She took a handkerchief out of her bag and rubbed her mouth very vigorously; then she spat; and sat with her hands palm-upward in her lap.
He lay chewing grass, hoping the blood wouldn’t burst out of his veins, the breath explode in his chest: it would be terrible, if Nance enjoyed glimmers of sensibility.
‘I liked it,’ she said in a dead, even voice, ‘it had sort of sparks in it. It was my paintun.’ Suddenly she was shielding the last rags of her aggressiveness. ‘I practically painted it with me own bloody tail—’ her voice rising before dropping.
Seated beneath the giant fig, she was the first original work of sculpture seen in a Sydney park.
Around them was a sound of what could have been pure silence, out of which she dredged up her voice to ask: ‘What did they fetch?’
‘One of them twenty-five. The other thirty: it was a bigger painting.’
‘Good Christ, you’re not much of an investment! Or else somebody’s a shyster.’
He couldn’t answer her.
‘But whichever it is, I gotter have my whack. That was in the agreement.’
‘Not yet, you can’t, Nance. I’m buying a piece of land.’ He swallowed a gusher of green spittle before rejecting the empty grass. ‘Up the line,’ he added desperately.
He couldn’t explain that the suburban bush, probably Africa to her, was in a sense of Mumbelong.
‘And wotcher gunner do—“up the line”? Paint?’
‘Yes, Nance. Paint.’
‘And live by the ladies that take yer down?’
He couldn’t answer that either.
‘Or Poncess Nance!’
Her coil of hair was halfway down; her eyelids might have been walnut shells.
‘Am I ever gunner see yer?’ she asked.
‘Whenever you feel like it.’
So it was settled beneath the spreading fig, on the uncomfortable fruit, some of it still sticky, some already petrified. From big blubbering orphaned baby who needed comforting, Nance became the insatiable goddess, who only didn’t think of tearing bits off her victim and throwing them into the blue waters of the cove.
It was a wonder they were able to recover their identities merely by his stuffing in a shirt, and her harnessing a torrent of hair; but they did: they bared their teeth at each other, lowered their eyes once, and resumed their actual lives.
Caldicott advanced him money against three more paintings; so it was possible to buy the strip of scrub on which, he had begun to feel, his creative life depended. The dealer, a mild creature of indeterminate age and sex, ran a little gallery at the top of some stairs not far from where Duffield lived. The gallery itself was almost always empty, except on occasions when ladies in twos and threes tried out their taste on the several paintings exposed for that purpose. The muted ladies appeared almost paralysed by their own daring.
Duffield couldn’t arrive quick enough at the office or cupboard across the gallery where Caldicott the dealer usually sat, wearing a leather eyeshade the colour of milk chocolate above his hairless, milky face. Caldicott was in such practised taste he practically couldn’t give an opinion on any subject, but would sigh and giggle his kind regrets he side-stepped.
‘I can’t say there’s any actual rush, Duffield, for your work.’ Caldicott tried to adjust the eyeshade so that it would give him greater protection. ‘But there’s a more general—growing interest in painting amongst people of the better class—and where one has rushed in,’ he sniggered, and stroked his hairless jaw, ‘there may be others preparing.’
The risk he had just taken encouraged the dealer to remove the eyeshade for a short spell. It had left a crude red mark across the milky forehead, at which Caldicott began to dab with a beautifully initialled handkerchief. His eyes, in contrast to the shade, were bitter chocolate, and in spite of the delicately discoloured lids, not as weak as you would have expected.
‘It takes time and you are ahead of it.’ He lowered his eyelids on his own epigram.
‘In the meantime, I’ve got to live,’ the painter suggested.
‘Oh yes, by all means—to live.’ The dealer showed his teeth in amusement. ‘You have employment, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m a cleaner—at Morgan’s.’
At this contact with life Caldicott bowed his head over the blotter: though he had never laboured, he had been reared in a country where labour is theoretically a sacred rite.
‘Then you will always be able to eat. Nobody need starve in Australia.’
