Night Street (5 page)

He and Mum had been carefully discussing the conscription debate, but the platitudes had gone as far as they could be taken and there was a pause. Louise and Ted looked at one another, as if listening for the baby, who was sleeping in a cot in the sewing room. Deep quiet. Father profited from the lapse in the pleasantries to make an exit; he was probably suffering from his fatigued nerves. And now Mum, with amused indulgence, said, ‘I should leave you young people to talk.' She stood and moved towards the door, and stopped. ‘Was that the little one? Louise? Do you want to look in on him? Or should I?'

‘I didn't hear anything,' Louise replied cheekily. ‘Ted, did you?' Louise and Mum doted on one another, but there could be a teasing friction between them. Louise had permission to be mischievous.

Mum laughed. ‘I'm sure I heard something.'

Ted was on his feet, impatient. ‘Come on, dear.'

Louise raised her eyebrows. ‘I don't know why, but I've come over all sleepy.' She yawned flirtatiously, then, with becoming lethargy, reluctantly stood, linked her arm through Ted's, and off they sauntered after Mum.

Silence submerged the room. Their gazes entangled, trying for innocence.

‘The tea is very weak,' Clarice commented, enormously regretting this charade, this elaborate hash.

‘Oh, no,' Stanley assured her. He was a decent man, who did not deserve to be in such a situation. ‘It's fine.'

‘I like my tea milky,' she went inanely on, ‘but it has to be strong. Well brewed. I don't like it weak.'

He coughed. ‘I'm not a strong tea man.'

To prevent him from saying anything embarrassing, she blurted, ‘The cart turned out fantastically. I made it without any problems.'

‘You did it yourself?'

‘I told you I would.'

‘Yes.' He evidently had not expected she would be capable of it. ‘That's . . . impressive.' It was hard to tell if he found the achievement admirable or off-putting.

‘No cuts or splinters.'

‘I think it's wonderful that you paint. I play the violin a little myself. Pretty terribly, but I can pull off a few tunes, more or less. Though the violin is unforgiving.'

‘So is painting.' Clarice was becoming irritated, all the more so for having brought this torturous conversation on herself, and on poor Stanley.

‘Yes, of course. Irish music is my favourite. There's a lot to be said for having something creative to do in your spare time.'

A nervy clack of china against china; she had lowered her cup to the saucer more forcefully than intended. ‘I don't paint in my spare time. When I'm not painting,
that
is my spare time.'

‘Oh, I see.'

‘I make time to paint,' she said quickly. ‘It's my most important activity.'

‘I see what you're getting at.'

He was gathering himself now to say what he wanted to say and it made her queasy. ‘Let's go out,' she said, springing up from her chair.

‘Out?'

‘Into the garden.'

‘For . . . a walk?'

‘I'll show you the cart. And maybe a painting.'

‘Right. Fine.'

Outside, the wind was sweet and ticklish with wattle, the day bending towards late-afternoon gold. Her breathing deepened and her spine lengthened. With what might have come across as haughtiness, she led him to the end of the garden. She would have liked to be kinder to him, but she would have had to let down the necessary defences.

‘This is a good, big yard,' he said, glancing at her. ‘It's getting chilly.'

‘Yes, it's bracing.' Reaching the shed, she turned to him. ‘The cold focuses me.'

She kept the shed locked because she could not stand the idea of her father poking censoriously around in there. She let her parents see her art as little as possible and only when prepared. There had been an occasion, when she ran into the house with a painting she had just then completed, to present it to them. A view of the Bay Road, a Model-T Ford from behind, a curious shadow thrown by a gum. Clarice was inebriated with what had happened: she had directed her full attention at a landscape, that landscape had returned the favour by looking right back at her—with the same intensity—and she had tried to capture the shared look in paint.

Her parents adjusted their glasses, drew breath.

‘Ah. Well,' Mum said, after a moment, labouring at tact.

There was a smart-alecky light in Father's face. ‘The sky is a funny colour,' he contributed.

Later, Clarice would see that attempt at the Bay Road as painfully imperfect, laughably flawed. The perspective awkward. The shadow not right.

