His face said he did not love her, not yet conclusively, or it preferred to remain unread; she was not at all bothered. Waiting for love was like waiting for a revelation. You had to be patient. And, on that glowing afternoon, she was pleased to consider herself not the marrying kind. An artist had to bring to the craft a free spirit, a spirit capable of falling in love continually with everything, everyone, and devoting itself to the daily labour of this love. How could such a woman’s spirit sustain itself tethered by law, religion and duty to one man?
She took up his reference to the war: ‘Were you a soldier?’
He made a rapid little gesture, adjusting his hat. ‘As a doctor.’ She did not expect he would talk about it and he did not. After a while, he continued, detached, ‘We’ve all lost our innocence.’
‘Were we innocent before?’
Brusquely, he leaned over and touched her arm.
She caught her breath and remarked, ‘After painting, you feel terribly lazy. You turn into a sluggard who just wants to be waited on. You think how nice it would be to have a slave or two.’
‘With palm fronds to fan you with and so on?’
‘Exactly.’
His hand remained on her arm. The salt on her skin was a light, fizzy burning. She took the flask from him.
‘We’ve almost finished it.’
In fact, there was only one mouthful left; she swallowed it.
‘Would you know what it was to be waited on, if it came up and tapped you on the shoulder?’ he asked.
‘I’m very keen to learn. I’m sure I’d have considerable aptitude.’
‘I imagine you would.’
He kissed her palm. His mouth was soft. Still cool from the water, her skin tightened into gooseflesh.
‘What can this humble servant offer you, Madam?’ he inquired croakily.
It was a good game. Perhaps it had been many years since he had known romance, but he had not lost the necessary vivacity, had not given up on its return. Nor had she.
‘Oh, just leave me to sleep, won’t you? Be gone.’
She stuck out her tongue and rolled onto her back. He waited a moment and then laughed, placing his hat over her face. She stayed beneath it, acquainting herself with the sweetly oily scent of his Brilliantined hair. When her lungs knew it, she passed the hat to him and the immense sky spread across her vision.
If desire were low, impure, then why did it feel holy, shooting up through the other layers till it broke free? Naturally, it entailed the risk of perdition, the undoing of the Family, and this was why it was ignored or shunned. Because it revealed many marriages as a lie or at least a half-truth. It was an ideal, a blindness, maybe even a sort of self-annihilation, and these things were dangerous.
Was then the powerful current of desire in the human a mistake, something the superior intellect of the homo sapiens should have overcome—but had not—during the evolution that brought him forward? Was it a kind of vestigial limb with no proper function? Yet there was the temptation to use the limb. Man lived with it uneasily, willing it invisible; nothing controlled you so forcefully as what was invisible.
‘I think I’m drunk,’ she said.
Her eyes swelling with the sky, Clarice wondered if the culmination of physical pleasure felt like a small death because it was a moment of grace in which the tragedy of life’s end was shown to be beautiful. Yes, what if desire were not low, the sorry mess of corruption they would have you judge it, but rather the highest force, the lushest thing—not what religion was required to repress, but religion itself, the true face of God, the superbly ruthless machinery of existence?
‘I get giddy,’ she observed and, turning towards him, ordered, ‘Come here.’ Graciously, he obeyed.
In his disoriented surrendering, she caught a flicker of Meldrum, the day he properly noticed her. The Doctor and Meldrum were both Older Men and Important Persons, but until then she had not compared them. She acknowledged that they had in common a quality of being unusually substantial; without being touched, they were tangible. Arthur had been like that too, in his way, though she had learned to see his bravado, the masked desperation. The man beside her was more quietly, less gregariously attractive than either Arthur or Meldrum. To begin to feel it, you had to look at the Doctor side-on or paint his portrait.
28
They had been intimate for a number of weeks, and she had thought about it but always managed to stop herself in time—until she did not. She got the number from the operator and rang the Doctor’s clinic. She put this illogical behaviour down to her interest in the other side of him, the illuminated side that others saw.
‘Can I help you?’
Hearing the strained cordiality in his secretary’s voice, Clarice took a dislike to her. Was it jealousy? Knowing she spent each day close to him?
