by Alex Miller
‘I thought Robert’s father lived in Germany?’
‘He did. He’s ill. He’s dying.’
He watched Nada put her pencil case in the drawer of her desk and close it. She picked up her Snoopy Dog and, holding the toy to her chest, set off towards the door.
‘Sorry, Marina, I’d love to talk but I’ve absolutely got to go. See you Wednesday.’
‘See you Wednesday, Toni,’ Marina said. She sounded disappointed. ‘It’s good to at least be in touch again.’
He hung up the telephone, stepped across the studio and swept the little girl into his arms. ‘Gotcha!’
She cried out with delight, ‘Daddeee!’ She clung to him and bit his shoulder hard.
He set her drawing of him on her table, then carried her across the courtyard into the house. On the way to the front door along the passage he paused beside a small framed gouache that hung on the wall. It was a modest tonal image of a straight-backed chair and the corner of a kitchen table with a jug and a bowl.
Nada pointed at the picture. ‘Granddad!’
‘Yes, Granddad, darling. He would have loved you like crazy.’ At the door he set Nada on her feet. ‘Let’s have a really big swing.’
They went out through the gate and walked hand-in-hand along the footpath. At the main road he scooped Nada up and waited for a gap in the traffic, then he ran across with her held against him. On the other side he set her down on the grass. ‘There’s no one on them!’ he shouted. ‘They’re ours! I’ll get there first! I’ll get there first!’
She screamed in terror and excitement and ran from him across the dry summer grass towards the safe ground of the empty swings. He followed her closely, watching anxiously as she clambered onto the swing. Marina’s phone call was a distracting resonance in his mind behind his anxiety for his daughter. What was Robert and Marina’s news? Did they want to share it with him? Did they want to pick up the old friendship where they’d left it four years ago? He could see them both: Robert’s faint smile, knowing something. Marina standing by his side admiring him. They were focussed people. A successful team. He had never known them to be without ideas and projects. The telephone call puzzled him. What did they want? He caught Nada on the back swing and pushed her away gently.
‘Higher, Daddy! Higher!’ she demanded.
He caught her and pushed her higher, the tails of her red jacket flying out behind, the wind of her flight lifting her brown hair, her friend Snoopy Dog clutched against the chain of the swing. His heart contracted in his chest with love for her.
two
A little after midday on the following Wednesday he bought a bunch of expensive out-of-season Iceland poppies at the florist and drove across town to Richmond. It was hot again and his car was not airconditioned. He worried that the delicate flowers would wilt before he reached Robert and Marina’s and thought that he had made a mistake buying them instead of robust proteas or natives; except that there was for him something emblematic in the vivid fragility of the poppies, and their name, Iceland. In the relentless heat it seemed like a message of hope.
Before he reached the river he turned out of the traffic into a side street. Three blocks later he turned right again and pulled up at a small square of park tucked between a row of houses. He sat looking through the windscreen, gathering his thoughts and remembering the park. Theirs was the last house in a terrace of painted brick and timber cottages, dwellings that had once been the homes of factory workers but which had been expensively restored and redesigned to accommodate young professionals. The scene before him was unchanged from his memory of it. The withered oleanders in the park and the small patch of bleached grass shimmering in the heat, the solitary palm tree, and beneath the palm tree the bench, still broken . . .
That summer night four years ago, Robert and Marina’s friends had spilled from the lighted house into the park. Robert Schwartz and Marina Golding, the brilliant collaborative team, were relinquishing their position of influence in Melbourne’s art scene for the vertigo of the great metropolis. That, at any rate, had been the understanding, a sense that it was Robert’s largeness of vision that compelled them to go. A feeling that it wasn’t so much that they had decided to go as that they were being drawn along the golden path of those who had found success in Syd Of being abandoned even. And, for a few, no doubt the departure of Robert and Marina for Sydney must have seemed a confirmation of their own failure. For the older ones especially. For it was what they had all aspired to. So there was a certain envy among the less-generous spirits. Despite their worldliness, despite their fervent scepticism, they had all privately clutched at a shamefaced hope of that sign of a divine care that placed upon a body of work a recognition that was not disputable.
