One another, p.1
One Another, page 1
About the Book
At Cambridge University, in the summer of 1992, Australian student Helen is completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad. But she is distracted by a charming and dangerous lover, Justin, and by a ghost manuscript, her anti-thesis, which she has left on a train.
Haunted by this loss and others, by Justin’s destructive tendencies and by details of Conrad’s life, Helen is unmoored. And then the drama of the lost manuscript sets in motion a series of events—with possibly fatal consequences.
In her masterly new novel, Gail Jones traverses the borders between art and life, between life and death, in a journey through literary history and emotional landscapes. Elegantly written, deftly crafted, One Another covers new territories of grief, memory and narrative.
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPHS
BEGIN READING
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
For Kyra and Robert
‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’
Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’
‘And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
He likes nothing more than ocean flexing with the menace of a storm. Swollen waves and rising foam, continuous din, the wash of a wall reaching up, then in a crash descending.
Now he dreams not of ocean, but of the unquiet dead, of his mother and father.
Eva stands in slushy snow, peering down at her bare feet, which look larger than in real life. She is silently weeping. Apollo walks away, his face obscured. He strides like a man on an errand, or running late, or leaving the scene of a crime before he is noticed. Neither speaks, nor carries even the trace of a meaning.
Somewhere in the far distance a black umbrella pops open. It may be a sign, or not. There is the lisping sound of snow blown asway in a breeze. Then more snow. And more. More Polish snow.
This is Joseph’s recurring dream. His mother and his father. Snowfall. Always the same pointless fragment; always this same recrimination directed at his father, and the same sense of his mother’s frozen suffering and grievance. The umbrella seems significant, just because it is there. It is one of those visions in which the dreamer is invisible and there is an impression of illicit glimpse and furtive intelligence, such as a small child might feel when hiding or spying.
Outlines are blurred. Shapes are uncertain. Snow falls evenly on the umbrella, coating it circular, like a skullcap.
When he wakes from such dreams, he is always disappointed.
∼
Eva dies first, of tuberculosis. Joseph is seven years old. He remembers standing at the end of her bed, looking at her blue feet, after she has been cleaned and laid out in a gauzy new nightgown. Her feet splay in a V and appear very large. Joseph cannot look at his mother’s face, and although the priest tells him to kiss her brow, he trembles violently, feels nauseous and flees from the room. The shame of this moment stays with him throughout his life, even at his own death, when his parents visit as apparitions to watch him fade away.
Apollo dies of tuberculosis when his son is eleven. Joseph never sees the lifeless body, not even the dead feet, or not that he can remember. There is just remoteness and a gruff cough and a man never quite facing front-on. His father is a hero; everyone says so. Joseph is the son of a hero. He clenches his fist over his heart (as instructed) but knows that he will never match his patriotic father. He wants to flee. All his life, he wants to flee. By temperament, he cannot bear too much reality.
His father’s grave in Kraków bears the inscription ‘Victim of Muscovite Tyranny’.
It is spring, mild weather, May 1869. A sky with fluent, swelling clouds resting at the far horizon.
The boy stands in a daze, hearing wren-call and watching the first buddings of new life in the graveyard.
His parents call him Konrad, though at school and on documents he is officially Józef. He loves his two names. Orphaned, he sinks into them.
He will remember his always-ill but ever-young parents, both melancholy and preoccupied, both decaying before him with wintry pallor and thin as old birch sticks, Eva with a nervous habit of tugging at her long sleeves, as if the perpetual victim of an inept dressmaker who has mismeasured her arms, Apollo stroking his beard to an angry point, a habit his son will inherit, so that the writer performs his father in the distracted gesture of his combing fingers, a mimicry unconscious as it is exact. Even as he writes, believing himself tropical or oriental, sailing and thriving in the world of his ponderous words, his beard-stroking shows him trapped in the habits of a cold place he can never quite dislodge.
How much does a writer carry forth their parents?
≈
Her manuscript on the life of Joseph Conrad had been left on a train. Six months ago now, a torment of missing.
It was not a serious manuscript, not a true biography, but fragments of a life intersected by literary-critical notations. Helen consoled herself with the knowledge that it was unpublishable—too fanciful for the scholar, too scholarly for a general reader—so that by stages she reconciled to the idea of useless labour and pages never read. In one vision she saw her manuscript flying out of a train window, lifting on the gush of slipstream, skittish and bright, a line of A4s twisting and fluttering in a zesty rise, like so many loosened kites. In another she saw it stolen by a man in his fifties, bald, denationalised, with greasy fingers. He chanced upon it and left smudgy fingerprints as he turned the pages, scowling. It was this version of loss that most alarmed her. Better flying pages, hopelessly scattered in the wind, than a mean reader, censoring, and his intrusive grubby marks.
She was a rationalist, she told herself, and able to renounce possession. But still it stung. To lose an entire manuscript, and all that work.
The scowling man appeared before her from time to time—a spectre of train platforms and the bored intervals that summoned gaps of an existential kind. There, in a beige raincoat, he stood gazing across the tracks, anonymous, plain, but somehow also untrustworthy. Not shabby, exactly, but dishevelled and in need of a haircut. He stooped a little and removed his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. He replaced his glasses. He resumed his gazing.