‘I wanted to make an appointment.’
‘Yes. Can I ask the nature of the problem?’
She was momentarily stumped. There was no problem—or was there a problem? ‘I need to see the doctor,’ she got out.
‘Could you be a little more specific?’
This struck her as impertinent and she replied, perhaps testily, ‘It regards my heart.’
‘The doctor is a cardiologist.’
It went without saying, of course, that her problem should be a matter of the heart. But still, there had been no need for sarcasm.
‘Well, that’s perfect then! Could you make an appointment for me, please? The name is Jane. Jane Young.’ She enjoyed this banal alias, and the tingle it produced gave her an insight into why a person might want to run away, to be someone else. ‘Shall I spell that for you?’ she asked courteously.
For her shady excursion to East Melbourne, she wore a dark skirt and a white blouse. Hidden under her sleeve, a bracelet: a trinket Louise had given her one birthday, with exuberant bottle-green ovals of Czech glass.
In the waiting room, she tried to read a magazine. Her attention strayed.
At last, the secretary invited her to stand. A door was opened for her. And she was in his office.
The Doctor. At work. Decorous in his suit, serious, a touch tired, head to one side. She knew that angle of his head. He was sitting behind a mammoth desk; the desk was like his own island, or maybe a raft he was floating on.
He lifted his eyes. They reached her, saw—froze. He was good at dissembling surprise; something in his eyes recoiled, his face staying expressionless. She did not speak.
‘Miss Young?’ he asked, after a moment.
‘That’s right.’
A pause. ‘What can I help you with?’
‘Obviously, it’s my heart,’ she said, sheepishly.
He nodded. ‘Obviously.’ She was not sure if he was angry. ‘Could you change into this smock, please? And we’ll . . . have a listen.’
He stood and turned to the window. Apparently, it had started raining; she had not anticipated that. Perhaps he wanted to hypnotise himself, watching the rivulets against the pane.
She went behind the screen. Her elbow knocked it as she fumbled with her buttons.
‘Remove everything on top, if you will. Including the brassiere.’ He said this with absolute detachment.
Her blouse had caught on the bracelet. She battled with it, trying to free the fabric from the brass chain that pinched the skin of her arm. The blouse would not come free; her face was growing hot. He must have been able to hear she was having difficulties, but though he knew how to assist in her undressing, he did not come to help. With a desperate final tug, she liberated herself from the blouse, ruining it and not caring. A cluster of white threads hung from the bracelet.
She came out in the smock. He turned away from the rain’s even inward light. It was gloomy in his office, and his face, beyond the small reach of the desk lamp, was saturnine. They considered one another.
Then he said, ‘Right’—a trace of vengeance in his smooth tone?—and stepped towards her, holding a stethoscope. She lifted her chin.
; His hands had not felt so cold before. He parted the smock and placed the frigid metal on her chest; knowing he was a witness to it, her heart raced. She avoided his eyes, after that.
He listened, saying nothing. She watched the whey-coloured window. Glad to have forgotten an umbrella, she craved the moment when she would be out in the rain, her clothes heavy and defiled by water. From out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that his hands were now empty; he had finished with the stethoscope.
But it was not over. He opened the smock once more and his fingers returned to her chest, to below her left breast, touching without tenderness. This method of palpation was absent, expert—gentle and cold.
‘The heart can be felt through the body?’ she asked.
His forehead was tight. ‘It can.’
His fingers continued their purposeful work, raising the flesh of her breast out of their path, as if wanting to burrow between her ribs to something more tender and essential than bone. She had a painful urge to laugh. She glared at the veiled window, but there was nothing for it and she heard herself chuckle. He did not reciprocate her reprehensible mirth and made no attempt to put her at ease. She laughed more, dissolving, gasping. Perhaps she felt a pulse in his fingers—or was it hers? She overcame the laughter. In his attentive absent manner she recognised something, suddenly, from her own painting self. Ah. This was how an observer might look. So alert and dispassionate. He and she both knew how to be there and not there, this wonderful disappearing act.
He took his hands away and stored the stethoscope in a neat, slender case. That case might have held an expensive gift—a man’s pacifying offering to his wife. It was over.
