When the chief character had first bought his binoculars, he had supposed that he would use them mostly for looking at fields of racehorses on the far sides of racecourses and occasionally for looking at birds in grassy countryside, but he had not hesitated to take his binoculars to the upstairs flat. During the year in the early 1960s when he was a regular visitor to the upstairs flat, the chief character was no longer a clerk in a building of many storeys but a teacher in a primary school in an outer suburb of Melbourne. He had earlier undergone a year-long course of teacher-training but not in order to live with a young wife in a cottage painted cream with dark-green trimmings; he had become a teacher so that he could apply to be transferred to a school far from Melbourne if ever he felt drawn in future to live among mostly grassy countryside. During the years while he had owned the binoculars, he had gone out on one occasion only with each of two young women, but he mostly saw himself as a bachelor who admired girls or women from a distance. He arrived with his binoculars at the upstairs flat hopeful that some or another magnified image from the opposite building might embolden him in his future dealings with young women but more inclined to suppose that whatever he might see through the binoculars would only show him more clearly what he was deprived of as a bachelor.
The chief character had moved out of his parents’ house during his twenty-first year. He took with him two cardboard grocery cartons full of books, several manila folders of drafts of poems waiting to be revised, his binoculars, and his clothes. During the four years between his moving out and his arrival with his binoculars at the upstairs flat, the chief character had lived in six different rented rooms in various suburbs of Melbourne but had kept safe his cartons of books and his folders of poems and his binoculars, which were still in their original case of imitation leather. In the case also was a parcel of white cloth, about half the size of the chief character’s thumb. The parcel was stuffed with some or another sort of crystal or granule, the purpose of which, so the chief character had heard from someone, was to draw off the moisture in the air inside the case of imitation leather.
Whenever he opened the case in order to take out the binoculars or to put them away, the chief character would touch the parcel several times with a fingertip. Afterwards, he would roll the parcel between several fingertips, pressing and squeezing the cloth until he could feel some of the many crystals that were packed into the parcel. Whenever he merely touched the parcel, he seemed to be plumping a pillow that belonged on a bed in a bedroom on the upper storey of a doll’s house. After he had plumped the pillow, it would have been ready for placing on the single bed in the upper room in his mind so that the young female personage whose room it was could have lain to rest in the bed whenever it had pleased her to leave off looking out from her upper-storey window and to step across the room to her bed. If it had occurred to him that the usual occupants of a doll’s house were lifeless figurines, then he would have seen the female personage in his mind either as a character in a comic-strip in his mind or as the handiwork of a craftsman of genius who had equipped the personage and, perhaps, each of the other personages in the same house, with tiny clockwork or electric motors that enabled the personages to walk and to perform certain rudimentary movements. Whenever he fingered the granules inside the parcel, he seemed to be fingering beads of a substance that he knew as Irish horn.
Like many another earnest Catholic schoolboy during the 1940s, the chief character had carried in his pocket a set of rosary beads. Sometimes he passed the beads between his fingers while he murmured the collection of prayers known as the rosary. He understood that the beads themselves were no more than counters or markers and had no intrinsic spiritual value. However, he had once received as a present from his father’s youngest sister a set of beads somewhat different from any that he had previously owned or seen. A small cloth label attached to the beads stated that they were made from genuine Irish horn. The chief character did not know at the time, and never afterwards learned, what were the origins of Irish horn, whether genuine or imitation. But his not knowing as a boy what the beads were made from only added to their value in his estimation. He would have prized them for their appearance alone. Every bead differed, however slightly, from the next, if not in shape then in colour. If a bead was not distinguished by some bulge or concavity, then it was more richly tinted or less so than its neighbours. The fifty and more beads, when viewed from a distance, seemed predominantly blue-green, but hardly any bead, when he looked closely at it, could have been called either blue or green. In many a bead was a tint that he could not name, but this only pleased him the more. He would sometimes hold bead after bead between an eye and the light, hoping to see what he saw whenever he peered into certain of his glass marbles or into certain panels of coloured glass in the front doors of houses: a luminous other-world waiting to be populated by personages of his own devising; or, perhaps, a limpid medium, much less dangerous than water, through which he might have found his way towards places beneath rivers and lakes where characters from comic-strips or from poems watched over their female captives who might have been, after all, not dead but merely fast asleep.
The chief character took his binoculars to the upstairs flat on a few Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but got no benefit from them. He and his companions soon tired of keeping watch in the dark bathroom until the light might have been turned on in the young woman’s bedroom. Sometimes, when one or another young man had seemed to stay overlong in the bathroom, the others would suspect him of having sighted the young woman and kept her for himself alone, as it were. Once, when the chief character had stepped into the bathroom in order to urinate, the light had just then appeared in the young woman’s room. The chief character had picked up the binoculars from where they lay in readiness on the bathroom floor, but before he had brought them into focus the light had been turned off again.