The Pages by Murray Bail Page B

talking. His name sounded like Sheldrake. Early on, he turned to Wesley, sitting on one side. ‘What have you got to say for yourself ?’ A heavy presence, bald, except for a ring of yellowish hair, the way corn soup has overflowed a saucepan – as if his head could keep only a certain amount of information. He introduced topics. That very morning he was pushing into a lift and a wheel fell off his trolley, almost tipping out an old woman, which hardly rated a nod, since it had happened at one time to each of them. Did you know there was not one but two conspiracies to shoot President Kennedy? In the Navy they’ve now got women going down in submarines. Have you ever heard anything so fucking ludicrous? When it came to the nurses, the Irish ones, and from there to women in general, the tone was detailed, vehement and dismissive, the idea being to gain wry agreement.
    Seated on his bar stool like a tennis umpire, this man Sheldrake waited for them to bat a conversation back and forth. The strong suggestion was they were not fulfilling their potential. As he stared at one, then another, they in turn leaned back on their assorted cane, tubular steel or perforated plastic chairs, and if one of them did say something it was usually an entirely fresh topic.
    Wesley’s chair was a wooden one. It had an uncomfortable dark-stained ordinariness, a nineteen fifties kitchen chair, and with it the memories of a certain Australian childhood, which didn’t concern Wesley but apparently put off some of the others. The day he arrived it had been the only one left, and he sat on it; he grew accustomed to the cobwebbed concrete and putting his feet up, always taking a position against the wall near a dripping tap. It was a lapse, a space. Traffic along Barcom Avenue, and farther away Oxford Street, rose and fell in a blurry regularity, as waves come forward and dissolve on a beach. And voices, faint.
    It was while half-listening to the others there in the sun that Wesley decided to begin thinking in a less pedantic manner. And he should begin now before it was too late. He thought of his father and his stamps. By following Clive Renmark’s recommendation and first concentrating on the Greeks, he had moved on in regular stages to the Moderns, soaking up everything he could lay his hands on. The discoveries of each philosopher allowed each subsequent philosopher to climb up onto their shoulders, as if philosophy was a form of gymnastics, from where they could climb still higher, or at any rate lean out at an angle while still holding on. All his available time spent scaling the tremendous peaks of western thought had left Wesley with the uncomfortable feeling his own mind was dutiful, pedantic, unoriginal. Clearly it was because his studies had followed a chronological path. In his apartment the books and journals piled on shelves, on the floor, on his unmade bed pointed to a free-ranging, seriously unconventional mind at work. This was the harbour city where cars rust and pages of books fox. Wesley had taken to underlining and scribbling comments in the margins, and made ‘copious’, as Rosie next door liked to joke, notes. Already he had formed the habit of writing statements on scraps of paper and sticking them on walls and mirrors, so he could reconsider them.
    Rosie Steig was impressed with his industry. Now and then Wesley would pause and rub his eyes in wonder. Other times he’d say, aloud, ‘I don’t think so.’ (‘All swans are white.’ Not where I come from!) It was enough for Rosie to lift her head. They were friends. If a book he required was out of print, and if he couldn’t pick up an old copy at one of the shops in Glebe, she happily borrowed for him at the Fisher Library.
    Wesley was finding a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject, and the softer, unavoidable intrusions of everyday life.
    Rosie Steig often came in and lay on the sofa and studied one of