Soon after, to his secretary, he murmured, ‘There will be no charge.’
They never spoke of the incident. That side of the Doctor did not talk to the side she knew. Or only rarely. Once or twice since, he had again felt her heart through a soft gap in her ribs, his fingers walking a tightrope between power and submission. Was he measuring his effect on her? Was there a warning in what he felt? Had he discovered a hereditary trap waiting to spring, or some other danger? He never told her what he learned; perhaps he was not able. She would have resisted the examination, squirmed away, only she was transfixed by his face. She had looked into it, as if finding herself with a looking glass, as honestly as she could.
FOUR
The Storm
29
She drifts the way a person considered dreamy drifts, afloat but vaguely aware of the censure of onlookers. At the Moira Private Hospital, the days have the confounding texture and aftertaste of dreams. Doctors and nurses labour to keep the patients enslaved to the laws of the material world with rites of nutrition and hygiene, social niceties, polite conventions, when all the while the edges of things are so indistinct, Clarice herself might have painted them. Quite often, she could swear she was standing behind her easel.
Today her chair has been wheeled into the solarium, where she is listening to a Chopin Nocturne. However, there is no sign of a gramophone and nor does anyone appear to be playing a piano. She checks the faces of the few other patients present; if they hear the music, it does not seem to affect them. But note surrenders to note. The Nocturne is shallow and limpid, dipping occasionally into obscure depths.
Since the storm, her thinking often takes an aquatic turn, as though the drenching had soaked through to her brain. Her mind has become an ocean at low tide, the broad sands of the past exposed. She once attempted such a scene with a rather giddy palette—hot-hearted sunrise colours radiating from the vast mirror of a damp shore. She refused to let Arthur have the painting and he went sullen on her. To make him forgive her, she stroked her favourite part of his head, where his hair was receding. That night, he bit her lip; it could have been an accident, her mouth filling with slick, salty warmth.
The music continues, though no one heeds it but herself.
30
There is a vase of tight roses on the bedside table, not quite the pink of the flowers that accompanied Mum’s passing. Father sits in the visitor’s chair and of course the parasitic Mrs Marks is with him. Cut flowers fill Clarice with the same moroseness that zoo animals do. There is no light in Father’s skin; he does not appear well.
‘Louise was here,’ he announces. ‘You were asleep.’
A flaccid silence. When Clarice glances through the door into the hall, she sees a girl pass. The girl’s name is Olive; she seems to remember someone introducing them. Olive wears too light a frock and she is twirling, arms spread wide. The zip at the side of the frock is open, offering a glimpse of pale body. She moves rapidly, unsteadily, but languorously too. Clarice is glad to have seen this. Soon after, Olive can be heard thumping into a wall, though she does not cry out.
‘Heavens!’ comments Mrs Marks. ‘This place.’ She stands fussily at Father’s side, scowling with her purplish mouth. The way she has of laying her hand on his back is distinctly proprietorial, wifely. What would Mum have thought?
‘Clarice,’ her father says, ‘I warned you something like this would happen.’ He mumbles, ‘Going out painting in all weather. It was bound to happen.’
‘Of course it was,’ scolds Mrs Marks. ‘Fancy getting caught out in the rain.’
A coughing fit helps to disguise Clarice’s hilarity.
Father is repentant. ‘When you get better,’ he improvises, ‘when you come home . . .’ He fidgets in his chair, his knee probably hurting, a detail in a masterpiece of discomfort. ‘You could paint some flowers.’ He nods curtly at the roses he seems to have brought her and concludes, ‘Those might inspire you.’ The word inspire and the appeasing tone are foreign, unsettling for him.
‘It’s almost time for your lunch,’ declaims Mrs Marks, speaking to Father. ‘And’—her voice dropping to a whisper befitting a risqué confidence—‘your medicine.’
Their conversations are always this airless and dreary. Clarice strains for a sound beyond the nurse’s voice. She wishes Olive would come spinning back down the hall in her party frock. Who introduced them? Thankfully, after a while there is the lopsided noise of a person dragging a bad leg. Much of her entertainment here has been deciphering sounds.
