by Lloyd Jones
Silence.
‘Edith tells me I talk too much. Just wave a hand or raise a leg or whatever, Alma, and I’ll put a sock in it.’
Silence.
‘Tell you what, wouldn’t some brandy be nice? A hit of something would put me away.’
Silence.
‘I imagine you’re a Jack Daniels man. I’ll get Edith to smuggle some in. We can pipe it down a straw into you.’
Silence
‘Funny though how they all put their wives in their pictures. Rembrandt squeezed two wives into his portfolio. He was twenty-six when he met Saskia, forty-three when he met Hendrickje. The Hendrickje version of Flora is more sober than its predecessor. He went outdoors with H—didn’t with S. I’m thinking of that beautiful work Hendrickje Bathing in a Stream.’
Silence.
‘One artist (I can’t remember his name. I want to say Bonnard but Cézanne’s keeps barging in), he points to a shadow beneath a tree and says, “See that shadow? Does it not look purple? Then paint it purple. And as for the tree, save your most beautiful green for it.” I may be making this up, but the point remains. The invitation is not to transfigure but to heighten the emotional engagement. Alma?’
Alma flung his hand against the bed frame and the watercolourist continued.
‘Constable described trees and meadows. Well, frankly, he might as well not have been there. The French painters by contrast put up signposts across the countryside saying, “I was here. I saw that. I saw that tree and its shadow!”’
Listening to all this, day in day out, Alma said, was like travelling in a foreign country where at first you don’t understand the language spoken all around you, then one day it happens, understanding drops into place and suddenly you find you can communicate. Drawing, he said, had been like that for him.
The Carmichaels owned some coastal land, scrappy, unproductive, lovely for living though, fruit trees and vegetable beds. Edith was the gardener. They insisted he convalesce in their home and it was there that he learned to milk cows and lop heads off chickens. The watercolourist and Edith had two grown-up daughters and for the time he was there Alma slept in one of the girls’ rooms. Her dolls were still as she had left them, arranged along the top of a bookcase. Her crayon drawings from childhood were still pinned to the wall. It was a fitting environment—it served to remind him of his status in this new world of drawing in which he was feeling his way. It was like tearing out a sheet of paper and starting all over again.
When I got back to the shop to relieve Guy I had the strange impression of a walrus blinking back at me. My head was racing with various thoughts, stuff that Alma has shared with me and Violet, and Guy was just too big and slow and ponderous. It was the same when I got home and Frances looked up from her jigsaws and waved through the glass doors; I thought, things could be worse between us. At least it’s not Switzerland and lemonade. That made me smile, then I found myself laughing. Switzerland and lemonade. And now Frances got up from her work table. I’d made her curious. She came through the glass doors. She was smiling too. ‘What?’ she kept asking. ‘What?’ I shook my head. It was impossible to tell her. It would be impossible to repeat the phrase ‘Switzerland and lemonade’ and for her to get it; I’d have to explain where I’d heard it, at the Eliots’ of all places, with Alma quoting from a watercolourist long dead.
In order to accommodate me the drawing sessions were scheduled for midday. That way I could get Guy in to cover for me. It was a good deal cheaper without my mother’s charity days, and I was pleased to help Guy with a little pocket money, hardly enough though to keep a family ticking over, and when I mentioned that he gave me sad, slobbering look.
‘Actually, Kath and the kids are still over at her mother’s.’
It was just a temporary thing, he added, but given the speed at which he looked away I seriously wondered about that. I went out the back way, and as I closed the door I heard Guy’s soft padding footsteps and the clatter of the beaded curtain.
I drove out to the tip to pick up Alma. With the reek of the tip all over him we continued on to Beach Road. Alma was grim; he sat tight-lipped. Something was bothering him. I looked across once or twice for him to spit it out and he just looked away.
I mentioned I’d seen George Hands the other day—but no Victoria.
‘I had a drink with Victoria, and George, separately.’
‘Sad about Dean.’ Alma cast his eyes on the road ahead as if this went without saying.
Finally as we bumped along Beach Road, he said, ‘This Ophelia woman, Harry. Tell me it’s none of my business and I’ll leave it alone. But you know how I feel about Frances. I think she’s a wonderful woman and whatever difficulties…’
‘Hold it there. Who told you about Ophelia?’
‘Alice. She got it from Frances. I don’t think she will mind me telling you that.’
‘Fine. I don’t know anyone called Ophelia.’
Alma turned his head to look at me hard for an uncomfortably long few seconds. Once that side of my face had turned red he looked away, satisfied.
‘I’ve known you for too long, Harry,’ he started to say. But I stopped him.
