by Alex Miller
Robert was thoughtful. ‘We have these black spaces,’ he said after a moment. ‘That’s all it is. They feel like the end, but they’re usually a prelude. You know, to something important.’ He smiled. ‘We won’t be asking anyone else. You’ll come up with an idea when you’ve seen the space. I know you will. And so you told Marina you were working on a grand new project.’
‘She took me seriously and I let it go.’
Robert laughed softly.
His assurance that black spaces were not ends in themselves had been given with his old conviction and Toni found himself wanting to believe him. It was the way things had once been between them; something reliable and perceptive in Robert that he had offered generously to those he cared for and believed in. Robert had not changed. Toni said, ‘Thanks.’ It occurred to him that Robert had always had a mixture of ambition and authority alongside a deep private modesty in his personality.
Marina came in and set the dish of antipasto on the table. ‘Here we are. All my own work.’ She sat down. ‘Not really. But I did choose the ingredients.’ She eased the dish towards Toni. ‘Please.’
three
He waited for her at the chainmesh fence, watching the slow brown river with its cargo of floating garbage, the tall trees of the sunlit island fifty metres out bending in the wind. You’re doing their bidding, Teresa had accused him scornfully that morning, working herself into a state. You’re just letting them interrupt your life. In a couple of months they’ll go back to Sydney and forget about you again. It was harsh but she had never liked them. An aluminium dinghy with an outboard rode at a timber jetty the other side of the wire, dipping and bobbing to the little waves. On her way out she had turned at the front door and shouted back into the house, You’re a bad judge of character!
Teresa believed he needed protecting from what she confidently referred to as the real world; that place, in other words, where she spent her own working days. He said maybe she’d prefer it if he never left his studio. But the truth was he had no legitimate room for complaint, so he shut up and let her do the talking . . .
Behind him, his old green VK station wagon was parked alongside a concrete pylon under the roadbed of the freeway. Beyond the VK, deep within the darkness under the columns, a slope of rubble. When he’d stepped out of the car he had noticed a dark-stained mattress humped with old clothes, or maybe a recumbent figure slumped in the monochrome of shadows. The scene put him in mind of Geoff Haine’s apocalyptic landscapes. The underbelly. A netherworld of empty Coke cans, discarded packaging and plastic bags. A theatre for drunks and the homeless. Fugitive figures. A family resemblance between the featureless people of his own installations and Haine’s anonymous running man, another human portrait-without-likeness. Robert was surely right to suggest that it was time to be doing something else. But what? His father had said, To work is what matters to the artist. And it was true. He would have given anything to be working right this minute, instead of hanging around here waiting for Marina to turn up.
Two kilometres to the north, the glass towers of the CBD shone in the midday sun. He could almost see Andy’s converted biscuit factory from where he stood. If it weren’t for Andy’s support, he would have had nowhere to show his work these days. Andy had never offered an opinion on his installations one way or the other and, when Toni pressed him after a few beers one evening, Andy said, You show your stuff here, whenever you’re ready with it. You do what you do. Feisty little Andy Levine, making a nice fortune supporting some of the least commercial and some of the most commercial artists in Australia. Supporting people he liked. He and Andy Levine had been staunch friends since first grade at Nott Street Primary. Andy’s father a backyard car dealer in those days, dreaming of a franchise with the big boys out along Burwood Highway, and no one at all surprised when his son converted the old Port Melbourne biscuit factory into one of the most successful contemporary art galleries in Australia. It’s your space, mate. Whenever you need it. That was Andy’s attitude, and Toni was grateful for it.
He turned from the fence at the sound of a car coming off the blacktop onto the gravel slope behind him, the tyres losing grip and popping the stones. The sun was against her windscreen, then she rolled down into the shadows and he saw her sitting behind the wheel, a big sunhat on her head.
He stepped away from the fence and walked across to meet her.
She parked beside his wagon and swung her door open.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Is it still morning?’
