Paint Your Wife (25 page)

After an hour the Eliot twins woke. I was pleased for the interruption because drawing
all that time was tiring. Violet unscrambled herself and jumped up to get them. They
emerged, pink, sleepy, black-eyed, over their mother's shoulder. For a while they
were content to roll around on the carpet in pissreeking napkins while Violet went
off to make the tea and put out the biscuits Alma had bought her.

We were all feeling strangely skittish. Violet, I guess, because the exercise wasn't
as daunting as she had worried it might be. I shared some of that self-congratulatory
mood. Violet and I, together, had come through the first session. Touch wood.
Alma
looked smug. Things appeared to be working out. When Violet returned with the tea
tray Alma asked her how she was finding the experience. She gave a happy shrug. ‘I
don't know. It was kind of hard to get used to, you two staring at me…'

‘Staring…?' Alma took issue with that. We weren't staring, he said. We were seeing.
‘There's a difference. For example, hills stare. Hills are like faces in a crowd.'

Without a blink Violet asked him, ‘How about the sea?'

‘The sea glances.'

‘Trees?'

‘In high winds a tree will show an interest in its surroundings. Otherwise, in my
experience, trees are reliably discreet. What they see is instantly forgotten.'

I don't know that Violet was hearing any of this, whether any of it sank in. She
just wanted to keep Alma going.

‘And the beach?' she asked.

‘Ah, the beach.' He stopped to think for a moment. ‘Pebbles on a beach are completely
innocent. Pebbles as we know were blinded at birth which is why a female bather will
happily undress in their presence.'

Violet gave a delighted laugh and for the first time in weeks, since we glanced up
at the tip to observe her get out of that orange Datsun, we saw a happier, intelligent
face.

Now she asked Alma where he'd learned to draw. Surprisingly this was a question I'd
never really thought to ask, since what Alma did seemed eternal like the hills and
sky and every other part of the world I'd come into; you'd no longer think to ask
a question like that of Alma than you would of the sky as to how it had come to be
there. Now I was glad Violet asked the question.

There were the drawing classes in hospital all those years ago. I knew about those.
But now Alma dismissed those lessons. The man who really taught him was the patient
in the next bed along from his own. A thin-lipped watercolourist in for a cataract
operation.

This all happened years ago, after the train tragedy. For the next half hour he went
back to that time and place, to a moment when his life as it had felt then was in
the balance and he drifted about in a semi-conscious state while occasionally surfacing
to voices around the next bed.

‘You know I hate fruitcake.'

‘No, Neil. It's sultanas you don't like. This fruitcake doesn't have any.'

‘In that case, why bother? Why make fruit cake without sultanas?'

Silence.

‘Edith? Hallo, Edith? Are you still there?'

Alma said the watercolourist was a crotchety old bastard with bandages over his eyes.
By his own account he was also the man who had probably saved Alma's life.

In between times of wakefulness he would drift back to a staging post where the accident
repeated itself over and over, with the night sky swimming in his vision, yellow
trees flashing up at the windows, the sideways angle of the carriage, the surprise
of the trees, he said, and their surprise at seeing him. The trees seemed to know.
They seemed to know half a second before he did that the train had left the tracks.
The trees were trying to point this out to him when he woke to another conversation.

‘Is he awake, Edith?'

‘No. He's out,' said the woman's voice.

‘What does he look like?'

‘Young. Thirty. He's got a wire running in and out of his jaw.'

‘Well look at his clipboard at the foot of the bed. They'll have the whole story
down there.'

‘No, Neil. I am not going to look at another patient's notes. They are private and
I am not going to…'

‘All right, Jesus, Edith, keep your hair on. Let's not broadcast to the world…'

It was weeks before he was allowed up. The morning arrived they pulled the drip from
his arm and to celebrate his new-won freedom he and the watercolourist had got up
out of bed and taken a walk in the hospital grounds. Up till now the man in for the
cataracts was reliant on his wife, Edith, escorting him over the grounds. Now it
fell to Alma to direct the blindfolded watercolourist by his elbow across the lawns
to the lily ponds where patients in hospital bandages perched between crutches or
slumped in wheelchairs.

