by JH Fletcher
Mad or not, she told herself, that is something I shall not do. The thought gave her the strength to let go, in mind as well as flesh. She opened her fingers; she washed her hands with careful ceremony; she went out of the room of death. Her brain frozen in her head, she left the building and walked down the street, hearing the meaningless clatter and clang of life around her. She was apart from life and therefore dead. Yet not dead; in this, too, she would endure. And perhaps, eventually, life would come back.
* * *
She did what Katie had asked. She remained on friendly terms with Brett and Donna, who were kind to her. Brett even suggested they should all move into a larger house together.
‘Makes sense,’ he said, a man of enthusiasms. ‘It’ll stop you being lonely and save costs. We can paint together, motivate each other when we’re feeling lazy.’
Marie had borne up better than she had expected, but was frightened of solitude and was willing to go along with the idea. Donna, however, was not. Sharp nose and sharp mind, she wanted nothing to do with it. Since Donna controlled the money, Brett had to drop the suggestion. In truth, Marie did not care very much; she had got on well enough with Donna during the summer, but the edges remained; sharing the same house might have created problems. I do not like being told what to do, she told herself. And that was something that Donna did very well.
As Brett said regularly. ‘She doesn’t mean much by it, but she certainly knows how to go on and on, when she’s in the mood.’
Now, with luck, it wouldn’t matter. Although other complications remained.
5
‘You paint people so poor they hardly have clothes to cover their bodies,’ Brett said for the hundredth time. ‘Children so malnourished that half will be lucky to grow up at all. Yet you do nothing to help them.’
‘That is how I help them. I paint them. I draw the world’s attention to the way they live, the need to do something about it.’
She had told him and told him, but Brett refused to listen. ‘We should apologise to the poor for how we force them to live.’
To Marie, that was nonsense. ‘It’s not my fault. Why should I apologise? To make myself feel good?’
Brett sidestepped. ‘Of course I’m grateful for everything you’ve done …’
‘You think I did it for you?’ She closed in on him, bringing her outrage and contempt to bear. ‘It was for Katie, only for her! She asked me to help you. That’s the only reason.’ And she was silent, hating the emotion that overwhelmed rage, leaving only tears. ‘I did it for her,’ she sobbed.
It took months, while Marie mourned her lost love. It seemed sometimes that her pain would never end. Outrage, too, sickening and futile, that death should have taken her. The headaches came back; demons with gargoyle faces pursued her through her dreams; she was terrified that, once again, she might lose her toehold on reality. Somehow she never did. She remained sane. Yet the fear, and the warning, remained.
I must put it behind me, she thought. I shall always be sad for her, and myself, but to be too sad, too long, is to be as self-indulgent as Brett, apologising for what he hasn’t done. I have spent too much energy painting the poor. It was what Katie wanted, but there is more to life than that. There is laughter, gaiety, beauty. What are the colours of gaiety? she wondered. Red and orange and yellow. Cardinal and crimson; apricot and marigold; cadmium and primrose. Their brightness blazed in her imagination; even to think of them lifted her spirits. I have to come out of the valley of shadows, she thought.
She remembered how difficult it had been to release her clasp of Katie’s dead hands, but she had done it. The final severing of physical contact … It had meant appalling pain, yet she had survived. As I shall survive this, she thought.
It was time to move on.
She had kept in touch with Martha, had written to tell her of Katie’s death.
She had taken it for granted that Horace would not permit her to come to the funeral, so was not surprised when she sent her apologies. But Horace had nothing to do with it.
I haven’t been myself recently. Hopefully I shall soon be better but, for the moment, I am confined to the house.
At the time, Marie’s emotions had been too raw for her to go to Woonga, but now she made the effort. She found Martha with her spirit as strong as ever, but in her body drawn and grey. Unlike Katie, she had seen the doctor, but he had been no help.
‘Getting old, he tells me.’ Martha smiled. ‘Fine one to talk. He’s older than I am.’
Martha could not have been much over sixty, but now would pass for seventy-five.
‘A second opinion?’ Marie wondered.
‘Doctor Pearce would be terribly upset if he thought I didn’t trust him. Rest up a bit, I’ll be as good as new.’
Perhaps she preferred not to know what might be wrong with her. Strange, in one so brave, but Marie thought that there might be different forms of courage.
‘We read the reviews of your paintings in the newspaper,’ Martha said. She shook her head sadly. ‘It was a very critical editorial.’
‘They said I was preaching revolution. They should listen to some of my friends, if they want to know how real revolutionaries sound.’
‘The title,’ Martha suggested tentatively. ‘Perhaps a little provocative?’
‘“Life on the Breadline?” It was the truth. They sold well, though. Some rich people must like finding out how the other half lives.’
