Prochownik's Dream (15 page)

‘Take it!'

Toni took the book and held it. ‘You mean for me to keep it?'

‘It's yours. You'll make use of it, I can see that. A little of my experience may be secured with you for a time, eh? To give a gift can be a selfish act.' He laughed and put his hand to the table. ‘Now, give me your arm. I'm going back to bed. But I shan't make it without your support.' Toni stood and Theo reached up and took his arm, leaned his weight on him and got up. ‘I'm sorry about the unpleasant smell.'

‘It's okay.' They went down the passage together and Toni helped him to his bed. Misty came in and stood in the half-light watching them.

•

He had been alone in the studio copying Theo's head from the sketchbook for more than an hour when he heard Marina come in. He was lost in the work and had more or less forgotten about her. He quickly put Theo's sketchbook away in his bag and looked up as she came into the studio. She was carrying a parcel.

‘I met Panos,' she said, coming across the room to him. She put the parcel on the cupboard. ‘You remember Panos? He used to do those enormous blue and grey field paintings. He was in the queue in the post office. He had just been told, this morning, an hour ago—he had just come from the hospital. He's got inoperable pancreatic cancer. My god! Apparently there's no cure for it. He's my age. He's devastated. They told him he has a month or two at the most. He looks perfectly healthy. Just a little tired, a little drawn, that's all. I took him for coffee and he wept in my arms. It was terrible and wonderful. I haven't seen him for years, and then there he was in the post office queue, his eyes begging me, and then I suddenly recognised him. He lives alone.' She stood close beside him, her hip resting lightly against his shoulder, looking over his pad with its pencil studies of Theo's head. ‘They're extraordinary,' she said. ‘Theo's been sitting for you?'

‘No.' He remembered Panos as a fierce loner, his vast blue and grey canvases strangely obsessive and dated.

‘You're doing them from memory? How incredible.'

‘Theo and I were talking for an hour.'

‘They've got the look of drawings from life. You really do have an amazing eye. I envy you.' She moved away from him and indicated the parcel. ‘Two advance copies of Robert's new book. I'll leave it for him to open later. I don't feel like working. Meeting Panos has upset me. We were never really friends, not close or anything, but what horrible news! Imagine living through a day like today for him . . . Then waking up tomorrow morning and finding it is still all true.' She rested her back against the wall and closed her eyes.

He said, ‘You'll feel better if we work.'

She opened her eyes. ‘I don't think I can.'

He turned the page and began drawing her quickly, the lines of her body, her attitude one of submission to her distress.

‘Don't!' she said. ‘Please!' She straightened and moved away from the wall.

‘It's time to work,' he said severely. ‘Get changed and come out and work on your picture. You'll feel better if you do.'

She stood looking at him.

‘Caving in won't help Panos,' he said. ‘Did I tell you I'd done an oil of you from my old Macedon drawing?'

‘I'd love to see it.'

‘I also did an oil study from my drawing of you asleep on the island.'

‘You didn't say.'

‘I don't tell you everything.'

She stood uncertainly a moment. ‘I'll change. You're right. We should be working. So you're using oil, not acrylic?'

‘You never quite know how oil's going to go on. You're never really in control with it. Acrylic's too predictable.' He watched her leave the studio. He was still seeing Theo's drawings of her; the old man's sketchbook and its contents a kind of confirmation of what he was doing. He liked the feeling. It was intuitive. Theo was right. His father would have agreed. His energy for the project seemed to be inexhaustible. He had never before felt so confident about his choices.

nine

It wasn't long before he had begun painting during the night and sleeping most of the day. He liked the night stillness of the city and the feeling of heightened isolation with his work that it gave him. Then, one night, when he had finished work and it was almost dawn, he did not go across to the house as usual but instead slept on the cane chaise. He told himself he was sleeping in the studio out of consideration for Teresa. She was showing signs of strain and irritation; she was working too hard and worrying about money and he did not want to disturb her sleep once again in the early hours of the morning. But in fact sleeping in the studio was really more of a yielding to the seduction of the night silence, in which he was able to enjoy a sense of unbroken intimacy with his work, than a simple act of consideration for his wife. He lay awake for some time in the pre-dawn thinking of Theo and Marina and Robert, and of how he was mining the intimacies of their lives for his art, and he knew he loved doing it and that it was like a surprising gift that had been brought to him, a trust that had been laid upon him, for which he was grateful and of which he was a little afraid.