It was a few days after this that he heard about the drawing classes from Carmichael.
Actually, it was one of his colleagues who came in to give them. Carmichael said
he wasn't much good; that in fact Alma would be better off with himself as his teacher.
They were out in the grounds sunning themselves when the watercolourist became suddenly
excited. He'd just had a brilliant idea, he said. It was too good to tell there and
then; he urged Alma to lead him back to the ward and got him to look under his bed
for the carton of drawing materials and an easel and a stack of paper. The huge eye
pads over a bald skull made the elderly watercolourist look like a bull ant. He
trembled
with excitement. He said, ‘Now let's take a crack at that palm tree Edith tells me
is outside our window.'

This, Alma said, was the first drawing he ever did, with the watercolourist holding
on to his wrist and riding shotgun for the journey through the tree. The watercolourist
wasn't an easy passenger. He became angry at one point and barked at Alma, ‘I'm not
interested in what you think a tree should look like. I'm only interested in the
one outside the window.' And once at the start when Alma stalled, which came as a
relief to me to hear, the watercolourist told him, ‘You'll have a heart attack pondering
the wherefores of getting down the detail. Concentrate on the spaces in the branches,
draw them, and bingo—the rest of the tree will come into play.'

Soon, within days, hospital staff were crowding the door to watch a man who couldn't
speak learn how to draw from a man who couldn't see.

Now Violet put her hand up to ask something.

‘Where is he now?'

‘The watercolourist? Dead.'

‘So sad,' she said, and hurried forth with her next question. ‘What then?'

‘Well, he talked a lot. Here was a man who couldn't draw for the moment. He couldn't
see for the bandages. So he would talk. He would talk all night about his favourite
artists.'

It would begin with a soft croaking inquiry in the dark.

‘Alma, are you awake? Just give me a sign if you are.'

And Alma said he would have to think for a moment. Was he awake? Could he be bothered
with being awake? Then he'd decide, okay, he could be awake. He wasn't exactly doing
anything such as sleeping, so he'd bring up his hand and lightly bang the bed head.

‘Remember earlier, Alma, I was banging on about Rembrandt. Of course Rembrandt never
painted flowers except in pictures of his wife Saskia. Interesting, don't you think?
He painted her as Flora, the goddess of love and the goddess of whores. If you like
I can get Edith to bring in a book with some nice plates. In a couple of them you
can see Saskia looking sluttish. There's one, now let's see, think…Jesus, my memory's
deserting me…that's right.
The Prodigal Son in the Tavern.
In this one Saskia is
perched on his knee, the slut as tavern trophy. Before them is a peacock pie which
according to all the commentaries was a contemporary symbol of pride and sensual
pleasure. Twenty years on and all that mischief behind them, Saskia is more elegantly
presented. She's in borrowed furs, feathers, lace and velvet. With these props he's
levered his wife out of the gin palace and into the monarchal class.'

Silence.

‘Well, they had fun together. At least you can say that. You know what Cézanne used
to say of his wife? “She likes nothing but Switzerland and lemonade.” In his portraits
he pays her back with a cold blue palette, adding a fluey red to Mrs C's cheeks. She
in turn pays him back with a drawn mouth; her left eye is flooded with an unkind thought.
She's probably thinking, Your socks smell, your breath stinks. When you look at a
portrait like that, you can hear the cross words whizzing about the studio, and yet,
poor Hortense, well this is what you hear: she was said to sit for her husband for
hours without moving or talking. Model and painter locked in a death silence like
a slow-moving train…One of those marriages where the two combatants are handcuffed
to suffer a long, slow suicide.'

Silence.

‘Edith tells me I talk too much. Just wave a hand or raise a leg or whatever, Alma,
and I'll put a sock in it.'

Silence.

‘Tell you what, wouldn't some brandy be nice? A hit of something would put me away.'

Silence.

