Night Street

by Kristel Thornell

  Ada wore a faint smile, perhaps picturing those feet, as Clarice was. She saw them oversized, on a statue, in marble, gleaming. Her brain was absorbing Mrs Hamlin, becoming permeated by her; people could flood you. Had Clarice been inclined to do such work, this woman would have made an intriguing subject for a nude—what would you find beneath that velvet and gloss, her solidity and great capacity for enthusiasm?

  ‘Your work would be interesting,’ she said, not really able to imagine it but not insincere.

  ‘It is,’ Mrs Hamlin affirmed. ‘And I think I feel so close to artists because my work is also about beauty and nature, natural beauty. We have a lot in common. I have many artist friends, we get on so well. We see the world in a similar way. I love being around you.’

  Clarice laughed gauchely. And she noticed, when Ada said, ‘Your dress is a lovely colour,’ how good the girl was with people, light-handed.

  ‘Lavender,’ Mrs Hamlin said. ‘It’s special, isn’t it? And feel that.’

  Clarice, too, automatically put out her hand to stroke the dress; the texture was quite hypnotic. Mrs Hamlin was now studying Ada, wanting to compliment in return. But they were so different. Mrs Hamlin large and full; Ada petite and slight, lightly freckled nose, plain dark dress, brown hair neither really fair nor dark, all quietly pleasant. She had an air of knowing herself to be unassuming, forgettable. And this made her a thin presence, somehow, the thinness accentuated by her gentle way with people—which was probably rather tragic.

  ‘You’re charming,’ Mrs Hamlin eventually told her, kindly, and the girl bowed her head.

  Clarice was suddenly very grateful to be in the company of these gracious women, to have merged, however briefly, with the evening’s stagey talk. It took her mind off Arthur, the too-handsome bridegroom, her paintings on the wall, her frightened vanity, the grandiosity and shocking immodesty of it all. It let her share her happiness.

  As usual, Father was done with The Age before Clarice and her mother were up; he must not have seen the review, as he had not made any comment. He did not read the cultural sections, as a rule. Meldrum had told the class that it would be coming, and the anticipation had kept her awake all night. Now it was Mum’s turn with the paper; she was perusing the front page, peeling and cutting into small pieces an apple, which she slowly chewed and ate. She had an upset stomach and had wanted nothing more, not even tea. Clarice was anxious that Mum would see it.

  ‘It’ll only make me more nervous if you come,’ she had said, when Mum offered to go to the opening. This was true. ‘It might be better if you don’t. And it would tire you.’ Her mother had agreed. Had she really wanted to go or only felt obliged?

  After the apple, Mum lingered over a glass of water, the paper forgotten. A curious object, densely black on its whiteness, soft and thin, while so authoritative. If Clarice had taken it to her room, it would only have drawn attention. But she had to look now. ‘Are you finished with that?’

  ‘What’s that? Oh, do you want this?’

  Opening the paper nonchalantly, Clarice stalked it. There, there was her name. In print. In a real newspaper. With a deathly calm face and frozen lips that wanted to mouth the words, she read what a Mr Chesterfield had written.

  Oh. And charged through to the climax: ‘And the lady has no right to obfuscate her subjects so tenaciously with mawkish veils of fog. The result is altogether dreary, and, I regret to say it, entirely without the lyricism in which we seek solace in art.’ He had noted, subtly venomous, that her paintings were ‘sub-manner’ and unfinished, as if this were something to be feared, abhorred. She had hoped but not expected that they would like her work; however, she had not quite foreseen this. She was not the only one from the exhibition to be condemned. In fact, condemnation was the general response, really—not even Meldrum was spared. But still, this felt appallingly personal.

  Having read her first review, she folded the paper neatly, stood and left the room, abruptly reminded of Mr Dagdale, the day she had rejected him, his folding of a newspaper and stunned, grave retreat.

  Like being cleaved through the middle, she thought, gutted—because maybe quickly describing the sensation would numb it. In the hallway, she paused and placed a hand on each wall. So the critics did not have much time for the ‘Meldrumites’; they were ‘mud-slingers,’ with their dull, mucky palette. But why could art not show nature, as it was, without embellishment or forced emphasis? Trust nature to be beautiful, on its own terms? Reaching her bedroom and finally closing the door, she found herself on her knees. She might have to be sick.