He woke mid-afternoon and went over to the house. He cooked eggs and bacon and made coffee and toast and put on the radio. Teresa was long gone with Nada and such was the liberty of his occupation of the empty house that he might have been living the solitary life of a bachelor again. He did feel a touch of guilt at the pleasure he derived from the situation, but it seemed to him that it was inevitable and only right that a certain edge of guilt should mediate a reconciliation between the suggestively transgressive nature of the imaginative life and the daily life of the family, which ideally subsisted within that steady condition of normality so dear to Teresa. Theo had cautioned him not to confuse art with life, but by what means did one achieve such clear-sightedness? Wasn't Theo's advice merely an example of the wisdom of old men? Hindsight, in other words, on a life in which he had himself failed to avoid this very confusion?

•

It was some time after midnight and he was squatting on the floor of the studio working on his ambitious painting, the two metre by two-metre oil,
The Schwartz Family.
The picture was well advanced, but he was having trouble with it. It was not the figures that were giving him trouble but the background. He was missing something and had yet to understand the problem of the setting for his figures . . . He became aware, suddenly, of someone standing in the open doorway to the courtyard and he looked up from the canvas. Teresa was holding her purple dressing-gown closed across her breasts and was gazing at the chaos of drawings and canvases scattered about the studio. She did not say anything or look directly at him and after a moment he resumed working. It was a hot night and he had stripped to his underpants. Sweat was glistening on his back and flecks of paint patterned his arms. He reached and loaded his brush, leaning and dribbling the thin glaze at the fugitive likeness of Theo.

‘Why do you have to work in the middle of the night?' Teresa asked, her voice was flat, toneless and unnaturally loud in the stillness, something aggressive in her manner.

‘My father painted in the middle of the night,' he said quietly. ‘Painting in the night is my family tradition.' He looked up at her, the brush poised in his hand. ‘No one interrupts you in the middle of the night.'

‘You don't have family traditions,' she said. ‘Your people were refugees.'

‘They were immigrants, not refugees,' he said levelly.

‘What's the difference?'

‘There's a difference.'

‘Then why do you always tell people your dad was a refugee?'

She was being provocative. He understood that, and he resolved not to get annoyed. ‘Dad was a refugee from Poland when he was a boy. But not from England. From England he was a migrant. No different to your own people from Calabria in the fifties.' He sat back on his heels, squinting to see the work in front of him. He did not want to have this conversation. It was a conversation he and Teresa had often had and it settled nothing. It was a difference of view which they never seemed able to finally resolve and which seemed to arise as a point of disagreement whenever there was tension between them. He knew he should just let it go and say no more. And that was what he meant to do. So for some considerable time he kept his thoughts to himself and said nothing. But the question had unsettled his concentration and continued to needle him. Whether his parents were to be viewed as having been refugees or migrants bore upon his sensitivity about their dignity and their precarious social status. He did not wish to think of his mother and father as having been bound by external circumstances in the important decisions of their lives. He did not want to think of them as victims of their fate, but as people who had enjoyed the dignity of personal freedom. The distinction as to whether they had been refugees or migrants was important to him, however, not only for the sake of his parents but also to his sense of who he was himself and why, in particular, he was an Australian and not a Canadian or an American or a New Zealander— or, for that matter, still a European like his mother's and father's own ancestors.

He stayed silent and Teresa also said nothing more. Then, without thinking, he lifted his brush from the canvas and looked up at her. ‘Mum and Dad could have settled permanently in England after the war but they came here instead,' he said. She turned and looked at him. ‘They could have gone to the US or to Canada. Or to New Zealand. Coming to Australia was an orderly migration for them. You know that.' She did know it. ‘They had a choice. They were migrants, not refugees. Night work is what I learned from Dad. It's my tradition.'

