Ellie & the Shadow Man

by Gee, Maurice

  Later they went down the Waimea plains and came back to the coast through the Moutere valley. They stopped at vineyards, where Hollis bought wine, wanting to try everything, red and white. The car tinkled like sleigh bells as Ellie drove home.

  ‘You’ll stay for dinner? I’ve got food in abundance.’

  ‘And I’ve got a plethora of wine.’

  We must be scared, talking like this, Ellie thought. She did not know if they would be lovers that night; had the feeling it might be too soon. She did not have her footing; felt a movement under her as though she were standing on a mat on a slippery floor.

  She gave him the meal she had given John, with ice cream instead of pavlova. They drank a bottle of sauvignon blanc, not chilled enough.

  ‘Come and walk in my garden,’ she said. ‘We’ll have coffee later.’

  They walked to the back fence, where a breeze from the sea was changing the warm evening into cool night. The sun was down, leaving the Arthur Range red rimmed. Over behind Nelson, where lights made an experimental blinking, Mount Richmond and Mount Fishtail thickened and increased. The sea held a final luminescence. It did not seem like water but liquid air. Ellie felt the largeness of the place she lived in: the plunge down from one range, the smoothness and scope of the sea, the concave upward sweep to the opposite skyline; felt everything between: encrusted towns, contoured hills, roads and solitary houses, orchards properly arranged, inlets lapping unnoticed, out of control.

  She breathed in deeply.

  ‘What?’ Hollis said.

  ‘I’m glad I live here. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, you’re lucky.’ He was quiet. ‘Maybe there’s a place for me down there.’

  ‘I’m sure there is. You haven’t told me why, though. Why you’re leaving your job.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and stayed leaning with his arms on the fence. She thought he might straighten up, withdraw and go away, but at last he said, ‘I’m sorry I gave up smoking. I’d light a fag about now.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’

  ‘Some people might say I’ve made it all up. But what it is – I got ashamed.’

  She waited, then said, ‘What of?’

  ‘Me, I guess. I’m fifty years old, and what am I doing with my life? Working out ways for greedy bastards to get out of paying their taxes. That’s what I do, Ellie. It’s what I’ve been doing mainly since you saw me last.’

  ‘Since Dolores?’

  ‘Yeah, since her. I don’t know whether this is as bad as that.’ He made a painful grin, not meeting her eye.

  ‘Is what you were doing – is it legal?’

  ‘Yeah, it is, by about a millimetre. One more step, just a little one, and you’ve gone too far.’

  ‘Like Barry?’

  ‘Yeah, like him. But I got him out of it, did you know? They didn’t proceed.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  He looked at her sharply and seemed about to reply, then let his breath out heavily and stared at the darkening sea. Ellie waited.

  He said, ‘You sit with these pricks and they’re saying “I” and “me” all the time. And “mine, it’s mine”, and you’re getting a fat fee, so you start saying it too. Me and mine. And you see ways of doing it that are so damned clever you forget what game it is you’re playing. You work out all the shifty bits without looking at them. You say it’s only business and you learn a kind of Alzheimer’s about the things you’ve done. I was good at it, Ellie. Good at doing it and good at forgetting. I’m just about the best there is – a technician, yeah. But the sweet thing is that millimetre, staying inside. I haven’t done anything I could get in prison or get struck off for. But I’m striking myself off. And I’d strike off most of the guys I was working with.’

  ‘You don’t have to see them any more.’

  ‘I wasn’t like that always. I was just a tax lawyer, starting out. I was helping people minimise, companies minimise. But the last ten years – everybody got so fucking greedy, and they don’t want to know whether it’s avoidance or evasion. It’s like sex, Ellie. You get urges and you can’t stop.’

  ‘Well, they all came tumbling down, all over the place.’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘And you have stopped. You’re getting out.’

  ‘I was like a man without a shadow. I was standing in some puddle, I don’t know … There were other things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Leveraged buyouts. Junk bonds. That sort of thing. Have you heard of them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s all sorts of tricks. There’s loopholes you can drive a cattle truck through as long as you give the wheel a twist now and then. If that doesn’t work, you set up a kind of labyrinth and go through there.’

