Prochownik's Dream (18 page)

He did know it. And he knew she was right. Setting was always a problem for the figure painter. He found her argument compelling. Almost a relief. He stood facing
The Schwartz Family,
trying to imagine what her backdrop to his figures might look like
.
He was intrigued by the sense of possibility in her offer, a lightness in it that surprised him, almost an inevitability about it, as if she really had seen the only true solution to his problem. He turned and looked at her. He was aware that for the first time he was being seriously challenged by her, and he felt a new depth of admiration for her. ‘So just supposing I did let you paint a new background for it, what do you think it might look like?' He knew already that he was going to take the risk. He had already decided, if being drawn into her challenge could be called
deciding
. He might be risking everything. But perhaps that was what he had to do. Perhaps it was time to risk everything. Perhaps this was what every artist had to do at some point, to gamble it all at the critical moment. ‘If I do agree, what do you think you'd do?'

‘I'd do trees,' she said without hesitation, and she laughed. ‘You should have guessed.' She turned to him, excited now. ‘Do you really think you might let me do it?'

He was trying to imagine what effect her trees might have on his figures.

She stood close at his side. ‘Robert and I only have one more picture to do for the show and we know exactly what that's going to be. So I've got plenty of time. You haven't.'

‘What sort of trees?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘I think I might. You'd do those trees around your old house at Macedon. Winter trees. Bare and black.' He made shapes in the air with his hands. ‘Those big elms against the mountain. A night picture, with the three of you sitting there gazing out from that weird interior light of your lives.' He laughed. ‘That's not something I could do. It's something you can do. I can see you doing it.'

She studied him uncertainly. ‘Are you sure you can trust me with it?'

The moment was one of intense clarity for him. It was a moment he knew he would look back upon and remember. ‘You're the only person I could possibly trust to do this.'

‘Toni!' she said with feeling, and she reached and took his hand.

‘There isn't anyone else.' The surprising familiarity of her hand in his, her fingers smooth and cool as he had imagined them to be that day in the café. The colour had risen to her cheeks. ‘Since that drawing I did of you asleep in the conservatory at Plovers, in a way you've always been a part of what I've been doing with my art. I don't know what I mean by that.' He looked at her hand in his.

‘Don't try to explain,' she said softly.

A moment of stillness between them as they stood hand in hand in the sunlit studio . . . Then her gaze shifted, suddenly, to the open door behind him, a warning in her eyes. He let go of her hand and swung around, a guilty flash of Teresa walking in on them. A man was going past along the lane, a pusher ahead of him with a child in it, shopping in plastic bags slung from the handles of the pusher. The man and the child looked in through the open door of the studio as they went by. The man scanning the tableau of the two figures, who might have just drawn apart hurriedly from an embrace; two people observed by the trio in the painting. The man's curious gaze sweeping the interior of the studio. Then he was gone.

Toni did not look at her but reached and lifted the painting down from the easel and laid it on the floor. ‘Perhaps we should make a start,' he said.

They mixed a neutral glaze and knelt on the floor and began painting out the man adrift against the black sky with its cold floating world. They worked in silence, conscious of the nearness of the other. It was Robert's vision they were obliterating: the knowing comment of the artist on his image, the self-conscious inquisition of the subject; Robert's restless intelligence forever seeking the means to unlink himself from the images of his imagination, as if he wished to bestow upon them a perfect autonomy of existence. As he worked beside Marina, Toni felt that he was seeing into the secret history of Robert's art; his sense of the three of them linked to each other in ways they would never unravel or fully understand. He wondered what he would have been doing at this moment if they had not returned from Sydney. He could never explain to Teresa in a way that would satisfy her that it was only through Robert and Marina that his work had found a renewal.

•

They stood and cleaned their brushes. Standing above the altered painting, he realised he could still make out the naked man adrift under the fresh medium, like a body frozen into the ice. The ghostly persistence of Robert's influence interred beneath the neutral glaze. He liked the accidental effect and felt sorry it was to be sacrificed to the trees.