But their failure to find important what had seemed somehow holy to her came on Clarice like a physical attack. Beside the point, that their opinion may have been correct. It was subtle, dressed in mildness, and they were no doubt ignorant of it; nonetheless, she suffered it, in the moment, as an attack. She half laughed and, before understanding the action, flung the painting across the room. It hit the wall, caught on the back of a chair. Fell, finally, to the floor, face down. General stupefaction, as if she had just confessed to an outlandish crime. Clarice, the quiet introvert, had done this loud, appallingly emotional thing. No one spoke or made a move to retrieve the painting. She turned and left.

Returning some hours after, humiliated and now humbled, she found the painting on the top step of the verandah. Reproach? Apology? Who had left it there? They had shown her it was hideous, her own presumptuousness; Father was not mistaken—the sky was a fancifully ardent, hysterical turquoise. She picked it up with the heartbroken futility she might have felt handling the corpse of a young animal. The paint was a little smudged, but the board was intact. She wished it had cracked.

‘Terrific,' Stanley said, inspecting the cart. He frowned thoughtfully, running his hand over the surface, suggesting that he himself might have done something differently.

He was a craftsman, after all, and building things with wood was his trade; however, she did not much care for the insinuation of his superior manly expertise. While he lingered over it, she considered which painting to show. One to demonstrate how foreign she was to him—irrevocably. Providing it was not to her parents, she had lately discovered that she was able to show her work with less discomfort than before. Or rather, it was still exquisitely difficult and wounding when the viewer was indifferent or critical—and hazardously delightful otherwise. But she could take a step back, as it were, spiritually slip away. An enormous relief, because paintings had to be offered.

It was a small tool shed, too narrow for a studio, though she might have tried to use it as one were it not, alongside her paintings, also packed with the sundry boxes that overflow from a family home.

‘Very nice,' he said. ‘I recognised her immediately.' From over her shoulder, he had peeked at a portrait of Louise: a painting from before Clarice trusted herself with reality—Louise looking self-effacing, without her sparkle of mischief, less seductive than she was.

‘I'll show you something else.'

‘Not only beautiful, but talented,' he murmured, behind her.

She ignored this gesture at flirtation, going through a stack close to the door, relaxing in the odour of oil paint. Something unpretty. Something people found murky and bleak. This.

Scraggly, minimal brushstrokes. Nothing but the essential. A rocky brown cliff. The sky and the sea dissolving into dark mist. These were the bones of a landscape, shining indistinctly like bones, a low twilight throb.

‘Here.'

His smile faltered.

6

‘How did it go?'

‘A good morning,' she said to Herb—a permanent fixture on the beach those past weeks. A sort of camaraderie had developed between them such that sparse words were plenty. She had met him in Meldrum's classroom, a broad-handed rubicund man with considerable intuition and a careless grin. He liked to quote Thoreau, saying intently,
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
. He was going to France soon, and before doing so had determined to suck the marrow from the Australian landscape. He was living in the caravan-studio he had had custom-made. Most of the time, he kept it parked by Half Moon Bay and there had been some complaints, but he resisted moving on. Herb had achieved a gypsy existence in the service of art and it made him buoyant, as if he might become airborne at any moment, rise up and float away.

He glanced at her work, nodded. Then looked again, for a little longer. He only ever approached her when it was clear she had finished. Herb himself was splattered cheerily with blues and reds, a wandering palette.

‘Tired?' he asked.

‘Not now. You?'

‘Fit as a fiddle. Tea?'

‘Oh, yes.'

He made for the caravan. As Clarice methodically packed up her kit, she noticed a man on his morning walk. The Doctor. They had never been introduced or said hello; local gossip had taught her his profession. She saw the Doctor most days, usually in the evening, knowing his silhouette and slow, sure-footed steps almost as if he were a feature of the landscape.

She joined Herb by the caravan. She took her tea from him and nursed it in her cramped hands. The blessed first cup of tea. Leaning forward on camping chairs, they studied the day: perfect, nearly smug, it might have been congratulating itself on inventing the idea of day.

‘I won't be able to stay much longer,' he said eventually. ‘They want me away from the beaches.'

