Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  The question forced her to consider the last time they had had fun together. The eve of his departure when they’d made love all through the night? Then on his return, amongst the resentment and hurt, there had been one fine day when they’d gone to the beach and swum out beyond the buoys to way over their heads, and George had swum underwater pretending he was a shark, and she’d squealed deliriously in anticipation of the shark’s teeth biting into her bum—which is exactly what George had in mind when he dived down.

  It was heartbreaking for her to watch George slog his guts out, move an entire hill in the mistaken belief it would declare his love over and above any normal human exchange such as sharing breakfast together, or a bath, or even a bed. And she thought maybe just a small thing had to happen, something as small as this time it being George who slipped on the wet planks and her hand taking his hand. But even as she was thinking these thoughts the die was cast. My mother’s future was more or less decided. She didn’t know it right then, at that moment she stood in the window watching George battle the hill. But she would know a month later when she would discover she was pregnant to the man she thought she’d already successfully shaken off.

  9

  Alma Martin was witness to my mother’s sly departure. Frank’s truck bumped across Chinaman’s Creek. The screen door at the house opened and my mother backed out dragging a bag after her. At this stage Alma didn’t know about Frank, and while he didn’t know what to make of what he’d just seen down at the house he didn’t think any more of it. His mind was on other things. He drained his cup and went inside to resume work on his painting of Alice standing by the curtains at the back window of the house.

  My mother couldn’t face George. She couldn’t tell him in person; she would rather die than see his face crumple and him sit down in the long grass from the force of this unforeseen blow. In the truck, my mother said, there were two contrasting moods. She felt she was on her way to a funeral while Frank was off to a wedding. There was no thought of her immediately moving in with him; she wasn’t up for creating more scandal. There was a spare room at the Browns’. Tui invited her to use that while she took stock of her life and thought what to do next.

  Two days later Tui got Alma over on the pretence of asking his advice on house colour. It was a waste of time because she knew Stan would never budge from white. But she thought Alma might have some ideas around the window areas. Some highlighter could be used to good effect. Alma had told her to think of the house as a face—hair, eyes, nose and mouth had their corresponding features in roof, window, door and porch. He told her the door would look good in brick red.

  ‘Brick red’s good,’ she agreed. She told him any ideas would be appreciated. ‘You’re the authority. I won’t pretend otherwise. But on the subject of faces,’ she said, ‘it’s all very well being noticed but you don’t want people tripping over themselves on the pavement.’

  ‘A quieter colour. I’ve got it.’

  Tui snuck a look at her watch. The man who had invented house butterflies was coming to dinner. Stan was keen on exploring an idea to develop a range of exclusive butterflies to go with the NE Paint colour range. She needed to get the meal on. And besides, suddenly there was nothing left to talk about. My mother had ventured out to the porch. And Alma had stopped listening. Tui Brown excused herself as Alice came down the steps slowly, one at a time, her arms folded, a wan smile. Alma thought she looked more beautiful than ever.

  My mother said she would have hugged him if Tui Brown wasn’t watching from the window.

  ‘Come on, we’ll walk up the street a bit,’ Alma said.

  For the moment they talked about everything but the burning issue. The monotony of the houses, this new neat rule used to carve up the farmland. The bone-white colour that Stan was sold on. The street came to a T-junction. They could go left or right. After looking in both directions my mother felt Alma tip her elbow.

  ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

  They walked slowly, and this time Alma brought her up to date with George.

  He told her he’d seen the truck and had even seen her with the bag backing out the fly-screen and still not thought anything about it. But in the middle of the night he had woken with a start. It had nothing to do with any noise; just a powerful sense that something was wrong. He told my mother he had got up out of bed and walked outside. The night was dark except down at the bottom of the hill the farmhouse had every light turned on. One or two lights can be passed over as forgetfulness but the house blazed with light. He had wondered if he should go down the hill and make sure that everything was all right. But he didn’t; it was too cold and so much easier to go back to bed.

  In the morning he returned outside with his mug of tea. He couldn’t tell if the house lights were on. As usual, his eyes took the well-worn course across the paddock to the hillside. The wheelbarrow was there, the shovel stuck in the ground. Usually George would be out by now. It was then that Alma saw what he’d missed—fifty yards back a lone figure sat on a canvas chair.

