Night Street (11 page)

The tenacity with which Louise sang Ted's praises made Clarice think something was amiss, especially as the man hardly seemed to deserve it; he did not quite look at you when you were speaking, giving the unpleasant impression of being somehow underhanded or suspicious yet also fundamentally uninterested. Was Louise afraid her husband would leave her?

Steam was shooting up from the kettle. Louise did not notice—her demeanour was too regal. Clarice went through the motions, scalding the pot, spooning in plump spoonfuls of tea; she loved the earthy sweet fragrance.

‘I didn't know what was going on. I was in our room. Ted had sent me off because I was wailing.' Louise had apparently doubled back on her story. ‘I'm a protective mother to a fault, but I can't help it, can I? It's the instinct.' Clarice poured in the water and fitted the cosy. ‘Ted took control of the whole situation. The little one was lying down getting tickled by the time the doc arrived. I was putting cold water on my face.'

Louise lifted a hand to her forehead, re-enacting. Clarice's own hands shook as she shaped the bran dough into circles; watching those fallible hands, she did not regret their actions in Arthur's van. What was he doing at this moment? She saw his lively, curious eyes—that open attention that separated him from the Teds of the world. She might tell her sister about him one day and give her a shock, but she did not feel like it now. The story of the snakebite, with its shifting chronology, was eternal.

‘Ted went out and killed the snake to show the doc when he arrived. So they'd know which anti-venin. I haven't a clue how he found it—it was almost dark. Ron was tickled pink with his ligature.'

Clarice remembered, with exquisite clarity, an earlier moment from the night before: waiting for the first reel to start, her effervescent orange drink, a volcano-shaped mountain through a painted window, the organist arranging his coattails as the red velvet curtain was finally lifting; waiting.

15

She had been working at a view of the Yarra, and afterwards came by Meldrum's studio to get his opinion on it. She told herself that this was her intention in going there; however, she soon understood it had been different. These visits were always convivial, slightly formal, a way of showing him thanks and respect, and maybe also her maturity—the risks she was taking. Rather than a failure or a half-failure, she usually brought him a partial tentative success, something she was not quite sure of, in order to see it through his experienced, severe eyes. Perhaps now considering her an independent artist, he was more forthcoming with praise, though he was sometimes silenced too. Her style, it seemed to her, was every day more particular and more itself, unwilling to be tied to his or anyone else's method.

She wondered what he was painting. The last time she had seen any of his work was at the Group Exhibition. Some gum studies done at Eltham had fascinated her, aroused a kind of recognition. It did indeed appear that he was onto something new in those; he really was setting about remaking Australian landscape painting, making it, on its own terms, afresh. They were not grand, sweeping or studied but close, immediate, tight. One called
The three trees
had especially interested her. Hasty, even rough. Its insides almost showing. Like all Meldrum's work, it proclaimed: that is precisely what I saw, right there, then, without prejudice;
that and nothing else
. When your mind entered its skilful depth, you were in the pungent bush, fixing on it a vigilant, unwavering gaze. You smelled a little smoke from a camp, your own damp human heat and, engulfing it all, the absolute crispness of peppery, lemony, honeyed plant life; you bathed in bush light. The Eltham studies, of course, had been too analytical and naked for the critics.

His lesson had not yet finished—the class was busy with a still life of ginger jars. As ever, he had them fervent and only two, hearing the door, turned in her direction: a girl she did not recognise, and Arthur. Clarice and her lover had to be careful that no one notice any unusual familiarity between them. She generally avoided socialising with the group, yet here she was, arriving before the end of the lesson, for the ephemeral, distressing pleasure of a look at him. This, she abruptly realised, was the true reason for her visit. He stared at her for a matter of seconds and his eyes were back on his canvas; she preferred not to study it.

She stood silently at the back of the room. There were fifteen or so of them there, earnestly infantile or housewifely in their smocks.

‘The optimal viewing distance for a finished painting will usually be approximately twenty feet back, the same distance that separated the painter from his subject as he painted,' Meldrum was saying intensely. ‘Otherwise it will not transmit the precise illusion of reality.' No one else could put
precise
and
reality
next to
illusion
with such unblinking confidence.

