The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  She’s going to be an artist. She tells herself this when she’s bent over the mop or elbow-deep in scone dough. From the kitchen window she looks out to the water, knowing now what it stands for: freedom, escape, wildness, loss, love. She sometimes thinks of her father too, fleetingly, without words, just as a bird skims a wave with its wing: touching down, bouncing off, soaring skywards again. Oh, to paint! To hold a brush to a canvas and commit; to take the wildness out of her head and into brushstrokes on a gessoed board. And then there’s the stab of terror, the ache of doubt: she might die before she becomes what she needs to become. On these leaden days she holds fast to the railings, the green water singing out to her to come close, closer, as if the only perfect way to understand is to go beneath.

  There was a watercolour painting of a beach, before she’d ever seen one, slapped up on a long, sticky February afternoon in her final year of school. At the last minute she painted a woman with an old-fashioned parasol at the water’s edge. ‘It’s you,’ she told her mother when she brought it home. ‘You’re on holiday.’ Had it been her mother she’d set out to paint or, when it was done, was there something in the figure — the straight line of her back, the tilt of her chin — that made it so?

  Her mother spread the painting out on the kitchen table. When Mary returned from the garden, hands full of washing, her mother was still bent over the picture. ‘Do you like it?’ Mary asked.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ her mother said. This wasn’t a word her mother ever used. ‘I’m going to put it in my bedroom.’

  She’d thought her mother had meant on the bedroom wall, but when she ventured in the next day it wasn’t there. ‘When are you going to put up my painting?’ she asked. The word beautiful still hovered.

  Her mother put a finger to her lips, as if the painting had overnight crossed into the realm of secrets. The floating, soft look of the day before had gone. ‘It’s in a safe place,’ she said.

  ‘But not so we can see?’

  ‘No.’

  Art is performance; performance is art. She once held high a shining fish while the crowd on the pier clapped and cheered. Was that when she knew? To be an artist is to burrow down, rise up, leap sideways into an altered state of knowing — a pocket of time and space in which she steps away from the drabness of the real. Every artist’s on show, a chink of their soul under the spotlight, their talent — or paler aspirations to it — hung naked on the wall. She’s used to being naked. She wants to be noticed. She’d rather be noticed failing than not at all.

  12

  In between lectures and his work in the glasshouse — ah, the life of a gentleman and scholar — Dominic steals away to the library. Tibble would slaughter him if he found out, but he can’t help himself. He wants to know. It’s genetics that draws him most.

  Kingsley’s introduced them to Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritance: segregation, uniformity and independent assortment, the concept of dominant and recessive traits. Brother Mendel in his monastery, at a place called Brno, pottering around his pea plants for eight whole years. You could do that in the 1860s, Dominic presumes, especially if you were a monk.

  Through the results of his breeding program, Mendel knew there must be an inheritable substance. Though he never laid eyes on it, he called it elementen: a name coined in belief. That afternoon he tells Hanna the rest of the story. ‘Mendel’s elementen was renamed chromatin by Walther Flemming in 1882. Flemming was a German anatomist. They call him the father of cytogenetics.’ What he means is: See? Some good’s come out of Germany. Something besides you. He goes on, for her sake. ‘Flemming was one of the first to study cell division. He developed his own staining techniques that enabled him to see, better than ever before, the process of mitosis.’

  ‘Mitosis? I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘It’s the distribution of genetic material to two daughter cells from a parent cell. Flemming saw how the chromosomes formed into threads and then split length-wise — each separate length for one new cell, every chromosome doing the same. He called the threads chromatin. The word chromosome came later.’

  ‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘Why does it interest you so much?’

  ‘Because it’s the future.’

  ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because psychology is about the past. You know, memories, the traumas of childhood.’ She smiles mysteriously. ‘Just an observation.’