‘I can’t believe how out of hand this has got. Look, I don’t know anyone by the name of Ophelia. I do not know of anyone called that in this community. Who the hell would call anyone Ophelia?’
‘Frances has an idea it’s that black woman you had that thing with in London.’
‘There was no “thing” as you put it. There was nothing.’
‘As you wish. As I started out saying, just tell me if it’s none of my business and I’ll shut up.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
For the next minute we listened to the stones flying up at the chassis. Alma stared out his side window and I stared out mine. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘It’s pure imagination. The whole thing is. It was a dream I had. I’ve already had this out with Frances. I can’t believe she spoke to Alice about it. We talked and I explained and put her mind at ease and now she’s happy.’
Alma still had his head in the side window.
‘Alice is upset,’ he said at last. ‘She was the one who asked me to speak to you.’
‘Now you have and now you know, and now it’s over. A misunderstanding in about three different directions at last count.’
‘As you wish.’
At the Eliots’ I was in no mood to draw. I couldn’t sit still and concentrate. Alma’s instruction didn’t sink in. I could hardly hear him for all the other stuff going on in my head. It upset me that Ophelia was everyone’s business, it was essentially a private matter. For all the trouble it was giving me I might as well have accepted Ophelia’s invitation. I should have played out the whole ritualistic dance to the end, and at least have the satisfaction of doing what apparently everyone back here at home had assumed to have happened. The facts were less spectacular. I remember I had put my beer down in the dark—her flashing white mouth and some delicious tropical smear of perfume—and Ophelia reaching for my hand and missing. Instead it brushed across the top of my trousers and as a kind of automatic reaction I found myself reaching for my beer again. What had been heatin
g up suddenly turned down to cordial, and within minutes, as it now seemed, there was a puzzling withdrawal of interest before she upped and left with that glass held before her.
‘You’re not drawing,’ Alma said at one point.
Violet broke out of her pose and stared at me.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ said Alma. ‘He’s got other stuff on his mind.’
A few minutes later the twins woke—much earlier than Violet had planned. She had put them down only an hour before. Now she was nervously apologetic. I thought she must be worried that she wouldn’t get her money. She tried putting them to sleep again. But when she tiptoed back to the front of the house and resumed her pose it wasn’t the same—there was the tilt of concentration in her eyes, her head angled, cocked, for the small tinny voices floating up the hallway. Progressively they grew louder, whimpering, nagging, screeching, persistent, until at last Violet jumped up to attend them. She tiptoed back and within a minute they had started up again. We tried to ignore it; it was hard to think that it wasn’t malice —they were just babies after all—but the bawling was intolerable and in the end Alma looked up and shook his head. Violet disappeared and this time the triumphant twins turned up with their black eyes glowing over their young mother’s shoulders.
She put them down on the carpet and tried resuming her former pose. But the twins kept going; they kept rolling up against our feet. One of the twins, Jackson, I think it was, began pulling on Alma’s trouser leg and in the end he put down his pencil with a sigh of exasperation and said, ‘It’s not working, sweetheart.’
Violet gave a hateful look to her babies who were sabotaging her potential earnings. She thought maybe they would go back down if they could stay up a while and tire themselves.
‘Up to you, Harry’, Alma said.
I glanced at my watch.
Poor Violet. The wheels in her mind must have been spinning for her to come up with an idea that would prevent the loss of chargeable time because before I could reply she got our attention with, ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to model.’
Alma closed his eyes. I gave the far wall a doubtful look.
‘It’s true,’ she said.
It was in a town far from here. She didn’t say where, exactly, but at the same time it was a town resonantly familiar once she spoke of its plans for a commemorative coin. This was an example of the kind of civic pride we had once gone in for. She said a search was launched to find the face that would be minted on the side of the coin. For a short time she had thought it would be her own.
Everything she said spoke of the ideal face radiating hope but not in a beggarly way. It would be in profile because a profile offers a certain decisiveness. That’s the thing about the profile. It isn’t just a face laid on its side like a lily pad. The line from the corner of the eye to the point of the nose indicates where the future lies. And this is what people would get in their hot little hands.
What happened was this. Violet happened to be standing on the porch to her house when a man in a van came to an abrupt halt—a squeal of rubber on tarseal, a forward jog of the chassis as the driver’s face turned in the side window. It was like he had been looking for her all this while. Violet thought he must be a courier in search of an address. No one, she said, ever came to their house in such a deliberate fashion. He hadn’t even parked his van properly—she could still hear the engine idling.
