‘But you can’t tell me—Don—so intimate and all—and you not a male nurse—an aspiring painter—you can’t tell me Hurtle hasn’t let fall a hint or two—while you were so nobly washing his feet—or given you a peep—come off it, mate—at the so-called God paintings!’
All the sawn-out mouths of the masks within hearing distance were working flat out. The telly young man had it sewn up. (Going to give him an award.) So the lacquered mouths clacked, some of them salivating Moselle; one lady was using her lover’s back as a ladder to climb to higher things.
‘Don?’
‘No.’
‘But you can’t tell me they don’t exist. When everybody knows they do.’
‘No.’
‘Well, in that case, we’ll have to terminate our interesting relationship, and disappoint our viewers. Shan’t we?’
‘You can’t talk about what’s too big. The paintings are too big.’
‘Ah? What do you mean by “too big”? What are their dimensions, Don?’
‘Mr Kircaldy, you’ve got me wiped! My father’s only a carpenter. I know. But I know there’s a point you can’t sort of talk beyond. You can only do. Or be, sort of. And that is what Mr Duffield. The painter. I can’t talk. I can only. Why can’t you let us all alone to do? Otherwise there’ll be nothing—no thing—done. There’ll only be people squatting in front of the box, hoping somebody they thought too big for them will turn out as little as themselves. Then they’ll be happy. Watching him pull himself off at a camera.’
What might have grown into a worse scandal than the possible existence of the God paintings was fortunately strangled at birth by the crowd which, normally, would have nursed it. Their instinct for something really of this minute began to prick those who specialized in the ephemeral, with the result that the whole of the amorphous monster was moved to suspect, murmur, groan, shuffle and finally shove. The lady who was climbing her lover brought her ladder crashing to the floor.
‘The Prime Minister.’
‘Is he here? I read he was in Pakistan.’
‘Somebody will speak. Got to thank the painter for conning us a good seventy years.’
‘But the Prime Minister—I saw Sam a moment ago. Talking to Gil Honeysett.’
‘Oh, beaut! Don’t you adore Sam? He’s one of the few men who can make a paunch look chic.’
‘Never get another vote from me. Not since he smirched our image overseas.’
‘I’m not interested in images. Men aren’t images. I’d adore to sleep with Sammy-lamb. He looks so utterly tenderized.’
‘Thanks to his missus. She mightn’t let him out, though.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘The main court. Looks like it, anyway. That’s where we’re being swept. That’s where all the gear was.’
‘Should have got there early—got us a good pozzy. Never be in the picture now.’
‘Nobody else ever is. The Brundritts must tip the cameras.’
As the monstrous black sea receded, boiling, sucked through archways, frothing round columns and buttresses, along static cliffs, a few pools were left behind: to trickle, according to some law of water, in the same direction as the original flood.
Smiling her most transparent, her most watery smile, Mrs Volkov started to tiptoe on long feet; then, when it decently could, her shadowy form tripped ever so lightly towards the mass from which, unwisely, she had allowed herself to become detached. ‘Oh dear,’ her voice blew back in faint droplets, ‘I do hope—never meant—not that kind of person.’ She was last heard resigning herself to what she only perversely dreaded. ‘And Kathy said the Prime Minister did her a very great kindness.’
As for the Cutbush couple, they burst out from the sense of duty which had been damming their true desires, and poured away as hard as they could pour, without looking back to explain their natural conduct; while Don Lethbridge followed swiftly, rearranging the clothes the telly had tried to strip from him. The sighs made by his Italianate shoes lingered across the emptied floors.
This left Rhoda. ‘Shall I come with you, Hurtle? Would it, I mean’—she had to cough it up—‘help if I stood beside you?’
When it was he who must help Rhoda, if he couldn’t immediately see how: certainly not let her stand beside him on the daïs.
She must have realized very quickly how awful her proposition looked, for she allowed herself, that is to say, her brutally irregular lump of pumice, to be dragged in what seemed the unavoidable direction, almost colliding with Gil Honeysett as he rose dripping out of the black collective wave.
