‘I’ll tag along,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
She dawdled, packing up. He was behind her.
She turned and . . . yes. He—Arthur—was at the back of the room, leaning towards the panel she had hung to dry. He was studying it.
She thought he blushed as she came near.
‘You have quite an eye,’ he said.
8
The low sky thickened, like a white sauce reducing in a pan. Clarice and Arthur walked behind the others. Wisps of conversation reached them, a mention of Freud. Someone was doggedly analysing last night’s dream.
‘You have an umbrella,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you have far to go at the other end?’
‘No, not far.’ She heard her voice, feeble and intent on lightness. ‘Anyway, I don’t mind rain.’
‘I’m the same myself. People are always complaining about the weather. I like any weather.’
She nodded. It was necessary, safer, to be sparing with words. As if they were spies, every element of an exchange and the interplay between the elements had to be evaluated. She had not felt this before with a man. He seemed to be trying to adjust to the rhythm of her stride. She listened to the city, people packing up shop, heading home or for a drink, rushing to catch trams or trains, pausing at doors that were entrances or exits, depending on the direction of one’s intention.
Up ahead, Henry was evoking a dream in which he was a king. He expounded on the kingly trappings, fine clothing, jewels and several buxom wives. It did not have the feel of a true dream. An inaudible, evidently bawdy detail provoked guffaws. The party atmosphere was Arthur’s doing. It was his confidence, his casual splendour. They were not brave enough yet to talk freely to him, but he agitated them.
‘I wouldn’t know how to tell a dream,’ Clarice offered. ‘To put words to it.’
‘No. Probably wiser not to.’
She watched a man catch a hat the wind had pulled off his very smooth, bald head.
‘We have a daughter,’ Arthur added, after a while.
‘Oh. And you enjoy painting?’
‘I don’t know if enjoy is the word. It’s new for me.’
She had begun to tremble earlier at the studio, when she sensed him behind her and then saw him looking avidly at her board. But the trembling was moving to her knees, spreading through her abdomen and chest, her hands and even the bones of her face; the breath in her was distressed. Though she could not have imagined it, she saw now that she had been waiting for this, for something elemental to take command of her body. Was this love?
‘I live with my parents,’ she said. ‘I sort of look after them.’
They had been facing straight ahead, but—briefly—he glanced sideways at her. She wondered whether her eyes were greener or browner at that moment, if it mattered, what kind of a woman he glimpsed.
9
A month had passed since his arrival in the studio. Already, though they were only cautiously friends, she knew much about him, collecting facts. He was a shy painter. Painting appeared to be the one area in which he was shy. He was unhurried, loose in himself, most of the time. His stance related easily to the ground beneath him. He walked strongly, seeming to expect a steady flow of good luck. He observed the moving shapes of the sky in the way of country people. He took control of a room without trying. He was a relaxed talker and a teller of stories, loving to entertain a group and quite humorous when the mood took him. Not talking was not a problem for him, however, as it can be for those whose talk is smooth. Silence flattered him like a high-class suit, a generously positioned lamp.
‘Out there’, as he sometimes said, he was a lawyer and you imagined him in this role as trenchant and formidable, always winning his cases. In fact, it turned out he was rather renowned, his name often in the newspapers. Whereas in the quieter world of painting, he was an unknown and a neophyte, feeling his way. It caught Clarice’s attention: he had reduced himself to this. He chose to be unsure, to proceed unarmed, surrendering to the experiment. He was humbled and perhaps a little afraid with a paintbrush, which he held solemnly and also self-mockingly, as if it were a mast bare of flag and he could represent only his own dreamed country. Arthur the man, keen to be a schoolboy again in Meldrum’s classroom. He was both a natural and a self-trained watcher, the good kind; he had sensitivity and maybe a scholar’s humility.
And she had seen his wife. Bella. In a spotted, black-belted dress. Not the child, thankfully. But the Mrs in her spotted dress, the wifely existence of whom could not be denied. His other half—which was not right, as he was so frighteningly whole on his own. Whole, yet questing, his gaze bruising what it passed over.