‘I imagine you're a Jack Daniels man. I'll get Edith to smuggle some in. We can pipe
it down a straw into you.'

Silence

‘Funny though how they all put their wives in their pictures. Rembrandt squeezed
two wives into his portfolio. He was twenty-six when he met Saskia, forty-three when
he met Hendrickje. The Hendrickje version of Flora is more sober than its predecessor.
He went outdoors with H—didn't with S. I'm thinking of that beautiful work
Hendrickje
Bathing in a Stream.'

Silence.

‘One artist (I can't remember his name. I want to say Bonnard but Cézanne's keeps
barging in), he points to a shadow beneath a tree and says, “See that shadow? Does
it not look purple? Then paint it purple. And as for the tree, save your most beautiful
green for it.” I may be making this up, but the point remains. The invitation is
not to transfigure but to heighten the emotional engagement. Alma?'

Alma flung his hand against the bed frame and the watercolourist continued.

‘Constable described trees and meadows. Well, frankly, he might as well not have
been there. The French painters by contrast put up signposts across the countryside
saying, “I was here. I saw that. I saw that tree and its shadow!”'

Listening to all this, day in day out, Alma said, was like
travelling in a foreign
country where at first you don't understand the language spoken all around you, then
one day it happens, understanding drops into place and suddenly you find you can communicate.
Drawing, he said, had been like that for him.

The Carmichaels owned some coastal land, scrappy, unproductive, lovely for living
though, fruit trees and vegetable beds. Edith was the gardener. They insisted he
convalesce in their home and it was there that he learned to milk cows and lop heads
off chickens. The watercolourist and Edith had two grown-up daughters and for the
time he was there Alma slept in one of the girls' rooms. Her dolls were still as
she had left them, arranged along the top of a bookcase. Her crayon drawings from
childhood were still pinned to the wall. It was a fitting environment—it served to
remind him of his status in this new world of drawing in which he was feeling his
way. It was like tearing out a sheet of paper and starting all over again.

When I got back to the shop to relieve Guy I had the strange impression of a walrus
blinking back at me. My head was racing with various thoughts, stuff that Alma has
shared with me and Violet, and Guy was just too big and slow and ponderous. It was
the same when I got home and Frances looked up from her jigsaws and waved through
the glass doors; I thought, things could be worse between us. At least it's not Switzerland
and lemonade. That made me smile, then I found myself laughing.
Switzerland and
lemonade.
And now Frances got up from her work table. I'd made her curious. She came
through the glass doors. She was smiling too. ‘What?' she kept asking.
‘What?' I
shook my head. It was impossible to tell her. It would be impossible to repeat the
phrase ‘Switzerland and lemonade' and for her to get it; I'd have to explain where
I'd heard it, at the Eliots' of all places, with Alma quoting from a watercolourist
long dead.

In order to accommodate me the drawing sessions were scheduled for midday. That way
I could get Guy in to cover for me. It was a good deal cheaper without my mother's
charity days, and I was pleased to help Guy with a little pocket money, hardly enough
though to keep a family ticking over, and when I mentioned that he gave me sad, slobbering
look.

‘Actually, Kath and the kids are still over at her mother's.'

It was just a temporary thing, he added, but given the speed at which he looked away
I seriously wondered about that. I went out the back way, and as I closed the door
I heard Guy's soft padding footsteps and the clatter of the beaded curtain.

I drove out to the tip to pick up Alma. With the reek of the tip all over him we
continued on to Beach Road. Alma was grim; he sat tight-lipped. Something was bothering
him. I looked across once or twice for him to spit it out and he just looked away.

I mentioned I'd seen George Hands the other day—but no Victoria.

‘I had a drink with Victoria, and George, separately.'

‘Sad about Dean.' Alma cast his eyes on the road ahead as if this went without saying.

Finally as we bumped along Beach Road, he said, ‘This Ophelia woman, Harry. Tell
me it's none of my business and I'll leave it alone. But you know how I feel about
Frances. I think she's a wonderful woman and whatever difficulties…'