers that his and their world is overhung by an altogether superior world, and if he has not learned also that that world has no days and no nights then he could hardly have failed to suppose that a personage looking thence down at his, the boy’s, world would see not a record of something called time but a richly detailed map of an immense landscape.

For reasons that are no part of this work of fiction, I was required, thirty and more years ago, to read several books purporting to instruct readers in the techniques of fiction-writing. The books were divided into chapters with headings such as Plot, Characters, Dialogue, and Theme and Meaning. I long ago forgot most of what I read in the books, but while I was writing the previous paragraph I recalled something of what I read in a certain chapter headed Flashbacks and Time Shifts. I recalled not actual words but rather their import. I recalled the author’s advising the intending writer of fiction to prepare the reader before introducing into the narrative any so-called flashback or time-shift. Thus, the writer might have a character look out from a car or a train at an apple-orchard before introducing as a flashback a scene from the character’s childhood, which scene would have for its setting a garden overhung by an apple-tree. I can hardly believe that anything so foolish was once delivered as advice to intending writers. The author of the advice was himself a writer of fiction, although I forget his name and the titles of his two or three books, and I supposed, even when I first read his advice on flashbacks and time-shifts, that he had in mind, while he wrote, those films in which the pages of a desk-calendar fly back rapidly or in which the face of a staring or a sleeping character is obscured by swirling mists as a signal to the viewer that what follows is a scene from the past.

I am not about to assert, as the narrator asserted in a piece of fiction of mine first published twenty-five years ago, that time is non-existent and that what we denote by the word time is no more than our moving from one to another place in an infinite expanse. Instead, I restrict myself to claiming only that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, the setting of which is place after place in what I called earlier the invisible world. The reader might care to observe how easily he or she reads the following paragraph, even though the matters there reported have no temporal connection with the matters reported in this and the previous few paragraphs.

Soon after I had read, in a weekly news-magazine from perhaps twenty-five years ago, a reference to a certain castle or, rather, to a certain image-castle, I began, as I ought to have reported earlier, to write this work of fiction. And yet I was still, it seemed, not wholly free from the influence of films that I had watched long before and could hardly recall. I foresaw myself writing, for example, about a man who preferred not to draw the blind or the curtain of his room except on a certain few afternoons of the year. If I had gone ahead with my first, misguided scheme, this, the fifth section of the book, would have comprised a brief account of a man who never failed, during every year of his long life, to mark certain days in late spring or in early summer. Those had been the days during his childhood when he had felt urged to draw the blind in the single window of the loungeroom of his parents’ house in a provincial city in the north of this state and then to raise the window slightly so that the north wind would agitate the worn brown blind and would cause to appear in the dim room flashes of the fierce light from outside. Influenced, surely, by scenes from a film I had never seen nor would ever see – a film set in a castle known to me only from a single sentence in an article in a news-magazine – I foresaw myself writing first about a man who would enact, as though for the benefit of a watcher, some or another ritual from his childhood as a demonstration that his life was all of a piece. Perhaps I even envisaged him in his dim room, on a day of hot north winds, as handling again some of the collection of glass marbles that he had kept by him throughout his life – the same marbles that had represented racehorses in one of his childhood rituals. But this misguided scheme, as I called it, not only seemed more suited to film than to fiction but lacked an appropriate setting. And then I, who have never seen any sort of castle nor any sort of European scenery, saw in mind an image of the only building where my true subject-matter might come into being and, around the building, the only scenery likely to surround such a building; and I foresaw myself writing not about pretend-characters enacting pretend-rituals but about fictional personages writing, on day after day during year after year, in a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys having several wings and numerous windows and being surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside.

The discerning reader, whether or not he or she allows my claim that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, might well consider me inconsistent or even confused to have used the past tense of most of the verbs in this work. If these paragraphs report events, so to call them, in a timeless location or an eternal present, why am I not obliged to use verbs in the present tense?

If my mood were wilful, I might reply that my way of writing is intended to prevent even an undiscerning reader from trying to apprehend my subject-matter in the way that a viewer, or so I suppose, apprehends the subject-matter of a film. A more respectful reply might include the information that these paragraphs are examples of what I call considered narration and the claim that the reader of such paragraphs is entitled to suppose hardly more than that the narrator of the paragraphs was alive at the time when they were written and felt urged to report certain matters.

The reader’s entitlements are limited indeed, but of course he or she, while reading a considered narrative, postulates or supposes with little regard for any such limits. Many a reader, for example, might seem while reading to hear what might be called the voice behind the narrative or even to see what might be called the personage behind it. The narrator, of course, knows nothing of such matters but I, the narrator of this work of fiction, am hopeful that many a discerning reader has understood by now why a piece of considered narration ought to include verbs in both the present and the past tense; has understood that a considered narrative reports both that certain events may have taken place, or may have seemed to take place, and also what it is to have knowledge of these matters.

