by JH Fletcher
Eugénie smiled brightly. ‘By ignoring it.’
‘But why is he like this? The rest of the world I can understand, but what have we done?’
‘We have survived, and he cannot bear that. And of course he will never forgive me for owning this house.’
‘As well you do.’
‘But it means he is indebted to me, and that he cannot stand, either.’
‘Would he sooner live in the street?’
‘I suspect he might.’ Again the light, dismissive laugh. ‘But I would not. So we stay here — forever, I daresay.’
‘You’ve never thought of leaving him?’
Eugénie looked displeased. ‘Certainly not. We are married, for better or worse, as it says in the marriage service.’
Eugénie cared nothing about religion. When she had talked so openly about taking a lover, it had been fear of hurt, not ethics, that had prevented her. Yet the form of the marriage service still bound her, where the substance did not. Eugénie was condemned by her temperament to face a self-imposed sentence, if not of death, then certainly of life imprisonment.
In their different ways, Marie thought, all people are the same. Everyone is condemned by the gap between what is possible for them and their most ardent desires.
It was a thought without comfort and without hope.
5
The following evening, Katie took Marie to meet Brett and Donna Samochin. Marie had no idea what to expect; she found, to her surprise, that they lived in an elegant cottage overlooking the harbour and the tram tracks in the fashionable suburb of Double Bay.
Katie looked at her slyly as they walked up to the entrance. ‘Someone else who lives in a palace,’ she said.
It was hardly that, perhaps, but well furnished and comfortable.
‘Like my mother, his parents made no money after they came to Australia,’ Katie said. ‘But his wife is rich.’
Brett Samochin was sturdy both in build and manner. He had wide-set cheekbones and blue eyes so pale that in some lights they appeared almost white. He was pleasant enough, but offered no apologies to the world for his existence or beliefs. These, with his violent talk of social ills and revolution, would have iced Horace’s blood, had he heard him. It was odd to hear such talk in so prosperous an environment.
‘You want revolution?’
‘How else can the world be put to rights?’
‘I’m an artist. I don’t understand these things.’
It was a feeble response, and she despised herself for it. I should care, she thought. At the human level she did, but suspected that would never be enough. No, Brett and Katie were right. Political action was needed, although how she could help she did not know.
‘Propaganda,’ Brett said. ‘When people realise how bad things are, they’ll start thinking about how to put them right.’
‘Those who can think,’ Donna said. ‘Those who are willing to think.’
Donna Samochin was American and hard to like. She was attractive in a brittle way, but also sardonic and contemptuous, as though she despised the world.
‘What do you mean by propaganda?’
‘Artists paint pictures, don’t they?’ Donna said. ‘So paint some.’
Which didn’t help, as far as Marie was concerned. ‘But —’
‘Pictures of the poor. Of the slums. Of the rich, too. It’s the contrast that’s important,’ Brett said excitedly. ‘The difference between those with money and the ones without. The injustice. It is your duty to help us.’
It didn’t seem to occur to Brett that he, too, lived like a rich man.
For the rest of the evening, while Brett went on and on about her responsibilities to the poor and Donna’s interjections slid blade-sharp into the pauses in what, increasingly, became a monologue, Marie endured the accusations and exhortations that beat about her head like angry birds.
Marx. Maxim Gorki. Chekov. The destiny of the Russian people. The brotherhood of man, of which Katie had spoken so fervently when they had first met.
She got away at last. Walking down the street, Katie’s slant eyes were sardonic. ‘How did you like them?’
‘You know I didn’t like them. Brett gives you no space to think or even breathe. As for his wife —’
‘She dislikes me,’ Katie said. ‘She is jealous, I think. She is afraid I may steal her husband.’
It was an extraordinary idea, to set out deliberately to steal another woman’s husband. ‘And will you?’
‘He is attractive, don’t you think? He has a lot of strength. I could take him from her,’ she mused thoughtfully, ‘but it would make life too complicated. She does not know that, only that I could do it, if I wanted. That she knows.’