Helen saw a possible thief at least once a month. He might have been from somewhere like Blackpool or Huddleston or a Midlands village so small that only five people remembered it, the low, coal-muddied sky, the smut-coated public buildings, the dingy corner pub with its stone walls hard and grey as a landlord’s face. Regional English pubs, she knew them well, and how they smelled of old men and something yellowish between beer and cat piss, the florid owner bursting at the seams, his cardigan straining, his pale, chubby face commenting rudely on her accent. There would be an exhausted barmaid her boyfriend Justin couldn’t resist trying to charm. There would be bitter ale and sodden beermats and the pock-pock of flung darts hitting a holey corkboard, or the new fad, karaoke, music muted but lyrics still scrolling on a luminous screen, the light casting an eerie mauve glow on the ceiling.
Back then they were slumming it, Helen and Justin, getting down with the workers before they moved back to the campus, smugly guarding their foreignness and superiority. Justin was writing on ‘Thatcherised’ labour—wages, conditions, a post-Keynesian analysis—Helen, a thesis on Joseph Conrad: Cryptomodernism and Empire.
One of the women at college quoted Nabokov with the hint of a sneer: Conrad had a souvenir-shop style, all bottled ships and the shell necklaces of romantic clichés; in mentality and emotions he was hopelessly juvenile. Helen argued against such snobbery, but she was defensive and undermined. Justin too thought her topic a waste of time, and with each visit to a pub—‘fieldwork’, he called it—she saw his tendency to insult increase, as he became loud and slurry.
≈
As a child Joseph is epileptic, anxious, and suffers stomach cramps and migraine headaches. He is prone to infections and inflammation of the lungs. The single son of two entirely singular parents, who died.
A photograph of him at six shows premature solemnity and an unfocused gaze, as if he’s already staring off into the distant world of his future travels. Dark eyes, a broad forehead and an open book on his lap. He’s wearing an ornately braided jacket and a thick belt with a huge buckle, a costume perhaps, to show his lavish possibilities. Maybe small Polish boys of his time and class all wore these jackets. But there is no childish spark or hint of animate life. He seems to know even then that what lies ahead is a gloomy business. A studio portrait of six-year-old Kafka rivals this one: he is posed unnaturally with a stuffed sheep, for which he holds a rein. But little-boy Kafka looks off to the side, not directly at the lens as Joseph does, and therefore appears more dreamy than inquisitive, and more emphatically self-contained.
Both boys have the velvet eyes that this era of photography bestows.
After his mother’s dead feet Joseph lives with his father, whom he’s never seen smile.
Apollo tutors his son, his dear Konradek, at home, but his heart isn’t in it. He confides towards the end that he is ‘too tired even to spit on things’. From his deathbed, attended by hovering nuns, he supervises the burning of his letters and manuscripts, while his son stands by, small for his age and irrevocably sad, watching the papers twist as if bashfully recoiling into the ash of the hearth.
Joseph sees then how much can be swiftly unmade: sentiments, proposals, ardent attachments. All his father’s translations. His poetry. His political musings. Pang. He feels a pang. To see his father’s words disappear in such speedy disintegration. And the bigger world gathering force, like a tidal wave approaching.
Uncle Tadeusz takes over. His mother’s brother, a widower, has always disapproved. How could his beloved sister have married a revolutionary patriot, bound to imperil them all? Reckless Apollo, Tadeusz called him, knowing nothing good could come of opposition to almighty Russia.
Tadeusz had a daughter who caused the death of her mother in childbirth and who died herself, skinny and disappointing, at the age of thirteen. Mournfully, Uncle Tadeusz hopes for substitute continuation. He has always wanted a boy. Here, then, is a boy. A weakling, but clever. With some of Eva’s features—although others contend he looks more like his father.
Tadeusz tries to correct the errancy of Joseph’s parents. When the boy leaves Poland at sixteen his uncle is in despair and can send nothing to follow him but hope and money.
≈
The lost manuscript was simple. It was handwritten and derived from the index cards Helen had used for her thesis. The little rectangles with their smidgen sentences seemed to show another kind of intelligence and another way forward. It took only a few adjectives to refashion loss of confidence into a higher purpose in which Conrad lived on, tenderly revived by biographical attention. She was trying a ‘para-literary’ task; she was interested in desire and bookish pleasure; she was reverting to some notion that there were real things residing in words and real truths to be discovered. For all the labour of her thesis and Justin’s beery disrespect, the alternative project had been a genuine delight.
Two documents; there were two. Her thesis and her anti-thesis.
She could not explain her thesis to her parents back home, nor to anyone else, without entering the abstractions of her own discipline that ballooned her speech and wafted it away, just as her own pages had possibly or impossibly wafted. Inflated prose was her special skill; it endeared her to academic staff and made her peers envious and stricken.
