by JH Fletcher
As she drove away, Kathryn watched Cal in her driving mirror until she turned the corner of the ramp and he was gone.
Yet was not. The night was peopled with images. The ecstatic thunder of the music. That, above all things; yet through it, like diamond points of light, gleamed other memories: the man, tall, long-armed; his strong mouth and sun-dark skin. The sun had always drawn Kathryn, despite, or perhaps because of, its dangers. Hair that was almost black. Emerald-green eyes that in certain lights would glitter like ice or burn, like the sun. They drew her, despite, or perhaps because of, their dangers.
An intolerant man, she thought, impatient when she mentioned ‘Coastal Sequence’. Impatient of her? Or of the paintings? From which he claimed to have moved on? Arrogant, too, then.
Oh dear.
Her uncle had called Cal a great artist in the making, and in matters of art Dave knew what he was talking about. She had heard other things, too: a litter of broken affairs that the media had reported gleefully; a punch-up outside a pub that might have ended in jail. Yet his impact remained. He was air blowing where until now her life had held no air.
She drove up the hill past the cathedral, the Children’s Hospital.
Most people would have envied her. She had a secure, comfortable life. If she chose, she could look forward to a future neatly wrapped, with little chance of unpleasant surprises; a future, moreover, where she knew she would be adored, if only in moderation. Charles Chivers was not a man for excess, especially in emotion, but, to compensate for what might otherwise have been disappointment, Kathryn knew she could handle him. Had been handling him, in fact, since he had first dated her three years before, when she had been nineteen and he twenty-six.
Then, and since, she had permitted him to touch what she knew she could have forbidden him, had she chosen. It had meant so little to her, yet was the way things seemed to work. Her friends said it was how to catch a man without being caught oneself — although a lot of them seemed to end up caught, all the same. Kathryn had not, nor intended to be, and knew how to say no when necessary. Mostly Charles had gone along, although he had rebelled a little, from time to time, most recently over the Wagner.
The mid-north was no place for the unconventional, and Charles had wondered audibly about the wisdom of spending so vast a sum on going to an opera. In which none of their friends was in the least interested. Charles liked Kathryn to stand out from the other eligible females of his parents’ acquaintance, yet there was a line beyond which individuality became suspect.
Kathryn had told him, defiantly, that she was going anyway.
He had conceded that it made sense, once you’d bought the ticket, not to waste it, but expected that on another occasion she would know better.
It was absurd to talk of being hemmed in when the countryside was so vast, when rains fell and crops grew on schedule.
The man she had met tonight had no place in any of this, yet when he had asked her to meet him after the opera, she had not hesitated — at least not at the time. Leaving the theatre, having had the opportunity to contemplate the dangers, she certainly had hesitated. Cal Jessop was dangerous, every instinct told her so. The fact that he was so attractive only made things worse.
So she had walked for a time alone, testing the darkness with her doubts. In the end, it was the offering of air that had decided her, the opportunity to breathe.
She had walked to the bandstand, had found him there, as promised. That had been her last chance: that he might have grown tired of waiting and pushed off. But she had seen him and known, with trepidation and delight, that she was glad he had not.
They had walked beside the silent river and said little, and in the silence had said a great deal.
Peace after storm, she had told him, knowing that he might think she was speaking only of the music. Which could have been a catalyst, she supposed.
After their walk, not wanting the evening to end, she had grabbed at the one thing she could think of, had suggested paying a visit to the exhibition of antique instruments. She had not cared whether he might be interested or not, but after he had said yes, had hoped he was not interested at all, because that would mean …
She would not permit herself to consider what that might mean.
It was all too soon, she told herself as she turned into the side road that led to her friend’s place. Too soon for the turmoil of ifs and buts and maybes, for imagining things when there was nothing between them but incompatibility.
There was certainly that. Herself and an artist, even a good one … What could they possibly have in common? It would be an experience, certainly, something different, but daring to be different was a danger to a future where being different had no place.
She had seen two of his paintings. One of the ‘Coastal Sequence’ was in the Adelaide Art Gallery; the other, the portrait of an unnamed woman, she had seen in an exhibition in Melbourne.
This was the one she remembered now. It had been a chromatic painting, planes and exclamation points of colour everywhere, yet somehow had combined breath-taking sensuality with an emotion that had seemed close to adoration. What she remembered in particular was how the integrity of the subject had been in no way subordinated to the feelings of the viewer, so that all three — emotion, observer, subject — had existed in their own right, a celebration of the potential and fulfilment of human love. She had turned away from it, startled to find tears on her face.
This was the man with whom she had walked beside the river, whom she would be seeing in the morning.
She parked in the street outside the unit.
To say nothing of all the other things she’d read. Womaniser, fighter, drunk — she certainly knew how to pick them.
She went indoors, closing the door softly so as not to disturb her friend, who would have needed no disturbing had she had any idea of the confusion warring inside Kathryn’s head.
