The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  Not mandatory sterilisation, Kingsley had said. He feels himself losing the argument. Bugger that. ‘There will have to be laws,’ he says.

  ‘Ah!’ She points an accusatory finger. ‘Laws. And will people be shot if they don’t obey your laws? Or gassed, perhaps?’

  ‘Stop it, Hanna.’ He takes her by the wrists, as if to restrain her. ‘You’re going too far.’

  She wrenches her hands from his. ‘Am I? Can’t you see that this has all been tried before?’ She looks at him, condescending, imperious. ‘I know you mean well, but that’s not enough. You can’t play God. People make choices because of the things that make them human, not despite them. Love, passion, insecurity, bravery, fallibility, not to mention the biological imperative: these are the reasons people have children together, not for the betterment of the human race. Why do you think you can interfere with this? Who are you to interfere?’

  It’s her European taste for melodrama; he should have known. Biological certainty pitted against the hysteria of Freud. Of course he’s right. ‘You’re personalising this too much,’ he says coldly. ‘This is science, not psychology.’

  She stands to go, contemptuous. ‘You poor deluded creature. Everything is psychology.’

  18

  There’s to be an art show at the end of the year: a biannual ritual, buoyed with wine and cheese and a photographer from The Argus. They’re to invite friends and family.

  ‘Will you come to the art show?’ Mary asks Robbie at his next visit. ‘There’ll be food. The art is for sale.’

  The date of the show is after the end of the university term, Robbie tells her. ‘I’ll be back home.’

  She knows of the Christmas parties, the day trips to Sorrento with his drinking mates, all their nicknames garnished with an o. ‘But you come up to Melbourne during the holidays all the time.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll see what I can do.’ Robbie hesitates. ‘Are you inviting your brother?’

  She sighs, sorrowful. ‘I wish. But not this time.’

  What to paint for the show? It will be a still life but something with colour — this much she knows. She remembers the Camerons’ roses in the front room in Baynton Street, the day after her father’s death: how their quiet evolution filled her scattered heart, the inevitability of their voluptuousness, their dignified decay. She draws roses in a cut-glass vase, a tabletop sheathed in white. No, it’s not right — too funereal and ordered. Where’s the order in life? She adds petals, littering the tabletop, teetering petals on its edges, some falling to the floor. Whole flowers, too, floating upwards, and huge buds drooping on quivering stems. Soon the canvas is awash with flowers, a river of roses floating downstream; Ophelia’s floral garland, her white robes spread on the water.

  Donald’s prowling. She hides her sketch behind a streetscape and knits her brow as he talks, thinking only of roses.

  ‘I’m going to take my painting home and work on it there,’ she tells him at the end of class. It’s to be encouraged, Donald says, work and more work. She collects brushes, varnish and paints, as greedy as the kiosk children choosing sweets, a hundred colours stuffed into her bulging satchel.

  When café kitchen duties are over and the last sodden tea towel hung up to dry, she clatters upstairs to her painting. Donald’s taught them the technique of the old Venetian masters: underpainting, glaze and scumble on a gessoed board. She begins with a knife in broad, flat strokes: black, light red and ivory. Before breakfast the next morning the petals are outlined with a fine brush, and later that evening a layer of glaze — oil paint thinned with varnish — is spread on as evenly as she can. The varnish is dry the next morning. She works in touches of colour — cinnabar green, cobalt violet, dianthus pink — until Tom shouts up the stairs, ‘Come on, Mares, we’re opening.’

  It’s a day of wind and petulant showers. The front door keeps banging and the oven goes out. Two batches of scones ruined, Molly’s at her flask before lunch. In the afternoon a kid vomits in the café: too much sugary excitement, and that incessant slap-slap of the fly-screen door in the wind, too. Mary mops up regurgitated Neopolitan ice cream — carmine, raw umber — and masticated musk stick, Montserrat orange.

  Later, on the bedroom floor in the dove-grey light, she mixes turpentine and varnish, adding white paint and quinacridone red to make scumble. Downstairs the jukebox blares, and something crashes to the floor with a shattering of glass. She works on, resisting drama, laying the scumble over the lighter tones so that they deepen and become opaque. The dark tones she leaves untouched, transparent.

