by Kim Scott
As she stepped out into the hall, she could see Matthew’s room at the end of the corridor. The blind was drawn, but the bed was visible, neatly made, with four pillows at one end, a bedside table on one side only, and on it two books and a white metal light clipped to the edge.
‘I think I need to get going,’ she had told David when she sat back down in the sunroom.
He was remembering the editor of the paper when he had first joined. ‘He was completely straight. Middle-aged – well, probably the same as we are now – suit, tie, neat hair, very traditional, apart from the fact that he meditated. For half an hour every lunchtime. He would just shut the door and sit there, eyes closed. Everyone knew what he was doing, and not to disturb him, and no one ever mentioned it. But it was bloody strange. I mean, it was so unexpected from him.’ David topped up his glass. ‘He was the calmest, easiest boss I’ve ever had.’
‘I have to go,’ she said again, knowing she was going to be ignored.
But Matthew heard her. ‘You don’t look well.’ He was staring right at her, his eyes dark and still, intent and focused.
‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘I have another show soon and I’ve been working long hours.’
‘I know,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s at Gallery 4. I’ve been looking forward to it.’
In the car on the way home, she had asked David why he never listened to her, why they had to stay so long, it was insufferable, awful; and he had looked in the rear-vision mirror to where Evie was sitting, listening to everything they were saying.
‘Why was it awful?’ Evie had asked. ‘Didn’t you like Sienna’s dad?’
‘No,’ Ellen had lied. ‘I did like him.’
‘He certainly knew your form.’
Ellen glanced sharply at David, who grinned back at her.
At home, David took Evie straight to bed, dressing her in her pyjamas, while Ellen switched on the heaters.
‘She can’t wear summer pyjamas,’ she said when she came in to kiss Evie goodnight.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ David said.
‘It does,’ and Ellen began to unbutton the top, pushing David to one side.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He refused to move. ‘You’re just going to get her cold if you undress her again.’
‘I’m fine,’ Evie said, pulling the doona up over her chest.
‘You’re not,’ Ellen insisted, forcing the covers down. She could feel David’s arm on her wrist, holding her back, and she shook herself free. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, leave her alone,’ he said. ‘Let her go to sleep.’
But Ellen wouldn’t. With the flannel pyjamas under one arm, she continued to try to undress Evie, who kept saying that she was okay. It was only when David forced her away that she stopped, and she turned to shout at him, her mouth open and ready, only silencing herself as she realised where they both were. But outside in the hall, she hissed: ‘Why do you have to fight me?’
‘I don’t,’ he had said, perplexed.
Now, so many years later, she and David speak occasionally and have dinner together less often, sometimes at his house, sometimes at hers. They talk about Evie, or work, or friends they have in common, and then they clear the table, and one washes while the other dries. It is almost as it should be, close to the way it might have been if she had never made that one particular choice. She opened the door, she thinks. She had a look.
The Secret Lives of Men
The Forgeries
Robyn Mundy
‘Howzabout a walk on the wild side?’ Simon wound an arm around my waist, at the laundry trough where I was wet to the elbows in Lux flakes and nylon slips. ‘You and me and Frida,’ he said with a purr, to which I resolutely shook my head. Back then, the sixties, I couldn’t look past the artists I’d learned about at high school. ‘Diego?’ he put on an accent. ‘Pablo?’ He walked his fingers beneath my skirt, knowing I was ticklish and defenceless.
A month before our wedding anniversary, I was given the task of choosing an artwork which, as time went on, meant long lists and short lists and then a final list, from which Simon plucked a name from the bowl, me sometimes shrieking, not the Whiteley, what was I thinking! at which time we’d discard that scrap of paper and choose another.
We celebrated our first anniversaries with the French Impressionists – predictable, but I adored them. We’d head off in the beetle to Harts Hobbies & Art, having set aside a portion of our pay (Simon was an apprentice cabinet-maker, I a student nurse). We made a pact to leave with nothing if the poster print we’d ordered did not meet quality control. Though neither of us could claim to have seen an original – there wasn’t a museum of that kind within cooee of our small town – Simon inspected the edges of the print for registration (he’d spent a year at a printing press and knew about these things), while I had my art books from the library to confirm that the colours were true.
