by JH Fletcher
Horace considered. Art was a woman’s province, after all, with embroidery and household matters generally. At heart he would be glad to be rid of the responsibility.
‘Very well, my dear. As you say. But I shall hold you responsible that everything is conducted with suitable decorum.’
‘Of course, my dear. That goes without saying.’
As so many of Horace’s observations would, given the chance.
Martha also had difficulty with the man’s paintings but, unlike her husband, knew what she did not know. In Marie she sensed an intensity that troubled her; it burdened her with a sense of added responsibility. Because Marie, undeniably, was different, with her own vision, and Martha believed that people with vision, who were different in the right way, were precious because of it. Within the difference, so troubling in itself, lay the hope for a future that might otherwise be unbearable.
Marie’s talent, if that was what it was, must be nurtured; yet Martha wished, so much, that it might have been otherwise. Any sense of difference, whatever form it took, was bound to bring sorrow to those who had it. She knew Marie as well as any person could. There was a brilliance like flame, but also a vulnerability that Martha feared might carry within it the seeds of self-destruction.
It could not be helped. The child was the way she was. And she must be helped, as Aline — whose secret had never been a secret to Martha — had been helped.
PART IV
SEEKING
Can we use art, which is to say magic, to fly from the cage of what is into the intoxication of what might be, into the extra dimension? Where we can walk, and be one?
— Cal Jessop (Wings of the Storm)
Alan
Each morning, when I awake, the first thing I notice is the light. Even in mid-winter, when it is still dark, I remain aware of the light waiting below the horizon. I stare at the invisible ceiling, conscious of the air through the open window, of life suspended in darkness, and wait for the first soft glimmer of the dawn.
The house is east-facing, high up in the range. Its windows are positioned so that they receive the first light before almost anyone else on the continent. Marie had it built, after she became famous and could ask what she liked for her work.
All her life she was conscious of commercial values, knew to a penny what a painting would fetch. Some artists have no idea of money, seeming to believe that an artist has no business with such mundane matters. Marie thought them fools and thanked what she called her peasant background for her astuteness in promoting her work and in making sure she got value for it.
‘Nothing for nothing,’ she used to say. ‘You want a Marie Desmoulins on your wall, you pay.’
She saw no shame in it and enjoyed in full measure the comfort, even luxury, that her talent both for painting and for business brought to the second half of her life. Heaven knows there was little enough in the beginning! Those complacent fools who say that artists should starve in order to realise their full potential have never tried it. Starvation, in an artist or anyone else, is ugly, destructive. At the very least, it is a distraction. How can you be creative on an empty stomach? With the anxiety of not knowing how you are going to pay the rent, the grocer, the light bill? Explain to the bank that you are a creative artist, too fine a soul for such considerations as mortgage repayments and overdrafts, and see how far you get.
Marie bought this land, one hundred acres of it, at a time when it cost a lot less than it would today. Not that anyone is going to sell it; she left the life interest to me but, after I’m dead, it goes to the nation.
Around election times the latest politicians slide in, beaming for the cameras, hoping to drum up support from the art lobby. How marvellous, they say, that Marie Desmoulins was so public-spirited. This, from people whose perception of public spirit goes no further than their superannuation payouts.
By saying such things they show how little they understand the woman my grandmother became towards the end of her life. She would have spat on them and their mealy-mouthed lip-service to work they do not understand. They do not even realise that she made the gift, not out of public spirit, but from contempt. Not for Australia or the normal run of Australians; never that, for to be an Australian was a great thing in her life. But for the officials and politicians of all countries she had only contempt. She lived through some of the greatest political upheavals the world has seen and that, perhaps, is why she thought so little of them; she had first-hand experience of the damage such self-seeking vermin do in the world.
When she gave the land to the nation, she did so with open heart, but also with a secret delight that, by so doing, she would make the politicians she despised crawl at her feet. They, too, would pay for the privilege of hanging a Marie Desmoulins on their wall.
Giles Kingdon, who loves to cosy up to the men of power, wants me to write the true biography of Marie Desmoulins. What would he have to say about that?
* * *
With the first blink of the sun above the horizon, I am out of bed. I dress, throw water on my face, go out into the stirrings of the dawn. The garden that Marie created out of the wilderness stretches downhill in a series of terraces. Before she died the garden had become almost as famous as she herself or her paintings, and indeed it is a great work of art from which she derived enormous pleasure and consolation in the troubled days that became such a feature of her later years.
In the dawn’s first brilliance, it is possible to see the architectural shapes that form the framework of the garden, the seemingly haphazard plantings of shrubs and trees and perennials that were, in fact, positioned with painstaking precision.
I pass between the sculpted shapes of plants that, especially in winter, give structure and form. I am surrounded by the deep scent of richness, of life and damp. I am aware of the soil poised to produce once again the colours and celebrations of spring.
