by JH Fletcher
He dragged a painting from his storeroom. ‘There. A commission from an industrialist in Melbourne.’
Horace was more interested in the industrialist than the painting. ‘Perhaps I know him?’
‘Undoubtedly. But he has asked that his name be kept confidential.’
The painting was the Return of the Prodigal, a study in gold and brown of an errant youth being accepted back into the arms of his magnanimous father. A portrait of how the world should be but, alas, was not.
‘We proclaim the ideal,’ Atlas explained.
Horace examined it approvingly. ‘This is a fair representation of your work?’
‘It is.’
Horace was satisfied. ‘I believe we have found a good man,’ he told Martha when they got home. ‘A safe man.’
It was gratifying: to be able to please his wife and do what was right, at the same time.
‘When do they start?’ Martha asked.
‘Tomorrow.’
From the first Atlas understood the importance of making a powerful impression upon his pupils. He bound them in a purple rope of words while discussing painting, the technique and glory of art.
‘The quality of life, that is what art is about,’ he told them. ‘I have devoted my life to my easel …’
To say nothing of other delights.
Aline and Marie, twenty-one years and eighteen, never been kissed in their lives, listened and watched and wondered, and felt sparks of an unmentionable excitement glow like coals beneath their decorous clothes, their demure and down-turned eyes.
This was life, indeed, or what might become so.
Yet, at the start, all was formal, even stern. Atlas approved, cautiously, of Aline’s tiny brushwork and precise draughtsmanship, the subdued palette, while believing she needed guidance in her choice of subject.
On the wall of his back parlour, a room that Horace had not been shown, amid a maze of classical towers and verdant pastures, gambolled ladies, young and scantily clad, a delicate titillation of breast and thigh, attended by satyrs.
‘Let the classics be your master,’ proclaimed Atlas.
‘People don’t look like that,’ Marie objected, eyeing the nimble flesh that had so clearly never known the sweat and scent of life. ‘They don’t behave like that, either.’
The artist’s eyes took violet fire. ‘From the depths of your experience, you presume to tell us how people behave? And how they do not?’ He breathed, centaur-like, through the hairy caverns of his nose. ‘We are not trying to portray life. Life is coarse and crude, not at all suitable for the drawing room. We paint allegories, dreams, the ideal. Let your work inspire,’ he proclaimed. And rubbed his hands, looking frankly through their clothes at the flesh of the young women who had been placed in his care.
Marie’s work he did not like at all. He did not know what to make of the broad slashes of colour, the reds and yellows and greens flung in confusion across the canvas.
‘What is it? What does it represent?’
‘Life. As you said. And light.’
Atlas did not appreciate having his words thrown back at him. ‘Concentrate on draughtsmanship,’ he told her. ‘When you have learned mastery of hand and eye, then will be the time to worry about life and light.’
That time, in his judgement, would be long in coming. And he put her to work with drawing block and charcoal, before a cluster of earthenware pots.
Aline was a much more promising subject, as fresh as the dew which might perhaps be sipped from the petals of flowers.
The summer beckoned hopefully. Art, Atlas thought, feeling the juices of life pulse within him, what a wonderful thing it is.
So passed the long, hot months. Sydney was a pit of humidity. Up in the mountains it was more bearable, but even here the weather took its toll. Fires flared across the ranges and the sunsets were lurid with the smoke of bushfires burning out of control. In Woonga none of the timber burned but there was fire, nonetheless, invisible but potentially as lethal as any bush blaze.
A Christmas ball was held at the house of Mrs Evangeline Campion, whose husband was a power not only in the Blue Mountains but throughout the colony. Short of acceptable young women, Mrs Campion stretched a point and invited the two French girls, out of kindness and curiosity sparked by the rumours of their involvement in art — art? — and the reprobate Atlas Pentecost, of whom much had been said since his arrival in the district.