Simon’s uncle owned a good camera and slide projector. Once we’d taken photos of the print and had the slides developed, we projected the best onto a stretched canvas, fiddle-faddling until the image matched the size of the original. My part was done, except for the patience required to curb my excitement until the forgery was complete. Forgeries, we called them, two innocents too innocent for thoughts of fraudulent intent.
I was banned from viewing the work in progress other than at the first sitting, which consumed an entire evening. Simon traced the details in pencil with such concentration that his teeth appeared to clench an imaginary pipe, or paintbrush – he looked just like the real thing. He was so steady-handed, such a perfectionist that I’d have been proud to hang any one of those works in its unfinished state.
At weekends and each morning and when he could at lunchtimes, he’d be at his easel in our glassed-in porch, the poster taped to the wall for reference.
Each unveiling marked a year of our marriage, or vice versa as it came to feel, and while some couples might splurge on champagne and dinner out, I set our best tablecloth and we stayed in, the painting covered in the corner until we’d had dessert.
I can still summon the thrill at looking upon the rendered scene, a tidal wave of pride for Simon’s skill, any difference to the original beyond my scope. My husband would disrobe the painting as alluringly as he would undress me later in the night.
Where else, with the money we won in the hospital raffle, but Paris – in low season – to stand before icons we never dreamed we’d see, pretending we were rich, our days planned around visits to the Louvre, the National Gallery, never mind the queues and shuffling and stamping away the cold. On the first day I must have looked like a child fuelled on red cordial, racing from gallery to gallery, colliding with onlookers, feverish to spot each famous painting I knew so I could dash back to the start and look through them again. There I found Simon, standing before Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait in such an other world, he didn’t notice me beside him. ‘Yours is just as good,’ I squeezed his hand, at which he gave such an anguished look, I felt foolish and naive.
On our final week, seeking sun and warmth, we wound through the countryside of southern France, tootling along lanes in a rented campervan. Simon slowed and pointed; he pulled the van over beside a dry stone wall.
‘What is it?’ I searched the wall.
He motioned beyond to a field of stubble unremarkable but for a stack of old wood primed for a bonfire. ‘Picture frame,’ he said. ‘Looks like a beauty.’ It took until dark, feigning a stroll each time a car passed, to heave it free from the rest of those worm-infested timbers.
Ornately carved, we assumed it old, but one sniff of the musty, rickety thing and I’d have torched it myself if not for Simon’s persuasion. ‘A bit of TLC. You wait.’ We dragged it inside the van where he carefully extracted the old tacks that secured it, placing each in his pocket. Such sweet, simple pleasures then, our faces flu
shed with brazenness, whooping and tooting the horn as we motored away with our spoils.
Whatever vintage the frame, I only knew that once Simon restored the wood and pieced it back together, it became a masterpiece itself, fit to show off the best of the best.
It wasn’t even close to our anniversary when he announced he was painting something special to fit the frame. ‘Seurat?’ I quizzed. ‘O’Keeffe?’ For weeks I bellowed out old and new-found names with nothing but a not saying.
The finished painting stood covered in the corner, Simon jittery and unable to settle during the meal; he was that same anxious boy I’d sat next to in class when we were ten. It was with a wrench that I looked upon the work and laughed in disbelief, unable to hide my dismay. Don’t get me wrong, the painting was as skilful as any of the forgeries, only this was his creation, his own strange style, and signed with his name. All fog and gloom, the streetlight casting a frigid glow. Where was the colour and light he knew I loved? Maybe I’d have grown used to it if not for the familiar figure, head down, huddled beneath a nurse’s cape, scurrying flat-footed along the path. Gaunt, colourless: was that how he saw me?
His voice was flat. ‘That good, huh?’
