Read Online The Pages by Murray Bail - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I’ve been to the funeral.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Which one do you think it is?’
    He looked at them again.
    â€˜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