The previous sentence seemed, while I was composing it, a most apt ending for this, the sixth section of this work of fiction. However, I found just now, among the scribbled pages meant to prompt me while I composed the section, certain notes that I could not bring myself to leave unused. One note was intended to remind me of something that I heard from a university lecturer in Islamic philosophy nearly fifty years ago, when I was a mature-age student in a faculty of arts. What may have been the lecturer’s purpose in telling his class what he told them I long ago forgot, if ever I understood it, although it was surely to do with the phenomenon that we call time. He asked us to call to mind a motor-car travelling on a road across a mostly level landscape. A person standing close beside the road and looking directly ahead would be aware for some time that the car has not yet reached him or her, then, for a brief time, that the car is present to his or her sight and then, for some time afterwards, that the car is no longer present, even if still audible. The lecturer then asked us to call to mind a person looking towards the road from an upper window of a building at some distance away. This person is aware of the car as being present to his or her sight during the whole time while it seems to be approaching, present to the sight of, and then travelling away from the person beside the road.

While I was writing the previous paragraph, it occurred to me that the lecturer mentioned might have been trying to explain the notion of eternity and that the observer in the upper room, for whom the present is prolonged, as it were, is meant to call to mind none other than God, who from a vantage-point beyond the last of the stars sees all human history as eternally present. Commentators on works of fiction sometimes have used terms such as god-like to describe the extensive knowledge that certain narrators lay claim to: knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the one fictional work and also a view, so to call it, ranging over many fictional settings and over the fictional present and past. I myself have never laid claim to any such knowledge, but sometimes while writing this and the previous paragraph I felt as though mine might not be the only view of my subject-matter. I felt as an observer might feel when he or she strains to look across some or another mostly level landscape while behind him or her some or another personage sees from an upper window all that the observer strains to see and more.

It would be absurd to suppose that the experience of some or another personage looking out from an upper window of a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys must be different in quality from that of some or another personage strolling in the grounds below. Nor do I intend to make the familiar claim that the personages reported as living fictional lives in this or any other work of fiction are somehow outside or beyond what we know as time; that such personages exist in some sort of timeless realm often assumed to be superior to our own. (Surely a person is able to sample the experience of eternity without having to read fiction? I found just now a passage that I copied more than thirty years ago from the translated writings of Alfred Jarry: ‘It is fine to live two different moments of time as one: that alone allows one authentically to live a single moment of eternity, indeed all eternity since it has no moments.’) What I was hoping to do when I began this paragraph was to explain, for myself as much as for the reader, why I cannot call to mind any detail of a certain house of two or, perhaps, three storeys (the silent corridors in the far-reaching wings, for example, or the grounds where strollers readily lose their way among hedges or thickets or ferneries, or the immense and mostly level distances to be seen from upper windows) without the conviction that the personages frequenting the place exist not in any sort of temporal progression but in what might be called the narrative dimension, which not only extends infinitely backwards and forwards, as we might say of our own time, as we call it, but has what I perceive to be a breadth or depth, likewise immeasurable.

How should I begin this paragraph? A certain male personage often recalls that he spent much time as a child looking at reproductions of famous paintings and wondering about a matter that he supposed would be for ever beyond his power to resolve. I was wrong to use the word wondering in the previous sentence. Surely no one, in fact, wonders. Surely we postulate, speculate, or supply possible answers rather than remain agape and vacant-minded. What I ought to have written was that the personage spent much time as a child seeing in mind whatever was out of his sight in the backgrounds of famous paintings, or to either side of the places depicted there, or in the sight of those painted personages who looked not towards their painter or their viewer but at persons, places, or things forever invisible to both. Given that the personage mentioned saw as a child no other reproductions of paintings apart from the twelve on the upper halves of the pages of a certain calendar sent each year as a Christmas gift to his parents by a certain devout sister of his father, most of the depicted personages that he saw were divinities or angels or saints or Biblical characters, and most of the narratives that they were caught up in were already known to him. He was therefore obliged at an early age to discover some more promising task than the envisaging of sights intended merely to inspire devotion or to promote piety in the viewer. Instead of following the gaze of kneeling worshippers upwards and past the seated Madonna and Infant or the all-seeing, all-comprehending stare of the God-man into heaven itself, he learned soon enough to see or, rather, to envisage for himself. He would send into the hilly and forested or the level and grassy backgrounds of certain paintings a version of himself hopeful of finding, beyond the last blurs and tints, a folk who were moved more by the vague or the imprecise or the random than by the certainties of religion; a folk for whom a complicated game of chance or a half-heard melody or an inexplicable dream commanded more attention than a prayer or a holy text. Or he might remain deliberately alone in the hope of meeting up with another of his own rare kind: someone, preferably female, who had found her way past the last hint of a horizon on a coloured page that he had never seen nor would ever see.

As soon as he had been able to make sense of books, he had learned that he was far more free to stray in his reading than in his observing of painted scenes. He had struggled to insert himself, as it were, into many a setting that hung before his eyes, but while he read he was hardly aware of having crossed any fixed boundary. And yet his being at home among denoted settings and personages was only the beginning of his pleasure. When he paused from following the text, or even when one or another book was far from his reach, even then he had access not only to narrated scenes and events but also to a far more extensive fictional space, so to call it.