‘You’re very sure of yourself.’
‘It is a skill, like any other. Like being a carpenter, or artist. Sometimes, when she annoys me very much, I talk to Brett in Russian. She hates that. I have a power over men,’ she said complacently.
‘No doubt my husband would agree with you.’
She had always told herself she would say nothing. Now it was out, like a piece of meat chucked down on a slab for them both to look at.
Katie seemed untroubled. ‘I always thought you knew. How did you find out?’
‘The photograph.’
‘You went through my things?’
‘When I first came to Sydney. I’m sorry.’
It seemed a shameful thing to have done, far worse than Katie’s behaviour with Neil who, at the time, had been unmarried.
‘Who took the photograph?’
‘Phyllis.’
It would be. ‘Did Neil know?’
‘How could he not know? We had to remain still for so long.’ She laughed. ‘Not easy, in the circumstances.’
‘And did Neil and Phyllis …?’
Katie tapped Marie’s cheek with a reproving fingertip. ‘You want to know too much.’
They reached Katie’s place and went indoors together. ‘You are angry,’ Katie said.
‘Not with you.’
‘With Phyllis?’ She laughed. ‘That is why she is on the earth. To do that. Only that.’
‘She makes the most of her chances, doesn’t she?’
Katie laid a gentle hand on Marie’s arm. ‘You hate me, I think.’
‘I shall never do that.’
‘I could not bear it if we quarrelled. As for Phyllis … Think nothing of her. She is worth nothing.’ And her fingertips stroked the inside of Marie’s wrist.
The flame came from nowhere, licking from wrist to shoulder, smouldering in her body’s core. No, she thought, no. But there was less force in her rejection than before.
Do not move. Simply … accept.
No. I will not permit —
Simply … accept.
A captured bird, too weary to flutter, uncertain whether it even wished to evade the hands that held it.
She could feel the rising heat in her eyes, the silk-tender touch of Katie’s fingertips tracing a path from wrist to elbow. And back. Over and over. So gently. Over …
She closed her eyes against the ache of desire, the desire to be desired. The need to be …
‘Special,’ she whispered, through lips that could barely move. Lassitude flooded every part of her being.
She lay back as Katie caressed her, her swimming senses focussed upon the heat flowing in mounting waves through her body. Until she felt herself plunging downwards, fingers clenched tight in the mattress that supported her, her liberated spirit soaring in a tumult of sighs into ultimate silence.
When she awoke, she was at peace.
Katie was watching her pensively. Marie reached up to stroke her cheek. My friend, she thought. My lover. My love.
Katie took her hand, turned it and kissed the inside of her wrist, softly, while Marie’s face was wet with grateful tears.
‘I love you,’ Marie said. She had thought it before, but this was the first time she had put it into words. She loved this woman, who in her time had l
oved so many men and women. She understood the dangers, should have felt alarm, but did not. She had told herself that she could not afford to love any individual, that by focussing on one she would lose the totality, but now she knew she had been wrong. To love a person was essential; without that experience, with all its dangers, her belief in love’s importance meant nothing.
Katie had told her so when they had first met. I wonder what kind of artist you will be after you have taken a lover. Perhaps several lovers.
Now she would find out, she thought. She had never imagined that her lover would be a woman. I have a husband and daughter; that is one compartment of my life. I have my mother, to whom I am still linked, despite all. That is a second compartment. Now I have this woman, whom I love in a way different entirely from the others; that is the third. All of them separate, yet each nurturing and enhancing the rest. Because, for the first time, I am truly happy, and happiness, outward-flowing, brings benefit to all who are touched by it.
‘Hold me,’ she said. ‘Just that.’
As she said it, she remembered how Katie had ejected the weeping girl, so cruelly, after the night when she and Neil had slept over in this apartment.