Helen had been conjuring Joseph Conrad since she first read his work as a teenager. She pretended she knew him intimately, as if from the inside. Some quality of her reading life puffed characters into people and writers into companions. For years she subdued this instinct, but it returned and settled within her. Not identification—nothing so crass—but a flow into fiction’s otherness that welcomed and accommodated her. Imagining the lives of characters was like imagining friends, those affectionate speculations, the sense of wishing to share in their feelings and witness their experiences. And at times almost a delusion, when she wept at the end of a book for a person made up only of words.
Sometimes, the comparison was with lovers, including her own (not a huge history, but large enough), in which the impulse was to enter the sympathetic magic of their coexistence. She wished to recover the experience of waking beside another body in hushed, clammy darkness, the initial moment of estrangement before the return of awareness. Then came warm concern, muffled lust and shy, unspoken questions. What lay behind the eyelids? What was the lover dreaming? How much did this person carry the vestige of parents?
Now she lived with three ghosts: her flyaway Joseph, her shape-shifting thief and the spectre of Justin, newly regretted. She no longer went to workers’ pubs—those had been Justin’s haunts, so to speak, nor did she want to sit alone, a target for tossers and sleaze artists—but began nostalgically to miss the closeness and the stink, the belief that they were in it together. Whatever ‘it’ was. Whatever true or fraudulent fellow-feeling they temporarily developed. Her favourite was in Reading (or was it Newcastle?), with the glasses hanging upside down and a sozzled lady in the corner nursing her gin, her bosoms maternally spilling, her wonky smile enough to break your heart, and the bloke who swung a drink before you with a tattooed forearm—Mother—in old-fashioned curly script. Two clichés for the price of one. And up there, the karaoke screen, flickering with silent songs.
Like thousands of others, she was a postgraduate failure; her time at university ended with her withdrawal from candidature.
Eventually she left her college digs and ended up in a rented room in Arbury, north of the Cam. She took to red wine, drinking slowly, wondering if she should return home, to Australia.
≈
She met Justin last summer, almost one year ago. Under a low Cambridge sky he walked across the grass, directly towards her. The sign that prohibited walking on the grass was no impediment: the young man with a patchy blond beard and leather jacket flaunted cool disdain. Justin was twenty-six then and modelled himself on Mick Jagger. He might have burst pouting into whiny song, but instead leaned across Helen and put his hand on the wall near her face, so that she was aware of how tall he was, and how sure of his smarmy appeal. He resembled Jagger only in the deep creases that ran each side from his nose to his lips—and the jacket, of course. In those days every male student owned a black leather jacket; there was a storage facility in the suburbs that sold ‘pre-loved’ jackets ‘from the back of a truck’. Gown and town all knew of it. Even dons turned up, furtively leaving with their illegal rock glamour.
Justin cleared his throat and said, ‘Let’s not waste time.’
She’d heard better openers.
‘My forte, wasting time.’
‘As now we are wasted,’ he added.
Ah, wit. The underestimated tool of seduction. This was their beginning: her resistance, his persistence, and the tone they would bandy between them that showed competition and quickened responsiveness. Helen stalled, since she saw his insecurity and intuited the range of his faults. And he was Australian, like her, when she had hoped for an Englishman. But resolve collapsed in the face of his sexual presence, which like his wit was forthright and apposite.
He was at Churchill College: modern, boxy and slightly out of town, suffering the condescension of the older colleges and full of Commonwealth colonials, doomed by English opinion to be already second-rate. Helen was at Newnham, the women’s college, with its garden of fat rosy blossoms and its neat rectangular windows. She lived at Whitstead, the college residence where illustrious Sylvia Plath had stayed for fifteen months. It was a blank white building of sixteen rooms, simply appointed, with shared bathroom and kitchen. Draughty, convivial and full of hyperintelligent women. The others left the bathroom in puddles and uncleaned, knowing that she would tidy up after them.
Justin drew his face away, just as she thought he might lean closer. This too was his manner, contrived to tease. Often, he would linger when she expected him to act, and so he inspired in her a caution, almost a distrust, which never quite left. He suggested meeting later at the quaint little teashop opposite King’s, not the location she’d expected.
‘Excellent scones.’ A formula recommendation of oldies. He tilted his head and waited for her yes.
In retrospect she saw how careful he was, not displaying his drinking at first, making her wait, finding a venue known for tourists and polite sedation.
As they sat across from each other in elderly hum, their teacups aligned, their conversation avoiding innuendo, Justin spoke of his parents. His father had left, he declared, before he existed in memory, so he was only a tale his mother told, and no doubt embellished. Father had been a qualified carpenter (like Jesus, Mother said) and sharp as a tack. He made kitchen cupboards and in his spare time small wooden boxes for gifts. They had a box on the mantelpiece, which might have borne a sign: father. It troubled Justin to realise that this was all father was, a leftover ornament, with no verifiable existence. His mother was religious and slightly mad. She raised him as best she could, shocked to have a clever, godless boy and unsure what to do with him. They lived in Geelong. She had grown there, his father too, so Justin spent his whole childhood covertly looking at men his mother’s age, wondering. He stood outside pubs and stared at working men as they entered and left. Every now and then he noticed a face in which he thought he saw a shadow of his own, but was helplessly passive and afraid of conclusion or revelation, so flipped—he said ‘flipped’—into despondent searching from face to face. Serial searcher.