  All night she dreams in colour, layering and mixing, seeing the finished work. If only it could be what she dreams for it! If only the mind’s eye could be painted, stroke for stroke.

  In the morning she’s gloomy. It’s not what she imagined, nothing near. Where is the heartswell of chiaroscuro, the glorious blush? Work and more work. She takes a knife to the board, scraping back her disappointment. She’s not beaten yet.

  The art show comes too soon: she’s still varnishing the painting the day before. It sits beside her on the tram to Bourke Street, and she stops herself from studying it in case she finds fault. Tom sits opposite, scrubbed clean of motor oil. ‘How much are you asking for your painting, Mares?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Money, for this? What is it exactly? Those dreams of luminosity. ‘Donald might suggest something.’

  ‘Fifty quid, I reckon,’ says Tom. ‘You’ve run yourself ragged.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Donald asks when she arrives and presents it. ‘I thought you were working on a country-town streetscape.’ He peers closely and straightens up. ‘It’s rather riotous. Where’s the geometry? Still, you’ve done a nice job with the glaze.’

  Tom gives the other paintings a cursory review. ‘Yours is the best, Mares, by a long shot.’ He returns from the refreshments table, shaking his head with the air of one who knows the business of catering inside out. ‘No bloody beer,’ he mumbles. ‘Could’ve supplied it myself.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘A quick drink before closing and I’ll be back before you know it.’ Robbie hasn’t yet arrived. ‘If that bugger doesn’t show …’ He slams a fist into his open hand.

  ‘You bodgie,’ Mary says. ‘He’ll come.’

  The evening’s shaping into a golden, jumbled success. Robbie turns up during Donald’s speech with a mate he introduces only as Bucky, and spends most of the evening avoiding the photographer’s flash. ‘I’d advise you to do the same,’ he tells Mary. ‘Imagine your mother opening The Argus and seeing you there.’ She imagines — and finds she no longer cares.

  Tom returns, mellowed by beer. He slaps Robbie on the back and talks to Bucky about cars. Joyce arrives with one of her new sculptor friends, an almond-eyed girl with a white camellia in her black hair. ‘Yours is beautiful,’ Joyce says after her tour of the room. ‘A celebration of beauty, in fact. Such a gleam on the edge of the petals, that early morning light.’

  Sam’s surrounded by women. The next time she turns to look he’s lighting a cigarette for Clarissa, and the other woman have gone.

  Lucien ambles towards Mary. ‘Maddy, darling, look at you. A real artist, an original.’

  She throws her arms around his neck. ‘It might never have happened if it weren’t for you. I can’t thank you enough.’

  He smiles. ‘I think it would have happened with or without me. Talent will out.’

  ‘What about your painting?’ she asks. ‘You haven’t mentioned it for ages. When are you going to have a show?’

  He shrugs, looks to the ceiling. ‘I haven’t been doing much of that recently. Sort of lost the fire in the belly, I’m afraid.’ His faded blue eyes look tired, and she sees that his soft, pale hair has begun to recede at the temples. ‘I’m about to join the family firm. Pressure from the parents, you know. Time to step up, and all that.’

  Her sole regret — yes, only one — is
that she didn’t invite Dom. She imagines them taking a grand turn of the room, her arm linked in his. ‘My twin brother,’ she’d tell the photographer. ‘Dominic and Madeleine Quinn.’ Let her mother pick up The Argus tomorrow and see what her daughter had made of herself.

  And, best of all, her painting is bought by a stranger for ten whole beautiful pounds. ‘George Lazarus,’ Donald tells her later. ‘A painter himself, of some repute. A Jewish refugee. The name Lazarus, of course — you have to see the irony.’ From across the room she’d seen him looking at her work. Looking, looking, looking.

  There’s a buzz about the studio: their show has been reviewed in The Argus. Copies of the newspaper are open on every table, and Donald prowls, hands behind his back. He comes over to Mary as soon as he sees her and plants a dry kiss on her cheek. ‘Well done, my dear. Not that reviews are everything, of course.’

  Mary joins a huddle but can’t get close enough to see. ‘What does it say?’ she asks Jim Walker, from the Tuesday class.