I can’t bear them in the morning …
The memory did not trouble her; they meant too much to each other for that to happen, now. Nor did it. Katie lay down and put her arms around her, holding her close. Later she did other loving, gentle, wonderful things, and Marie, swooning, knew she had indeed reached the true haven for which she had sought so long.
The difference in her work was immediate and obvious. Every canvas blazed with sensual passion; every sketch proclaimed it.
Even Neil noticed it. She came on him one afternoon, studying a painting that she had finished the previous day. Slanting sunlight shone through the windows of the studio. In its light the painting — of the Hawkesbury River at Wiseman’s Ferry — blazed in ardent colour. Yet it was gentle, too, containing all the fulfilment with which Marie herself was filled.
Neil no longer painted, but knew what he was seeing, and frowned.
‘This bloke you mentioned, this Brett Samochin …’
‘What about him?’
‘See much of him, do you?’
‘I’ve seen him twice.’ Because neither he nor Katie had been willing to take no for an answer, Brett still hoped to persuade her into painting what he had called propaganda. ‘With his wife.’ She knew that Neil was wondering whether she had fallen for Brett Samochin. She could have laughed. He had not accused her, but she was prepared to defy even the thought. ‘And Katie. Remember her?’
She suspected that Neil would never forgive himself for his affair with Katie; he was a man obsessed by guilt. His inability to forgive himself exasperated her. It meant that, in similar circumstances, he would not forgive her, either — although he would, she thought, if he truly loved her. Yet a residue of guilt remained. Her husband, her child, the oath she had sworn to forsake all others …
She said, ‘I would like us to go away for a few days. To the sea. Just the three of us?’
They went to a hotel standing in its own grounds near the beach, a short distance north of Sydney. It was grand and stiff, used to catering for the Otways of the world, to whom it deferred, condescendingly.
True to the promises she had made to herself, Marie was loving to Neil and Alice. She walked and sat with them, she talked and played …
While her fingers, and her mind, itched to be getting on with what mattered. At last, despite her good intentions, she could bear it no longer. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said on their fourth morning. ‘I feel like doing some sketching. You don’t mind?’ And smiled at him, prettily. For three days now she had been loving; she knew he would not refuse her.
She took a sketch pad and crayons and walked along the path between harsh grasses that whistled in the salt wind. A mile on, she came to a fence, which she climbed, heading northwards along the cliff. After an hour the path sloped steeply to a group of houses clustered at the mouth of a river that flowed silently out of a line of hills, half a mile or so inland.
Marie talked a fisherman into hiring her a rowing boat. She stowed her bag in the stern and rowed upstream, pulling awkwardly on the oars. Beyond the first bend, the houses and salty coast were gone. She was in a world of reeds, rasping insects and the slow, peaceful slide of water whose dark surface reflected a drift of billowing clouds. In the bottom of the boat was a heavy stone attached to a rope. She fastened the rope to a cleat and threw the stone over the side. The boat drifted backwards until the rope drew taut, then stopped. Oars safely stowed, she took out the pad and crayons and settled down to sketch the river banks, the solitude, the blue swell of the hills.
After a while she looked critically at what she had done. It was as she had thought: with her eye near water level, the perspective was totally different from conventional waterside scenes. Now the river’s presence filled the page. The discovery opened all sorts of possibilities. I should go to the beach, she thought. Dig a trench in the sand. My eye will be so low that the waves breaking on the beach will loom as big as mountains. The idea excited her. She worked with silent fury, crayon flying; one after another, she stowed the sketches in her case.
After an hour she hauled in the anchor and continued upstream until she reached a place where the stream flowed quietly between hills rising high about her. There was no sound; even the insects were still. She drew in to the bank, where there was a patch of level grass, a tree with branches outspread. She made sure the boat was securely moored, clambered ashore and walked a little way into a ravine that opened between steep cliffs. A flicker of movement made her pause. She turned her head, inch by inch. Saw, in the shadow, the head of a wallaby framed by leaves, its body hidden in the undergrowth. For several seconds they regarded each other, unmoving; then the wallaby was gone in a succession of bounds, as fluid as water, and the faint thud, thud of feet.