When the last guests were leaving, Robert entreated him to stay with them in the park under the stars. It was he whom Robert had chosen to be the very last to sit with them on the grass, drinking wine and talking far into the night—Had it been that he and Marina could not bear to arrive at that moment when they would be alone with their happiness and without a witness to its splendours? Now they had returned.
Today the park was deserted.
He reached across to the passenger seat and picked up the bunch of flowers. As he lifted the blooms a scatter of petals was left on the grey nap of the seat. He was nervous now at the thought of seeing Robert again. He stepped out of the car, locked it and walked the few paces to their verandah. He pressed the bell and stood waiting.
Marina opened the door. ‘Toni! How lovely to see you!’ She stepped forward eagerly and embraced him lightly, touching her hand to his arm, touching her lips to his cheek. She moved away and examined him. ‘It’s cruel the way the critics ignored your show.’
‘It’s okay. It’s their loss.’
‘Exactly. And you’ve got your new project. Good for you.’
He handed the flowers to her.
A gust of wind tore off a scatter of bright petals. Marina exclaimed and sheltered the flowers protectively in her arms. ‘You remembered! I love being given flowers. And Iceland poppies are my favourites.’ She was moved. ‘Thank you.’
So the Iceland poppies had been for Marina after all. He had not remembered, but had imagined himself to be choosing the flowers at random.
‘What is it?’ Marina asked. ‘Have I changed so much?’ She was older than he, by as much as ten years, slim and dark, her short hair freshly styled.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed at all.’
She smiled, enjoying the exacting quality of his attention.
The passage was narrow and she walked ahead of him. The disconcerting sensation of stepping back into their world, the familiar, elusive, clarified smell of their lives, a smell of cleanliness and good order. Today she was being welcoming and encouraging. Previously she would have stood aside, her manner silent and interior, observing him with Robert. Marina had seemed to him in those days to be in Robert’s shadow. A faithful collaborator, content to be the apprentice of Robert Schwartz’s studio. Perhaps, after all, she had stood within the shadow of some private inhibition of her own, an uncertainty too intimate to be disclosed. And of course she was older now.
She said over her shoulder, ‘Robert’s running late. He apologises. He rang to say he’ll be in a meeting. We’ll have a minute or two to catch up before he gets here.’
He followed her through the archway at the end of the passage into a lofty rectangular room. It was cool in here, the light filtered through pale blinds. The faint background hum of an airconditioner. An old man was sitting by a wall of books on a set of folded library steps. His loose cotton robe had slipped from his shoulders. He was barefoot, craned forward unsteadily over the book that he was holding open on his knees.
Marina stood beside a circular table in the centre of the room, the vivid poppies held against the white of her blouse, the tips of the fingers of her free hand touching the table beside her, steadying herself. She watched him, interested, her feet neatly together i
n smart Italian sandals.
‘You have changed,’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m older.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
The table was set for lunch, a chair at each of the four places. On the table were breads, Greek dips, a green-glazed bowl of olives. There was the faint aroma of dill.
‘What did you mean?’
‘I suppose we’re bound to have changed,’ he said. ‘In some ways. All of us, I should think.’
‘You’re being evasive.’ She laughed. ‘Come and meet Robert’s father.’
The old man did not get up but stretched an arm around Marina’s waist and drew her to his side. It seemed to Toni to be a gesture of possession rather than of fondness. He was trembling, his head jerking and nodding. The lower lid of his left eye drooped, disclosing the livid weeping membrane. ‘I’ve come home to die,’ he said and laughed, his breath catching in his throat, his glance quick and amused. ‘I shan’t be around to bother you for much longer.’
‘This is Theo Schwartz,’ Marina said. ‘Robert’s father. Toni is an old friend, Theo. He was one of Robert’s most gifted students.’
