by Lloyd Jones
On the afternoon George was due back, my mother happened to glance up at a portrait still on the wall of the bedroom. In her hurry to get it off she pulled the pins out with it and as she rolled up the canvas a pin stabbed her finger. A small pinprick of blood appeared and dropped onto the canvas. She rubbed it away into the timbered foreground of Alma’s deck by her bare feet. A stubbed toe she could always explain. The only place she could think to hide the canvas was in her underwear drawer.
She spent the rest of the afternoon on the window seat waiting for George to turn up. Sometimes a vehicle travelling up the valley saw her get up and walk expectantly to the far window. It was a little like the first times she sat for Alma Martin. Questions of how to present herself preoccupied her.
Soon the shadows of the hill had spread from the bottom paddock across the house to reach the road. My mother wasn’t feeling nervous any more. She was fed up with waiting and considering going to bed when she heard something. She looked up at a flash in the window. She heard a motorbike roar off. This time when she went to the window she thought she saw George. It was George. He had crossed the bridge and had stopped to look back at the house. There was a large bag by his feet, a lit match, a bowed head. The George she remembered and the one out there juggled and worked into each other. The waiting was over. As he moved she smiled at his slightly bowlegged walk, and the way he held his hands up to his chest as though he was playing with twine, eyes and mouth shaping for pleasant surprise.
She closed the fly-screen quietly behind her so he wouldn’t hear. George didn’t see her until she was well away from the house. And as she went to hug him his first words to her were, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Alice, sweet. I’m sweating like an Arab.’
The physical changes are more easily dealt with. His hair seemed both coarser and thinner, darker at the roots. The skin over his face was heavier. The dark rings under his eyes were new. And there was a cloudy quality there, unknown for the moment, the sad droop of things seen and stored.
They walked to the house hand in hand. George set his bag down in the kitchen. My mother saw him throw a wary look in the direction of the bedroom. He didn’t unpack. She made him a cup of tea, then another, until he asked if there was anything stronger. For hours they sat at the kitchen table, talking. She held George’s hands in her own. And when it was time for bed they dressed as if they were going out, taking their time to button up pyjama tops and smooth down nighties. They went to different sides of the bed and climbed in and my mother switched off the lamp.
This isn’t an area to dwell on. For one thing, George wouldn’t appreciate the world knowing what happened between him and my mother beneath the bedsheets. But I will say this—the earlier observation about memory and reality making for mismatched partners holds here—and I’ll leave it at that.
In the days after George’s return Alma kept his distance. George had to be given a chance to slot back into his old life. My mother welcomed that space as well. After all, a flower can bend only to one source of light.
Early on, the signs pointed to future difficulties. Once when Alice was in the sitting room and George came in looking for something he apologised and actually said, ‘Sorry.’ She told him he didn’t have to say that—this was his home as well. ‘Right,’ he said, not at her. He nodded at the window and as he left the room he mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ again. He seemed troubled by something. He fell into long silences. More than once my mother suggested they go out, or if he preferred George could go off by himself, cycle into town to the pub.
On the second Saturday he was back she was preparing dinner when she looked up and saw a match flare in the darkness of the window. Across the yard light from a lantern swayed in the open door of the barn.
She saw George, and there was someone else. She could make out a shoulder, and now Alma’s shirtsleeve. She moved away to the oven. George hadn’t said anything about Alma coming down the hill. When she checked again she could see Alma sitting on an apple box that was too low to the ground for him. George had the sawhorse. She saw him stand up to get at his tobacco. He got out his papers and wet one with the tip of his tongue. When he did that he drew his tongue along the paper and sometimes he sent his eyes in the same direction. My mother hopped out of the way. An hour passed before George came into the house. She said, ‘I thought I saw you out there with Alma Martin,’ careful to refer to Alma in full.
‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Came down to talk about those rats causing merry hell.’
The next day George cycled into town. As soon as he was gone Alma showed at the door and my mother learned the gist of the conversation that had occurred out in the barn.
Alma said George had come at everything in a roundabout way. As he wet his paper he’d glanced down and said, ‘You seem happy, Alma.’
Alma told George he wasn’t unhappy.
‘That’s what I mean. You seem all right.’
‘Then I must be all right.’
‘I’m not trying to be tricky, Alma. It’s just an observation.’
George looked jumpy though. He shook a box of matches in his hand. His gaze was restless. He said, ‘So, how does Alice seem to you?’
He snuck that one in while lighting a match.
‘Oh, she seems fine,’ said Alma.
George lowered his eyes and grunted.
‘Terrible about Dean.’
