Night Street

by Kristel Thornell

  Kristel Thornell grew up in Sydney, Australia. She has lived in Italy, Mexico, Finland and, most recently, in Canada and the United States. Her short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Meanjin, Southerly and The Fiddlehead.

  Thornell’s writing has been described as “elegant, potent and picturesque.” She uses language as painters might use light. Although Night Street is her first novel, it has already won numerous awards, including The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, the Dobbie Literature Award, the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist Award. Kristel Thornell lives in upstate New York.

  Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Kristel Thornell

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  First published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd.

  Cover images: Wet Evening (detail), c. 1927, by Clarice Beckett, courtesy of Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Victoria, Australia, www.castlemainegallery.com; and A sigh is just a sigh, ~BostonBill~, flickr.com.

  Cover design by Julie Scriver.

  Page design by Post Pre-press Group, Australia.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Thornell, Kristel

  Night street [electronic resource] / Kristel Thornell.

  Electronic monograph.

  Also issued in print format.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-746-0

  1. Beckett, Clarice, 1887-1935 — Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.4.T497N55 2012 823’.92 C2011-908558-5

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Wellness, Culture, and Sport.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  In respectful acknowledgement of Clarice Beckett, whose art

  and life drew me into this dream.

  To be alone seems at once so natural and yet so un-natural

  I’ve never understood it.

  Daniel Keene, Two Shanks

  ONE

  Open Air

  TWO

  The First Blow

  THREE

  Seascape

  FOUR

  The Storm

  Night was approaching, cool tattered mist blowing in from the bay. She appeared in an area of transparent air, drawing along a wheeled object the size of a largish dog. From a distance, she made a perplexing spectacle, seeming slightly misshapen, some hybrid creature. Getting the contraption onto the beach was not so awkward, the tide having retreated to leave the sand compact and smooth. She pulled the thing, stopping, and pulling again, in search of the right position.

  Out alone in the lowering light, with just the company of her equipment, she was at ease and people could stare if they wanted to. There were few people on the winter beach at that time, in any case. The only hardy or unusual enough were a solitary-looking man in a battered hat and a trio of fishermen accustomed to her presence. She waved to these unsociably, keeping her mind for herself, guarding it. Ceremonial, she was taking her time. She had an image of herself moving through the waning silvery twilight in her dowdy skirt and cardigan—but it was flickering, uncertain; she was already losing track of who she was, of Clarice. The marine air was potent with the odour of kelp, between life and decomposition.

  When she had chosen the spot, the purpose of her inanimate companion was revealed; a lid was lifted and treasures removed from its belly. Then the no-nonsense business of preparing the palette, and a wash was done in umber and next a brush had begun to pursue the colour of the moment: the unsettling, yielding blue of that precise evening’s gravitation to darkness. She worked quickly, because she preferred it so and time was always short. Almost instantly, she fell into the self-hypnosis that resembles dream-filled sleep but is in fact a ruthless wakefulness. This was like a game. And so very serious.

  She stepped back, at last. A simple scene. So deceptively bare that most would see nothing there. A curve of flat, open bay draped in dwindling radiance. The horizon line, barely perceptible, joining the two blue-mauve masses of sky and gently undulating sea. Everything soft, softening. Nightfall. The borderland time, neither here nor there, when the world, though seen less exactly, is more fully felt. The hazy edges made this scene appear malleable. Liable to change.

  Clarice took another step back from her easel, and mist dropped like a fine curtain into the gap between the artist and the painted view, hiding it. Her figure, too, became confused with the mist shrouding the beach like unearthly smoke.

  ONE

  Open Air

  1

  She was already thirty and beginning to think of herself, with intermittent irony or embarrassment, as an artist, when she first heard Meldrum speak. An odd feeling of prescience told her he would influence her life. It turned out that he was the closest she would come to the tantalising world of European art, despite his decision to bring no reproductions back from abroad. He abhorred the avant-garde, rejecting even the Impressionists, but did show his class the copies he had made of artists such as Corot, Turner and Chardin. She would always love him for that. And possibly hate him a little, too, as you do when a person seems to have lifted off the top of your head, reached in and plucked out some of your choicest fantasies, then brazenly passed them off as someone else’s.

  Meldrum gave her permission to trust what she saw, discounting what did not strike her as important. Perhaps this was the same as saying that he allowed her to consider herself sane: if she was looking properly, she could take what she saw seriously, without suspecting herself caught in a net of private delusion. No small matter. He believed absolutely in sight, believed that by faithfully recording the impressions received by the eye, in the order of tone, proportion and colour, painting could render an accurate, scientifically constructed illusion of reality.

  Tones came first. Apt and beautiful, the word tone for describing the stages of intensity of light and shade, gradations in luminosity being indeed every bit as subtle and sliding as the moods of a voice.