Yes, she thought, but you were not always after accuracy, exactly. Coming close to the painted surface—though it seemed incomprehensible, abstract—revealed the magic, the artifice, the art: the application of paint upon a flat plane capable of bewitching a viewer. She herself was bewitched, right then, by Arthur's statuesque form and the idea of his hands. To distract herself, she paid attention to the new girl.

Young, perhaps twenty. Later, Clarice would hear someone call her Jean; she would never know her. Jean did not distract her from Arthur. In fact, the girl somehow reflected Clarice's awareness of him. In a snug red jumper, Jean had an extreme prettiness, a childish yet flowered femininity. Her eyes were amused, opulent. She was delighted to be there, relieved to have turned at last into a bohemian. She kept turning to smile at Clarice, an irrepressible smile that seemed exaggerated and charming to Clarice, who was so practised at dissembling her own higher-pitched feelings. Jean's excited, joyously free rendering of the ginger jars showed she was famished for art. She would develop quickly as a painter.

A month or so after smiling back at Jean, Clarice read in
The Age
that the girl had been discovered dead. She would not develop as a painter. Jean had gone to the theatre with ‘artist friends' (was the journalist implying that frequenting artists was itself a dangerous activity?) to see Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion
. She went missing that night. After the play, someone saw her running for the train, giggling, and that was her friends' final view of her. She had been killed— a random, inexplicable attack, apparently, no meaning to hang from her death. Her spark extinguished like that. And one burgeoning artist, one bright-eyed young woman less to walk among them.

Clarice spent the best part of two days brooding over this passing of a girl she never knew; even when she was not thinking about it, she was thinking about it. It was odd. Was it just the surprise of the news? The incongruity? Jean and her ginger jars had been so promisingly vital. It was wrong that such a life force, such momentum should have been directed at death. This has to be Arthur's doing, Clarice thought; he leaves me too open. She wondered if to be open to love meant being open to death. And at that moment it dawned on her that all the thinking about Jean was also a way to think, finally, about Paul, her little brother, who had ended his own life in the asylum. She saw that Jean's death and Paul's were connected. They were the same, because one death is really all deaths—
is
Death.

She would never forget Mum coming in, still-faced, to announce it. At home in Casterton. Clarice was twenty.

‘What is it?'

‘I've had a telegraph. Your brother's died.'

She remained in her usual armchair for some unusual twisted moments, then floated to her feet. ‘What?'

‘Yes. Died.' Mum's voice was too full and awfully flat. She appeared to be postponing her reaction.

Clarice moved towards her. ‘How?'

When she learned some years later of soldiers under the influence of shell shock, she recalled the silent frozen quality in Mum's face as she gave her the news.

So, he had done it himself. In her head, she kept repeating, as if it were a riddle:
by his own hand
. She was stupefied, but perhaps not wholly surprised. Before she felt sad for little Paul or for herself, she felt sad for Mum, because once she had let herself grasp this, it was unlikely she would be the same again.

Clarice had never pictured him doing it. That is, she had thought of a torn sheet and his white neck—so thin. But she had not allowed herself to come too close to the practicalities. After learning about Jean, her body face down, one leg in the gutter, her handbag missing and red jumper askew— no doubt the same jaunty red jumper she had worn that day under her painting smock—Clarice wanted the details of Paul's death. She required them. The facts of horror can be moreish: once you have started nibbling, though you may begin to feel sick, you discover in yourself a ghoulish appetite.

Now she re-created it mercilessly. Paul in pyjamas, pacing the room. His expression unemotional, quite impassive and adult in its resignation; precocious. Violet pools of fatigue under his eyes. An air of something—hard to define—gone irreparably wrong with him. Next the sheet. The sheet parting company from the narrow, ungiving bed. The tearing of the sheet, difficult at first, becoming easier, easy. The sound of tearing fabric, strangely penetrating and loud, as if it were more than just textile in nature, what was being rent.

