Night Street (2 page)

But the eye was drawn to the coral beads.

Meldrum made a tentative sound of approbation, but then produced another sound, shorter, higher.

In the foreground, the beads were familiar, recognisable as beads, yet also startling. Their red hue had the intensity of coral, glowing with warmth. The beads looped forward like a garter. Or a noose. They led the eye into the painting's low heart, twisting, coaxing you further back before finally coiling, serpentine. The transmuting coral beads were charged.

At least, this was how they seemed to Clarice—but it was often hard to predict the effect a work would have on others; would they be stirred? The edge of shock in Meldrum's silence, however, told her that he saw it. He was affected.

‘You've used the paint well,' he said finally. ‘You haven't just pushed it around with your brush like most students do.' He sounded troubled. ‘Nice and thin. No superfluous brushstrokes.'

She lifted her face, absorbing the compliment, waiting for the verdict.

‘Quite alright,' he continued slowly. ‘I wonder about that red, though.'

‘For the beads?'

He nodded. ‘Was that exact?'

‘Exact?'

‘True. It seems a bit high-keyed. A bit
strong
?'

The criticism she had heard from him before was solidly dismissive, sharp, even barbed. It was odd to observe him lenient.

She spoke in a rush, without reflecting that he was probably not used to defiance: ‘No, I think it's right. That's what I saw.'

He looked at her as if just roused from the solace of a thick sleep. And she gazed back, not finding it in herself to be falsely modest or evasive with this teacher she admired. They measured each other up. He was not a ladies' man, though perhaps he noticed her also as a woman.

‘It's the effect I wanted.'

‘That was the actual colour?' He was testing her.

‘As I saw it. Yes.'

‘The draughtsmanship is good,' he said carefully. ‘You studied with McCubbin?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you took drawing classes before that?'

‘As a child. There was a Miss McFarlane.'

‘Ah.' He half smiled, as if acknowledging that there was always a Miss McFarlane, in some shape or form. ‘And she identified your
aptitude
?'

‘Yes,' she said, suddenly more vulnerable. ‘But I've always drawn.'

‘I see.' His intonation almost ironic, faintly entertained— not disparaging. Meldrum turned to consider her landscape.

A dim city street in fog or fine rain. This could have been a view through a mesh of eyelashes, or captured by some instrument tenderer than the eye. There were parked motors and a few people on a footpath, though they were hardly there, the human figures, just hinted at. There was an awning and a sign attached to a building, likely a theatre; these adorned with flecks of orange and yellow, electric lights. Other small lights, some the headlamps of approaching cars, were dotted spectrally through the dewy blur of an evening.

He did not speak for a while, and then he observed, ‘Interesting. This is quite modern, isn't it?'

Modern, related to art, was usually a dirty word in his mouth and now it had to be coming, the reprimand.

Instead: ‘You are not new to landscapes, I gather?'

‘No,' she admitted—or was it a boast?

He looked at her again, seeing her as she had scarcely been seen before. Quietly, he said, ‘You've rendered the tonal values sensitively.' More reluctantly, ‘And overall, you're a fine colourist.'

He wanted to criticise it, rebuke her, she understood this, but he was not sure how to go about it. He seemed disarmed. It was a singular experience.

‘It's modern. But I think I see what you're after, I think I do.'

Her teacher did not warn Clarice away from landscapes, back to safer indoor terrain, though she imagined he was asking himself if she might be a little mad. It was much more than she had hoped for, a victory, maybe the beginning of an awkward respect. She was incredulous and wanted to shout.

‘I look forward to seeing where your work will take you,' he said. ‘I mean, once your style has settled down.' And this was his way of reasserting his authority, the final sign that her paintings had shaken him.

They were not quite friends after that, but their exchanges held the suggestion of a friendship, of a stern, restrained kind. Meldrum marked the backs of his students' paintings with a grade, A, B or C. Clarice took his hard-won marks to heart, and before turning over a painting to see what she had earned, she was apprehensive. She began to receive a few As, then mostly As, and she never had a C. She had heard him declare women incapable of giving themselves completely to art, lacking a propensity for solitude. But his behaviour contradicted such unoriginal and limited beliefs. He sometimes praised Clarice over the boys and used her paintings in class as examples. He seemed now to consider her his star pupil.