  He walks beside her, brimming with facts. Prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase: the chromosomes drawn to the cell equator and pulled apart into sister chromatids as the spindle fibres shorten; pulled apart and divided into two new cells with identical genetic material. Jesus, he likes to use his brain. This is just the stuff of memory — regurgitation, really — but soon he might be able to put all he’s learned into something worthwhile. Experimentation, discovery; the cell, the world. ‘Then along came Theodor Boveri, a colleague of Flemming’s,’ he continues. ‘He used Flemming’s staining technique to describe mitosis in the roundworm.’ Ascaris megalocephala, just four chromosomes. Don’t bore her with this, he tells himself. Don’t be a boffin. ‘He noticed during fertilisation — these are sea-urchin eggs I’m talking about now — that the cell nuclei of the sperm and egg didn’t fuse together. Instead, each contributed sets of chromosomes in equal numbers.’

  ‘I see.’

  He’s losing her. ‘I’m getting to something,’ he pleads. ‘Meiosis.’

  ‘Will it be worth it?’

  He takes her hand. ‘Meiosis is everything. It’s the basis of reproduction, of the transfer of genetic material from parent to offspring. During meiosis the number of chromosomes is reduced by half in sperm and egg cells. Then, during fertilisation, when the sperm and egg combine, the original number of chromosomes is restored.’ Mendel, a bloody genius, deduced this without ever seeing it. Boveri, and at the same time, Walter Sutton in America, with the benefit of the microscope and all of Mendel’s rediscovered work, concluded that chromosomes were the basis of heredity. Walter Sutton was a farm boy from Russell, Kansas. Dom thinks — he hopes — Russell might be on a par with Kyneton.

  He wants to blather on about Thomas Hunt Morgan — his famous experiments on white-eye in Drosophila — but he bites his tongue. Mendel, Flemming, Boveri and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Sutton, Hunt Morgan, McClintock. Knowledge handed down from one scientific generation to the next, passed on like the very genes themselves.

  Hanna tells him she must visit her rats. ‘One final observation before I can write up. Will you come with me? I don’t like to be there alone.’

  They cross the Union courtyard, where a few last students loiter over cigarettes and coffee, and head down Tin Alley to the psychology huts. From the tennis courts beside the alley comes the promising thwack of a ball against strings. The courts are never empty, he’s noticed, now that the campus is in the grips of Olympic Games fever.

  When they reach the psychology hut, Hanna unlocks the battered tin door. The odour inside is enough to turn his stomach: kerosene from the old heaters, and the moist, acrid stench of rat droppings. He believes he can smell fear as well. The rats in their cages, lining three walls of the room, grow agitated at his approach. ‘What do you do with them?’ he asks.

  ‘Train them to do what we want. Reward them with food, punish them with isolation or relative starvation.’ She puts her finger to the nearest cage and holds it there. One of the rats creeps tentatively forward, its snout raised, whiskers twitching, to sniff at her finger. ‘See? Here’s the optimist,’ she says. ‘I’d like to reward her, but it might ruin our protocol.’

  She takes him to a large enclosure that holds an elaborate maze of criss-crossing alleys. ‘You’re in luck,’ she says. ‘Tonight it’s the rewarded group.’ She opens the door and fills a box at the end of the maze with pellets. The rats in the adjacent cage huddle as close as they can to the food, snouts upt
urned, whiskers twitching. Hanna crosses the room and returns with a chart and a stopwatch. ‘Are you ready?’ she asks. She takes a deep breath, deftly unlocks the cage door, picks up a squealing white rat with both hands and deposits it at the entrance to the maze. ‘Only three more after this one,’ she says, as they watch the rat navigate the maze with ease. ‘Let’s hope they all make it through in record time.’

  ‘It must be hard to work there,’ he says when they walk across campus. ‘Though harder for the rats, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s a compulsory subject; otherwise I wouldn’t be there. I often wonder if that’s enough of an excuse.’ She picks up the pace, pulls on his arm. ‘Here’s the dilemma: we study animal behaviour to learn more about our own, but if animals are so like us, why would we think it right to experiment on them? Alternatively, if animals are not like humans, why are we subjecting them to experiments we can learn little from?’ She stops and turns to him, solemn. ‘These are the sort of things that keep me awake at night.’

