Night Street (14 page)

By the waterfall called Phantom Falls, she stood on a flat river boulder and stripped off her clothes. She was getting efficient at this, almost cocky. She crouched and lay back on the cool, eroded rock, staring at a patch of tree-hemmed sky. Everything leaned against the unbroken music of water thrown from a great height.

Arthur approached her. He was learning to wait, starting to understand the rhythms of her moods or at least to calmly accept them. Hands on his hips, he gazed down. The redness of his skin was sobering into a tan that gave him a dramatic air of wisdom, of life lived. She had to choose between watching him or the sky. She reached for his hand and pulled him down, to have both. Their bodies, demanding, combative and slow to yield, fused on a black stone bed in the middle of a river. Later, would her fingers find blood along the ridge of her back?

They did not. And this was fitting and unsettling. There had been a feeling of fantasy to the urgent, ungentle coupling. She and Arthur might have been primordial beings or gods, essences rather than people, distillations of spirit. If she was right to suspect that he could not continue for long to live so divided, that such strong sensation could not be sustained, then soon, they would be making love only in the back rooms of her imagination, where the cuts and haemorrhaging were intangible. This time seemed already to have arrived. The moment was too exotic and sharply defined, still, somehow, in its violence; it had to be an illusion, magic of the mind. As they moved in the multicoloured light, her eyes latched onto a green like the mossy green of Bella's soft or soft-seeming dress. She shut them, after a while.

Rainforest.
Rain forest
. The paired words like the heart's twin drum beats. Rain forest. Forest of rain, a sublime, completely unrelenting image.

After Anglesea, her rabidly nostalgic memory reached over and over for their bushwalk. She preferred remembering this to Flinders Street station. Their last conversation.

It was some weeks later. The platform was nearly empty and the creamy sky was cryptic and cold. Her ears were freezing. His hands turning nervous, Arthur was explaining that his life with Bella was a good one. Even. Without certain highs and lows. Ever so good.

‘Good?'

He did not speak of his daughter; he never did. He likened his married life then to a domestic garden. Tended, nurtured over the years. A symbiosis. A contract. She had not asked that he choose between his family and her, had not demanded justifications. She understood but detested this talk of the garden, its civilised tepidness. The choice it implied—of comfort over passion. The correct choice, for him, no doubt; she did not dispute it. He was trying to be open, talking this way—though, suddenly, she was tired, wearied by justifications and the apologetic, hangdog shifting of his hands. Her ears, her body was growing colder and colder in the unreadable light; it was that cold that alarms the blood into a retreat, resembling burning. He wanted their ‘friendship' to continue. When he said
friendship
, she found that she could not remain near him. She could no longer stand to provoke in him such guilt. At times, the guilt had seemed to spread by contagion, from him to her; at others, to originate in herself. She saw that only in ending it would they have peace, be done with this turbid compromise.

‘We mustn't see each other again,' she told him, smoothly, carefully, gauging his shock.

For a moment, he appeared to hold his breath. She felt a blockage in her own chest and the old pull towards him— fainter now. He knew she was right. She would have said something more had she been sure it would not have come out surly or stricken. Why should it be such a treacherous thing, the showing of emotion? And when and how to show it a matter of such complexity that it froze you? She might have given him more. She offered a face as impenetrable as the sky.

At Anglesea, the end had been approaching. But their love had always contained a fatal flaw, the suspicion of immorality. Perhaps passion always did.

Someone had insisted Bella stand with them for the photograph Arthur took on the day of Mrs Hamlin's party. Probably she would have preferred not to, because she came out looking distracted. Clarice never did discover just how much his wife knew, though she had believed Bella
knew
. Clarice kept the photograph in the drawer of her bedside table. They stood together, a motley crew joined by their commitment to tone, the conviction that this was the key to sight: the life of a subject was in the mingling of light and shade. In her own face, joy. She could not have hidden it from Arthur, who was watching from under the camera's dark skirt. She would not pretend to be depleted when she was full, her ecstasy having no tolerance for the usual duplicities.

