Night Street (10 page)

She snapped, ‘I wish you'd just drop me back.'

Arthur took out his keys, startled, and would not meet her eye. He opened the door for her and she scrambled in, as if by removing herself from the view of those in the street she might erase herself. The van reeked of smoking and art: tobacco fustiness, oil paint, turpentine and linseed oil. She breathed that air greedily. His studio. This was his vehicle for escape; it could take him where he wanted to go, away— and also take him home to Bella. He had both more and less freedom than Clarice did.

She imagined stealing the van, herself in the driver's seat. Waiting a little, over the moon with her theft. And then, off, accelerating, without a backwards thought. Mr Freud's notions of women's envy regarding the male member did not convince her, but she knew herself to be horribly envious of men's vans, these wonderful means of evasion.

The chill city, then the suburbs went by beyond her immobile reflected face. Their laughter of an hour earlier seemed unreal and they avoided mention of the picture altogether. She was weary but completely awake, as she sometimes was when there was no energy left in her and she had to dig for something to replace it. She kept herself turned away from him. Her eyes were smarting. She was too aware, of everything; this night, it would have been better to see less.

Two streets from the house, in the parked van, she hung her head.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I can't stop thinking of that poor fellow with the newspaper.'

He touched her neck beneath her chignon—it was still so new for him to touch her—but she stayed rigid. It was strange that two weeks before they had undressed each other and lain down on Mrs Hamlin's guest bed, a party within earshot. She could not be calm.

He sighed. ‘Don't think about anything.' He shifted closer. ‘Don't think.'

She thought of Collins Street, a classy illusion. It was cold in the van. Around it, the darkness was complete.

‘You have to get back.' Then, with an injured meanness, she added, ‘You must get back.'

‘Don't be like that. At least let me see you go in. I'll drive slowly by the house. Please. I want to see your lamp go on. Please be happy. We had fun tonight, didn't we?' She suspected he was ashamed.

She nodded.

They had to be little children for it to seem alright, or play the hedonists with no regard for consequences. But this was not Paris or New York. What if they lost their memories following an accident that left them otherwise intact? Their pasts would be quite gone, allowing them to advance through a translucent air with unknotted stomachs and no expectations guiding their steps, no routines identifying them, no one
noticing
—nothing hindering their limbs or hearts at all. In this vision, there was no harm in warming themselves by passion's fire, in taking a measure of joy.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?' Arthur had his hands on the wheel now and was gazing straight ahead.

She shook her head, wondering whether physical love's highest moment had to feel like an undoing, had to shame, maim. Could it not instead be a sort of honesty? Could the joining not in some way endure?

Before he had lit his cigarette, she saw in her mind's eye a cloud of smoke leaving his lips, blue-grey and changeable, diffusing quickly—the smoke whose odour would cling to her dress as the memory of one passed on clung to a mourner.

‘I'm painting tomorrow.'

He was resigned. ‘Of course you are.'

She turned to him slightly, and it appeared to her then that desire could not be obstructed or dodged. It was a catchy song that kept forcing its way back into your head. It was forgotten, banished, but here was the foot tapping again. The throat humming. She turned further, laying her hand on his arm and following it down till she got to his hand that sent heat into her. He handled the cigarette nimbly, his lips expelling the drugging smoke as if knowing themselves watched, real smoke now produced by real fire.

14

The storm that had been dreaming itself finally crossed the line into being and woke her in the early hours, wind worrying the loose slate shingles. It was cool and too early to go out, so she stayed in her spinster's bed with her head tangled in the previous night. Her thinking revolved endlessly on tracks as futile as those of a compulsively circling dog. She lay there until the bedsprings creaked in her parents' room.

The day that followed was bleakly prosaic around the hiatus of painting. She arrived at the Beaumaris shore a little before dawn, pulling and then wrestling her cart. She sensed disorder.

The foretaste of light, before the sun was up, showed her what the wind had got up to during the night. A door had been ripped off a bathing box and another box thrown clear across the beach, where it would eventually be claimed by the tide. She gauged the altered geometry, the gap in the line of bathing boxes. She had sometimes found Herb here and she measured also the space created by his departure. The artist driven out. Artists were a different breed, and of course what was different was misunderstood and almost always feared.

