by JH Fletcher
‘It was her idea to take me to the pub tonight. More’s the pity.’
‘Pity?’
‘The fight. I started it. There was a man, you see.’
His smile warmed his eyes. ‘Let me guess. Kevin Garford.’
If he knew Garford, he probably knew what had started the fight. The idea embarrassed her; she was not ready to share the intimacy of her feelings with this man.
‘What did you do to him?’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘I threw a glass of beer in his face.’
‘I’d have given quids to see that.’ His laugh was rich and warm.
‘It made him furious.’
‘Serves the bastard right. He’s been asking for it for years.’
His delight was so clearly genuine that at once her sense of embarrassment was gone. Yes, she thought. Garford had been asking for it. She grinned at Neil, sharing the joke. She caught his eye, the smile spilled over into a laugh and all at once they were clutching each other, laughing hysterically in the middle of the street.
‘You should have seen his face,’ she managed.
‘Dripping in beer,’ he added.
A sight to see, indeed. So were they; a man and woman, smartly dressed, hurried past them with averted faces. They heard the man’s outraged voice. ‘Drunk …’
It was enough to set them off again, ribs aching, eyes streaming, laughter echoing from the sober-faced buildings of George Street.
‘I haven’t laughed so much in months,’ Neil said.
‘I’ve never laughed so much,’ Marie said, and realised with surprise that it was true. I have led a sober life, she thought. Too sober.
Perhaps now was the time to do something about it.
They reached her building. She did not invite him up and he did not suggest it. He did not try to kiss her or touch her in any way.
‘Goodnight,’ he said, and walked away.
She watched him go. ‘Neil?’ she called after him.
He turned. ‘Yes?’
‘Thanks.’
She climbed the staircase to her room and went inside. She closed the door behind her. She stood, feeling her life come back to her. It was the same whenever she returned to this room: the quietness of regained solitude, the smell of paint, the slow breathing of the paintings that watched her in the darkness.
This is my place, she thought. None of what had happened that evening was able to damage her peace, now that she was home again. Here, here, was life. Yet, as she walked slowly across the room, breathing the welcoming air, she knew that one thing had in fact changed. It was not in the least damaging, but a change nonetheless.
She held it to her as she undressed and got into bed. Its warmth was company, driving away any vestige of loneliness. Neil Otway’s smile accompanied her as she slid effortlessly into sleep.
‘So where is he?’ Katie asked.
‘Where’s who?’
‘Neil, of course.’
‘How should I know? He walked me back here, then left.’
‘You let him go?’
‘Of course I let him go. I’d never set eyes on him before last night.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Maybe it wouldn’t matter much in your life, but it certainly does in mine.’
‘Time you changed, then. And after I’d gone to the trouble of arranging everything —’
‘What did you arrange?’
‘For you to meet Neil, of course. You don’t think it just happened, do you?’
‘He never said …’
‘Of course he never said! He didn’t know!’
‘You’re not telling me that Garford —’
‘God, no. He wasn’t supposed to be there, at all. That bastard’s enough to ruin any plans. But Neil … My whole idea was to get you together with him.’
‘Why?’
‘To save you from Horace Ingersoll.’
Marie threw exasperated arms in the air. ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re afraid Horace may cut off your allowance if he finds out what you’ve been painting. Right?’
‘Yes. But —’
‘So provide him with other ones. Neil’s taking a trip into the Outback. I thought, play your cards right, he might be willing to take you with him. Come back with some landscapes, show them to Horace, you’re safe.’
Into the Outback? With a man she barely knew? Out of the question. But if the man were Neil Otway … Hmmm.
‘Why should he agree to take me?’
Katie laughed ruefully, shaking her head. ‘I love you. I truly do. Of course I hadn’t thought of you kicking him out.’
‘It never entered my head …’
‘Well, now it has. I’ll see what I can fix up. But try not to mess things up, next time.’
‘What happened after I left?’
‘They quietened down, had a few more drinks, we all went home. Take no notice of what happened; they’re always fighting. It means nothing. If you can bring yourself to come with me again, they’ll be glad to see you: you’ll see.’
‘Kevin Garford included?’
‘The way you handled him, he’ll not try his luck a second time.’
Even so, after Katie had coaxed her back to the Orient that evening, Marie was glad that Kevin Garford was not there. Whereas Neil Otway was.
Katie left early, with Doug, leaving Marie not only with Neil but a couple of sore ribs where her elbow had gouged her, suggestively.
Now was the time. She could let him walk her home, as last night, then leave him and go upstairs alone. Or she could follow Katie’s urging and invite him upstairs with her.
She resented the need to make a decision at all. Did she want this man? Of course she did. Did she want to be free of him, of all ties that might circumscribe her life? Of course she did.
To have both was impossible. Another problem: memory stalked her, remorselessly.
The bush reeling past, blurred by tears, terror. A sense of violation. Jim Keith’s breath upon her neck.
