Clarice had once overheard Mum say to Henrietta, the maid, ‘Clarice is a natural drawer.’ Mum’s soft voice even more whispery than usual, as if she were telling a secret. Proud but wary.
By the time of the lessons with Miss McFarlane, when she was ten, Clarice had seen that Mum’s watercolours were only prettyish and slightly good. This hurt a bit. She still enjoyed gazing at the bird of paradise, the better of the two: it did remind her of the flower—dazzling, both flower and bird, with that stiffly birdlike attitude, watchful and distant.
‘The girls are artistic,’ Mum liked to tell company. ‘They take after me.’ A facility for creating likenesses had been identified in each of them. Clarice drew relentlessly; Louise, when bored or wanting attention. She was four years younger and babyish. Clarice had never been that babyish, she believed, and neither had the little one, Paul, who, a year younger than Louise, had more of a right to be. He rarely drew, but when he did, it was scenes from his own imagination, with a great frightening strength, objects or creatures colliding, or poised in an intense stand-off. The girls were encouraged to sketch flowers, corners of their home or each other. The latter held little appeal; they were more inclined to draw Mum, desperately competing for her approval. It was better later in the day, if she sat reading or embroidering, her face not tight, public and symmetrical anymore but drooping, her eyes more searching and sometimes slightly pained. Usually, though, she insisted on posing dressed up, hair freshly done and wearing her expression for the mirror, half smile and half moue. You could not draw her properly like that. Louise gave up as soon as she had the mouth too large or the eyes too close, and even Clarice lost interest quickly. She was uneasy drawing Mum, wishing the mother in the picture to be beautiful, to shine with easy unconditional love. So much simpler to draw objects, houses, plants or the cat, Daffy. It had been decided that Paul would not participate in the lessons with Miss McFarlane. Perhaps he did not want to, or perhaps it was because his drawings never looked like anything you recognised, seeming to belong in dreams you would wake from afraid; their parents said he was too little, though they also occasionally described him as precocious.
Mum greeted Louise’s efforts as triumphs. It was hard for Louise to sit still and concentrate; if she did so for the time it took to finish a drawing, then this was an achievement. Mum and Louise both fought against quiet, needing to be busy and to have other people around them to be cheerful. Mum said, glowing, ‘Louise is very vivacious.’ There were sometimes graceful details in Louise’s drawings, but she ruined them by not looking carefully for long enough. Clarice’s drawings were also praised, joylessly, and she turned over in her head the comment about being a natural drawer. A compliment—but not. Meaning that she did not have to try, that drawing well just came to her.
The drawing did come to her. It came because she was waiting for it; she was prepared. At times, she tried so hard that there was nothing left in her afterwards. It could be exhausting to look in that way. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ Mum might say, kissing her forehead at bedtime. ‘My introvert. We need to bring you out of yourself a bit, don’t we?’ Introvert may have come from Father, who liked to sum people up, often ending a conversation: ‘. . . Well, he’s an expert’ or ‘. . . an incompetent’ or ‘. . . a liar.’ Drawing was being in herself. If you came out of yourself, where would you be?
Miss McFarlane was refreshing, like half-light, so different to other women Clarice had met. Though she was an adult, she did not give the impression of being completely grown up. Her plain dresses were worn with a straight, supple back. She was comfortingly and thrillingly serious. And she was also beautiful, actually, in a bare fashion, except for her extravagant dark-red hair that was out of a fairytale. This was restrained in a very neat bun, as if someone had angrily brushed and pulled it hard into place for her; the bun loosened over the course of an hour, fine silken tendrils making a gaol break.
The hour felt longer than an hour, slower, floaty—then it was crushingly over. Clarice was always grieving for the last lesson and starving for the next. Lesson was a funny word for it, because there were no real commands and you did what you would have chosen to do yourself. You could be ‘moony’. Slowly circling the desk at which the girls sat, Miss McFarlane made suggestions if they were stuck, but these were light and did not upset. She said they would find their own way with art, if they were patient and committed. Sometimes she spoke of perspective, something Clarice thought she mostly knew—had suspected, at least, even if she had not had a word for it before or felt it needed one; the more the word was in her mind, the more complicated things got and she was likely to confuse herself and make a mess.