‘But when I withdraw to the scrub, how am I to paint and eat, Mr Caldicott? Unless, of course, I live off the immoral earnings of a woman.’
Caldicott almost fell apart. He enormously enjoyed someone else’s joke in doubtful taste. Though his latest painter was so unknown, so unfashionable, he might begin to cultivate him in a tentative way: ask him to dinner with a broadminded few; bad taste in a protégé could be a social asset.
The hushed ladies in their striped voiles and black-and-white polka-dot crêpe-de-chine adored Mr Caldicott. Instinctively they recognized ‘Maurice’ as one of themselves by the way he tweaked at his non-existent string of pearls; while on a grander, terrifying plane, they accepted him as a guardian of a world of art they could never hope to enter, married as they were to barristers, bankers, physicians, graziers even. So the ladies no more than hovered round his cupboard door, entrance to a desirable, though forbidden, Hades, murmuring felicities such as: ‘Thank you, Mr Caldicott—so stimulating—so gratifying to see we are coming of age in the arts.’
Once, a lady more perspicacious, more informed, than the others, stuck her head inside the cupboard, and announced in a whisper made to carry: ‘I’m glad we’re not going as far as Picasso!’
She stood there flickering her eyelids, waiting for her measure of praise: and the dealer laughed the conniving laugh his client expected, and rearranged his invisible pearls.
‘Oh, Mrs Farquharson,’ he suddenly remembered, ‘this is one of our artists you’re going to hear more of—Mr Hurtle Duffield.’
The lady flickered appreciatively, and recoiled. It was difficult enough to introduce to her barrister, her banker, or her grazier, a water-colour of grazing sheep, without the artist who had painted it.
On one occasion when a fair gaggle of ladies was appreciating an exhibition, the painter asked the dealer: ‘Is she any of these?’
‘Is she—who? Oh, Mrs Lopez! No. She’s young, and,’ he averted his face, ‘some consider, dashing. She was here recently; but went away again. She lives away. She was widowed soon after her marriage in Ecuador. Or was it Peru? Very tragic—though I can’t say anyone ever met Mr Lopez. (She intends to remarry, I believe, and live in Berkshire.) But don’t let that discourage you. The word carries when a lady buys a painter—if the lady has means—and Mrs Lopez has very substantial means of her own. All these,’ Caldicott’s bitter-chocolate eyes darted out at the tasteful ladies, ‘are chicken-feed.’ Vulgar for Maurice: it must have been the humidity.
His only patron removed, Duffield plunged downstairs. He could feel the sweat running down his ribs, probably rotting the seams of his shirt. To take courage, he tried to visualize his strip of scrub, and the house he had begun to build—it wouldn’t be much more than a shed—in which he proposed living. His blood-blisters and scabs were positive reminders; but the house, founded on an Australian instinct he hoped he possessed, rose only groggily in George Street.
Nance hadn’t seen the house. He hadn’t been seeing much of her: they had started on the phase in which each considers the next move.
Along the street the asphalt was heaving and undulating, a flickering of deck-chair stripes on colourless ladies, one of them half-emerged from the chrysalis of widowhood; heat on summer oceans was the colour of jade, in Sydney, brutally blistered brown. What could an Australian lady of means have married in Ecuador—or Peru? Berkshire was the more likely place.
The careering trams didn’t prevent him becoming involved with his ‘Marriage of
Light’, which the faceless Mrs Lopez had carried off. Nance Lightfoot took him by the hand. There was no mistaking the heat they generated together, as he re-enacted the details of his painting; but neither Nance, its source, nor Mrs Lopez, its buyer, nor any future owner, could lay claim to what was sprinkled with drops of his blood. The taste of it on his tongue made him draw back his lips, out of repulsion, or exhilaration. Suddenly, in plate-glass, there he was: more than real. He might do a self-portrait with warts. He had never contemplated it before. The prospective orgy of knowing himself encouraged him to run up the stairs, to the room he was soon going to leave.
