The first of the five young women mentioned told the young man after their second outing that she could no longer accompany him anywhere because she was giving serious consideration to a proposal of marriage from a man some years older than herself who was hoping soon to acquire on generous terms of sale a property suitable for dairy farming in a coastal district in the south-west of Victoria formerly covered by forest but recently converted by the state government into mostly level grassy countryside.
The second of the five young women shared a spacious twostorey apartment with two other young women who seemed to be often absent, as a result of which the young man and the young woman in question were often alone together in the apartment for many hours after they had returned from some or another outing. During much of their time alone together, he and she lay on the couch in the lounge room while it was lit only by the glow of the ceramic columns of a gas heater. During the forty-eight years that followed the few months when he and she had had dealings with one another, the man who had been the young man supposed often that the young woman had wanted him to be much bolder with her than he had been while they had lain together in the glow mentioned. The young man had not been overly bold with the young woman because he could not forget what he had read in a certain letter that he had found protruding from the pages of a certain book of fiction on the mantelpiece of the lounge room mentioned on the morning after he and the young woman had gone on their first outing together and after they had lain together for several hours on the couch mentioned before the young woman had gone upstairs to her bedroom and the young man had slept for a few hours on the couch before returning to the bungalow where he lived in a nearby suburb. The letter mentioned had been sent to the young woman by a man whose age the young man had no way of knowing. The man had been in Sydney when he had written the letter and had been obliged to remain there for several months afterwards. He had tried to cheer the young woman by writing to her that the time would soon pass until he could return from Sydney and could again be as bold with her as he had so often been before he had left.
When he had first read the letter mentioned, the young man had not been able to decide whether the letter had lain where it lay because the young woman, the person addressed in the letter, was a slovenly person or whether she had left the letter in the book of fiction so that he would find the letter and would read it. Nor was the young man able to decide why the young woman might have wanted him to read the letter if, in fact, she had so wanted.
The third of the five young women had been the young man’s companion on only a few outings before she explained that she could not meet with him during the following two weeks but that she would willingly accompany him on one or another outing afterwards. During the second of the two weeks mentioned, the young man had been told by a girlfriend of the young woman that she and the man who had been her most recent boyfriend had spent much of the previous week arranging for her to have an illegal abortion. The young man chose at first not to believe the girlfriend, but once having believed her he chose to avoid the company of the young woman.
The fourth of the five young women was the younger sister of a drinking companion of the young man under mention, who drank beer until late on Friday evening each week in the house where the sister and the brother lived with their parents. The young woman was younger than the young man by five years and seemed always busy with her course at a primary teachers college, although she found time to chat with the young man whenever he approached her. Believing that the young woman had no boyfriend, the young man decided to ask her to accompany him on some or another outing but not until late in the year, when she would have finished her examinations and assignments. During the months after he had decided this, the young man felt more cheerful than he had felt during any of his time in the company of any of the three young women mentioned previously. Late in the year, however, when the young man asked the young woman to accompany him on a certain outing, he learned that she had had a boyfriend for two years past although she and he met only on alternate weekends because he was the sole teacher at a primary school in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne.
The fifth of the young women accompanied the young man on many an outing for five months. The young woman worked in a bookshop where the young man bought many books of fiction, although he did not tell her that he read the books in order to learn how he might bring nearer to completion the work of fiction that he had been writing for some years. The young man felt comfortable with the young woman after she had told him during their first outing that she had not long before broken off, as she expressed it, with a man who had meant a lot to her, as she expressed it, and that she would prefer not to become serious, as she expressed it, with another man for the time being. Later, the young man had learned from the young woman that the man she had mentioned to him had been a married man. Later again, the young woman had told the young man that she believed she needed a change in her life and that she was thinking of moving to Sydney or Brisbane. Later yet again, the young man wondered whether the young woman had been surprised, or even disappointed, when he had not tried to persuade her to go on living in Melbourne and had not written to her after she had moved.
Even if the young woman had been concerned to know what was in the young man’s mind during their last outing, he would not have tried to explain to her that he saw in his mind the image-view of the topographical map mentioned earlier or that he saw, rising to view, the same image-details that had thus risen while he had read, more than five years before, the last pages of a certain book of fiction by the famous author mentioned earlier. Among those image-details were a black image-flag above a distant image-building in the image-city mentioned earlier; a young image-man and beside him a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl; and, barely visible on distant image-farms or in distant image-villages, or even among the image-trees of distant image-woodlands, many a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl, who might later be mentioned on image-page after image-page of image-fiction.
In the mind of a man aged nearly forty years, an image appeared of the front cover of a thick book of fiction. The man had bought more than a thousand books of fiction and had read more than half of them, but he had never learned the various terms used by publishers and booksellers to describe their wares. The man knew only two kinds of books: hardcover books and paperback books. The cover mentioned was at the front of a paperback book.
The man mentioned would have liked to own only hardcover books of fiction. Such books reassured him when he looked at them or touched their spines. He understood that hardcover books numbered many fewer than paperback books. He preferred to own books of fiction that were read by few other persons. He got much pleasure from owning some or another book of fiction that had supplied him with a rich pattern of connected images but was unknown to his friends.
The image of the front cover mentioned seemed always to the man mentioned a drab image. The image-cover was mostly white with black image-words appearing on its lower third. In some or another part of the upper third of the image-cover was an arrangement of blue and black and red image-discs. The man understood that the image-discs were intended to represent or to suggest glass beads of many colours. He had been given to understand this by a review of the book mentioned or, perhaps, by a paragraph on the rear cover of the book mentioned. He had been given to understand also that the book contained, among many other things, a report of a monastic community living in an isolated place at a date several hundred years later than the twentieth century and devoting much of their time to the playing of a game with many-coloured glass beads, each of which was intended to represent or to suggest one or another item or strand or theme in the history of civilisation. The author of the book was a German man who was considered by some persons a deep thinker and who had been born sixty-two years before the birth of the owner of the book.