by JH Fletcher
Yet she had sworn a thousand times that art would have priority in her life. She should have been a nun, she thought, without man or child or love. She should have spent her life in adoration of the sublimity of art. Yet, without love, how could art exist? Love of art was totally different from the love that created art.
Now she was on her way to Katie and to freedom. Freedom to come, to go, to breathe. Above all, to work. A life without the worship and fulfilment of work would be a travesty — even, perhaps, a sacrilege. Yet who was she to turn her back upon the man and child to whom she should be bound by nature, by the commitment she had made?
The arguments and counter-arguments pressed cruelly upon her. For long minutes she buried her face in her hands. When she opened her eyes, she saw the sunlight slanting through the side windows, flooding the white-clothed altar in light. From the shadowed roof came a clatter and whirr of wings as a sparrow flew among the rafters: another creature seeking refuge from the predatory birds. Yet the sparrow would have to leave, eventually, to find food. She, too, would have to leave. The falcons that quartered the skies, so ominously, would be waiting.
Marie stared at the altar, willing herself to feel the presence of whatever might have power and willingness to forgive. To provide solace.
If you exist, let me feel your presence.
Yet she knew that there could be no such manifestation; proof precluded the need for faith, and faith, so the nuns had taught her at school, was the rock upon which the world stood.
There was only one solution. She had to take up once more what she should never have laid down. She had to give up what she had forfeited the right to have. She had sworn a marriage oath that had itself been anticipated by the repeated and pig-like rutting which, at the time, she had called fulfilment. She had lied to herself, to Neil, to the unborn Alice, to the world. Neither she nor art nor Katie, nor her love for Katie, had any claim. She had sworn. She had permitted Alice to come into being, and so was bound. She had chosen a life of duty. Let her, then, discharge it.
She stood and went out into the sunlit clamour of the street. Without looking where she was going, she crossed the road. One hansom swerved to avoid her, then another. Marie was not even aware of them, careless of the hooves of horses, of the cabbies yelling abusively after her. She did not lift her head to challenge the eyes of the patrolling birds, whose presence she felt even as she ignored them. She was tempted to shout up at them — I am doing what you want. Leave me alone — but did not. She remained decorous; no passer-by turned to stare open-mouthed at the woman screaming defiance at the invisible birds. In whose unseen presence, unlike the unseen God of the sun-drenched altar, she had faith. She had yielded to their judgement; let them be content. She returned to the station.
There was a train, stopping all along the line. She walked the length of the corridor, seeking an empty compartment, but there was none to be had. She sat in a tight corner, eyes turned inwards, avoiding those of the other passengers. She felt them pressing upon her, sliding pincer-like into the recesses of her brain. Her brain, her breath, every particle of her being: it was not only the church that could compose incantations. The locomotive wailed, the smoke blew back. There were stations, one after the other, the train chugging doggedly from one of them to the next. The journey was interminable. People came and went. She would not look at them, would look at nothing and no-one, but felt their eyes, the eyes of the birds perched malevolently upon their shoulders, upon the luggage rack overhead, whose wings beat the frenzied air before her.
She stood, seeking desperately for refuge. On panicked legs she ran into the corridor and along its swaying length. She cowered at the end of the carriage, hiding her head from the beaks, the eyes.
The train slowed at yet another station. Passengers were moving towards the doors. One paused behind Marie’s cringing back.
‘Are you all right?’
The voice was kind, but Marie was not deceived. She averted her eyes from what she might see, if she dared to look into the woman’s face. When their eyes met, she knew that the note of concern would turn at once to condemnation of the woman who had yielded up husband, child, love, art, life, who now had nothing but guilt and the accusing eyes of birds.
The train stopped. Doors banged; steam hissed; porters shouted.
‘Can I help you?’
She felt the woman’s hand upon her shoulder. She turned from her, breaking free from the hand that pretended to console, but was intent only on detaining her. They will lock me away in darkness for having betrayed everyone, even myself. Her hand found the door handle. She shoved the door open and half-jumped, half-fell onto the platform. She fled from the woman, from the screaming birds, from herself.
Outside the station a lane ran between woods, a paling fence on either side. She climbed the fence and took refuge among the trees, cowering to avoid the pursuit that would surely come. The hue and cry. The eyes and accusing hands. They will lock me away in darkness.
No-one came.
They are waiting for me to show myself. I, too, can wait. If I cannot escape by flight, I shall do so by guile. I, too, can wait.
Later, it was dark. She insinuated her body between the closely-clutching branches. She reached the road. She began to walk.
10
By the time she arrived at Katie’s flat, dawn was breaking. Her feet were bleeding; she was exhausted. She had no luggage, no clothes, nothing but the dress she wore, ripped and stained by the journey. She had no idea who or where she was, how she had got there. She did not recognise Katie, was raving about birds and watching eyes and guilt, even as she fell through the open door at Katie’s feet.
