Chapter 22 - Sarah
Sarah had never felt the passage of time until that day her mother had come to visit and told her the story of her family. Now her need to pass this story on vexed her and made her feel anxious.
She always thought she would have children of her own, but somehow it had never happened. Perhaps if she had found that special man; maybe then it would have been something that they both got organised about and made occur, a love child. Now that time had passed.
She remembered with fondness some men in her life, happy memories; wild, funny, joyous, passionate memories. There were places where she was a bit too stoned to remember clearly, a psychedelic blur. While not a child of the sixties she was definitely a young woman of that era and had enjoyed the artistic liberation along with all the others.
What parties they had in this house, often there were half a dozen of them as loosely arranged couples, with their own bedrooms when wanted, but mostly sitting around in the living room, sprawled on bean bags, rugs and half broken chairs discussing art, politics and how they would save the world.
Her art had been the one abiding passion of her life. It had come from her Mum, a love of pictures and paintings, not that she had understood the place it had first come from until her Mum told her about little Sophie, of her reading stories to Rachel as a child. Now she understood the source, it was her own legacy from Sophie. It took the form of a burning desire to capture images as they flowed through her mind and create them on canvass.
She had wonderful memories, a child in the garden with her mother, paint and easel set up. Rachel painted, often laboriously, capturing images that passed before her eyes, boats sweeping across the harbour, dawn lit silhouettes of the city, the sky, perfect flowers that grew in spring.
Before long she started helping her mother; holding brushes, passing paint, even adding her own little touches. Soon Rachel had taken to setting up a second easel nearby for Sarah to work alongside her.
From the earliest she knew she had the flair. Soon she surpassed her mother in technical ability and artistry. And her ability to paint had been much developed. She had gone to art school and worked alongside famous painters. Not only did she paint beautiful scenery, but much else besides. At times, when the mood took her, she would paint with photographic detail. Other times she wanted to evoke primeval forces and her paintings were combinations of light and dark, blurred shapes and overpowering colours, bordering on grotesque.
People recognised and applauded her talent, awards and paintings hung in major galleries. Still her fondest pleasures were in the quick book-sized pictures she made and sold immediately in the markets, done in the moment and of anything that took her fancy.
But her mother had something too.
Of all the favourite paintings that she owned, and there were many, it was one her Mum had done, painted one spring when Sarah herself was a teenager, that remained most special.
It was like a view from this house but not quite real. It looked down on people having a picnic in the park below, distant boats on the harbour and, at the edge of the park was a boat tied to the jetty, facing out to sea, a blue hull and tiny red writing on the stern – too small to actually read, but looking like three words joined together. People at the picnic were celebrating, you could tell from the way they stood, the way they moved and looked at each other and out across the view. You knew it was a special happy occasion.
Towards the centre were two women talking together, clearly mother and daughter, the small to medium sized bodies, neat full figures wearing brightly coloured dresses, seen from the side. The one woman with a cloud of brown golden hair, with red highlights where the sun caught it; the other with hair much the same, but washed with grey. She knew, watching as her mother painted, and without being told, that they were her grandmother, Maria, and her great grandmother, Alison.
But it was not so much the colour and the light that set the picture apart. It was the vital life force that flowed between these two central figures. She knew that, with all her ability and success, here was something well beyond anything she had ever painted, it was better than her best.
At last she knew what she would do. Perhaps it would be as good. She would paint them as she could now see them in her mind, that same day but now each half turned to face forwards, facing towards each other, but gazing out to a place of shared memories over a distant horizon.
She set to work and in five days the painting was done. She knew, as she walked away from it, to put away her brushes, that this was, to her at least, her best work. It had transformed their memories into her memory. Now a life force of together shared imagination would live on, an old story retold.
There was a space next to her mother’s picture, high on the timber living room wall. It had been waiting all these years for something to fill it. That was where this picture belonged.
As she moved into her later life many people would come to visit and sit with her, side by side, in a chair next to the fire. As they lifted their gaze these two paintings would capture their eyes. Many asked their story. She would tell about the one her mother painted, but of hers she would shrug and say, “That’s just some old thing I found, but before you ask it’s not for sale as I rather like it.”
Now remembering back to Rachel’s story she was glad to know where all her family had come from and what they all knew about this girl, Sophie. She, who would have been her aunt, had she lived. Instead she was caught forever in a glass frame. This figure needed to be given a chance to move to a life to a place beyond a picture, no longer the small girl in the communion dress, held forever young.
Even though she had looked at Sophie’s picture a hundred times on the mantel in her Gran’s big house, it was like the picture on the front of a book that was closed. If she could pass her story to another then perhaps that image would be enough, but there was no other to tell. She knew that now the book had to be opened and fully read before it could be closed and put away. She must do something yet for this to happen.
She understood what was needed and why she was troubled. The story had come to her, like a mixture of sunlight and shadow, much of it told of happiness but a dark space sat at the centre. When she was little she had known of Sophie, but not really known about her. They had told her the simple story, but at the end the question remained.
Sometimes, before that day, she had asked her Mum for more, but her Mum would not answer, she did not want to say. So that door of pain stayed locked tight, until almost the end. With all her being, she wanted to unlock that door. But how to do it and what would be found?
It was like an unfinished painting; it sat there and troubled her. Brush strokes and colour and people across part of the canvass, but at its centre a place that sat empty, where nothing dwelt. She needed to take up her brush again and finish that part of the picture. But first she needed to see, in her own mind, a real image to paint there.
She must find and know for herself the real Sophie, the person who was alive beyond this photo. That way she could create in her mind her own real picture, a thing she could turn into paint on canvas. Doing that would let her remake Sophie as a finished, complete person. It would be her final picture, one in which Sophie’s and her life reached places of understanding, closure on behalf of all who had known and grieved for this girl, trapped in glass for over a hundred years.
The Old Balmain House Page 26