The Pages by Murray Bail

and boring.’
    This was Rosie Steig, close up – a broad forehead, narrow chin, severe eyes, messy black hair to her shoulders. She was studying Old Norse and psychology, among other things. Wesley explained where he came from. Because she had asked, he described his sister. Even with a headache she listened carefully. His mother and father he mentioned with a shrug. Describing his interest in impressions and movement, he realised he didn’t make sense, and sounded almost mournful when he said he didn’t know what to make of anything much.
    And the kitchen became crowded. Although they were in her place, she asked over the noise if they could go next door to his place. There, still talking on his second-hand sofa of muddy roses, he allowed his left arm with its restless fingers and a Swiss watch strapped on, to lengthen towards the first port of call, her shoulder. At the very moment his fingertips touched, he stopped. She seemed to be waiting – but you never can tell.
    Later, lying next to her, conscious of the welcome of a woman’s body, again Wesley Antill decided to pause, decided to remain separate. He concentrated on the smallest gaps between them – not to remain faithful to the memory of Mrs Kentridge, who he was still seeing, but to experience the difficulty, the austerity of resistance. Was it celibacy? It was close, but not really.
    From then an apparent naturalness flowed between them; a pleasant ordinariness, none of the complications.
    A few weeks after the party she suggested one afternoon they go up on the roof. It was too ‘stuffy’ inside. Chatting away at the bedroom door, she bent forward to let her breasts fall into the floral bikini he had last seen on the roof.
    To his sister he wrote, ‘My neighbour next door is like you. I’m trying to work out why exactly. (When I know I’ll let you know.) Is about your size. Don’t screw your nose up! Name is Rosie. She tells me there’s no problem attending lectures at the university. All I do is tag along as if I’m a student too, which of course I am.’
    Rosie Steig took him to other parties, where he looked on as she and her friends discussed politics, and names and ideas Wesley had never heard of. He left early, and didn’t mind when he heard Rosie arrive next door with another man. It was Rosie who first led him through the gates of Sydney University and into the lecture hall. With Wesley in tow, she liked to arrive late, and take a seat in the front, where she would begin brushing her black hair. To Wesley the descending tiers of seats gave the impression he was stepping down into a volcano, or some sort of excavation where, instead of eruptions, a small vertical figure stood at the microphone and spoke with quiet reasonableness, trying to make sense of it all. It was here that Wesley first heard the main theories of psychology and psychoanalysis, which had been transported in book parcels all the way from Vienna, Zurich, London.
    Whenever he looked up one of Rosie’s friends waved at him using her little finger.
    Nothing before had produced in him such keen anticipation. The process itself of arriving and choosing the best position for learning, then to sit down and wait for the lecturer to arrive, watching and waiting as the papers were shifted, sometimes just a page of notes, before the mouth opened and pronounced the first words. It hardly mattered what the subject was. Theory and information unfolded as one. In this it resembled the way Mrs Kentridge undressed in stages, proud to reveal her nakedness to him – who flew into a rage when he happened to tell her this.
    He attended as many lectures as possible. And so he acquired broad knowledge of the histories of the significant parts of the world – really, a history of congestions. Even a bit of Australia was touched upon; he traversed the Spanish lake; listened in on linguistics, the Romance languages; Greeks, the myths;