Friday

Tiny feet fled when Tom entered Nelly’s house. In the kitchen, there was a morse code of mouse shit on the sill, the sink, the table.

He unpacked the car, then sat on the back step with coffee from his thermos. It was shortly after eight; he had risen at four. His mind brimmed with metal and oncoming lights, with images slippery as speed. He concentrated on the stream of his breathing, trying to absorb the saturated calm of the place. Cattle raised their heavy heads to look at him, then lowered them once more to their table. Magpies drove their beaks into the damp earth.

The dish of oats he had left by the steps, partly covered with a piece of masonite, was soggy but undisturbed.

He noticed that his ritual magic had taken a variant turn. His latest revisioning of the scene with the wallaby began by Nelly’s water tank, where, instead of fastening a length of orange polypropylene baling twine to the dog’s collar, he merely clipped on his lead. The wallaby crossed in front of them. The dog bounded into the bush. He reappeared shortly afterwards, shamefaced but unrepentant; his lead, too short to tangle with the undergrowth, dragging through the mud.

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 superphosphate.

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.

Nelly 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 fi ction.