She took off her sunglasses and squinted up at him. ‘I’m not late, am I? What a beautiful day we’ve got for it!’ She stepped out of the car and grabbed at her hat. Her dress was sleeveless, grey cotton, light and summery. On her feet flat-heeled sandals. She turned and leaned into the car, one knee on the driver’s seat, putting the strap of a denim satchel over her shoulder. She reached across to the passenger side, saying something he did not catch, and lifted out a basket covered with a blue and white tea towel. She turned, resting the basket against her stomach, the wind lifting the edge of the towel. ‘I brought us some lunch.’ She handed him the basket and took from the satchel an orange float with a bunch of keys attached to it. She flourished the keys. ‘One of these fits the padlock on that gate over there.’
At the end of the jetty she took the basket from him and he got down into the dinghy. She handed the basket to him and stepped into the boat. While she was starting the motor he unfastened the mooring rope and slid it through the ringbolts on the dock. She opened the throttle and the boat cut through the water, slipping out of the shadow of the freeway into the sunlight.
‘It’s wonderful to get out of the studio for a day,’ she said.
The island presented a dense margin of trees, willow branches trailing in the river and snagging the garbage. As they rounded the southern tip of the island a landing stage came into view, a canopied barge moored next to it. The barge was decorated like a fairground boat that might ply the make-believe waterways of Luna Park or Disneyland, The Tunnel of Love or The Pirates Cave. BREAM ISLAND PUNT in blue lettering along the side of its canopy.
He took hold of the rope and tied up alongside the barge.
Marina cut the motor.
He secured the boat and climbed out onto the landing stage, taking the picnic basket from her and standing to read the sign. Bream Island Environmental Sculpture Park and Art Space. All native plants and animals are protected.
‘It’s like playing truant.’ she said beside him.
The smell of the dry incandescent bush in his nostrils.
Her features were uplit by the reflected sunlight within the shadows of her hat’s brim. In this modelling of her features, something of the burnished softground of an etching needle. In art, beauty is everything, his father had told him. The artist’s enterprise is to refuse the world’s ugliness.
‘I bet you never played truant,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the space.’
She walked ahead of him, climbing the levee that was set with redgum sleepers for steps, rising diagonally across the face of the bank.
He followed her, admiring the free swing of the grey dress against her legs—the dress she had chosen to wear for her truant day. Taking it from her wardrobe this morning and holding it against herself, considering how she would look. Robert sitting on the edge of their bed admiring her. She telling him, They said on the radio it’s going to be hot.
She waited for him on the crown of the levee. ‘Look! It’s amazing. An island of native bush preserved in the middle of the city.’
Below them a sweep of dry grass and tall eucalypts. A plein-air vision trembling in the golden summer heat.
‘We never went to the bush when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Mum and Dad knew the way.’
They walked along the top of the levee.
‘What time do you have to pick Nada up?’ she asked.
‘Three-thirty.’
‘Good, we’ll
have time for our picnic.’
They followed the track down into the hollow of the island. Electric barbeques with tables and bench sets, and here and there among the trees the environmental sculptures. Constructions of local stone and timber suggesting the work of shamans, something to do with the sanctity of wilderness.
She reached out with her straw hat, pointing. Ahead, through the trees, a pale building reclined along the verge of the timberline.
A few minutes later they came up to the building and she unlocked the door with one of the keys on the orange float. She waited and he went in and set the picnic basket on the floor.
It was a large empty space with narrow vertical windows looking out on to the surrounding bush. There was the smell of fresh paint.
She stood beside him. After a minute she asked, ‘So what do you think? Can you see your work here?’
‘It’s a good space,’ he said. He was not enthusiastic.
She walked away from him, impatient. ‘So you haven’t really got a project?’
He watched her standing on her own in the middle of the expanse of vacant floor, the hard light from the windows behind her, isolating her. The human figure, isolated and vulnerable. He said playfully, ‘You could be my installation.’