‘They're mad. What harm are you doing?' Her voice was rusty, not yet self-conscious. ‘Still bent on France?' Everyone seemed to lust after France.

A beguiled smile. He was lighting up with exoticism, with the immortal feeling that comes from closing in on a dream. Perhaps she would miss his laconic companionship, when he went. They understood one another and his enthusiasm was a tonic; she laughed.

He seized her empty cup. ‘Coming in for a swim?'

‘I am.'

He let her change in the caravan. It was innocent between them. He might have liked it to be otherwise, but he appeared to appreciate that it was the generous distance in their friendship that made it. Inside, his caravan was somehow roomy, holding a vocation and the few, rough-hewn pieces of an itinerant life's jigsaw puzzle. Herb had driven through South Australia in this, crossing deserts. The incestuous jostling together of art and day-to-day existence, the whiff of grand emancipation, pleased her immensely. As she undressed, her eyes travelled obliquely over her now remembered, renewed body; she was well coordinated, unhesitating.

They stood in their bathing suits with just their ankles submerged, feet taking root in the liquid sand. It thrilled them that they had spied on the beginning of the day, had participated in it; they felt young, in the best way: bold. The water was an amazingly cold reward.

The sea gave itself entirely. It did not hold back, having no modesty or reason for restraint. It surrendered because it never lost anything. The water's embrace was soothing and alarming; she was never sure out here which had the upper hand in her, happiness or crazed fear. It was the world in raw form, the swimmer constantly on the edge of the precipice, kicking to stave off drowning, deceptively weightless.

TWO
The First Blow

7

Clarice saw him for the first time on a Tuesday promising rain.

She was early for class and, on her way there, she had paused to admire Princes Bridge. Her notion of what was interesting—aesthetically pleasing or beautiful, you might call it—was large and flexible. She was not concerned with grandeur or decoration, and she ruled nothing out. Clarice loved her city well, comprehensively; all its plain, enticing fragments. A length of half-empty road, a long wistful shadow stretched out over it. An arrangement of telegraph poles. Some were offended by change, but she thought it a pity to see progress as the enemy of beauty—because then, you were left only with nostalgia, having turned your back on so much that deserved your attention. An infinite-seeming number of small and indispensable views asked to be looked at, demanded it, and proceeded to etch themselves onto her awareness. It was usually after she had finished a board when she realised that a painted view suggested something beyond itself: the substratum of an emotion, the air that a story might pass through. On that Tuesday of imminent rain, she saw Princes Bridge. A slice of it: the solidity of cast iron resting on bluestone bulwarks, and the steady current of traffic this carried. The palm trees in the foreground, in some way endearing, self-consciously adolescent. The little boats on the mirroring water beneath and above, a maternal, impersonal sky. She thought she would do a quick sketch or two and a colour study to fix it in her memory.

But she was soon busy with a panel, squeezing obliging worms of paint onto the palette, adding a little of this and some of that and working it together with rhythmic, religious rigour till her colours came towards what she saw, like a tentative meeting of strangers who have recognised something in each other.

The trance released her when she had done what she could do. She enjoyed it this way, painting in one fell swoop.
A premier coup
: at the first blow. A storm of painting quickly arriving and departing—a transient frenzy. The finished painting was different to the picture she had held in her mind before beginning. It was never, of course, that perfect. You did what you were able or needed to do at that moment, tried to accept it, to be unafraid. She was developing.

She entered the studio quietly. Holding the panel with care, she was mindful of the impressionable baby-softness of its wet surface. She pegged it to the wall at the back of the room for drying. She had not quite exited the painting yet; sometimes she lingered within a just-completed work, reluctant to go.

One of the young men, Henry, came to see.

He laughed sharply, in spite of himself. Then he hurried over to where the other students were sitting in a loose but attentive group. Ada came to stand beside her, staring at the fresh paint. She had heard it said that the girl was an imitator of her style, but this did not bother Clarice. If some people occasionally did not know to which of them to attribute a work, Clarice herself did not see any particular resemblance between their paintings. Meldrum could always tell the difference.