She had used to picture a moment between Arthur and Bella, when the penny had dropped for her.

Oh. Our love is beyond resuscitation.

And another moment when, looking at Arthur, Bella saw that someone else had filled him up right to the brim with new life.

This is what Clarice had imagined. It had made her unhappy and also gleeful. But it was not wise to make assumptions about what people saw or understood, suffered or were indifferent to; it was surprising what could be missed. And most likely, it had not gone the way she had thought between Bella and Arthur at all.

She cherished the photograph, thinking of the French term
chéri
that began the word cherish, with its hint of bed-warmth and sweet red fruit. Or she resented its thinness, its cool surface and hard edges for being the only niggardly embodiment of him—on so many nights—to fill her hands.

He did not, of course, appear in the photograph. He merely haunted it in the haunting way of absence, as intimately and invisibly as a maker haunts his creation. He was its gaps and hollows, its longing and its emptiness.

THREE
Seascape

21

Years, looked back on, could concertina flat, as if there had not been any space or breath in them, no fluctuating light, no atmosphere. No jubilation, desperation or shifting chameleon states of mind. No contemplation of the moment.

It was the case too that, from outside, a woman's life not furnished with a husband and child rearing would appear bleak, brittle, to most. In a magazine that Louise had left at the house, Clarice read an article by a famous author on how the fight for women's freedom had gone too far. Men, he believed, had been left emasculated, without faith in themselves, because women had no faith in them, fought them, would not give up fighting for freedom. She had not really been able to make sense of the anxious argument. It was logical to her that if freedom was fought for, then this was the result of it not as yet having been won—not being secure and able to be counted on. She did not recognise herself here. When she thought of freedom, she thought first of the freedom to paint. If she had turned her eyes away from the common shape of a woman's life, it was in order to fight her true opponent: her art. The author found the Woman of today an unhappily severe creature, with her brief attire, short hair and aggression, a kind of soldier, and hers an unfulfilled, impoverished femininity. He clearly did not believe that a fighter, a soldier, could be enriched by her own cause.

She was continually surprised by the confidence with which many were ready to determine the self-fulfilment of others. With bemusement or exasperation, she realised that in the dozen or so years after it ended with Arthur, little happened to her that most would have considered eventful. But those were fertile, full years, with a fullness eluding words, as fullness does. Years dense with work for which her paintings would have to speak, if they could; if someone would listen.

A person she had not seen in a long while would ask, with a little tragic frisson, ‘Clarice, my dear? How have
you
been?' Telling her she was indeed judged a sorry, reclusive figure, an object worthy of compassion. If you dedicated yourself to observation, you were viewed as isolated and sorrowfully inert. An outrageous misconception. Seeing what there was to be seen was far from passive; having your eyes and self open was surely the opposite of isolation—how could you be more connected to life? She and Herb had discussed this once, many years ago, before he left for the Continent.

‘Active contemplation!' he exclaimed, triumphantly.

‘Precisely,' she said, feeling they had a lot in common.

She completed hundreds, thousands of canvases and boards; a good deal more boards, which were cheaper. She got them, along with all her materials, from W & G Dean, in the city; they gave her a special price, understanding that those were hard times for artists, for almost everyone, of course, and sometimes even threw some in for free, bless them. The walking—journeying through landscapes on foot—was inseparable from the art. She was so much on the move, there being so much ground to cover. At night, she went home to cook, eat and sleep in her parents' house, but that was only her official residence, her domicile fixe, because in reality, she inhabited the outdoors. She was a wanderer. A nomad.