‘What is it?' she asked.

He pointed. ‘See? It's haunted.'

She looked and said nothing.

‘Let's take it over to Richmond.'

She stood considering him. ‘You don't think you should take a day or two to think about this?'

‘Let's just do it.'

Out in the lane they loaded the picture onto the roof rack of his wagon and she got into her car. He leaned down at her window. ‘Theo gave me his sketchbook. Did you know?'

She looked up at him. ‘Yes, he told us. He said he was sure you'd make good use of it.'

‘He made me promise not to show you and Robert.'

‘We'll see it one day.'

There was a question in her eyes, even the moisture of a tear, a need perhaps to be reassured. He might have kissed her then—have kissed her lips and sealed it. ‘I'll be right behind you,' he said and straightened. He stood back and waited for her to drive away. He watched until her car turned into the road at the end of the lane and was out of sight. When she had gone he went back into studio and got a brush and a tube of black. He lifted the painting and wrote on the back of the canvas,
The Schwartz Family, 200
×
200cm. March 2003. AP 17. A homage
to Pablo Ruiz Picasso's
The Soler Family
.

eleven

She was waiting for him on the verandah. As he came up to her carrying his painting she said, ‘Oriel's viewing our pictures for the show.' She reached and took hold of the other end of the canvas. ‘She brought Geoff Haine with her. It looks as if Andy's here too.'

‘The whole family!' he said. He was not delighted by the idea of Haine and the others seeing his unfinished painting.

‘It will be all right,' she reassured him. ‘They'll be impressed. You'll see.' She set off ahead of him through the house, holding up her end of the painting.

In the studio Robert and Haine were standing talking in front of
Chaos Rules
with Andy Levine and the Bream Island curator, Oriel Liesker. Theo was sitting in isolation on the hard-backed chair over by the wall, a one-man audience to the group around the painting. He had dressed for the occasion and was wearing jeans and a purple silk shirt open at the throat. His feet were bare as usual and his pale hands were jumping and twitching in his lap like freshly landed fish, his fine silver hair shimmering around his skull as if it were not attached but merely accompanied him. Misty was sitting on the cupboard in front of him, solemnly observing the group by the painting. Theo and the cat turned and looked across as Toni and Marina came into the room carrying the painting. Theo inclined his head and raised one hand in solemn greeting, as if he saw himself as some kind of presiding chieftain.

Marina said, ‘Sorry, but I've got to hear what Geoff has to say about my picture,' and she abruptly left him standing with his painting and walked over to join the others around
Chaos
Rules
. Oriel's physical presence dominated the group around the painting. She was a large woman in her mid-fifties, her abundant flesh modelled around the bones of her Frisian forebears. She was taller than Marina and the three men, and broad in the shoulders, a wild tangle of richly hennaed hair piled on top of her head and held precariously in place with an elaborate arrangement of combs and pins, as if she were perversely determined to make herself appear older and taller than she really was.

Andy left the group and came over to Toni. ‘Here's the boy himself,' he said and he stepped up and pinched Toni's cheek, as if he were a familiar aunt greeting a favourite nephew.

‘How you doing, old buddy?'

‘Yeah, I'm good, mate. How's it going?'

Andy took hold of
The Schwartz Family
and turned it around, squatting to examine it. He called, ‘Come over here and look at this, Geoffrey! This is something!' He looked up at Toni. ‘You're on to it here, mate. I've got collectors out there queuing for this.' He stood up, one hand steadying the canvas, as if it had already been consigned into his care.

Haine walked over and stood looking at the picture.

‘Tell him all about it, Geoffrey.' Andy patted Toni's cheek. ‘You keep doing this and you're going to be as rich and famous as our Geoffrey here.'

Marina came over with Oriel and Robert and joined them. Robert stepped in close to the picture and squatted in front of it, adjusting his glasses, his eyes on a level with the eyes of the figures in the picture.

Oriel gave him a steady look.

