She nodded and disappeared into the shop, returning with four rulers. ‘Normally, I’d have put a mat around your picture but a mat would cover too much action. Yet look what would happen if I had.’ She placed the rulers inside the frame making the picture smaller – too small – but suddenly it sprang to life.
‘Why . . . ?’
‘Look out any window, you’ll never see a complete view. Windows crop scenes, your painting shows a complete one. When you crop a picture you create an impression of the scene continuing beyond the frame. More realistic. More interesting.’
Of course, so simple. What was happening out of sight? Another artistic pearl from Mrs Know-Everything-Valier.
I looked at my painting things. All neat, all waiting, just add . . . Lindsay. I moved to the chair, sat down and picked up a brush. We worked in silence for a while, just the tink of brush on jar and the creak of our chairs. As I painted, the tightness in my chest gave way. Helen gave me so much; I gave her so little. I stood up to rescue the apron from the floor. As I bent down, I felt a sticky wetness between my legs. I went out the back to the bathroom and found spatters of blood on my knickers. I blinked . . . my first period. Unsure what else to do, I lined my pants with layers of toilet paper. As I walked back inside I could feel it shifting around and I took smaller and smaller steps to keep it in place.
Helen stared at me. ‘What’s wrong, Lindsay?’
‘I think, ah . . .’ What to say?
‘Lindsay, what is it?’
‘I think I’ve got . . . it’s um . . .’ I ran my tongue over my lips. My mouth was dry.
She looked at me curiously. ‘Oh . . . ! Have you, ah, your period?’ Colours suddenly rushed higgledy-piggledy around her head – pink, red, orange – a total dither. ‘Well, well . . . no problem. Would you like a pad? First time, is it? Gosh, nothing to worry about, just need to . . . do you know about this? Good, good. Um, I’ll get you . . .’ She rummaged in a drawer, pulled out a pad and some elastic with metal clips. ‘Do you know how these work?’ She pushed the sheer tag of the pad through a clip. ‘Holds like this, see? Front and back.’
I took the things to the bathroom where I struggled to fit the pad and elastic. I went back inside, bandy-legged as a cowboy.
Helen handed me a glass of cordial. ‘Welcome to womanhood,’ she said. ‘Some of it good, some not so good. Here, have the rest of these to tide you over.’ She gave me the bag of pads. ‘You know it’s monthly and all that, I suppose?’
I nodded and sat down. Picked up a paintbrush. Couldn’t think what I was supposed to be painting. There was a pillow between my legs and a trail of sticky liquid I couldn’t control. I felt like crying, a baby; anything but a woman.
Helen leaned over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Bit of a shock, isn’t it? A big milestone, though, but you’ll soon get used to it.’
I cycled slowly home. Would everyone be able to tell? Would Chris? He seemed to have forgotten the night of the pantomime, or maybe he was just being polite.
I told Mama my period had arrived while I was at school and that a teacher had given me pads.
She went earnestly through her instructions. ‘Any pain? Lucky you. Cramps are perfectly normal and it’s okay to have an aspirin if you need it. Listen, if there’s anything you want, anything at all, just ask. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Please, Mama. Just let me paint.
April. Moresby was drying off. Every few yards I stopped to gather flowers – orange bougainvillea, pink frangipani and white hibiscus – into a fragrant bunch. I tied them with wild passionfruit vine and when I reached Helen’s I put them in a jar in front of her.
‘How sweet. Nice to paint.’
A cloth beanie sat on the shelf over her desk. ‘Is this your brother’s?’ I said.
She reached up and fingered the clay-coloured fabric. ‘No, it was my husband’s. He died.’
I didn’t tell her I knew. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. What was he like?’
‘Gentle. Gallant. Big. Not in size, but in spirit. He was in the diplomatic corps, like my father. That’s how I met him.’
‘You must miss him.’
‘I do.’
Did she miss Dad?
‘But Claude was sick for a long time and sometimes it’s hard to remember him when he was well. That’s the worst part.’
‘Were you married a long time?’
‘Five years. We were planning a family when he got sick, then it didn’t seem right to go ahead.’
