The Sitters

by Alex Miller

  She goes right across the creek, dipping the rolled ends of her jeans into the water, and she climbs the bank on the other side. There’s a cattle track there. It’s where the white-faced cows come down to drink and they’ve eroded a path. The soft green couch grass grows right up to the edges of the path, as if a gardener in a city garden has arranged the effect to look natural. She reaches up for a branch and hauls herself onto the high bank. She stands there looking off at a view that I can’t see from where I am down here in the bed of the creek. She stands straight, making a picture of herself, then she stretches, embracing her childhood playground. Her bare arms in the sunlight.

  She knows I’m watching. She’s proud of the way she looks. She’s proud of being in good shape, of not having let herself go. She’d like people to think of her as a woman in her prime. She’s like someone who is with their biographer. She wants honesty, of a kind. She doesn’t want any of the small or the mean things to register with me.

  I think she’s about to turn round and say something to me, maybe invite me over, but she moves off, going over the bank and out of sight without saying anything. Maybe she’d forgotten I was there. Maybe she assumed I’d occupied myself examining the creek. I sit down in the shade of the casuarinas and I lean against a fallen tree and I wait for her. I could follow, but I don’t. I don’t feel I’ve been asked to follow. I don’t always only go where I’m invited. I wasn’t invited to her reception in the common room. But there it is.

  While I wait I get out my little notebook and do some small sketches of her standing up on the bank by the cattle track hauling herself aloft with the branch, her bare arm extended, smooth and pale and strong, this limb reaching out and the rest of her coming along after it, like an afterthought, the arm doing all the work, being all the person, twice its normal size but just exactly right. The slim branch of the casuarina pliable and springy, bending and responding to the strength in her grip. Drawings no bigger than two centimetres square. Later I think I hear her coming back with someone and I stop drawing and listen, surprised that there’s someone else here besides us. But it’s the water going over the stones, making the sound of people talking.

  I wasn’t a child prodigy. The idea of being an artist came to me late. I’d always kept up a bit of drawing and watercolour from when I was a kid, but it became a secret thing that I did for myself. It was a private passion that I concealed from the people I worked with. As a labourer and a farm worker I never met anybody who cared about art. I never saw my drawing as something that could have any value for anyone but myself. I still have a couple of those early notebooks. They’re filled with my commentary as well as my drawings. Titles that I elaborated into stories. Titles have always been important to me. They’ve always been half the story. Drawing was my diary, a private listening device for what was going on on the inside. I was twenty before it was suggested to me that I could take myself seriously as an artist. I saw at once that I was being offered freedom — from having to do a job. And I took the offer. People had expected something from me. This had puzzled me. I could never see what it was until this woman, whom Jessica reminded me of, took my drawing seriously for me. She took it for granted that I had a choice. And I believed her. I’ve invented many reasons since then for why I became an artist and what art means to me, but really it has always been freedom. And whenever I’ve decided the artist’s life was too arduous for me, it’s been the prospect of losing my freedom that’s driven me back to art.

  An artist is free. That’s the greatest thing there is about a life of art. At every moment you see your life to the end. You’re not working your way towards something. You’re not waiting for an event in the future. You’re whole. You belong to yourself. Success is the only thing that has threatened this for me. Success made art my profession and my livelihood. Success meant I no longer viewed art as a simple choice, which was the greatest thing about art, the fact that I chose to do it. The choice disconnected me. I became detached. It was a kind of daily suicide that I survived to repeat again the next day. It was the most arrogant thing, the most selfish, and it humbled me. Freedom frightened me. I was afraid each day when I had to decide to begin work again. Nothing affirmed that decision except my own choice. With success I lost the fear of choosing freedom for myself and I lost the best thing in art. It was Jessica who linked me up to that fear in myself again. The intimate image I have of her in this portrait in front of me, an image in which I am content to recognise myself. In my portrait of Jessica, revelation has become an act of concealment. It’s a fiction. A private mystery. An entry in my diary in which the identity of the true subject has been hidden.