  Her earnestness charms him. He tries to find something helpful to say. ‘It’s a compulsory subject, so you’re obliged to finish it to get your degree. And when you graduate you can go out, a qualified professional, to do as much good as you can.’

  She looks at him with a serious expression. ‘Are you saying the end justifies the means?’

  He shrugs. ‘Perhaps, in this case.’

  She kisses his cheek. ‘What a good choice you made, to study plants.’

  ~

  To compile a list of the differences between Robbie and Sam might — so Mary suspects — place one of them at a sorry disadvantage. But when it comes to the question of the condom, she can’t help but compare.

  Robbie blows it up like a balloon, checking for holes. ‘What if someone at the factory stuck a whole batch with a pin?’

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’ she asks.

  ‘There are some crazy bastards out there.’ He holds the condom up to the light. ‘One of your lot, maybe.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Micks, Mary. Your lot. Everything except the rhythm method’s a great big bloody sin.’

  Sam uses a condom just as long as she provides it, just as long as she’s been able to sneak one from the stash in Robbie’s tobacco tin. One tiny package at a time: if Robbie takes to counting them, she’s a goner. She tells herself it’s for Robbie’s sake, too. God knows she’s heard enough about venereal disease to last a lifetime.

  She’s grateful to Robbie — she really, truly is — for his fixation on cleanliness, but it’s Sam’s nonchalance that sets her alight. No, she doesn’t want a baby, but to be so close and nothing in between. They’re kindred spirits then, tearing loose, hurtling towards something that feels like an escape, except that it might be an awful trap, a steep-sided well. A black, black hole. She’s reminded of the Kyneton gardens in summer, when she lay at the top of the steepest hill, Joan beside her, their arms crossed over their chests as if laid out to die. Ready, set, go, she’d say, though it was never a race, and rolling, rolling, the grass newly cut, the sun in her eyes, gathering speed, willing her angles and edges to smooth and round out, letting the gradient take over. She’d shut her eyes against the flickering sun, and with Joan’s voice behind her, with all the voices in the world behind her — Stop, Mary, stop — she’d dream of rolling, rolling until she slammed into a tree, or dropped into the river to be carried away.

  The sandy-haired girl in the vest is Joyce Bremner, until recently of Beaufort. When Mary comes out after getting changed one Tuesday evening, Joyce is waiting, hands in pockets. ‘The men have gone to the pub,’ Joyce says, ‘if you want to join them. I know you don’t, as a rule.’

  She’s pleased that Joyce has noticed. ‘It is a sort of rule of mine.’ She laughs, and adds for effect, ‘I don’t have many, you know.’

  ‘We could go somewhere else if you like. Away from the men.’

  At the Fan Court Café they order coffee and toasted sandwiches. ‘I’m starved,’ Mary says. ‘I never get dinner on Tuesdays.’

  ‘I’m always hungry.’ Joyce puts her hands to her waist. ‘And I eat whenever and whatever I want.’

  In the daytime Joyce works as a tram conductor on the Carnegie line. ‘Couldn’t bear the thought of working in an office or a shop. Me, behind a desk! At least on the tram there’s a constant change of scenery. And a changing clientele — I like that too.’

  Mary asks about Donald’s classes. ‘Are you finding them helpful?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s my thing,’ Joyce says. ‘All that fuss about technique. It seems a bit prissy. And to tell you the truth, the blokes in the class give me the irrits.’

  ‘All of them?’

  Joyce laughs. ‘More or less. Even your precious Sam — and don’t try to deny it,’ she adds when Mary meets her eyes. ‘I’ve seen him hovering around you. He seems pretty full of himself, if you ask me. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s how I see it.’