The noose, his hands knowing what to do, demonstrating how it is done. See? Like this. It's not complicated. Such a bright boy. His hands beginning to shake, a kind of reflex. Then the cloth being tied to the upper bunk, the secure, simple knot, and the loop going over his head, over the perfect beautiful line of that incredibly soft-skinned neck. His fifteen-year-old, terribly soft neck, never kissed by anyone but their mother.

The moment before it was too late, time thundering in his ears; a furious sea in a shell. And the spasmodic moment after.

She did not imagine he thought of them much, at the end; he was always independent, his thoughts his own.

After having at last watched his death unfurl in pictures, known it, she went to Half Moon Bay to paint, hurrying to get there before the light changed. The work gave her some rest. When she had finished, she identified in her landscape something of the passing of time. Time, passing—a slow, viscous flow. A painting was a dream not of immortality but of mortality.

At home that night, she told Mum she meant to go to the art colony Meldrum was organising at Anglesea. A fortnight of camping; it would not be expensive. They would drive down in a convoy. She had had the offer of a place in Henry's car. Ada too.

‘You'll have to ask your father,' she said.

‘I'm going.'

‘An art camp?' Was she put out?

‘Yes. I must go.'

She studied Clarice and then, her tone shifting, courageous, said, ‘I'll see what I can do.'

16

She approached the beach through a blackening mass of dense, stunted trees. It was nearly sundown. Oriented by the roiling noise of the waves and the old smell of salt, she followed a sandy path between trunks moulded into curves by the wind.

The beach. A long stretch of wet sand glowing silver, dark clumps of seaweed thrown by the water. Without being hard, the light was rather metallic, a slightly purple blue-grey that lent the cliff wall across the way a deep warmth, between red wood and caramel. The incoming waves were shockingly white, extravagant with the finest foam.

There was room here and her spirit expanded into it. She subsided onto the slope leading down to the beach, her fingers convulsively grasping a tuft of sharp spinifex. She was not thinking of Arthur, but her urge to paint resembled the tremulous restlessness of other sensual cravings. The light diminishing quickly, she unlaced her shoes, pulled them off and sat breathing hungrily, as hungry as a drunk guzzling liquor. Clarice would not paint that first night. She had to clear herself of home, let in the new air, freshen herself—she had to go vacant. After a while, she began to laugh, laughing till a ticklish pressure built in her skull and her own internal sea erupted, salt water running down her face.

She stood and wandered, giddy, barefoot, through the near dark, towards the rising tide.

17

Arthur was grateful but also unhappy she had come. His words and gestures were as smooth as ever. His stable exterior was undisturbed and this was probably all other people saw: the still lake of him by which you wanted to linger, reflected in that proud surface to advantage. But his turmoil was loud to Clarice; there was trouble in him. He had become a divided man, suspended between a lawful wife, the mother of his child, and a secret consort who mothered only painted landscapes.

They had found the odd hour together at Anglesea, but never a whole afternoon until the day Bella came down with a nasty cold that made her morose and unwilling to leave their tent. And he was liberated.

Out, as usual, since before sunrise, Clarice was returning to camp and human society, swollen with her art, vigorous and boyishly blithe. Not far from her tent, she caught sight of him.

‘Hello,' he said warily, though he had been lying in wait. ‘How are you?'

‘Hello. I'm very well,' she replied, with similar delicacy. ‘You?'

‘Fine, fine.'

They could be adept at handling the uneasiness, like practised jugglers of asymmetrical objects, but later they would be clumsy and this was the nature of it: there was no clear progression, no security. It was after twelve by her wristwatch. Ada, who was only a short distance off, sketching a gum, had noticed their exchange; from her observant posture, her body even quieter than usual, Clarice thought she had deduced its meaning.

Did everyone at camp know? She tried to make her face superficial, but it was impossible to talk to a lover without displaying intimacy. Her face betrayed them by striving not to. During the years when she had waited for this intensity of feeling with a man, she had not foreseen how guilt could muddy it. She lifted her watch again, as if measured time might absolve them.