Dark Places (11 page)

Ten

THE BOOKS had warned me that
a houseful of women is like a cageful of monkeys
, but in the end, a houseful of women did not eventuate. Shortly after Norah and I were wed, Kristabel finally found a man who seemed to be willing to have her; perhaps catching the bouquet had done some good after all. They would make a strange pair, I thought; Forbes was a big windy guffawing man with a red face and powerful whiskers hiding a feeble chin, a man whose name I somehow found easy to forget.

I did not oppose, although I could not enthuse either. ‘Well, Kristabel,' I said in my heaviest jovial way, ‘I suppose you will be asking me to say a few words, will you, before too long?' But instead of being startled, and blushing, as any proper woman would have done, and exclaiming, ‘Why Albion, I had not thought, you will have to ask Mother, or Forbes, I do not know'—instead of this type of response, my perverse sister simply continued stitching away at some bit of white stuff, and said calmly, ‘Thank you, Albion, but we have decided to have the quietest possible wedding, and speeches are not permitted at the Registry.' I had begun to frame an apt phrase or two in my mind, and it took me a moment to realise that she had decided that she had no use for my apt phrases at all: the freckled vixen, laughing at me up her sleeve and stitching away like the soul of sweetness!

It was only right that Norah and I should now take over the master bedroom from Mother, but I had expected a fight about it, and had assumed that getting her out from among all her flounced bedroom furniture would be like winkling a beetle out from under a stone. But Mother astonished me even more than Kristabel had. She could not seem to turn her back on the master bedroom, or in fact the house itself, fast enough. ‘I have it all planned, Albion,' she told me calmly. ‘I am going up to Katoomba, to Daphne's, she has plenty of room and could do with the company.' Going to Aunt Daphne's! Without so much as discussing it with me, or doing me the courtesy of seeking my opinion! It was too late now, of course, and no arguments against the coldness of the place or the wrinkled unpleasantness of the sister prevailed against her obstinacy. It was
the reaction
, everyone agreed, from Father's death, although that event seemed positively ancient history to me. It took people in funny ways, everyone agreed, and she had her own means, of course, from Grandfather, so there was nothing anyone could do. ‘Thank you for your concern, Albion, but my mind is made up,' she said, but mildly, so I could not accuse her of anything.

At the station, farewelling her, I experienced a pang. It was the same echoing sooty cavern where I had been the one boarding the train so many times to go to that loathed school. I had hung out the window for a last glimpse of Mother's hanky waving among the others, and in front of all the other boys had not been able to shriek,
Mother! Mother! Do not make me go!

Was it an echo of all that grief, swallowed, stifled, flattened at the time, that caused me now to be glad of the folds of my face to hide behind? I watched Mother's lavender bottom labour up the steps into the carriage and the person within cried out in his heart,
Mother
,
Mother
,
do not leave me!
But now, as then, such thoughts were inadmissible: the boy crushing the tears rising in his throat had been practising to be this man, nonchalantly handing his mother up into the train that would take her away.

Norah's first act was to get the dining-room
re-done.
‘It seems perfectly pleasant to me the way it is, Norah,' I said, but my reading had warned me to be patient about new wives and their whims, and I said no more. This
re-doing
occupied her for an astonishing length of time. There were endless holdings-up of strips of wallpaper, endless unpackings of Chinese vases and endless discussions about the merits of watered silk.

But when the room was finished according to Norah's taste, I regretted not having been firmer. In place of the embossed cream paper, and the gravy-coloured
Views of Loch Lomond
, Norah had gone radical. ‘It is absolutely the latest thing, Albion, so much more dynamic than that boring old cream.'

The scarlet silk wallpaper was certainly striking, the new lustre chandelier certainly brilliant, the engravings of exotic faces on the walls certainly original: Kristabel and Forbes, invited over for the unveiling, agreed that it was a huge improvement. ‘Oh yes,' Kristabel said. ‘It was utterly awful before,' and I was reminded of how irritating her dogmatism was, as if no one could possibly think differently. Personally, I had always found the
Views of Loch Lomond
rather soothing.

