The Pages by Murray Bail Read Free Book Online Page A

Club. It was a few minutes from the Astor – same street. After finishing his business or attending the races Cliff Antill went back to the property without looking in on his wife. And when after almost a year Wesley and his father eventually spoke again it was in the dining room of the club, where the oil paintings were benign and the lunch specialty was the steak-and-kidney pie.
    Because there was no point going over their argument, and Wesley showed no interest in the horses, his father looked into the distance as if he was back on one of his paddocks, and talked about his stamp collection. There were collectors and there were philatelists, explained his father who had plump, weather-beaten fingers. And there is a difference. He was a philatelist. Look at the near-completion of his collection: among its treasures, the blue first kangaroo, 1912. All a man needs is a preoccupation, preferably involving classification. Later, as Wesley walked home by the water at Woolloomooloo, he saw how philately was a solitary pleasure which centred, unusually, not on the specimens secured in rows, but in the contemplation of those that were missing . Now there’s a strange pleasure. And he could see his father sitting in his office at the homestead – could go for weeks without a word – identifying from his swivel chair the gap in the pattern of his life. His wife as a rare postage stamp! A figure of theatrical design who had to be handled with tweezers; for the moment unattainable, out of reach.
    â€˜Have you found your feet?’ his father managed to ask as he bent into a taxi, not turning around. ‘More or less,’ he would have said at that early stage.
    At one of the Thursday dinners Wesley found himself seated next to Virginia Kentridge, a friend of his mother’s. Instead of talking he fiddled with his knife and fork, and considered the farm shed with its hard dirt floor, and on the bench the grey metal cabinet, which held in drawers, at different levels, screws and nails of various sizes; always interesting pulling them out and having a look, even if you didn’t want anything. Under the bench old bottles, sheets of tin, lengths of wood.
    â€˜What are you smiling at?’ woman, in black, cut in from the left. ‘You’re thinking about some poor girl?’
    A small tanned woman, Virginia Kentridge had a thin neck with prominent sinews sweeping up from her shoulders like a Moreton Bay Fig, enough to stretch her credibility, for when activated, which was often, they gave a neurotic force to any ideas she may have had. And this neck – those sinews – also suggested emotional adventure, just below the surface.
    Wesley’s mother had told him about her.
    To commiserate he said, ‘Your husband couldn’t have been so old.’
    What actually happened? (Why think, let alone ask? Why was he talking?)
    â€˜He was with his poxy girlfriend,’ Mrs Kentridge smiled. ‘A clear day, a perfectly straight road, and he was driving. The rest I leave up to you.’
    â€˜Was she killed too?’
    The widow shrugged. In broad daylight at any given moment there was always somewhere a head-on collision taking place, especially on the road to Cooma. There were so many solid trees in Australia. Far better to lean forward, which she did, allowing him to glimpse the softness of her neglected breasts.
    The following night he spent at her house. Photos of the husband in silver frames were still on the shelves – a man entirely frank with the camera, nothing to hide. Stacks of hair, the strong wiry stuff, and in silver eruption above his teeth like a burst water main. By looking straight at the camera he was looking straight at her.
    Until Virginia Kentridge, Wesley had fumbled around with the willing experimenters from the nearby towns – on the slippery seats of locally made cars, he was the awkward skater on pale green ice. But this energetic woman who exercised a tennis