She swung around, making a sweeping gesture at the space with her extended arm, the broad brim of the hat, her skirt swinging around with her. ‘Come on, Toni! What do you really think? Be serious!’ She stood, considering him. ‘It’s the silence of the critics, isn’t it? God knows it’s hard enough when they do notice us.’
‘It’s not the silence of the critics,’ he said. ‘Nada’s got more idea of what she’s doing at the moment than I have.’
‘You can’t let this opportunity go by, Toni. I can’t believe you won’t think of something.’ She walked back and stood beside him. ‘Robert and I don’t want someone else doing this show with us.’
They looked out the narrow window together. Two magpies walking about stabbing at the leaf litter.
‘I hated Melbourne our first day back,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I panicked. I went to your show that day to reassure myself that you were still here doing the things you do.’ She looked at him quickly. ‘I needed to know there was some sort of continuity. In my life, I suppose. I was being selfish. But when I stepped through the door at Andy’s and saw what you’d done I almost turned around and went straight out again. That awful napthalene smell of those old clothes. The way you’d set up those racks, like a crowd of forlorn refugees standing there waiting for something impossible to turn their fortunes around and make them whole and happy again. But you could see that theirs was a lost cause. They were like someone’s memory of people. People from a dream. It was almost too personal to be on display. I thought, no wonder no one’s here. I wanted to leave at once.’
He liked the way she talked about his work, vehement, angry. As if it had meant something to her. ‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I forced myself to stay half an hour, then I fled. I didn’t tell you, but I went back again the next day. But you’d already dismantled it and they were hanging Geoff Haine’s pictures. Geoff’s pictures were a relief. I was glad your empty people were gone. I had to make an effort to believe I’d actually seen them. And then, of course, they began to haunt me and I couldn’t get them out of my head. That was when I began to realise you’d done something impressive.’ She stood looking out at the encompassing bush. ‘I know just how you’re feeling. I know what it’s like. When you can’t work, life stops.’
The warbling of the two magpies. The birds peering curiously through the glass, or perhaps looking at their own reflections.
‘Let’s go and have our picnic,’ she said with decision. ‘I don’t have the right energy for this.’
He picked up the basket and they went out of the building into the sunlight.
She slipped her arm through his and they walked together through the crackling bush, as if they were strolling down Brunswick Street among the crowds. ‘You were always observing us,’ she said. ‘Drawing and watching, that’s what you used to do. You never stopped drawing and looking. You were so certain of your gift. So sure of what you were doing. You had no curiosity about the world. We couldn’t believe it when you wrote and told us you’d given up drawing and painting. You turned everything into drawings in those days. Everything can be drawn, you used to say.’
‘I was quoting my dad. I only drew people. Nothing else.’
They walked on in silence.
‘Dad always said drawing is superior to painting. He never drew people. He never drew us, his sons or his wife. I think we were too precious for him to risk our likenesses.’
The magpies stood looking after them, heads on one side then on the other, considering, making a judgement.
• He was sitting with his back against the trunk of a gum tree. She was drawing the group of pale gums in front of them, seated cross-legged in the shade of a wattle, her drawing block on her lap. She checked her subject, then touched her pencil to the paper. Beside her a half-empty glass of wine. The remains of the salad and chicken and the last of the bread were spread on the blue and white tea towel between them, the empty wine bottle on its side on the grass. She eased her back and set the pad and the pencil aside on the grass and reached for her wine.
‘Can I see?’ he asked.
She passed the pad across to him. ‘When did you first know you were going to be an artist? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak about how you came to it.’
‘This is good,’ he said. ‘I can’t do trees.’ He handed the pad back to her. ‘Kirchner turned to landscape near the end. I might have a go at it one of these days.’
She looked at her drawing then set the pad aside. ‘Tell me. I want to know. You don’t mind?’
