by Alex Miller
She’s not sure whether she’s come back to live in Australia or not. She doesn’t say this. It’s something I gather for myself. Something I get a feeling about.
She says definitely she has no plans to stay in Australia beyond the end of the year, when her visiting fellowship will come to an end. But I don’t feel convinced about this. She would like, she says, to see that her mother is properly cared for. That some arrangement is made, before she goes back. That’s all. But she’s not detailed about this. There’s some concealed difficulty that she doesn’t speak of to me. She is troubled about the whole business and for some reason to hear this in her voice makes me feel very close to her. This is the feeling on the way down in the car. Being a passenger and going somewhere new and listening to her. The magic of the drive has come to an end now that we’ve arrived. I feel a little let down and try not to show it.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ I say. ‘Very peaceful and beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ she says, drawling the word, as if she’s reluctant to agree but can see no alternative. And she gets out her cigarettes and shakes one from the packet.
We’re both wondering if this project of the portrait will go ahead or whether it’ll fizzle out. We don’t know yet. It could go either way. We’re not making any rash forecasts. But it has complicated things for both of us and we’re not sure that we need the complication. Maybe we don’t have the energy for it. Maybe it’s too late for this kind of thing. We sit in the car and watch the woman in the garden. Her mother. The sun is warm coming through the closed windows of the car. I convince myself not to worry about anything and soon begin to enjoy the feeling of being in the country. Of not working and being on an outing and not having the responsibility of being the one who’s in charge. It’s more complicated for her, I tell myself, than it is for me. There’s the click and scrape of a steel hoe against stones and the faint shrieking of insects.
‘You’d think nothing’s changed,’ she says quietly, as if she’s had to say this. The very least she could say with all the things that must be going around in her head. Her entire childhood. The peace and quiet of an autumn morning in the country.
‘There used to be a lot of families around here. All through the bush. There were people all through this area. There was a school.’ Her schoolgirl friends running down the hill with her, swinging their bags and yelling and her mother coming from the garden to greet them, and going into the little house and giving them milk and biscuits, or whatever she had for the occasion. I remember my own big chunks of fresh crusty bread-and-dripping after school, the dripping scraped from the bottom of the bowl with the dark sauce in it, and lots of pepper and salt.
‘My mother’s the last of them. She’s the last of the old people. The others are all dead.
‘ She turns to me after she says this, potentially hostile, appraising me. Wanting me to be more responsive. I’ve been making noises of assent. Trying to sound interested. Am I worth these painful disclosures? Someone who does not communicate in volumes of words. Is there any point in giving me this information? I don’t say anything. I can’t think of anything to say. I look out at what she’s talking about. I’m looking at her old home. The place she grew up in. There’s a broken post-and-rail fence running alongside us. It’s been fixed with barbed wire years ago, then the barbed wire’s rusted and broken and a couple of steel posts have been driven in and some plain wire strung along. The whole thing’s just hanging there, ready to fall over. There are three white-faced cows in the paddock lying in the shade of a big tree and watching us, their heads rocking from side to side, chewing and chasing off the flies. They don’t look as though they’re going to challenge the fence. I can think of nothing to say. I regret my silence but can do nothing about it. It’s the lines of my drawing, thin and spindly, like my writing, meagre and secretive. Messages to myself. A deep habit. Cagey, tight and cryptic. My art began as a private listening device for detecting something out there in the silence that would keep me interested. Fragments. I learned to look for fragments, not for whole things.
She turns to me and, smiling, asks me what I’m thinking. She’s been distracted from her own thoughts. I realise I’ve probably sighed.
She touches my shoulder and swivels round in her seat and points behind us. ‘See that walnut tree up the hill there?’ It’s March and the air is bright with the first touch of autumn. The enormous tree is heavy with clusters of green nuts. ‘My grandmother and her mother are buried under that tree,’ she says. ‘My great-grandmother planted it. My mother buried my grandmother there when I was a girl.’
I twist around in my seat and look up the hill at the tree, awkwardly craning around to see it through the rear window, trying to absorb the density of the history that’s being offered to me, the significance of all this. Jessica’s watching me.
‘My mother wants me to bury her there,’ she says and waits for me to look at her. ‘It’s one of the things she’s expecting from me.’
