by Ashley Hay
Every extra bit helps, that’s what Clem always said, and Elsie thought about how proud he’d be. And then she would sit in that lovely light room. And someone else—a painter—would make a whole new version of her.
Imagine that.
Elsie stepped onto the road and startled as a truck rattled past—she hadn’t noticed it coming. No, she thought, no, I won’t tell Clem about it. I’ll wait till it’s done, and then he can see it. I’ll tell him there’s a lot of cleaning that needs doing, to set the house to rights before the professor comes home. And the other, the other thing—the blush again. She’d keep that secret for herself.
Letting herself into the artist’s house the next day, Elsie stood a moment in the middle of the kitchen, her bucket of rags and detergents in one hand, her housecoat in the other. There was a handwritten card propped on the table—Morning tea—next to another slice of the sister-in-law’s cake.
She paused in the quiet of the kitchen. It felt strange to be alone in someone else’s house. Usually, when she whipped round with the duster, there was a young woman, lying in, with a new baby, needing a hand—or an old one, at the other end of time, no longer able to keep up her work. Elsie walked through the rooms: the floor plan might have been an enlarged echo of her place, but here was different furniture, so many shelves of books, a heavy desk with a green lamp, and stack after stack of papers, journals, notes. Here were paintings and strange ornaments—from New Guinea, she supposed. And here was a bed—its legs holding it higher off the ground than she’d ever seen before; its two ends delineated by great strips of dark wood.
She touched the quilt cover, a heavy velvet, and couldn’t stop patting it. It had a supremely soft nap and she wanted, for an instant, to be lying face down on the pale blue expanse, to feel its rub against her cheeks, her bare arms, even the tops of her feet. This overwhelming desire for sensation: her own house did not make her feel like this. Nothing that she knew of ever had.
Back in the studio, her body skewed with the weight of a bucket of hot water in one hand and the shaft of a mop in the other, she pulled up: there was carpet on the floor, where she had remembered—or imagined—bare boards. It was brown and ridged, like corduroy, flaring with every colour imaginable around the space where Ida’s easel stood. Elsie crouched down, feeling the way the paint had set rigid onto this surface, feeling its smoothness against the rough fibres of the matting. She rocked back on her feet, looking around the room from this shrunken height: shelf after shelf of books, and against the one solid wall, a stack of pictures set in on their ends as if they were slightly taller, wider volumes. Crossing the room, she pulled out one at random: a man’s face, a dark room behind him—perhaps it was the professor. Another showed the very garden outside this window, and another a mess of mud on a seashore somewhere. She stared a while, then slid them back into their nook.
It must be strange to be an artist. How did you know you wanted to be one? Elsie wondered. How did you even know to try? She scratched her nail through the grime on the cabinet’s top—she was etching a sort of leaf, or a boat maybe, into these leftover particles of stuff—and then sponged it into nothingness with her cloth. There had to be artists, she supposed, if people were to have paintings on their walls. And museums, too; she’d found herself once in the gallery on Gregory Terrace, escaping from the rain, and spent a morning staring at the pictures in their ornate frames, wondering how long she was supposed to look at each, and what she was supposed to see.
‘What do you make of that one?’ It was an elderly man who’d spoken to her. He was leaning towards a picture of an old woman, one hand propping her chin, the other holding a letter. ‘First Australian painting this gallery ever bought,’ he said, ‘and it’s by a woman.’ He shook his head. ‘None of your Robertses. None of your McCubbins. Just an old woman reading a letter—what do you make of it, miss? What do you think?’
And Elsie, whose children had recently started school, had blushed a little at being mistaken for someone so young they warranted ‘miss’. It wasn’t even clear to her from the picture whether the letter had brought the old woman good news or bad.
‘What’s it called?’ she asked at last, leaning in towards the frame. ‘Care?’ She paused, not wanting to sound ignorant. ‘She’s made the scarf very pretty,’ she said, gesturing towards the canvas. ‘Blue, but silver; I suppose there’s a proper word for that.’
But the old man coughed into his handkerchief and stepped three frames ahead of her. ‘By a woman—by a woman!’ she heard him mutter once more before he reached the door and went away.