‘Hi, fella—Hurtle! Where ’uv yer bin? We’re waiting for yer. Or all but. Are yer ready?’
‘Yes, Gil. But my bladder isn’t.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Gil Honeysett’s schedule made no allowance for an old man’s waterworks. ‘I suppose you’ll have to do it. Won’t you? Give you five minutes at most. After that, there’ll be hell to pay with the A.B.C.’
All along that side of the deserted gallery the pictures had revived: the Duffields. There was scarcely time to glance at them: never look enough at your own paintings.
Though whipped along by Honeysett’s warning, he might have paused to indulge, if the perspective of archways and parquet hadn’t been flooded with a vision: of a figure, small certainly, but in its formal, golden grace instinctively true to archetype. He was walking giddily as he hadn’t for years, but without illusions or expectations; his great joy was in recognizing his psychopomp, so very opportunely descended with ‘love and thoughts’ to give him courage. As they advanced towards each other, her golden, boy’s figure melted into all the tones of rose. She bowed her head, as though to hide the face which might give her away too soon. So they hurried, she coolly, he feverishly: not that he would have dreamt of touching this embodiment of a spirit. He would speak to her, in few, though significant words: let her know he had received and understood the messages.
So he called out: ‘Have you come to show me the way?’ In other circumstances he might have embarrassed himself: too loud, too brazen; it was all the fault of the Trustees’ inferior wine.
Instead, he had embarrassed the psychopomp. ‘The way? To where?’ A voice unexpectedly tuneless, cracked, panicky.
‘Why,’ he shouted louder, laughing, ‘to the Infernal River!’ as his psychopomp became an anonymous wrinkled soubrette hurrying in her pink from the LADIES.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘the loo is what I’m looking for.’
And she scurried faster: to catch the Prime Minister’s speech, and the famous painter’s reply.
Of course he knew too well the gloomy latrine where he had often taken refuge from personages and situations; but now, as though his hermetic guide, his Kathy Mystagogue, had sent her proxy to liberate him, he turned in the opposite direction.
The entrance hall was deserted, except by the postcards, and a couple of well-lit attendants scoffing a plateful of sandwiches. He went out. The unlikely building was groaning with the legend it couldn’t contain. The audience had begun to applaud the delay, then to thump and stamp; or were they trying to force the creative spirit into its coffin? Jumping on the lid for luck before nailing it down, so that nothing of what was inside would escape them—ever.
He went down the steps, one side of him dragging the other half behind. His body was exhausted, but his mind darted back prickling around him as he staggered laboriously over the grass, and stood pissing, propped against the fortified trunk of a Moreton Bay fig. It was a lovely relief. The evening might have remained one of predominantly watery impressions: of water shifting over knives; if he hadn’t eased his head back, and at once the stars began to ricochet off the branches in a galaxy of resumed activity.
So he shambled on, over the fallen fruit. He succeeded in hailing a taxi somewhere near the cathedral, and was whirled home, into that silence where he had spent half a lifetime begetting, and giving birth.
10
They were sitting at breakfast in the asbestos comp
artment which served as kitchen, the usual hugger-mugger of unwashed crockery and battered aluminium waiting at the sink. It was agreeable to prolong breakfast; though neither of them had ever admitted to enjoying its luxury, unless through irritation: which is another luxury. He particularly mistrusted indulgence in the wetter emotions from having to protect the gift still burning inside him. But at breakfast, while their habits were of the slacky instinctive, not yet of the obsessive kind, he did feel drawn to his sister Rhoda. He was not certain how she felt about it: but her more relaxed behaviour suggested she was in agreement with the essentials of their relationship, if not its details. Rhoda was at her most relaxed, her most cat-like, surrounded by her complacent cats, as she read the morning papers, particularly the advertisements and deaths.
It was like that the morning after the opening of Duffield’s Retrospective. He was wearing the nondescript dressing-gown which had outlasted the years, and would jolly well have to see him out in spite of its patina of food spots and paint smears, and general scumble of forgotten origins. It was so comfortable, and would have been a comfort, if you could afford to let yourself be seduced by comfort.
