The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks Hanna now. He wants to say her name just as she’s said it, but he’s afraid he’ll make a hash of the breathy h, the long sighing ah.

  But Hanna is already glancing at her watch. ‘I have to go or I’ll be late for class.’ She stands quickly, lightly, as if springing to her feet is a movement she’s perfected.

  He, too, rises to his feet, his left leg all pins and needles, hands in his pockets. The spell is broken; he shouldn’t have pried. ‘Well, goodbye.’

  ‘So,’ Hanna continues, as if he hasn’t spoken, ‘if you can meet me here tomorrow, at this exact spot, at this exact time’ — she consults her watch again — ‘yes, let’s say thirteen past three precisely,’ she says with a wry smile, ‘I’ll answer your question then.’

  He tries not to grin like an imbecile. ‘I’ll be here,’ he says. ‘Thirteen past. Ten past, even. I won’t be late.’

  ‘Good.’ She walks a few steps, stops, turns back. ‘Don’t forget,’ she says.

  That night, under Hanna’s instructions, he closes his eyes and tries to be Mary. Dancing and music and spangly lights, somewhere lively but not too glamorous; a place with faded decadent charm, home to drifters, artists, dreamers. Only one place comes to mind. She has to be in St Kilda.

  11

  Mary sometimes finds herself wondering if she’s gotten too fat. Perhaps her nose is a little too broad, her chin a touch prominent? She gives herself a talking-to as she lolls on the studio couch. It’s only because they’re sketching you that you’re dwelling on trifles. Besides, you usually end up with a triangular head and legs without feet, and you know that’s got nothing to do with your looks.

  She tells herself that such thoughts are borne of boredom — Lie still, Madeleine, and please don’t touch your hair, Donald is always intoning — but deep down she knows that it’s all about Sam.

  ‘Structure, proportion, the togetherness of the elements,’ she hears him tell Donald, almost as if he were the teacher. His hair’s just long enough to curl, and she can’t help wishing that one day he’ll walk in with hair to his collar — blond locks, blue eyes, the heir to the kingdom, like the prince in every fairytale she’s ever read.

  ‘The Americans are coming into their own,’ Sam says at the pub after class. ‘Taking inspiration from new things, moving away from the figurative.’ He taps a syncopated beat on the table. ‘I’m sick of this social realism crap. I’m going to Sydney to study with John Passmore.’

  ‘Are you really?’ she asks. He doesn’t reply.

  ‘Or I’m going to New York,’ he says, a minute later, ‘to study with Hoffman.’ He leans in on his elbows and the others lean in too. ‘Abstraction’s the thing. Rhythm, balance, tension — ideas, man, ideas.’ He’s so handsome when he’s worked up. ‘Jazz music, Chinese calligraphy.’ He sticks a finger in his beer and then draws quickly on the table. ‘That’s the Chinese symbol for water. And this one’s for fire.’

  Something’s shifted, loosened within her, these last few weeks. She was Robbie’s girl, and still is, but all at once she won’t let that stop her from being other things, as well. And there’s a strange sense of grieving, too, because for so long it was all she wanted, and now it’s just one thing of many, and not even the most important thing. Does it mean she has grown up? Irrelevant, she tells herself. There are no endpoints: life’s constantly in motion. Her life as an artist has barely begun; her life of men, too, is just beginning to bloom. Where’s the dream of marriage gone? It was hers for so long, but it’s not the dream of the person she is now. That’s where the grief comes in.

  ‘I’m going to have an affair with Sam,’ she told Clarissa last Saturday night, in the ladies’ at the Downbeat Club. ‘It seems inevitable now.’

  ‘You won’t be the first.’

  Mary watched her friend’s face as she leant towards the mirror, and saw, for the first time, the capacity for sadness. Clarissa and Sam. Of course. ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, two years ago, at least.’ Clarissa reapplied lipstick, closed her handbag with a resolute click. ‘Be careful, darling. He’s a heartbreaker.’

  ‘I won’t if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘You’re sweet, but it has nothing to do with me. Not now.’

  She put her arm through Clarissa’s. ‘I don’t expect it to last.’ And she’s surprised that even as she says it to comfort Clarissa, she realises it’s true.