And then he died and you met my father and fell in love again, and that didn’t work out either. You sent him away.
She carefully brushed sap green over her drawing, a curled leaf with a dew drop inside, lying among pebbles. It was one of a series commissioned by the Australian Post Office for postage stamps and looked so real I reckoned a snail wouldn’t know it was a painting. How ironic, I thought; my mother would love Helen’s pictures.
‘Did your mother mind you painting?’ I asked.
Helen shrugged. ‘I never knew her; she died when I was a baby. Dad raised me, with the help of a nanny. My brother’s older than I am and he wasn’t around much.’
So many people Helen had lost: her mother, her husband – and with him her chance for a baby – and Dad. Yet she was still soft. Mama had grown a shell as hard as a limpet. All that mattered was getting somewhere, being someone. ‘My mother says painting isn’t a real career.’
‘It’s a difficult career; very hard to make money. I’m lucky I can earn a living at it but this type of art isn’t my first choice.’
‘What is?’
‘Bigger.’ She shrugged. ‘Looser. More heart.’
‘Like mine?’
‘No. Not like yours is at the moment, anyway. Hopefully that’ll change.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lindsay, you have plenty of talent. Flair. Insight. Your work is very promising. Being able to see colours puts you ahead when it comes to understanding people and painting them, but what’s missing from your paintings is you. If people can’t see you, they can’t connect with your work. They want to know what you feel, not just what you see.’
Like Mama and her photos; no sign of the photographer. No! I was nothing like my mother.
‘Where are your paintings with you in them?’ I said.
‘At home.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Perhaps . . . one day.’
Chapter Eighteen
Sydney, May 1961
Boarding school might be years off but my mother and Mrs Breuer were making plans for Stefi and me at St Catherine’s School. We’d been accepted as pupils but the headmistress wanted to meet us. So in May, Stefi, Mrs Breuer, Mama and I went South. At the airport, Stefi and Mrs Breuer were whisked away by friends. Tim was supposed to be joining us in Sydney but Tempe met us with the news that he was still in Melbourne, with chicken pox.
‘I’ll have to go to Melbourne,’ Mama wailed.
As soon as the interview was over, Tempe and I took Mama back to the airport. She pecked my cheek. ‘Have fun. I’ve told your aunt to make you buy some jazzy clothes. Those smocks are so depressing.’
‘She’s right about your clothes, Bertie,’ Tempe said as we walked to her car.
‘Please don’t call me that.’
‘What? Oh, sorry, I forgot. It’s just that you don’t look like a Lindsay to me. Lindsays are fair-haired and pale and nice. Do you feel like a Lindsay?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s my name.’
‘So was Roberta, and I always liked it.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, Slug, but we’ve got a problem.’ Tempe gazed at me across the roof of her Austin. ‘Your mother made me promise not to let you have anything to do with art.’
‘Oh. I should have guessed.’
‘She started on about how art made you a thief and if I didn’t promise she’d send you to stay with the Breuers. So I promised.’
‘All for a handful of pain
ts, over a year ago.’
Tempe slid into the driver’s seat and leaned across to open my door. ‘Poor old thing. Have you really not painted in all that time?’
‘No, well . . . not . . . officially.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I sketch a bit.’
Tempe put the car in gear and we drove away from the airport in silence. As we travelled through the rain-washed city, afternoon sun splashed rainbows of light over the water.
‘Look at that light,’ I said. ‘All that colour.’
‘If it weren’t for light there’d be no colour.’
‘If it weren’t for light the world would be black.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘See this car in front of us, the blue one? It isn’t blue at all.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘Aha. Well it’s not. It looks blue because the pigment swallows up every colour in the spectrum apart from blue. The blue gets reflected back, that’s why we see it.’
‘So you’re saying a green leaf isn’t green at all?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And if I use red paint, I’m actually using paint that’s every colour except red?’
‘Yep.’
I wondered why Helen had never told me that vital piece of information. Hadn’t got around to it yet, I supposed. Never enough time.
Outside her flat Tempe yanked on the handbrake and slammed the door. We clambered up the stairs with the groceries and she put them away, banging drawers and jars and crockery.