  The lecture Meldrum presented that day to the Victorian Artists’ Society was on his controversial, scientific approach to art. The man was as forceful as the ideas he was expounding. Meldrum was blatantly seduced by his own sober charisma; he represented an original, compelling ideal and you could not risk closing your eyes to it. Of course, the mythology surrounding him could not have been what it was had he himself not been a great believer in it. He was fabulously authoritative, splendidly convincing.

  Without being tall or particularly robust, Meldrum was imposing in his black suit. In his early forties, he seemed barely middle-aged in nineteen seventeen and it was clear he was to be a significant player on the stage of Melbourne art. His pointed, still-dark beard, long, strong nose and close-set, probing eyes showed that he was a man of Reason. Waving his arms about behind a lectern (he might have picked up this loquacious gesturing during his French years or from his Gallic wife), he was like some Noah prophesying the flood, striving to convince a herd of backward, indolent animals to accompany him to salvation. He talked down to you from the height of his certainty, his intellectual and therefore moral righteousness; curiously, the effect was of a very sombre kind of sweet-talking,
leaving you intent on embarking for whatever destination he was setting off for, signing up, enlisting in that pacifist’s company. There were those who judged him harshly for his unmanly stance in relation to the war, but Meldrum was the hero of a different, equally vivid adventure. Art was a deadly important cause to which one could give oneself honourably. Clarice agreed with him.

  Not quite naming the National Gallery School where he himself had got his start, Meldrum insinuated, with the force of his fierce freethinking logic, his low opinion of airless, fossilised, academic teaching and mentioned in passing that he had his own art school. By the end of that hour in the crammed hall fidgety with excitement, she had decided she was going to desert the Gallery School for his. She had completed her three years in drawing, once winning second prize, and been offered a place for a fourth in oil painting. She had intended on accepting it—until now. Alongside the apparition of this uncommonly impassioned Melbourne Scotsman, the prospect of the Gallery School, with its plodding rigidity, suddenly turned stolid, stifling: she had to be Meldrum’s student.

  For how long would she study with him? A year? She suspected that most of what she had to learn, she would have to teach herself. This was no doubt the case with everything.

  2

  When Meldrum finally noticed Clarice, truly registered her existence, she had been attending his Saturday afternoon class at the Hardware Chambers in Elizabeth Street for nearly a month.

  Each week, after the instruction was over, he would use the final part of the class to make a round of the students, pronouncing on the paintings they had brought along, hopefully, timorously, for his critique. She happened to be the last for him to get to that day, and the lesson had just ended. There was a swift exodus, a rushing-off of students back to their less artistic lives, the few girls screening the daring lustre in their eyes with insouciance; most of them were alternately animated and insecure. Now only Meldrum, Clarice and Ada were left. Ada was shadowing Clarice, and clearly wanted the two of them to be friends, though Clarice was not drawn to form anything but a light alliance.

  ‘I’ve already seen your work,’ Meldrum told Ada, efficiently dismissing her. He was not worried about giving offence; his sense of purpose did not allow it. ‘I’ll speak with Clarice now.’

  With a darting look at Clarice, Ada hurried to be gone.

  And they were alone: the great teacher, his new pupil and her two small panels. Meldrum was somewhat subdued, having worn himself out rhapsodising about Velázquez.

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said.

  Quavering but feeling also queerly disembodied, Clarice laid them alongside one another on her easel, a still life and a landscape. It was the first time she had brought Meldrum a landscape. The decision to do so was a little rebellious, a slight provocation, because he maintained that students should stick to indoor work for at least two years before earning the right to take on wily natural light. But her interest in light’s slipperiness was stubborn; it was a difficulty she wanted to be equal to.

  Meldrum’s eyes flicked over the landscape, did a double take and retreated to the still life, as if the first painting could be ignored.

  ‘Hmm.’

  He took two steps back, two more and another two, and settled his chin in the V of his right hand. He went rigid with concentration. The wise man pondering. Some small though strangely spacious amount of time passed. Then he shifted, coming in very close to the painting and scrutinising its surface, coldly analytical.

  The still life was one of few she had completed that came close to satisfying her; generally she wanted to escape from interiors as fast as possible and be out in the open air, in real limitless space and tempting, fickle light. However, this was not, she hoped, uninteresting. It was not neatly domestic, not obvious, though the little assortment of objects she had portrayed was common enough. A vase of ranunculi, a glass bottle, an empty oriental vase, a string of coral beads. The flowers were sanguine and yellow, their dark centres echoing the almost-black background. The transparency of the glass was like a watery phantasmagorical after-image.

  But the eye was drawn to the coral beads.

  Meldrum made a tentative sound of approbation, but then produced another sound, shorter, higher.

  In the foreground, the beads were familiar, recognisable as beads, yet also startling. Their red hue had the intensity of coral, glowing with warmth. The beads looped forward like a garter. Or a noose. They led the eye into the painting’s low heart, twisting, coaxing you further back before finally coiling, serpentine. The transmuting coral beads were charged.