He took the old man’s hand, catching a whiff of body or bowel rising from the gown where it fell open. As he stepped away his eyes were drawn involuntarily to the gape of the material, his eyes encountering a glimpse of what he should not see, a mound of coiled and yellowed flesh, the inadmissible disaster of old age and disease.
Theo Schwartz smiled and released Marina. ‘Gifted and in his prime,’ he said in a tone of mild irony. ‘Did you know that Nero murdered his wife and mother, Toni? People do such things.’ He patted Marina’s arm. ‘My son’s wife.’ He might have wished a connection to be registered by them between the present situation and Nero’s murderous violence towards the women of his household, the idea that murder, giftedness and youth were commonplaces of existence.
Toni read the title of the book. It was a German edition of the diaries of the artist Paul Klee, Klee’s Tagebücher, the spidery inked lines of an illustration between blocks of text, Klee’s occult signs and portents. Toni considered making a comment, but Theo turned his shoulders away and re-entered his reading, lifting one hand to them in gentle dismissal, preferring the company of Klee’s immortal journal.
Marina said, ‘Let’s put these in water before they wilt. They’re beautiful.’
He paused to inspect a bronze figure of a running man that stood on a small table. He grasped the heavy figure around the waist and picked it up, turning it and examining it. ‘This is new. Whose is it? I have a feeling I should know it.’
Marina said, ‘You should. It’s Geoff Haine’s. His show followed your installation at Andy’s. We were at his opening. We thought we might see you there.’
He remembered the preoccupied, offhand greeting of the famous Sydney artist when Andy had introduced them. He set the heavy figure down on the table. ‘I met him.’
Marina reached over to adjust the figure’s line of flight, as if she knew its secret destination. ‘Robert wrote a piece on his sculpture for Art & Text. Geoff gave him this by way of thanks.’
‘Haunted,’ Toni said unhappily. ‘Isn’t that the word they always use for Haine’s work?’ He stood looking at the bronze running man. He recognised it now as the figure that appeared and reappeared in the artist’s monumental post-industrial landscapes, a solitary fugitive human presence in vast wastelands of rusting machinery and empty office towers aglow with the unearthly light of the end-of-days, visionary scenes calculated, perhaps, to impress the viewer with the towering moral authority of the artist himself. They had been hanging Haine’s pictures at Andy’s when he was carrying the last of his own dismantled installation out of the gallery, his arms filled with the wooden racks and old clothes, a rag-and-bone man. He had been feeling dismantled himself that day. Helpless. Gutted. Angered by the deathly silence with which his work had been received. He turned away from the sculpture, the enormous weight of Geoff Haine’s reputation too much for him to deal with generously.
‘So Sydney didn’t work out for you two, then?’ he said. ‘We all had the impression you were doing brilliantly. I’m sorry!’ He apologised quickly. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’
‘No, it’s all right. I know you must be wondering.’
‘I was thinking earlier of that great send-off we had for you two on your last night in Melbourne.’
‘Wasn’t it terrific! It was like being students again.’ She spoke with enthusiasm of the memory. ‘You stayed and we talked in the park until dawn.’
‘Teresa was ready to kill me when I got home.’
‘Of course. Teresa wasn’t with you. I’d forgotten.’
‘She was home with Nada. Nada was only a few weeks old.’ His guilty reluctance that night to leave Robert Schwartz’s magic circle. Staying until dawn, knowing Teresa was alone with their new baby waiting for him. Teresa had made plain to him her satisfaction that they had seen the last of Robert and Marina. They’re not our kind of people. He had defended himself with the claim that they were his friends.
‘It’s funny, but I always picture you on your own,’ Marina said. She smiled to soften her remark. ‘I mean, we don’t seem able to separate what we actually remember from what we invent about other people’s lives, do we?’
She might have observed that it was not possible to ever know one’s friends except through one’s own imagination. A comment on the slight awkwardness between them, the lapse of time and the failure of the friendship suddenly being reversed.