Miss McFarlane’s hands were what Clarice adored most about her. Unless they hovered or fluttered a little, with curiosity, she kept them folded together under her breast, or placed them behind her back, one hand holding one elbow. They were careful and decided. Her long fingers had intelligence, though probably many of the things they knew, they would keep to themselves.
If the teacher was pleased with you, she did not flatter, did not gush, as Mum did; you believed her. Maybe she considered Clarice capable of more. For example, she often gave them different subjects to study. Clarice’s might be a surprising branch with a bulbous bit on it like a knuckle, bark peeling off or disorienting colours, and Louise’s an easy common flower. One afternoon, after settling Louise with a dainty rose, Miss McFarlane took a seashell from the big floppy bag she always had with her, and placed it before Clarice.
She worked at her drawing in a state of extreme nervous concentration. Finally, sweating, she saw that her seashell was too small on the page. Not much of a seashell. Odd and silly, as if she had scribbled. It resembled a cloud, more than anything. Her throat turned narrow and sore, her nose burning, as if she had breathed in water, swimming.
Miss McFarlane leaned over the desk. She laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder; it exuded gratification. Clarice was confused, and slowly it dawned on her that this was a special message: Miss McFarlane had been ambitious for her and found her worthy. She struggled to see her seashell as the teacher might. Did the clumsy shape promise something, the way a seashell did? Make you think of something much bigger? She was not sure. But how marvellous that to fail could be a kind of success; it was entering a world with rules that were impossible to predict.
Miss McFarlane smelled as if she had eaten an orange without washing her hands afterwards. ‘Very nice,’ she said of Louise’s fancy, hurried rose. Perhaps it too was a success, if you saw it differently.
Clarice wanted to be kind to Louise. It would not take anything away from her. ‘Lovely,’ she added.
Louise could tell that something important had passed between the other two. ‘Show me that,’ she said skittishly, and Clarice’s desire to be kind hollowed.
‘No.’
Louise, strong and determined, snatched her strange seashell away.
‘Give Clarice her drawing.’ Not exactly hard, Miss McFarlane’s voice, but meaning business.
With passionate indifference, Louise crumpled the edges and left a profaning grey thumbprint before surrendering it; she had to leave her mark. The final flourish was a plaintive smile.
The best revenge was ignoring her. But it was difficult to look away from her dark hair, pink skin, and eyes that were lively when she was happy, which was most of the time. Vivacious.
The teacher had gone, Mum seeing her to the door and Clarice hanging back, not wanting to watch. Louise was in their bedroom, singing, freed. It was such a relief to have Louise in a different room, with space clarifying where each of them ended.
Striding to the kitchen, Mum called, ‘Why don’t you go and lay out your clothes with your sister?’
Some of Mum’s friends and their husbands were coming for dinner, and she was propelled by the contented anxiety of all this; Father was less fond of company, but from time to time he indulged her, sulking a little. Clarice loitered in the hallway, marooned somewhere be
tween the drawing lesson and the paler activities that lay ahead. She was trying to ignore Mum’s conversation with Henrietta, but made out, ‘I feel awfully sorry for her, without a family of her own. She’d be so lonely.’
‘Did her husband pass away?’ Henrietta asked reverently.
‘No, no. A spinster, poor dear. Daffy, out of the kitchen. Scat!’
The cat loped into the hallway on three nimble legs. A rabbit trap had stolen her fourth. Daffy gave Clarice a quick look that suggested raised eyebrows, then slipped, yellow-grey eyes emptying, into the frame of mind in which human matters were irrelevant.
‘But she’s attractive.’
Miss McFarlane?
‘Yes, isn’t she? That auburn hair. Bad luck, I suppose. She never met the right one.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘She could still, if she keeps her wits about her. She has a neat little figure that lots would envy. But she can’t wait forever.’
