I have often wanted to bring forward the story of Bridget. The time when I seemed most likely to do so was a certain year in the late 1980s, when I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing and when I approached my place of employment on four mornings of every week on foot, having walked from the nearest railway-station through certain back-streets of a suburb of Melbourne where the value of the meanest cottage would have been twice that of the house that my wife and I had been paying off for twenty and more years in a suburb on the opposite side of the city. In a certain back-street, I used to walk for some distance beside a high wall of bluestone that was one of the boundaries of a large allotment. I sometimes heard the sound of trickling water from the far side of the wall. I supposed the sound might have come from an arrangement of fish-ponds with a tiny waterfall between them or, what was less probable but more to my liking, from a streamlet issuing out of a grotto wherein stood a statue of a female personage. I was never able to learn what caused the sound of trickling water, but I was one day able to assume that a fernery of some sort was on the other side of the wall. On that day I noticed, as I walked beside the wall, a pale-green button-shape protruding from the grey mortar between two blocks of bluestone. I found that the seeming-button was the uncurled frond of a fern. On the other side of the wall, so I understood, was a fernery so well-watered and so lush that one of the fern-plants there could find no other way of reproducing than by forcing a child-frond into a crevice within the strip of mortar between two blocks of bluestone in a massive wall, as though somewhere, on the far side of the wall, was a place where a new and more spacious fernery might come into being.
On day after day, I observed that the button-shape was developing into a frond and that the pale green was changing to green. My first catching sight from a distance of the single shred of greenery protruding from the dark-blue wall became for me the chief event of each day. I soon understood that the sight of the fern-frond growing out of the wall would become in time the sort of image that would go on troubling me until I had discovered more of the network of images and feelings of which the frond-image was only the most noticeable part.
For as long as I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing, I used to tell my students that my own way of writing fiction was only one of many ways. Even so, I made sure that my students were well aware of how I went about my writing. I told my students of Advanced Fiction Writing during a discussion about the origins of fiction in the year when the fern had appeared that I believed I would write at some future time a work of fiction the central image of which was an image of a fern-frond protruding through a bluestone wall. I told my students further that an image connected with the central image would be an image of a strand of hair lying diagonally across the forehead of a young female person who looked out across an ocean or who lay with closed eyes beneath a lake.
Only a year or two after I had told my students what is reported above, I gave up writing fiction. The work of fiction that I talked about in front of my students will never be written. And yet, the simple network of images that would have given rise to that work remains in my mind and has become more complex in recent years.
Nowadays, the south-west coast of Victoria is often described as a popular tourist destination. At a certain point on that coast, the local government authority, hoping perhaps to reassure the persons known as tourists that the place whereat they have arrived is of historical importance, has erected a sign on which appear two words. The second word is Bay. The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by the possessive apostrophe. The surname on the sign is, of course, the surname of the author of this sentence and of all the other sentences in this work of fiction. I have been told that many tourists, so to call them, visit the place where the sign has been erected and admire the high cliffs thereabouts and even descend the steep stairway to the small bay named on the sign. I myself have not visited that part of the coast for twenty-nine years and will not visit it again. When I last visited the place, long before anyone would have wanted to erect a sign on it, I did so for the purpose of showing to my wife and my three young children a district that stayed in my mind even though I had turned away from it. I showed them the red-roofed sandstone farmhouse built by my father’s father on the site of the earlier wooden house built by that man’s father, who was the first owner of the nearest farm to the coast and the man for whom the steep bay was named. I photographed my children standing on the edge of a cliff with the bay visible below them and beyond the bay the Southern Ocean. I told my children of how my parents had taken me often to the farm beside the coast while my father’s father was still alive during the 1940s. During those years, the steep bay was so seldom visited that the sand would be littered with driftwood during winter and spring. Only in the hottest weeks of summer did visitors arrive, and they were mostly local farming families bringing picnic-lunches. I told the children that my parents and my brother and I sometimes picnicked in the steep bay. I told the children of how I had hated and feared the sea since the time when my mother had taken me onto the beach at Port Campbell before my first birthday and when I, a quiet and docile baby, had screamed until she took me away from all sight and sound of the waves. I told the children of how I used to plead with my parents not to take me down the path from the cliff-top into the steep bay; of how I used to stand on the cliff-top and to turn my back on the sea and to look northwards across the first few of the hundred and more miles of the so-called Western District and to yearn to belong to one of the families who lived there and who looked out all day from their windows and verandahs onto views of seemingly endless grassy countryside with intervening lines of trees marking the courses of creeks that trickled towards some far-away river that flowed sluggishly towards some farther-away ocean. I told the children of how I was always compelled to go down with my brother and my parents into the steep bay but of how I often avoided having to paddle and to splash among the incoming waves and to pretend that I was enjoying myself or even learning to swim. I often avoided these hateful rituals by creeping, with my parents’ reluctant permission, in among the piles of boulders at either side of the bay. The boulders were pieces of cliff that had fallen during past centuries. The waves from the ocean had so eroded the boulders as to create a complicated system of tunnels and sluices and pools. If I crept far out among the boulders, I was able to hear the crash of each ocean-wave against the outermost boulders and afterwards the long succession of hissing- and gurgling- and sucking-noises that marked the flowing of the water from the wave inwards among the boulders. I could sit in safety by some or another rock-pool while the force of the ocean-swell shook the boulders all around me but barely troubled the water of the pool. The sides of the pool would have been overgrown with bunches of the plant that I called sea-lettuce and with fronds and ribbons of plants that I had no name for. Currents in the pool caused the plants to sway continually. The currents were surely caused by the waves that struck the outer boulders, and yet the swaying of the plants seemed unconnected with any inrush of water from the ocean. The water from each wave took so long to travel through the heaps of boulders to the furthest pools (the nearest to the beach) that a second wave would sometimes arrive before the water in those pools had begun to recede. The plants attached to the sides of the rock-pools moved unpredictably, although always gracefully. Many years after my last visit to the heaps of boulders beside the bay named after my father’s grandfather, at a time when I supposed that I might soon begin to write a piece of fiction in which one of the central images was of a fern protruding through a wall of bluestone and another central image was of a strand of hair lying across the forehead of a female person, I began to understand that a further central image was of green bunches or fronds moving under water at unpredictable intervals, which further central image might require me to report in my piece of fiction that a certain young female personage on a balcony, or a certain young female personage presumed by other personages to have died, seemed sometimes to move her head from side to side as though she wondered at, or as though she disbelieved, or as though she could wish not to have seen some or another image that appeared in her mind.