I shrugged. I couldn’t speak. I don’t know you anymore, is what I thought. Me, my work, my life turned drab. Night Duty, he’d titled it. I felt short-changed – that beautiful frame. I wrestled my own boorishness: the effort he put in and I couldn’t be happy for him. The room felt as sharp as a packet of pins, both of us sensing some deep irrevocable change.
Weeks before our anniversary, Simon came in from the porch. ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore.’ I thought he meant another forgery. At the hospital, I would take a patient’s hand, sit quietly at their bedside, knowing they were dying. I watched my husband’s hand reach out for mine.
The parting was amicable enough. We each took three forgeries; the only question left was who would claim the final piece. By rights I should have relinquished it – I hated the painting, it was Simon’s creation, I’d never have hung it, then all the hours he’d spent restoring the frame. But each time I walked past the thing propped against the boxes, I felt a gritty defiance at letting it go scot-free. I resented that nothing I could do would set things right again; that this painting had somehow unspun the magic.
‘We could put two slips in a bowl,’ said Simon, which we did, and he drew the blank.
I’d turned thirty-five when Alec and I stood on a headland within view of the city to exchange our vows. While Alec wasn’t one for wanting children, in every other way he was a good match for me, thoughtful and kind – I never wanted for a thing. Simon, I’d heard, had also moved down to the city, and I once saw his name in connection with an art exhibition. I gathered he’d given away his trade.
Our patio dining seated twelve and in the warmer months we fell into an easy pattern of entertaining Alec’s colleagues and clients. After a meal, one of the wives requested a little tour, so we left the husbands, lazy from wine, to smoke and survey the harbour. One fellow tagged along, admiring our collection of art and Alec’s antiques. He slowed at the forgeries, his eyes shifting to the signatures. He looked at me askance. With Simon, I’d never felt compelled to explain, but in this house, everything we owned authentic, it came down to principle.
Just a bit of fun, I heard myself say, thinking, as we moved on, how a few flippant words can sap merit and worth and turn your youth, which hadn’t cared or even known the difference between genuine and imitation, into something trivial. Truth, before these transitory acquaintances, held its own deceit.
We shared thirty-three years, Alec and I, when I found myself widowed and alone, rattling around in what felt, without him, as lifeless as a mausoleum. The decision to downsize was easy enough, and I put a deposit on a luxury ground-floor apartment with good security, lawns and water views. But the prospect of winnowing belongings to fit the smaller place was something I couldn’t manage alone. I had no children to call on, no family left, only cousins in the country who I’d lost touch with long ago.
A clean sweep, my Alec would have called for.
I settled on an auction house that we’d dealt with before. Values and commissions were drawn up, a draft of the catalogue sent for my approval, the only addition a tribute to Alec. The sale was set for June.
I sat at the far end of a row where I could remain more or less anonymous, see forward and across the room, or turn to look behind. As ten o’clock drew near I felt an uneasy mix of nostalgia and nervous anticipation. When the doors opened I was taken aback by the throng that streamed in, young and old, bidding cards, catalogues, faces I knew that nodded or paused to say Hello.
I didn’t immediately recognise Simon as Simon. My first impression was of an old muso – puffy-faced, a drinker’s nose; he had an awful pallor. His hair was pulled back to a ponytail that could have been styled that way before it thinned and turned grey. Oblivious to my presence, he slopped past my row in frayed jeans and trodden-down sandals, his paunch filling out his shirt. I opened my catalogue to steady my nerves. What had I seen in him? Why was he here? Come to spy on my life with Alec, covet our success? These were our things. My day.
