The Idea of Perfection (24 page)

He realised he was rehearsing a conversation.
Express my thanks. Lunch, or perhaps afternoon tea?

He could not seem to stop himself, hearing more pompous words shape themselves in his mind.
Give me great pleasure. Gesture of appreciation.

It was ridiculous, the idea of talking to her like that. The backs of his knees tingled when he thought of it, as if Harley Savage was a great height.

He coughed and turned around, watching where the bulldozer had already made a long raw rip in the paddock. Chook was standing on a mound, pointing like Napoleon.

It was quite simple. Next time he saw her, he would just say
Hello!
and smile. He might make a remark about cows if it seemed appropriate, but he would not do anything foolish.

HER FATHER HAD been a big handsome man with a fine head of hair, a paintbrush in his hand, skeins of paint threading along the canvas making a bird look like an angel. He was the famous James Appleby Harley Savage, son of Harley Talbot Appleby Savage, brother of Norman Back-house Savage. It was an illustrious family.

From when she was old enough to hold a pencil, the little girl Pixie Appleby Harley Savage had been taught about vanishing points, and was made to work out at the start where the horizon was going to be, and how to make things at the front bigger than things at the back. No matter how young, she had never been allowed to scribble. Nor had she been allowed to do stick people, or square houses with symmetrical looped-up curtains at every window and a carefully curving path to the front door with a round tree on one side. It was
uncreative
and it was
unimaginative
to do drawings like that, and even at a young age she picked up that there was something else not nice about it which had a name later on, a favourite word of Mother’s: it was
vulgar.

Her father’s hands skimmed across the paper and out of the end of his pencil came a bird, a twig for it to perch on, behind it a branch.
See? Like that.

It was an illustrious and gifted family, but it seemed that
the gift
had passed Pixie by. Even after so many patient lessons, from the end of her pencil came only hard ugly lines, and a bird that looked like a surprised tadpole.

She was ashamed of her big muscly legs and her round face. But the shame of this grotesque bird was unendurable.

I don’t want to be artistic,
she cried, and heard the silence, saw the ring of shocked faces.

Oh, but you are very artistic and terribly creative,
her mother said quickly, with something like fear in her voice.

There was a silence in which no one agreed.

Someone cleared their throat.

At school they had known she was an Appleby Savage, and hoped for wonders. They were even willing to see them where there were none. It had taken a long time, but finally they came to expect no more wonders.

Use your imaginations, girls,
Miss McGovern would say, but what Pixie drew was never what Miss McGovern meant by
imagination.
Pixie was interested in the veins on the leaf, and in the
xylem
and the
phloem,
in
transpiration
and
photosynthesis.

You make a plant look like a machine,
Miss McGovern accused.

But you must be good at art,
her best friend Gillian had said.
Because you’re no good at maths.

Her sister, of the fascinating wide mobile mouth, the far-set cat-like eyes, had always been a proper Appleby Savage. She had had the Appleby Savage
gift,
as well as long brown legs that looked good in shorts. Celeste had known about things at the back being smaller than things at the front without ever having to be told. She had a way of being dreamy, dishevelled, lovely even in her old pink flannelette pyjamas, thinking interesting thoughts behind her lovely green eyes. Celeste’s birds made Father laugh with surprise and pleasure in a way Pixie’s never did.

Celeste had other knacks, too. She was good at catching Pixie in moments when she would rather have been alone. Celeste’s reflection would join Pixie’s frowning into the mirror. God, Pix, she would say in her sophisticated way.
That lipstick! Makes you look like a shopgirl.

She was not the older sister, but acted as though she was.

 

 

Why did you call me Pixie?
she asked her mother once, when puberty was making her look into mirrors.
You were such a beautiful baby,
her mother said, and smiled into the air at the memory of that beautiful baby, not at the face of her plain daughter.

Later, she learned the expression
jolie laide,
and hoped it might rescue her.
Oh, I‘ma jolie laide,
she had tried telling a hairdresser, airily. But the hairdresser had not known what it meant, and when she had tried to translate, it sounded silly.

She had to recognise, in any case, that she was not interestingly ugly. Not enough to be a
jolie laide.
She was simply ordinary: ordinary brown eyes, ordinary brown hair. An ordinary small nose, an ordinary mouth. No one would ever find her fascinating across a crowded room.
So like your grandmother,
her mother had sighed.

Mother had always made her go on trying.
You never know who you might meet,
she had said, and done that little winsome thing with the corner of her mouth that she did so well.

As a child, she could not do much, but she could refuse to answer to the name of the beautiful baby who had turned into herself.
Harley,
she insisted.
My name is Harley.

 

 

James Appleby Harley Savage the celebrated painter had frequently said that
All Nature is Art.
But the
Nature
he had in mind was some flowers arranged nicely in a vase, or a landscape with a tree two-thirds of the way along the left-hand foreground.

His in-laws’ shabby farm, everything grey and blistered in the dry and the heat, dirty-looking sheep everywhere and too many flies, was not the
Nature
he was thinking of. And Mother, for whom that cracked lino, those warped weather-boards, that curling roofing-iron, had been home, wanted nothing better than to put it behind her, a sentimental memory among all her
nice things.

However, it was at Gran and Grandfather’s farm that plain awkward Harley had been happiest. Celeste was usually not there. She hated the farm, and in any case popular Celeste was usually invited to someone’s beach house or snow lodge for the holidays.

