A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  •

  On the morning of her last sitting for Ida Lewis, Elsie slipped her new silver frock from its pretty hanger and stroked the fine material. It did look like moonlight; it did make her hair shine. Behind her, she heard Clem come into the bedroom and give a small gasp at the sight of her holding the new dress in front of her, with her hair scooped up onto her head.

  ‘Should take you out in that, love,’ he said, rummaging in his lowboy for a handful of pennies. ‘That’s a classy dress.’ ‘It does look like a dress for a celebration,’ she said, turning a little in front of the mirror. ‘Maybe I can wear it for Gloria’s christening.’

  ‘Christening be blowed,’ said Clem, coming close behind her to kiss her neck. ‘That’s a dress for Cloudland. What are you up to today?’

  ‘I’ve been doing some work for Ida Lewis,’ said Elsie, as carelessly as she could, loving the way the secret strangeness of it burrowed in at the centre of her body. All week, she’d turned back to the sensation of those tears, the sensation of that kiss, the warmth of one held hand—reminding herself that it was hers. A tiny, secret thing. Who knew what might come after that? Another portrait, Ida might say, or Would you care to accompany me to—what? Accompany me to this gallery? Come round sometime for tea? Just sit here and hold my hand?

  ‘Nearly done, I reckon,’ she heard herself say; as if her work for Ida Lewis was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Do you want me to tell her about the mangle? How are you going with that?’

  Clem patted at the dress just as he’d patted at his granddaughter, respecting it as treasure, something rare. ‘Oh, I took that round for her a couple of weeks ago—she showed me that picture she was painting. Very nicely done, I thought. Fancy my wife ending up in a portrait—’ He broke the word awkwardly, making its second syllable too long and too hard. ‘And keeping it all so quiet too.’

  Spinning away, Elsie stuffed the dress into the wardrobe. Its heavy panels rattled as she slammed the door.

  ‘What? What did I say?’ Clem looked up from counting coins in his palm as she pulled on her old housecoat.

  ‘It’s just—the painting—well, I wanted it to be a surprise. I was going to take you up when it was done, and show it to you then. I didn’t know you’d have a sneaky peek when you’d lugged your stupid mangle up the hill.’

  Clem laughed, hugging one arm around her shoulders. ‘You know me and surprises,’ he said. ‘Ruin them any way I can, and usually without meaning to. Off you go then and finish your modelling. I’m proud as punch of you, Else. And you looked—well, you look gorgeous. Tell Mrs Lewis to call me if that mangle needs adjusting.’ He kissed her neck again, and was gone off into his day, the coins jangling as he ran down the back steps, two at a time.

  In the dimness of the bedroom, its blinds and curtains drawn against the brightness outside, Elsie peeled away her housecoat and stood before the mirror: bra, step-ins, stockings, flesh. She peered at herself, piece by piece: her head, her torso, arms, legs and belly. What did Clem see in this shape—what had she seen, her whole life? She pulled her shoulders back and dropped her chin: she was a film star in a magazine—Doris Day; no, Marilyn Monroe. Imagine that; imagine having such bright and brilliant hair. She let her body sag: she was a grandmother who’d have been better off taking in ironing. And her brown hair was turning quite grey.

  She kissed her own hand and felt a fool. She heard the theme for the news on the radio—top of the hour—and sighed. She hadn’t meant to be late.

  Coming up to Ida’s gate, Elsie paused to catch her breath. She had a jar of lime pickle in her bag as a present, although it seemed a slight and inappropriate gift now that she was on the brink of giving it.

  I could go home. I could say I had a headache. I could leave it as it is, unfinished and undone. But then Ida might finish it without her, and that seemed worse. Her hand moved towards the latch and she was across the lawn and knocking on the door.

  ‘I brought you this.’ Thrusting the jar at the artist as soon as she answered. ‘It seemed rude not to bring you something.’ Elsie didn’t know the etiquette for such a moment—had never seen a note about it in the advice page of the paper.