I couldn’t concentrate when the bidding began and the auctioneer’s voice sped away to a sprint. I fell behind, unable to jot the amounts as each item sold. I looked to Simon seated the other side, two rows in front. His arms rested on his belly, he stared at the floor; that glazed look went all the way back to our school days. It punched me through to the moment when he’d uncovered the final painting, our undoing, his silent rebellion against something that only now I recognised for what it was: an ordinary life. Perhaps the cry for change had been set in motion that first day in Paris, Simon transfixed before Van Gogh, seeing a quality I couldn’t, that the real thing commanded a life of its own. Perhaps, motoring away from the dry stone wall, both of us charged with the thrill of pilfering, he’d looked through the ornate picture frame to sheets of Formica and chipboard, a colourless town, to the prospect of years with me, a small town nurse with small town wants, each anniversary, each forgery a Munch’s Scream for the life he’d never have.
Well. Look at him now; look where it got him.
‘Lot fifty-one,’ the auctioneer called. I’d lost the page. I wanted Simon gone. He had no place here.
Oh, but he did. He did.
Simon shifted in his seat as the three forgeries were carried in and set on stands. I watched him shake his head – disdain for our life? Affront that his anniversary offerings were up for grabs? Hardly the spirit in which they were given. I hung them for forty years, I wanted to cry; I don’t have the space now. But I cringed with that sickening feeling of being caught out. It brought to mind the time Alec recognised a pair of ivory bangles he’d given me, worn by a girl I’d passed them on to.
The auctioneer declared the forgeries Museum Quality Original Reproductions. They created a stir through the crowd and he called for hush. I’d named a reserve of three thousand dollars each (see, I wouldn’t have let them walk). A bidding card went up and it was on. The Monet sold in less than a minute to a man at the front, for over six thousand. The Modigliani went for five, to a bright young thing whose arm shot up the instant she saw someone else bid. Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait – I should have kept it – became a volley between a rotund man near Simon and two fellows at the back, one of whom fell away when the bidding reached eight thousand. The duel turned into a battle of wills, the crowd delighting in it, me trying to look calm, the auctioneer performing his magic, the pauses lengthening, the hammer hovering, once … twice … all done at eleven thousand, six hundred dollars. People clapped while the buyer near Simon swivelled in his seat – a beaming porcelain clown into whose open mouth you might pop a ball.
I watched the back of Simon’s head for some sign of expression. Surely he’d be flattered, gratified. God, the thought struck me: perhaps he expected
a portion of the sale.
I sat rigid in my chair, prickling at what was next.
‘Lot fifty-four,’ the auctioneer called. The work was held up by two assistants and placed on an easel. ‘An original oil on canvas, Night Duty, by Simon Tarpin.’ The auctioneer lifted his glasses and looked my way. ‘Painted late 1960s, is that right, Mrs Westerway?’ Faces turned. I nodded dumbly. I couldn’t meet Simon’s stare.
‘Exquisitely finished,’ the auctioneer waited for the crowd to settle, ‘with a rare, fully restored mahogany frame, a fine example of early nineteenth-century French craftsmanship. An investment in its own right. Who’ll begin the bidding at ten thousand?’ He repeated the amount. There wasn’t a sound, not a movement through the room. He dropped the amount by a thousand. Someone coughed. Papers shuffled. Another thousand. Why hadn’t I nominated a reserve?
‘Come on, folks,’ the auctioneer held out his hands. ‘Hand-carved mahogany. Early nineteenth century.’ He waited. ‘Who’ll give me seven thousand?’ Someone gave a nervous titter. I held my breath. ‘Six,’ he said, in the tone of a parent losing patience with a child. ‘The frame alone is worth twice that price!’
His expression switched to one of flirty tease that I admit to being partial to in our dealings. He gestured to the previous buyer. ‘Toss Florence Nightingale and hang your Van Gogh in it.’
The room itself seemed to cackle. ‘Five hundred,’ the buyer cried back.
The auctioneer scanned the room for a follow-on bid. He saw me shake my head. ‘A comedian in every crowd,’ he said to the man and moved to the next lot.
Simon had seen what he’d come for. I watched the effort it took for him to rise from his seat – no one near offered to help. I thought to follow as he shuffled down the aisle. What could I have said? The look he gave me was the wounded flicker from an ill-treated dog.