  I didn’t fight with my father about becoming an artist. It was never that classic fight between a father and son about doing something useful that drove me away from home when I was a boy. I didn’t know I was going to be an artist then and my father couldn’t have cared less about money and usefulness. If he had money he gave it away. He shared it. He was careless with his money. He threw it away. They say the Scots are mean but he was recklessly extravagant. At Christmas he’d pick up a dero and bring him home. Was this supposed to be a display of Christian charity? He wasn’t a Christian. He always told me and my sister that religion was the great evil and to watch out for it. Which was maybe just a way of having a go at my mother, who’d been raised a Catholic and had taught us to say our prayers. So what was it with him then? His old men at Christmas? He’d sit them up close to the coal fire, which he’d stoke with a bucket of wet dross, in his own chair in our parlour and they’d start steaming and smelling the place out and he’d give them a glass of neat whisky, which was how he drank it himself then. They’d want to get out. They’d be missing their pals. They didn’t feel right sitting in our parlour drinking and eating and having a good time. It wasn’t a good time for them. But he’d insist. He wouldn’t let them get away. With me and my sister watching them they were ashamed of themselves. And we were expected to be respectful to them. They were his long-lost brothers. He was telling himself a fairy story. He flattered them. ‘Here’s one of the few men in England you can trust,’ he’d tell us, putting his arm round the old codger’s shoulders and making us come up and shake him by the hand. He was rescuing himself from ruin. He’d forget about being generous to us. The dero would get all his attention. And after a few whiskies he’d take the old fellow up to the Baring Arms and that’s the last we’d see of our father for Christmas. We were glad and we were sorry to see the back of him. His old men at Christmas and later his broken-backed books. They were his freedom. I learned to despise the meanness of his vision before I realised this. By then it was too late. We were never reconciled.

  I didn’t do any formal training. I never went to art school. I only do portraits. People. Us. You don’t find me doing those enormous urban landscapes. I don’t know how to do that kind of architectural stuff, or motor cars and kitchen appliances, or those surrealist ideas where one thing’s becoming something else.

  Metaphors in paint. I can’t stand all that banality. All that symbolism, it’s too literal. It doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t deal with the facts of my condition. I’m limited. I admit that. My lack of training has always limited my choices and my tastes. And maybe that’s made it easier for me.

  I never hesitated. I wasn’t distracted by other possibilities. I didn’t consider anything else. It was us from the word go. Portraits. It was never another subject. It was me. Myself. The solitary act of painting reconnecting me to something begun in childhood and not completed. When I can’t work there’s nothing. It’s all futile. There’s not a sufficient reason for living. It’s always been the mask. And I soon realised it was just glimpses. Bits and pieces. Fragments. There was no way out of that. The more open I was the deeper I was hiding something.

  That day by the creek Jessica gave me a private picture of herself. It was a picture of a woman sitting in a comfortable armchair looking out of a window onto a summer landscape. I kept the idea without conscio
usly considering it. It stayed with me. It was simple and there was something optimistic in it. She said it was a picture of herself she’d always had in her mind. She couldn’t remember when she’d got it. In this picture she has her back to the viewer. She’s facing the view (it’s another Hammershoi). Well, naturally things got changed, but I kept the idea of her looking out of a window. We’re always looking out of windows. They’re not just there to let the light in. If there’s a window, sooner or later we look out of it. We like to look in windows too. But that’s not so easy. Into the private goings on of our neighbours. So there was nothing remarkable about her private picture of herself sitting in a chair gazing out these ample windows onto a beautiful summer day. It was just this little private view of herself. And that’s what attracted me to it. A commonplace thing.

  She was gone for more than an hour. She didn’t come back the way she’d gone, across the creek where the cattle had broken down the bank and made a track, but came up quietly behind me. A stone clicked and I turned round and she was standing there looking down at me. She was laughing at something. To herself. The light was shining up from the water into her eyes. It was an effect I’d noticed before in someone else, I couldn’t remember when. She was lit up with her exercise and with some excitement of her thoughts and with the way she had surprised me.

  I closed my notebook and put it in my pocket. She sat next to me on the stones and said, in a bantering tone, ‘You’re not going to let me see, I suppose?’