  Some time later, Mum knocked on the door and opened it.

  ‘Clarice? The telephone for you. What? What are you doing down there?’

  ‘Thinking.’ The worst was passed, the nausea gone. She had not heard the phone.

  Mum was waiting.

  ‘I was feeling off,’ Clarice tried to explain.

  ‘Could it have been the porridge?’ Mum asked carefully. Did she know about the review? If she did, neither of them was going to mention it.

  ‘Porridge does make me a bit queasy, sometimes.’

  ‘Porridge is like that.’ Her mother was probably relieved not to be faced with any more substantial vulnerability. They were cautious together, when it came to anything private.

  ‘You might have this same upset that I have. Do you think you should see Dr Broadbent?’

  ‘I’m a lot better now.’ She was. Almost strong. Standing, she was only slightly unsteady. ‘I’ll get the phone.’

  ‘The porridge? Do you think?’ Mum seemed concerned. ‘Something we had that your father didn’t, because Daddy is fine.’

  Mum was the only one who called him Daddy; he presented Clarice with the phone, looking indeed as if his health were beyond question, indomitable. He disapproved of the telephone for anything other than emergencies: it was for communication, not conversation. When he himself was forced to make a call, he took notes beforehand, the process efficient, exact. ‘It’s Ada Anderson,’ he said questioningly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking it and turning her back on him.

  ‘I’m calling to commiserate. Are you alright?’ Ada’s voice was cheerfully melancholy. She had not been mentioned in the review.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m alright.’

  ‘It’s just bitterness. Bitterness against Meldrum. He’s the target. They won’t forgive him for spurning the Gallery School. For having pluck and going his own way. You’re his best student, so they’re taking it out on you. They haven’t even looked at what you’ve done. They don’t want to see it. You can’t take this to heart.’

  ‘Everyone got a hard time of it,’ Clarice said. The hurt mixing with fury now, and she could be angry for Meldrum, for all of them. ‘The only serious art is big bright sentimental potboilers. Apparently. You can’t show the smaller view, the real colours of the Australian landscape. That’s unacceptable. Not heroic enough, I suppose.’ She was nearly pleased to have provoked them, and sorry that Ada had been left out of it. ‘How are you, Ada?’ She should invite Ada over for tea one of these days.

  The girl rushed by the question, embarrassed or unaccustomed to having others consider her feelings. ‘Your art is important, Clarice. But it’s easier for them to discount you as a woman. Mrs Hamlin is right—it confuses them. You’ll have to get used to it.’ Could she? Clarice asked herself. Would they always have such a view of her? ‘You don’t paint as a Lady Painter should.’

  Father passed the doorway, checking his watch. Still angry but also increasingly pleased with herself, she said, ‘No, I don’t.’

  11

  The week after the opening, on an excessively luminous, unseasonably hot day, Mrs Hamlin threw them a party in the garden of her stately home in South Yarra. Arthur, thoroughly one of them by then, did the honours and took a photograph of the artists uproariously arrayed on the lawn. Under the sun, a tablecloth, a handkerchief, a woman’s high-collared shirt, a rather incongruous goat were all celestial;
Clarice was dazzled by so many white forms, containers of light. She felt the dizzying suspension that precedes an Event and it cost her a considerable effort to control her trembling. She gritted her teeth.

  The picture taken, wine was drunk amid growing amusement. She toasted with the others, to art for art’s sake, to life, to everyone’s health, to goats, to the entire animal kingdom. She was not used to drinking; one of the few outward signs of Father’s Low Anglicanism was his scathing view of alcohol; equating it with swift and total moral decline, he did not allow it in the house. The music was persuasive, divine coils of Debussy unspooling from a gramophone through an open window. This was followed by other music that was new to her—faintly but persistently troubling, liquid; it released something in her. The crimson wine, too, spawned obscure impulses and left dark perfect rings on the tablecloth. She drank two or maybe three whole glasses to soften the idea of Mum at home: she had appeared a little glum as Clarice prepared to leave; her stomach was not quite back to normal and perhaps she would have preferred her daughter at home, for company. Those glasses of wine must have induced the migraine, though the beating of her head took some time to distinguish itself from merriment. It was a marvellously bohemian afternoon, pain holding her skull like a large, insistent hand.