When Harley thought of Gran now, it was of her bending down to the door in the fuel stove with the curly black-on-yellow enamelled letters on the door, AGA. Gran called the stove
Agatha,
affectionately, as if it was one of the family, although Grandfather called it
the range.
It was black and mysterious with many doors of different sizes, and made a peaceful enclosed roaring when the fire was going. On the top were metal rings fitting one inside the other that Gran moved around with a stubby metal tool. Underneath the rings was the fire. It had taken Harley a long time to see that the more metal rings you took off, the more fire licked at the bottom of the pot. The rings were what turned the stove up or down.

Gran would move around the kitchen in what she called her
pinny,
which was what Mother would have called an
apron.
But none of Mother’s aprons had been made from an old dress with the sleeves taken out and split up the back from top to bottom, and Mother’s aprons never actually got dirty, the way Gran’s
pinnies
did.

If Grandfather was away in the paddocks, and she needed more wood, Gran would go outside the kitchen door and stand blocks of wood up on the chopping block to split them neatly with the axe. Harley was proud, helping her carry them inside, and Gran never seemed to notice, or care, that her jumper got covered in bits of bark.

Gran did not care much about being neat, although she was clean. Days had gone by sometimes before she would remember to brush Harley’s hair. The days were busy but peaceful, and went along entirely without the benefit of clocks.

Grandfather did the sheds and the paddocks in the old felt hat he always wore, that had cracked open along the creases. When he came in at the end of the day he’d stand in the kitchen and take the hat off, revealing a forehead as white as a scar.
What’s for tea, Mother?
he would say, and whatever Gran said, he nodded in a satisfied way, hung his hat on the wooden peg, and went to wash his hands.

At the farm she slept in the closed-in back verandah.
The sleepout,
Gran called it, and Harley was anxious the first time, thinking
the sleepout
might mean she had to sleep outside, in the country darkness full of strange noises and things rustling secretively that might want to bite you.

But she came to love the sleepout. You were not completely
in,
but you were not exactly
out,
either.

She loved waking up there, under the heavy home-made bedcover Gran had put together out of pieces of the kind of material men’s suits were made of. The pieces had been cut into triangles and sewn together in a simple pattern:
light, dark, light, dark.
It was filled with something that made it bulge in strange ways.

Lying pinned under the weight of the bedcover in the morning, listening to the chooks waking up and Gran clanging Agatha’s door, she could lose herself in the pattern.
Light, dark. Light, dark.
Somehow it was a comfort. Close up, the pattern was harder to see because some of the dark
lights
were almost the same as some of the light
darks.
But even if you were too close to see that the pieces went
light, dark, light, dark,
you knew that that was what they did. You knew you could count on it being there, whether you could see it or not.
Light, dark, light, dark.

Gran had sewn everything: sheets sides-to-middle, pinnies from worn-out dresses, curtains when something was on special at Woods’ in town. The machine ran magically backwards and forwards to patch the seat of the grandfather’s overalls. Once she had made a loose-cover for the couch, a huge flowered creature writhing under the needle as she hoisted its mass around, little Gran enveloped in a tangle of pockets and corners and dead-end tubes, emerging out of it at last and fitting it triumphantly around the bulges of the old couch.

As a little girl, she stood beside Gran watching the thread winding through the little hooks and loops on the top of the machine, and the unfathomable workings of the thread coming up out of the hole in the silver plate under the needle. No matter how hard you looked, there was a moment when it did something too fast for the eye, and came back up holding the bottom thread.

She sat on the floor behind the machine, watching Gran’s feet in their serious black shoes with the bunion-bulges, treadling up and down like semaphore. She watched the dark simple workings, furred with oily dust, the big solemn flywheel turning, the sinister endless loop of the belt running into the hole in the wooden casing.

Never touch,
Gran had said, cross with the gravity of it.
Never ever.

But when Gran left the room, she turned the wheel at the side, the shiny silver metal cold against her palm. She was frightened then, the way the needle leapt down into the hole, and tried to turn the wheel the other way to make it come back up. But the needle was stuck fast, seized tight by whatever lived in the little hole.

Gran saw, straight away.
Didn’t
I
tell you,
she said,
never to touch the machine?

She frowned and her voice was as stern as Harley had ever heard it. But even when it was stern it did not have the bitter edge of dislike that came into Mother’s voice, and Father’s.

Harley felt very small and wicked, standing next to Gran in the silent room.

Somehow she was always in trouble at home, for breaking things with her clumsiness, being rude without having meant it, or not being very good at anything.
Why can’t you be more like your sister?
her father had shouted once in exasperation. So it had become a habit, lying. It always seemed simpler.

It wasn’t me,
she had said to Gran, and made her eyes go round with honesty.

But it did not seem to be a game that her grandmother knew how to play. She did not accuse, the way Mother and Father did, and pincer her in logic, wear her down with it until she gave in. Gran’s face just came over puzzled.
It’s all right, lovey, she
said.
You were only being inquisitive.

But Harley had to go on, adding layers to her lie. The cat had jumped up through the window and pushed the wheel with its paw. She had seen it. It was trying to catch a beetle that was hiding under the machine. No, actually it was a mouse. A black and white mouse.