  I took out my notebook and gave it to her. She examined the little drawings with intense interest. And that’s when she said she’d always had this picture of herself, just telling it to me, of herself sitting by these ample windows looking out at the sunny day. She was touching the drawings with the tips of her fingers, as if she expected to experience texture. There was a movement of the air and I smelt the water on her.

  ‘Have you been for a swim?’ I asked, watching her swimming naked in the sunlit creek under the canopy of the casuarinas.

  She flourished the notebook. ‘It was our bath,’ she said. ‘Just down there. There’s a deep hole at the bend of the creek. I went to see if it was still there. The creek changes. I used to bathe with my grandmother every day. Even when it was cold and raining we’d come down and have our bath. The water was so cold after a frost we’d scream.’

  She tells me this as if she’s not just remembering herself as a girl but is still that girl now, as if she’s just been out there in the landscape becoming that girl again, going to this swimming hole in a way I’m not going to be able to understand, then coming back and sneaking up on me just to see if she could be that quiet in the bush, doing the kind of thing you do when you’re still young. But the way she has of talking like this keeps a little barrier up between us, her manner remarking on the barrier, reminding me it’s there, as if she’s saying there’s no way I’m going to get her portrait right. She hands my notebook back to me.

  And she says, ‘They look like drawings for a sculpture. Little bronze images. Detached. The sort of thing you imagine Rodin doing, putting everything into one arm. As if the arm can be the whole person.’ She’s looking over my shoulder at the notebook that I’m looking at. Then she looks directly at me. And her gaze is candid and open and curious as she’s searching my features. Asking herself a question. I’m reminded of our meeting in the corridor at the university the evening I was feeling low and exhausted and wasn’t taking any notice of things around me. Suddenly it’s her again, that woman for an instant, fleetingly, looking into me, expecting something from me, offering me something of herself. Then she reaches forward and picks up a stone and the moment has passed.

  I put the notebook back in my pocket.

  It’s a touchy business for everyone this. She’s not sure what it’s leading to. I’m annoyed by her reference to Rodin. She’s right, of course, but she needn’t have said it. Artists hate people to remind them of where they’re drawing their ideas from. She might have guessed that. You have to start somewhere. I’m thinking, she didn’t pick Hammershoi. She only picks the ones everyone knows. You can’t reinvent the whole thing every time you paint a picture. It’s what the writer Nabokov called ‘lawful property in the free city of the mind’.

  I look at her and wait for her to notice that I’m looking at her with all this in my mind. I say, ‘I could smell the water on you when you got back, Jessica.’

  She shuffles at the stones with her bare toes. Maybe she’s shy about the image in my mind of herself naked, swimming in the private bath as a young girl with her grandmother, or on her own in the autumn sunlight today, no longer a young girl. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s not an image she wants me to have.

  ‘The Araluen creek,’ she says. ‘There’s something about the water. The old people used to talk about it. They wouldn’t drink the water below the junction with the river.’

  We watch the special water of the Araluen creek flowing past just beyond our feet. An abundant stream as clear as glass. The notebook in my shirt pocket is pressing heavily against my chest. And there’s that shrieking in the air, rising and falling and sidling along the creek in waves, searching the wavelengths, tuning to something, a succession of tones searching for a certain resolution, elaborating the silence of this place. Birds call high in the forest, cries of alarm echoing among the gullies and the zamia palms, back and forth among the antique cycads. And we’re waiting.

  I’m expecting her to say something about herself, or maybe about her mother. I can feel her thinking. I’m remembering a painting which my wife bought for me in London more than twenty years ago. It’s a Sickert. A Mornington Crescent nude, contre jour. It hangs in my bedroom in my house in Canberra opposite Henry, arrested in his sideways plunge. In the Sickert the dark form of the naked woman shimmers against the light. The blaze of light along the edge of the naked female body, that was Sickert’s contribution. The woman’s body is heavy and flowing and is in the splendid assurance of middle-age. She is raised on her elbow, anticipating the attention of the viewer. We’re always seduced into reading the world as waiting for our thoughts to be completed.