  The paddock was heavy from the overnight rain. George would have heard the squelching footsteps of someone approaching. Only the cow looked back over its shoulder. George stayed slumped. Perhaps he was sleeping? Then, Alma said, as he came up from behind he saw what George was looking at: the sunrise over the ocean. The view was still not quite there. There was still a section of hill to clear in order to widen the frame. But nonetheless contact had been made, and here was something to celebrate.

  Without turning his head George said, ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where, George?’

  ‘She’s pregnant.’

  Thinking that congratulations were in order—and here as Alma was relating this my mother felt a pinch of guilt at the darkness she sensed Alma was scrambling out of, the different points he was forced to connect and at the same time stay calm in the face of revelation—Alma opened his mouth to speak, and again George filled in the blank spaces.

  He said, ‘Not to me. Another bloke.’ He held up the letter my mother had left on the kitchen table under the salt shaker.

  As she was hearing Alma retell this she could only imagine the impact of the news on him, and yet, according to his account, it seems he had switched into a practical mode. He told George he’d go inside the house and make a cup of tea. He said, ‘You can follow me in or I can bring it out here.’

  For the first time George raised his bloodshot eyes. His mouth was unshaven and broken-looking. ‘Somebody by the name of Frank Bryant. If you happen to know him, Alma, tell him I plan to shoot him. But not today. I’m too friggin’ tired for it right now. Tomorrow I imagine will be a different story.’

  Alma told my mother that he had left him there out in the paddock and walked back to the house. In each room he had to turn off the light switch. He didn’t know what had possessed George to turn on all the lights. In the sitting room he stopped at the window and looked out. George, he said, had looked like a man hurtling through space, his hair every which way, his eyes focused on a point set at a tremendous distance inside of himself.

  At the Browns’ that night, my mother was bad company. She sat opposite the butterfly man, a small serious-minded fellow, listening to the manufactured varieties of butterflies, to confident pronouncements about the f
uture. Listening but not really hearing. She couldn’t tear herself away from the picture of George sitting in that canvas chair. In the end she had to apologise and excuse herself from the table.

  Later that night from her borrowed bed she listened to the low male rumbling talk of Stan and the butterfly man, and at a very late hour she heard the two men outside her bedroom window. Both of them were pissing into Tui’s bed of roses. The butterfly man was doing all the talking and Stan was assenting.

  To shoot another takes more anger than George could summon. He wasn’t the hothead type who later regret their action from the dock. George was more of a melancholic and so naturally he veered towards self-pity and drink.

  By that Christmas, George was one of the regulars in the Albion, one of the after-hours patrons who led the other drunks in song. It would be easy to think that this would forever be his lot—a fast-spreading bum on a bar stool or worse, a rumpled drunk found asleep on someone else’s lawn next to the newspaper delivery.

  It would be easy to leave him there alone to deal with his pounding head, except for this: it was the lawn directly outside the Anglican Church. Any moment now the first parishioners would turn up. Victoria was rostered on to morning tea which is why she had turned up so early. Here is another story to file under ‘accidental encounter’. She walked over to where George lay asleep. He looked like he might in bed, his right arm folded up beneath his head, except for the fact that he was in his clothes and shoes. His tied laces gave the impression of fastidiousness and for a moment Victoria wondered if she had a heart attack or stroke victim on her hands. She crouched to feel his pulse. His breath was sour. She called his name quietly then insistently, and after that, irritably.

  ‘Come on, George. You can’t sleep here.’

  Eventually one eye opened to the world in all its brilliant angles.

  ‘It’s me, Victoria,’ she said.

  She told him he couldn’t lie there in full view of the congregation due any moment to file in the door. Congregation. The word induced deeper sleep. She shook him awake again. ‘George!’ She raised his arm and slipped her own underneath it. She was strong from hauling Dean around the place and George was still whippet-like from months and months of his labour on the hill. She was able to walk him along the road to her house. It wasn’t so far. She had to help him up the front steps.

  George was complaining of his head now. She told him, ‘The door’s open, and the bathroom’s the one at the end of the hall.’

  Victoria watched George stagger up the hall, a steadying hand against the wall, head dropped between his shoulders. She was late. She supposed she could leave George in the bathroom and still get over to the church and take care of the morning tea before services started. In the end she decided to wait and see. George might not be able to cope. He might slip and fall and bang his head against the bathtub. Anything could happen with him in that state.

  When he emerged his face and hair were slicked clean. His skin shone with health. He looked so transformed, and all it had taken was a basin of cold water. And later, years later, she would surprise my mother with, ‘He had the most wonderful teeth and he was smiling.’