‘Your paintings of floral arrangements were pretty. They were nice.’ Father is really extending himself. Perhaps he would not have made a bad art critic. She imagines him saying, mawkish veils of fog. ‘The arthritis has been bothering me,’ he adds.
He laces his fingers together, illustrating his unease. She thinks of a prestidigitator coolly displaying the result of a magic trick.
She squints and his fingers take on the fuzziness of distance. She tries to bring back Pavlova in The Dying Swan, struggling but finally drawing the ballerina into her mind’s eye: effort so consummate and finely honed that it was erased; grace.
When she is indifferent enough to speak, she volunteers, to no one in particular, ‘In my first solo exhibition, I hung one hundred and ten paintings in plain frames. I really prefer a plain frame.’ Short sentences are easier. ‘Eleven were still lifes of flowers. Only eleven of one hundred and ten—all the rest landscapes.’ She does not cough, but when she breathes deeply, there is a little rattle. ‘One hundred and ten minus eleven makes ninety-nine. Ninety-nine landscapes . . . One critic called his review Flowers and Vases.’
Coughing from another room, sharp and staccato. She is not the only cougher at the hospital; there is a choir of them. They each follow a different melody, but are made brothers by the same carnal beat.
She giggles. ‘Can’t anyone do arithmetic?’
Father and his nurse are looking perturbed. They find her incomprehensible. How long did it take Mrs Marks to perfect that inhuman look? Could she have been born with it? The two of them are not unlike art critics, secretly pleased to witness how landscape painting has overcome her; they are colourblind to her victory. Clarice’s tolerance for talk has evaporated. She longs for her own nurse, a reassuring robust redhead, to come and drive them away, and is tempted to su
mmon her with the bell. We each have a nurse now, Father, she thinks—how comical. The redhead has become her defence, the monarch of the country of her illness, just as Father is ruled by his hard-mouthed queen, Mrs Marks. Clarice must have become weak; she never required anyone’s protection before. And yet she is feeling quite feisty.
‘Father, go home and rest,’ she tells him in a stranger’s voice. The white ceiling hovers above her bed. ‘You must be tired. Thank you for coming.’ She makes small circles with her wrists beneath the wool blanket. ‘And for the flowers.’ Her chest is a little sore, but she rolls over till she is facing the door. ‘Incidentally, I haven’t painted flowers for a long time,’ she says. ‘And I have no plans to. Ever again. You should know that.’
The redhead, finally, as though wishing for her had caused her to materialise. She touches Clarice’s forehead knowingly; it is like the cold, salty ocean on sun-provoked skin. Clarice wants more of that touch, wants sleep, her visitors gone.
The redhead leaves her frame of vision to speak to Father and his queen. Mrs Marks’ voice is withering, the redhead’s matter-of-fact, low, as she enunciates the queerly cushioned words double pneumonia. A twinge of alarm in Clarice’s chest. She is missing the Doctor.
31
She is a prolific dreamer at the hospital. One night, or perhaps day—the line dividing these states is no longer quite fixable—Clarice is lying between two men in a rather grand four-poster bed. The bed has a canopy whose drapes seem to be filmy, restless pieces of the sky itself, a breeze lifting and subtly rearranging them. The sheets they lie on have an extraordinarily fine texture, impossibly smooth. As for the men, they are familiar, though she cannot definitively place them and they are therefore somewhat, but not altogether, menacing. The three of them are cocooned like triplets in the delectable sheets, floating drapes and balmy breeze. The sea is not far away.
She struggles to keep her thoughts in order, get things straight. Difficult to decide what she prefers: the never-ending circular caresses low on her back with the heel of a palm or the halting journey of a slightly ragged fingernail over her inner thigh. One of the men gives moist, enveloping kisses that form a timeless continuum; it would be simpler to just hibernate inside his mouth. The other’s kisses are noncommittal, taunting little jabs that infuriate Clarice, especially as she has to stay passive to show no favouritism. While the outside of her is inert, there is hot, cataclysmic activity within her, in the unseen realm beneath her skin. Her poor skin bears the heavy task of concealment. But her belly is going warm, all of her turning as soft as the sheets.
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