He found it impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit. For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he had pored over it. This is surely a common experience, but he wanted more than to brood over only those scenes and events that the narrators of works of fiction had allowed him to read about. What he did as a child was hardly more than to daydream about the unrecorded future lives of personages reported to be still alive when last written about, although he sometimes tried to write a few pages of his own to report what he hoped might happen to them or had already happened to them in some or another time-scheme beyond his comprehension. In the years when he would have been called an adolescent, certain personages who owed their existence to his having read certain details into certain works of fiction seemed not only closer to him than any of his family or his friends but closer even than the divine or sanctified personages that he believed to be watching his every deed and thought. Not only did the fictional personages, so to call them, seem closer than the religious, so to call them, but whereas the religious seemed ready always to judge him or to censure him, the fictional world seemed to want no more from him than that he should side with them rather than with the religious, even though his doing so would earn him not eternal salvation but the right to live with them, the fictional ones, for perhaps no more than a few days of their peculiar, immeasurable version of time.

Until as late as his twentieth year, he dared not consider the eternity promoted by his pastors and his teachers as less than factual or the mysterious time-scale of the fiction he read as anything more than a beguiling illusion. One of his heroes during his first twenty years was an uncle of his, an unmarried brother of his father and a brother also of the devout unmarried woman who was the sender each year of the calendars mentioned earlier. This man, who was hardly less devout than the sender of the calendars, several times during the first twenty years of the chief character of these fictional pages deplored in his hearing the number of young men who lost their faith and gave up the practice of their religion as a result of their dealings with some or another, or with more than one, young woman. During an exchange of letters in a year soon after the chief character had lost his faith and had given up the practice of his religion and had preferred not to meet with his devout uncle and aunt, the uncle had put it to the nephew that the true cause of his lapsing, as he, the uncle, called it, had been some or another, or more than one, young woman. The chief character had denied his uncle’s claim, but he, the chief character, had acknowledged to himself that the claim was accurate, although not in the sense that his uncle would have intended. He, the chief character, far from lusting after and then taking up with or cohabiting with some or another, or more than one, young woman, (the sentences hereabouts report fictional events purporting to have taken place during the fictional 1950s) had decided – no, had accepted what had seemed from the moment of his acceptance to have been inevitable since the time when he had first read the first page of fiction that had made sense to him (the chief character would have been some or another fictional female) and from the time when he had written the first sentence of fiction that he could later recall (the subject was some or another fictional young female). He had accepted, at some or another moment while he was reading some or another poem by A.E. Housman or some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy, that his most urgent need was not to perfect himself so that his soul would later be admitted to a heaven without end but to bring into being some or another fictional version of himself that would be able to move unchallenged, if only during a few fictional hours or days, among the unfulfilled lads of Shropshire; nor to burn with the devotion to some or another deity or virgin-mother of sanctified personage, but to convey by some or another means to some or another female personage in some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy that a fictional version of himself was in sympathy with her.

The previous four paragraphs may be thought of as having been written behind some or another upper window in a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys and in some or another room opening off a corridor frequented by, among others, those wayward few who look for their subject-matter not in visible places on the far side of the mostly level grassy countryside surrounding this building but in the mental space surrounding fictional texts, which space is to be thought of as reaching endlessly backwards, so to speak, from the first paragraph of each text, endlessly forward, so to speak, from the final paragraph, and endlessly sideways, so to speak, from every intervening paragraph. The wayward few, as I call them, take for their subject-matter scenes and events never reported in any fictional text but likely to have taken place in the vast zone of possibility surrounding not just every page but the merest sentence on that page. And the mental space that I mentioned just now extends so far in every direction from every fictional text that the wayward ones, as I call them, are able to write as though the content of many a seemingly separate fictional text adjoins, or is entangled with, the content of many another such.

One of the terms often appearing in books meant to instruct intending writers of fiction is point-of-view. Being an unscholarly person, I can only speculate as to when some or another writer of fiction or commentator on fiction first devised the term, which he or she surely did in an effort to describe and, partly, to explain a process that countless readers of fiction and nearly as many writers of it had engaged in for centuries past and engage in to this day without troubling themselves to examine it. The result of the process is that the reader (myself and, surely, not a few others excluded) is persuaded that he or she stands in relation to one or more fictional personages as no one in the world where I sit writing these words could ever stand in relation to another: the reader (excluding those noted earlier in this sentence) is persuaded that he or she knows what the fictional personage thinks, feels, remembers, hopes for, fears, and much else. I am not concerned here with the manifest folly of the reader thus persuaded: the reader who wants from fiction an experience hardly more subtle than the viewer gets from a film. I prefer to suppose that the discerning reader of this work of fiction needs no further reminder from me in the matter. Perhaps even the discerning reader, however, is unaware of the many variations of the process that goes nowadays by the name point-of-view. At one extreme is the boldness and directness of the nineteenth-century writer of fiction who informs the reader, as though possessing an unchallenged right to do so, that this or that character is contented or disconnected or weighed down with remorse or uplifted by hope. Many a writer of this sort ranges freely from character to character, even within the same few pages, with the result that the reader might be enabled to know the intentions of each of two characters in a dispute between antagonists, for example, or a proposal of marriage. One such passage that occurs to me reports the scene, so to call it, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, in which Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville meet for the first time. The narrator reports in the same few pages not only Tess’s thoughts and feelings but some of what occurs to Alex when he first meets her and even the motives of Alec’s dead father, he who had built the mansion in front of which Tess and Alec meet and had appropriated the ancient surname that seemingly linked the two characters. I quote here a short paragraph from the chapter titled ‘The Maiden’.

Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

I quoted the lines above for no other purpose than to show how a certain sort of author of fiction claims to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one of his or her characters and will sometimes report in a single sentence, as the narrator reports in the quoted passage, the viewpoints, so to call them, of two, but while I was copying the sentence above, I noticed, for the first time that I could recall, the seeming incongruity of the adverb here. I then read the paragraphs before and after the paragraph that includes the quoted sentence. In those paragraphs, the author moves freely, as it were, among his characters, so to call them. At some or another moment, he might seem to lean closely towards one or another character while he reports, in the person of the narrator, the thoughts and feelings of that character. Soon afterwards, according to the time-scale of the narrative, the author might seem privy to the thoughts and feelings of quite a different character. Soon afterwards again, the same author might seem to step noticeably backwards from all of the characters and, far from seeming to loiter furtively, with bowed head and downcast eyes, in range of the sighs and murmurings of this or that character, might seem to fling back his head and to look far outwards and upwards while he reports to the reader not only the broad outlines of the far-reaching fictional landscapes surrounding the cramped cottage-garden or the tiny parlour where he had learned, not long before, the secrets of those characters, but the fold upon fold of field and forest surrounding garden and parlour and even the sight of distant villages and towns that he, the far-seeing author, but none of his characters might have been aware of and, this being the boldest of all his authorial claims, the history of all that he claimed to see or, should I say, the tendencies that he divined in the history, its moral purpose or the lack thereof, and the pressure of that history on his characters, whether or not they perceived it.

The sort of author who practises this narratory nimbleness might seem sometimes, even to the discerning reader and, more importantly, even to himself or herself, the nimble narrator, to be present in the place that he or she happens to be writing about rather than in the place where he or she sits writing. If I, a reader of average discernment, saw, while I read the passage quoted above, a translucent image of an elderly man derived from a few reproductions of photographs in some or another biography – saw the ghostly image sometimes lurking near this or that character, then perhaps the author of the passage would have seemed sometimes, while he was writing the same passage or similar passages, to be present in the setting, so to call it, of his own fiction. And yet, despite such brief impressions, he, the author, could surely never have supposed, while he composed his actual sentences, that he was doing so anywhere else but in the visible world while his characters, so to call them, were elsewhere. Why, then, did not Thomas Hardy, when reporting indirectly the reaction of his character Tess to her being in a certain fictional place and in the presence of his character Alexander – why did not Hardy use the adverb there but its opposite here? An actor in a film would use the word here when referring to her situation. Likewise, a character in a work of fiction by an author with no more worthy aim than to have his or her characters seem to be actors in a film – such a character would report himself or herself to be here. But Thomas Hardy was using the traditional form of wholly indirect fictional narration in which all fictional events are presumed to have taken place during a fictional past and at a fictional distance, as it were, from the places where authors write and readers read and was therefore obliged by convention to write not here but there. Other readers of Thomas Hardy may conclude far otherwise, but I choose to conclude that he, Hardy, on at least one occasion during the countless hours while he wrote fiction or while he had in mind fictional subject-matter, seemed to be in the presence of one or more of his characters, so to call them. He may have supposed himself to be standing on the same soil where stood Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville, or he may have supposed those two to be standing beside his desk; whatever he supposed, I derive much encouragement from the mere fact of his having supposed it and I believe that he would have supposed similarly on other occasions, even if his grammar offers no evidence for this. I derive much encouragement, I who have been always a timid author, but the residents of a certain upper storey in a certain wing of a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys may for long have considered self-evident my hesitant conclusions and all that follows from them.

At the other extreme from Thomas Hardy and his like are those writers of fiction who became increasingly numerous during the twentieth century and whose narratives report the thoughts and motives and such of only the chief character. This character is often of the same gender as is the author, and some at least of his or her fictional experiences can be seen to resemble the actual experiences of the author. However far-reaching or however narrow might be the view, so to call it, of the narrator, whenever I read a fictional text I am never unaware of his or her fictional presence. What happens in my mind hours or days or years after I have read such a text may be far otherwise, but for as long as the text is in front of my eyes I am mindful of its being a fictional text: sentence after sentence composed by a human agent. I seem to hear the written words as being transmitted to me in a sort of silent speech, however absurd that expression might seem. I cannot hear, or seem to hear, such speech without seeing, or seeming to see, the personage responsible for it, and even though my reporting what follows may be evidence of credulousness or gullibility on my part, I confess that my first impulse is usually to trust the narrator; to regard him or her as reliable. At this point, the discerning reader wants to know how I react in the presence of a narrator whom I suspect of being unreliable or when confronted by one of those curious texts sometimes published as fiction but having the appearance of diary-entries or collections of letters or other documents. I have no answer for the discerning reader, but I can state for his or her benefit that I decline to read any piece of fiction if I suspect the author of believing that fiction is mere artifice and that the reader of fiction has no more urgent need than to be diverted or teased. (Even the undiscerning reader should have learned from the previous sentence that the narrator of this present work of fiction is to be trusted.)