Sunrise seemed to come reluctantly and she felt it form and take hold of her as she fumbled with her kit in the damp, muddled time just before dawn—the darkness that was occasionally in her tingeing everything with its dark hue. The wind off the water was sharp. She fixed her focusing point, pulled her hat down lower and separated her feet further, bracing.

But then the hours of reprieve, absence, dwelling nowhere and occupying each particle of what she saw. Work. The other place.

There was a problem, early on, a blockage. She had rushed. Rushing, she distracted herself by thinking about composition. She caught herself doing it, wasting mental energy, shackled to the named world. She was not seeing but naming—bathing box, water, sky—and in this way holding on to things, stuck in their net.

She was on her own, studying under no teacher and sometimes, if this felt odd, she was able to summon Meldrum. That morning, she heard him bidding her to simplify, simplify, to forget her awareness of things.

She closed her eyes, trying to relinquish it.

Then gazed anew, cleanly at the view she was portraying and yes, found herself in the space of pure ocular sensation. She raised her palette and brush. Only the visual miracle of nature existed. Where last night she had climbed out of Arthur's van, releasing that particular dream, now she gripped the hand of reality. She would not let go. She painted, speaking only the universal language of depiction, a scientist of the visible world—or perhaps, though this could never be said to Meldrum, some class of medium or mystic. The fine movements of her brush sewed her own fibres firmly to life.

In the end, when she laid her brush down and finally invited words and the things they named back like reprimanded children from the other room, Clarice thought she had the proof of her diligence. She had transcribed the visible, some of it at least; there was some truth here. She showed the seascape to its reflection in the mirror she had made. There.

The bathing box at the shoreline and everything suspended, nestled within a smoky haze. The brownish-olive cliff. A suggestion of the curve of the next bay. The water, nearly flat: pink, grey, white, blue. One sensed that the ocean was not senseless but a sentient, musing thing. The bathing box's torn door was iron red. Across the expanse of water, beyond early morning's cloudy drift, a softness of coastline.

She hankered for salt on her skin, but it was not a day for swimming; it was cold and chaotic and her body too unrested. She packed up and took the path between shaggy, dispassionate gums, wattle and tea-trees. Concentration and clarity left her, now it was over, and she was gone to the dogs. The cart was even more unwieldy than before.

She was panting when, at home, she sneaked a last anxious look at her canvas, which would take days to dry and become definitive, closed the shed door on it and resumed her second life as housemaid.

They breakfasted on porridge and tea. Clarice gave Father his tonic, and dusted till she had to sit on the stairs to stifle an impulse to weep. She felt dilapidated—could she too, like her father, be afflicted with unsteady nerves? Was she meant to inherit this, along with the weak heart? She laughed sorrowfully.

‘Clarice?' Father called from the drawing room, where she had not yet collected his tray.

Who else?

‘I'm dusting,' she replied, trying to sound as if she were a great distance away. She was never properly alone here.

In the kitchen, the stove soon made the dismal, cold air hot. The Beaumaris house had witnessed her graceless transformation into a poor and usually reluctant housekeeper. Before Father's retirement, they had enjoyed domestic help, or better, taken it for granted. Her parents were reserved when it came to talking about money, to talking about most things, really, but she gathered that their financial situation had been debilitated by copious medical expenses; they had both grown very reliant on doctors—Mum for her heart, Father for his nerves and arthritis. It was surely worse to have had and lost servants than never to have had the luxury. Growing up with it had ruined Clarice. She was a laughable cook, uninspired, incompetent, with no natural inclination. The vacancy of a kitchen.

She lost track while Father's beef tea custard was firming in its pan on the side of the stove—the brightening garden had held her eye at the window—and suddenly the water around the gelatinous yellowish stuff was boiling.

Her hands panicked, and she dipped one into the water. It was scalded. She felt a little sick but also vindicated by the knowledge that when the custard was turned out, there would be holes in it. Father would pout at them. She would have preferred the burning sensation on the back of her hand to be more violent; it helped to steady her mind. She prepared the pater a baked apple, as penance. He liked his sweets but could not stomach anything heavy.