Marie released her breath. The furred and inquisitive face, the flow of its movement, the silence itself … She sensed she was on the edge of a great mystery. It was an experience similar to her feelings when she had climbed up to the eagle’s nest, yet it was not the same. Then she had been an observer of life; now she was an integral part of it: one with the stillness, the wallaby, the mirror-surfaced water of the creek. The knowledge was both precious and precarious. She returned to the boat and cast off, taking care to make no sound that might disturb the fragile unity of the moment. This I must retain, she told herself. This is the spirit that I must depict in my work.
Reverence filled her. The feeling was a million miles from the emotion she had felt in the Sydney slums, yet both were facets of the life that joined wallaby and stream and slum. The unity of life, she thought; perhaps that is what I am looking for.
She returned to find Neil and Alice on the beach. She had expected him to complain about the time she had been away, but he did not. Dutifully, she spent the rest of the afternoon with them, while she itched to put her new idea into practice.
Wait, she instructed herself self-righteously, sacrificing urgency to husband and child.
Tomorrow would be the day.
Next morning she woke very early. She got out of bed, went to the window and lifted the curtain: just a fraction, so that Neil would not be disturbed. A clear dawn, the breeze from the sea.
Perfect, she thought.
She slipped on her clothes, gathered her things together and went out quietly into a still-sleeping world. From the hall porter she borrowed a light spade. At the beach, she thought how she should have left Neil a note, but it was too late now.
She dug a trench in the sand, twenty yards from the edge of the sea. When it was deep enough to bring her eye down to the level she wanted, she set up her easel, balancing it precariously on the sand. Anyone sees me now, she thought, they’ll think I’ve taken leave of my senses.
Up to her knees in water, she started work. She had been right; seen from the lower vantage point,
the breakers seemed to hurl themselves at the viewer, out of a sky the colour of gentians.
Within the hour, she was finished. On her way back from the beach, weighed down by easel, paints, brushes — all the clumsy tools of her trade — more still by the weight of the feelings that she had failed, once again, to express to her satisfaction, she stopped and bent, looking into the infinitesimal. The tiniest of flowers, barely visible amid the jungle of grasses. Beside it, another flower different from the first. They lay together, half-hidden, gold and lilac amid the green.
Earlier, crossing the sea-licked sand, she had seen amid the sudsy foam innumerable tiny circles of jelly, translucent, colourless, each containing within its centre a rust-coloured nucleus. Tens of thousands of them. Millions. She did not know what they were, knew only that in them, as in the minuscule flowers, lay the secret essence of all things.
She thought, If only my naked eye could see the atom, the building blocks of the universe. The scientists will seek them out in time, perhaps even in my time. They will decipher the facts of things. But the spirit …? I don’t think so. That is the artist’s function and that, too, is the key to the universe. Without knowledge of the spirit, the facts mean nothing. To uncover the spirit … It would be a burden terrible beyond reckoning, but also glorious. Those who worked at the limits of what was known had to accept the terror with the joy. The idea frightened her. She feared she might not be strong enough, that her mind might crack beneath the burden of seeking. Yet she had no choice; nothing could distract her from a search that every day grew more demanding, that might, eventually, require everything she had.
There are others to be considered, she told herself. I cannot do it. Yet knew, even as she said it, that she must.
Neil was displeased at the way she had abandoned him without a word, and the rest of their holiday was a strain. When they got back to the Hunter Valley, Marie knew, by the looks he kept shooting at her, that he was building up his courage to say something. Let him, she thought. I have a life to lead, too.
Two nights later, as they were getting ready for bed, Neil at last came to the boil. He paused in the middle of removing his dress studs — dressing for dinner was standard practice in the Otway house — and stared at Marie belligerently. ‘I want you to give up this business of traipsing off to Sydney all the time.’