Night Street (22 page)

Olive turns to check no one is behind her. Quickly unbuttoning her blouse, she yanks it open to show Clarice the pallid hillock of her left breast.

‘Oh.'

Olive is clearly the type of person who knows that art makes it all poetry, scrambling the lower with the higher things. She says, ‘We don't get much to eat here. Luckily, I'm not very hungry,' winks and is gone.

‘Neither am I.'

The wheezing calls for a visit,
Hello, me again
. But Clarice will not be distracted. She is remembering the lusty storm—the surprising smoky calm at its heart. She shivers. Her wet dress might still be moulded to her skin. She wishes she had her trolley or at least a nice piece of charcoal. As she is looking, eyelids almost lowered, for the darkest and the brightest regions, the redhead returns, as wondrous in the shadows as her old doll, Rosamund.

Hushing her: ‘It's alright, love. It's alright.'

‘Could you wait a minute?' she says, concentrating. ‘I'm just getting somewhere.'

36

‘It's going to rain,' the Doctor predicted, serenely analytical, looking through the door of the green bathing box that was a fraction ajar. A crisp wind darted in.

She was stooped over, with her back to him, lacing up her boots. ‘It might.' She stood and inhaled. ‘Yes, you're right. Not for a bit, but soon.'

It was her habit to wait for him in the bathing box at Half Moon Bay on Thursday afternoons. They had a ritual of arriving and leaving at different times, but it was June and they did not encounter many people on the little beach—and no one who, noticing them, had seemed to find anything awry. Perhaps they had just been lucky; they felt lucky—felt they were owed some luck—and this was the eccentric, captivating package it had arrived in.

He had given her the key to keep. It was like a ring between them, only less symmetrical and certain, more original and teasing. She loved the cold metal of it in the morning and also how quickly it warmed in her palm. Sometimes, just woken, she seized it from her bedside table, hoisted up her nightgown and laid their key on her stomach, flinching and then relaxing, observing how the loop at the end echoed her belly button. She adored having it in her pocket—its slight but important weight. She adored it on the kitchen counter, where it would have been difficult to explain, if someone had asked her to. The key was similar to having a drink in certain company, the way it sent out ripples, making everything pregnant and portentous, playfully grave.

There was no theatrical haste; waiting, she had very slowly, piece by piece, removed and folded her clothes, lingering in the partially undressed state, conscious of a pleasing sort of torpor. Thin beams of light—dusty, mollified winter light—insinuated themselves through gaps in the bathing box's wooden boards. The wind also occasionally forced its way in, singing spectrally. It was really much too cold at that time of year to be naked with only the meagre protection of rough uninsulated walls, but she relished the sense of hardship, of standing on an inhospitable frontier. She toyed with a pretend suspicion that someone was watching.

Her body in a loose focus. Perhaps she looked spare and modern, with her hair cut nearly as short as a boy's, though she knew she had reached an age where the beauty that had sometimes been remarked on was coming into doubt. It had not, after all, been innate and immovable. Its vestiges were still there, but these were more apparent some days than others. She caught a new shifting quality in her face, the rare times she consulted a mirror, a compelling hesitancy. Her eyes, Clarice liked to think, had become richer, more wakeful. And she approved of her hands. These were the only part of her you could not have called pale, and she was proud of their workmanlike colour. In the hut's penumbra, they seemed even darker, a little orange, and consequential. She held one up, shaking and blurry. She was trembling and not only from the cold. You had never finished with this heady, risky mix of fear and elation, the exhilarated panic; if anything, as time passed, the stakes got higher.

She felt him approaching. Here he came, piecing together a path to her. If she had anything, it was an awareness of how landforms, vegetation, weather, built things and men animated space, influencing its mood.

A noise, outside. In retrospect, she would understand it as the cry of a gull, oddly grating, wounded. She was startled. Her balance disturbed, she was suddenly tumbling into the wall of the bathing box. When her arm shot out to break her fall, her hand snagged on wood.

A splinter had pierced her skin and slipped under it; the shock was curiously smooth. She gasped, but barely made a sound and the violent non-sound made her think of the silent lovemaking that would follow. Her heart beat a touch off-kilter. The sensation in her palm throbbed between pain and itch. She did not remove the splinter, however. There was not much longer to wait. And perhaps anticipation was the most extravagant and affecting part of this.

She had begun to see sex as a particular kind of detail in a composition. It was a detail that could appear unassuming. It might be small, half hidden, indefinite, and yet the surrounding space was in thrall to it, aware of an undertow. The space around sex was not empty—as sex was not without emptiness; sensuality was more and less than itself, nothing and everything, and in this way it resembled what could not be entirely seen in a painting.

He came in quickly. They did not say hello. Like a mannequin displaying an imaginary dress, she turned around for him.

Unselfconsciously but with a faint physical stiffness that seemed liturgical to Clarice, he undressed. She liked watching him. He was both stocky and soft, his body not athletic or beautiful. Her attraction to him hummed below the level of appearances.

A little sooner than she had expected, he approached her where she was standing by the wall. Her hand hurt and the wood behind her was furry, abrasive. Subdued light striped her skin, but he would not notice it. There was an odour of salt and burning tea-tree.