  Mary adds another teaspoon of sugar to her coffee and stirs with deliberation. The mention of Sam’s name still makes her melt — those clever hands of his — but, all the same, he is rather full of himself. ‘It’s difficult to tell the difference between self-confidence and talent,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Men are always going to assume their work is good,’ Joyce replies. ‘It’s their default position. They take a lot of persuading otherwise. Women, in my experience, take the opposite view. And how many men are going to spend a lot of their time persuading a talented woman of her worth?’

  What Joyce says is so true it seems unlawful. Mary sits straight in her chair. This, from a Beaufort girl. ‘What do we do then, if we want to be serious artists?’

  ‘Go into it with your eyes open. Don’t believe everything they say. Find support from other women. Stop wearing lipstick.’

  Mary puts her hand to her lips: she’ll have to find a way around that last rule. ‘You’ve been thinking about this a lot.’

  ‘Well, I read.’

  ‘There are books about this?’

  ‘Not many. De Beauvoir has some interesting things to say. But I’ve also learned to read between the lines.’ She puts down her cup. ‘For instance, Donald praises the students who paint like he does. He’s probably not even aware of his bias.’

  Sam paints like Donald, thinks Mary. Joyce makes good sense. ‘Will you stay with Donald?’ she asks.

  ‘Until the end of term.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I could go to university. I’ve just been accepted into architecture.’

  ‘You don’t want to be an artist?’

  ‘Not a painter. I’m considering sculpture. I have a practical bent. I grew up on a farm, without any brothers. I like getting my hands dirty.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of sculpture.’

  ‘There’s something so flat, so two-dimensional, about painting. All that crap about perspective.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s crap.’

  ‘If it’s three dimensions you’re trying to achieve, why not make something that’s actually in three dimensions?’

  ‘You can’t throw a whole artform out the window.’

  Joyce grins. ‘Watch me try.’

  On the homeward tram, Mary thinks about friendship. Well, she wants it, that’s for sure — one true friend who can share in her life, who’s happy that she’s happy, who wants her to succeed. She remembers Joan Corrigan, once always in her thoughts. The secrets shared in Joan’s flowery bedroom; their crazy laughter, infectious and aching, in the cinema dark. But Joan pulled away the day Mary tried to kiss her, and she knew then — didn’t she? — that something had shifted. She wanted more than Joan did. She wanted more than Joan could even know existed.

  Atlantic Ethyl beams down, high above the junction, lighting the way. How is it that she, Mary Quinn, more or less an orphan, has fashioned a life of such
richness? Could it be that she’s stronger than anybody knows? Not made from her mother’s steely fibre — never that — but instead something molten and quick. Adaptable. Wanting is for getting, not for pushing those wants deep down inside yourself and hoping that everyone else is pushing hard too. ‘See me happy or not at all,’ she whispers to Ethyl, and the tram takes up the chant as it rollicks towards the sea.

  ~

  At the Carlton Picture Palace, Dom kisses Hanna when the lights go down. She’s chosen the film, and he tries to like it for her sake, but there’s too much talking and shouting about not much at all, and even Marlon Brando can’t save it. The title unnerves him: A Streetcar Named Desire. He reaches for Hanna’s hand in the dark, and she lets him take it. She kisses him back and then it’s all he wants to do for the rest of the session, but she keeps pulling away. ‘I really want to see this,’ she whispers. He sits back, arms folded for a minute, but can’t stop himself from reaching an arm around her shoulders. How can she concentrate on the bloody screen?

  After the film they walk to Lygon Street. ‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee,’ Hanna says. Is she buying him off? It’s been raining, and the wet footpaths shimmer with reflected light. He breathes in the night air, trying to shrug off the heat of the cinema, the lingering desire. ‘Real coffee,’ Hanna says, as if sensing his sulkiness, ‘and an Italian pastry. You haven’t lived until you’ve drunk an espresso.’