Miss McFarlane; not married. Clarice was shocked by Mum’s superior tone, Henrietta’s Poor thing.
Amazingly, the windows in the front room, when she went to them, framed Miss McFarlane, who was still on Henty Street, outside the bank. Rummaging in her floppy bag. Had she lost something? The teacher looked as if she were talking to herself in her own head, thinking no one was observing. There was nothing unlucky in her appearance, certainly not in her dignified hands that were perfumed from an orange. Her beauty was not on account of her hair—that was somehow the least of it—but of there being nothing extra to her. She was gentle and stark, like silence. Spying, Clarice was a little frightened, as you can be of silence, even though you want it.
Miss McFarlane found what she was looking for, or remembered where she had left it, and was on her way. Clarice imagined the room that she lived in: it would not be in one of Casterton’s more handsome homes, such as their own above the Colonial Bank; you would probably need a morose, bossy bank-directing husband for that. A modest room in which to loiter and draw in a restful half-light, eating fruit or just lying on the floor, face turned to the carpet. Perhaps with a cat, which would play only when in the mood.
When Miss McFarlane left for New Zealand to be near an ailing relative, Clarice mourned.
4
The day Miss McFarlane was framed by the front windows, so private and contained, searching then satisfied, could it have been then that Clarice realised there were roads you might choose over marriage, roads involving art? Before she got to Meldrum’s classroom, she had received several proposals or near-proposals. She had come out at eighteen, her mother cooing over the official photograph for which she had scrubbed up so well, the implication being that she could be attractive more often, if only she would try. Louise commented that she was diaphanous in it, and laughed; Louise thought Clarice considered herself above everyone else, ridiculously ethereal, or something of the sort.
The first offer came the week after the photograph was taken, from an acquaintance of the family, Jim. When they used to vacation at Beaumaris, not imagining they would one day live there, Jim, his younger sister Nellie, Louise and Clarice all played together on Sandringham Beach, as children do, by turns improvising and regimented. Little Paul, who was slightly different in a way the adults, without explaining it, clearly found embarrassing and oppressive, never penetrated the games. Jim and Nellie had been judged good playmates because their father was an engineer and their mother a pious person, apparently, who kept a flawless house in Brighton. Jim was kindly and not unimaginative, with a good instinct for the arrangement of interesting driftwood or shells and a pleasant, light manner of teasing you out of a funk if you were sad.
But as can happen, he had flattened out in the process of growing older and trying to make himself into a man, and by the time he started coming to ‘visit’ them at Casterton, he had a hardened posture and the makings of a cocksure swagger he was developing. A shame. There was no perspective to him anymore, nothing to look back into, no vista. Finding him rather insipid, when the proposal came, she turned him down. Mum was horrified; he was going to be an engineer, following in the proud paternal footsteps, with a bright future, et cetera, and Father thought him an upright citizen—high praise.
Nothing after Jim for years, then, in the way of attention from men. That is, other than the usual games of glances— at social functions, in the street—driven by off-balance impulses. She was sometimes prey to romantic daydreams; a man’s quality of gaze or gesture could set off an odd quickening of her pulse, a piquant fancy, which usually deflated quickly.
The next open expression of interest in her came from the distinguished Mr Dagdale. She and Louise had been allowed to leave home to live in St Kilda, at Elenara, a guesthouse on Fitzroy Street, so they could attend the Gallery School. For Clarice, this was all intoxicating, but Louise’s interest in study was half-hearted at best and she had immediately begun to play with the idea of dropping out. Mr Dagdale was often on their tram, going to or coming from the city. Clarice quite admired the clean, unobtrusive way he inhabited the fresh or softened creases of his pinstriped suits, and the diligence in his reading of newspapers, however his attraction to her felt courteously distant. It may have been that this distance was not on his side of the line that separates two people, but on hers. He delivered his proposal in a hushed monotone, standing on Fitzroy Street, his formal figure set pleasingly against the Cricket Ground, almost silhouetted; she had no notion of his substance. The sunset was beginning. The changing light made her think of getting down to the beach. His hands looked reliable, and rose-coloured reflections moved over the lenses of his glasses, but she was distracted by the saffron cloud formation above him—vast and majestic, like some recumbent god. Though she did not mean to offend him, she was brusque in her reply. Mr Dagdale folded his newspaper carefully before he walked away. Looking back on it, she would realise that she had been cold, possibly cruel.