  ‘You’re out of it.’

  ‘Yeah, with so much money – big fees, Ellie. I don’t know whether I can use it for buying land.’

  Was he saying he could not make good wine using dirty money? She touched his hand.

  ‘Yes you can.’ Because he had confessed, because that brought its own absolution? She did not believe it would be so easy, but wanted to believe he had taken a step. It was painful seeing someone so ashamed. Exhaustion must have come close to emptying him out – but he’d had enough strength left to make a gamble: come to Nelson, search for a piece of land, come to her.

  Ellie was aware of her blood coursing. Aware of arteries and joints and throat and mouth. She felt that she might stop him wasting away. But slowly, she thought. Say ordinary things. Don’t go fast.

  She looked over the garden at her house. The open door threw light into the fruit trees.

  ‘Come on, I’ll make some coffee,’ she said.

  They sat on the sofa side by side, with Fan’s paintings gleaming like jewels, half in and half out of the light. She had never thought of her house or herself as empty, yet there were places in her into which he flowed. She wondered if that were delusional, or sentimental, even silly – and unnecessary at her time of life, with work that filled her, completed her, although it depended on what someone, somewhere, had called ‘a maniacal inner solitude’. She had that: a possession, a treasure, and would not have it disturbed. Yet there were empty places, and here was Hollis Prime.

  He asked if she still painted the shadow man and she said no, she was moving on to other things but was having trouble; could not go ahead because of something she hadn’t seen properly yet and a balance she had not arrived at.

  ‘Do you keep on working? Work your way through?’

  ‘Yes, I will. But I’m waiting for a little while. There’s a part that needs to click into place. In the meantime, I could paint pictures, I suppose. And they’d probably sell. Hills and trees. I’m good at those. But with the shadow man I moved away from landscapes, that sort of thing. I want my pictures to be human.’

  ‘And nothing abstract?’

  ‘No, no. I’ve got to have real things or else I’m lost. I want people and hills, and creeks and valleys. And I want a connection with whoever looks at them. Fan would have hated my stuff. But it’s right for me. I’m almost frightened sometimes that the things I draw in my mind seem like a language, yet when I get to painting them the meaning gets lost, as if I haven’t moved past simple notation, found the image.’

  ‘Found the myth?’

  ‘Why yes, I suppose. Image or myth or symbol, but something that people looking at the paintings share. Without effort. From a kind of deep acquaintance. That’s what I get from certain paintings when I look. Even Fan’s, who really is, you know, much better than me …’

  Ellie talked. She had not explained her work before – how it concentrated her into a moment of time, into the colour and the stroke of the brush; how it opened like a flower and declared itself complete; and how all her self was absorbed into it until the moment when the picture was huge and weighty and whole and there was nothing of her left, just for a moment, before the one shrank to its proper size and the other came streaming back, restored. When she pai
nted, Ellie said, she was herself yet overcame some excess of self. And when she lost a picture, when it failed to work … She held out her hand with the thumb folded under: ‘I feel I don’t have an opposing grip.’

  She told him about her visit to Gethsemane and Derek’s rescue of Paula, and Paula’s return; and would have gone on to describe Robert Early in the river – but stopped, saw the danger, and was almost dizzy with her escape. That was no one’s. It was hers, and other people must not know of it until she had seen it properly and painted it. She felt sorry for Hollis, excluding him, but almost triumphant with self; and she saw him clearly: a man with a disappointed life, whom she liked for some reason, without restraint, and whom she might even come to love.

  She sat looking at him, thinking of the shape of his head. Drawing Robert Early, she would sketch a ball; but with Hollis it would be a box. He was sharpened at the temples, with a corresponding sharpness at the back –

  ‘Ellie?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else. Do you want to stay the night, Hollis? I’ve got a spare bed.’

  She felt that with her talk and his confession they had done something just as intimate as making love, and it was enough for now. From the way he behaved so easily – phoned his hotel in Nelson, cancelled his room – he felt it too. He brought in his bag from the car. She made him use the bathroom first, walked on the lawn among the trees, and when she went back inside he had gone to his room. His light went out as she locked the doors.

