Night Street (15 page)

He had written:

What was sold as a bathroom is the dirtiest, most squalid and suffocating place you could imagine. And you know I have lived in a caravan and don't have fancy tastes. The strangest thing is the tub. If you can call it that. I've never seen such a tiny bath in my life, by a long shot. More of a sink. You wouldn't have believed it. I got in, but as I should have known from the unpromising appearance, it wasn't made to fit a human. I don't know what it was made for, really. Once I was wedged in, with my legs jammed against the sides, I thought I'd never get out again. I thought I'd have to call for help. You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm not even long-legged.

It seemed to her that there was something poignant and unspeakable in this. And she would have liked to comfort Herb. She felt a little ashamed for being remote from her friend, from world events, from the war. She pictured the war so inadequately. Not able to bring the pictures to life, she could not keep her attention on them long. She waited some time and then replied with a short, insufficient note that finished with the postscript:

Your depiction of the bathtub horrified me. How atrocious. Charging good money for a room like that should be illegal. I hope you are putting it behind you.

He might have found her flippant.

Another letter, fourteen years later. This time, amid the strangeness of letters, she recognised something of Herb. She penned a reply quickly, the words storming out.

Dalgety Road
Beaumaris

Dear Herb,
I'm glad to hear you've been prolific. Me too. There's no better feeling—or, at least, few forms of happiness to rival that one. The art you saw on your last trip to Paris sounded marvellously peculiar and heady and foreign and I love the idea of your gentle golden light there in the south. I can feel it from your description—so warming. Have you really laid down roots in Provence? Don't you ever miss The Bay? I must say I'm not much inclined to budge from Melbourne, though I will seem the yokel to you, alongside your European dalliances.

She wondered if this odd chatty woman in the letter could be the result of being too much in her own company. Most of her daily talk being of the functional, domestic kind, she had lost the habit of real conversation—and were letters not supposed to create the illusion of a conversation? There was no Clarice to offer but a distortion; she could not bring herself far into the wavering, deceptive light of language. She continued:

But I think of Corot, who found he had to return endlessly to the same subjects. I too have a notion that I must master what I have in front of me before I can go elsewhere. Master? Ha! One tries, manages, within one's limited capacities. Anyway, I suspect a landscape can never truly be mastered, never domesticated nor wholly known, no matter how many times you paint it. I've become philosophical.

I also have been busy, wearing out my shoe leather fast and getting around in quite a scraggly state. Lately, we've been buffeted by wild, breathtaking storms. At Half Moon Bay last night—our old haunt—a violent wind had the clouds speeding and the waves so ferocious that the spray was lashing me as I stood sketching. A few hours later, back at home, I sensed stillness and went out into the yard. The sky had cleared—completely—and the moon, high and almost full, was amazingly salient. It seemed to have been drawn on, with great precision, with some celestial, impossibly luminous ink. As the household was asleep, I couldn't resist. I threw on coat and hat and ran down to the Beach Road. It was cold, that Melbourne cold that comes as a solid shock, then tingles, then aches, and makes your exhaled breath seem a spirit friend—you've probably forgotten it, you traitor. The ocean was brooding but becoming pacified moment by moment. It grew misty. I realised there was no sensation left in my extremities. I'd been there some time. I was so happy.

You ask after my parents.

She hesitated.

The week before, she had come back from town one day to the smell of smoke. Following a faint milky streamer of it around the side of the house, she found, at its origin, her father, standing over a small fire. His face, tilted down into the flames, absorbed some of their yellow. Somehow, she knew what was happening.

A painting was burning. He was doing it.

She asked what was going on.

‘I'm clearing out the shed. There's no room left in it.' He insisted: ‘It's overflowing.'

She hurried to the shed. Its door was open but had not been tampered with. She always kept it locked; it was her corner of private territory. It appeared that, by some bizarre accident, that day she had not locked it. It was true there was no room left in there. It had become a great struggle to close the door: she had to lean all her weight against it. And she was forced to store new paintings in her room, under the bed, on top of the closet and in every available spot. Mum had said, shaking her head, ‘One day, you'll wake up floating on a sea of landscapes.'

