After the boy had felt as reported in the previous paragraph, he felt for a few hours, or perhaps only for a few minutes, that his patroness understood him in such a way that he need hardly explain himself to her in words. He felt as though she understood that his wanting to see into tabernacles and such places had only ever arisen because he had lacked for a patroness and had been driven to look for such places as might console him for his lack. This feeling, of course, could not last, and in the daydreams that followed, he found in some or another church or convent a tabernacle that was no longer used for religious ceremonies but was still decorated and was still even locked. By some preposterous means, he found the key to the tabernacle. He opened the door, and if he had had more courage, he might have explored all of what lay behind it. But he did not so dare. All he dared to do was to leave in the dark space behind the outer curtains a written message to the patroness — or for some or another personage who might be disposed to read the message and to understand it.
It was never to be expected that any decisive event would take place: any event that might convince the boy of his patroness’s interest in him, let alone her indisputable existence in his mind or elsewhere. If he went back in his daydreams to the tabernacle where he had left the written message and if he found that the place behind the curtains was empty, could he be sure that she had understood the message? Had she even read the message? Had she merely removed it as a formality in the same way that priests of certain religions, so the boy would learn long afterwards, would consume in private the sacrificial food offered by the faithful to their non-existent gods?
While I was writing the previous paragraph, which is, of course, part of a work of fiction, I remembered for perhaps the first time in sixty years an event in the seventh or eighth year of the life of a person who can never be any more than a personage in the mind of any reader of this writing. I remembered my having found one afternoon on the way home from school in the largest city in northern Victoria a short tunnel of about the circumference of my index finger in the trunk of the tall grey-box tree that grew in the gravelly margin of the street outside the house where I lived with my brother and my parents. What was probably no more than a deep knothole seemed to me a phenomenon not to be ignored.
In the shabby rented house next to my parents’ hardly less shabby rented house was what my mother called a tribe of kids. The nearest to me in age of the tribe was a girl a year older than myself. If the reader of this paragraph could accept that certain fictional events may closely resemble remembered events, then I would be willing to report that the girl mentioned in the second sentence of this paragraph had the name Sylvia; that I sometimes felt urged to confide to Sylvia matters such as I would have confided to few other persons, and not just because I seemed to read from her face that she would have been a trustworthy confidant but also because the sound of her name when I pronounced it brought to my mind vague images of pleasant scenery; that I addressed to Sylvia, soon after I had discovered the short tunnel mentioned in the previous paragraph, a brief note telling her that I wanted to talk to her soon about certain matters; that I rolled the note into a cylindrical shape and pushed it as far as I could push it into the short tunnel in the grey-box tree but that I never afterwards informed the person addressed in the note of what I had done, although I often paused on my way past the tree and reached a finger into the tunnel, hoping to find that my message had been retrieved but always having my finger come up against a wad of unread paper. A day came, of course, when I walked past the tree without remembering my message; and when I learned, five years later, that silvus was the Latin for woodland, I had forgotten, so I thought, the name that had been at the head of my note and had forgotten even the grey-box tree.
I got hints sometimes of personages much more remote from me than my patroness but perhaps not wholly inaccessible if only I could have discovered the means of access. In a certain corner of a garden behind a spacious house that my father sometimes visited, I found a fish-pond full of shaggy water-plants and overhung by ferns. In another part of the same garden, an ornamental grapevine grew over the frosted-glass panels of a wall of the garage. Whenever I stood alone in these places, I felt nothing more subtle than a child’s anger and helplessness, and yet the cause of those feelings was too subtle almost for me to explain nowadays. I wanted to see or to hear or to touch some or another being who was able to comprehend and to enjoy and perhaps even to express in words what I was only vaguely aware of in those places. It seemed to me impossible that what I was caught up in consisted of no more than myself and a pool of water or panes of glass and a few garden-plants; I was one small part of a mystery that I myself could never hope to explicate. If only I had been granted as little as a glimpse in my mind of one of this remoter sort of personage, I would have devoted myself to her (she was much more likely to have been female than otherwise) as I never devoted myself during childhood or afterwards to the personages recommended to me by my teachers and priests.
There were personages even less accessible to me than those mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Those impossibly remote beings probably seemed as they did because the scenery they lurked beyond was itself distant from me. In a coloured booklet advertising the scenery of Tasmania, I found, when I was ten years old, an aerial view of Elwick racecourse in Hobart. Each curve of far-off white-railed fencing was perfectly graduated, and yet the whole racecourse had a tantalising asymmetry that brought into being a goddess of racecourses, even though I had scant hope ever of catching sight of her. And when, as a young man in my twenties, I finally travelled through the landscape that reached northwards from the view that I had never seen from the upper floor of the convent mentioned much earlier, far from being disillusioned, I often became aware that some or another barely perceptible being might have presided over the view ahead of me of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. I was unable to envisage even the merest outline of the being, but I was able to ascertain that she was at least as well-disposed towards me as the remembered image in my mind of the brown-robed nun who had once made a pet of me in her parlour and had later sent me a certain holy-card.
I met with the nun, my father’s friend, only once after my visit to her convent of two storeys in northern Victoria. My father died suddenly when I was only twenty. After his funeral service, I was standing among a throng of relatives in the grounds of the church when the persons around me stepped aside in order to open a passage for two nuns who were striding towards me. The two were my father’s friend and a travelling companion. I stood awkwardly while the friend reminded me of what a fine man my father had been. As she left me, she expressed the hope that I would one day do something to make my father proud of me.
I have never since seen the nun, who is surely no longer alive. However, I have in my archives several short letters from her and a copy each of my equally short replies. She wrote chiefly to tell me that she had recently come across one or another of my books of fiction and had read it but had been, on balance, disappointed by it. Only once was she more specific.
My published books of fiction comprise many more than half a million words. Of all those words, no more than 150 could be said to report an act of sexual intercourse between two characters. Of those 150 words, only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are hands and knees. Most of the remaining 148 words report the impressions of a male character who seems to imagine himself as a jockey during the latter part of a horse-race. The act in question results in the conception of the chief character of the book in question, which character is a boy who devises elaborate games to do with imaginary horse-races. In one of her short letters to me, the nun wrote that the passage mentioned was unworthy of me.