Marie remained delirious for a week; it was months before Katie told her what had happened. Katie had been out of her own mind with worry, not knowing what to do, what not to do. She had to work, but every day, posing for one artist or another, her mind was on the invalid she had left in the apartment, fearing what she might find when she got home.
Marie might be there, or not. She might be silent, or raving. She might be dead. Leaving her was so hard, yet she had no choice; she could not take Marie with her. They had no money for doctors; besides, Katie was afraid what a doctor might do. She had visions of her friend being dragged, screaming, to an asylum where rats gnawed the inmates’ faces to the bone. Or so it was said.
Even when she got home in the evenings, it was not easy.
‘Why have you imprisoned me here? Why? Why have you imprisoned me?’
The same question, again and again. Or terror, gushing from the darkness where Marie lingered. Raving of birds, of beaks that tore, of faces laughing endlessly.
One evening, a week after Marie’s arrival, Katie came home to find her sketching the view from the window. She was wearing one of Katie’s dresses.
‘Don’t tell me, I look a sight. But I couldn’t find my things.’ And laughed, cheerfully.
She had come out of the darkness. Of that terrible journey she retained only blinks: a train, smoke billowing past the window; a church; a plantation of trees, with night sifting gently down. Nothing meant anything; all Katie knew was what she had seen: the exhausted, incoherent creature falling through the doorway, a dementia that had lasted a week and that now, perhaps, was gone forever.
Something had happened to distress her, she told herself. She had a breakdown. Now she is well again. Now everything will be as it was before. She did not believe it, but hope was all she had.
Only once did she try to find out what might be relevant.
‘I had an aunt, once. She was a regular lunatic. My mother was afraid I’d catch it from her. Said it was contagious. But I never did.’ She glanced casually at Marie. ‘Any crazies in your family?’
It was then that Marie had the first inkling of what had happened to blot a section of her life so inexplicably from her memory, how it was possible one minute to be at home in the Hunter Valley with her husband and daughter, the next to be sketching the view from Katie’s window.
She could have asked, but did not. She did not want to know. Instead, she told herself it was unimportant: an episode inexplicable and now passed. She had been ill before, but had always got over it. She was determined that she would be well again.
Yet in reality she knew the truth, depite all: that her psyche was not strong enough to withstand the pressures she put upon it; the creative impulse that was the most powerful thing in her life, far more powerful than she was, had forced her to do things that were not natural to her. She was not proud of it, but had no choice.
Marie Desmoulins was one of the most creative artists of the twentieth century, perhaps of any time, but there was a price to pay for that kind of talent, and Marie paid it, in full measure.
PART IX
THE GARDENER IN WHITE
For one night or the other night
Will come the Gardener in White,
and gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin!
— James Elroy Flecker (Hassan)
Alan
I read of a man arrested by the secret police of the country in which he lived. He was held for a month, interrogated daily, finally released. He had never been involved in politics, never knew why he had been held. Outside the police headquarters, he looked up at the sky and thanked God that it was over, that he was free.
He was wrong. It was not over, and he was not free.
That man, over there. He is watching me. Perhaps this night they will come.
The fact that he had been ignored for six months meant nothing. They could take him any time. He read verse, while he waited.
For one night or the other night
Will come the Gardener in White,
and gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin.
They never came. The man he had seen had probably not been aware of him at all. But, while doubt remained, he was not free.
So with Marie. The demons were loose in her head. For months, for years, they left her alone, but she could never take it for granted that they had abandoned her forever. Each morning she awoke to the knowledge that this might be the day when they returned.
In the meantime, fuelled by madness or ambition, her restlessness drove her steadily onwards.
She did all right, in many ways. Honours, wealth, reputation came her way. Long before the term was invented, she was an icon of the Australian people, as famous as a sports star. If she’d lived so long, they’d have trotted her out to push a lawnmower in the Sydney Olympic Games. And she’d have gone; she’d have marched up and down, waved to the crowds, they’d have loved every minute of it. And so would she — on the surface. Underneath would have been a different story, perhaps, but no-one would have known. She herself would not have been certain; she never permitted herself to look too deeply into the darkness that came from time to time to flood her mind.
Typically, she joked about it. ‘Look? No way. I’d be too scared what I might find.’
With her breakdown behind her, at least for the present, there remained other problems: what to do about the husband and daughter she had abandoned, her relationship with Katie and with Brett and Donna Samochin, whom she had disliked when they had first met, but who now became more and more important in her life.
Marie
1
‘You watch,’ she told Katie. ‘Neil won’t let me go. He’ll pitch up any day now.’
She was wrong. Neil never came but, a month after she arrived in Sydney, Marie had a visit from someone else.
For the first time, Eugénie was looking her age, or more than her age. Marie calculated that she must be in her late fifties, yet she looked ten years older than that. Henry and the way things had gone in her life would have put years on Methuselah, but she had not come to talk about that.
‘Your husband has paid me a visit. He wants to know where you are.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘I said I didn’t know.’