She assumed he was after directions. So she looked up at the clouds and counted to three; when she dared to look again she saw he had come no closer but had stopped at the edge of the dry lawn to look at her, as though he was checking that his initial impression was right. He shifted his head to the side, squinting, a squeeze of judgment in his face because he had been travelling at forty k’s when he had seen her, this barefoot waif in the light and shadow of her parents’ porch.
Violet’s arms were stiff at her sides. The man’s stare made her feel awkward. She pulled down the hem of her skirt and experienced that annoying rise of butterflies in her tummy, which was what she felt like when she entered rooms in which people were already seated and acquainted.
The annoying thing was, she said, the thing that would get her offside with her father in the first place, was this idea that she had deliberately sought the man’s attention, as if by raising an eyelid she could bring traffic to a halt. As if in spite of herself and whatever else her intentions might be, she could detach a man from his van, and even—or especially in a neighbourhood as scruffy as hers—have him leave his senses behind him where he’d left the engine of his van running. Even the neighbour’s dog sat up. The clouds seemed to drift down for a closer look. She told her father all she’d done was come out for air. He seemed to think her face was a lure and that her cast had been perfect to catch that wily trout in a passing van. But in fact—as she told her father—she had been thinking she would cross the road and see if the neighbour’s dog was dead. She had stood on the porch a full five minutes and it hadn’t moved a whisker of hair. She didn’t want to touch it though in case it was; she didn’t want to touch death. Three weeks earlier there had been a death in the street and she had stood at a distance watching the ambulance people pass the body up through the back doors of the ambulance parked next to the green recycling bins and bulging black rubbish bags. These were her random thoughts when her father asked her what the hell she had in mind standing out on the porch if she wasn’t looking to lure a man—if she wasn’t some suburban siren operating from her porch.
And who the devil was this passing ship, so called? As it happened, breathing calmly and outwardly at the thought now, she wasn’t sure what she would do. The day wasn’t as inviting as she had hoped it would be. The sky was too blue; it made the windows appear dull and witless. They made her wonder at what moment, precisely, did the man along the road decide to drive his car into the garage and close and bolt the doors and engineer the exhaust pipe up through the floorboards of a car she had seen pass up and down this same street with groceries, sometimes the man’s wife aboard, observant always of the speed limit. Days like this made you ache to be elsewhere.
She was still to discover that elsewhere. She was no longer at school, but not yet at work. There was a home, but a home with so little space, so little air of her own. She had come outside to the porch to escape the whine of her baby siblings. Some days their sounds drilled into her brain. Some days her mother lay like a sow, the faces of her tiny brothers panting and suckling and sometimes turning their faces to their older sister standing in the door. They could look so knowing, so alert to the circumstances they had arrived to; almost as though they knew that if they didn’t get this attention now they would get nothing later. Some days were so unbearably alike that she wished she could just draw her curtains and default on them.
She didn’t say any of this to her father. He would say she was spoilt. Maybe slap her and call her ugly names as he was prone to do when he worked himself up. Maybe she was disporting herself like a common slut? Why else would a total stranger bowl up with his visiting card and leave a van running?
It was about now that she noticed his camera. About now she brightened. And this despite what her fathe
r would later scoff at—any old jackrabbit with a camera. Some seducer! Her father would walk to the window and point out to the street. ‘Out there, you say? Out there our friend pulled up and offered you the rainbow?’
She recalled his keen oval face; an honest face, she remembered thinking at the time. A clever face spinning out words, entreaties. Coin. Visage. Profile. Opportunity. Fame. The words linking to form a rope with which he could, the man said, with her blessing haul her out of this world of burnt lawns and finger-smudged windows. If she would take hold of this rope he was offering she would find herself catapulted—that’s what he’d said, catapulted! And that’s when she began to laugh, which was okay because the man laughed with her and said, ‘Hell I know what I must sound like.’
She remembered the clipboard with the ballpoint attached by string. He needed her signature, which she gladly gave. And when she handed back the clipboard he nodded back in the direction of the house to ask if Mum was home. In that direction came the noise of toilets flushing, doors closing. She said her mother wouldn’t mind which was true up to a point as far as raffles or lotteries were concerned. The man’s offer seemed to sit squarely in the lottery basket.
Now that he had her signature he fell back to examining the house. His face was not quite as friendly as before. He said, ‘We’ll take that picture, shall we?’
She stared back at the lens and on the edge of hearing babies were calling and crying. The man told her to stop looking so cross, then she heard a click and then another. ‘Hold it there,’ he said. ‘Just like that. Good…Good.’ Click. Click. Click. He raised his head, smiled, lofted his eyes past her to the house and hurriedly rolled on more film. This was definitely one of the strangest things to happen to her. She’d left the house to get some air and now look what was happening. She was having her photo taken.