The next offer—or almost-offer—of marriage was a more significant matter (for Clarice, at least: she did not know what she might have meant to Mr Dagdale). Thomas was a fellow boarder at Elenara, well ensconced when the sisters arrived, having been there for some years already. It was alleged he was in his forties, and a lifelong bachelor. Certainly, he was not very outgoing but had the attitude of one observing from the sidelines, which is perhaps why Clarice found herself warmly disposed towards him.
The first time they passed on the pretty, carved staircase, he expressed an interest in the sketchbook and boards she had with her. She showed him a couple of things and he was thoughtful and appreciative; he went on to tell her that he sometimes consulted art books at the Public Library. She liked that he was enthused by art and took her seriously. He was lanky and slightly stooped, his hair very ginger, his face grave.
‘Would you like to come up for a cup of tea?’ he asked. This became their custom. The cups of tea were accompanied by impressive sweets, often Spanish, treacherously crumbling, enormously sugary concoctions made from pulverised nuts. He obtained them through his family’s business—the importation of exotic foods and luxury items, such as the weighty bricks of soap from the south of France he once gave her—that was run by his older brother. They had lost money in the nineties, but there must have been plenty left over because there was never any evidence of Thomas doing a day’s work. He tried to enlist when the war broke out but had not passed his medical; there was a problem with his hearing. After this, he abruptly changed his mind about the war, about war in general. ‘I was suffering from a patriotic delirium,’ he confided, suggesting that his own infirmity had saved him from unimaginable horrors. Clarice nodded, indeed unable to imagine them, and said nothing. She herself had a hazy sense that nationhood should not be invoked to condone violence. Once she saw him on the banks of the Yarra, amid a group listening to what she thought was a communist speech; she did not join them, though for a moment she considered it. She planned to investigate politics, one day when she was less engrossed by the river, less troubled by how to b
ring it onto her board. Thomas seemed to settle into a kind of cheerful pessimism that only confirmed him as an epicurean and an aesthete.
Giving onto the Catani Gardens, where the rotunda, the palms and the pines, their tops like elongated drifting clouds, were all so elegantly outlined at dusk, Thomas’s rooms were among the nicest at Elenara. They were clearly a bachelor’s residence but were attractively chaotic, littered with books (Henry Lawson, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Karl Marx) and gramophone records (Satie, Debussy, American jazz), biscuit tins, and invariably a saucer bearing a strainer clogged with swollen dark tea-leaves in a tannin-rich puddle. The first time she came, he insisted Clarice take a chaise longue patterned with red flowers. Impossible to imagine his angular length arranged along this piece of furniture. Keeping primly to the edge, she sat achingly straight-backed. The next time, however, resting on one elbow, she tentatively half reclined.
‘Is this what psychoanalysis is like?’
‘Tell me anything that comes into your head,’ he said, with a wonky smile.
‘Must I talk?’
‘No, of course not. Have a nap, if you like. Don’t mind me.’
During the following visit, she slipped off her shoes and stretched right out on the chaise longue. Early on, with Thomas, she might have been testing just a bit her ability to attract him; she was quite new to the effect she might have on a man. Would he be noticing her ankles and calves as she lay there? But soon she stopped asking herself such questions and was natural with him and rather serene in his room. She enjoyed his company, his relaxed manner. They developed a routine for saying goodbye. When she was ready to go, Clarice sat up and slowly put on her shoes. Then she stood at the window, looking out. Thomas came to stand beside her for a minute or two, close enough that their arms sometimes touched. It was companionable.
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