I have mentioned so far only third-person narrators and none of my sort of narrator, who writes in the first person. The undiscerning reader may be surprised to learn that first-person narrators are hardly less varied than third-person narrators if they are classified according to how much or how little they claim to know. In fact, almost all first-person narrators during the past century have been of the one sort: reporters of their own thoughts and feelings and also of what they observe of the doings of other fictional participants. At the other extreme from these limited narrators, as they might be called, are those – mostly from the nineteenth century and earlier – who seem to report for the most part in the conventional mode of far-seeing and knowledgeable third-person narrator but who report occasionally in the first person. Anthony Trollope, in some at least of his novels, narrates thus. I seem to recall a few examples of such narration in the novels of Thomas Hardy. At a further remove even from these writers and their kind is Henry James, who will be mentioned later in this work of fiction, he being of much interest to some of the occupants of an upper floor of a certain building of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Whereas my instinct is to trust a third-person narrator, I am wary of several kinds of first-person narrator. I cannot bring myself to read any fictional text issuing from a pretend-narrator, as I call any purported first-person narrator of a different gender from the author of the text or from a different historical world. I could not read, for example, a first-person narrative by a female personage if the author is known to be male. Nor could I read a first-person narrative by a personage who is obviously derived from a grandparent or a forebear of the author. The sort of first-person narrative that most repels me has for its purported narrator a personage who could never have had the wit to recite the narrative, let alone the verbal skills to set it down in writing. The late-twentieth-century American writer Raymond Carver wrote many stories purporting to be narrated by pretend-narrators, as I call them. I object to such fiction because it claims to be other than fiction; because it makes the same absurd claim that a film makes: the claim that its subject-matter is of the same order as what is commonly called real or true or actual. Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window. What happens in the mind of the reader of true fiction is richer and more memorable by far than anything seen through the lens of a camera or overheard by an author in a bar or a trailer park.

Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration – even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were. The reader should think of me as a personage as being in some respects less than an actual person and in other respects rather more so. At the very least, I am a voice: the voice behind the text. At the risk of confusing the undiscerning reader, I might well describe myself as the voice of another sort of personage who has been scarcely mentioned as yet in this work: the author or, rather, the implied author, by which I mean the personage of whom nothing is known except what can be inferred from this text. At the very least, I am a voice, but who knows what I might not seem to the discerning and sympathetic reader before he or she has read to the end of these pages, which are, let it be remembered, a sequence of sentences composed by a human hand long before they sounded to any reader as though recited by a mere voice.

I mentioned earlier in this section my being impelled to trust fictional narrators. This must not be taken to mean that I consider the subject-matter of a trustworthy narrator as anything but fiction. Never, while reading any novel by Thomas Hardy, for example, would I mistake, or even wish to be able to mistake, the text in front of me for a report of actual matters or a description of actual persons in actual places. I acknowledge that many another reader looks to fiction for what he or she might call a deeper understanding of actual persons or events or moral issues, so to call them. I am well aware that scholars are able to name actual or historical persons or places that are the originals, so to speak, or the inspiration for fictional counterparts. (Only the other day, I found in a handsome illustrated selection of poems by Thomas Hardy a reproduction of a painting with the title ‘Tess’s Cottage and Evershot Church’. I have already forgotten most of the details of the reproduction. Nor am I curious to learn why the cottage is so named. If it is claimed to have some or another connection with the fictional character Tess Durbeyfield, then I can only marvel at how far the depicted cottage is from any of the scenery where I have located the fictional personage known to me as Tess Durbeyfield during the past fifty and more years.) Even so, I can only state what clear-sighted observation has taught me, which is that many a fictional character, so to call him or her, has become, from the moment when I first learned of his or her fictional existence, a far from fictional personage in a far from fictional setting that happens to be, among other things, the setting for this and every other of my works of fiction. And if I report that I trust certain narrators, I am thereby announcing my confidence that those fictional presences would approve of the previous sentence.

One of the many sorts of fiction that became briefly fashionable during the past fifty years was called by most commentators self-referential fiction. I can recall reading several examples of such fiction in the 1970s, or was it the 1980s? Self-referential fiction was never more than a small part of the body of fiction published at the time, but those who wrote it or praised it seemed to suppose that no sort of self-referential works of fiction had been published in earlier times and, predictably, that writers and readers would soon agree that self-referential fiction was better able than more traditional modes to achieve the aims of fiction, whatever they might be. In the 1970s and the 1980s, I was easily deceived as a reader. Even so, I was just sufficiently alert to be able privately to refute the claims of the advocates of self-referential fiction. I had read Tristram Shandy and some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope and much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy. I admit that I was dazzled at first by If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, but I did not fail to note soon afterwards how little I could recall of its intricate contrivances or of the seeming-qualities of its glib narrator, not to mention its stock characters, and if I think of the book nowadays I think of its author as someone for whom writer and reader are opposed to one another as the players on either side of a chessboard are opposed. Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences.