3

Miss McFarlane came to the house in Casterton above the Colonial Bank once a week for a year to give Clarice and Louise a drawing lesson. Mum had met her through the church choir and formed the opinion that she would benefit from some extra income; she had only a few private students and it seemed was not very well-off. Mum also believed in the value of creative occupations for one's leisure time, in artistic accomplishments for girls and women. She was attracted to Culture, associating it with elegant grandeur and civilised pleasantness. She herself had painted a little, before Clarice's memory began, and two souvenirs of this foreign time, watercolours, graced the walls of her bedroom when her children were small. Clarice stared at these for long periods, enthralled by the watery, slightly smudged look of them. One was of crimson rhododendrons in a green vase. The other, of a single bird-of-paradise flower that floated in the air. The areas of colour were bright and gay; they gave you a happy jolt or else grated on you.

Clarice had once overheard Mum say to Henrietta, the maid, ‘Clarice is a natural drawer.' Mum's soft voice even more whispery than usual, as if she were telling a secret. Proud but wary.

By the time of the lessons with Miss McFarlane, when she was ten, Clarice had seen that Mum's watercolours were only prettyish and slightly good. This hurt a bit. She still enjoyed gazing at the bird of paradise, the better of the two: it did remind her of the flower—dazzling, both flower and bird, with that stiffly birdlike attitude, watchful and distant.

‘The girls are artistic,' Mum liked to tell company. ‘They take after me.' A facility for creating likenesses had been identified in each of them. Clarice drew relentlessly; Louise, when bored or wanting attention. She was four years younger and babyish. Clarice had never been that babyish, she believed, and neither had the little one, Paul, who, a year younger than Louise, had more of a right to be. He rarely drew, but when he did, it was scenes from his own imagination, with a great frightening strength, objects or creatures colliding, or poised in an intense stand-off. The girls were encouraged to sketch flowers, corners of their home or each other. The latter held little appeal; they were more inclined to draw Mum, desperately competing for her approval. It was better later in the day, if she sat reading or embroidering, her face not tight, public and symmetrical anymore but drooping, her eyes more searching and sometimes slightly pained. Usually, though, she insisted on posing dressed up, hair freshly done and wearing her expression for the mirror, half smile and half moue. You could not draw her properly like that. Louise gave up as soon as she had the mouth too large or the eyes too close, and even Clarice lost interest quickly. She was uneasy drawing Mum, wishing the mother in the picture to be beautiful, to shine with easy unconditional love. So much simpler to draw objects, houses, plants or the cat, Daffy. It had been decided that Paul would not participate in the lessons with Miss McFarlane. Perhaps he did not want to, or perhaps it was because his drawings never looked like anything you recognised, seeming to belong in dreams you would wake from afraid; their parents said he was too little, though they also occasionally described him as precocious.

Mum greeted Louise's efforts as triumphs. It was hard for Louise to sit still and concentrate; if she did so for the time it took to finish a drawing, then this was an achievement. Mum and Louise both fought against quiet, needing to be busy and to have other people around them to be cheerful. Mum said, glowing, ‘Louise is very vivacious.' There were sometimes graceful details in Louise's drawings, but she ruined them by not looking carefully for long enough. Clarice's drawings were also praised, joylessly, and she turned over in her head the comment about being a natural drawer. A compliment—but not. Meaning that she did not have to try, that drawing well just came to her.

The drawing did come to her. It came because she was waiting for it; she was prepared. At times, she tried so hard that there was nothing left in her afterwards. It could be exhausting to look in that way. ‘What am I going to do with you?' Mum might say, kissing her forehead at bedtime. ‘My introvert. We need to bring you out of yourself a bit, don't we?'
Introvert
may have come from Father, who liked to sum people up, often ending a conversation: ‘. . . Well, he's an expert' or ‘. . . an incompetent' or ‘. . . a liar.' Drawing was being
in
herself. If you came out of yourself, where would you be?