Elsie had stood a while then, alone in the big room, turning slowly so that the canvases melded into trails of colour, like the wake of a boat along the river. Stepping outside into sunlight, she’d looked up at the now clear sky and paused again. It had to be all right to think it was blue. That was, after all, what it was. Who was she to try to make any more of it than that?
Now, in Ida Lewis’s studio, she looked again at the colours the artist’s paints had left across the floor. Cerulean, she thought, ultramarine. The words sounded so rich, they might almost have been forbidden. On the table by the easel, silver tubes of pigment lay scattered. Elsie shifted the water bucket on the floor—positioning it carefully between the overflows of colour—and ran her fingers across them all, reading the names on the tubes. Alizarin crimson. Viridian. Scarlet Lake. Olive, cutch, sap green. So much more than pink or green or brown or red.
In the magazine she’d read with her cup of tea that morning, Elsie had paused at the line where the heroine swooned, and wondered, what would that feel like? How would it come? Now, with these thick words pressing in on her and the floor a brilliant spectrum, she thought, swooning, well then. Yes. There you are. And she stood for a moment, trying to get her breath.
Outside in the garden, a magpie called. Elsie could see its young one hopping on the grass, worrying for worms. The baby’s feathers were grey: Elsie concentrated—like cinders. The mother’s were darker, and darkened again by the shadows in which she stood. They were black, thought Elsie carefully, black like coal. And for a split second it seemed she could even see tiny sparkles glistening along the bird’s wing, like the fuel’s secret scintillants. She straightened her shoulders: she’d thought these things; she’d noticed them. There was power, there was poetry in that, and it was hers. Then she set the compact tubes of paint in a long, careful line, ordering them like a rainbow, carried the hot water over to the window ledge, and began to wash it clean.
She knew where she was with this work.
She loved the sight of baby birds—loved the idea of lives beginning. The day she and Clem saw the house they would buy, there’d been a baby crow in the yard. That she never saw it again, she knew, was the reason she and Clem had had no more children. There were messages implicit in these things, even if she rarely put them into words.
It was afternoon before the room was done, and she stood in Ida Lewis’s kitchen, wolfing down the cake, and draining a second large glass of water. She brushed the crumbs into her hand and stuffed them into the pocket of her housecoat, loath to put anything messy in the now-emptied bin. Then she picked up the little rectangle of card, and the pen that lay beside it.
Thank you, she wrote in her most careful hand. I hope the studio will do. And I’ll see you in the morning.
Letting herself out the back door, she saw the two magpies at work on the thick lawn. The mother cried out, a rich round gurgle that sounded exultant and utterly free.
•
‘There now.’ Ida Lewis pulled the wicker chair towards the northeast corner of the room, where two of the huge panes of glass met. ‘Sit you here and you’ll have something to look at while I look at you—there’s always something to see in a garden, don’t you think?’
Elsie nodded, her hands busy with the handles of her purse; she wasn’t sure where she should put it. But she sat in the chair as Ida indicated, placing her bag near her feet, and kicked it a little so it rest
ed behind her legs. Perhaps it would be distracting to a painter—an artist—to have a quilted purse in clear view by their subject’s toes. Their model.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Ida, arranging the blue scarf—cerulean, ultramarine—into rolls and folds around the back of the chair. ‘I don’t see half of it once I’ve got you in place. Now, don’t jump.’ She leaned forward and placed her hands on Elsie’s shoulders. ‘I know it’s a shocking thing to have someone push you around—’
A shocking thing to have a stranger touch you, thought Elsie, trying not to flinch. Ida seemed so very sure.
‘—but I just want to make sure we’ve got everything facing the right way before we start.’ Ida stepped back and narrowed her eyes. ‘Could you turn a fraction more towards the window?’ Her finger was light against Elsie’s chin. ‘And could you try not to look down so much? Look up, look out. That’s it.’
Elsie had counted to five before the artist took her finger away.
‘And I think we’re ready.’ Ida stood with a palette resting on the wrist, the palm of one hand, a canvas propped up on the easel before her. On the palette, Elsie could make out a stripe of blue, a stripe of red, and a mound of something brownish-orange, or orangey-brown. It looked for all the world like the substance Elaine would soon be washing out of a baby’s nappies: Elsie pushed her lips together, afraid that she might laugh.