‘God yes. Awful.’
Now George pointed with his cigarette to the house.
‘She wrote lots of course but what does a letter tell you, really? I’d say they leave out more than what they tell.’
‘Dear Johns?’ asked Alma.
George nodded and drew on his cigarette. ‘I know of one man who had his hands blown off ask a mate to read out one of those. You can imagine.’
That’s when another light came on in the house and they had both looked out across the darkened yard.
‘So, Alma, nothing took place as far as you know?’
‘Nope, nothing as far as I know,’ he said.
‘Not as far as you know.’ George seemed to find that problematic, worthy of closer interrogation. Alma’s glass caught his eye. ‘Tide’s out.’
As he poured from a flagon George said he had something he wanted to show Alma. A painting, he said. ‘A very good one it is too. You have a talent, Alma, no doubt about that.’ He carefully screwed the top back on the flagon. He was taking his time. Alma watched him walk across to a large old leather suitcase. And as Alma watched George unbuckle the straps he wondered if he was getting something other than a painting. But in a few seconds he smelt the paint. He stood up from the apple box. George nodded to the light switch behind his head. Alma got that, then helped George to unroll the portrait of my mother reclined on his deck; clothed, he was relieved to find. But there were things he’d missed the first time around. Looking at this portrait of my mother with her husband in attendance he was unsettled by the residual traces of pleasure in Alice’s face and figure. If you had to give the portrait a title you might have called it Contentment. George looked like he was trying to see right through the paint to the scene on the other side. He let his bottom hand go and the painting rolled up.
‘It’s a nice painting, Alma. Don�
��t get me wrong.’
As he said that he dropped the painting into the suitcase and attended to the straps. What was he doing? Why would anyone lock up a portrait?
Once more George asked his earlier question—how things had been.
‘You know, quiet, George. A lot of time left over. If I wasn’t drawing I don’t know what I would have done.’
‘That’s what I hear,’ George said. He nodded as if he was hearing it all over again. Then he said, ‘Guess where I found the painting? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t on a wall. I found it in her underwear drawer. Strange, don’t you think?’
Alma folded his legs and tried to look for the answer out in the yard, as though this was a puzzle to share.
‘Now why would she roll up a painting and stick it in her underwear drawer? You see how you are forced to ask yourself that question, Alma? I mean, anywhere else in the house and a painting is just a painting. But in an underwear drawer…a woman’s underwear drawer. My wife’s. You see how the news just gets worse, don’t you?’
Thankfully at that moment he noticed Alma’s empty glass and lost his thread. Alma let him reach for the flagon; he waited, then stuck his hand over his glass. He didn’t want anything to slip out while his guard was down.
George smiled and refilled his own glass. ‘Down the hatch.’ He emptied it in one gulp. He swirled the foam while he thought what to say next.
‘I was away nearly two years. It’s automatic to think certain what-have-yous. Well cheers, Alma.’
He put down his glass and screwed the cap back on the flagon. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear about the rats. What am I being hit for?’
‘Well, I’d say there’s a nest or two under the floor of the kitchen, judging by what you’ve told me.’
‘Why aren’t I surprised to hear that?’
Alma told him, ‘I can do you my day rate or we can take it by the head.’
‘Whatever. If they end up inside the house Alice will bitch. What’s your bitch rate?’
‘Same as my daily.’
‘In that case, let’s say per head otherwise you’ll clean me out.’
Then as Alma stood to leave, George said, ‘I was in Franklin’s today. Dennis is selling mousetraps. Did you know that?’
‘That won’t stop a rat.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I just thought I’d mention it. Everything is changing, Alma. These are changing times.’
‘A trap might slow down a brown rat. That’s if you’re lucky. But honestly, George, a trap won’t clean out a population.’
‘I’ll pass that on to Alice.’
At that moment, according to Alma, as he told my mother, they both looked across the yard to the lit window.
‘Anyway,’ George said. ‘Loyalty’s got to be worth something.’
‘Definitely,’ Alma was quick to agree. ‘Loyalty is all there is.’ It had come out more passionately than he intended, and that caught George’s interest.
‘Don’t get me wrong about the mousetraps. I was just pointing to them as an example of changing times. I’m not griping about your rates.’
Alma moved to the door. He was anxious to leave.
It was early evening of the next day when my mother heard Alma slide himself under the floor of the house. Muffled effort carried through the floorboards and now and then there was a sound like a hammer.
She was trying to put the fact of Alma’s presence out of her mind because once more George had brought the painting into the house from wherever he was hiding it. He held down the corners with a small Bible and a brass alligator doorstop and an empty beer bottle.