‘Do they still allow you to do that?’
‘Well, we’ll see. Shall we get out?’ she says and laughs. We both laugh. And for a moment we like each other in a way that is open and without complication.
‘My father used to keep his paints in a walnut box,’ I tell her. ‘We went out into the country every weekend together to paint.’ We get out of the car and she lights her cigarette and we walk up the hill to have a look at the walnut tree and her ancestral graves.
‘You’ve been a painter all your life then?’
My success as an artist came with the sale of the Tan Family portrait to MOMA, which everyone has heard of. It wasn’t until I was successful that I seriously began to doubt my ability. When I was working on the Tan Family portrait I felt the necessity of it. That piece of work had singled me out. Which is the nearest thing to inspiration. The knowledge of its necessity is the inspiration of a work. That’s what I’m hoping for with Jessica. It’s what I’m always hoping for. I know it’s not a free gift. I haven’t had it for a long time and I’m hoping to get beyond the uncertain stage with this project. So far there’s still only this mute stubbornness.
She’s sitting on a narrow iron bed in a room that’s so small she could nearly touch both walls if she were to stretch out her arms. She’s looking out of the window. Only you can’t see the window. But that’s where the light’s coming from. The window is off the frame to the left. It’s her old bed from when she was a child. She’s in her old bedroom in her mother’s house. She’s being assailed by the sounds and smells of her childhood home. Nothing has changed. She’s looking out the window at her mother hoeing in the garden. The click and scrape of her mother’s hoe on the stony ground. Whenever she sits here looking out the window at her silent mother in the garden, Jessica tells me, she feels that her journey back to Lower Araluen has been a mistake. Once she is actually here, in this place where she grew up, with the smells and old familiar sounds, once she can see and can touch the broken and the worn and the cared-for bits and pieces of this place, she begins to feel that by returning she has willed some kind of punishment on herself. There’s a heaviness in being in her mother’s house that she can’t explain or shift from her mood. ‘I hadn’t expected to feel at home,’ she says. ‘The difficulties, I mean, of being at home.’
She tries to talk to me about this when we’re in Canberra at my place and I’m drawing her. Sitting by the big windows in the studio she tries to tell me about it.
‘My mother in the garden, hoeing the earth the way she’s always hoed the earth,’ she says, speaking her thought suddenly into the quiet room with just my scratching on the pad with the stub of charcoal. ‘It’s her own earth. She’s the one who’s created it! The rest of that hill’s just rock.’ She takes a packet of cigarettes from her bag and shifts it about in her hands, feeling its edges with her thumb.
‘I don’t mind,’ I tell her. ‘It’s okay. Have a cigarette if you want.’
She thanks me and strokes her bag. The bag is a fine green leat
her. ‘I bought this bag in Florence last summer,’ she says, stroking the bag, as if it’s a pet on her knees. She looks at me and laughs as she lights her cigarette. ‘I should give them up,’ she says. ‘I keep meaning to.’ She closes her eyes and lets the smoke drift from her lips. For a moment she looks young. The person she once was.
In her childhood bedroom in her mother’s house at Lower Araluen there’s a little blue china dish on the chest of drawers. The room is so small that Jessica doesn’t need to get up from the bed in order to reach the dish. The little dish fits snugly into the palm of her hand. She taps the ash from her cigarette into the little blue dish, which she remembers from when she was a child, and she weeps. It’s the first moment of her return. As the tears run down her cheeks she lifts her face to the ceiling and blows out the smoke of her cigarette. It is a confusion that is both sadness and joy that makes her weep. Then she stubs out her cigarette and she dries her eyes and blows her nose. And she replaces the blue china dish on the chest of drawers and she laughs and tells herself that she is an idiot. She runs her hand along the top of the chest of drawers. A piece, like a small bite taken from a pie, is broken from the bevelled edge of the chest of drawers. She inserts the ball of her thumb into the hollow of the ‘bite’ and rubs it back and forth. This is one of those idle gestures that are ventured upon involuntarily. There is something intensely familiar, something unexpectedly private and deeply personal, in the pleasure she gets from the feeling of rolling the ball of her thumb in the hollow of the wood. She is taken by surprise and she repeats the action. She rolls the ball of her thumb in the little hollow and searches in her memory for something. But it is like trying to remember a dream after waking. The harder she tries to remember, the more recessed the image becomes, until it is lost altogether. She stands by the bed looking at the chest of drawers and she feels suddenly heavy and old, and she wishes she were back in England and could call her friend, Caroline, and have a laugh and be on confident ground again in the present. She wishes she hadn’t come back to Australia, to the valley. She wishes she had left it all in her memory.