In the summer, the scent and colours of the flowers are everywhere. The colours are like her palette: primary notes laid side by side upon the earth as on the canvas, with beyond them the circle of other buildings, white-painted, forming a deliberate break between the garden that she created and the bush that, in a sense, she created, too.
In all her paintings, the bush is dark, often threatening. Sometimes it forms a backdrop, sometimes it is the subject of the painting itself. Many people have told me how they have come to a proper appreciation of the Australian bush only after seeing it in Marie’s work. Those who do not understand that know nothing about her at all, neither as artist nor woman.
People ascribe the darkness in her bush paintings to nature. The Australian bush is like that, they say. So it is but, in Marie’s case, there were other reasons.
It was here, in the bush below what later became her garden, the bush that I see now in all its beauty and menace, that occurred the first of the events that were to have so profound an impact upon Marie’s life and work.
The Game Cock is a hotel, just down the road from here, standing alone a mile or so out of town. Wealthy Sydneysiders drive up there for the weekend. They patronise the spa, the gym, the courts for squash and tennis; they guzzle in the four-star restaurant; they prink and preen in the gold-tapped bathrooms. No harm in any of it, if that is what you enjoy, and Marie, in the heyday of her wealth and reputation, would probably have enjoyed it, too. She always had a weakness for luxury: something you would never suspect from a study of her paintings.
In the 1890s the Game Cock was not like that. It was a basic country pub, without trimmings, standing on a gravel track that scribbled a wavering line through the bush. It had a bar, a couple of rooms for passers-by, a dunny out the back. The forest was all about; the branches of trees shadowed the building. The people who used it were mostly forestry workers or travellers on the road to somewhere. Rough as a goat’s knee, some people called it, and the man who ran it was as rough as the building.
To judge from his portrait, Rupe Scales was a good-looking bloke, with a bright eye and ready smi
le. Good shoulders from lugging kegs of beer; from chucking out drunks, too, when chucking out became necessary. Sort of bloke you’d say would fancy his chances with a girl or in a fight, and you’d be right. Had a mean streak in him, too; I’ve heard he would work a drunk over and smile while he was doing it.
I don’t know how she met him, but Marie talked Rupe Scales into letting her paint his portrait. It was probably the first work that showed her true potential. The man’s nature shouts at you from the canvas: the good and the bad. Marie was still working with Lukas Smart at that time; she told me that it stopped him in his tracks. He looked and looked, and walked around it several times. In the end he told her that he had nothing left to teach her — this man who had started off their relationship by saying that women were incapable of taking art seriously.
Marie
1
The Rupe Scales painting marked a turning point in Marie’s life. Lukas had already told Horace Ingersoll that she had talent. Now he reported that she had the potential and motivation to become an important artist.
This was not at all what Horace wished to hear. To have a painter in the family was one thing; there were hundreds of women in Sydney painting watercolours of the harbour, of flowers, of gum trees sympathetically arranged in a smiling, two-dimensional landscape. It was what women of a certain class did. To be serious about art, however, to have the potential to become a major artist, was a different matter altogether.
‘Unacceptable,’ said Horace testily, as though it were somehow Lukas’s fault.
That was exactly what Lukas had expected him to say; in truth, he felt something of the same himself. But had no suggestions as to what might be done to rid the girl of the talent that she, so inconveniently, possessed.
The first thing, obviously, was to stop the lessons.
‘Going on with them would only add fuel to the fire,’ said Horace when he discussed the situation with Martha. ‘Unless we really want a professional artist in the family.’ And he laughed merrily at such a preposterous notion.
He was right to be concerned; even the idea could damage, perhaps fatally, Marie’s chances of a good marriage. Then he found that, contrary to his expectations, his wife did not agree with him. Or rather, she claimed to do so, but with other ideas as to how the objective might be achieved.
‘Let her carry on with the lessons. She may fret if we stop them now.’
As far as Horace was concerned, Marie could fret as much as she liked. She was a sensible girl; she would soon get over the disappointment. However, in the politics of marriage, it was prudent, always, to be in a position to blame his wife if things went wrong.
‘You believe there’s no danger of her getting carried away by this art nonsense?’
Martha was not sure what she believed. She certainly shared her husband’s concern; no-one knew the dangers better than she did. After the fire that had destroyed her earlier life, Martha had learned what it meant to be single in a society that expected women to be married. The sideways glances, the condescension, were things she did not want Marie to endure. Yet she sensed that there was something in Marie that would never be content with the conventional. More importantly, she was convinced that everyone, even a woman, should be given the chance to realise what potential they had, although how Marie was to do that without ruining herself she did not know. Individuality was dangerous in a society that valued a woman’s acceptance of convention above all else. In any case she knew better than to say such things to Horace, who might be kind, but was no friend to heresy.
‘I’ll have a word with her,’ she promised. Which did not answer Horace’s question, but was sufficient to satisfy him, for the present.
By contrast, the conversation between the two women would have disturbed him greatly.
* * *
Marie stared at Martha as though she had sprouted horns. ‘What do I want to do?’ she repeated. ‘I want to paint.’
