Clarice spent the best part of two days brooding over this passing of a girl she never knew; even when she was not thinking about it, she was thinking about it. It was odd. Was it just the surprise of the news? The incongruity? Jean and her ginger jars had been so promisingly vital. It was wrong that such a life force, such momentum should have been directed at death. This has to be Arthur’s doing, Clarice thought; he leaves me too open. She wondered if to be open to love meant being open to death. And at that moment it dawned on her that all the thinking about Jean was also a way to think, finally, about Paul, her little brother, who had ended his own life in the asylum. She saw that Jean’s death and Paul’s were connected. They were the same, because one death is really all deaths—is Death.
She would never forget Mum coming in, still-faced, to announce it. At home in Casterton. Clarice was twenty.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve had a telegraph. Your brother’s died.’
She remained in her usual armchair for some unusual twisted moments, then floated to her feet. ‘What?’
‘Yes. Died.’ Mum’s voice was too full and awfully flat. She appeared to be postponing her reaction.
Clarice moved towards her. ‘How?’
When she learned some years later of soldiers under the influence of shell shock, she recalled the silent frozen quality in Mum’s face as she gave her the news.
So, he had done it himself. In her head, she kept repeating, as if it were a riddle: by his own hand. She was stupefied, but perhaps not wholly surprised. Before she felt sad for little Paul or for herself, she felt sad for Mum, because once she had let herself grasp this, it was unlikely she would be the same again.
Clarice had never pictured him doing it. That is, she had thought of a torn sheet and his white neck—so thin. But she had not allowed herself to come too close to the practicalities. After learning about Jean, her body face down, one leg in the gutter, her handbag missing and red jumper askew— no doubt the same jaunty red jumper she had worn that day under her painting smock—Clarice wanted the details of Paul’s death. She required them. The facts of horror can be moreish: once you have started nibbling, though you may begin to feel sick, you discover in yourself a ghoulish appetite.
Now she re-created it mercilessly. Paul in pyjamas, pacing the room. His expression unemotional, quite impassive and adult in its resignation; precocious. Violet pools of fatigue under his eyes. An air of something—hard to define—gone irreparably wrong with him. Next the sheet. The sheet parting company from the narrow, ungiving bed. The tearing of the sheet, difficult at first, becoming easier, easy. The sound of tearing fabric, strangely penetrating and loud, as if it were more than just textile in nature, what was being rent.
The noose, his hands knowing what to do, demonstrating how it is done. See? Like this. It’s not complicated. Such a bright boy. His hands beginning to shake, a kind of reflex. Then the cloth being tied to the upper bunk, the secure, simple knot, and the loop going over his head, over the perfect beautiful line of that incredibly soft-skinned neck. His fifteen-year-old, terribly soft neck, never kissed by anyone but their mother.
The moment before it was too late, time thundering in his ears; a furious sea in a shell. And the spasmodic moment after.
She did not imagine he thought of them much, at the end; he was always independent, his thoughts his own.
After having at last watched his death unfurl in pictures, known it, she went to Half Moon Bay to paint, hurrying to get there before the light changed. The work gave her some rest. When she had finished, she identified in her landscape something of the passing of time. Time, passing—a slow, viscous flow. A painting was a dream not of immortality but of mortality.
At home that night, she told Mum she meant to go to the art colony Meldrum was organising at Anglesea. A fortnight of camping; it would not be expensive. They would drive down in a convoy. She had had the offer of a place in Henry’s car. Ada too.
‘You’ll have to ask your father,’ she said.
‘I’m going.’
‘An art camp?’ Was she put out?
‘Yes. I must go.’
She studied Clarice and then, her tone shifting, courageous, said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
16
She approached the beach through a blackening mass of dense, stunted trees. It was nearly sundown. Oriented by the roiling noise of the waves and the old smell of salt, she followed a sandy path between trunks moulded into curves by the wind.
The beach. A long stretch of wet sand glowing silver, dark clumps of seaweed thrown by the water. Without being hard, the light was rather metallic, a slightly purple blue-grey that lent the cliff wall across the way a deep warmth, between red wood and caramel. The incoming waves were shockingly white, extravagant with the finest foam.
There was room here and her spirit expanded into it. She subsided onto the slope leading down to the beach, her fingers convulsively grasping a tuft of sharp spinifex. She was not thinking of Arthur, but her urge to paint resembled the tremulous restlessness of other sensual cravings. The light diminishing quickly, she unlaced her shoes, pulled them off and sat breathing hungrily, as hungry as a drunk guzzling liquor. Clarice would not paint that first night. She had to clear herself of home, let in the new air, freshen herself—she had to go vacant. After a while, she began to laugh, laughing till a ticklish pressure built in her skull and her own internal sea erupted, salt water running down her face.
She stood and wandered, giddy, barefoot, through the near dark, towards the rising tide.
17
Arthur was grateful but also unhappy she had come. His words and gestures were as smooth as ever. His stable exterior was undisturbed and this was probably all other people saw: the still lake of him by which you wanted to linger, reflected in that proud surface to advantage. But his turmoil was loud to Clarice; there was trouble in him. He had become a divided man, suspended between a lawful wife, the mother of his child, and a secret consort who mothered only painted landscapes.
