by JH Fletcher
‘This is not a portrait. It is an insult: to Sophia Petrovna, to me, to all the Russian people.’
‘It was intended as a tribute. In that painting,’ Marie declared passionately, ‘I am weeping for you. For all the suffering world.’ It was true, even though it had taken her until that moment to realise it.
Katie drew the rags of her pride about her. ‘Russia has tears of her own. When the time comes, she will free herself, by revolution and blood, without help from anyone else.’
‘That is politics. I have no interest in politics.’
Katie flung out her arm, finger pointing at the portrait upon its easel. ‘What is that, if not politics?’
‘It represents humanity. Of which I, too, am a part.’ Marie was unsure whether she dared expose her feelings to this mercurial woman, but impulse overcame caution. ‘An artist is an agent for the sacred. Birth, catastrophe, art, all flow from the spirit-force that creates and destroys us. When I paint, I am an agent of that force.’
Katie wiped her feet, savagely, on Marie’s claim. ‘You do not understand the Russian people.’
‘On the contrary, that’s what upsets you. Because I understand them too well.’
They parted, noses in the air, the atmosphere between them soured by what had been said but, two days later, Katie came to see her. Neither mentioned the incident, or Russia, or anything to do with politics or even art. No apologies were offered, but wounds were tended in silence and, eventually, things went back almost to where they had been before.
Then Marie moved out of Loretta Gladwyn’s boarding house and the world changed.
12
The Gladwyn experiment had been doomed from the first. The landlady never let Marie out of her sight. She dropped in unannounced (checking up on me, Marie said), went through the paintings upon which she was working, expected to be told of Marie’s every movement. Marie felt suffocated.
‘She is only trying to take care of you,’ Martha said, when Marie complained.
‘She is spying on me. I can’t stand it.’
A week later she lost her temper with the nosy bitch. ‘What I do is none of your business.’
See how high and mighty Mrs Gladwyn became, then. ‘Mr Ingersoll has made me responsible —’
‘Mr Ingersoll is in Europe.’ As indeed he was.
‘But will return, and will expect a report. This city is a dangerous place for a young woman.’
‘I’m twenty-five, for heaven’s sake.’
‘So old.’ Mrs Gladwyn’s teeth gleamed in the gloom of her respectable house. ‘I’m sure you know all about such things, then.’
It was too much.
‘I shall move out in the morning.’
Katie found her a room on the top floor of a tall and dilapidated building not far from where she stayed herself. It was an area with few pretensions. Drunks bellowed at night, the dunny at the back of the building was vile, but through her grimy window, Marie could see the harbour, the ships coming and going, the ceaseless bustle of the wharves. She was alive. As for her painting, the owner did not care what she did in her room, as long as the rent was paid.
The walls were thin. The first night, lying wide-eyed in the dark, Marie listened as the couple next door made love, seemingly interminably, their cries and groans as loud as any steam whistle at the docks.
She was amazed when she met them in the corridor the next day; mouse-meek, not even young, they scurried furtively, heading for the stairs.
‘G’day …’
And were gone. Marie felt kindly disposed towards them, as though they had included her in a secret that they shared with no-one else. She wondered what it must be like to abandon oneself to such passion and hoped, very much, that one day she would find out.
Katie, who had found her the room, inspected the view through the window, then plonked herself down upon the tousled bed and laughed.
‘Up here you are like a bird in a tree,’ she said. ‘What you need now is someone to share your nest with you.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Marie might hope for such things, in a general way, but to have it spelt out so bluntly was another matter.
‘Of course.’ Again the uninhibited Russian laughter. ‘Unless you are one of those who prefer women?’
‘Nothing like that.’ Marie was shocked, and felt foolish because of it. Perhaps twenty-five was not so old, after all.
To make it worse, Katie read her embarrassment. ‘There is nothing wrong with that.’
‘Two women?’ The idea was extraordinary, yet undeniably exciting. As sin, she thought, would be exciting, with the right person. It was like wading through a dark pool, bare feet exploring cautiously, never knowing what one might discover next.
‘Have you ever done it? With a woman?’ She could have bitten off her tongue, but the words had demanded to be said. Now she could not look at her friend.
In answer she felt Katie get up and come softly to stand behind her.
‘Of course,’ she said.
Marie felt the fingers touch her, softly, trail across her shoulders and down her back. Her nerve ends stirred under the fingers’ gentle touch. And again, as the fingers worked their way back, following the line of her spine to her neck, where they took hold, thumbs probing the muscles beneath her shoulder-blades.
‘That feels good,’ she said.
Her voice barely grazed the silence in which the only other sound was their breathing. So gentle in the silence, in the room at the top of the tall and crumbling building. Where the world was apart.
The probing fingers, the soft breathing, spoke their own language. Marie felt a weakening flood of warmth but alarm, too, and tried to move away from the gentle prison of Katie’s hands.
Katie spoke sharply. ‘Don’t move. Simply … accept.’