I can recall today no instance of my admiring some or another work of self-referential fiction, much less of my trying to write such a work. (I will explain briefly in the following paragraph why this present work of fiction is not self-referential, although it may have seemed so already to a certain sort of undiscerning reader.) The more extreme examples of their kind repelled me. The narrators of these works would sometimes pause in their reporting and would affect to be unable to decide which of several possible courses of events should follow from that point or, as an undiscerning reader might say, what should happen to the chief characters. And yet, I myself was not discerning enough at that time to be able to explain to myself why I turned away instinctively from such writing.

The narrators who postured in front of their readers and who wondered aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters, were deriving enjoyment, so I now believe, from what they supposed was the dispelling of an illusion held by most, if not all, of their readers. The illusion is that the characters described in fiction are, if not actual persons of the same order as the readers themselves, ideal persons, so to call them, who live out their lives in the same sorts of place as are depicted in films while their authors are required merely to report on them in the way that the makers of films observe their characters. It is not for me to guess how many readers of fiction might be under the illusion mentioned or how many of the deluded, so to call them, might have revised their beliefs after having read that the subject-matter of fiction depended on the mere whim of some or another belittler of the long-held trust between reader and narrator. All that I can do is to state here what seems to me self-evident: while the writer and the reader, together with the words that they write or read, may be seen to exist in this, the visible world, what they are pleased or driven to write about or to read about – their subject-matter – is nowhere to be seen: those seeming persons and seeming events and the seeming scenery behind them are present to one writer alone or one reader alone in the cramped foreground of somewhere vast and vague; and while I would never presume to understand the laws or principles operating in either of the two places – the visible or the invisible – I could never doubt that those in the one differ greatly from those in the other and could never consider any writer claiming otherwise to be anything but a fool.

I recalled just now an earlier undertaking of mine to explain in the previous paragraph why this is not a self-referential work of fiction. The discerning reader should have found the promised explanation in the paragraph as it stands. For the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the narrator of this work and not the author. In the matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more able to exercise choice than is any narrator of any of the texts going forward in room after room in this wing of the house of two or, perhaps, three storeys where this text is to be understood as going forward, or any character, so to call him or her, in any work of fiction reported to be going forward in any of those rooms.

The subject-matter of a work of true fiction may be understood as extending infinitely backwards and forwards, for want of better terms to denote the twin axes of what I called earlier the narrative dimension. The same subject-matter may also be understood as extending infinitely sideways in opposite directions, and again I use words less than appropriate for concepts seldom written about. Had I been more mindful of this when I began the fifth section of this work, then I might well have written such as the following.

He had been attracted, during his long lifetime, by hundreds, perhaps thousands of female faces. He had no doubt that if ever he were to visit one or another parlour or reception room where visitors were received in the distant wing that was said to be occupied mostly by females – he had no doubt that he would see there during his first visit one at least of the sort of female whose face would cause him to suppose, before he knew her name or the least detail about her, that she might be better disposed towards him and less bothered by his peculiar ways than many another of her gender and age-group. He had long ago given up trying to define, or even to isolate, the features of the faces that drew him. He recognised, however, that the hair framing the face was more likely to be dark than otherwise. This, then, was all that he knew about her whom he was likely to see in the distant wing, wherever it might have been: that her hair was dark. And although he had not the least intention of visiting the place, he was readily able to foresee what would happen if he did so: his looking at her for what he believed was no longer than some or another man might have looked at some or another woman who held no interest for him but his learning soon afterwards from her way of looking at him that he had given himself away yet again, by looking either more often or more intently than he had been aware, and that she had learned about him already what he hoped she might not learn until much later, if at all.

He had never been able to make sense of the theories popular during his time for their seeming to explain the workings of the mind. In this, as in every other field that interested him, he trusted in his concern for particulars and for details. What others might have called meaning he called connectedness, and he trusted that he would one day see (revelation being for him always a visual matter) among the multitudes of details that he thought of as his life or as his experience faint lines seeming to link what he had never previously thought of as being linked and the emergence of a rudimentary pattern, which word had always been one of his favourites.

He had forgotten, of course, many of the dark-haired females. He recalled most clearly those from his earliest and his latest years. The very latest and, so he had promised himself, the last had been young enough to have been his granddaughter if he and his children had not been the human equivalents of those animals that his farmer-grandfather had called shy breeders. He, the personage in the upper room, had wanted only to exchange handwritten letters with the dark-haired woman. He foresaw a correspondence lasting for year after year in which two oddly matched persons came gradually to learn how closely they stood as readers of one another’s handwriting, but in her third letter she had rebuked him for something that she claimed was inappropriate in an exchange between what she called an older writer and a younger reader. He had been so stung by her words that he had never afterwards dared to look at his copy of the offending letter or even of his subsequent hasty letter of apology. Each wrote once or twice more until she claimed not to have anything more worth writing about, which claim seemed to him absurd, although he believed he understood why she made it.