  Ellie went to bed. She heard Hollis turning where the night before Kerri had yelped. He’ll have to pay for his hotel room, but maybe the firm will do that, she thought. She turned out her light and realised as she went to sleep that he hadn’t brought a walking stick with him, and she hadn’t noticed if he still limped.

  They ate breakfast together and it seemed to her a bit like underpainting, forcing pigment into a canvas with a spatula. She spoke, he spoke. At their next meeting, perhaps they would start to paint their picture.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just thinking.’ Almost said, It’s a consequence of living alone, but said instead, ‘I do a lot of it.’

  He left her three bottles of wine; said he’d like to visit again, perhaps in February or March. ‘What I was saying last night –’ he looked at his hand – ‘I guess I’ve got the monkey grip, eh?’

  ‘You’ll make it,’ she said, and finding they were eye to eye, kissed him on the cheek.

  He smiled and reddened, threw his bag into the back seat and drove away.

  Ellie watched the car move slowly under the pines: saw Hollis’s neck and squared-off shoulders, his blue summer shirt – and thought of Robert Early, standing up to his waist in the glassy water. It was as if she’d stepped to a neighbouring window and seen the same view differently, for the first time. So – it almost blinded her – that was how she must do it: the man in the river no longer drawing everything into himself. He stood right of centre, where the eye would start and where it must stop, but now there were people balancing him; the shingle bank held its proper weight, the trees and hills took their place by right. She saw the colours she would use to hold him still – stop Robert Early getting away with all the things he wanted …

  She did not watch Hollis all the way down the drive but strode back through the house, plucked her studio key from its nail, and hurried under the trellis and across the lawn.

  Her tuis were swooping. She understood their greed.

  Between times

  1991–92. ‘A fellowship more quiet than solitude’: Robert Louis Stevenson. It is like that with Ellie and Hollis, although now and then they disagree. The orchard of young olive trees down by the inlet is for sale, and she wants him to buy it and do olives instead of grapes – something different, with more risk, more adventure – but he won’t, it’s wine he wants, his own label in the end; and before that, decisions – what varieties of grape, in what proportions, how the rows should lie – and work, putting in the posts and wires, planting the vines, watching them, protecting them in their dangerous first year. ‘All that,’ he says, with a reflexive twitching in his hands. Ellie sounds the phrase dismissively, but lets it go. His desire is stronger than her impatience. It’s important not to quarrel over what can’t be changed. They lie side by side after making love. She hears his breathing change as he goes to sleep, and feels how she has altered in her fibres – it’s more than just the physical satisfactions of love – and knows that at last she has the lover she has wanted, a friend with whom she talks all day if she’s inclined, and lies breathing with all night. ‘No longer another person in the troublous sense’: Stevenson. Oh, that’s right. How right. Ellie smiles as she goes to sleep.

  He stays a while, goes away – winding things up at Endacott Prime – comes back, leaves again. Auckland puts a frown on his face but at last it’s done, and in that week he buys the land he wants, across from Bronte on the Waimea inlet. His pupils dilate as though he’s recognised a lover, and Ellie sees she’ll have both less and more of him – less of his time but more of Hollis, because some part that had collapsed begins to fill out, unwrinkles as though he has stepped into the sun. She’d like to paint him.

  She paints Gethsemane through those two years and has eleven paintings at the end: ‘Baptism 1–7’, and two called ‘Flight’ and two ‘Return’. (Calls ‘Return’ ‘Surrender’ at first but then decides on neutrality.) They make a narrative – and how Fan would have hated that. She finishes as the builders frame Hollis’s new house, as his year-old vines begin to flower. He looks at her work and she at his, and they praise one another – and disagree, not for the first time, about where she will live. He’ll build her a studio down by the water; she can watch the tide come and go as she paints, and anyway isn’t it time for a change? But Ellie will not leave her house and land. No, no. She touches his cheek, kisses him. ‘Let’s just be happy with what we’ve got.’ They are only five kilometres apart. ‘We’ll wear out that piece of road. We’ll always be together,’ she says.