She wishes she had neglected her mother and the whole issue of the possibility of a return. She tells me, ‘I’m not one of those people who insist that there can never be any regrets in their past. I think that’s just cowardly,’ she says. She crosses her legs and she leans her elbow on her knee. She inspects me keenly and draws on her cigarette and she tells me that she misses her friend. ‘I miss her, Caroline,’ she says, savouring the pain of saying her absent friend’s name aloud. ‘Should I chuck this in and just go back?’ she asks me. ‘What do you think? Tell me honestly what you think. Should I call it a day?’
I turn the page and begin another drawing. ‘Stay like that,’ I say. ‘Leaning forward, just as you are.’ Her eyes are narrowed against the smoke of her cigarette and her face is tilted up towards me and she’s examining me, finding me worthy of these questions, looking into her feelings for me. The soft afternoon light from the window is falling across her cheek, and she is wondering about things in her life, and just for this moment, for no reason, she is suddenly happy. Through her sadness she is happy. I would like to tell her that she is beautiful. But it is better to say nothing and to hope that I will gather the charge of this story into my images by remaining silent. She waits for me. Watching me. There is a sensuousness in being told to stay as she is. There is enjoyment in it. I feel her gaze on my face as I draw.
She’s wearing a brooch pinned to the v of her blouse. It’s a replica of an antique Celtic design, a gold circlet set with paste and amber and blue. I admired it earlier when she arrived. Now, while I draw her, she fingers the brooch and reminds me that I admired it and she tells me this story about it. I feel there’s a reason for her telling me the story, but I don’t know what the reason is. Perhaps she just wants to talk about her friend. Who knows? It’s guesswork. It’s all guesswork. Maybe she doesn’t know the reason herself. But still, I have this feeling she’s telling me something else while she’s telling me the story of how she came by the brooch.
‘Caroline gave it to me,’ she says, reaching for the brooch and touching it with the tips of her fingers, the way a blind person might, forming its shape in her mind. ‘We had dinner together the night before I left. It was an Indian restaurant in Beaconsfield. Do you know Beaconsfield? It was London you were from wasn’t it? It had belonged to her mother. Her mother used to wear it all the time. Caroline’s mother and I were friends. When she died I missed her more than Caroline did. I feel free, Caroline said to me when the news of her mother’s death came through. But that wasn’t how I felt. It was a generous gift. We spent a few minutes admiring it. When I went to fix it to my dress the hasp broke and it fell from my hands in two pieces. I couldn’t say anything. I felt it must be an omen. Caroline just looked at me, as if she blamed me. As if I’d broken her gift on purpose. I couldn’t defend myself. Caroline’s mother and I had shared a particular understanding that for a number of reasons I’d never been able to talk about to Caroline. Her mother had helped me a lot in the early days. So when Caroline gave me the brooch I was secretly a bit embarrassed. It was a shock to see the brooch. I mean I had to pretend I felt something simple when really I had this rush of memories. It was as if her mother was giving me the brooch through Caroline. So when it broke I felt that the more complicated side of the gift was being exposed. Are you superstitious? Isn’t everybody? I picked up the pieces of the brooch and I was thinking about my own mother. I was thinking about this business of coming back to Australia and seeing her again. I sat there in the restaurant with the two pieces of the brooch in my hand and I knew there was some sort of complicated connection with home and my mother and all that stuff I’d left behind thirty years ago and that I was going back to in the morning. I’m wearing it now in defiance of those feelings. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand that? We both drank quite a bit that night. We couldn’t shake off the feeling of hostility between us. Caroline is taller than me. She’s very thin and younger than I am. She’s English and she can seem to be disapproving in a very glassy impenetrable way, as if you’ve transgressed some basic rule that you’re never going to understand and that doing this has let her down. She can’t be made to talk about it. She’s even more disapproving if I try to talk about it. Sometimes I absolutely loath her and I can feel her loathing me. It’s horrible. That’s what it was like. But we persisted. We stayed on and drank Drambuie after the wine. The harder we tried the worse it got. The restaurant bill was enormous. I flinched when I saw it. We’d planned this celebration and she’d given me this generous gift and everything had fallen apart and I was leaving first thing in the morning to go to Australia for a year. I knew she was wishing there was some way she could take her mother’s brooch back. We parted disliking each other. A jeweller in Sydney repaired the brooch while I waited. He said it was nothing and wouldn’t charge me for it.’