Because the fighter was also the painter of the portrait. That frightened her. The painting depicted an intensity of emotion beyond anything she had known, a mingling of spiritual and physical that had left her breathless. What could she offer a man who was capable of producing such a thing, a man who had — how clearly each brush stroke proclaimed it! — endured and gloried in the fire?
Who was the woman? she wondered as she got ready for bed. Where is she now?
To which questions neither the darkness of the room, nor the steady beating of her heart, gave reply.
Next morning, very early, Cal went into his studio. He looked at the unfinished painting on the easel and saw all sorts of things wrong with it that he had not seen before, saw that it was, in fact, beyond redemption. As he had believed himself beyond redemption. As, indeed, he might still be although, for the first time since Gianetta died, he was less sure of that or anything. For so long he had wanted death, yet now saw that to die would prevent him from producing the body of worthwhile work that was the only reason, he believed, for his ever having lived.
He took the painting and stood it on the floor with its face to the wall. He replaced it with a piece of board and pinned a sheet of drawing paper to it. With quick slashes of a sepia crayon he drew a sketch of Kathryn Fanning as he remembered her from the previous evening: the slender, sun-bronzed arms emerging from the summery dress, the graceful column of her neck, the dark eyes watching him from the tanned face. She came to life; he felt the tremor of her breath on his hand as he sketched, the liquid glint of light upon her eyes. Behind her the river flowed in tranquillity and, all around, the peaceful night held its breath.
He stood back, studying it dispassionately as he studied all his work, then did another drawing, confident strokes creating out of air and memory the likeness of the girl. A profile, this time: the angle of nose and cheekbone, the close-fitting cap of dark hair poised above the graceful neck.
Again he studied the drawings, recognising the quality of both, then went out of the studio and climbed the path to the cliff. There was a wind blowing and brigh
t sunlight: a starched, clean day. He looked down at the breakers bursting in spouts of spray against the boulders far beneath. The wind flattened his shirt against his chest. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air crackled with salt and over everything — sea, sky, cliff — lay the golden blessing of the sun.
He turned, went back down the track to the house. He took a shower, pulled on clean clothes. He rolled up the two sketches he had made of Kathryn, went out to the car and drove back to town.
THREE
The guide was trilling in an appropriately flute-like voice about the characteristics and merits of serpent and sackbut, of lute and claviharp and dulcimer.
Cal and Kathryn watched, sort of, and listened, perhaps, as he wafted them, and others, through the shuttered silences of the exhibition. All the time Cal was conscious, not of the instruments they had supposedly come to see, but of Kathryn beside him. She was very small, the top of her head reaching barely to his shoulder. Very upright, too, yet she walked with liquid ease, limbs flowing as effortlessly as the river beside which they had strolled the previous evening. She was wearing a shift of oatmeal-coloured linen. It hung straight, barely disturbed by the contours of her body. The effect was one of sensuality and grace and Cal felt an attraction that was both sexual and devoid of sex, a mingling of purity and desire that he had known only once before in his life.
‘The playing of these instruments,’ the guide told them, ‘required a discipline entirely alien to the times in which the musicians lived. A combination of military precision and feminine grace,’ he proclaimed, melodious as any sackbut.
Kathryn risked a sideways glance at Cal’s face. His expression was impassive, yet, in its stillness, offered the hint of a sardonic smile.
The guide pirouetted, beaming at the half-dozen sheep he had succeeded in mustering into the dusty paddocks of the exhibition hall. ‘Now upstairs we have —’
Cal caught Kathryn’s eye. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Laughing in the street amid the hustle and shove of shoppers, the belch of traffic, Kathryn stared at him accusingly.
‘You weren’t interested in the exhibition at all.’
‘Not at all,’ he agreed.
He grinned; she grinned; again they were laughing, joyously, without reason.
Only yesterday he would have been defensive, alert to what might have been criticism. He would have scythed her down and lost her. Now he was filled with the lightness of knowing that she had not been getting at him at all; on the contrary, she had been sharing with him her laughter at the pompous little man with his pompous little phrases. The sense of lightness became one with the magic of the previous evening. Cal felt inexpressibly happy, kindly disposed even towards the flute-voiced guide, and laughed again. He wanted to seize Kathryn’s hand, to run and run. Instead they crossed the road, most decorously, and walked until they came once again to the Arts Centre. They crossed the grass to the river bank. The water flowed, lovers walked with interlocking hips, joggers ran lightly, or doggedly, leaving upon the air an imprint of sweat and clutching breath.
There was a restaurant by the bridge. Cal had eaten nothing all day and was hungry.
‘Fancy some lunch?’
They sat at a table by the window. They barely spoke, but watched the river and, occasionally, each other: skipping glances, while tentative smiles touched the corners of their eyes. Which remained cautious, nonetheless.