Rhoda, on the other hand, must have thrown away the old dark gown he remembered. Recently she had come out in a net-and-lace garment, which only Mrs Volkov could have created, in dusty pink. Probably it was its off-colour which made Rhoda’s gown look old from the beginning; but she was an old woman, after all, and in the pink confection the impression she gave was unfortunate: she reminded him of stale Turkish delight rolled in grey icing sugar. (What on earth had possessed her to doll herself up like this? Or was it Maman, reaching out from those last rooms in Battersea?)
The morning after the opening Rhoda sat reading the news. The deeper she got into the sheets the worse she always messed them up; and that morning she must have ordered all the papers: to read deliberately under his nose what they were saying about him.
Rhoda’s ankle clicked: still pretty neat; the veins, swollen in what passed for calves, hadn’t affected the ankle. ‘It seems to have been a success,’ she revealed.
‘That is what they say. It isn’t necessarily what they mean.’
‘Oh, I shan’t pretend it was an unqualified success.’
‘Not if I know the Telegraph.’
Her ankle went click click as she shucked the newspapers. ‘The Prime Minister appears to have made an extremely witty speech.’
‘Didn’t you hear it, then, last night when you were there?’
‘No. They were very kind. Mr. Honeysett found me and took me up on the daïs. I sat in a leather chair. While the speech was made. But I didn’t hear it. Everybody looked interested to see the painter’s sister. We were photographed for television. They wanted me to speak. But I couldn’t. Not even when they asked me questions. Because I wasn’t sure what you would have wanted me to answer, Hurtle.’
‘Poor Rhoda, you must have suffered.’
‘No. I’ve learnt not to suffer.’
She had got herself into training, no doubt, dragging that converted go-cart round the neighbourhood. Though health and age had forced her to give away the go-cart, the habit of endurance had stuck.
‘I understand the film will be shown tonight. Bernice Cutbush has invited me to go and view it on their set.’ Rhoda couldn’t resist picking up scraps of the vernacular. ‘You too, if you feel like it.’
‘No, thank you! Watch a funeral without a corpse?’
Rhoda laughed, and said: ‘Don’t tell me you’re becoming cynical, ’ trailing a sheet of the Herald through the bacon fat in front of her. ‘In any case, I stood in for the corpse.’
He got up and began the climb to his room. He could have wept for Rhoda, whom he heard putting down the paper by what sounded like handfuls of galvanized iron. Through the hall, even on the stairs, there was a smell of what she referred to as ‘cat pooh’: whereas what he wanted to convey was already rising above the animal—and human—bowel stenches: not that he hadn’t often been inspired by a successful stool, in surroundings of weatherboard and whitewash, under the Bignonia venusta.
He went upstairs. Where Rhoda’s martyrdom had been the daïs, stared at by human eyes and the camera, his was the block, made for his secret purpose and to his own specifications by Ron Cuppaidge the art student.
Now that he was so far improved in health he could dispense with the attendant archangel’s help in mounting the block, but needed, and probably would always need, someone to prime, and manoeuvre into place, the enormous blank boards.
Himself a blank at times, the live hand clamped by his knees, he would sit teetering on the edge of the bed, dreading the desert he had to cross. Experience never lessened the prospect of tortures, the possibility of failures, even death if the spirit refused to accompany him. Just as you can twist the tail of human love once too often, perhaps the creative spirit couldn’t be flogged into climbing that additional inch. In which case: o God, have mercy on us. (He would look round afraid somebody might be tapping his thoughts.)
On the morning after the big shivoo at the State Gallery, he, not Duffield the painter, was stranded in such a condition: his throat had never felt so parched; all the tributaries of his body had dried up: films were forming over his eyes; his mind, worse than passive, pricked in every direction like a pack of unthreaded needles scattering amongst the barren forms of furniture.
Downstairs, Rhoda had begun to bash away at the accumulated pans. How enviable are those to whom it is given to express themselves by scouring a saucepan: their art so contained, finite, yet lustrous. He would even have envied Rhoda the disgusting little cart she used to drag round the streets, with its gobbets of purple flesh and amorphous offal from restaurant bins. This morning he would almost have exchanged the dead weight, the gross deformity of his non-art, for Rhoda’s hump.