Aline did not want to go, to be scrutinised from behind fans and dissected by the disparaging smiles of the district’s young ladies, who would most certainly think themselves superior.
Horace Ingersoll, to whom wealth was still a new experience, would have none of her nonsense.
‘The Campions are rich,’ he pronounced. ‘And very well connected. It is a great thing to mix in the company you are likely to meet at the Campions.’
It turned out better than she’d feared. There were looks, indeed, from behind the palisades of privilege, but Mrs Campion, a lady given to causes, went out of her way to see them right. And several young men had no objection at all to assisting their hostess in the process.
All this made the two sisters even more the object of scorn from those who felt slighted by having to share the air of Mrs Campion’s drawing room with foreigners. Who, rumour said, were flighty. Or so the young ladies hoped.
One of the young men was Charles Widdecombe, whose squatter father owned vast tracts. Ardent eyes made it plain that he, at least, had no objection to sharing Mrs Campion’s air with the older sister, in particular. Aline enjoyed his attentions, although she told Marie, and herself, that Charles, two years younger, was no more than an amusing boy. Nevertheless, when he invited her to a polo match, she accepted, chaperoned by her sister, and watched as he galloped vigorously to and fro, returning to her glowing with sweat and the willingness to accept praise.
Which, playing a more serious game, Aline gave him in full measure.
Mr Ingersoll was in heaven. Mrs Campion had a great deal to recommend her, but the Widdecombes were in a different category. Marshall Widdecombe owned half the colony, and Charles was his oldest son. A match with such a paragon was beyond Horace’s wildest dreams — which did not prevent him discussing it, incessantly, with his wife.
‘She has seen him twice,’ Martha pointed out. ‘I am sure Mr Widdecombe will be looking for greater things for his son than we can offer.’
It was true that owning half the colony did not stop you from wanting the rest, and there were a number of more eligible candidates. But Horace was determined to remain optimistic.
‘You will agree that the fact Charles invited her to the polo was significant. Extremely significant.’
And he warmed his toes before the vision of discussing business with a man as eminent as Marshall Widdecombe. While Aline, accompanied by Marie, continued to paint under Atlas Pentecost’s attentive eye.
Marie, sick of pots, wanted to graduate to other things. Atlas conceded that her work showed promise. More than promise — her pot portraits were so solid that it was hard to believe they were not real.
‘Plein air,’ he said. ‘Are you familiar with the term?’
This, to a woman whose father had been on the fringes of the Impressionist movement, who had known Monet and Renoir by their first names.
‘It means painting in the open, away from the studio.’
He took her arm, looking down at her with the eyes of a true artist. Or satyr. ‘How would you like to try it?’
It was a bombshell, but wonderful. ‘Am I ready?’
‘One way to find out,’ Atlas said.
The next day, try it she did. Her heart pounded with trepidation as Atlas accompanied her, leaving Aline to work unsupervised in the studio. Sadly, he was correct in everything he did, walking at her side but a little apart, taking care not to brush against her even when the trees grew close. He helped her set up her easel in a clearing, where the light fell in slanting ladders through the branches of the trees. The
greens and golds, the shadows, the blue of sky and air, the sense of infinity within the present filled her throat, choking her so that she could breathe only in gasps.
Atlas’s virile presence compounded her emotions. If only I could paint as he wishes me to paint, she thought. And smiled with secret lust at this man who had brought so much of her to life. Her thoughts were fire-hot, uncomfortable. She tried to concentrate upon the scene before her, the shifting patterns of brightness and shadow.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. And could not wait to begin.
‘Watch the light,’ Atlas said. ‘See how it changes as the sun moves. But remember: interpret it only in accordance with classical concepts. It would be nice,’ he told her, pointing to the furthest part of the clearing, ‘if you were to include a ruined building, perhaps a temple or shrine, there, where the sun is falling now.’
‘With a centaur?’ Marie said, expression ruler-straight.