Clarice had returned to the fire. She was a little peaky from the smoke or the unexpected emotion, but when she saw what it was he was burning, she collected herself; she became almost casual. Fortunately, he had initiated the proceedings with that old portrait of Louise. Louise's nearly black eyes gazed placidly from the flames. Clarice had never been fond of that painting. She had made Louise too sweet and sisterly. Those eyes not properly irresistible, too staid.

‘I think that's enough arson for today,' she told Father, with a steely smile. Curiously, she had the upper hand. ‘I see your point about the shed. It does need clearing out, but it's no concern of yours.'

He blinked, off-guard. Now that she was getting used to the situation, it was not so much rage in her, not exactly, but more a tension released. As if she had always known he had this destruction in him, this denial, and he had simply made explicit something that had long gone unspoken between them.

She went for a bucket of water and doused the little holocaust. When she turned, he had gone.

They had exchanged no further words on the subject. She did not tell her mother about it, not wanting to worry her. She had been sleeping at the time. Perhaps Mum's poor health affected Father more than he let on. It seemed to Clarice, too, that his own ageing was a surprise to him. He walked stiffly, as though on new legs he had not yet got the hang of; it was no doubt in part the arthritis.

After this, she had entrusted the bulk of her paintings to Mrs Hamlin, who was delighted to take them into her care, clearly considering this a Task of Great Importance. Her son came to collect them in a van on three consecutive days and each time Clarice saw him off depleted, as if sending beloved babies away to boarding school. But she liked knowing her paintings were safe and sound in a fine barn in Daylesford. Mrs Hamlin had promised to try to sell some of them, which would not be easy; Clarice could have done with the money, though, for supplies.

The shed would never be left unlocked again.

She resumed:

Mum is steadily frailer and hardly goes out anymore. One of the last times, incredibly, was three years ago, when we went to see Anna Pavlova and her company. The tickets were a treat from Father for Mum's birthday. Pavlova was an inspiration to me. I'm nervous to describe her, lest I dispel the magic with pedestrian words. Let me venture that she was equally sparkling and sombre, a silver apparition somewhere between sunshine and moonshine but within a live body absolutely athletic and refined, sensual and spiritual. There. I'll stop before making myself any more ridiculous. The evening was a throwback to the more stylish life we used to lead, when there was more money for cultural outings. It was really quite an idyll: Mum and me watching as if our lives depended on it, me manically sketching. I later tried a couple of little studies of my dancing idol, wispy things—total lightness being the only possible approach. There is no equalling her, of course. I could only fail miserably.

Louise has not had an easy time of it. The marriage soured. Both of them may have been a little too fond of drink and of having their own way. And I wouldn't be surprised if Ted had behaved vilely. L is now living alone with the kiddies, as we still call them, though her boys are turning into young men. The youngest, Charlie, has been problematic, rather taking after his father, I gather. L comes infrequently to the house, so we hardly see one another, except, very rarely, for a picture in town.

They had gone to see
Spite Marriage
and laughed side-splittingly at Buster Keaton's heartbroken face.

Leaving the theatre, Clarice said, ‘The wayward girl's wicked deed is put right.'

‘Quite. A nice fairytale. Keaton is awfully handsome.'

Clarice agreed. He made continual humiliation hilarious, but there was a sorrowful shadow about him or in his dark, dark eyes. It seemed that light could not stick to him, though his yearning for it could hardly be borne.

‘That scene where he's trying to get his wife onto the bed!'

The shapes that floppy, stone drunk girl got folded into, and all those times she fell. It had been very intimate to watch that, like spying on an unimagined, subtle violence. But a different sequence was playing itself out in Clarice's mind. The married couple is alone on a ship at sea. The wife asleep, unknowing; Keaton, her husband, who masqueraded as a gentleman and has inadvertently become a sailor, finds himself in the engine room. He is up to his chest in water. All he can do is take the small bucket on hand, fill it, hurry like a trained monkey up the stairs onto the deck and empty it over the side. And back down the stairs. And over and over. All through the night, this endless, minute unseen work with the bucket to stop the boat from going down.