So accept she did, listening to the peaceful language of the fingers, her own body’s response. While the warmth rose again within her core. The fingers explored further, moulding her shoulders, her upper arms, Katie turning her so that they faced each other for the first time, their breath intermingling as they looked into each other’s eyes. Katie was taller; as Marie lifted her head to look into her friend’s face, she felt the first touch of the probing fingers on her throat. They moved so gently, so slowly, they explored the deepest parts of herself, kindling flame from the sultry heat. Flame, flaring, burning. Her own arms came to life, lifting to wrap themselves around Katie’s neck. While Katie kissed her, lips on lips, fingertips moving up and down, up and down, tantalising, circling without touching her breasts, their rhythmic movement and the contact of Katie’s lips drawing her soul sighing from her body.
‘Come …’
Still embracing, they were sitting side by side upon the bed. The hands moved more freely now, strayed more boldly. As did her own. They were lying upon the bed, lying so close that each part of her body burned in its contact with each part of this other body that dominated her now. The heat might have been dissipated by the gradual shedding of her garments but was not, growing more intense as her body arched, seeking the touch of the fingers that bruised now, that probed now, that brought her swiftly to cries and clutching limbs and silence.
13
Y‘ou see?’ Katie said. ‘It is not so terrible.’
While Marie, less certain even than before, did not know where to look.
That night, from memory, she painted a swift portrait of the woman who was her friend and had become, for the first and possibly the only time in her life, her lover. She put it away in a drawer, with her other memories.
Marie had hoped that leaving home would bring freedom, but freedom was a disease against which Mrs Gladwyn’s door had been kept stubbornly shut. Now, perhaps, she would find freedom in the tall and crumbling house.
She did, if only the freedom to be tied. Because she had discovered that the life of an artist imposed its own demands. In addition to the discipline of work, there remained the shopping, cooking, cleaning, sleeping that gobbled up
so much of her day. She needed to keep mind and emotions scrubbed and clean, to enable herself to see, and feel, and reproduce by pencil and crayon and brush, watercolour, pastel and oil. She needed to open herself to life. Now she had permitted herself to become involved with Katie, who indeed represented one aspect of life, but who posed a threat to her emotions and the inner peace she needed to enable her to work.
After what had happened, Katie was inclined to presume. She dropped in when she felt like it, seeing no shame in interrupting Marie’s work. ‘Love is more important than work,’ she proclaimed.
She was not right but might become so, if Marie permitted the relationship to continue. How to end it without creating more trouble she was unsure, but knew she had to do something.
That evening she said, ‘You’re going to have to be patient with me.’
‘Why?’
‘I need more time to myself.’
Katie’s response was savage. ‘You want to get rid of me?’
‘It’s not that —’
‘Say so, if you do. Say the word and I’ll be out of here. If that’s what you want.’
‘It’s not a question of wanting —’
‘Then what are you talking about?’
‘— but what has to be done. I’m an artist. I need to work, to think, to feel. I need to focus my emotions —’
‘And I can’t do these things for you?’
‘You do. But —’
‘But not enough. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That I distract you from what’s important in your life?’
‘My art. Yes —’
‘You cow,’ Katie said. ‘You make up to me and then, when you’ve got what you wanted …’
It was worse even than Marie had feared. Katie was important to her, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
‘You are telling me that your puny little talent is more important than I am?’
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ said Marie, beginning to believe that might indeed be necessary, ‘but I have to paint. I am an artist; it’s what I do.’
‘I offered you love,’ Katie said. ‘I introduced you to my friends. I found you this place —’
‘Please don’t.’ Marie’s cry was wrenched from her, anguish tearing like pincers at her heart. ‘You are important to me. You know you are —’
‘But.’
Despair boiled over and a sense of betrayal that Katie would not, seemingly could not, listen to what was reasonable. ‘I need space, emotional space. Space to work.’
‘Space?’ Katie’s eyes were as cold as the winter steppes. Abruptly she snatched a vase off the table, hurled it crashing against the far wall. The chair followed. Frenzy howled in the small room as Marie tried to protect her few possessions and herself from destruction. The table went over, an easel, paints.
‘You want space,’ Katie said. ‘I have given you space.’
She walked out of the door, slamming it violently behind her. The sound echoed briefly and faded, leaving the spilled memories of rage, trauma, and Marie alone, mourning the wreckage of her room, her lost friend.
Yet, it seemed, she was not lost, even now. Once again, after a week’s surly silence, Katie came back full of penitence, bringing with her a gift that she presented as though it were the greatest treasure: a gaudy vase, red and yellow and a particularly vile green. A treasure it certainly was, though, because Marie, achingly alone with a talent in which she had little faith, had missed her friend. Yet, glad though she was to have her back, she would accept her only on terms.
‘No more sex,’ she decreed.
‘You don’t love me.’ Histrionic Katie, once again on the lip of despair.
‘Carry on and I’m afraid I may love you too much.’
‘Is it possible to love too much?’
But Marie had made up her mind; her first loyalty remained, as always, to her art. She would permit no distractions.
‘You are cruel.’ But Katie’s penitence was genuine, and she did not persist.