  The teeth had done it. But water was the transforming element. Not paint.

  10

  In 1967, a young surveyor turned up at Alma’s door with a district plan. He’d come up the hill for a better view of the surrounding landscape, a boyish-looking fellow with a mop of blond hair and a struggling moustache that he was perhaps too proud of, angled sideburns, shorts, walk socks. The world had sprung a surprise. According to the contour map, the hill down on the Hands’ property shouldn’t be where it was.

  ‘Oh, you mean George’s hill.’

  The surveyor raised his dull face. He obviously didn’t know what Alma was referring to; and Alma found himself annoyed by the young man’s moustache on its joint quest for maleness and officialdom.

  ‘You don’t know about George’s hill?’

  The surveyor preferred to consult his plans than to hear what Alma had to say. With Alma’s permission he spread them over the deck and knelt down to peer at the alphabet of squiggly lines and land titles. For the moment, Alma was content to let the surveyor search for the missing bit of landscape. He wasn’t sure if he could be bothered with explaining. Eventually the young man stood up and walked to the edge of the deck and squinted down at the deceiving landscape. The new hill was clothed in grass. A new generation of sheep which had no reason to think the hill hadn’t been there forever trailed over its grassy bumps.

  Alma came and stood behind him.

  ‘The hill moved, if you must know.’

  The young man smirked.

  ‘Hills don’t move,’ he said.

  Alma told him, ‘I don’t know if I can be bothered with this, but you had better believe me when I say that this one did.’

  The surveyor thought he was talking to an old fool. Alma could see that and didn’t like it. He reached up and grabbed his shaving mirror that hung from a rusty nail. He told the surveyor to take a look at himself. The surveyor looked around.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s just us.’

  The surveyor held up the mirror and stared at his blushing face. ‘Now what?’ he said.

  ‘Well let’s talk about that moustache of yours. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to suggest that five years ago it wasn’t there. And that, there, that crease, that frowning line that just lit across your forehead, that wasn’t there when you were crawling bare-arsed over your parents’ sitting-room floor.’

  The surveyor dropped the hand that held the mirror.

  ‘So what’s your point?’

  ‘My point,’ sighed Alma. He felt like showing the surveyor the road. ‘My point is this. The hill you’re looking at, for example. Why should it be where a map twenty years out of date says it is?’

  The surveyor scratched the back of his neck. This was proving more difficult than he had expected.

  ‘I see. So what should I tell my boss, Mr Martin? He will want to know. Did the hill just pick itself up in the night and go out for a walk—as hills do, of course—and got lost and couldn’t find its way back to the exact spot?’

  ‘That sort of tone won’t help you. I was going to tell you but I don’t think I will now.’

  The visit of the surveyor is the closest occasion to the story of Alma’s portraits getting out before now. I’m aware that various people will have different versions, but that is the history I more or less caught the tail end of.

  I grew up with the neighbour always down at our house drawing my mother. I must have been very young the first time I ever saw my mother sit with the sort of patience I would later see on the closed-down faces of people waiting at bus stops.

  I can remember coming across a box of old sketches. These ones were done at an earlier time. My mother is back in the house and pregnant with me. Frank is by now working at the paint factory like everyone else. George is with Victoria and Dean, newly established behind the counter of Pre-Loved Furnishings & Other Curios. And I am curled up in my mother’s womb waiting to come out to the world I have just described.

  As far as Frank went, my mother says he and Alma Martin never hit
it off. Alma’s mind was made up early in the piece when he saw Frank wander out one morning across the paddock with a shovel over his shoulder. All that remained of the original hill was a small mound of dirt, a morning’s work, probably not much more. Frank was still some distance short of George’s old site when he stopped and swung the shovel head down; he tapped the earth in front of him in the manner of a cricketer patting down a rough patch on the pitch, then shouldered the shovel and turned back to the house. It is unfair to dislike a man for perhaps not being in the mood right there and then but that was the moment Alma made up his mind that he didn’t care for Frank. It’s the oldest story around—the artist falling for his favourite model. And for years after, whenever the subject of Frank came up Alma would drop his eyes and wait until the malignancy of the subject had passed.

  For his part, my father, Frank Bryant, appears to have taken a more generous view of the neighbour always hanging about in my mother’s life. Alma drew my mother throughout her pregnancy. She leans back in the armchair, that immense belly, her hands resting on top. The point of her chin seems to sit another mile or two back in sunny exile.

  There are plenty of other examples of this kind of arrangement.