  ‘I hope you’ll like the painting,’ said Ida, stepping back to let Elsie pass, and following her into the studio. ‘You might bring Mr Gormley up on the weekend if he’d like to see it when it’s finished—he was very complimentary when he came. Richard will be here; we’ll make a party.’

  It would be too much, thought Elsie, the four of them staring at this new version of her. She needed it to be private and small—kept apart. Her body settled immediately into its pose, so easy, and her eyes fixed on the spot in the garden outside that she most liked to look at. The bushes had grown in the six weeks of her sittings and the fence behind them had all but disappeared.

  ‘Surely it’s been a nicer job than cleaning,’ Ida said after a while, ‘although perhaps you can come back and do that when I next need to deal with the dust.’

  So it was over. So that was its end. A char, thought Elsie, and resolved that she wouldn’t cry again.

  ‘Where do they go, pictures like this?’ she asked at last, realising for the first time that other people might see the painting, apart from Ida, apart from her professor, apart from Clem.

  ‘I’ve got this one in mind for a competition,’ said Ida, pausing with her brush. ‘I’m terrible at names though—you couldn’t think of one for me, could you?’

  ‘You could just call it after me,’ suggested Elsie, her voice as shy as a child’s. It would be something to have her own name attached to this painting—as if anyone she knew might walk into a room where it was hanging, and recognise her, and think, well.

  ‘That’s what I usually do,’ said Ida, busy again, while Elsie wondered how many other women had sat under the painter’s gaze and felt themselves remade by her concentration. Or how many men.

  ‘Clem asked if the mangle was going all right,’ she said then. ‘He said he can pop up and adjust it if you need him to.’

  ‘Very thoughtful, your husband, but I think it’s working fine. I have a lady who comes to do the washing once a week, and she hasn’t made any complaints.’

  And Elsie saw it, this traffic of people doing for this woman who stood still at her boards in the centre of it all, catching bits of their busyness and their being.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you just let me know about the cleaning. I’m bound to be busy now with the baby, but it’s no trouble to run up the hill with a duster.’ Thinking, So much for this.

  When the professor’s clock chimed twelve, Ida stepped back from the easel and declared the work done. ‘Have a look, Elsie, do—I’ll leave you with it while I wash my hands. I bought prawns—do you like prawns? There should be something like a celebration. It’s always worth a fuss, seeing something to its end.’ And Elsie heard the bathroom door and the running water before she was brave enough to get out of the chair and cross the room and look, for the first time, at what was there.

  And there she was. Elsie, but not herself, and so still, so quiet, so calm. The eyes were hers, she could see that, and the mouth was set quite straight and firm, with no sense that it ever smiled, or even spoke. The hair was redder than her own fading chestnut brown—more like Ida’s, she thought. And where was the evidence of all the thinking she’d done: the staring and the puzzling; the wondering and the remembering? Where was all the time she’d sat, patiently, as if she was inventing herself so this other woman might invent a picture? And the kiss—that magic kiss; where was that hiding in this tidy, formal canvas?

  This has made me want more. The thought was so emphatic that she wondered if she’d said it aloud, and felt herself gulp. At the top of the painting and around the shape her figure made, the background shone with a thick, regal blue, so rich that Elsie thought it must be infusing the air. If I can keep that colour by me, she thought, reaching out to touch it as gingerly as if it were a snake, I might hold this other me.

  She raise
d her other hand to her cheek, patting it to make sure she still felt somehow like herself and hadn’t been entirely transposed into this other guise. Behind her, Ida Lewis was busy in the kitchen—plates, flatware, the fridge—and Elsie wondered, for a moment, about slipping out the side door. There was nothing to say now; it was done and made as she, the artist, had wanted. This was the version of Elsie that the world would see—Ida Lewis’s imagining of her, rather than Elsie herself.

  ‘I was just saying I could take a photograph of it, if you like—if you wanted to show your daughter or something.’ Ida was standing in the doorway, a tomato in one hand and a knife in the other. ‘You know, I think I’ve made you look a bit like me.’ She pointed the knife at her own head, at the reddish hair of Elsie done in oils. ‘Must have been the sunlight on your hair. I’ve shelled the prawns, and I was going to suggest a glass of something cold—but I don’t think I’ve made you brave enough for that in the middle of a bright, warm Tuesday.’ She crossed the room and peered at her own work.