‘Was it supposed to represent marriage?' she asked. ‘The part on the boat with the bucket?'

‘Hmm? Oh.' Louise chortled. ‘Maybe. Rather accurate, in my experience.' She was quiet, then said, ‘I think in many marriages someone uses a bucket and someone sleeps.' A few moments later, she added, ‘It can be hard to tell the difference between floating and sinking.'

Clarice was sad for Louise, who had not got what she had anticipated from her destiny. And she did not have art or, say, religion to sustain her—a powerful distraction. Clarice sometimes felt as if Louise had thrown her to the wolves by leaving home to marry, but this was completely absurd.

It was a rare opportunity to be tender, and all she managed was, ‘He wasn't good enough for you.' Though it sounded vacuous, she had meant it.

Louise said, ‘Who would you want to play you, if they made a picture about your life?'

Clarice had never considered it.

‘I'd choose Louise Brooks, my namesake. It's funny. Everyone says we look so much alike.'

I've kept to one solo exhibition per year at the Athenaeum and it is no trouble to produce this quantity of work. I'm not so scared of openings as I used to be. There is always the last frantic arduous night of hanging—the running around in a flap, shifting something, extracting a piece and adding another. I find it satisfying, and when the moment of reckoning comes and I'm standing there in a group of well-wishers in my Sunday best, I'm less uncomfortable in the limelight than you might think. Not that I relish the role, but I try to rise to the occasion and thank people and smile enigmatically, even if I am unslept and red-faced from childish bashfulness and wine. I have remained largely a teetotaller, so the latter goes to my head. The last show did not go badly, I suppose. A couple of critics came, but the crowd consisted mainly of old friends, Meldrum's cohort and admirers, plus the inevitable uppish stranger come to look down on me. Few purchases—nothing new there. Mrs H, the dear woman, bought several.

Mrs Hamlin had indeed outdone herself: crimson lipstick striking the senses first, then a powdered phosphorescence, veiled hat and formidable silk gown baring a long, abundant white back. Desperately wanting to be ravishing, she was.

She is her own work of art and I appreciate her more and more. Meldrum was there too, recently back from America, and quietly supportive. He said he was thinking of writing a second book on his theories. Though he was missing some of the usual vitality. He insisted I pay him a visit at Olinda. It had been ages—years—since we'd talked art. I have been remiss, out of touch with everyone, really.

I was true to my word and took the train to Belgrave, where he came for me by car. It's a lovely, bucolic place they have.

Meldrum had still seemed lacking in verve, a tad doleful, diminished, even in that peaceful setting. She noticed a little more grey in his beard, but nonetheless he recovered his energy and his step was lithe as he prowled the studio, presenting his recent work to her. He really was a skilled showman. Without quite wanting to reveal it, he appeared anxious for her response, almost as if he considered her his equal. She had not been his student for so many years, but now it was final. She had wondered if such a day would come and now that it had, her limbs were heavy; she was listless, somehow.

What to say? The work was, of course, technically irreproachable. And she had a soft spot for his fields, gums and dappled light, the resolute simplicity of his subjects. However, there was something rigid or limited in what she saw. It hurt her to notice it, as it had hurt, as a child, to observe the limitations of Mum's watercolours. She could have been wrong, but she sensed in Meldrum's new work, more than anything, his self-discipline like a hard fist. She could not breathe deeply, looking at it; her mind was corralled.

‘Masterful,' she said.

It occurred to her that he might set so steadfastly about depicting just what the eye could see (the innocent eye) that he forced himself to look through too small an objective and so forgot the edges of his vision. Out of his hatred for sentiment and storytelling, could he have gone too far, stripping away also feeling and suggestion? These, she had come to believe, were inseparable from sight, if not wound up in its very heart. How innocent was the eye, finally? The artist tried to be honest and clear-visioned, but remained human— an individual, with the sensitivities of his own gaze.