‘Did he believe you?’
‘Who cares what he believes? The point is, what do you intend to do about it?’
‘Get on with my life.’
‘Here?’ Did not add with this woman; there was no need.
‘Yes.’
‘You have a child. What about her?’
Marie shrugged.
‘How could you bring yourself to do such a thing?’
‘It was hard, very hard. You said the same thing yourself. Remember?’
The words came as violent as a blow; Eugénie blanched. ‘You blame me for this folly?’
Marie had had enough. Her eyes pinned her mother to her chair. ‘I told you from the beginning. I told Neil. I am an artist. Not a wife. Not a mother. An artist. The rest is … irrelevant.’
‘And this woman you live with, is she also irrelevant?’
‘She has never forced me to choose!’
Eugénie dismissed such talk. ‘All life is choice. You have a responsibility —’
‘To art and myself. Nothing else.’
‘You have sacrificed your woman’s duty to be an artist. Is that what you are telling me?’
‘My art is myself. Don’t you understand? It is in every part of my being. Without it I do not exist. My duty, both as woman and artist, is to be myself.’
There was nothing left to say. Eugénie left, still-slender hips indignant beneath her prim dress. From the window Marie watched her. Why will no-one listen? she besought the sky. Why will no-one understand?
2
Katie had described to her the coming of the Russian spring: the melting snow, the break-up of the ice, the glad rush of water released from frost. Now Marie’s own life and everything connected to her was in a similar state of melt. Each minute was filled with joy; trepidation, too, as she felt herself plunging headlong into a future over which she seemed to have less and less control.
Husband: gone. Child: gone. Society’s normal constraints: gone. Instead there was love — of art, of Katie, of the pulse and tumult of life — and the determination to explore all things to their limit. Because that was the nature of love.
Katie nagged her to get together once again with Brett and Donna Samochin.
‘I don’t like them,’ she objected. ‘We’ve nothing in common.’
‘Give them another chance. For my sake.’
‘Why do you care so much about them?’
‘Not them, him. Because he is Russian, as I am, and believes in the Revolution.’
Marie relented because she knew it would make Katie happy. For another reason, too: Lucien Henry apart, Brett was the only person she knew with whom she could discuss technique and the thousand problems of painting without having to put up with the groping and innuendo that was the response of most artists.
Thankfully, she found the Samochins easier than at their first meeting; perhaps Katie’s opening remarks helped.
‘I want you to be especially nice to her,’ she said, as they opened the door. ‘Because I love her.’ And took Marie’s hand in front of them and turned it palm upwards and kissed her, lingeringly, on the inside of her wrist. While her slanting eyes laughed.
Marie was not used to parading her feelings in public, especially these feelings, which she had been conditioned to believe shameful. She tried to pull away, but Katie, laughing, would not release her.
‘And she loves me.’
Marie, confused and embarrassed, did not answer.
Katie leaned forward and kissed her full on the lips. ‘Don’t you?’ she demanded. And held her until Marie, cheeks as red as sunset, answered.
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
As suddenly as that, everything was all right. She had publicly acknowledged her feelings for the first time, yet the world had not ended. She looked sideways at Brett and Donna, wondering how they would take it, but all they did was laugh, seeming not in the least offended. It made her realise how much she had longed to hold Katie’s hand and tell the world she loved her. Bringing out her feelings was like exposing a flame to oxygen: the air made it burn all the mor
e brightly.
Arms around each other, laughing, they followed the Samochins into the house.
3
Marie heard nothing from Eugénie, or from Neil. Memories and guilt still troubled her, but she tried to ignore them. Slowly, resolutely, she told herself she was putting the past behind her.
Once again, the pattern of her life changed. She was more comfortable with Brett, now, but still hesitated when he suggested they should go into the slums together, to paint the conditions of the poor. She spoke to Katie about it.
‘What’s Donna going to say about that?’
Katie laughed. ‘She’s seen us together, hasn’t she? She knows you’re not interested in her husband.’
‘She knows there’s been a man in my life.’
‘Not any more.’
Not entirely reassured, Marie nevertheless accepted his invitation and went with him into the slums. It was an area where she had thought he would have little to teach her, but soon discovered how wrong she had been. Under Brett’s guidance, she explored more deeply what it meant to be born and to die in such places. They went into the grog shops and the factories, saw the conditions there, reproduced them later in the studio. She spent hours painting women laundry workers, their skin grey and puckered by the wet heat in which they worked for twelve or fourteen hours a day. She sat in a corner of a one-room tenement while an Irish family mourned the death of a child who might have lived, had there been money for treatment, for food. Brett smuggled them aboard a barque lying at the wharves; they sketched the dingy fo’c’sle, trying to capture the effect of the light reflecting from the deck above their heads. They went into the country, saw how the poor lived on the outskirts of the city and in the bush. Marie went one stage further, spending a day in an aboriginal camp, where privation and despair were worse still.