  She’s flirting with me, thought Elsie. ‘The prawns are treat enough, really.’

  Standing beside each other, they both stared at the painting.

  ‘What do you think?’ Ida asked at last. ‘I’m pleased with it—and these colours have come up so wonderfully.’

  Which was nothing to do with Elsie.

  ‘I thought it would be more like a mirror,’ Elsie said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘But then I thought it would be more like a painting too—like something I didn’t quite understand, I mean, or something I didn’t know how to look at.’ And she told Ida the story of standing in the gallery—‘years ago now, when Elaine and Donny had just started school’—and not knowing what to say to the man about the painting by a woman, of a woman, called Care.

  ‘But do you like this?’ Ida asked. ‘Is it all right? Is it all right with you?’

  And Elsie nodded. There were things that it was possible to ask for, or to say—she felt her way towards what they might be.

  ‘I want to ask two things,’ she said slowly. ‘Can I take a tube of . . .’ she braced herself for the unusual word, ‘. . . of cerulean with me when I go? And can you never mention . . . ?’ Her words trailed off, and she waved at Ida’s hand.

  ‘Here.’ The painter caught Elsie’s hand, pressing the small silver tube into her palm. ‘You must remember there are other words for blue. And a colour like that is as good as a kiss anyway—you can have that from me.’

  Elsie blushed, and wished she could bear to say thank you, not sure if she wanted the other woman to say it was something, or nothing, and never mind.

  ‘Come on, then, let’s get at these prawns before the flies have a field day,’ said Ida instead, heading back into the kitchen and leaving Elsie alone with herself.

  She stepped forward then and let her fingers rest again on the brilliant blue that surrounded the shape of her body—the sky, or the sea, or just a pure breath of that magically named blue. She shouldn’t wear silver; she could see it now. Her skin, her hair—it was a deep, rich blue that set them off, that brought them to life.

  The weft and warp of the canvas beneath the pads of her fingers were coarser than she’d imagined, and she felt no trace of the paint, the beautiful colour, that formed the barrier between its fabric and her skin. Bringing her fingers up to her face, she looked again for a stained smudge of blue—and if they had been, she’d have rubbed it hard on her cheeks, above her eyes, like some fierce old war paint.

  I want this thing to mark me.

  As for Clem seeing the portrait, she wasn’t sure it mattered. What she needed, she knew, was him—she needed him to trace out her body and make her feel it was hers again. His was the gaze that defined her; she’d just lost sight of that for a while.

  So she sat at the wide green kitchen table, and she ate the luxurious prawns, and the fresh sweet tomato, and the thick slices of bread. And she let the size of the artist’s words wash over her one last time—let them soak into all the chinks and crevices of herself she hadn’t known before this work began. She heard Ida Lewis suggest that she come and clean the house once a month—‘so I can keep you in new yards of fabric,’ Ida said, smiling, and pushed the last of her payment across the table to her—and heard herself reply that she would find someone else to come.

  ‘As you wish,’ said the artist, and that was all.

  When the professor’s clock struck one, she helped Ida stack the plates in the kitchen, and she went away, after shaking hands as businessmen did in the movies at the end of a transaction. Then she walked down the hill and unlocked her own front door. It was quiet and dim inside, and she moved quickly, pushing back the curtains and pulling up the blinds so that the house filled with light.

  ‘Here I am,’ she called to the empty rooms. ‘I’m home.’

  Then she drew a long, hot bath, even though it was only early in the afternoon, and let herself lie there a while, at home and at ease.

  She was clean and fresh, powdered and perfumed, zipped into her new silver frock when Clem came home around dusk to find her sitting there, waiting.