They had found the odd hour together at Anglesea, but never a whole afternoon until the day Bella came down with a nasty cold that made her morose and unwilling to leave their tent. And he was liberated.
Out, as usual, since before sunrise, Clarice was returning to camp and human society, swollen with her art, vigorous and boyishly blithe. Not far from her tent, she caught sight of him.
‘Hello,’ he said warily, though he had been lying in wait. ‘How are you?’
‘Hello. I’m very well,’ she replied, with similar delicacy. ‘You?’
‘Fine, fine.’
They could be adept at handling the uneasiness, like practised jugglers of asymmetrical objects, but later they would be clumsy and this was the nature of it: there was no clear progression, no security. It was after twelve by her wristwatch. Ada, who was only a short distance off, sketching a gum, had noticed their exchange; from her observant posture, her body even quieter than usual, Clarice thought she had deduced its meaning.
Did everyone at camp know? She tried to make her face superficial, but it was impossible to talk to a lover without displaying intimacy. Her face betrayed them by striving not to. During the years when she had waited for this intensity of feeling with a man, she had not foreseen how guilt could muddy it. She lifted her watch again, as if measured time might absolve them.
‘Can I look?’ he asked.
She was rather embarrassed by the morning’s painting, not used to producing scenes so resplendent, so very unambivalent.
The light already hot, the sun was lifting over a beach. There was a touch of green, but you were mainly aware of a bright flood of oranges, reds, yellows—sumptuous colour soaking sky and sand, everything liquefied, no terra firma and the horizon irrelevant, arbitrary. A figure in a bathing suit stood to one side, long, thin, featureless, neither quite man nor woman, overwhelmed by radiance.
He would think it showed their coming together. It did, of course, and more particularly,
her physical ripeness; it was all sensation, a sort of wholeness, a victorious flush. She had omitted guilt or ignored it and this made her blush, now, echoing the painting, but also making it sordid. There was no denying the thing had come from her. Arthur did not comment. After a moment, looking down at the hot canvas, he briefly described his idea. She consented immediately, avoiding thought, her head turned so that she could not see Ada. They would no doubt be missed. That was the price.
He waited a way off with folded arms and a vaguely studious attitude, while she went into her tent, supposedly for a cardigan in case it turned blowy but really to gather herself; crawling on all fours, she had a sense of alarm at not being able to predict the weather.
When she re-emerged, Ada was gone, having removed herself as unobtrusively as she had earlier filled the space. They saw no one else as they walked briskly along the cliff-top path, away from camp and the beaches where most of the painters worked. It was important not to run into anyone. To someone watching from the beach below—seeing two silhouettes suddenly invading the frame of a landscape, hastening across it—if not recognisable, they would certainly appear furtive.
They kept up a strong pace for a time, marching dumbly along in an almost military fashion. Her shoes were covered in sandy soil, as if they had become extraordinarily old, relics. The sun burned her hands; the cardigan would be useless or she could put it under her head. Beyond the circle of her hat’s brim was a great incandescence that was most intense over the ocean, which could not be stared into.
When they were distant enough from the campsite, they slowed. Their silence grew more comfortable but then somehow argumentative. Flirtatious.
She was dazed by the sun and had no idea where they would find shelter. The only vegetation was a low, thick marine heath unbroken but for the path. How long had the path existed? As far as she could see ahead, there was no change; nothing would offer concealment. On what was probably a fool’s errand, they continued doggedly.
‘I have to see you more,’ he said at last, offering this impossibility with an irritable tone. ‘I think of you constantly.’
‘Did you expect you would stop thinking of me, after a while?’
‘No. I didn’t mean that.’ He turned away and when he looked back at her his face was pink. They were both perspiring heavily. ‘I never let myself expect anything.’ He did not ask what she had expected or expected now. Perhaps he did not dare.
‘You expected . . . nothing?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. But I’d do anything to be with you all the time.’
‘Anything but.’
He grunted, but she was only stating, not reproaching him. She had never demanded anything, never been tempted to. There was no shared life to envisage. What they might have been together, out in the open, was hollow potential, a half-formulated question. Arthur had changed towards her: his opinion of himself was sullied; he had grown cynical.
‘When I look down there at the water, I get a bit of vertigo,’ he said angrily. ‘I was afraid of heights as a kid. Less so as an adult, but it stays with you. I get it from my old mum, who had a pathological fear of them. She wouldn’t even get up on a stool.’ Reluctantly, he added: ‘I’m nervous up here. Nauseous—I feel dwarfed.’
Clarice was interested. ‘Dwarfed?’
‘It’s a sensation like being about to die.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘How I imagine it, anyhow. Like thinking you’re about to die.’ He paused again. ‘I’ve been coming here at night.’
‘Why? Why did you want to come here today, then?’
‘In the dark, it terrifies me. Even if I stay on the path, well back from the edge.’