Arthur was a whetstone keeping her sharp, over-alert, perverting her nights so they became a wakeful, sickly, queerly self-satisfied torture. The nights could be difficult. But they ended with a morning-to-be like this one, the fragrant world latent in the reddish dark and the cart in her hand rolling single-mindedly on its wheels towards the sea. When Clarice got to Black Rock, the waves were gentle, nocturnal yet, almost soundless. And she was besotted. Besotted with the sea and besotted with Arthur Blackburn.
A visual imagination can be a scourge and, with her mind’s eye, she saw scenes she would rather not have been privy to: Bella’s hair being brushed by lamplight, the ripe swelling of her belly with his child, their rapturous intimacy. It seemed unfair that a woman should have a name meaning beautiful, as if she had the monopoly on beauty. Clarice had not found Bella stunningly attractive, not even particularly comely, however she doubted her own perception. There had to be rare loveliness in a woman with such a lucky name and destiny. Perhaps it lay in a detail not immediately obvious. The sinuous volumes of her thighs. Her warm, private smell. Or—painful to consider—some quality of her heart.
Clarice was wretched from wrong, incessant thinking and under its spell. She was often cruel to herself in those days, vindictive, punishing herself in little, secret ways, pinching the flesh of her own arm or biting her tongue that threatened to speak. She was brutally exacting with her art, hating most of her paintings, once they were complete. But she was still too self-indulgent and undisciplined to rein in her truant mind. She was really only tranquil when properly in a painting; that was her respite.
She settled into a spot on the beach, separating her feet the right distance, stretching her toes inside her shoes. Mercifully, extraneous thoughts were dispersing, dropping away. The dawn began and she lifted the cart’s lid, entering the usual strange meditation. She emptied so she could fill, or was it feel—differently, calmly? She rubbed her hands together, getting the blood flowing. Looking. Impressions travelled towards her like wave fronts through a kind of ether. Her brush in a loose grip, she was part of a design larger than her own, deeply scientific or inscrutably holy.
Afterwards, slightly cold, she stood in her bathing suit close to the sea. When pictures of Arthur returned to surround her, a dense fog, she jogged into the water.
Swimming, she followed for a while the cool, majestic progress of an ocean liner, vaguely curious about the intrigues and inner lives of its passengers. The mindless gliding of gulls held her attention longer, as did her astonishment at how a lone body, hers, could disturb and alter a wave, so subtly. Time was soft and the universe fecund. She discovered, putting her chin to it, a strand of seaweed on her shoulder, verdant and fishily alive. It stayed where it was, amiably claiming her. And there was more of the plant floating about, like her own marine hair. Those were her long, luxuriant tresses: she had intermingled with the watery element. She was anaesthetised.
But here was Arthur again, bringing back the new ignited Clarice. Coming in, chilled and shaking, she found Herb on the beach. He waved and she approached. He was sitting drinking tea and smoking, pleased with himself, carefree, irreverent. ‘I’ve been round at Sandringham,’ he said. ‘What a day for it. I drew the fishermen with their nets. Magical thing. You’ll have a cup? I’ve got a fresh pot brewing.’
The morning was getting on and the
re was not long left, the minutes shrinking quickly. ‘Lovely,’ she said.
He looked her up and down. ‘You’d better get some clothes on.’
In the caravan, her damp nakedness was preternaturally white. She dressed, and forced her hand through her tangled hair. There was a sketchbook on the cot. She thought of the airiness of fishing nets, which Herb—with that weightless quality of his—would know how to convey, but she did not open it. He sometimes asked for her opinion on something and she was always reluctant, thinking it better not to look at a friend’s work that way; she might be hard on it, as she could be on her own. But she had seen a few of his paintings, and liked the pioneer hunger they had in them. Where would this take him? Back in the expanding light, she was shivery, jerky.
‘I must be coming down with something.’ She watched the swirl of milk on the surface of her tea, a white spiral staircase slowly undoing itself.
They sat for a few minutes, the sun hot but not quite easing her chill.