  14

  The flood

  No matter how much Lucy wiped the kitchen bench, the door, the handrail on the stairs, she couldn’t quite remove the small puffs of fingerprint powder the friendlier policeman had dusted about as he looked for non-existent prints. It lay like a shadow, dulling the different surfaces.

  ‘Our house has a layer of frost,’ Ben joked. ‘Perhaps that’s what’s on the bathroom door as well.’

  ‘How many robberies do you think have happened here?’ Lucy was appalled.

  ‘Well, now, I don’t know. Is this a robbery?’ He was serving Christmas dinner as the rain drummed on outside. ‘Maybe it’s just a fact of modern life—the loss of an expensive phone.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it.’ Lucy pushed the wet cloth once more along the laminex, frowning at the powder that it caught. She thought: tarnished. She thought: residue. She thought: pall. Her safe new house: she couldn’t bear this breach.

  ‘My kind of festive,’ Ben said, setting out the food. The three of them together at the table. On their own.

  Lucy brushed imaginary dust from her hands. ‘It’s certainly one of the calmest we’ve had.’

  ‘Calm, wet and not too hot. I told you it was best to work through.’ Ben was scooping potatoes onto his plate. ‘We can take a holiday when the sun shines, hey, little man? And these duchess potatoes, Lu—you’ve made them just like Mum’s.’

  Tom was moving his potatoes with a spoon, separating them into discrete and fluffy lumps. ‘Clouds!’

  His parents smiled.

  ‘Remember that Christmas we had in Helsinki?’ Ben poured a little gravy for his son and leaned close to scoop the food onto his fork.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ said Lucy in a flat voice. She watched her husband’s sudden discomfort at a clinical remove.

  ‘I said I was sorry, Lu. I was so bloody tired, you’re lucky I could remember who I was, let alone anyone else.’

  She had laid it out for him like this: his forgetting that it was Lucy who read him the poem was as if she’d forgotten the first time they met.

  At which he’d shrugged and said, ‘You know, I think it’s not that big a deal.’

  ‘Like the phone?’ she’d batted back.

  ‘Yes. Like the phone.’

  And it had festered from there.

  •

  On New Year’s Eve, they popped a bottle of champagne at nine o’clock, the city’s early fireworks croaking like thunder in the distance. It was a clear night—the first, it felt, in forever. They sat on their back deck, their feet on its rail as if they were on a plush ocean liner, steaming south. They’d played at making resolutions, played at saying they were fine. But still it niggled. Lucy felt a jag in her throat every so often, somewhere between disappointment and a threat.

  ‘I love you,’ she said out of nowhere. ‘But I’m going to bed.’ It was barely ten o�
��clock.

  ‘First year we’ll have missed it.’ Ben grabbed at her hand, trying to keep her by his side.

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t care; too tired. I’m ready for my new year, Mr DeMille.’ The in-joke from their earliest days, when everything had felt as glorious as a production number.

  Are we such a long way from that now? Lucy wondered as she waited to fall asleep. She’d fix it in the morning; she was done.

  It was hours later when she woke, startled, listening to new noises in the night.

  A bang. Another bang. Like something rapping on a door. And then again.

  She sat up. Possums? Robbers? Elsie? Sliding out of bed, she looked across Ben—fast asleep—at the clock. It was just after three. Then another knock. It was the laundry door downstairs, blowing in the wind. She chocked the back door as she went down, still cautious of being locked out.

  The sky was dry and vast—it felt like a long time since she’d seen that. Standing on the concrete underneath the deck, Lucy looked out and saw tiny patches of starry brilliance between scuttling clouds. New year. Dry year. She’d take that. And something moving overhead—a satellite, not a shooting star, but she may as well wish on it, she thought.

  The arbitrary promise of a new year: she pushed her hair back and stepped onto the grass, the lingering dampness rising up around her feet.

  Here we are, safe and sound. Just like she’d say to Tom. It was as simple as that.

  Yes. Here they were: they had a house—and they had never owned a house. They had a kid—and they had never had a kid. And life went on. This place was good. This place was safe. And there was Elsie. She was guidance, or guardianship. A little daydream, nothing more.