‘That’s it!’ He was delighted that he had won her, at last, to the truth. ‘I declare there is hope for you, after all!’
And he left her to get on with it.
‘You know how to get back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only after you’ve finished, mind,’ he cautioned. ‘That’s the challenge of painting in the open. The light changes so fast. If you don’t finish at the time, the light will have changed and it’ll be too late. Take all day, if you have to,’ he instructed her. ‘Just make sure you get it right.’
He departed, leaving her with fire already burning in her heart.
As she got out her tubes of paint and studied the effect of the light upon the spear-shaped leaves of the gum trees, she told herself she was hardly a child. Things that had been mysteries to her only a few years ago were now quite plain.
She knew that Aline, for all her enthusiasm for painting, did not have her own sense of wonder at the capacity of art to make all things true. To Aline it was a pastime, whereas to her it was as vital as breathing.
If Charles Widdecombe proposed to her sister, she would accept him, whereas Marie couldn’t see herself marrying anyone. Not that anyone was likely to ask her, looking the way she did. In contrast with fair-haired Aline, Marie was swarthy, hair black as a coal hole. At school, Clarissa Cummings had called her a gypsy. She’d given her a good slap for saying so but, in her heart, had agreed with her. She did look like a gypsy, and people like Charles Widdecombe did not marry gypsies. Not that it worried her. She wouldn’t have accepted Charles if he’d been gift-wrapped; her idea of a desirable man was a good deal nearer home. Someone older, with fire in his voice and belly. Someone to set her, and the world, alight.
Someone like Atlas Pentecost.
He made her juices run, just to think of him. It was the man she wanted, not the artist, but she told herself it might be possible to have the one without the other.
She uncapped tubes of paint — how lucky to be able to do that, for painting in the open air would have been impossible before someone discovered how to put paint in metal tubes — and got to work.
At once all thoughts of Aline, even of Atlas, were gone. There remained only the trees and leaves, the slanting columns ofsunlight that flickered as the breeze stirred the branches overhead. She was one with all of it. As she worked, she knew what it was like to be a tree or branch swaying in the wind; if she’d had time, instead of worrying about pigments and light and the effect of one primary colour beside another, she could have talked to the leaves in their own language. She was one and entire, part of the universe that was itself part of her. She was, and time passed.
As the sun moved, the light changed, as Atlas had warned. Perhaps there might be some way to represent that, too, to capture that truth with all the others that competed for attention within her mind. She thought about it even as she slapped one brushstroke after another on the canvas, working fast, without time to think about technique or the smooth, invisible strokes that all the experts said you should use.
The shadows cast by the trees were calling to her. She stared and stared, trying to sense their texture in the air. In every painting she had seen, the shadows had been depicted in tones of grey, yet these, she saw, were not grey but green. She drenched her palette with various shades of green; on the canvas the shadows flared, as brilliant as the light. That was another thing: her paintings were not subdued but brilliant, a blaze of colour, with a rough texture caused by the individual brushstrokes that she did not have time to blend properly with all the rest.
She put down her brush and looked at what she had done. Catastrophe.
It was useless. No-one would be able to look at it without laughing. Yet she was willing, still, to deny her own judgement. That was how I saw it while I was doing it, she told herself stubbornly. Which didn’t alter the fact that it was useless. It was so hard to capture the light, the colours that dazzled and changed even as you looked at them, to record upon the canvas the aura that lay between the subject and artist … It will take all my life to work it out, she thought. Perhaps I shall never learn it at all.
She looked again at the painting, this daub that did not deserve the name of painting. The only thing to be done with it, she thought, was to burn it. Consign failure to the fire. Obliterate it. Let only the innocent ash remain.
She considered wiping the canvas clean and starting again, but could not bring herself to do it. She could not even begin to imagine what Atlas would say when he looked at it, yet it had been as true as she could make it and for that reason deserved to be preserved. Very well, keep it she would. If Atlas didn’t like it, too bad.