  Meldrum, dapper as usual in a dinner suit, held court on the lawn. The company seemed by turns a circus troupe under the direction of their ringmaster and the devotees of a sage. He was indulgent, that day, a benevolent patriarch. It made her consider the rumours of his playful side, a penchant for climbing trees; she tried to visualise him in a tree. Hard to combine such a picture with the sharper edges of his thinking, but you never knew. The sky was blue glory.

  The throbbing of her brain became more commanding, something tightening in her or unravelling, and an impromptu party melody sprang up. It was a gentleman she did not know, playing jigs on a fiddle that worried the goat. Why did they keep a goat? Its milk must have gone into one of Mrs Hamlin’s beauty treatments. Later, Arthur was telling a story about a drunken novice’s complicated attempt to shear a sheep. Everyone was in stitches, and Clarice’s belly hurt as she watched his hands elaborating the absurd tale.

  When Bella came to stand beside him, his eyes fled up to the clear sky.

  A scent of perfume was inescapable, sugary and heavy with roses, as was the more calming smell of cut grass. The entire afternoon was like the children’s game where one spins around and around, as fast as possible, keeps spinning, although a collapse is coming and the degree of its severity steadily worsening. It was funny how eager one was to abandon orientation and balance for speed and its risks; the freedom of lost control was intoxicating, hence one’s fateful inclination for it.

  ‘Clarice, are you feeling well?’ the hostess asked.

  Was she wincing from the headache or smiling strangely? The brooch that held Mrs Hamlin’s dress in place seemed an improbable insect, the gaudy fruit of an hallucination.

  ‘I think I have a migraine. But what a delightful party!’

  ‘Would you like to lie down inside for a while? The guest room is made up. A little rest?’

  Clarice would sooner not have separated herself from the rare entertainment, but she had begun to screw up her eyes in the imperious sunshine. Mrs Hamlin saw this mix of reluctance and discomfort, and took Clarice by the arm. She was led inside. The hostess’s ardour for artists might have contained some possessive impulse; nonetheless, she was warm and admirably colourful.

  ‘Sorry for the trouble. I don’t usually drink. That’s probably it.’

  ‘Oh, a little drink won’t hurt you. It’ll be the heat. But don’t worry, my dear. A lie down will do you a world of good.’

  The richly appointed house was a dim, soft blur.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Clarice said, more than once. ‘I’m really so sorry for the bother.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Mrs Hamlin helped to ease off her shoes and get her settled on a bed. ‘It’s a madhouse out there,’ she said happily, going for a damp washcloth and a glass of water.

  Clarice took the pins out of her hair. Shortly after, already in the dark of her eyelids, she felt the washcloth come down hesitantly on her forehead. ‘That beastly Chesterfield person,’ Mrs Hamlin said, nearly whispering. ‘Plain cruel. I hope you didn’t let it get to you. They just vent their grievances, while pretending to be civil. And quite enjoy themselves. Discrediting the lot of you like that. But Mr Meldrum and you bore the brunt, I’m afraid.’ She was now patting Clarice’s hair. ‘Especially you, because your paintings are hard to put your finger on. They’re atmospheric, your paintings,’ she offered shyly. ‘Haunting.’ She seemed to wait for a response and, when it did not come, added, ‘I myself was so maddened by the injustice, and depressed, after I read it, that I cancelled my appointments, went back to bed and stayed there all day.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Clarice told her. She was now also a touch drunk on sympathy and sensitivity, this understanding, which reached her gently through the layer of pain. ‘I’m over it.’ She smiled, then opened her eyes. ‘Almost. You’re so kind.’

  Mrs Hamlin smiled back and Clarice closed her eyes again and heard, in a murmur, ‘You’re lovely. Truly heavenly skin. It gives off its own light.’ In a voice lowered further still: ‘You could make a man very happy.’ Did this hold any particular reference? ‘Stay as long as you like.’