‘Did I say something?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s not you. It’s this damn promise. I’m your aunt but I’m also an artist and it’s ridiculous to expect us to spend a week together and not do any art. I’ve no problem with breaking the promise; the question is how we handle it. Either we keep it a secret, in which case we lie, or we come clean, in which case we’ll both be in strife.’
‘It’s easy, Tempe. We lie.’
‘It’s not easy. Lies have a way of backfiring. We need to think about it.’
‘I thought about it long ago.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
‘Well, I do paint.’
‘Oh? And how do you manage that?’
‘I go to a friend’s.’
‘What friend?’
‘Just . . . a friend.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘A name, Slug; I mean it.’
‘All right. Your friend.’
‘My friend?’
‘Helen Valier.’
Tempe’s mouth dropped open. She shut it. It fell open again. ‘Are you kidding me? Are you mad? What do you think you’re doing? What does Helen think she’s doing?’
‘Like you said, banning art is dumb; Mama’s punishing me because Dad’s ex-mistress is an artist.’
‘Jesus, Harry and Joseph. If your mother finds out you’ll be history. Helen must be off her head.’
‘Mama won’t find out. I paint at Helen’s shop and if she discovers I was there I’ll just say I was buying a book. It’ll work. Once, anyway.’
Tempe shook her head. ‘Helen Valier. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
We went to the city to buy clothes. ‘You’d better do something to please your mother.’
At David Jones I bought a new skirt, patterned like one of Tempe’s paintings, and afterwards we went to see South Pacific. I drooled over John Kerr playing the lieutenant and suffered through Mitzi Gaynor clutching her bleached curls and washing that man, whom she didn’t deserve, right out of them. Rossano Brazzi was too old for me but why he was attracted to the likes of ditzy Mitzi was beyond me.
We went for a late lunch afterwards. ‘What do you think of Rossano Brazzi?’ I asked, sucking chocolate malted milk through a pink-striped straw and crunching toasted cheese sandwiches.
‘I rather like Mitzi,’ Tempe said.
I burped. ‘Yuck.’
The doorbell jangled.
‘That’ll be Allie,’ said Tempe.
After a lunch of avocados, salami, bread and olives, Tempe, Allison and I went to an exhibition of Old Masters. The paint on some of them had cracked but they were still stunning.
‘Because their structure is good,’ said Tempe. ‘That’s why drawing is so important. Art is much more than splashes of paint.’
She let me use her studio and all her art things. ‘You might as well be hung for a lamb as a sheep,’ I said.
‘Smarty-pants.’
‘Not me. It’s Helen’s.’
‘Oh, really? She shouldn’t be so cavalier. She might yet hang.’
I sketched out a street scene from Kings Cross while Tempe prodded clay and cast glances at my work. ‘She’s been teaching you a few tricks, I see. Nice composition. Your perspective’s out though. Move over.’ She dumped the clay back onto a heap and slid beside me on the bench. With a ruler and pencil she drew V-shaped lines across my drawing. ‘Larger here at the bottom, smaller up the page. Stay between the lines to get the sizes of the buildings right in relation to one another.’
As I worked Tempe leaned her chin on her hand. ‘You were rather anti Mrs Valier once upon a time. What changed your mind?’
‘She did, I suppose. She’s kind of . . .’ In my mind I saw her at her desk, curls tied in one of my ribbons, the tiny heart winking on her wrist. I saw the sink lined with jars stained cobalt, vermilion, emerald green and through the window the limbs of the gum tree jutting across the sky. A breeze clacked the bead curtain and fluffed Helen’s skirt and she turned to me and smiled—
‘Slug?’
‘What?’
‘Where were you?’
At home. With Helen. I missed her.
‘I’ll certainly hang if your mother finds out,’ said Tempe, ‘but I’m taking you to my life-drawing class nevertheless. It’s too good an opportunity for you to miss.’
‘Naked ladies?’
‘Yes.’
‘Naked men?’
‘No. And forget that sketchbook. We’ll be using much bigger paper.’