Now the painting was finished, she could afford the luxury of thinking about Atlas again. She did so as she packed up the painting and easel, as she cleaned her brushes and put them carefully away, recapped the tubes of paint, stored everything in the carrying bag that she used. She thought of his laughter, the rich sound of his voice, the way his violet-coloured eyes stared with such penetration from beneath the tangled thickets of his eyebrows. Nothing escaped those eyes. She wondered what it would be like to have them staring at her with such penetration. To look at all of her, every inch. She felt weak at such thoughts, which she knew were terrible. I shall be damned and go to hell, she thought, but the notion meant nothing. Nor did the image go away.
She felt utterly drained. A pair of magpies burbled as she walked, drag-footed, through the sun-warmed dust towards Atlas’s house. It is so hard, she thought again. The explosion of energy, the attention focussed to the exclusion of all else, and then to come back to a painting that I know is useless, feeling as though I’ve been run over by a dray … It would be different if my work were any good. As it is, it is unbearable.
There was nothing she could do about it. Painting was like breath; without it she would die. And perhaps she was wrong; Atlas might like it, although she doubted that very much. How she wished she could paint as he wanted, be everything that he wanted.
She climbed the steps to the house. For the first time she wondered how her sister had been getting on. It was obvious that Atlas considered Aline to have more talent than she.
Perhaps he is right, she thought dolefully, perhaps my painting really is a mess as I, too, am a mess. Perhaps no-one sees colours the way I do.
She felt the weight of not knowing press upon her. She could have wept with weariness, the dread of having confirmed what she already knew, that she had no talent, was wasting her time, Atlas’s time, Horace’s money …
How she longed to be free of the burdensome dreams that she was incapable of sharing with the world! Yet perhaps everyone had these images locked away inside their heads. A vision of infinity, glorious and all-embracing. Most people would never express the image, but only because they lacked the ability to put it into words or music or paint. It did not mean it did not exist. Perhaps that was why there were so many unhappy people in the world: because they could sense the vision but not express it.
She opened the door and went inside. Was at once conscious of a pr
ecariousness about the air, of something within the house demanding stillness.
She paused.
Nothing.
She took another step. Opened the door of the studio. Was greeted by the smell of fresh paints, by Aline’s easel on which was displayed another of her closely-fashioned paintings. This one was of a lustrous shell lying upon a beach of white sand with, beyond, a disciplined sea that would never dare rage or smash upon the shore. In the painting all was still. In the house all was still.
Where are they? Marie wondered. She suspected that she did not want an answer, yet could not bring herself to leave without finding out.
On the far side of the studio, a door led to the storage room. Filled with a sense of doom, Marie opened the door, just a crack. Saw canvases stacked against the walls. To one side, a couch. Upon it …
Softly she closed the door again. She stood, forehead pressed against the wooden frame. An ivory shout of skin. A mounting threnody of moans, cries. Images that her subconscious would forever retain, of betrayal and loss.
4
The shock sickened her. Both Atlas and Aline had been far too engrossed to notice the partly open door, but how could Marie deal naturally with them, after what she had seen? They would be certain to suspect. Yet to walk out, go home without explanation, would be as bad. She had no alternative but to wait it out and take whatever refuge she could find in silence.
‘Is something the matter?’ Aline’s innocent concern might have convinced, had it not been for the wary alertness of her eyes.
‘Should there be?’ Marie could not keep the dagger from her voice.
‘That’s all right, then.’
Aline’s eyes continued to assess her yet, after the first shock was over, Marie found herself stronger than before. It does not matter what she knows, she told herself. Or thinks she knows. She can say nothing. All I have to do is go on pretending.
Some strain was unavoidable yet, even with Atlas, there were compensations. What had happened had done more than commit her to a conspiracy of silence; it had freed her, too. She no longer felt bound by his opinions about her work. In that, ultimately, lay salvation.