The silence flowed like the river, separating and uniting them. Kathryn knew that she could drown so easily in its depths. She commanded herself to consider all the things that made up her life: the friends, the man who would marry her, if permitted, the expectation of an ordered and fulfilling life. They were eminently desirable and as nothing.
I am helpless, she thought, and did not care.
The food came. Now they talked, their tongues of trivia, their eyes of what mattered. Even now there were long minutes when they said nothing at all but sat, and looked, and experienced the moment.
Over coffee Kathryn said, ‘My uncle phoned this morning.’
‘Dave? What did he want? Checking up to see I haven’t kidnapped you?’
‘He said you might be having a one-man show in New York.’
‘He could just as easily have said might not.’
‘Why should he say that?’
‘He warned me. The gallery over there doesn’t like the stuff we sent them. Nobody does.’ He toyed with his spoon. ‘I don’t like it myself.’
There was a sense of shock in saying it, in acknowledging that all this time he had been wrong and the others right. Relief, too, that by admitting it he had created the opportunity to sort things out at last.
‘About bloody time,’ he said.
‘What is?’
He did not answer, sat staring at the shadowed water, the boats, the people walking. Now it begins, he thought. Then corrected himself. Not now; early this morning, when I did the sketches.
He wished he had them with him. He wanted to touch them, to trace with his eyes the movement of crayon on paper, to re-live the emotion that had guided his hand when he drew them: the moment, he recognised now, of re-awakening. He had always hoarded his work, but now wanted to show them to Kathryn, to let them speak for him in the silence that had once more come down between them.
Which, later, they did.
They stood beside his car in the parking garage. He handed her the sketches. She unrolled them, looked at them silently.
Now he was embarrassed by what he had done. His mind seized words that would be frivolous enough to dilute the awkwardness but, at the last, watching the dark head lowered over the sketches, he said nothing.
She looked up at him. A slight frown puckered her forehead, and he saw she was trying to guess his motives in offering her the drawings.
‘I did them this morning before I left. I’d been painting something else, but decided it was no good. So I did these instead.’
‘They’re lovely,’ she wondered.
‘Ten minutes work,’ he said. ‘No big deal.’
It was important she should understand that the sketches really were a gift, that accepting them would commit her to nothing that she did not wish for herself.
‘You could stick them on a wall somewhere.’
Or in a drawer. Or even in the fire. Because it was the offering and acceptance that mattered, not the drawings themselves. This he did not say; yet something in his tone must have resolved her doubts. Her face cleared.
‘Thank you very much. They really are beautiful.’
And looked at them more happily.
He did not want her to go, but knew she must. She had told him she lived a hundred kilometres north of the City, whereas he was the same distance to the south. He wanted to see her again very soon and hoped she might feel the same, but the patterns of their lives made it difficult. The thought troubled him. Their two meetings would come to nothing unless they did something about things straightaway.
He knew nothing about her life or commitments. Last night and again today these things had not mattered, but now that they were going to be apart, they would matter very much.
He was determined to stop things fizzling out.
‘You could give them to a friend,’ he said, watching her.
She rolled them up, her slim hands clasping them to her. She smiled at him. ‘I shall keep them for myself.’
He walked with her to her car on a different level of the same garage.
‘Here we go again.’
She looked the question.
‘Yesterday and now today. Watching you drive off.’
‘I can’t very well sit here forever.’
He looked at the concrete ramp, the rows of other cars. ‘Not much of a view,’ he agreed. ‘Not like the river.’
‘Thank you for the lunch.’
‘I’ve no idea what I ate,’ he confessed.
She burst out laughing. ‘Neither have I.’ And was again sober.
‘The exhib
ition,’ he said. ‘I remember that, all right.’
‘Military precision and feminine grace,’ she said. ‘He was pretty graceful himself.’
‘Not to say feminine.’
Shared laughter warmed them.
He said, ‘I would like to see you again. If that’s possible.’
Now was the chance for her to say, No, I’m sorry, I don’t think that would be a good idea.
‘Fanning,’ she told him. ‘You can always phone me. We’re in the book.’
A handful of words, yet filled with light and hope. And, yes, joy.
‘I shall.’ He took her hand in his, feeling the slender fingers smooth and cool against his own. ‘Thank you again. It’s been wonderful.’
‘And you will phone?’
‘I shall.’
Once again he watched as she drove away. Except that this time, as she went down the ramp, her arm waved at him through the open window. He raised his own hand, then she was gone. The dying hum of the engine, the squeak of tyres; silence.
Certainly I shall phone, he thought. Yes, indeed.
He drove home for the second time in successive days, seeing in daylight the hills that had been invisible the previous night, seeing superimposed upon them once again the dark-haired, smiling features of the girl.
Cal had been home an hour when Angela Scales arrived.
He heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel and went out to see her hauling her flab out of the little sports car that seemed too small for one of her heroic proportions.
One look at her expression, concerned and apprehensive, and he knew why she had come. Anger and resentment returned in full measure, like a sickness. He stared at her silently, with no intention of making things easier for her.