The tutor helped me set up an easel and pin up an enormous sheet of paper. A lady wrapped in a chenille bedspread draped herself over an old-fashioned settee and dropped the bedspread to her waist. I’d seen plenty of black breasts before but not white ones. These looked like ski jumps. I didn’t know where to start. The tutor came and put a mark either side of my sheet. ‘This is where she starts, this is where she finishes. Now mark points in between where things belong. Middle here. Three-quarters, one-quarter. When you’re starting, it can help to see her simply as shapes and tones. A knee is a curve and a bump related to a straight line here and then the curve of the calf, and up here, a Y-shape. Don’t get sidetracked by the idea of what you’re drawing, just draw what you see.’
Echoes of Helen. Draw the shapes, not the idea. Two hours flew by in a landscape of contours, curves and colours. At the end we viewed each other’s work. Everyone had drawn the lady differently, some more professionally than others, but each had something unique: a scar, a wisp of hair, a look of boredom, a reflection of light. I felt like I was in the Tiger Moth with the world spread out before me, and all I had to do was jump.
Chapter Nineteen
Port Moresby, June 1961
The new high school library was small. There was only a handful of books on art but I had access to them whenever I wanted. An hour with Helen was never enough and Tempe’s introduction to perspective had whetted my appetite for more.
On my first day back at school, I found a book I hadn’t seen before. At first I thought it was a photography book, until I saw how weird the photos were. The first was of a man and a woman, headless and naked. The next showed them kissing (heads attached) and the one after that showed a penis in a vagina among a frenzy of black curls. Then there was a picture of a pregnant woman and after that, a baby at the woman’s breast. Not a photography book but a sex-education book misfiled. But, added to wh
at I’d learned at the life-drawing class, the pictures gave me an idea. One of my favourite books in the library was by an artist called Miro. ‘What really counts,’ he said, ‘is to strip the soul naked. Painting is made as we make love: a total embrace, prudence thrown to the wind, nothing held back.’ His pictures were intensely coloured, unexpected and exciting. They looked simple yet there was so much you could make of them. Miro also used a lot of lines so, using his work as a guide, I spent several lunch hours in the library turning the photos into lines. One line suggesting a leg, another a curved hip, two lines for swelling bosoms, one for the soft retreat of underarm, another for the sleek curve of backbone. Soaring and dipping, my pencil traced the folds of flesh – heavy, light, even absent. A woman’s eyes shut, head tossed back to expose her throat, the man more muscular and bulky, the planes of his face more lean.
Mama was having a ‘family’ night, which she made a point of doing whenever she’d been away for a few days or had been coming home late so often Dad would be steamed-up. That night, because Mama and I had been South for three weeks, she produced steak to please Dad, macaroni to please me and a salad to please herself.
‘I’ve made an appointment for you, Lindsay,’ she said, forking lettuce into her mouth. ‘Tomorrow, after school, to get your hair cut.’
‘I’m not getting my hair cut.’ My hair was one thing I could control and she wasn’t having any of it.
‘Not short,’ she said. ‘Just tidy up that tatty fringe and get some taken off the bottom. Your plait’s so long you look like a squaw.’
‘I don’t care.’
She eyed me sharply. ‘You do care. I’ll drive you to school in the morning and pick you up at three.’
I left for school early the next morning on my bike while my mother was in the shower. But she was waiting for me beside her car when I came out of class.
‘I’m not getting my hair cut,’ I said, and went for my bike.
She grabbed my arm. ‘Just a trim, Lindsay.’
‘No!’ I pulled away.
She lunged after me, catching my satchel. I yanked it back but she hung on and I lost my balance and let it go. The bag flipped over, spilling books, pencils, waxed lunch paper, my fountain pen, two ancient lollies and my sketches on the ground. Mama registered the mess in irritation, then her face changed. She bent down and picked up a drawing. A woman lay in the grass by a river, breasts exposed to the sun, pubic fuzz exposed to her lover’s hand. My mother stared for a long time, then bent to pick up another sketch – backs arced in pleasure, a cross-hatch of bloom on the man’s rump. She picked up each sketch one by one, the pad and pencils, and dropped them into my bag.
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