The subject-matter of the previous paragraphs may be thought of as being the contents of a handwritten or typewritten text composed by some or another fictional personage in some or another upper room of a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Most fiction has never been published, and even a published piece of fiction may be only a small part of a far-reaching unpublished text and an even farther-reaching collection of notes and jottings. The three paragraphs above, and several that will shortly appear below, may be thought of as reporting some of what might once have formed part of some or another published work of fiction if only they had been written at the time. Or, the same paragraphs may be thought of as a report of fictional events likely to have involved certain personages in a certain published work of fiction but in fictional places never mentioned in the published text and during fictional hours or days never reported by the narrator.

The first of the dark-haired females had taken his eye during his eighth year. She, being one of his classmates, would have been of the same age. She had a strange-sounding surname that he had never before heard, and he knew only the sound of it until thirty years later when he met a man of the same name and understood that it was French. If the boy had read the name before he had first heard it, he could never have known how to pronounce it. (Of course, as soon as he had first heard her surname, he visualised a written version of it, as he did with all words heard for the first time, but he never saw anywhere but in his mind his unwieldy private word and he felt sure that he had got it wrongly.) Words, both written and sounded, mattered greatly to him, even in his childhood, and his not knowing, for as long as he was interested in the dark-haired girl, how her surname was spelled was very much a part of her attractiveness. She arrived at his school at the beginning of the year and was gone before the end of it. He has class photographs for some of his years at primary school but not for her year, and yet he recalls her clearly. He has no memory of any words spoken between them but he can easily call to mind her scrutinising him, usually from the middle distance. Her face would hardly attract him nowadays, but he was stirred whenever she turned it towards him and stared as though trying to get his measure. Surely she knew that she was his girlfriend, in the language of that time and place; even if they had never spoken, she had surely learned as much from his own staring. Perhaps he had sent a message through one of her girlfriends, but such messages were always answered, even if with insults, and he would hardly have forgotten any hint that he had once received of her feelings towards him. And now he recalls that he once followed her homewards in order to learn where she lived. He recalls not so much his walking, one hot afternoon (in February or March?), out of the gravel schoolyard by way of the gate that he had never before used and his following the dark-haired girl at a distance along a road that led in the opposite direction from his own neighbourhood, but his overhearing his mother telling the woman from two houses away what he had done and the two women then laughing together. This puzzles him more than any other of his memories: that he could have confided to his mother not only his having followed the dark-haired girl but even his being interested in her.

His mother herself was dark-haired, as were four of her six sisters. Three of those four had faintly olive skin. Once, as a young man, he had studied his mother’s family tree, hoping to learn the source of the dark colouring, but the surnames alone told him nothing; all were English, all of his mother’s eight great-grandparents having been born in either Devon or Cumberland. He supposed there might have been dark-haired descendants of the Celts still living in Devon in recent centuries or that a gipsy from the Lake District might have married into one of his ancestral families of small landholders and tradesmen. In this, as in many other matters, he preferred speculation to research.

His mother herself was dark-haired, as he seemed to have learned for the first time one cold morning during his fifth year and later to have forgotten until a certain cloudless afternoon with a cool wind blowing while he was sometimes writing at his desk and sometimes watching through his window the waving of a clump of treetops in the middle distance. (The reader will surely bring to mind some or another image formed earlier while he or she read references to distant wings, upper storeys, sunlight falling on window-panes, and the like.) On the cold morning mentioned, he and she were together at the kitchen stove, she cooking porridge or toasting bread and he trying to warm himself. His two siblings were surely nearby, but he remembers only himself and his mother. All through his life, he was able to call up numerous memories from his fifth and his fourth years and some even from his third year, but his memory of the morning at the stove is the earliest memory in which a visual image of his mother appears. He has earlier memories of words spoken by her or of things done by her and memories of her as an unseen presence, but the image of the dark-haired woman at the stove is his earliest visual memory of his mother.

The woman at the stove wore a dressing-gown tied with a cord at the waist. Throughout his life, he has taken scant notice of clothes or fabrics or furnishings, but he believes he can recall the exact colours of the dressing-gown – he would call them indigo and silver-grey – and the exact feel of its silky texture. The dressing-gown belonged not to his mother but to his father. He was a minor public servant who neither drank nor smoked, and he and his family might have lived in frugal comfort except that he bet heavily on racehorses. He had never operated a bank account but carried a roll of banknotes always with him. After a series of winning bets, he would treat his wife and children to crayfish, blocks of chocolate, and what were called in those days family bricks of ice-cream and would peel off several banknotes from his roll and would tell his wife to buy with them something for herself and the children. His winning bets, however, were fewer than his losing bets, and during some of his lean periods, so to call them, he would place credit bets with bookmakers. After an especially lean period, three years after the cold morning mentioned above, he escaped from his gambling debts by quietly resigning from his public-service position, giving the minimum required notice to his landlord, and fleeing with his wife and children from the northern provincial city where he had lived for several years to his native district far away to the south-west.