Jessica stopped talking and looked down at the brooch and touched it. ‘Caroline’s mother gave it to me from the grave. It was difficult, but she did it. You must think this is all very stupid. I rang Caroline soon after I arrived and everything was all right between us. She asked me how the flight was. I didn’t tell her I’d had the brooch repaired. We talked about the possibility of her coming out for a holiday. She said she’d think about it. She’s my very best friend. I’ve known her since my first week in London. But there are still things I can’t talk to her about.’
The big silvery redgum in the paddock beyond the garden where the white-faced cows are is acting as a reflector and is driving the light against the window. But the room’s resisting the light. The room, this other room, her old bedroom down here at Lower Araluen, is staying in a kind of low suffused state of semi-darkness. Vertical blocks of deep purple and umber, the earth shadows, which contain their own resistant densities. Resisting the streaming light that’s crashing against the side of the house and shaking the window, which is throwing it back. As if the air outside is
filled with millions of fragments of exploded glass. The light hissing dangerously across the garden and the paddocks, and that faint dry shrieking all the time, which never stops, so that you cease to hear it and feel the irritation of the nerves, an abrasion of the senses, pervasive and deep and incurable, or, inexplicably you are soothed by it. It becomes a quality of the silence. And the old woman bent over tapping at the ground, tap, tap, tap, encompassed by the storm of light and noise that’s raging all around her, probing for something in the earth with her iron implement. Engrossed.
It’s a picture of a woman sitting on a bed looking out of a window. That’s what the portrait is. It’s only the second time I’ve done a portrait of someone in their bedroom. A bedroom portrait. The other one was Dr Henry Guston on his deathbed. Henry, as I called it, created a controversy with the Archibald committee. They couldn’t decide whether a corpse was a proper subject for portraiture. But as there was nothing in the rules disqualifying cadavers they were forced to hang it. It didn’t win of course. They accused me of trying to gain some notoriety with Henry. Which I didn’t need as I’d already sold the Tan Family and everyone was trying to get something off me by then. I was painting money.
My portrait of Henry wasn’t like Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. I mean I didn’t begin it expecting to do a corpse. He was my friend. One of my very few friends. I’ve never had more than one or two friends in my entire life. I’ve never had the problem of too many friends. I know people who have that problem. They’re always apologising for not seeing them. But Henry Guston was one friend I did have. I loved him. He and I fell into friendship years ago, when I first came to live in Canberra with my wife. He was at the CSIRO. It was like falling in love. I wanted to talk to everyone about him. It was recognition. It was believing. Henry was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. We didn’t care what the other one did or how the other one lived. He wasn’t like me. Henry knew how to live as well as how to work. Which I think is a rare gift. It was something I envied him. It was something I didn’t know how to do. It’s not something you learn. He had lots of friends. That was another gift, the gift of friendship. Henry was a gifted man. I was just one of his many friends. Which was fine. He knew how to make you feel okay about that kind of thing. Anyway he was fit and well and happy when I started working on his portrait. Then he died without warning. His death was completely unexpected. It was a great shock to me, to everyone. His wife and children were struck a terrible blow. Henry’s death left me without a friend. I resented his death. I went round to his place in a fiercely resentful state of mind and stood by his bed, looking at his dead face, talking to him, telling him what I thought of him, gathering from his features certain information I couldn’t resist and could never have found any other way. I had my little sketchbook and I made a few notes. I was careful to do it while there was no one else in the room. People get upset about these things. Those notes turned out to be the basis of the portrait.