  Jessica lobs a stone into the creek. It’s an impatient gesture and punctuates the sense of strain and unease and maybe even disappointment that’s growing up between us. I’m disappointed in myself. She sorts aggressively through the stones between her legs, rattling them against each other and she selects another and throws it, this time hard, right across the creek and onto the far bank, as if she’s testing how far she can throw, testing her strength. The stone hits the bank with a thud.

  ‘I was married once,’ she says. And she runs her palm over the water-worn stones, back and forth, rattling them against each other, something in her mood that she wishes to pass off as playful and teasing, but which is more akin to resentment. ‘There aren’t any flat stones in the Araluen,’ she says, and she breathes and looks at me. Something of that challenge and enmity in her gaze. And then she tells me this story about how she came to get married. And while she’s telling me she’s selecting stones and tossing them into the creek. We watch the stones lobbing into the water. She’s keeping our attention off herself with this. Keeping the situation fluid. Not letting things lock up.

  ‘We were friends,’ she says. ‘It was a good friendship. We lived together for two years. We took our holidays together. One day a group of us were going to Austria. We were going skiing. The night before we were due to leave on the skiing holiday we met at a restaurant in Soho and we all got drunk. Someone made the observation that he and I were the only ones in the group who weren’t married. So we decided to get married and join our friends later, so that we could all be on the holiday as a group of married couples. After the ceremony we stayed at a hotel in the West End and tried to behave the way we thought a newly married couple would behave. We both loathed it but we persisted with the pretence of it. We could feel it doing us harm but we didn’t quit. We didn’t mention the harm to each other. We didn’t say we weren’t
enjoying it. We pretended we were enjoying ourselves. It was as if the whole thing was a test of our nerve, to see who would give in first. But neither of us gave in. We didn’t know how to be truthful about it without feeling we’d failed. You know when you cut your finger, or you do yourself some sort of injury, and you’re aware the second before you do it that you’re going to do it and yet you don’t stop yourself from doing it. A kind of will beyond your own will takes over and you just go on with it and you harm yourself, and then the pain is a relief and a punishment. You’ve satisfied some awful inner prompting, some grim and childish impulse has been satisfied. And you realise this thing is underneath your normal life and it can surface at any time and harm you. You’ve hurt yourself on purpose. And now you’re satisfied, but you’re ashamed of yourself. You’ve done it out of spite. For no reason. I’m not going to be jour friend any more, that kind of thing, that little girls say to each other to be as hurtful as they possibly can be when they’re trying to control everyone. I’m sure people kill themselves, or even kill other people, while they’re in the grip of this.’ She threw another stone and we watched it strike the water. ‘I felt capable of killing him. Of course we didn’t go skiing. There are still times when I feel cheated out of that holiday. We couldn’t stand each other after that. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other. It was over. We’d admitted we’d never really known anything about each other before, despite our friendship and those years of living together. We never discussed it. I still run into him from time to time. At conferences and that sort of thing. I think he’s happy. He’s a grandfather.’

  Jessica held another stone, ready to lob it into the Araluen creek. ‘I don’t know what made me think of all this,’ she said, a little sad. She was silent for a long time. Then she came out with this, ‘It’s coming back to Australia, coming back here, to my mother’s, to the garden and everything. It’s punishing myself. I’ve always kept away. I love this place. That’s why I’ve always kept away from it. I hated this place when I was eighteen. I couldn’t wait to escape. And when I came down the road last year and saw that old post-and-rail fence falling down I cried. I sat in the car and cried. My gran split the timber for that fence when I was a kid. I sat up there under the walnut tree watching her driving the wedges. We used to call it the new fence. My mother probably still refers to it as the new fence. My mother never had anything to say. She just waited for me to clear out. She knew I would. Now she thinks I’ve come back. She thinks I’ve finished with whatever it was I had to go away for. She expects me to start fixing the fences and putting things back in order again, like they were when she was a kid. She doesn’t say anything. She’s never said anything. But I know that’s what she’s thinking.’