I cannot permit a man, any man. I cannot.
Yet she felt warmth as she watched the man who sat with her now, hearing the peaceful flow of his words to which she did not listen, conscious of the background murmur of other voices, laughter, the smell of beer in the smoke-hazed room.
She thought, If only we could stay. But that was impossible. Eventually there would have to be an end. Leading, one way or another, to a beginning. She wished decisions weren’t necessary but, since they were …
Neil’s taking a trip into the Outback.
The Outback, where Jim Keith …
To be alone, with a man, in the Outback. In the darkness, in the room, in the soft-breathing air, in the bed.
To be alone.
Let us do it. Let us rid ourselves of decision and non-decision. Let us break the bonds.
She swallowed the last of her drink, placed the glass on the table’s varnished top. The rich colours of the varnish, of the smoke-blue air. She smiled at Neil, signalling with her eyes, waiting for him to say:
‘Shall we?’
Into the night air, past lights glowing apologetically behind curtained windows, barely stirring the surface of the darkness through which they walked in silence, hearing but not listening to the noises of the city: voices from another street, a dog’s bark, the rumble of cartwheels. The circle of their silence enclosed and accompanied them: silence not simply of non-speech, but of heart and mind.
Marie walked through the silent darkness. She had not decided what her decision would be when they reached her building. She had not surrendered her will, but was waiting passively for the moment when it would say Yes, or No.
And so to the tall, slant house, its outline stark against the stars. Marie stopped before the entrance and began at once to speak without having planned what she was to say, letting the words flow out of the decisions that her will had made, secret even from herself. As she did so, she looked up at the
grey oval of Neil Otway’s face, watching her in the darkness.
‘Katie says you’re going into the Outback?’
‘Yes.’
‘To paint?’
‘To see what it’s like out there, too. To feel it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the Outback is the heart of this country.’ He gestured at the buildings around them. ‘This is nothing. The Outback is what matters. It’s what makes us different, individual.’
‘People say it can be dangerous.’
He shrugged. ‘The city can be dangerous, too.’
She remembered the larrikins of the Argyle Cut, who could most certainly be dangerous. And who had not stopped her doing what she wished to do.
‘Take me with you.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
I shall not have time.
I cannot afford distractions and that is what you would be, a distraction, irrelevant.
You are a woman; it is not a woman’s place to do such things.
You do not interest me.
Or:
Come, by all means, if that’s what you want. I daresay we shall think of things to do. One word of warning, though. I cannot afford to pay.
That would be the worst thing of all: that Neil Otway might think her the harlot that Kevin Garford had taken her to be.
She would not be bought. Nor would she plead.
‘I want to go out there, to see and to paint. But it is difficult to go alone. We could be quite separate, if you would prefer.’ She smiled at him, her inner certainty welling powerfully within her. ‘I’ve made up my mind to go, even if you say no. But it would be easier, and safer, to go with someone.’
She would not blackmail him by speaking of the weakness of women, in which she did not believe. But was willing to allow him to think along those lines, if it might persuade him.
What have you got to offer me, if I say yes? He watched her, his expression dark, speculative. ‘I’ll think about it. Let you know.’
His voice was cold. She saw he resented being pressed in this way. In his place she would have been too protective of her art to agree, but she suspected that his ardour burned less fiercely than her own. She thought he liked her, too, and hoped that this would overcome his lukewarm commitment to his art. She had already decided that he was not as strong as she was. In which case, for good or ill, she would prevail.
It meant that the other decision, whether to invite him to her room or not, could be deferred.
She was on the point of turning away, cold in her turn, but instinct prevented her. She took his hand in her own. ‘We would both get a lot out of it,’ she said. ‘A very great deal, indeed.’
PART V
INTIMATIONS OF DARKNESS
A great horror and darkness fell upon Christian.
— John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress)
Alan
My grandmother used to talk of her sighting of the eagle, the lunacy of her climb up the face of the stone column where it had built its nest, as one of the defining moments of her life. One of those times that divide what has gone before from what comes afterwards. She never had much to say about the trip she took into the Outback with Neil Otway, yet in truth that was a truly defining moment that separated the student — of life as well as art — from the mature person who came back.
She went into the Outback with Neil, not because of her feelings for him, but because her instinct told her that the journey was necessary for her artistic development. It was to be a journey of discovery — of her land, her talent, herself — and it awoke in her the clarity of vision that ever afterwards guided her through life. Neil, on the other hand, agreed to take her because he had already fallen in love with her.
What I know about her journey I got from her, years later. Even then she was reluctant to talk about it. It was one of the inhibitions that governed her life, an uneasiness at expressing her feelings except through the medium of paint. She never had any dealings with the great German composer Johannes Brahms — he died in 1897, the same year that she went with Neil into the Outback — but would have agreed with him when he said that those interested in his emotions should seek them in the tones of his music. Yet there is no doubt that she was very fond of Neil. She was a woman of strong appetites, too, even if it took her longer than most to discover the fact.