Marie went back into the slums, which had lost their terrors now. She haunted the wharves, painting the ships unloading, the lines of grimy men emerging from lighters with sacks of coal upon their backs, the night-time flare of lanterns reflecting in the water. She painted people: sailors and shopkeepers and whores. She sat one whole day amid the drays drawn up in Phillip Street, painting the view past Mort’s Wool Warehouse to Circular Quay, the street’s stern buildings in stolid contrast with the rigging of the vessels along the waterfront while, in the background, a tug’s tall funnels puffed smoke into a blue and hazy sky.
At first she had wondered how people would react to her presence, but they didn’t seem to mind. At first they laughed at her, then with her; after a little while, they accepted her.
She attempted other projects: a Chinese man, old and wizened, from the Haymarket; an Irish unionist from the newly-built Sunlight Soap factory at White Bay. Greatly daring, she even threw together a rapid sketch of a push of larrikins on the Argyle Cut, working the painting up when she got home.
Lonely or not, she discovered that she was happy: although even Katie was appalled when she heard about the larrikins. ‘Those aren’t blokes to mess with.’
But they, too, had done Marie no harm, had thought her a bit of a joke, maybe, but nothing worse than that.
‘I took care to keep out of their way,’ she explained seriously. ‘And I am getting better. I can feel it.’
Katie remained unconvinced. ‘You’re mad. What’s Horace going to say when he sees what you’ve been up to?’
That was indeed a problem. Horace was on his way back from Europe at last. He was a man who saw revolution behind every doorpost; the thought that his guineas had been used to finance paintings of the poor and disreputable would infuriate him. As for Katie, who now had taken up with another man …
‘He’ll probably cut off my allowance,’ Marie said.
Katie looked grave: money would never be a laughing matter. ‘When’s he due back?’
‘Three weeks.’
‘You’d better cover your arse.’ Russian or not, Katie was fluent in the coarser phrases of English. ‘What you doing tonight?’
Marie had thought to attempt a black-and-white study of the harbour by moonlight, but that could wait.
‘Nothing.’
‘Come to the Orient with me. I’m meeting Doug there.’
Doug Willis, her latest man.
Marie, unused to pubs and parties, hesitated.
‘It’ll be a bit of fun. A bunch of artists meets there, sometimes. Time you caught up with them, isn’t it?’
Once again Katie was right. Isolation not only made Marie lonely; it was hindering her development. She needed to talk shop to people in the same field as herself, to debate the ways of depicting light, and movement, and the varying textures of life.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come.’
It was boozy and raucous and fun, as Katie had promised. To begin with, at least. Doug worked in a warehouse, humping bales of wool. Had the muscles for the job, which no doubt gave Katie joy. He knew nothing about art or anything else, his greatest claim to fame being how he had once shared a beer with Les Darcy, the Captain of the Push himself. All the same, he was a cheery bloke, good mates with everybody, and they were soon surrounded by other drinkers, with whom Katie laughed and flirted, batting away hands, good-humouredly, when they became too venturous.
Marie, less experienced, had a harder time of it. She discovered that some men, at least, thought they had the right to feel a woman who was bold enough to come to such a place. The artists were the worst. She had visualised discussing techniques with them, the interchange of views that in her isolation she lacked so sorely, but they had no interest in anything like that. What they wanted was her. By being there she was asking for it; her opinions, even about that, were of no concern.
The worst was a man called Kevin Garford. Katie had warned her about him. ‘More interested in scre
wing his models than painting them.’
Now, it seemed, he was hoping to screw Marie. With his worm-like fingers all over her however many times she pushed them away, he gave the impression of wanting to do it there and then, in front of the lot of them.
‘Stop it!’
No use.
‘Will you stop it?’
‘Stop what?’ An innocent look, while slimy fingers investigated Marie’s thighs beneath her dress. The space between her thighs …
Again she pushed the hand away. Again it returned. Until Marie, in fury and despair, snatched a glass of beer from the counter and threw it in his face.
The way people reacted, it might have been a bomb. Everyone was screaming and punching — Katie, too, with her fist in the eye of a bloke who had thought to take advantage of the commotion. Kevin Garford was purple in the face, the beer dripping off his chin, bawling that he would have Marie locked up for assaulting him. Two or three others were trying to quieten him, while the barman threatened to bring down the devil on the heads of all of them, himself included, for being barmy enough to have taken up such a job in the first place.
Marie, shattered, terrified half out of her wits by the shindig that she had provoked, cowered in a corner of the bar and hoped to die. Until a man she had not previously noticed came to her, kindly, his arm raised to protect her from the brawl still continuing about them, and offered to escort her home.
‘Yes,’ she said, not even stopping to think that this man, too, might spell danger. ‘Please.’
Out in the street she had time to ask herself what she was doing, but something about the man’s face gave confidence. They walked away from the raving pub, as decorous as gravestones as they strolled down the empty street.
She asked his name.
‘Neil Otway.’ And smiled. It was a nice smile, with nothing of teeth or lust in it.
‘I am Marie Desmoulins,’ she told him.
‘I know. Katie told me about you.’
‘You know Katie?’
‘She models for me. I’m an artist, too.’