‘I mean, with your life generally?’
‘I’ve just told you. To paint.’
As Martha had feared, there was no point of contact. To separate life and art made no sense to Marie, whereas Martha found incomprehensible the idea of a life devoted exclusively to painting. She sensed the outrage that Horace and society would feel at the notion; was exasperated that Marie should be willing, so carelessly, to provoke such hostility.
‘There is more to life than painting,’ she said crossly.
‘Not to mine,’ Marie said, willing to defy the man whose opinions, she knew, lay behind the discussion. ‘What’s his problem, anyway?’
Horace’s problem was that Marie might be too talented for her own good; for Horace’s good, too, perhaps. But Martha’s loyalty to her husband would not permit her to say such a thing.
‘He wants what is best for you.’
Or what he considered was the best which, to Horace, would always be the same.
‘The best thing is to let me carry on with my lessons.’
‘Which he has agreed you can do.’
Martha had expected Marie to be amazed and gratified. So she was, in her own fashion.
‘What’s all the fuss about, then?’
‘There is no fuss.’
But there was: in Martha’s mind, at least. Despite what she had told Horace, she could not see where Marie could hope to go with this art business. Given the way the world was, how could she expect to have the freedom that she would need to become a real artist? Artists, what little Martha knew of them, lived independent, unconventional lives. They wandered the country, painting people and landscapes. Some starved, picturesquely, in garrets. It was impossible for a respectable woman to do such things. She could not even go to an art exhibition alone, or avoid becoming an outcast of society if she did.
Still Martha felt that the best chance of Marie settling down was to indulge her wish for lessons now. She told herself that the girl would soon learn how impossible it was to take things further. She would come to terms with the need to follow a conventional existence, as Aline had done. Heaven knows, Aline had caused anxieties enough, yet look at her now. She was the very picture of domestic contentment, with her husband, her place in society, her child, who had thrived, despite her premature birth.
Horace, she knew, wished most fervently that Marie should enjoy the same fulfilment. Martha did too, perhaps.
Yet it was hard to say what the chances were of its happening. Martha thought uneasily of how far Marie had already strayed from what the rest of the world would call proper behaviour. The idea of her painting the portrait of a man like Rupe Scales, in private, appalled her. At least Horace had not heard about that. But who could say what she might get up to next?
2
Jim Keith was twenty years old and worked at the Game Cock Inn, a hulking man with the build, and brain, of an ox. He did the rough work; it was all he was fit for.
While Marie had been painting his portrait, Rupe had told her about a glade he knew, a mile off in the forest.
‘A bit of a waterfall, a cascade running down, ferns … You’d love it.’
Marie wanted to have another go at doing a forest landscape. ‘You’ll have to show me,’ she said.
‘Finish my picture first,’ said Rupe, vain as any game cock.
They made a time, Marie turned up on schedule, but Rupe was too busy to go.
‘Have to make it another day,’ he said. ‘Or I can get Jim to show you, if you like.’
Marie was anxious to get on with it. ‘That’ll be good. If you can spare him.’
The track into the forest was dark and narrow, with a crackle of dry leaves underfoot. Such light as permeated the canopy served only to make the undergrowth seem darker; even the water of the stream was black, the crystal sound of the distant cascade the only brightness.
Perhaps, she thought, I can make a painting out of it, bring out the menace that I feel. It was not what she had expected yet, when they finally reached the glade, she found that here the forest was a lot light
er. Sunlight flowed like liquid through the leaves, kindling sparks of gold upon the waters of the fall. The fall itself was not high, the trees less overpowering than they had been along the track. There was nothing melodramatic about the scene at all, yet it pleased her. She would be able to evoke all the drama she needed from the use of pigment. Already, looking about her, she felt the familiar sense of excitement that she would be able, by doing this, and this, and this, to record the sense and feeling of what she saw. To make come to life not what the world could see, but what was personal to herself, her own image reflected in the subject and her art.
Jim was looking about him, a soppy, pleased look upon his face.
‘Pretty …’
‘Better than pretty. Just what I was looking for.’
Emergence of colours in sunlight, green and green, browns and golds and golds. Moist colours of mud, exhalation of dampness from moss, rocks shining under lip and spill of water.
‘Pretty,’ Jim said again.
‘Very pretty,’ busy Marie confirmed absently, eyes and brain shaping images. Here. And here. So.
‘You, too,’ said Jim.
‘Right.’ Paying no attention. Sheen of water, snatching colour from the underside of leaves. Columns of light. Her hands took brushes from the case.
A hand, groping.
For the first time she was aware that he was standing much too close to her, a foolish smile nailed to lips that glistened, hopefully. She felt the sudden tension of muscle, of nerve ends, but told herself it was clumsiness, no more than that, an eagerness to help that had tangled him in her path.
‘You’re in the way, Jim …’
The shovel hand reached, seeking to fondle cheek, lips. Marie jerked her head away.