They went south to the Murray and worked their way downstream, camping on the river bank and spending their days trying to capture the colours and textures of the bush that surrounded them. It was not the Outback that Marie had envisaged — she had been thinking of the Centre, red and burning, fire-hot — but a close-shuttered landscape of olive-green and brown tones, with the distant outline of ranges set against a sky of fragile blue that they could see only through the close-growing leaves of trees. It was a land of mystery and suggestion, where wallabies and kangaroos, alert and graceful, watched from the shadows, and the harsh cries of emerald parrots scissored the silence.
‘I felt something,’ Marie told me. ‘It was an experience both intense and profound, hinting at the millions of years that had passed over the land, the tens of thousands of years in which people and animals had lived here. I felt that those first people, the animals and the land, had become absorbed into each other so that past and present had become an ongoing and continuous is of which, like the silently-flowing river, I was no more than an observer.’
It was this sense of continuity that she attempted to capture, the ancient landscape of gum and marsupial and water, carrying its memories of the beginnings of the earth. In these early paintings one can see traces of the mysticism that later came to be so important to her.
One painting in particular stands out. They had got hold of a boat, which had enabled them to travel downriver more swiftly than would have been possible otherwise. One day, they came to a series of rapids, where they had to take to the land. At the top of the portage a huge boulder jutted out from the bank. Below them, the teeth of the cataract gnashed the river into foam. Beyond the fall, the water grew tranquil once more, running between high cliffs that glowed in the sun in a kaleidoscope of orange and gold and blue light.
They camped there overnight. ‘In the morning,’ Marie told me, ‘we went down to the river, stripped off our clothes and plunged in. The current was very strong but there was a lip of rock extending into the stream, so there was no danger of being swept away.’
‘Took off all your clothes?’ I teased her. ‘How disgraceful!’
‘I don’t remember even looking at him,’ she said. ‘It was the moment that mattered, for both of us. The feeling that we were where we had never been before, where very few people had been, where everything was so old, yet new because of it. By getting into the water, we were taking part in a spiritual experience.’
‘An anointing,’ I said.
It was in that spirit that, later that day, Marie painted what became the greatest and most famous of her early landscapes — although at that stage no-one was interested in it at all.
It is in a private collection in America and I have never seen it, but a photograph of it is before me as I write. It is a picture of the river on its way through the rapids; beyond, the placid reaches extend into the open mouth of the gorge, where the bejewelled cliffs are bathed in sunlight.
The scene it depicts is still and beautiful. Profound, too; everyone agrees that there is something in the painting apart from its beauty, although no-one seems able to agree what that something is. In the way of critics, many have used gaudy words to hide their own lack of thought. Others prattle about mystery and mysticism, as though such grab-bag words can convey the sense of what it was that the artist saw at the time she painted it. Undoubtedly, something is there. I believe that Marie did what she always did; she set out to paint, as simply as possible, what she saw in front of her nose but that, because of the almost magical insight that was so fundamental a part of her nature, she was alive, too, to the nuances that the landscape contai
ned for her: the silence, the unimaginable history of this first of lands, the sense of continuity that meant she was seeing, not only the present, but the past as well. An affirmation of herself, too, because no-one who had not become a part of the spiritual heritage of the land could have hoped to portray it in the way she did.
‘I like to get beneath the skin of things,’ she told me once, and in this painting of the Murray she certainly did.
It was the highlight of their trip. Out of time, almost out of food, they returned to Sydney, and to the trouble that was waiting there for them both.
Marie
1
Sydney had changed, or perhaps it was herself. After the limpid succession of days by and on the river — the solitude, the peaceful sounds and scent of flowing water — the hurly-burly of the city hit Marie like a hammer. The clatter of carts and drays, the hooting of factory whistles, of tugs in the harbour, the presence and sounds of so many people — all talking, running, shoving, being — oppressed her horribly. Even breathing was difficult, the smoke-stained air snatched from her by the pressure of city life. She got used to it again soon enough, yet her memories remained: a river of silence flowing dreamlike through her mind and heart, as the river of water had flowed in reality through her Outback days.
Only now, back in the city, had she acquired the perspective to see clearly all that she had experienced while she had been away. Trees, with ladders of sunlight falling through the canopy; the crunch of fallen bark beneath her feet; the river, wide and silent, reflecting the sky in shades of brown and green, with white and silver glints in the rapids. The vast sky hinting at even greater vastnesses downriver, at the emptiness of the continent that lay beyond the horizon and beckoned so enticingly.
Days of heat, the frustrations and joys of painting, of seeking to capture the scent and spirit of the land through which she travelled. Frustration when she failed; joy when it seemed to her that she had succeeded. Joy in other things, too.
The firelit nights.