Well, it might be original, and I was no expert in these things, but it was also possible that it was simply outlandish. I took my place at the head of the table with a certain misgiving. No one wanted to be boring, or to have a dull wife. But there was a limit to everything, and I decided that Norah's originality must not be allowed to encroach beyond the dining-room. As with horses and dogs, so with women: a firm hand has to be taken right from the start.

When it had been made clear to Norah that the rest of the house did not require
re-doing
, and Norah took up painting, I was pleased. A man did not have to eat his dinner in a picture. ‘Very suitable, Norah,' I agreed, ‘by all means, what a perfectly splendid idea.' There were various anaemic watercolours of
The Boats
and
Sunset over the Bay
, and I thought no more about it.

Before long, though,
a bit of painting
became
Art
, and things became less satisfactory. There were classes in the city, from which she returned with sticky oil-paintings of vases of flowers and arrangements of pumpkins. Art had begun by seeming a harmless enough occupation for a lady, but I grew to dislike the way her face lost its sunny little smile, and almost scowled with concentration, as she laboured over her palette, and the way she kept on fiddling with her picture and only paying me half her attention, as if her pumpkins mattered more than her husband.

‘But Norah, have you ever seen a purple pumpkin, and what is this object here, is that supposed to be a leaf ?' She held the picture up, squinting at it through half-closed eyes—she would get wrinkles that way, I made a note to tell her—and sounded quite smug and superior as she said, ‘Oh, it is called Impressionism, Albion, the latest thing, you are not supposed to paint every leaf.' She made it sound as if painting every leaf, or even expecting a painter to paint every leaf, was a terribly boring thing to do, and continued to inspect the picture, holding it up to the light and humming as if I were not in the room.

As far as I was concerned, it was a lot of twaddle: either you knew how to draw a thing the way it looked, or you did not, and if you did not, you would do better not to try. And it was a fact, a simple fact of history, that there had never been any significant women painters. What was more, I was growing suspicious of these classes she went to. Naturally at the start I had made sure there was no nonsense about life studies, but the teacher had struck me from the beginning as a charlatan in need of a good haircut. Now it was transpiring that he could not even teach a person how to draw a leaf or get the colour right on a pumpkin.

I began to feel seriously encroached on by Art. As time went on, I was more than likely to come home at the end of a hard day at the business to find my drawing-room full of soulful-looking young women, and pale young men with hair in need of a good cut and big liquid eyes: it was like a roomful of spaniels. My wife would be radiant behind the teapot, her little red mouth shaping itself around smiles and exclamation, her little wet tongue flickering in and out, her head tossing and flirting so that her little ear-rings twitched and twinkled at them, and the men hung on her every word, nodding and curving their long fingers further around their teacups.

When the dynamic figure of Albion Gidley Singer burst in on a gust of nor'easter from the Harbour, their moonlike faces all swivelled around. A man could be made to feel an intruder in his own drawing-room.

‘Why Albion,' Norah would call from her position at the head of the tea-table, ‘you are just in time for a cup of tea, and Mr Reynolds here is just telling us of the fascinating paintings he saw in Paris, please go on, Mr Reynolds,' and courtesy would force me to sit and accept a cup of stewed tea and listen to some lisping little pansy come out with a lot of poppycock about pictures.

They all thought themselves artists, of course, although in point of actual hard fact they were simply students of painting, no doubt producing the same misshapen pumpkins as my wife. One of the young men wished to paint a portrait of Norah, while another sketched her profile as she sat over the teapot, and presented it to her when he left. The soulful girls nodded and looked soulful, but none of them seemed interested in doing a portrait of my wife.

It was a pang like the prick of something sharp to see Norah's face light up in eagerness when she spoke to them. Her skin softened and warmed: she was like a wax figure coming to life. It made me realise how little she glowed and warmed with me these days, how cool and bland she was: she was politeness itself, but she never showed her eye-teeth to me the way she did to her artist friends.

