Sun in Splendour

by JH Fletcher

  She had spent years immersed in the stagnant existence which was all that remained to her. Now, having endured it far longer than most people of her temperament could, she’d had enough. Her fastidious but pragmatic nature would not let her seek a lover of her own age, but she was right to be cautious of an affair with someone much younger than she was. In very rare cases there can be genuine affection on both sides but, without it, nothing is more contemptible than a person of either sex entangled in a relationship with someone a generation younger. No, Eugénie had left it too late for love, so turned instead to ambition. She was not thinking of a career for herself; like most women in those days, she lived through the lives of others: a father, a son or, in this case, a daughter. Eugénie intended to sublimate her ambition through Marie’s career. Marie would come to live in the big house and, together, they would achieve great things.

  Or so Marie suspected. She didn’t want a bar of it. The advance Stanford Harris was paying her was niggardly but at least it kept her alive. It was riches beyond measure for someone who until then had been compelled to rely on the charity of others. Eugénie’s plan would mean moving from the city and her friends, which she did not want to do. It would also mean giving up her freedom, the precious ability to live how she liked. She could see the benefits for Eugénie but, from her own perspective, it made no sense at all.

  She explained as tactfully as she could. Eugénie, displeased as only a woman of ambition can be, tried to argue, but Marie would not be persuaded. Her excuse was the exhibition, how she had to stay where she was at least until that was over, but Eugénie was not deceived and never raised the subject again.

  Perhaps she never forgave her daughter, either. Certainly, she did not come to the showing, although Marie took care to send her a special invitation. She was one of the few who might have been expected to turn up, but did not. As for the rest of the art world, Harris Stanford’s reputation ensured that, when the show took place, the main hall of the Technical College was thronged.

  As to opinions about the quality of Marie’s work … That was another matter, but that was something she could do nothing about.

  2

  During the week before the show Marie almost lived in the Exhibition Hall, getting the place ready, sorting paintings and supervising how they were hung on the large, blank walls. The official opening was scheduled for Saturday afternoon, when the light through the hall windows would be at its best. Stanford Harris would be Master of Ceremonies. Marie had been anxious about that; Harris was as dry as the Simpson Desert, an agent on top of it, but he moved in the same circles and spoke the same language as the patrons who, hopefully, would be buying the paintings. Above all, he was not political; if Lucien Henry had opened it, as Marie had wanted, a lot of people would have stayed away because of the opinions that he made no attempt to hide.

  So Stanford Harris it was to be. Marie kept her reservations to herself, concentrating instead on not throwing up as her nerves devastated her, leaving her sweaty and cold and close to tears.

  She went home to change and was back early, unable to stay away, yet wishing that she could somehow merge into the walls and disappear.

  ‘There’s no need for me to be here at all,’ she told Neil. ‘It’s the paintings they’re coming to see.’

  If they came. Neil had been a fortress through all the panics and crises that had never quite spilled over into catastrophe. He had fetched and carried, clung to the top of teetering ladders to hang paintings, lugged boxes, slapped paint around to make the scarred and discoloured walls more presentable. His presence had steadied her nerves at times when all she had wanted was to howl in a corner or take a knife to every painting in the hall. He was there now, elegantly dressed, looking like the millions he did not have but might, one day, inherit. If he did not fall out with his father in the meantime.

  The opening was scheduled for three. Stanford Harris arrived at half-past two, pushed his plump belly around the hall and peremptorily demanded that two of the most inaccessible paintings be hung in plainer view.

  Marie and Neil looked at each other: smart dress, smart suit, a thousand miles from teetering ladders.

  ‘Where?’

  Harris pointed. ‘There.’

  ‘I think they look fine where they are,’ Marie said.

  Harris was uninterested in her opinion. ‘We want the people who are coming to buy your work, do we not? How can they do that, if they can’t see it properly?’

  ‘Who’s going to move them at this stage of the piece?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ And strolled on.

  Again Marie and Neil looked at each other. Neil sighed and unbuttoned his jacket.

  The first people — a group of four, expensively dressed, the two women with voices like galahs — arrived at ten to three, just as Neil was putting the ladder away. He might have been a hole in the wall. They walked past him, unseeing, as he struggled with the awkward ladder, a smudge of dirt on his face, another on what had been an immaculate shirt. They strolled the length of the hall, staring first at the paintings, then at each other, while Marie watched from a corner and hoped for death.

  One of the women pointed, and laughed.

  From that moment it was all downhill.

  By the time Harris stood up to make his speech, the room was full. People promenaded slowly around the floor. They stopped before this painting or that, they stared, they walked on. Their demeanour gave nothing away — no-one else laughed out loud — but the underlying tone of their voices made Marie wish she could jump in the harbour.

  They hated them. Worse, they thought that the paintings over which she had slaved for months, into which she had poured all her talent and insight and soul, were funny.

  Funny.

  A man came looking for her: ferret face, sly and confiding manner to set her teeth on edge, all wrapped in a jacket of purple and brown check.

  ‘Mrs Desmoulins?’

  Marie felt defensive at once. ‘Miss.’

