A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

About ten years ago I was in the process of reorganizing the books in my library. I ran across the four seasons of Powell's Dance, didn't really know what they were, but just put them in the place they should be and continued on. I think I figured they were just more novels I'd acquired at some point and never read, like many others.

After joining Goodreads a few years later, I happened to see Manny's review of Powell's masterpiece. Not too long after I read "Spring". What impressed me immensely about those first three novels was Powell's idea of bringing out the way in which, as we dance our way through time, we only gradually come to know more and more about friends and acquaintances, often in very curious circumstances - a flash of insight caused by someone's casual remark. This struck me as such a beautiful comment on the way people go through life.

A bit later, I got curious about how I had got the books. I offhandedly said something about them to my wife, and she said that they were her books, and that she'd read them. I was stunned. Right now, relating this late at night, with her asleep upstairs, I can't ask - and I can't imagine when she would have read twelve novels by Powell. It seemed utterly out of character for her. She was a scientist, hardly ever read books (novels) for pleasure, read newspapers, scientific journals, but novels??? Twelve by one author?

And, I should point out, at that time we'd been married at least forty years, and I'd known her since we were five years old.

Ten minutes into the last quarter, it began to rain, freezing rain, driven into our facts by a wind that had passed over pack ice in its time. We only needed a kick to win but nobody could hold the ball, let along get a book to it. We were sliding around, falling over, trying to recognise our own side under the mudpacks. Mick Doolan was shouting instructions from the sideline but no-one paid any attention. We were completely knackered. Finally, close to time, we had some luck: a big bloke came out of the mist and broke Scotty Erwan’s nose with a vicious swing of the elbow. Even in the rain you could hear the cartilage crunch. Scotty was helped off, streaming blood, and we got a penalty.

‘Take the kick, Mac,’ said Bill Garrett, the captain. He would normally take the kick in situations like this, but since the chance of putting it through was nil, he thought it best that I lose the game for Brockley. ‘Privilege,’ I sad, spitting out some mud. ‘Count on my vote for skipper next year. Skipper.’

I was right in front of goal but the wind was lifting my upper lip. I looked around the field. There were about twenty spectators left, some of them dogs sitting in old utes.

‘Slab says you can’t do it,’ said the player closest to me. He was just another anonymous mudman but I knew the voice.

‘Very supportive, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You’re on, you little prick.’

Squinting against the rain, I took my run-up inot the gale, scared that I was going to slip before I could even make the kick.

But I didn’t. I manged to give the ball a reasonable punt before my left leg went out under me. I hit the ground with my left shoulder and slid towards goal.

And as I lay in the cold black mud, the wind paused for a second or two and the ball went straight between the uprights.

The final whistle went. Victory. Victory in round eight of the second division of the Brockley and District League. I got up. My shoulder felt dislocated. ‘That’ll be a slab of Boag, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You fucking traitor.’

‘Brought out yer best,’ Flannery said. ‘Psychology. Read about it.’

I said, ‘Read about it? Psychology in Pictures. I didn’t know they’d done that.’

He'd been killed where he lay, his head pulled back by the ponytail and his throat cut. More than cut. He was almost decpaitated.....Carlie mance was in the bathroom, naked....the man had been behind her when he cut her throat....

At school I had known Tom Goring, who had later gone into the Sixtieth, and, although we had never had much to do with each other, I remembered some story of Stringham's of how both of them had put up money to buy a crib for Horace - or another Latin author whose works they were required to render into English [fucking hell, why oh why this tedious qualification. Are we going to find the narrator out? Ah ha. YOU said it was Horace and actually:] - and of trouble that ensued from the translation supplied having contained passages omitted in the official educational textbook. This fact of her elder brother having been my contemporary - the younger son, David, was still at school - may perhaps have had something to do with finding myself, immediately after our first meeting, on good terms with Barbara; though the matter of getting on well with young men in no circumstances presented serious difficulty to her.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese.

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.

These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.