Returned from her travels, her shoes would be thick with dust; upturned, sand rained from them. In bare feet, she winced to take a step. Blood pounded in her feet and the bones of them felt tender; she examined with pride the sturdy calluses that clung to her big toes as barnacles cling to a pier. In bed, her left hip or right knee turned fretful. Asleep, she dreamed of walking. She drifted along Flinders Street, or made her way languidly over sand, as if walking through water. Her trolley sometimes figured in her dreams, but instead of being drawn along behind her, it usually hovered in the air above, like an overgrown balloon on a string or an odd cloud she was suspended from. She was so grateful for walking she almost felt guilty, as though the men on crutches or in wheelchairs, their mobility incomprehensibly disrupted by war, were reproaching her for glutting herself on smooth movement. On rare occasions, however, feeling a kind of kinship with the disrupted men, she thought of her trolley as a prosthetic limb.

She was promiscuous in her looking, wanting to see everything. Every caress light bestowed on the city and the people it sheltered and exposed. Many of these were exposed, destitute. Disenchanted. Passing silently among them, she sometimes felt like a shade, only she was very much alive, with her robust body and toughened feet, and obscenely fortunate. Perhaps, on occasion, when she painted a landscape bare of people, it was in fact a sidelong portrait of a person she had spied on the street.

She venerated streets and roads, however modest. They refused inertia, being an opening, a kind of door, always saying, ‘You see, things could go this way. Or that.' And the motorcars that circulated in them, with their lovely silhouettes, boxy or aerodynamic. A certain Mr Fitzhugh, a critic who wrote for
The Argus
and seemed not to disapprove of her, conceded that no other artist had portrayed the motorcar as she had, with a sort of harmonious beauty. She took this as a terrific compliment. Motors were a blessing. Even the dangerous smell of their petrol exhaust was magnificent, as it mixed with the other loud ingredients in the scent of the city's life, the potent heat of carthorses, or men in the dole queue who were sleeping rough, the coal smoke lifting from factory boilers against the slow falling of birds.

The buildings, to her mind, were close, inscrutable friends, who turned splendid or a little sinister at nightfall, when they tossed light across the sleek Yarra. Those dribbles of light were a coded message that would always be beyond her grasp. Studying it, she was content—in her deep ignorance, in the long reverie before a revelation— and could have remained by the river indefinitely, herself a night reflection trembling towards dissolution. She could not stay out after dark as often as she would have liked, Father insisting she be back by a Reasonable Hour, but at calculated intervals she transgressed. She followed the electric lights along the night's confidential passageways, into its velvet volumes. Sometimes, she passed a place like the Latin Café, where there might have been people she knew or had known, a cluster of Meldrum's former students hotly debating art and philosophy. An odour of beer leaked out. Some jazz, perhaps. If a bearded, shaggy type whom she recognised emerged into the street, she looked quickly away. She only wanted to watch and, in this way, to take the city's pulse.

By squinting at the circle of light in a street lamp, you transformed it into a many-pointed star. Under the headlamps of passing motors, telegraph wires were revealed, briefly, as the silver threads of a great spider web. And there was the clean, fresh privilege of mist. Melbourne in the mist. Tucked between substance and mirage, her city of shifting presences. There was surely nowhere else more alluringly ghostly. She seldom felt alone. Clarice and Melbourne were joined; the paintings of her city were love poems, a consummation.

22

Maybe her friendship with Herb remained where others did not because it was easeful, each of them on a different side of the world, years elapsing without any word, and then a letter arriving and never any resentment for the silence. The understanding that you were living as you had to live and would be in touch when it was appropriate. She had had two letters from him during the war, not long after he left. The first announcing his decision to enlist. This was his latest adventure, the most recent chapter in his quest for experience; it would give him material for his art. She had recognised the tone, as light and carefree as his mood on those fresh mornings at Half Moon Bay. The second had arrived from his life as a soldier, though it did not evoke this. Chipper but tense, accelerated, it described a visit to Paris during a break from service; she had not found Herb there as she had known him. Long passages elaborated on the enchantments of Paris, but one section complained of the bathroom in the small hotel where he had lodged.