Once he got as far as the landing, and called out, though diffidently: ‘Rhoda? Can I be of any help with all that stuff you’ve got piled up?’ Then a little louder: ‘Rhoda?’
But she didn’t hear; and at once he was glad: not that it relieved his emptiness to know he could keep his shame a secret.
As he continued shuffling, sitting, getting up to look inside drawers, rummaging through junk, turning over derelict drawings, almost everyone was enviable: free to read newspapers, open letters, answer doorbells, waste their lives yarning on the telephone—happy human beings who hadn’t preserved themselves for a final statement of faith they probably wouldn’t be capable of making. Most of them would die in bed, not in desert places.
Rhoda, with her nose for failings, had smelt a rat some way back. ‘If you no longer read the papers, you’ll cut yourself off from life.’
‘I have more important things to think about.’
‘Well—in some ways—I expect it does no harm not to realize what a bonanza you’re missing out on.’
They were able to join in laughing at that one.
When Rhoda said: ‘And this big dishful of letters—aren’t you ever going to open them?’
‘No. Who would be writing to us? Nobody we want to hear from. And rates and income tax—we can recognize those easily enough.’
‘Yes, but there might be just that letter—that moment more delicious than any you’ve experienced yet—from somebody more fatale—more rejuvenating.’
She wasn’t going to tempt him. He swept up the lot and carried them out to the incinerator.
No. Not the lot. There was one: an air letter from the United States.
But it was a time-waster, from a woman asking him to discuss his paintings in connection with an essay she was writing for an intellectual magazine. At the end there was a touch which appealed to him: P.S. After reading this over I feel I should add: I’m not half as dry as I sound.
Rhoda asked at a later date: ‘That American letter, Hurtle—was it from Kathy?’
‘Kathy and I don’t need to write each other letters.’
‘Oh, but they’re nice! She writes such charming, affectio
nate letters to her mother.’
‘This was a letter from some American bluestocking.’
Rhoda asked in her driest voice: ‘Did you—in your broadminded days—ever try on a bluestocking?’ Immediately she burst into shrieks for her own wit, and he went out so as not to listen to them.
Was he as ludicrous as her outbreak of forced vulgarity seemed to imply? Achievement didn’t help reduce absurdity. Perhaps Rhoda was the only one who recognized this, and now, at the end, he recognized himself in the glass she was holding up to him; to the others he remained reason for admiration, for hate, for shy worship or plain honest indifference.
If he could have chosen, if, rather, he had developed the habit of prayer, he would have prayed to shed his needled flesh, and for his psychopomp to guide him, across the river, into an endlessness of pure being from which memory couldn’t look back.
But how bloody dishonest! As if he could ever wish to renounce his memories of the flesh even when renounced by its pleasures: the human body, unbroken by its own will, leaping and bucking to unseat, but rapturously, the longed-for, the chosen, though finally abstract rider; yellow light licking as voluptuously as tongues; green shade dribbled like saliva on nakedness; all the stickinesses: honey, sap, semen, sweat melting into sweat; the velvets of rose-flesh threatened by teeth; exhausted, ugly, human furniture, bulging with an accumulation of experience acquired in years or by a stroke of lightning.
The morning after the Grand Inquisition into the nature of his heresies, it was the furniture by which he began to rehabilitate himself. In and out of the upper rooms. Groping the no longer barren forms. Clutching when he misjudged his step. Smooth mahogany rocks, split open in places by time, in others by human vagary, disgust or desperation. Arabesques of cobweb, mildew bloom coming to organic life: lichens in their own right. Dust offering paths only taken before by fly or spider; over one unbroken expanse a rat must have dragged its tail.
Of all geographic features the great crater of a bath was by far the most tactile: higher up, the extinct geyser, with its spattering of verdigris and scattering of dead matches. The same bath, brown-stained, the bottom scarred where the enamel had worn off: they had intended to replace it and do the bathroom up; but he didn’t use it all that much, and Rhoda, unwilling to risk the stairs, owned a child’s hip-bath shoved out of sight in the conservatory.
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