  Tuesday evening, a bottle of wine finished between two. They head east through the city, crossing Spring Street into the gardens. Sam strolls with his arm around her, his hand firm against her waist. A possum leaps from a tree and scampers across the grass, its fat, feather-boa tail upright and hostile. Sam pays no attention to her fright. Robbie would have thrown his arms around wildly to scare off the creature, and later he might have made fun of her fear. She understands, then, the extent of Sam’s single-mindedness.

  Mr Welsh is the only other man she’s known to live alone. ‘Bare bones,’ Eunice Moran once said of his house in Yaldwyn Street. ‘Just a couple of old chairs and a knockabout table. Nothing in the pantry.’ Not that she’d really believed that Eunice ever had a chance to look. Still, Eunice swore that she’d once dropped in on Mr Welsh for a cup of tea after Mass. ‘Didn’t have milk, let alone a biscuit,’ Eunice declared triumphantly. ‘What he needs is a wife.’

  Up three flights of stairs, Sam’s steady breathing behind her, and into a magical land. The front room — ‘my salon’, says Sam — is plumped with cushions and prettied with Chinese vases. Paintings hang on every wall. She recognises a Roberts in the plein air style, a Fred Williams nude. ‘Bought by the old man, on my advice,’ Sam tells her. ‘Some tax scheme thing.’ He waves his hand at the canvas over the mantle. ‘Max Meldrum. Tonalism. Not what I’m aiming for.’ He pours wine for them both, and leads her to the bedroom.

  Bare bones, a knockabout table: no need for a woman’s touch here. Except her touch on his cock, the tips of her fingers tracing hearts on his back. He throws the satin cover back and she sees damask sheets edged with lace. Sam’s not afraid of feminine things. He’s not afraid of women. Is it the artist in him that makes him so? He kisses her with a connoisseur’s lips, unbuttons her dress with an expert twist of finger and thumb. Not content with her petticoat, he slips it over her head. ‘Pretend you haven’t seen me naked before,’ she whispers as he runs a thumb from her chin to her sex, as if dividing her in two.

  ~

  Dom’s pacing the South Lawn by ten to three. Will she come from the cafeteria or from the psychology huts on Tin Alley? He keeps an eye on both directions. He’s worn a clean shirt and, Christ knows why, there’s a handkerchief in his pocket. She appears in his mind’s eye in a series of snapshots, clear and bright, stamped into memory: the expression on her face when first she looked at him, the nape of her neck where her hair begins, the knot of little bones that rose up under her skin as she bent forward. She appears in motion, too, in glorious technicolour, as she rolls on the lawn: pale yellow against grass green, the black gloss of her hair. His stomach growls, and he realises that he’s forgotten to eat lunch.

  At three-twelve he stands. She isn’t late, not yet, but it suddenly seems possible she mightn’t come. Then he sees her approaching on Professor’s Walk, and the sway of her skirt as she moves is enough to render his day glorious. She’s as he remembers, yet different. No longer the stuff of dreams, she’s real and she’s coming to meet him — it’s hard to believe, and yet it seems the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘You’re here,’ she says when she reaches him.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Did you think I wouldn’t come?’

  She smiles. ‘Not really. Still, it’s good to see you. Have you skipped class?’

  He nods. It’s the first prac he’s missed.

  Over the course of the afternoon he finds out more about her. She’s Jewish, she tells him. Born in Berlin, live
d there until she was seven. ‘To be German and Jewish is to be split down the middle,’ Hanna says. She holds her hand perpendicular to her face and winks. ‘But which half is the Australian one?’

  He pulls at blades of grass. What can he say to her? He weighs the words, German and Jew, and finds himself thinking of his mother in the Beauchamp Street house, the kitchen table scrubbed clean, his chickens scrabbling in the hard summer dirt. The memory of the climb on his bike up Romsey Road — the shy scent of wattle in the spring, and Hanging Rock on the return home, the golden glow on its western side, especially after rain. That’s all the history he has to offer her. ‘You’re safe here,’ he wants to tell her. ‘This is a safe place.’ Instead he says, ‘Perhaps you’re split into three: German, Jewish and Australian.’

  She lies on her side, looking up at him, as if she hasn’t heard his last remark. ‘Once, my mother kissed my father in the street outside our house as he left for work, and one of our neighbours happened to see.’ Her smile is measured. ‘I’m being generous: she didn’t just happen to see. She was peering through her window, watching for something to complain about. “We don’t do that here,” this neighbour said to my mother the next day, when they met in the street. “We don’t make public exhibitions of ourselves.”’