As if apprehending the drift of her thoughts, Herb said, ‘You should get yourself a boyfriend. It would do you good.’ He glanced away. ‘I hear on the grapevine that someone has rather taken to you.’
She had jumped a little in her chair, unmasked. She laughed—a husky, staccato attempt at subterfuge. She saw that it had been unsuccessful. ‘Oh, really? He has a wife. Didn’t you know?’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’ Herb slurped his tea. ‘The little problem of marriage. Would it be a problem, though?’
She had a twitch of irritation. He imagined that the lives of others should be as easy and light as his own. They were all masters of their own fate; surely they all enjoyed the luxury of improvisation. And he did not consider how different it was for a woman. Conspicuously, she ignored him.
To appease her, he said, ‘Thought I’d drive over to St Kilda in a bit. I don’t suppose you want to come along . . . we’ll have our own art camp?’
The day had grown yellower and broader.
‘Duty calls,’ she replied, somewhat tetchily. ‘They’ll be wanting their breakfast.’
‘And what will you be wanting?’
‘I won’t be studying with Meldrum much longer,’ Clarice found herself saying, after a moment. ‘Not much longer at all.’ It had been in her thoughts, had been coming on, but she had not announced the decision until now; her path sounded surer than it felt. This was not to do with Arthur. She must try working as an independent artist. Herb was watching her, curious. Perhaps he was impressed. She got up. ‘I’m off. Thanks for the tea.’
Her teeth were chattering on the way back. Not even the forced pace of the walking warmed her, yet she was hot-cheeked and, unusually, found herself craving domestic work, that well of dullness; she wanted to drown in it. Could the others believe that Arthur liked her? Liked her, not platonically? Could this be a common view? When she stopped going to Meldrum’s classes, she would no longer have to see him, not in the flesh, anyway. Would it be easier?
At home, she hurried to put her cart away in the shed and set the awful painting to dry, then headed for the kitchen for something to occupy herself with. She stood savagely rigid in the centre of the room. The first thing her eyes caught on was a cookbook lying on the counter. She seized and aggressively opened it at random.
‘Cakes,’ she read aloud.
‘Clarice, dear?’ Her mother’s light singsong from the front room.
‘Yes, Mum. I’ll be in shortly. I’m getting breakfast on.’ In a lower voice, she continued, “The success of a cake will depend entirely on the baking, and on constant attention. Be sure to test the heat of your oven.” She repeated these lines several times over, one hand gripping the book, the other on her hip to keep it quiet.
Once the trembling arrived in her, it did not leave. It dwelled there. Sometimes it was slight, hardly noticeable, but not so she could forget it; other times, it was as if she were just then emerging dripping from the bay on untrustworthy legs. It was always there, thrumming along with other pulses that threaded invisibly through life and were its vital energy. Her shaking affected things around her in such a way that nothing was left slack and certain ideas were given a breathtaking impetus. Though it was an impetus that, for a very long while, would have nowhere to go.
10
During the year since she had ceased to study with Meldrum, she had continued to drop into his studio from time to time to show him her work, and he invited her to exhibit several pieces in his first Group Exhibition. It was a serious, Spartan affair, the paintings listed in the catalogue without titles, black frames all around. The look of that long wall of the Athenaeum Hall, dense with art. Forbidding. Pure! Five of her paintings were there, an honour.
The hanging had captivated her. What next to what? What above what? And beneath? The arrangement of a show was not straightforward; it was a question of design, rhythm. She took a long time over the hanging of her works. She agonised, her back burning. She dithered till she was— almost—content. Paintings grouped together could be mirrors. The right placement would angle them towards one another so that each melted into and deepened the others, giving a feeling, soft, powerful, of amplified space.