  ‘You get a mention,’ he says to her. ‘Of myself, not a word.’ He threads his arms through a space in the crowd and begins to part the waters. ‘Stand aside,’ he booms. ‘Let Madeleine have a squiz.’ People peel away with a smile, a hand on her shoulder, a congratulatory murmur. She sees her name, blinks, sees it again: Madeleine Quinn’s painting contains within its riotous composition a flavour of the unexpected, of incandescent magic. Her modulation of shapes and colours and her feeling for spacing is exceptional, but it is through the sensibilities that she primarily appeals.

  The reviewer mentions Sam’s work, too. The word exactitude is used, and balance — good, respectful words. Sam’s not entirely happy. ‘Some jumped-up copy boy,’ he says, at the Mirka Café after class. ‘What qualifications does he have for judging art? This town, this whole country, is so fucking backward.’

  Across the table, Mary is silent. She doesn’t extend a comforting hand, for to do so is to diminish her glorious moment. Enough of being second-best; enough for a lifetime. She sips her wine while the murals dance in the candlelight and the silence yawns and stretches, seconds turning into minutes. She knows Sam’s waiting to hear how much she admires his work — but does she? Does she really? — while she waits for him to realise his slight. A man seeking affirmation of his greatness, a woman asking for no more than an apology: will they always pull in opposite directions?

  She sighs. Just a little thing, this stand-off, the barest breath of a lover’s tiff, yet she can’t bring herself to reach for his hand. To love him, or any man — nakedly, wholeheartedly — she has to compete with him or remain a step behind, conceding him first place. She has to stand when he stands, meet his confidence with her own. And so she stands now, drawing coins from her purse. ‘My shout,’ she says, and means it. Ten pounds, after all. She has to be able to provide.

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He doesn’t ask why. Neither does he ask her to stay.

  ‘Mary,’ she says to him.

  He looks at her blankly. ‘What?’

  ‘My name’s Mary, not Madeleine. Mary Elizabeth Rosalie Quinn.’ She puts her money on the table and leaves Sam behind.

  Softness and sweetness. She still prizes these things, still takes satisfaction from the pleasing depth of her cleavage, the flesh on her hips. Gone is the lean, hungry girl she once was. Yet softness and sweetness aren’t enough in the world, or at least in the one she wants to inhabit: the ateliers of Paris, the galleries of London. A foothold in all that means courage and persistence, not to say talent. Can she summon what’s needed? From where will it come?

  ‘From other women,’ says Joyce, the next time they meet at Joyce’s sculpture studio. ‘And soon enough from within.’

  Joyce is experimenting with wire. ‘On the farm it was always laid straight. Mile upon mile of straight lines and square corners, yet it’s so bloody bendable.’ She takes a length and quickly fashions a heart that she holds up to Mary. ‘Take heart, my dear,’ she says.

  Mary laughs. ‘I always do when I’m with you, Joycie.’ Mary takes the twisted wire and holds it to her chest. ‘Can I keep this? I’ll hang it above my bed. My first-ever Bremner.’ Joyce will be famous one day, a sculptor known and loved right across the world; Mary sees it in every flick of Joyce’s wrists, every nod of her wise head.

  ‘Work hard, and be honest with yourself,’ Joyce says as they leave her studio and descend the stairs. ‘Don’t let yourself off the hook out of laziness. But don’t play down your achievements, either.’ She opens the studio door and they step out into the summer evening. It’s close to nine o’clock and a full moon casts its queer, skittery spell.

  ‘Don’t be so gloomy,’ Mary teases her friend. ‘We’re still young. Can’t we just have fun?’

  ‘Not if you want to be a serious artist. Hard work, Mary, and the more enduring satisfaction that comes from it. Fun is a stick of fairy floss. Creative satisfaction: there’s your three-course meal.’

  ‘Race you to Lygon Street?’ Mary asks, smiling. ‘Loser buys the gelati?’

  ‘Okay, you’re on,’ says Joyce, relenting. ‘Double scoop.’

  ~

  There’s more time for other things, now that he’s not seeing Hanna. ‘Women,’ Tibble says, over a beer at the Clyde — not one beer, but several. ‘Women,’ they say in unison. Still, alcohol goes only part of the way. And Tibble has weightier things to discuss: his birthday’s come up for Nasho.

