I did not tell my children of how I had often daydreamed during my childhood about a certain series of events that might take place on one or another Sunday afternoon in the near future: a Sunday afternoon when one or another of my mother’s sisters and her husband and children would join my parents and my brother and myself for a picnic at the steep bay with the rock-pools at its side. The series of events would have begun with one or another of the daughters of the sister of my mother, that is to say, one or another girl-cousin of mine agreeing to go with me among the boulders in order to watch the swaying of the green leaves and fronds in the rock-pools. The series would have continued with the girl-cousin and myself, soon after we had found ourselves alone together beside the most secluded of the rock-pools, agreeing that a girl-cousin and a boy-cousin were uniquely placed one to another, being neither sister and brother nor girlfriend and boyfriend but something in-between, as we might have expressed the matter, and further agreeing that we two cousins, during our few minutes together beside the secluded pool, were provided with an opportunity to treat with one another as surely no sister and brother, nor any girlfriend and boyfriend, ever treated.
The series of events reported in the previous paragraph never took place beside the fictitious rock-pool or any other sort of rock-pool or in any other sort of secluded setting. And yet, there came into my mind while I was writing the previous paragraph an event that happened during the week after the horse named Rimfire won the Melbourne Cup in the world where I sit writing these paragraphs, and there came into my mind soon afterwards a fictitious version of that event: a version well-suited for including in this piece of fiction.
During the week mentioned in the previous sentence, my brother and I and my parents lived in a farming district about five miles inland from the steep bay mentioned previously. The district, so far as I could see, comprised mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, some of which comprised the nearest tracts of the Heytesbury Forest. My family had arrived in the farming district only a few weeks before. We had previously lived in a provincial city several hundred miles away. I did not know it at the time, but we had left the provincial city in haste so that my father could avoid paying the large sums that he owed to bookmakers who had allowed him to bet with them on credit. In the farming district, my family paid a token rent for a house that had no bathroom, no laundry, and no sink or running water in the kitchen. We were one of only two families in the district that had no motor-car; my father rode a push-bike for three miles each day to and from the farm where he milked the cows and did labouring jobs. I marvel today that I never shrank with shame during my first days at the school in the farming district when one after another boy or girl asked me where I lived and what my father did. Perhaps I thought that my family’s humble circumstances counted for nothing beside the fact that my surname was attached to the steep bay on the coast not far away: the bay where many of my schoolfellows picnicked with their families on Sundays in summer.
My family’s circumstances were seemingly no hindrance to my proposing to the daughter of our nearest farmer-neighbour that she and I should look at one another’s naked bodies from near at hand. The daughter was a year younger than I. She had yellow hair and a pert nose, and I considered her pretty. On several afternoons each week I would visit her parents’ farm on the pretext of wanting to play with her brother, who was in my class at school. The parents were always in the milking-shed when I visited. The mother, like the daughter, had yellow hair and a pert nose. The father I hardly ever saw; he seemed always to be finishing some or another job of work. I learned some years later that the farm was owned by his father-in-law, the father of the pert-nosed wife. The father-in-law owned several other farms and was the largest land-owner in the district.
I would like to be able to remember what arguments or inducements I used in order to persuade the yellow-haired girl to show herself to me. I can only remember the sight of her standing in the dimly lit shed with her pants around her knees and her dress bunched beneath her chin. During the minute or so while she stood thus and while I inspected her, she neither moved nor spoke, so that I remembered her body afterwards as being hardly different from the many images of marble torsos that I looked at in books about sculpture, except for one or two significant details. And even those details I had struggled to appreciate in the dim shed, not because the yellow-haired girl was less than generous in showing them to me but because I had been for so long outside in the bright sunlight. I had been playing cricket or football with the brother of the yellow-haired girl in the so-called house paddock and looking often across the mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, and my eyes had been dazzled.
Some years before I began to write this piece of fiction, a man who has read all of my published writing told me by telephone that he had been travelling recently along the coast in the southwest of Victoria and had come across a certain steep bay above which stood a sign proclaiming that the bay was named after a person bearing my surname. I told the man that the bay in question had been named after my father’s grandfather. I told him that I had not visited the steep bay for nearly thirty years and would not visit it again. I told the man also that I hoped he knew me better than to suppose that I got satisfaction from having my surname displayed on a sign above the Southern Ocean. I told the man finally that I had already arranged for my surname and my given name to be displayed at some or another time in the future in the only sort of landscape that I cared to be connected with. I explained to the man that I had bought some years ago a burial plot in a cemetery at the edge of a small town in the far west of Victoria after having satisfied myself first that the view in every direction around the cemetery was of mostly level grassy countryside with scattered trees in the middle distance and with a line of trees in the far distance and then that many a person standing in the Western District of Victoria and looking towards the furthest line of trees to the west of him or her would be looking in the direction of the small town.