  1993. Her exhibition sells out, which is rare. Ellie visits Wellington for a final look at Gethsemane (and because her mother has a ‘friend’ she’d like her to meet). She walks around the empty gallery. David Shea parades with her until she sends him away. How did I know that? she thinks, looking at Robert Early. Know to paint him from the back – his billowing shirt and hooking arm and angled neck, with a single rounded line for cheek and jaw: the water sliding, his buttocks and legs stratified; and the woman no more than a patch of blue deep down, except for her white headscarf turning like a fish: ‘Baptism 1’? She moves back from number two as it moves from her: the woman still submerged, Robert Early smaller, the bank of pebbles solid along the top, the men’s shoes gleaming, their trouser legs standing like tree trunks in a row. I made that one beautifully, Ellie thinks. He raises the woman in number three, holding his black bible in an upthrust hand. (Who’s to know that in real life he gave it to one of the men?) They (twelve if you count) stand watching, sombre eyed, while the skirts of the women make a sky-blue sky, as if they’re seen through feathered eyes. So the paintings go, shrinking the Earlyites into their paddocks and hills until, in number seven, the baptised woman walks tiny as a beetle up the shingle bank, Robert Early waits in the river, and another woman runs towards the gate where a red car waits.

  How did I do it? Ellie thinks.

  She’s not so pleased with ‘Flight’ and ‘Return’. A bit Victorian: the girl (only Ellie and Derek know who she is), seen across the paddock from the gate, stands on the concrete forecourt, not knowing where to run; and then, ‘Flight 2’, with skirts held up and one arm out, makes her stumbling run towards the gate. There’s scarcely any detail in her face. Behind her the hills go up to the sky, with paddle-shaped clearings brown and yellow in the scrub. (Ellie has resisted the temptation to put a driverless tractor in one.) Then ‘Return’: skirts more narrow, headscarf tight, Paula walks in the dawn towards the dining hall. M
en stand in the paddocks like isolated posts, watching her. (Seven if you count but there’s no significance in the number.) The final painting shows her sliding away, a smear of blue, behind the glass door, while a man (Robert Early) turns to follow.

  Not bad, Ellie thinks, but too much story. All the same, she goes away deeply satisfied.

  She visits Derek at the City Mission: sees his innocence and gravity and wants to praise him. Takes a bus to Brooklyn where she meets Steve Sholto, a Londoner, retired taxi driver, lapsed Catholic (‘A God-botherer? Me? You’re joking, lass’), who has been her mother’s lodger and is now her ‘friend’, and will be her husband before long. Mrs Brownlee glows. She drinks a glass of beer and blushes red at his jokes. Ellie flies home. There’s no danger of Hollis taking her over like that. And why? She could dress it up but finds it enough to say, Because I’m a painter.

  1994–98. Five years at the start of which Ellie unaccountably slows down. She tires easily, can’t climb hills, sleeps after lunch and wakes exhausted. Wonders if it’s a forerunner of menopause, and how bad that will be; but what it is – she’s relieved, almost elated to know – what it is (she savours those three words, which foretell a cure) is a fibroid in her uterus, sucking her strength away. If it had haemorrhaged there would have been trouble, especially if she’d been out sketching somewhere alone. She might have bled to death; and Hollis goes pale, his own blood draining from his face. She sees him as she wakes from her operation (hysterectomy) and thinks – so unutterably tired – I don’t mind if I die; but wakes again and sees him and is pleased in a slow suspended way that she’s alive. They seem to exist in a clearing they have cut from the tangle of their lives, and she decides, We’ll stay here, yes we’ll stay.

  She spends whole weeks, then whole months at his house, painting in a sunroom he converts to a studio, but goes back to her own place when she’s ready to be alone – when she feels she’s getting close to some image that she wants to declare. Hollis leaves her by herself up there – or, as he sometimes says, out there. Her paintings are full of the pressure of the tides. She paints the ebb as well as the flow and the rich emptiness of the inlet when the last film of water is gone and the sand sucks light into itself. These paintings make her happy. Nothing she has done before has made her feel so happy. It doesn’t need to come from only trouble, she thinks.