  A short sleep carried away much of the pain or made it into something thicker but airier. Clarice noted this when she was startled awake. She listened. Raised voices, childlike in their pleasure, the fiddle. She wriggled up so that she was leaning against the end of the bed.

  In the dresser mirror, she considered what Mrs Hamlin thought of as good looks. A very pale complexion, not undignified features, perhaps—but ravenous eyes, somehow exaggerated, and what was that mark at the corner of her mouth? She leaned forward to inspect a stain, blackish, maroon, as she massaged the nape of her neck with one hand. She was boiling.

  And there he was, finally.

  When he had closed the door, he entered the mirror in profile; he was facing her. Arthur exhaled raggedly.

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. Sorry.’ He appeared winded. ‘I couldn’t find you. Mrs Hamlin said you weren’t feeling well.’

  ‘It’s just,’ she said. ‘It was just. A little . . .’

  He gave a slight nod, and it was his turn, now, to notice the picture they made in the mirror and hers to look at him.

  Becoming aware, perhaps, of her disordered state and his standing over it, he sat down on the side of the bed, with his back to her.

  ‘Are you any better?’ He was different to when they were in company together. ‘Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?’

  ‘I’m alright,’ she said, grappling with the dissonance of waking; it sounded like a lie.

  He twisted to look at her. It was a difficult position to sustain. He looked away, and back. He put a finger to his lips and brought it to the colouration at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know where that came from,’ she said. ‘I was just wondering what it was.’

  ‘The wine,’ he replied, looking perturbed. ‘We don’t see enough of you.’

  His hand did not withdraw and so she turned her head to kiss it. This was not audacity. She had no choice in the matter. Taking his hand, as if it were a surprising new invention, she drew his mouth to the place his finger had encountered. It happened fast.

  The surprise of the kiss. An assertive flavour of tobacco. After that, the taste of his own exotic mouth and of his desire for her. It was her first real kiss and she would not forget it. The unveiling. Smooth heat. Blind tunnelling from one interior world to another.

  They were very quiet. Arthur held her hands, her shoulders, her waist; her head drumming gently, she too wanted to hold him fast. Her clothing turned oppressive, mysteriously intricate, as they tried to free her from it. At the same time, she was trying to free herself from a memory. The memory of som
ething unreally disturbing, such as a detail from a bad dream that pesters you after waking.

  It had happened a few hours earlier, before the party got going: Arthur had not yet lifted a dark cloth and, momentarily beheaded, peered through a camera’s objective at artists standing to be photographed; a migraine had not yet led her to this room where he had found her. She had arrived too punctually and been invited to sit in the drawing room, awaiting the arrival of the more appropriately tardy guests, while Mrs Hamlin directed some task in the kitchen. Self-consciously alone, Clarice gazed through a window at the brightness exploding outside.

  She had thought herself alone. Bella sat down opposite her, holding a precariously full glass of punch.

  ‘Ooh,’ breathed Bella, with amusement and perhaps a little nervousness. ‘I almost spilled it!’

  They had been briefly introduced on the occasion when Bella had worn her spotted dress. Now her dress was moss green and well cut, her purse matching. The weave of the dress was fine; it would be soft under exploratory fingers. Bella’s posture somehow gave her the status of wife. Though again, Clarice was surprised not to find the woman’s appearance more striking. The body before her was ordinary, disconcertingly unexceptional. In her mind, she always saw a goddess.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, battling to meet Bella’s eyes—a flat, uniform hazel.

  ‘Isn’t this a remarkable house?’ Arthur’s wife had a way of speaking that was both modest and resilient.

  Where was he? In the next room? Outside under the heavy sun? A malaise was moving through Clarice’s viscera. ‘Isn’t it? I gather Mrs Hamlin has sensational toenails.’ Before this sentence was entirely out of her mouth, she saw it for the gossipy misfit that it was. She floundered. ‘They’re her pride.’

  ‘Ah?’ Bella crossed her legs. ‘Her toenails?’

  ‘Yes. She’s a beautician, did you know?’