‘Now then,’ said Ida Lewis, and raised her brush to the canvas.
Outside the window, the leaves of the trees flickered a little in the breeze, just a shimmer, and the shifting planes of their shapes caught the early morning light. Elsie watched as another cluster of leaves shook with the flurry of movement of a bird, hidden among the green. Clem didn’t dislike trees. They made a yard messy, he always said, and it was a bugger to mow around the trunks. At least he tolerated the poinciana his mum had planted when he and Elsie bought the house, but he pruned it ferociously each year.
Elsie watched the breeze play across the poinciana in Ida Lewis’s garden: she’d never noticed before the way sunlight on leaves could make them look wet, or flare them into a ray of light as bright as might shine from a powerful torch.
‘Did you lose your electricity last night?’ Ida Lewis asked then, as if the thought of brightness hovered over Elsie’s head. ‘Ours went down for half an hour or so; I thought it was a fuse, but Richard’s much more likely to attribute these things to union malcontents.’
Sitting stock still, Elsie wondered how much of her would move if she spoke. She was suddenly conscious of a nervous tic she had of raising her hand to her cheek, as if to brush off a fly, whenever she was unsure what to say.
‘You’d rather not talk?’ Ida said then, stepping back behind the board so that Elsie could only see the strokes of her right arm. ‘No, that’s fine, that’s fine.’
And Elsie went back to the light and the leaves.
What would Clem say, if she told him tonight? What would Clem say about her sitting as an artist’s model? She watched the leaves a little longer and then found that she wasn’t watching anything at all, and couldn’t have said how long she’d been staring at nothingness.
Ida was crouched down beside her, fussing at the fabric by her feet. ‘It’s hard, I know, but you do need to stay with me a little, if you can.’
The artist was so very close; Elsie glanced down and almost touched her fingers to the other woman’s soft-looking red-brown hair. Her words sounded like a scrap of conversation you might catch from the other side of an open space. Another blush blazed from Elsie’s forehead to her chest.
‘Oh, Mrs Lewis, I’m so sorry—did I—did I fall asleep?’
Back at the easel, and stretching both arms up towards the ceiling, Ida Lewis shook her head. ‘No, no, but you wandered off somewhere. I always find it’s easier to try to catch the shape and the sense of a person at the outset if they can keep their imagination in the same room as I am, but I know that’s a lot to ask for a first day. And you’re doing very well; we’ll have a cup of tea in ten minutes or so. An hour is a long time for a first sitting.’
An hour. Elsie swallowed. Through the window, she could see that the sun had inched across the garden, and the movement of the breeze had swung around and busied itself in an altogether new direction. There were clouds too, wide white tufts, in a sky that had been, the last time she looked—the last time I paid attention—perfectly clear and blue. An unaccounted-for hour: what was I thinking?
Once, when Donny and Lainey were just babies and struggling with a cough, she’d sat by their bassinets through one long, awful night, patting them and soothing them as they needed, changing their soggy nappies, and making sure they drank their milk.
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Clem had said in the morning. ‘If you’d had a light on or something, you might have read—anything to pass the time. But to sit there, from ten till five, in darkness, with two hacking littlies . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t envy you that, love.’
That way he had sometimes, she thought now in Ida’s studio, of talking about the children as if they had nothing to do with him.
But that night, that night with the twins, there were seven hours for which she could barely account. Sitting with Clem the next morning, watching the way he could eat a fried egg in four mouthfuls, she’d wondered where her mind must have hidden so as not to have noticed so many silent, passing minutes. And now, sitting in Ida’s studio, she wondered about it again, and if its lost time linked up somehow to the time she had lost here, this morning.