‘There,’ he said, and with his finger stabbed in the area of my mother’s painted face. ‘Who is that person, Alice? That one with love shining out of her eyes?’
It was the same old song-and-dance routine with George in the prosecuting role and my mother bluffing it out. She told him he was acting nuts. It was just a painting. She couldn’t help how she came across. She couldn’t help what another human being saw. Then she stopped. She could hear the scuffling noise of Alma sliding out from under the house. George heard it too and swore an oath at the rats overrunning the place.
George wouldn’t let go of the controversial painting, what it represented, what was being held back from him. It drove him crazy. He lay awake with it at night, dreaming up new angles of investigation. He moved into a testing phase and began to make suggestions and watch for her reaction, such as when a few nights later he told her he’d invited Alma down for cards.
At the card table no one mentioned the painting of course, their eyes lowered around their hands. They were playing twenty-one and George was banker. Cards, and games generally, brought out a side of him my mother didn’t much care for.
‘I hear you’re doing good deeds at Victoria’s,’ George said to Alma at one point.
‘If you mean putting a pencil in Dean’s hand is a good deed.’ Alma was trying out a certain voice. After their conversation in the barn he had gone away feeling he’d been too defensive. He’d allowed George to get away with too much.
George grunted; his interest had returned to their respective hands. This was the part he liked best. He said, ‘I have a feeling Alma’s bluffing and Alice, dear, dear Alice, bless her, has underestimated. I’ll pay over nineteen.’
They showed their cards and George smiled to himself, got that cocky look my mother didn’t like, and swept the pennies to his side of the table.
‘Alma, why don’t I lend you some pennies.’
‘I’ll make do thanks George.’
‘All right. It’s no skin off my nose. Alice?’
She said, ‘The same,’ and stole a quick glance at Alma but immediately George was there to pick that up. He said, ‘Anything else I can lend you, Alma?’
That night my mother moved into the spare room.
Three days later she is standing at the sitting-room window with its sweeping view of hill and paddock when George comes staggering into view.
There is the day in the high part of the window in all its giddy indifference. Cloud. Sky. And there is George like he is acting the goat. Stumbling around like that. Throwing his arms up. Bees lifting and falling over him. Masses of bees. A dark cluster forming and re-forming. Some banging against the window behind which she stands.
Later when George was to ask her where she was when she saw him she would tell him she happened to be passing the window—not standing in the window which is a position too removed, too chillingly neutral. Still, it had taken a moment to register, to distil this unlikely fact of George covered in a swarm of bees. What it meant exactly. It had taken a moment to awaken from the slumber of everydayness to this surprising new thing. Even now she didn’t rush. She walked quickly.
There was a hose at the side of the house. My mother turned on the tap and trained the nozzle on George. Clusters of bees rose until George’s pinched face was revealed, then for reasons known only to himself he lurched back in the direction of the hives.
Here was another job for Alma. He would know what to do. What she should have done was get out the smoker. On this point Alma was mildly
reprimanding. ‘A little bit of fuel and newspaper or a damp rag and a match. The smoke does the rest…’ He spoke in a cool brisk way as they hurried down the hill. ‘Bees hate smoke. I’m surprised that George hasn’t told you that…’
Some survival instinct must have stirred in George because as they crossed Chinaman’s Creek they saw him below, half-submerged in the water. He lay on his side, his raised hip and shoulder exposed. When they pulled him out he was barely conscious. His pulse was faint. George’s face a swollen mess. His eyes were slits.
My mother fumed over him. ‘What a crazy thing to do, George. Crazy. Crazy.’ Some layer of being an inch beneath George’s swollen red skin seemed to acknowledge this point. His eyes shifted wider. His chest rose.
It was another hour before they heard the doctor’s Wolseley bump across the creek bridge. He climbed out of the upholstered car in his tennis gear, a middle-aged schoolboy with a shining flop of brown hair. His white legs waded in large white shorts and white canvas sandshoes. He didn’t bother with introducing himself. When he got out of the car he simply looked dimly in the direction of the house. ‘In there, is he?’
He took George’s pulse. He rolled back his eyelids. George’s pupils were fishy and dull. He said George was in toxic shock. Obviously George had a strong ticker. But the doctor was confused. Why would a man rush into a hoard of bees and dance around like a drunk at a fairground? It made no sense unless you knew what my mother knew, that George had been looking for a gesture. Once, years before, when they were going out and she had showed some interest in another boy George had deliberately crashed his Indian motorbike to make her look his way again.