Seeming a veiled message, this annoyed her. She could not stop herself. ‘Martyrdom?’
‘You must hate me and sometimes I hate you.’ She thought he was both relieved and appalled to have blurted this. He waited a little too long before clarifying: ‘I love you so much I hate you.’
She stopped walking. It was the first mention of love. ‘We have a lot going against us, but we have an advantage. We have honesty. I prefer you to be horribly honest. You seemed so lucid to me, when I first met you.’ It was hard for him, she knew. He was not a hypocrite: he was a free being restricted by a fully shaped life. He had a flair for improvisation which he was not at liberty to exercise.
He tried to draw her to him. She did not open her arms; she was not ready.
His hands fell to his sides. He said, ‘You keep yourself apart.’
‘Physically?’
‘No—in all ways.’
But if she was aloof, it was not just because she was jealous of her privacy. It was also on account of Bella’s face, which could appear in her mind, smiling a gentle elastic smile. A confusing vision that turned her cold; their physical bond should not have admitted this interference.
‘Let’s stay here,’ she suggested, wanting to prove him wrong.
He was taken aback.
No one in view in any direction. It was not out of the question that someone might come along, but they were going to risk it. The alternative to taking risks was paralysis. She began to undress right there, fast, before she could think better of it. She stepped out of her skirt and laid it out on the path, ludicrously crouching to smooth it, as though it were a cloth on a table she was setting for a special occasion.
Arthur waited, but then he untucked his shirt. Clarice continued undressing under the harsh sun. She had not showed him her body completely before and never like this, in daylight. He watched her remove her underwear, exposing herself. She was curious about her own pale forms, the pinkish areas and the patch of dark hair. Her comically gangly knees. Her head cast a shadow when she looked down that gave her the feeling of being two people, one taller and foreboding. The hours of work had left her neck wooden. She loosened her hair. The air and sun on her nudity were dreamlike or potently real.
His face alert, he moved towards her, but she gestured for him to finish undressing. She sat down on her skirt, listening to the waves and half closing her eyes against the light’s assault. There was titanium white on the fingernails of her left hand, cadmium yellow on a few matted strands of hair falling into her eyes. She felt strangely sure of herself, insightful.
Their accumulated time alone together over the past months did not add up to much. The handful of times they had been intimate, it had tended to begin beautifully, but her pleasure was painfully short-lived, anticlimactic. After, she retracted into herself.
Arthur’s clothes were scattered haphazardly around him. Even naked, he held himself confidently. His body was compact. She looked at it, at his silky shoulders and muscular, imposing hands, solid legs and slender buttocks, brown neck and face, long, unexpectedly delicate feet and queer, soft masculinity. He remained unknown. A pattern to be puzzled over.
He sat opposite her cross-legged, with a pleasant sort of pride, but needing her approval. They were both rather stunned and incredulous to find themselves in this situation. She chuckled. His discontent had receded to somewhere remote, letting him be childlike.
He grinned hesitantly and lowered himself with clownish gravitas so that he lay on the earth, drawing her down with him. She acquiesced, finally, and stretched out, though when he brought his body over hers, she shifted away. She wanted them to lie side by side. This disoriented him. She cupped her hand against the side of his face to shade his eyes; they were both half blinded by sun. Squinting hard, she found a trace of his work—burnt umber on his cheekbone. Her artist. She kissed his temple fondly as if they were old lovers, their bodies entirely accustomed to mutual adoration and coupling.
‘What did you paint today?’
‘Hm? Oh, those rock formations at the end of the beach.’
‘And?’ He was hard on his own efforts; she had to inquire about them discreetly.
‘I was floundering around. Thinking about you. I’m always scared you won’t like what I do.’
As she had done with Herb, she tried to avoid commenting
on his art. ‘I do like what you do. Your landscapes have weight to them.’ He was a new painter, but some of the authority that surrounded him in his public life, that lawyerly clout, maybe, was finding its way onto his boards. He too had not been able to resist starting early on landscapes. His scenes were straightforward, grounded. You felt their materiality. Or she felt it because she was his lover, her body knowing the hands that had made them. His skies, though, were not convincing—he never really took grey on and his clouds were small and well behaved. So your eyes stayed low in those earthly landscapes.
‘I’d love to make you happy,’ he said.
‘You can’t paint to make people happy.’
‘Can you make people happy with love?’
‘You’d like to think so. I don’t know.’
Their skin was roasting and this might have been true freedom, nakedness against a backdrop of breaking waves. Modern life appeared to have been obliterated and they were reduced—or was it enlarged?—to simple inhabitants of nature. She would have liked all her skin to peel right off, to be a blinking newborn animal. This, she thought, could have been what attracted her to him: he tugged her down, as his paintings did the eye, into her body, her animal self.
Though he had not hurt her, there had been moments in their lovemaking at Anglesea when she had sensed Arthur barely holding himself back from brutality; rage simmered in him and her sensibility was repelled, could not link with his. She was stranded in the wasteland between her fantasies and the world they moved in. Reality became thin, full of holes.
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