I was thinking about the light and the leaves. I was thinking about the garden I would plant if Clem didn’t have to mow. I was thinking about Clem, mowing, and the way he stands when he’s finished, with his head tipped back and more satisfied than at any other moment, pouring a tall bottle of cold beer down his neck as if it could run straight to the centre of himself. I was thinking about how loud the sound is when he swallows. I was thinking about how loud Mrs Lewis’s brush sounds against her board. I was thinking about the way Donny snored even when he was a baby, and how adorable that sounded. I was thinking about that look of Elaine’s, so blank, like she doesn’t even know me. Her voice so cold sometimes. I was thinking I must get on to that last rug for her little one, and about the rugs I knitted for the twins, scratchy brown war wool, but they carried them about with them for years, and brown as good a colour as any for two children who were always playing in the garden. I was thinking about the time I thought I’d lost Donny to the swamp, and how pale his little hand looked with the rest of him speckled by its mud. He brought me a bunch of water hyacinths: we set them in the bowl my mother had always used for fruit, and they seemed to light up the kitchen. I can’t remember the next time we had cut flowers in the house. I can’t remember the flowers I carried at my wedding. I can remember Elaine wanting more flowers in her bouquet and I’d never before thought she was greedy . . .
‘I’ll see about that kettle,’ she heard Ida say, and then her own voice, as if from a long way off: ‘That can’t have been ten minutes already.’
‘More like twenty.’ Ida rubbed at her hands with a messy cloth—Elsie could smell the turpentine in which it was soaked. ‘You’ll be reporting me to your union.’ She laughed. ‘Come on, come and have a cuppa. Come and tell me where you went while I was trying to pin you to my canvas.’
Stirring her tea, Elsie heard herself say, ‘Do you remember very much about your wedding? In there, while I was sitting for you, I couldn’t remember what sort of flowers I carried. You know that feeling, once you’re scared you can’t remember something; the way it disappears completely from your memory.’
Ida prised the lid off a biscuit tin and slid it across the kitchen table towards her guest. ‘I didn’t carry any flowers when we were married. It was a registry office, just the two of us and two witnesses. We’d had to wait for Richard’s divorce to come through after the war. I regretted that though—the flowers, I mean, not the divorce. I always said I didn’t
mind not having the dress and the church and the cake and all the rest of it. But I do wonder that I hadn’t thought to pick a posy of flowers as I walked out through the garden to the car. There’d have been roses, too, that time of the year—the house we were living in had beds of the most beautiful apricot roses. I can still remember their scent.’
‘We were married during the war,’ said Elsie. ‘I wore the dress I was wearing the first day I met Clem, with a pretty chiffon layer on the skirt. It was green. I don’t know the word a painter would have for that colour, but it was light, like the new growth on trees. Perhaps I had a rose in my bouquet. I remember Clem’s mother making it up for me from the flowers in her garden and she grew such beautiful roses. You’re right; I can remember what it smelled like. I sometimes wish I’d had a new dress—but it doesn’t matter, does it? As long as you’re together in the end.’
She’d never before met anyone who’d had anything to do with a divorce; and yet how easily, how flippantly, Ida Lewis had mentioned it, and how easily she had replied. ‘Your husband’s first wife,’ she went on. ‘What did she—?’
‘She went back to America eventually, although she stayed on a while in Sydney. It was a blessing really, us coming up here. I was always afraid I’d run into her in the grocer’s or on a tram and have to think of something polite to say.’
From the corner of her eye, Elsie saw a lizard dart across the kitchen floor, a tiny brown thing, half the length of a pencil, and she jumped.
‘Oh, it startles me when the outside comes inside,’ she said, blushing again. ‘Clem says I’d be no use in a proper jungle, but there were mornings in his mother’s house when I’d wake up and find a plant had grown in through the window—I swear it happened overnight.’
Ida Lewis laughed, reaching up from the table to a long shelf lined with notebooks. ‘You want proper jungle?’ she asked. ‘That’s where I met Richard, up in New Guinea. I was nursing there. He was an officer, and a good one, his men said. But he would sneak in a bit of fieldwork where he could. His precious flies. He would sit for hours watching creatures coming and going on a single plant—and I’d sit with him, sure I could see the plants growing while I had my cup of tea.’ She flipped through the pages of one of the books, patting it open on a spread of washes in browns, greens, olive, khaki. ‘I met a woman up there, an artist—it was her job to paint bits of the war. She got me started, gave me my first notebooks. I got quite creative about interpreting the tones of mud. That was all I painted the first few years, as if that was all the colours in the world. I’ve never painted so many clear blue skies and so much light as I did when I first came home. Pretty still lifes, with china and flowers, and everything clean and bright.’