However crude and basic the house or shack on the edge of the gorge, it was the artifact he had made. Helped by its primitive nature it soon settled into the ironstone and eucalypt landscape. The rocks might have been fired on a primordial occasion before it was decided to disguise the cleft of the gorge with its austere fringes of vegetation. It remained an oven in summer. Not surprisingly, trees sown in rocky crevices had taken the colour of smoke, of ash, their leaves narrow and listless, but tough. Even now, smoke would unravel without warning, its pungent strands threading through the bush. The whole of one night he stood by his unfinished house and watched the gorge snap and gnash at its own flames, as the trees went up in a clatter of fiery blinds. In the first light he himself felt ashen, not to say emotionally charred, while he still waited with a hacked-off branch to protect, if necessary, his timber skeleton of a house. It continued standing. The half-empty water-tank glittered as the morning clapped its eye on the unpainted iron corrugations.
The bush never died, it seemed, though regular torture by fire and drought might bring it to the verge of death. Its limbs were soon putting on ghostly flesh: of hopeful green, as opposed to the ash-tones of a disillusioned maturity: the most deformed and havocked shrubs were sharpening lance and spike against the future.
He liked to scramble down the face of the gorge through the evening light, chocking his boots against rock, clinging to the hairy trunks of trees, his fingers slithering over the slippery, fleshier ones. Once he caught his mouth trying out the response of one of the pinker, smoother torsoes. He was never so happy as in the communicative silence of the evening light. Sometimes he remembered he had been a painter before growing physically exhausted: musclebound, woodenheaded, contented.
He hadn’t seen Nance Lightfoot for months when he was handed her letter at the post-office store.
Dear Cock,
What are you up to ‘up the line’! I bet the art ladies are bringing you picnics of champers and chicken mayernaise. Well good luck to them and art, but not all the mayernaise on Darling Pt is going to paint my painting back the marriage one.
I am wondering about you dear Hurt, whether you have got enough to eat—and bush fires on top. I will come up to see you one of these days, so dust the art ladies away, I am a bull where ladies is concerned.
I am hungry I don’t mind telling you after a diet of commercial travellers and railway porters. I lie there. I let them look at my armpits.
There was a bloody Irish merchant seaman bilked me out of the money and pinched half a bottle of gin. You could of stood his socks up on their smell.
Dear love and Cock, I will die of you if I don’t soon see you, just the shape of it. Course I don’t mean that, I mean more than that. I could eat you up raw.
NANCE
She had done a drawing on the bottom of the page which the postmistress would have liked to get a look at, only he went outside.
No suggested date for the visit, but the threat had thrown him into an uproar: he heard that squelching sound in his ears; as he turned off into the scrub he could feel the blood padding through his veins. Nance had unnerved and nerved him at the same time; when he got inside the shack he began to unpack and lay out his neglected paints.
All those months at Ironstone his physical energies had been too thoroughly drained off by the building of his house and the difficulties of day-to-day existence. He decided to eat less, to avoid further calls on Caldicott and Nance. He lived off damper, dried beans, rice, lentils, and the woody swedes he grew himself in the thin soil of the ironstone escarpment. At one point he joined a road gang, and worked with it for a few weeks; with the pay, he debauched himself on butter, tea and sugar. Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn’t relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter.
Later on he realized he had been expressing himself in his tentative house: a wood-carving of necessity.
Caldicott had paid him a visit. The dealer walked with a slight limp, the origin of which the painter didn’t discover. Caldicott arrived mopping himself. He had on a tussore suit, the coat of which he was carrying over a shoulder: abandoned, for Caldicott. His hat was a new Panama through which the sweat was spreading. He looked not so much amused at his protégé’s eccentricity, as amazed at his own foolishness. The veins were bursting out of his flushed, hairless skin as he stumbled limping down towards the ledge on which Duffield had perched his misguided shack.
Caldicott peered into the gorge, and must have found the gulf between art and life at its most repulsive. ‘Do you really think you can live in this place, Duffield, and work?’
‘That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve almost learnt to knock a nail in straight.’ Duffield refused to indulge in the nuances on which Caldicott throve.