‘It was my dad,’ he said. ‘He used to have nightmares and couldn’t sleep. He’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen drawing and painting. It was his night world, his escape. Watercolours and gouaches. He taught himself. He’d paint these modest studies of the domestic items around us. Our stuff. Cups and saucepans. The kitchen chairs. Tea towels Mum had left drying over the stove. The bag of flour or box of cereal. You know? The tins on the shelf. He had dreamed of being an artist when he was a boy, but the war ended all that for him. With his art he was reclaiming something of his boyhood dreams out of that landscape of ruins, something of his innocence. I’d see the light under the door and I’d get up and come out to the kitchen and watch him. To me it was magic. I’d hold my breath. He wouldn’t say anything, but he’d slip his arm around me and press me to his side and keep working, and I knew he was glad to have me there with him in the night. Just the two of us. It was a picture in his mind, the perfect picture, father and son safe together. For him it was the greatest blessing that I was interested in his art. Emotion was always close to the surface with my dad. He would weep and smile at me and wipe his eyes and I’d give him a cuddle. But he never talked a lot about himself. About what had happened. It was too much for him. I soon started doing drawings of my own. His stuff. Copying him. He never tried to teach me. You don’t teach drawing, he used to say. Drawing is something you learn by doing it. There’s no other way. We’d be there in the night together doing our drawing and painting and he’d tell me about the great artists he admired. Max Beckmann and Kirchner. It haunted him that Kirchner killed himself at the age of fifty-eight because he realised he was never going to be in the first rank of the artists of his day. The art and the struggles of these men to make sense of their lives fascinated him. And Giorgio Morandi, of course. He loved Morandi’s solemn still-life etchings.
Those artists helped Dad sustain his belief in himself. With them he was never alone with his art. He loved them. He loved their passionate vulnerability and the tenderness of their work. He recognised himself in them. The dream is to have made sense of one’s life at the end, he used to say. That is all. He would whisper it: To have mad
e sense of it. To me it was as if he had discovered the secret of existence. He would get their books out of the library and study them. Those self-portrait pencil drawings of Kirchner’s that Kirchner did during the last weeks of his life. Those simple poignant line sketches of the man’s features held him. He would stare at them for hours, lost in them, as if he were touching Kirchner’s despair and sharing it with him. Dad made me see the point of art, showing me how Kirchner was groping his way towards a meaning in the reflection of his own features. It was beautiful. I loved it when he talked like that. He would pass his fingers over the reproductions of Kirchner’s features in that book, and sometimes he would weep for the man. Dad believed art was something noble. Something with the power to lift humanity out of the factory and the prison. Which is where he worked, in a factory that was his prison.’
‘Toni. I’ve never heard you talk about any of this before. You change completely when you talk about your father. It’s astonishing.’
He had never spoken in this way about his father. Not to anyone. He was surprised to have heard himself say these things, as if he had achieved a sudden clarity.
‘Did he ever show his work?’
‘No,’ he said slowly. He was a little reluctant to continue. Perhaps he had already said enough.
‘Why not?’ she persisted gently.
‘Art was a private thing with Dad. It wasn’t the way it is for us. It wasn’t something for outsiders to admire or for strangers to buy. Dad was building a temple with his art. A temple of our lives together. The intimate things of our daily use. To be a family was something deeply precious to him. The domestic realities. He never took any of it for granted. He never complained. The Dunlop factory was like his second prison. He was more familiar with prisons than he was with temples. Mum told me that when he was fourteen he was separated from the rest of his family and was transported to a labour camp in Poland. Then, after the war, he was in a refugee camp in England, which was where she met him. They both worked in England for ten years, then they had the chance to emigrate in the fifties and they came out here. That’s when they had Roy. And then me, of course, but much later. Mum still says I was her surprise package. After a while I took it for granted I was going to be an artist when I grew up. Dad did too. It became our joint project. My future. We worked on it together. Drawing. Always drawing.’ He fell silent, thinking back.