Horace was away. There was talk of a government reshuffle; Martha thought he might be in with a chance. ‘Or so he’s hoping.’
‘I’ve a friend who wants me to get involved in politics,’ Marie told her.
Martha pursed her lips. ‘And will you?’
‘No.’
‘It is no occupation for a lady.’
‘Not because I’m a lady. Because I’m an artist.’
Martha was clearly troubled by such plain speech. She said nothing, but there was a constraint between them that was new. Probably Marie’s lifestyle and her recent divorce, both widely reported, lay at the root of it. It made Marie cross. Even Martha’s tact in not speaking openly about it exasperated her. Everyone believing they had the right to judge how she lived … She wanted to tell Martha that artistic endeavour demanded a price, that she was willing to pay it, that conventional behaviour had no place. She could not. The dark wind blowing from her future prevented her saying anything. What was the point? She was alive, like the billions upon billions of the human race. Her life had no room for Martha’s scruples, Neil’s pain, Brett’s poverty-haunted multitudes. All of them, all, were privileged by the fact of being alive.
Katie is dead, but is alive in me, Marie thought. I, too, am alive and shall live in my paintings. Only when we are forgotten by those who knew us, when they too are forgotten, shall we be truly dead. The rules by which society seeks to bind us do not matter; what is important is that each of us should live in the light of our own truth. Only then shall we have the chance to experience eternity.
‘You are unwell,’ Martha said.
‘No.’
‘I can see something in your face …’
‘No.’
‘You look tired, strained —’
‘NO!’
The denial clanged like bells.
I have to break the mould, escape from the sorrow in which, for all my brave words, I am still trapped. I must begin again, in order to reach wherever it is that I must go.
* * *
Once again she coupled her visit to Martha with one to her sister. Found that Aline did not want to know, although the painting of mother and child still hung in the drawing room. It has become a possession, Marie thought, like the Georgian furniture, polished daily by servants’ hands. Perhaps that, too, had represented love to someone, once.
‘I was sorry to hear of your friend’s death,’ Aline said formally. Her prim mouth was pursed, so. Her feet together, so.
‘Thank you.’
‘Perhaps, in time, you will s
ee it was for the best.’
A recoil: of spirit rather than flesh. ‘I loved her.’
‘It was a highly irregular arrangement.’
Marie could have clawed her sister’s eyes for saying it. So things end. They had been so close, even while apart. No more.
‘I must go.’
Aline made no attempt to stop her.
6
After her visits to Martha and Aline, Marie knew that, once again, she had to break the mould of her life.
She went to Double Bay, found Brett alone.
‘Donna’s gone to Melbourne to see her parents.’
It had not been Donna she had come to see. Her intentions drifted like mist, but were there, nonetheless.
‘I want to paint. Come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere!’
Not to the slums; to the open spaces of drought and sunshine and heat. Where they painted, and Marie seduced him: deliberately, ruthlessly. Brett, remembering Katie and Marie’s relationship with her, had thought himself safe and was not. But he was eager enough, when it came to it.
Afterwards he apologised, as though it had been his fault. Absurdly, he blamed himself.
‘Please forgive me.’
For having taken advantage of your grief.
Marie could taste the unspoken words upon the air. At least he had not dragged Donna into it. The experiment had been a failure. The distraction, if that was what it had been, had been only momentary. The desolation of loss had returned even as they lay entwined upon the hot grass, plunging her even deeper into despair. Now Marie, too, felt guilt. Brett was vulnerable, Donna’s knives too sharp for him, and Marie, by using him, had probably hammered a final nail into the coffin of their marriage.
‘When shall I see you again?’
Crippled by self-hatred, Marie said: ‘Any time. You know where to find me.’
Donna came back from Melbourne. She found out about it almost at once: Brett was not a man for dissembling. She gave him an ultimatum: finish with her, or finish with me.
‘I have fallen in love with you,’ Brett told Marie when he brought her the news. ‘I want us to be together.’
Love comes and goes, I think.
Marie wanted a tranquil life, clean of guilt, of complexity, of doubt, in which she could paint, reproduce the observations of light and colour and movement that made up her world. She told herself she wanted to live in a white room free from distractions, occupied only by her easel, her paints, her images. Herself, in the sublimity of solitude.
She could not do it. She was afraid of the demons that might return, twisting her in their talons, flinging her writhing to the floor.
She had hoped, with Katie, to find peace.
And now? Could Brett provide her with peace? No. But he offered companionship, an escape from the loneliness that was neither tranquillity nor solitude, but despair and a longing for death. Perhaps, after all, Brett could provide the means whereby she might save herself.
‘Do you love me? Do you, really?’
She was using the questions to bite out morsels of time in which to think, and feel, and decide.