The latter expectedly winced. Secretly he hoped his own life might appear a work of art to others, and with this in view he collected paintings, rare objects, limited editions, and kept the gallery in George Street to encourage interesting boors like Duffield whose bad taste might eventually be excused as genius.
‘In any case,’ he said, swallowing down an astringency, ‘you look aggressively healthy—don’t you?’
Duffield felt all scabs and blisters as he fetched a couple of bottles of beer standing in a bucket of lukewarm water in the shadow of the iron tank.
They drank the warm beer out of cups, while the shade of Edith the parlourmaid hovered round them: for a moment the white sun caught the rim of her salver, and Hurtle swallowed his beer in knots.
With Caldicott, distaste was now becoming business. ‘I am planning a mixed show for February. Will you be ready for it? Oh, conventional on the whole; but you, Duffield, will provide the controversial salt.’ Flatter just a little.
Duffield had become a mumbling groaning lump of man, or rock. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when I shall be ready.’ He kept shifting his position on the very uncomfortable chair.
‘What—aren’t you painting?’ Caldicott looked at him with a kind of disapproving admiration: as though his protégé had turned out to be a disguised labourer.
He took a snapshot or two with a camera he produced jokingly.
Presently Duffield led the way and they ate some rubbery cold salt-beef on a table in the long half-built room; or Caldicott messed the beef about, carefully, rejecting the gristle with the tips of his lips.
When the meal was over, Duffield brought out a bottle of brandy. After the first sip, Caldicott had to look at the label: he shuddered to find his suspicions confirmed, but went on with it, out of camaraderie—or was it mateship?
The sun, at its heaviest, was bulging over their heads. Heat was scratching the corrugated iron.
‘Well, dear boy,’ Caldicott smiled his milk-white smile, ‘provided you’re happily involved in the experiment!’
Then he put his hand on Duffield’s thigh, in a gesture halfway between unconscious affection and conscious appraisal. Almost at once he removed the hand: he could have burnt it; but his smile was trembling painfully.
‘Keep February in mind,’ he fluctuated. ‘I should like to hang three Duffields. Three should allow them—some of them, at least—to grasp that your intentions are serious.’
Towards the end he had raised his voice, hoping to hear it ring out in impersonation of a
forceful man; but what they both continued hearing was Caldicott’s echo accusing him of a slight indiscretion. Or wasn’t it so slight? He looked at Duffield: one could never tell.
Duffield warmed towards Caldicott limping away through the scrub in his escape back to civilization. If it had been in his power, he would genuinely have liked to help the man out of his cabinet by smashing the panes; but he had never felt so impotent.
When his visitor was long enough gone to be out of earshot, he took the brandy bottle and chucked it into the gorge, where it hit a rock and exploded into a galaxy. He hoped Caldicott hadn’t heard after all. With guilt on his heels, how much more noticeably he would have limped. He was accusing his friend of his frightened little attempt: he was demonstrating against an emotional state of his own, which had unexpectedly given birth to this plume of transcendental glass.
And now, what most disturbed and disgusted: Nance was coming; though she still hadn’t given a date. In preparation he took to shaving every morning; he shook out the rumpled bags he used as a mattress between himself and the floor.
As self-protection he had started painting again: his visual abstractions soothed, if they didn’t completely satisfy him; but his thought was growing, out of rock and a shower of glassy light.
Nance didn’t come, and he grew dirtier, more sullen, afraid his material resources might give out before he had arrived at what he was vaguely hoping to achieve: when Caldicott sent him a cheque, without comment, let alone explanation.
The same day he walked into Hornsby to cash the cheque. On his way home, the postmistress at Ironstone was refurbishing her staghorn ferns by pulling off the dead, outer skins. The great heads from which the antlers rose were looking aggressively frontal and glossy, bulging from the trunks of the camphor laurels. The postmistress was a pale widow, who told him through pale lips that staghorns derive their nourishment from the air. She was proud of her ferns: she didn’t know what she would have done without them after her husband passed on.
The Vivisector Page 25