‘Whatever you say,' Teresa said without a trace of interest, as if she had forgotten ever having said a word about it in the first place. She looked down at him. ‘So how come you're working on the floor?'

He was annoyed with himself for having let himself get annoyed. But why couldn't she just accept his explanation? They were
his
parents and it was
his
story! So he should know! It was simple. He tried to sound relaxed and neutral, but could hear himself sounding aggrieved. ‘I like the way the glaze pools in the horizontal.'

‘I only asked,' she said mildly. ‘There's no need to get angry.'

‘I'm not getting angry. I'll work on the easel later when I'm using a thicker glaze.'

After a minute she said, ‘You've set up your dad's old suit again.'

He turned and looked at the old three-piece on its rack, standing over against the wall, as if a dark-clad figure observed them from the shadows.

‘It's spooky,' she said. Then after a moment, ‘I thought she was still out here.'

So that was it! He laughed. ‘Marina left
hours
ago.'

‘I didn't hear her car.' She looked him over. ‘You were working in nothing but your underpants while she was here?' She stepped into the studio and walked over to him.

‘I was dressed.' He gestured to his T-shirt and jeans, which were lying on the cane chaise.

Teresa stood above him. ‘So what else do you two need the bed for?'

‘It's not a bed, it's a chaise.'

‘I can see what it is. It's a bed. You've been sleeping on it, haven't you?'

He looked up at her from the floor: she was foreshortened for him, wider than tall, her fists tight in the pockets of her dressing gown, her arms held against her body, pushing her breasts together. He said gently, ‘You'll be a wreck in the morning if you don't get some sleep.'

She was silent a moment, her lips compressed. Then she said, ‘I want our old life back.' It sounded like an ultimatum, but there were tears in her eyes. ‘I'm sitting up there on my own every night watching that box. You come over for your dinner as if you've wandered into someone else's house. When I speak you don't hear me. When do we talk any more? About us? About anything? I'm trying to go along with this project. I'm doing my best to stay with it. I know how important it is to you. But I didn't expect to be sleeping alone. I want to know if you're coming back to our bed, or if you've settled out here for good?'

‘Of course I'm coming back. I just need a few undisturbed nights, that's all. I have to get this picture right. It's my first big one. Ever. I have to find it.' He considered the painting and made a slow sweeping pass over its surface with his open hand, as if he were a shaman invoking a spirit. ‘It's not right. Something's holding it up.'

‘I can't sleep on my own,' she said. ‘I've forgotten how to do it. I can't switch off on my own. I need a body next to me. I get up and come out to the kitchen and I look at your light on over here. I'm standing up there just now looking across the courtyard asking myself,
Is she still down there with him?
The
working partnership
!' she said almost violently. ‘Jesus!'

‘It
is
a working partnership,' he insisted quietly.

‘It can't
all
be in my imagination.'

‘We're working. That's all that's going on. I finished the sitting with Marina hours ago and she left straightaway.' He turned and indicated a pile of drawings on the plan press. ‘Have a look. I did lots of work. It's all there.'

Teresa did not move or look towards the press. ‘You're not with
us
anymore,' she said.

He squinted at the likeness of Theo. He had seen something that demanded adjustment. ‘Of course I'm with you,' he said absently, as if it were part of an incantation. He loaded his brush and leaned and dabbed at Theo's brow. ‘It was too dark there,' he murmured.

‘Listen to you! You're talking to yourself! You're not talking to me.'

‘I'm talking to you. That's what I'm doing. I'm talking to you.' He touched the brush to the picture again. ‘I feel like Dad when I'm painting. It's amazing. The way his hand used to move. I see it.' He moved the brush around, as if he were conducting an orchestra, conjuring a secret music from the air. He looked at the brush with surprise, almost tenderly. ‘I've noticed I hold the brush exactly the way he used to hold it. I never realised that before. The brush feels free and light in my hand when I hold it the way he held it. It's incredible how you learn these things and you don't know you're learning them. As if your hand learns them and you just follow along obediently. Then, suddenly, you realise you've been doing it without consciously thinking about it. Somehow that makes it more real. I don't know why. But it does. I paint with Dad's traditions in my hand. I really do. Honestly. It's not an empty boast.'