At the opening, she was unspeakably proud of her temerity. She—yes, she, Clarice—was exhibiting. This was part of being an artist; you had to do this. She was elated and terrified. It was a rowdy crowd of intellectuals, art people, eccentric and original, or more conventionally fashionable, and others who belonged to who-knew-what passions, fixations. The talk flowed in excited eddies and she did not follow its circles. Her position in relation to any group was always at its edge or beyond. Arthur was there, though he had nothing in the show; painting for little more than a year, he had not felt ready. It was months since her last glimpse of him at the studio. He was like a painfully handsome groom, in a black suit and extremely white shirt that gave his skin the appearance of milk tinged with coffee. He looked as though he had not expected to find himself there, yet he was not out of place. She had an urge to stand near him, but did not give in to it. They did not speak or meet one another’s eyes. People were attracted to him; he was always in a binding conversation.
Ada, on the other side of the room, was a little pale, her face serious and disbelieving. Was she quaking too? Clarice’s eyes kept returning to the places on the wall where her own paintings hung, severely edged in black. Would she remember anything of that night, other than clamorous voices, a brightly coloured, slippery surface? She tried to focus on some of the details in all that fuss.
As if to help with this, Ada arrived beside her on the arm of a statuesque personage swathed in velvet and lace. ‘Let me introduce you to Mrs Hamlin,’ she said, reassuringly.
The lady’s hair was golden, thick, complexly vertical, like some fantastical plumage. ‘What a delight to meet you. I’m so taken by your paintings, which are absolutely exquisite. Delicate! I don’t have words for them. You must be a highly, an unusually sensitive person. I can tell.’ Her manner as velvety and intense as her dress. ‘I’m a bit of a patron of the arts.’ She beamed an enormously satisfied smile, finding everything delectable. ‘This is one of the things I’m most proud of. You see, my husband, Mr Hamlin, has been successful as a jeweller and I’ve had advantages. I try to use them well. Some years back, I fought for our suffrage. I used my influence in little ways.’ Clarice’s own achievements, on the wall, now seemed rather questionable. ‘But returning to the topic of art, I’m a great admirer of Mr Meldrum. And I’d heard of you, but this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of observing your art first-hand.’
‘Clarice is a unique talent,’ Ada said. ‘It’s almost unnatural—everyone is in awe of her, even if they don’t let on.’ She laughed modestly. ‘She intimidates us.’
Seeing Clarice’s face, Mrs Hamlin said, ‘Surely you’re not surprised. After all, you’re the artist most represented here tonight, after Mr Meldrum.’
She desired and dreaded this singling out. She knew, of course, from his words
and acts, especially from his mannerisms, that Meldrum appreciated her work. The choice of so many of her paintings for the exhibition had only really been a minor shock—more a confirmation. But she had not been sure of the others’ opinions. They had laughed at her Princes Bridge; she was taken aback by the idea that she might intimidate them.
‘I’d be honoured to buy one or two of your canvases,’ Mrs Hamlin went on, ‘but we’ll talk about that later.’
‘There’s so much confidence in her paintings,’ suggested Ada, with an odd formality, as if too timid to direct this at Clarice. ‘I wish I had her confidence.’
Confidence seemed a strange word, when she was suffering this stage fright. ‘Painting, you can be yourself,’ Clarice said, recalling that Ada was thought to copy her. ‘You try to be yourself. You don’t always manage it.’ She raced on: ‘At these things, who are you? I never know. I’m very awkward.’ Rather pathetically, she blushed; you were not supposed to admit to social unease.
Mrs Hamlin took her hand for a moment and pressed it. The contact was calmly firm, anchoring. Clarice tried to smile. The lady holding her hand was long, solid, queenly, magnificently rounded in the shoulders, and the rest of her, too, was covered generously with flesh. Mrs Hamlin said, ‘You’ll have to get used to intimidating people. Men will be alarmed, because you can do such things and you’re beautiful, also, which will confuse them. One rarely sees a fair skin as radiant as yours. That’s another sort of beauty I have an eye for. I’m a beautician. For my own pleasure—my husband sees it as a hobby, an interest rather than a profession, but I take it quite seriously. Manicures and pedicures are my area of expertise. I’ve been told that my own feet are a work of art.’ Was this intimate information proffered to balance Clarice’s declaration of discomfort? ‘And not just by my good husband.’
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