  He looks away. What’s she asking of him? Again he thinks of his mother, this time at the kitchen door, calling to him, the day his father died. The fear on her face had rendered her a stranger. They’d sat together at the kitchen table after Dr Cameron left, while the room grew cold. The cup had rattled in its saucer as he brought it to her, and he’d been afraid that it might slip from his hands. This is what binds him to his mother: these memories of an afternoon in which the die was cast. Could he call it grief? No public exhibitions, no wailing or gnashing of teeth. He doesn’t think his mother’s shed a single tear. Does that mean she hasn’t suffered?

  He changes the subject. ‘When did you come to Australia?’

  ‘In Thirty-nine. After Kristallnacht.’

  Kristallnacht. The way she says it, the rolling r, the ch that bounces against the roof of her mouth. The night of broken glass, Mr Welsh told them, years ago, while at her desk Mary drew shattered buildings with jagged roofs, the streets lined with shards of glass and ghostly people. He remembers the stars, yellow in the night sky of her copybook; a trickle of stars that made its way down to the black-coated figures. The chosen people, Mary wrote at the bottom of the page. He’d never gotten the irony until now.

  ‘We heard about it at school,’ he tells Hanna now, lamely. ‘It’s good to know it’s talked about.’ She looks at him with such directness that he turns away, a bloody failure in the face of this history. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry it happened.’

  She brushes his hand with hers, and his heart lifts again. ‘I’ve been lucky,’ she says. After Kristallnacht, she tells him, the Australian government decided to accept Jewish refugees, but only for a matter of months. Immigration was stopped again when war was declared. ‘We came at exactly the right time, my parents and I. We’ve always been lucky.’

  He can tell that she’s told this story before. Perhaps she needs to keep telling it. He understands now why she’s saved it until today.

  Her uncle and aunt and her two cousins came later, in 1940, via Singapore, and were interned as enemy aliens at Rushworth migrant camp. ‘We visited them every second weekend. It was a long drive, I remember, a long, flat road. I’d lie along the back seat and watch the trees flicker overhead. There was always the smell of rye bread in the car. My mother would bake it for them: she’d bring three or four loaves at a time. It was a small thing she could do for them, a small comfort. They hated Australian bread.’ She leans back, her outstretched arms behind her. ‘I remember the flies and the dust in summer, and my uncle and aunt whispering to my parents about the Nazi sympathisers in the adjacent building — can you believe that they housed the Jews with Nazi sympathisers? But I seem to remember it was the bread that was always the biggest problem. My family has always been particular about their bread.’

  Dominic chews on a blade of grass, remembering the soft white bread they bought from Hayes’, which they’d cut thick and spread with butter and homemade jam. They mustn’t have had bread like that at Rushworth. No one could hate that.

  ‘We tried to get them released, of course,’ Hanna says. ‘Papa made many requests, but they were held there until the end of the war. “Better to be here,” my uncle often said, “than in Germany.” We knew that to be true. My cousins went to school there, in a tin shed, like the ones they use for shearing sheep. They had a German teacher, a refugee herself. They’re now studying medicine. Here, the two of them.’ She looks at him, satisfied. ‘It’s turned out very well.’

  He’s skeptical. ‘It must be hard to forget five years in a refugee camp.’

  ‘They don’t want to forget. But they haven’t let it get in the way.’

  ‘In the way of what?’

  ‘The rest of their lives, of course. Their happiness.’

  Happiness. He lies in his bed and thinks of her. Happiness. The more he says it to himself, the less sense it makes. Something tugs at his memory — a scene between his mother and Mary, already half-played out in his absence. He took it all in as he came through the back door: a bread-and-butter plate in pieces on the kitchen floor, his mother standing against the sink, and Mary sitting at the table, head between her hands, sobbing. ‘I just want to be happy,’ he heard Mary say. ‘Is that so impossible?’ He’d not answered, and he’d not asked. Instead he retreated to see if the chickens had laid anything since that morning. By the time he came inside again, it had all blown over. Well — he reconsiders. Had it, in fact, blown over? Wasn’t it just before Mary ran away?