  ‘Beg your pardon. Alan Bains. Morning Review. I’m here to check out the show.’ A sharp grin and cocksure voice, very confident of his power.

  Courtesy was necessary, if difficult. ‘I hope you’re enjoying it.’

  ‘This your work, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What they supposed to be telling us, these pictures of yours? I mean to say —’ the sharp grin now knife-edged ‘— we all know women are different, but I never thought they were that different.’ And looked her up and down, insolently. ‘Know what I mean?’

  ‘Being a woman’s got nothing to do with it —’

  ‘Shouldn’t you rather be at home, looking after the hubby and kids? Instead of producing this … stuff?’ The tiniest hesitation, deliberately inserted before the last word, was a signal that he could have said worse, but for politeness. Of which he nevertheless seemed to have very little.

  ‘I have no hubby. Or kids.’

  ‘You lot don’t go in for that much, do you?’

  ‘You lot?’ There were limits, already overstretched. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Come on, darling, we all know arty blokes like fellers. I thought it might be the same with the girls, too.’

  ‘You thought wrong. In any case, it is none of your business. You are here, I think, to review the paintings.’

  ‘If that’s what you call them. Daubs, more like.’ A derisive finger pointed at one of the plein air works. ‘Paint caked on, so you can see every stroke. Colours side by side, not even blended properly. Looks to me like you don’t know the first thing about art.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Damn right. I’ll bet a quid it’s the opinion of just about everyone in this room.’ He turned and looked about him, an expression of savage triumph on his face. ‘Listen to them. They think it’s some kind of joke.’

  And indeed the undercurrent of voices sounded perilously close to laughter.

  ‘What’s your angle, anyway?’ he wond
ered. ‘You got to be making something out of all this, I suppose?’

  ‘Why are you here, if you don’t like this type of art?’

  ‘It’s a job. Anyway, someone should be telling the world about jokers like you. Smells like a con job to me.’

  She could have burst into tears; she could have hit him or dismembered him. Instead she turned her back and walked away, shaking.

  I shall not forget. And one day …

  A child, promising retribution. Futile.

  That night, after sweating out the remainder of the horrifying hours while fashionable people peered and chuckled and walked on, while she felt herself — and, worse, her work — increasingly defiled by the contempt that she returned in full measure, after checking the fact that not one painting — not one — had been sold, after she had declined Katie’s well-meaning offer of a piss-up — ‘to get the taste of the afternoon out of your mouth’, after dragging herself home like a gut-shot beast, she took it out on the world in the form and body of Neil Otway. He, despairing of consoling her by other means, took her to bed, where she lacerated him with nails of fire, not from passion and least of all from love, but from hatred. Hatred of him, for his patience with her; hatred of herself, for her inability to be like other people; hatred of the world, for rejecting her.

  She wanted Neil to go on loving her, and did not want it; wanted him to go on caring, and felt suffocated by the thought that he might. At length, lying on her back in the darkness and staring at the invisible ceiling, she thought of what had happened and not happened, the echoes of derision sawing at her nerves, the snide voice of the unspeakable reporter chuckling insidiously in her ears.

  Smells like a con job to me.

  The ignorance and contempt …

  Because I am a woman, she told herself. Only that.

  She had to believe it because that, at least, she could fight. Or even ignore; she was strong enough to overcome such insinuations. But suppose it had not been that? Suppose he had told her the truth, that her work really was no better than rubbish? Then, she told herself, she was doomed. Doomed and damned, doomed and damned, doomed …

  Stanford Harris has faith. Lucien Henry has faith. But their opinions did not matter. Did she have faith? In herself? In her vision? Her ability? Because, if she had, she could dismiss what had happened that afternoon, put it down to ignorance, the inability of those so-called connoisseurs to relate to something new.

  Was it that? Did she have ability, despite what Alan Bains had said? Was she really the woman of talent and vision that she had always hoped? Or as the world and that reporter had seen her, a figure without ability, deserving only laughter and contempt?

  She twisted and turned under the bed covers, frantic to escape her memories of his derisive laughter, whose echoes continued to scarify her heart. If I have been deluding myself all this time …

  She could not bear it, yet knew she must, that stoic acceptance of pain was part of the deal she had made with life.

  I must have faith.

  She had taken it for granted that she would not be able to sleep after such an ordeal yet did so, falling into an exhausted oblivion, from which she awoke while it was still dark.

  Neil was sleeping at her side. She hated him for his ability to sleep despite everything that had happened. In the darkness the questions loomed as large as ever. Do I have talent? Or not?

  One thing, at least, had changed. During her sleep — she had no idea whether it had been for hours or only for minutes — her subconscious had come to one conclusion. With talent or without it, she would go on. She had no choice; there was nothing else she could do.

  The decision to abandon herself to the inevitable gave her strength, even a measure of tranquillity. Again she fell asleep. The next time she woke, the sun was shining.

  Marie received a letter from Martha who, like Eugénie, had not been at the Exhibition.