When they spoke to me, it was in an over-polite and over-clear way, as you might to a foreigner who was more to be pitied than blamed for being so stupid. They showed me paintings, and engravings of other more famous paintings, and I saw only bunches of flowers in vases, or women pouring milk out of jugs, or ships sinking: I saw nothing in these but a representation, more or less accurate, of what I could see better with my own eyes.

It could make a man a little anxious, if he thought about it too much. Was it possible that I was lacking some faculty, in the way a deaf man cannot imagine sound, cannot even believe that sound exists? Was there, in fact, something in these pictures that others could see, and I could not? It was my student days all over again, with a circle of shoulders gently closing me out, the knot of people evaporating at my approach.

They were puffballs, but they were astute enough to flatter the provider of the elegant drawing-room and the plentiful ham sandwiches. ‘How I would love to do your head in bronze!' Reynolds cried out at me on one occasion. ‘Mrs Singer, you must agree, your husband has a head that would suit bronze.' I flinched from his cry, like the call of a mad bird in my own drawing-room, and stared everyone down as they turned to observe my head. Indeed, it was a splendid head, and probably well-suited to bronze. But I did not like the way Mr Reynolds cocked his head on one side, considering me as an object in bronze, and the way he made little moulding gestures in the air beside my cheeks; even less did I like the way Norah stared and smiled, as if I were already nothing more than a bulb-eyed bust to have my nose tweaked and the size of my ears remarked upon. There was a little ripple of something very like laughter as they all stared at my head, which under so much scrutiny felt as hollow as a gong.

Enough was enough. After dinner that night, I came to Norah in her room where she was brushing out her hair and staring dreamily at herself in the mirror with her hair electric around her. Whoever her dreams were for, they did not appear to be for her husband: when I appeared behind her in the mirror, she drew her wrapper up around her neck as if I were a cold draught.

‘It is not the money I mind, Norah, or even the smell of turpentine, though that is peculiarly pervasive in the house. But my dear,' my voice was at its most reasonable, ‘do you really feel you have the talent to make it all worthwhile? Can you really say you are in the same class as Mr da Vinci or Mr Rembrandt?'

Embroidery turned out to be much more satisfactory. I liked to come home to an embroidering wife, and I liked to pause behind the plumbago before I entered my house, in order to watch my wife as she stitched at her petit-point, and sighed, and crossed and re-crossed her little feet and glanced at the clock, a wife with every hair in place, and every fold of skirt arranged for the delectation of a husband on his return from the shark-infested sea of business. The scowl faded from Norah's face: embroidery did not make her screw up her eyes, or become deaf to her husband's remarks. When she had filled the sofas of our own house with petit-point cushions, she started on Kristabel's. That sister of mine, even now she was a married woman, had not acquired any womanly graces.

Norah's became a small life of no real event. She made expeditions to Town, and could make a day's work out of choosing a new hat or some gloves, or of having luncheon at Bartholomew's with Mrs Longbottom or Mrs Cameron, and choosing another embroidery transfer at Mark Foy's. She no longer showed off her French accent over dinner, holding forth about
pointillism
and
palettes
, but listened while I told her little anecdotes about the business, and what Rundle had said to me yesterday, and how if the price of rubber kept going up we would be ruined, and by a process of association the fact that a rubber tree produces thirty-two pints of rubber sap per year, and that it takes three trees to make the bladders of a dozen fountain pens, and seven trees to make a gross of elastic bands. I would quiz her about the accounts, and she would try to tell me that two-and-six was cheap for mutton, and bring me the account book to prove it.

To my surprise she had turned out to be a pretty fair manager of the house. I had heard other husbands speaking in a tone of tolerant amusement of the inability of their wife to add up the grocer's bill, and I had been ready to step in every month in a jocular way to sort out a cash-book that did not add up. In fact it had been one of married life's little duties that I had almost looked forward to. But Norah did not ever come to me apologetically with a muddle of figures, and when I slipped the account-book out of her escritoire now and then, it seemed satisfactory enough.