Mum was reading in bed, avidly.

‘Still having fun with your Somerset Maugham?'

She smiled a lovely, secretive smile. ‘It's very entertaining. Did the painting go well?'

‘Not too badly.' It was almost impossible to talk about her work, but she was rather touched Mum had asked. ‘What do you fancy for pudding?'

Resting her book on her knee and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, Mum thought. She looked slightly anaemic. ‘Maybe scones? The bran ones agreed with me last time.' Dr Broadbent had lately recommended Mum's conversion to wheatmeal and she was bravely embracing it. ‘With jam? You don't want to sit here for a bit and chat?'

Clarice was restless; she did not think she would be able to abide sitting by her mother. Better misanthropy, solitude.

‘I'll see about those scones.'

‘Don't go to any bother, dear.'

This familiar phrase grated less than usual. She laid her hand briefly on the old head. ‘I'll leave you be.'

She was stirring ginger cordial. Louise, swanning in on an impromptu visit, demanded a glass. Clarice realised she had been listening in a trance to the sound of the spoon against the jug, possibly for a while. She stopped stirring and surrendered the jug.

‘Not enough sugar, Sis,' Louise concluded. ‘You're lucky to be in here in the warm. The rest of the house is freezing!'

Louise disappeared and her barely audible chattering with their mother was pierced every so often by a shriek of laughter. Mum's cheeks would be pink after Louise went.

Drying her hands on her apron, Clarice went to put Chopin on the gramophone. She had purchased the record after hearing this music at Mrs Hamlin's party. Back in the kitchen, a fragment of music would suddenly present itself as a gift. Finished for better or worse with her chores, she would pass the time till the light started to fade, sewing old fur cuffs into the lining of Mum's slippers. She had read in a magazine that this gave a cosy effect. And then she would be away from here—painting.

Louise popped her head in again, saying she would give her kingdom for a hot cup. Clarice had no conversation in her; she only wanted to look at the garden and listen to her music, contemplating the gorgeous unease of last night.

Her sister was wearing some new provocative scent, animal-musky. Not even the second baby had taken away her style. She leaned coquettishly in the doorway, her life seeming a playful thing. The vermilion scarf slung over her shoulder threatened to fall. She was always preparing for a glamorous performance, her hips toying with the air they occupied.

‘Gosh, I'd kill for a cup of tea.' Louise waited another minute before she reached for the kettle and filled it herself.

‘Ouch!' She had plucked a hair off Clarice's head.

‘Grey one. Well you
are
the older sister. Ha! Thirty-two. You should look after yourself a bit more. It starts to become important at our age.' Louise had been colouring her own hair for years. It was very dark, timeless. ‘I could help you, if you want . . .' she trailed off meditatively.

‘No, thank you.' The tiny prick of pain gave way to a discomforting raw feeling. ‘Silver,' she said. ‘Silver hair is dignified.'

‘Yes, on a man.' Louise smiled. ‘I agree. Quite seductive.'

‘And on a woman, too, I find.'

Louise raised her eyebrows. ‘That Carruthers from down the street—what do you think of him?' she asked brightly. ‘He's pretty enough. One could do worse.'

Clarice hesitated. ‘He's a boy.'

‘A boy?
So
? That reminds me, Ron got bitten by a snake last night,' she tripped on, and Clarice felt herself melting into shadow behind the glare of her sister's talk, eclipsed. ‘He came racing in from the yard on his toddler legs, crying, but Ted knew just what to do. He always knows. Somehow he calmed the little chap down and got him in the bathroom to wash the bite. He cut incisions through the puncture marks! Cut! Can you believe it? He only dared confess this later when the doctor had reassured me and I'd had a sherry.' She winked. ‘I do like a drop. It relaxes me. I said, “You took a razor to the baby?” It was outrageously funny. We get on famously with the doc. After Ted did the cutting, he sucked out some of the blood and venom. The doc was so impressed. He said, “If everyone was like you, I'd be out of business.” Ted really does have the coolest head I've ever seen.'