Miss McFarlane was refreshing, like half-light, so different to other women Clarice had met. Though she was an adult, she did not give the impression of being completely grown up. Her plain dresses were worn with a straight, supple back. She was comfortingly and thrillingly serious. And she was also beautiful, actually, in a bare fashion, except for her extravagant dark-red hair that was out of a fairytale. This was restrained in a very neat bun, as if someone had angrily brushed and pulled it hard into place for her; the bun loosened over the course of an hour, fine silken tendrils making a gaol break.

The hour felt longer than an hour, slower, floaty—then it was crushingly over. Clarice was always grieving for the last lesson and starving for the next. Lesson was a funny word for it, because there were no real commands and you did what you would have chosen to do yourself. You could be ‘moony'. Slowly circling the desk at which the girls sat, Miss McFarlane made suggestions if they were stuck, but these were light and did not upset. She said they would find their own way with art, if they were patient and committed. Sometimes she spoke of perspective, something Clarice thought she mostly knew—had suspected, at least, even if she had not had a word for it before or felt it needed one; the more the word was in her mind, the more complicated things got and she was likely to confuse herself and make a mess.

Miss McFarlane's hands were what Clarice adored most about her. Unless they hovered or fluttered a little, with curiosity, she kept them folded together under her breast, or placed them behind her back, one hand holding one elbow. They were careful and decided. Her long fingers had intelligence, though probably many of the things they knew, they would keep to themselves.

If the teacher was pleased with you, she did not flatter, did not gush, as Mum did; you believed her. Maybe she considered Clarice capable of more. For example, she often gave them different subjects to study. Clarice's might be a surprising branch with a bulbous bit on it like a knuckle, bark peeling off or disorienting colours, and Louise's an easy common flower. One afternoon, after settling Louise with a dainty rose, Miss McFarlane took a seashell from the big floppy bag she always had with her, and placed it before Clarice.

She worked at her drawing in a state of extreme nervous concentration. Finally, sweating, she saw that her seashell was too small on the page. Not much of a seashell. Odd and silly, as if she had scribbled. It resembled a cloud, more than anything. Her throat turned narrow and sore, her nose burning, as if she had breathed in water, swimming.

Miss McFarlane leaned over the desk. She laid her hand on the girl's shoulder; it exuded gratification. Clarice was confused, and slowly it dawned on her that this was a special message: Miss McFarlane had been ambitious for her and found her worthy. She struggled to see her seashell as the teacher might. Did the clumsy shape promise something, the way a seashell did? Make you think of something much bigger? She was not sure. But how marvellous that to fail could be a kind of success; it was entering a world with rules that were impossible to predict.

Miss McFarlane smelled as if she had eaten an orange without washing her hands afterwards. ‘Very nice,' she said of Louise's fancy, hurried rose. Perhaps it too was a success, if you saw it differently.

Clarice wanted to be kind to Louise. It would not take anything away from her. ‘Lovely,' she added.

Louise could tell that something important had passed between the other two. ‘Show me that,' she said skittishly, and Clarice's desire to be kind hollowed.

‘No.'

Louise, strong and determined, snatched her strange seashell away.

‘Give Clarice her drawing.' Not exactly hard, Miss McFarlane's voice, but meaning business.

With passionate indifference, Louise crumpled the edges and left a profaning grey thumbprint before surrendering it; she had to leave her mark. The final flourish was a plaintive smile.

The best revenge was ignoring her. But it was difficult to look away from her dark hair, pink skin, and eyes that were lively when she was happy, which was most of the time.
Vivacious
.

The teacher had gone, Mum seeing her to the door and Clarice hanging back, not wanting to watch. Louise was in their bedroom, singing, freed. It was such a relief to have Louise in a different room, with space clarifying where each of them ended.

Striding to the kitchen, Mum called, ‘Why don't you go and lay out your clothes with your sister?'

Some of Mum's friends and their husbands were coming for dinner, and she was propelled by the contented anxiety of all this; Father was less fond of company, but from time to time he indulged her, sulking a little. Clarice loitered in the hallway, marooned somewhere between the drawing lesson and the paler activities that lay ahead. She was trying to ignore Mum's conversation with Henrietta, but made out, ‘I feel awfully sorry for her, without a family of her own. She'd be so lonely.'