She spread her arms, comically sacrificial, offering herself. As she did so, he saw something, maybe in her lopsided smile, which his eyes were versed in.

‘What's wrong?' he demanded.

She glanced at her pulsating hand.

‘Show me that,' he said in his formal doctor's voice.

‘You're going to paint in the rain?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘You're not serious?' He might have been a little jealous of her art.

‘I couldn't be more serious. It's wonderful to work in the rain.'

‘I'm consorting with a madwoman.'

‘You knew what you were getting into.'

‘I did?'

‘There are few things I enjoy more than painting in the rain. I'm offended you didn't know that, after all these weeks. How well do you know me?'

‘Fair question,' he said. ‘Ten weeks.'

Unusually—it was a decision they had reached by some tacit agreement—they left the bathing box together that evening. He drew her cart along, gallant and lightly vexed. They sat for a moment, half turned to the water, on the stone wall at the end of the beach.

She was staring at the
Cerberus
. The old armoured warship was partly visible above the very slight waves thirty yards or so out from shore, where it served as a breakwater. It was disturbingly incongruous-looking, like some queer submarine rising from the deep.

‘The gun turrets are intact,' he said. They had been looking at the same thing.

‘Oh?'

They studied the ship's darkening silhouette, tamed but still somehow threatening.

‘Avant-garde eighteen-sixties technology.'

‘The French refer to this time of day as the time between the dog and the wolf,
entre le chien et le loup
.'

‘Pretty accent. Loathed French at school, myself. Say it again.'

‘Maybe it's not so much the interval between the dog and the wolf,' she reflected, ‘but of the change from one to the other. You know, the dog becoming the wolf.' She looked at him, then turned back to the bay. ‘The words for this time are so poetic. Painfully so.
Twilight. Dusk
. Don't you think?
Crepuscular
.
Gloaming
. Gorgeous. Almost too beautiful.'

He did not snicker.

When she was ready, she told him, ‘Get away with you now so I can work.'

‘Can I help you take the cart somewhere?'

‘I'll manage. Actually, this looks good from here. Adieu.' She laughed. She was not willing to miss a moment of this gentle final light, the soft implosion.

‘Next Thursday, then?'

‘Thursday.'

It did not take long for a churning muscular darkness swirled with pearl grey to come into view, approaching quickly. There was electricity in the air; you thought of séances, of bright messages flashing over and above any normal communication. One of them throbbing, her hands did seem possessed, as she made her preparations. She was only half thinking, vivid, unweighted thoughts. She felt almost lightheaded but strong; she was going to paint her way right into the storm. Everything was splendid and as it had to be.

She did not really expect anyone to understand what she was doing. The refreshing thing about being accustomed to disregard was the mighty freedom it allowed. It did not matter if the paintings in her next exhibition did not sell; that would not damage her. She would go on painting what and how she liked, and there was an end on it.

The work began well or rather, neither well nor badly, occupying a place cleansed of judgement. There was only the work doing itself, what it needed to do. The always-unexpected tricky moral, depth in the surface. When the rain came, she welcomed it wholeheartedly, angling her board and letting it close around her like drapes around privacy. Not fearing sopping clothes and bedraggled hair, savouring the deluge's first sweet drops, she slid into the calm rapture of her own transformation, her self dissolving. The clouds unveiled their inky plans, their violet and indigo inners, their luscious complexity. And the panel was thirsty, sucking in the paint that was spreading fast, silky with medium, just enough and just so.

Author's Note

The Clarice who appears in this work is not Clarice Beckett (1887–1935) but my imagining of her. While the historical figure's art and life inspired me, I took many creative liberties with these. The protagonist's family and personal life, for instance, are invented, as are the other characters—including Meldrum, another imagining of the historical figure whose surname he borrows. Among other facts, I have changed names, dates and places, and the art in these pages is also fictional: paintings were reinvented through language, altered and sometimes fabricated entirely; the dates of completion of several that correspond closely to works by Beckett differ considerably from those of the real works. I attempted to ‘look' at Beckett as she might have looked at a landscape, squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in the search for patterns of light and shade.

The following books were extremely useful in my research: first and foremost, Rosalind Hollinrake's
Clarice Beckett, The Artist And Her Circle
and
Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect
; Tracey Lock-Weir's
Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950
and Max Meldrum's
The Science of Appearances
.
Nettie Palmer: her private journal ‘Fourteen years', poems, reviews and literary essays
, edited by Vivian Smith, and Jeff Sparrow's
Communism: A Love Story
were also valuable reference points. The quote from Henry David Thoreau comes, of course, from
Walden
. The phrase likening the effect of Clarice's art to ‘looking through an opening' was taken from a review in
The Age
by Alec Colquhoun of Beckett's 1927 exhibition.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the University of Adelaide, the University of Western Sydney,
The Australian
/Vogel Literary Award and Allen and Unwin.Special thanks to Nicholas Jose, Rosalind and Ian Hollinrake, Clara Finlay, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, Catherine Milne, Siobhán Cantrill, the team at Goose Lane Editions, Jim Mott, Jim Healy, Jeff Sparrow, James Eichelberger, Carl Nielsen, Stephen Lawrence, Hazel Rowley, Moya Costello, Gail Jones, Gary Thornell and Miguel Alonso.