  He rolls over in bed. It’s a female word, happiness. A silly, flighty word a woman uses to get a man over a barrel. Happiness is marriage and children, a tidy house and a garden. But that’s a woman’s dream, not a man’s. He’s going to study hard and work and keep himself to himself, and no woman is going to tell him to clean the dirt from under his fingernails. Then he pictures Hanna cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails, and groans. How can he be so stupid? He thinks of her lean, quick fingers on his cock, the string of green beads around her neck resting in the hollow between her breasts. He masturbates, and comes with a sigh of resignation. That’s as close to happiness as a man needs to get.

  ~

  Donald, Mary divines, is older than he appears. It’s all his talk of the glorious past that gives him away. During this evening’s class it’s the story of the 1939 Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art. Eight paintings each by Picasso, Matisse and Gauguin, seven by Cézanne, six by Bonnard and four by Braque, as well as many others: Chagall, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, says Donald, reeling them off on his fingers. ‘But Christ, the controversy. All that nudity. More decadent still, all that modernism.’ The punters flocked in their thousands to be outraged, excited, delighted, scandalised. The critics were divided, old guard against the new, but the worst thing was that no Australian gallery bought any of the paintings. ‘They were all up for sale at bargain prices. Picasso, Cézanne. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ Donald’s beloved Cézanne.

  After class, as they leave the studio, he talks to her of the local artists he knows. The expressionist group that were once called the Angry Penguins — Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester — who thumbed their noses at pastoralist painting, instead creating new visions, modernist works influenced by surrealism and French symbolism. He speaks quickly, almost savagely, as if he both hates and admires what they do.

  The Angry Penguins no longer take the name, but they still congregate, usually at a place called Heide, an artists’ colony in Melbourne’s verdant north-east.

  ‘Tell me more about Joy Hester,’ Mary says on the stairs.

  ‘She was married to Albert Tuck
er but she left him for someone else, a lesser artist. Left her son, too.’

  ‘What about her art?’

  ‘Brush and ink mainly, a lot of human faces. At one point heavily influenced by concentration-camp imagery. Rarely uses oils, rarely exhibits.’

  ‘Where can I see her work?’

  Donald shrugs. He wants to talk about Nolan instead. ‘He’s the fastest painter I know. He works without sketches or photographs, painting from memory or something that’s close. You know his Ned Kelly paintings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you must. Too mythical for my liking. Still, you need to see them. They’re hidden away at Heide. All but one, that is.’ Under a streetlight he scribbles down an address. ‘The owner’s name is Carlo. Don’t telephone. Just turn up — no earlier than eleven, mind you — and smile. Wear lipstick.’

  She goes the next day. The address Donald gave her leads to a second-hand bookshop on the Bourke Street hill, near the grand Parliament steps. ‘Does Carlo work here?’ she asks the woman who sits filing her nails by the till.

  ‘Upstairs,’ the woman says, jerking the file towards the ceiling. ‘He’s there. Who knows who’s with him.’ The ivory comb is visibly slipping from her long black hair. ‘Stairs at the back.’

  The shop smells of something exotic. Patchouli, Mary thinks, not really knowing how that smells. Patchouli dabbed on one’s wrists, a nail file driven into a man’s unfaithful heart.

  Carlo is at home, alone it seems, dishevelled and beautiful. He guides her through the rooms of his excess — upended bottles, torn canvasses, discarded clothes — to where the painting hangs on a whitewashed wall. It’s the flatness of the country that first draws her eye: the rigid horizon, the scratched yellow paddocks. A landscape that’s lodged in her bones. She wants to shake it out, exorcise it. Her collarbone tingles, threatening pain. She sees the land as the black-suited figure on his horse does — with a hatred for the memories it holds. Kelly, the outlaw. She’s a fugitive too, fleeing from something she can’t even name. Armour and gun, the hangman’s noose. Dominic in the shed, holding a rifle to his shoulder and pointing it at a magpie, so many years ago that it mightn’t have happened. He didn’t know she’d seen. Other images hover as well: moths flailing, sickly and desperate, around the verandah light; a bare-branched tree casting shadows on a wall; a lattice of pink and green on a carpeted floor. Carlo stands behind her, his breath warm against her skin. She knows what comes next. She leaves before it does.