  At least, this was how they seemed to Clarice—but it was often hard to predict the effect a work would have on others; would they be stirred? The edge of shock in Meldrum’s silence, however, told her that he saw it. He was affected.

  ‘You’ve used the paint well,’ he said finally. ‘You haven’t just pushed it around with your brush like most students do.’ He sounded troubled. ‘Nice and thin. No superfluous brushstrokes.’

  She lifted her face, absorbing the compliment, waiting for the verdict.

  ‘Quite alright,’ he continued slowly. ‘I wonder about that red, though.’

  ‘For the beads?’

  He nodded. ‘Was that exact?’

  ‘Exact?’

  ‘True. It seems a bit high-keyed. A bit strong?’

  The criticism she had heard from him before was solidly dismissive, sharp, even barbed. It was odd to observe him lenient.

  She spoke in a rush, without reflecting that he was probably not used to defiance: ‘No, I think it’s right. That’s what I saw.’

  He looked at her as if just roused from the solace of a thick sleep. And she gazed back, not finding it in herself to be falsely modest or evasive with this teacher she admired. They measured each other up. He was not a ladies’ man, though perhaps he noticed her also as a woman.

  ‘It’s the effect I wanted.’

  ‘That was the actual colour?’ He was testing her.

  ‘As I saw it. Yes.’

  ‘The draughtsmanship is good,’ he said carefully. ‘You studied with McCubbin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you took drawing classes before that?’

  ‘As a child. There was a Miss McFarlane.’

  ‘Ah.’ He half smiled, as if acknowledging that there was always a Miss McFarlane, in some shape or form. ‘And she identified your aptitude?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly more vulnerable. ‘But I’ve always drawn.’

  ‘I see.’ His intonation almost ironic, faintly entertained— not disparaging. Meldrum turned to consider her landscape.

  A dim city street in fog or fine rain. This could have been a view through a mesh of eyelashes, or captured by some instrument tenderer than the eye. There were parked motors and a few people on a footpath, though they were hardly there, the human figures, just hinted at. There was an awning and a sign attached to a building, likely a theatre; these adorned with flecks of orange and yellow, electric lights. Other small lights, some the headlamps of approaching cars, were dotted spectrally through the dewy blur of an evening.

  He did not speak for a while, and then he observed, ‘Interesting. This is quite modern, isn’t it?’

  Modern, related to art, was usually a dirty word in his mouth and now it had to be coming, the reprimand.

  Instead: ‘You are not new to landscapes, I gather?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted—or was it a boast?

  He looked at her again, seeing her as she had scarcely been seen before. Quietly, he said, ‘You’ve rendered the tonal values sensitively.’ More reluctantly, ‘And overall, you’re a fine colourist.’

  He wanted to criticise it, rebuke her, she understood this, but he was not sure how to go about it. He seemed disarmed. It was a singular experience.

  ‘It’s modern. But I think I see what you’re after, I think I do.’

  Her teacher did not warn Clarice away from landscapes, back to safer indoor terrain, though she im
agined he was asking himself if she might be a little mad. It was much more than she had hoped for, a victory, maybe the beginning of an awkward respect. She was incredulous and wanted to shout.

  ‘I look forward to seeing where your work will take you,’ he said. ‘I mean, once your style has settled down.’ And this was his way of reasserting his authority, the final sign that her paintings had shaken him.

  They were not quite friends after that, but their exchanges held the suggestion of a friendship, of a stern, restrained kind. Meldrum marked the backs of his students’ paintings with a grade, A, B or C. Clarice took his hard-won marks to heart, and before turning over a painting to see what she had earned, she was apprehensive. She began to receive a few As, then mostly As, and she never had a C. She had heard him declare women incapable of giving themselves completely to art, lacking a propensity for solitude. But his behaviour contradicted such unoriginal and limited beliefs. He sometimes praised Clarice over the boys and used her paintings in class as examples. He seemed now to consider her his star pupil.

  3

  Miss McFarlane came to the house in Casterton above the Colonial Bank once a week for a year to give Clarice and Louise a drawing lesson. Mum had met her through the church choir and formed the opinion that she would benefit from some extra income; she had only a few private students and it seemed was not very well-off. Mum also believed in the value of creative occupations for one’s leisure time, in artistic accomplishments for girls and women. She was attracted to Culture, associating it with elegant grandeur and civilised pleasantness. She herself had painted a little, before Clarice’s memory began, and two souvenirs of this foreign time, watercolours, graced the walls of her bedroom when her children were small. Clarice stared at these for long periods, enthralled by the watery, slightly smudged look of them. One was of crimson rhododendrons in a green vase. The other, of a single bird-of-paradise flower that floated in the air. The areas of colour were bright and gay; they gave you a happy jolt or else grated on you.