Theo cleared his throat and turned a page.
‘This house is still very much you and Robert,’ Toni said. Their lives childless and mess-free, the assurance of their fastidious idiom persisting.
‘I’m glad you feel that,’ she said.
The room was bare of ornament except for Haine’s running man and a solitary canvas leaning against the wall on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
She turned to him. ‘We did do well in Sydney. And of course we had that wonderful six months of Robert’s residency at the university of Minnesota. He finished his book. Lots of good things happened.’ She considered him. ‘I missed Melbourne. How frivolous does that sound? I only realised once we’d left how deeply I belonged here. I still remember our first night in the apartment in Glebe, looking out the window at the lights of Sydney and knowing, suddenly, I was never going to be at home there.’
He looked at her.
‘I couldn’t possibly justify such a feeling, so I didn’t try to. I didn’t say anything about it. Sydney was very beautiful and everyone made us welcome. And I was supposed to rejoice at being there. After all, wasn’t Sydney where everyone wanted to be? I went along with the idea that I’d eventually get used to it, but I knew I was never going to. I should have had the courage to say so that first night. I should have said, I can’t do this, we have to go home.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Robert loved it. It had taken him an enormous amount of energy to plan the move. I could see that Sydney was everything he’d hoped it would be. He had his job and his connections. For Robert, Sydney is the heart of the world. It’s where the main game is. It always will be. But I knew that in Sydney I was not in my right place and that I would be cast as an onlooker for the rest of my days. Anyway I don’t know that I belong at the centre of things. Not everyone does. The main game! What a pompous idea that is, really. As if anything can be the main game for everyone. Last Christmas I told him I needed to move back to Melbourne for a period. For a few months of each year. I need to feel at home somewhere at least for some of the time. I didn’t insist he come with me.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘After a very long silence he said, If that’s the way it is for you then we must go back together or this will become a trial separation for us. Neither of us wanted that. So here we are. Trying things out in Melbourne again. It’s not fair to be unloading all this on you.’ She turned away. ‘I’ve needed to tell someone. I must sound terribly selfish. Robert’s Sydne
y friends are convinced I’m being manipulative. But I’m not.’ With a sudden impatient fling of her hand she indicated the painting above the fireplace. ‘Well, what do you think of it?’
He said, ‘I would have thought being cast as an onlooker is something you allow to happen to you, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t! Please! Look at the painting! Tell me what you think.’
He turned to the large two-metre square unframed canvas. It was an image of a naked man falling upward into a sombre sky of deep lustrous black. The figure sharply defined against the sky, suspended in a place without atmosphere. The luminous blue curve of the earth infinitely distant below. The man’s body foreshortened, viewed from underneath, a perspective from the Sistine ceiling, his genitals and grey skin chilled by the life-neutralising forces of outer space, the wrinkled soles of his feet presented to the viewer. He was not dead, it seemed, but was a man adrift. An ironic ascent of man. A suggestion of crucifixion, but without the cross. Below the wrinkled soles of the naked man’s feet a trompe l’oeil of an open book, the deckled edges of the pages casting a delicate filigree of reflected light onto the black sky, so that it appeared as if an actual book had been artfully attached to the canvas. Toni recognised the complicated ideas of Robert, the exemplary theoretician and assiduous practitioner of the contemporary, the post-postmodernist absenting himself from his works. His pictorial images a comment on the outmoded act of putting paint on canvas. The painting was a beautiful, sardonic self-apology for the abstracted hand of the artist, the absent master of his own designs. Robert’s generous, calm and reliable good sense behind the carefully articulated idea of the painting. He could see Robert now, considering Marina’s nervous announcement that she wanted to return to Melbourne, soberly reflecting on the realities of their situation and concluding that his choice was either to lose his beloved Sydney or to lose his beloved wife.
‘You two have always been serious about wanting people to enjoy looking at your pictures,’ he said and moved in close to the painting to examine its surface. He turned to her. ‘But is it still both of you?’