Andy put his hand on Toni's shoulder, his fingers gripping the back of his neck as if he had caught a thief. ‘Toni Powlett, Geoffrey Haine. Have you two met? Painter to painter. You should be friends.'

Toni took Haine's hand. ‘Good to see you again.'

‘Yeah, likewise.' Haine was a short, heavily built man in his late fifties, his manner cautious and reserved. His bald head was oiled and tanned, his eyes hard and black and attentive.

Andy said, ‘What do you say, Geoffrey? Listen to the voice of Geoffrey Phillip Haine, people! We'll quote him in the blurb to your show, Toni. How about it, Geoffrey? Is this what it's all about?'

Robert stood up and turned to Toni. ‘I see you've freshly painted out your background?'

‘Marina's doing a new background for it,' Toni said. He spoke without thinking.

Marina gave a small smile.

Robert looked surprised but said nothing.

Toni waited for his verdict. His old teacher seeing the build-up of texture, smelling the freshly applied glaze, his practised eye cutting through the surface illusion to the intention behind the artifice—still the master assessing the student's motives and aspirations.

Robert turned to him. ‘That's our
Man Adrift
you've painted out.' Robert detecting the ghostly remainder of his own presence under the thin glaze.

Toni felt as if his private thoughts were on display to Robert in the picture. Robert seeing
him
behind his composition.

‘It's very good,' Robert said. It was not a wholehearted endorsement of the picture.

There was a steady silence in the big room then, as if a motor had been switched off. They stood looking at the unfinished group portrait. The three members of the Schwartz family gazing out from the strange, inaccessible dimension of the painted image. Robert, Marina and Theo, more real in a way than their realities, something of the truth unmasked in their stony images, something of the inadmissible hinted at in their expectant unease that silenced the onlookers.

Toni feared they might see his picture as merely caricature-in-depth, an exaggeration of the most obvious features of his subjects, and dismiss the work. He had not noticed before that the black frames of Robert's narrow spectacles in the picture resembled the slits of a gun turret. It seemed a crass overstatement to him now, almost a cartoonish effect. He was sorry it was not a more generous portrayal of his friend. The Robert he referred to here could be read as a man lost to himself, a man older than his human counterpart, becoming his own father. The body of the woman seated between father and son was faintly visible through her shirt, a hint of the veiled and the erotic in the manner of Marina's depiction, her slim lips polished jade in the greenish light. It was all there for them to see, every thought that had been in his mind while he had been working alone through the warm summer nights in the privileged silence of his studio. He knew that these people saw through the artist's sleight of hand. That was their job. They were not the bidden public. When they looked at a work they looked at the artist, not at the subject of the picture. He thought with envy of his father, who had never laid his work before strangers.

Oriel was the first to break away, her movement abrupt and impatient. Her shirtfront was open almost to her waist, a necklace of heavy amber beads swinging between her breasts like a slave chain. She flourished a packet of Marlboros. ‘I'm stepping out. I need a cigarette. Anybody care to keep me company? Andy, how about it?'

Andy waved her away.

‘No? All pure as the driven snow.' She laughed, a big fruity bellow that filled the studio with its overbearing sound. She turned to Toni. ‘You haven't got Marina yet, Toni. It's a bloody good picture, mate, but you haven't got her.' She waved her cigarettes at the picture. ‘She's your centrepiece, but you haven't got her. Okay? You've got her cat. Stay with it, there's a way to go with this one yet. How many of these are you putting in my show? You and I are going to need to talk. I'll come around to your place in a week or two and have a look at what you're doing for me.'

‘It's not finished,' he objected unhappily. He caught Haine's watchful eyes on him. ‘It's not finished,' he repeated, a little truculent. The older man turned away, keeping his doubts about the quality of the painting and the newly collaborative situation with Marina to himself. Apart from the fleeing figure of the running man, the human presence was scarcely represented in Haine's work. His paintings were whole, complete, autonomous and entirely his own. Toni was aware that in Haine's classic perception there was almost certainly no such thing as
background
, and that such an idea would undoubtedly offend his sense of the artist's responsibility to the work.