  ‘The olds are beside themselves,’ he tells Dom. ‘Writing letters to Menzies, trying to contact everyone they went to school with in case someone knows somebody in Defence.’

  ‘It’s shit luck.’ Why Tibble and not he? ‘But it’s only training.’ One hundred and seventy-six days of it. ‘You’re not likely to go to Korea.’

  ‘I’ve told the parents that. And a bit of extra fitness can’t hurt.’ He quickly grows glum. ‘But my summer’s damn-well ruined. It’ll drag on all holidays.’

  ‘The war might end tomorrow,’ Dominic says. ‘Or Menzies might get thrown out of government next week.’

  ‘Yeah, and pigs might bloody fly.’

  A month later, Tibble telephones him at Rose Street. ‘There’s a newsreel of Montebello showing at the Lyceum in town. Come see it with me.’

  Dom hesitates. Everyone knows about the Montebello nuclear test, the plutonium bomb exploded by the Brits off the Western Australian coastline two months before. Every newspaper in Melbourne — and the whole country, he presumes — brandished front-page photographs of the mushroom cloud that rose two-and three-quarter miles high. ‘Why so keen?’ he asks Tibble.

  ‘Jesus, Quinn. Cut me some slack. All this training, for the good of the nation, and you can’t even spare me an hour of your time?’

  They meet at the cinema a few days before Christmas, on Tibble’s day off. He’s survived the first twenty at Nasho. ‘Swinging ropes and jumping barrels, day in, day out.’ He groans as if his muscles still ache with it. ‘It could be worse, though: I could be peeling potatoes in the mess, like some of them. Look at my arms, mate.’ He flexes an impressive bicep.

  The newsreel footage is nothing short of spectacular. ‘To think it happened in Australian territory,’ Tibble says proudly, as the white cloud rises and the cinema grows suddenly light in its glow. That lethal cloud rising above Montebello marks the achievement of British science and industry in the development of atomic power, but it leaves unanswered the question of how shall this newfound power be used — for good or evil, for peace or war, for progress or destruction. The answer doesn’t lie with Britain alone, but we may have a greater voice in this great decision if we have the strength to defend ourselves and to deter aggression. That was the meaning of Montebello. So proclaims the newsreader in the final stirring scene. Some of the audience claps as the lights come up, and Tibble joins in. ‘Show the North Koreans a thing or two.’
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  Dominic’s glad to see his friend. Things have been pretty dull since classes finished for the year. Kingsley’s slung a job as a research assistant his way, so he’s hanging around Melbourne most of the holidays. He had to negotiate with his mother: Christmas to New Year at home, plus every second weekend, but the rest of the summer he’s on his own. ‘I wouldn’t give this job to just anyone,’ Kingsley told him. ‘I have great faith in you, Quinn.’ He handed Dom the glasshouse keys with a mock-solemn bow. ‘Though I didn’t see you at Professor Keith’s lecture.’

  Dom made up some cock-and-bull story and got the hell out of there. Gutless. He should’ve told Kingsley how much Keith’s lecture cost him.

  Hanna. He telephoned her once, the week of the exams. He’d surprised himself by sprinting from the tram and barging through the Nevilles’ front door, straight to the telephone. If he’d so much as blinked he would have backed down. ‘I wanted to wish you good luck,’ he said when she answered. ‘Not that you’ll need it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She was going away after Christmas, she said, camping with her family.

  ‘Just you and your parents?’ he asked.

  ‘Some other families too. People my age. Dear friends.’

  Every word killed him.

  He spends his mornings watering plants and doing the odd cross-pollination, according to Kingsley’s research protocol. On warmer days he leaves the glasshouse at lunchtime and whittles away his afternoons at the Fitzroy Baths, a lone swimmer in the outside lane. A lap in under forty-five seconds, and Hanna will be at the other end. Half a lap underwater, no breath, and she’ll telephone tonight.

  On cooler days he sometimes retires to the library. The mushroom cloud of Montebello — the orange flash; that giant uprush of water, smoke and steam — is still there in ghostly negative when he closes his eyes. He hasn’t been chosen for the war in Korea (not yet, anyway) but that’s no excuse for inaction, now the nuclear age is upon him. He can prepare himself in other ways. He decides to swat up on radiation.