The dressing-gown was one of several costly-seeming items that his father had bought from the proceeds of winning bets in the years before he had married. (He had been a bachelor until his mid-thirties.) Other such items were a bespoke three-piece suit that would have cost the equivalent of ten times his weekly earnings before his marriage; several pairs of gold cuff-links; a gold watch that his widow would finally sell, thirty years after his death, for a sum equal to her yearly income from the pension for the aged; and, of course, the dressing-gown, which was described earlier as having a silky feel and may well have been partly or wholly of silk.

His mother would have been wearing the dressing-gown because she had no dressing-gown of her own. She had been married in her eighteenth year, after she had been working for several years on the small farm belonging to her mother and her stepfather, who could seldom afford to pay her any wage. He, however, the chief character of these paragraphs of fiction, had not surmised until later years who had been the true owner of the gown. On the cold morning beside the stove, he considered the blue and silver gown his mother’s property. She wore the gown often; his father never.

In his memories and in the connections between them, colour is always important. Nearly twenty years after the cold morning mentioned, he would try to write a poem to explain to himself why he had for long disliked the colour blue. While he was trying to write the poem, he supposed that the cause of his dislike was his never having been able during his first twenty years to fall in love with Mary, the mother of Jesus, even though he had felt continually obliged to do so. (Blue was traditionally associated with Mary, who was almost always depicted as wearing a blue robe or mantle.) He had never finished the poem, but before he had abandoned it he had recalled for perhaps the first time in twenty years, and in minute detail, the colours and the texture of the indigo and silver-grey dressing-gown and even the subtle interweaving of alternate strands of the two colours in each of the many approximate rectangles separating similarly shaped areas occupied by one or the other colour alone. He had recalled these details for the first time in many years in somewhat the same way that he would recall, many years later again and likewise for the first time in many years, and while he was at his desk in an upper room and preparing to write about certain dark-haired female persons, that his own mother had been dark-haired. And again, as on the earlier occasion, he seemed to feel what he had felt on the cold morning mentioned: as though his feelings came not from some mysterious part of his own person but from the blue and silver strands of a fabric that he had not seen for sixty years and more.

On the cold morning mentioned he had decided, and for reasons that he could never afterwards recall, that his mother was not to be trusted. If he did not understand at the time how singular was his decision, he began to learn soon afterwards and went on learning throughout his life that it was singular indeed. He learned at the same time, however, what he ought to do and to say in order to seem to be a son who had never made any such decision about his mother. And she, his mother, whom he always suspected of knowing what he had decided on that cold morning, seemed to have learned what she ought to do and to say in order to seem what the two of them knew her not to be.

He had followed her home, so his mother had told her neighbour, in order to learn where she, the dark-haired girl, had lived, but at his desk who could say how many years afterwards, he could not be sure why he had walked out of the schoolyard through the gate that he had never before used and had walked ten or twenty paces behind her past the pepper trees marking the course of the creek and then over a timber bridge and into a network of streets where he had never previously been. He had never, in fact, learned exactly where she lived. It might have been enough for him to know that she lived in a district strange to him, or so he had surmised long afterwards when he recalled that the end of his adventure had been her turning around, soon after he had followed her across the bridge, and her staring at him until the face that he had previously considered pretty was creased and frowning, although perhaps not hostile. So he had surmised at his desk, but then he had got up and had stepped to the window. The sun had set, which allows me to surmise that the last rays of sunlight may have reached his window only a little while before, and while he had been writing his own version of the substance of this paragraph. He looked through the twilight towards one of the distant wings. He supposed it to be one of the wings occupied mostly by female personages, but he could not be sure. Here and there in the far wing, a window was already lit from within, and while he stared at one or another distant glow, he composed in his mind a sentence reporting that the boy turned back towards the bridge and the streets familiar to him from a concern that he had been about to disturb an existence hitherto untroubled.

She who had lived on the far side of the creek was named Barbara. (She was the first of four of that name who had attracted him during his first twenty years. Three of the four were dark-haired, although the one that he had most often in mind while he wrote fiction had pale hair.) After her came someone whose name he never learned. He could recall having seen her only once, and she was probably unaware of his existence. Like the first of the four Barbaras, she and her family moved into his suburb and then out again within a year, although this was not uncommon at a time when many families rented rather than owned their homes. When he saw her, she was with her two young brothers in the dusty front yard of their weatherboard house. After more than sixty years, he recalls only an approximation of her face but he can readily visualise what he believes to be the exact shade of the newly painted weatherboards behind her: something between grey and turquoise. He learned long ago not to struggle to recall her face but to call to mind first the bluish grey of the old timber house and then to hold the rare shade in focus, as it were, until he not only caught sight of some or another detail of clear, pale skin or dark eyebrows but felt what he supposed was something of the impression that the actual face had made on him long before, during the few minutes while he had observed it. He learned in time that this feeling was sometimes available to him even when he was unable to recall the face that had first given rise to it, and often in later years he needed only to call up an image of blue-grey weatherboards in order to feel again as though he was sauntering past a certain shabby house on a hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, in an inland provincial city, was staring at a girl of about his own age who was pushing repeatedly a worn rubber car-tyre suspended from a tree-branch and serving as a swing for one of her two younger brothers, and was waiting for her to turn so that he could see her face.