  I had hoped to come to your first one-man show — the first, I am sure, of many — but Mr Ingersoll felt it would be wrong for me to attend, since neither of us believes that the course you have decided upon is the right one for you. Nevertheless, I hope with all my heart that things went well. I would ask you one favour: please put on one side for me a painting of your choice, for which I shall pay when I see you next. It will serve to remind me of a day that I could not attend but that I am sure will remain always in your memory, as it will in mine.

  To Marie it sounded as though it were Martha who had been banished, rather than herself. She held the letter in her grateful hands, reading it again and again, luxuriating in its warmth. I shall go back to the hall, she told herself with determination. I shall face the rows of disgraced paintings. I shall select one that I believe is suitable. I shall place a red sticker, ceremoniously, in one corner. I shall have made a sale.

  Another sale, she corrected herself. The two paintings that she had shown at the Spring Show, two years before, had also sold. She had never found out who had bought them. At the time she had supposed it was her mother, but had seen no sign of them on her visits to Eugénie’s house. Nor was her mother a sentimental woman, likely to do such a thing. Perhaps I have a secret admirer, she told herself. An astute investor who knows value when he sees it.

  And was heartened, absurdly, by the thought.

  We clutch at such straws, when drowning …

  She felt a completely different reaction when she read the story printed in the Morning Review.

  Miss Desmoulins is a young woman with a mission in life: to render the unspeakable in paint. Unhappily, it is something she does only too well. However, she appears to have overlooked one potential benefit of what in kindness we shall call her art: its capacity to amuse. Certainly, the handful of people who attended Miss Desmoulins’ first one-man, or should we say one-woman, show at the East Sydney Technical College derived a great deal of pleasure from Miss Desmoulins’s unconscious humour in parading such a succession of uninspired daubs under the name of art.

  Miss Desmoulins is well known in political circles as a relative and dependant of Horace Ingersoll, the tycoon who we hear has political ambitions of his own. If that is so, Mr Ingersoll was wise to stay away from an exhibition that would have humiliated him almost as much as it did the so-called artist. When asked about her primary responsibility to home and family, Miss Desmoulins confessed to having neither. If a husband is to be expected to endure such excrescences upon the walls of his living room, Miss Desmoulins’s single state is not surprising: although we understand that our fair artist has a close friend — a very close friend — in the person of Mr Neil Otway, a scion of the Otway family of the Hunter Valley. During the course of yesterday’s fiasco, Mr Otway never strayed far from Miss Desmoulins’s side, but not even his sturdy presence could convert failure into success. Only talent could have done that and talent, alas, was lacking.

  ‘I shall kill the bastard,’ Neil said.

  But would not, of course. All the same, he had good reason to be worried; within two or three days, at most, his father would have heard about it, with all that would mean to his finances.

  ‘He’ll cut me off,’ he told Marie. ‘He’s never been able to bear any kind of publicity.’

  ‘That reporter wasn’t talking about him.’

  ‘The family name was mentioned. He’ll say it’s made him a laughing stock.’ Neil tried a tepid smile. ‘I can see you having to keep me, before we’re much older.’

  Yet Harris, astonishingly, was delighted. ‘He couldn’t have done better for us if we’d paid him.’

  ‘How d’you work that out?’

  ‘Controversy. The public loves it. Bad publicity is a hundred times better than none at all, and this will put your name in front of people. I shall increase the entrance fee, immediately. Instead of a shilling, we’ll charge them half a crown. Plus sixpence for a programme.’

  ‘Won’t it put them off?’

  But Harris was confident. ‘You’ll see: they’ll be turning up in their droves, after
this.’

  ‘To laugh,’ said Marie bitterly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter why they come. What’s important is that they’ll be there. They’ll have a chance to judge for themselves.’

  A prospect that, after the nightmares of the first day, Marie feared most of all.

  Sure enough, Neil received a letter from his father. He showed it to Marie, silently. It said what they had expected. It ordered him home at once. If he did not obey … She had no need to read further. Wearily, she handed it back to him.

  ‘What shall we do?’ he asked her.

  She didn’t know. For them both to live on the few shillings that Harris advanced her would be impossible; she had a battle to survive by herself.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Harris. He keeps telling me the show’s a success; maybe I can talk him into giving me a bit more.’

  But Stanford Harris had an agreement, which he expected to be kept. As for Neil …

  ‘Pack him off home. You’ll be better off without him.’

  ‘After he’s done so much to help? I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘A true artist has no room for sentiment,’ Harris said unctuously. ‘Neil’s a distraction. He gets in the way of your art. Get rid of him.’

  She would not consider it. ‘No. I want him with me.’

  ‘Then you will have to pay for your pleasures, like the rest of us.’

  Perhaps they would have to learn to starve, after all.

  Back to the Exhibition she went. She hated it and feared it, yet could not keep away.

  Several paintings had been sold, after all. Heart lightened, she went looking for the lady who kept the records.

  ‘Who are the buyers?’

  At least, with their own show, there would be no nonsense about confidentiality.

  She ran her finger down the list. Three or four names she didn’t recognise. The painting she had selected for Martha. A couple for Harris, who had told her he was buying them as an investment. And one more.