Brett, who might have been unsure of her response, placed his hands on her forearms, staring intently with pale blue eyes that had become a little bloodshot, Marie saw. Perhaps the stress of Donna’s ultimatum was beginning to tell on him; Brett was not a man competent to manage his own life, should he fall between one woman and the next.
Yet again, she wondered where she would find the man who would dominate, yet leave her free. Foolish thoughts; no such person existed. At least, with Brett, she had common interests, would be able to do as she wished.
‘I don’t have much emotion to spare,’ she warned him.
He did not understand.
‘I mean my work comes first.’
His eyes lit up. ‘Of course.’
She was displeased that he should agree so readily to second place. It put their relationship on a lower level than she would have wished. She bullied him, to see how far he would permit her to go.
‘I’ve told you I’m no politician. I shan’t get involved in anything like that. That’s what I meant by not having much emotion to spare.’
For either politics or man, but there was no need to be so specific.
‘Are you staying with me tonight?’
He hesitated. ‘I must let Donna know what I’ve decided.’
It was important to start off as she intended to continue. Her need was for a partner, not necessarily this partner. ‘I shall not expect you, then.’
That left her with lots of time to wonder whether she was doing the right thing. Physically, she was more than capable of living alone; doing so emotionally was another question. She had told Brett she would not expect him, yet sat all evening. He did not come. She forced herself to eat, the food like sawdust in her mouth. She went to bed and lay listening to the building creak. There had been a time when she had been astounded by Katie’s casual remarks about taking another woman’s husband. Now she was doing it. Yet in truth, she corrected herself, she was doing nothing. The marriage of Brett and Donna Samochin had been doomed for a long time; all Marie was doing was offering Brett an escape route — if he chose to take it, which was by no means certain.
Doing nothing? she thought. Believe that, she’d believe anything.
Round and round went her thoughts, her sense of self-reproach. The darkness held out no solutions and, towards dawn, she slept.
When she woke, she took her paints and other gear. She had invested in a bicycle; she rode westwards along the river bank until she reached a spot where pleasure boats were moored between banks of reeds. She dismounted, set up her easel and began to paint. At the back of her mind the question remained — would he come or not? — but hand, eye, brain combined to function independently of doubt. It was a scene bright with sunlight and gaiety, the water sparkling between the reeds. Even to look at it cheered her and, when she had finished, she was pleased with the results. She rode home in lighter mood, to find Brett waiting for her.
PART X
RETURN TO THE SOURCE
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
— Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Windhover)
Alan
Donna Samochin went back to America, taking her money with her. More than her money. A vindictive woman, she also took the determination that never, never, would she grant Brett a divorce. He was her husband and would remain so, until death. That measure of freedom, at least, she would deny him, and the harlot he had chosen before herself. By denying Brett and Marie their freedom, she was also denying herself, but that was unimportant.
Marie always claimed she had not cared, but she did. The rituals of church and state meant nothing to her, yet she resented having her life controlled, even to this extent, by the woman she had replaced. For the rest of her life, she never had a good word to say for Donna Samochin, herself a victim, not of Marie or even of Brett, but of herself and her own razor-edged and unforgiving nature.
Marie and Brett entered into a relationship that no-one — themselves included, perhaps — expected to last. Their feelings towards each other were never intense; even in its earliest days, the association was one of expediency rather than passion. Marie had meant what she had said about having little emotion to spare, while Brett Samochin was never a passionate man. Perhaps that muted level of engagement was what they both needed; it gave them freedom to operate within their relationship without becoming imprisoned by it. Whatever the reason, it worked; they stayed together for twelve years which, by Marie’s standards, was a very long time indeed.
For the first three of those years, they lived in Sydney, in a small cottage with a scrap of garden on the edge of the city. Financially, it was a grim time. Donna had bankrolled Brett for ten years and he had lost, or perhaps had never had, the knack of living frugally. Flowers, wine, expensive presents: money had always slid through his fingers like melted candle grease. It d
id so still. Now, unfortunately, there wasn’t much to slide.
It was the last bleak time in Marie’s professional life but, for a while, it was very bleak indeed. Fashions had changed; no-one was interested in her studies of the poor which, until then, had provided the bulk of her income. As for her other work which, in the end, formed the bedrock of her reputation, that had never been reliable, commercially speaking. Marie was never a true Impressionist — there was too strong a spiritual dimension to her work for her to fall into that or any other category — but this did not stop the critics from dismissing her work as derivative.
‘Idiots!’ Years later, that dismissal of some of her best work still had the power to infuriate her. ‘Those fools knew nothing about art. Nothing!’
It was a cry that she was to repeat regularly over the years. Later, with her reputation firmly established, she could afford to be forgiving but, in those early years with Brett, when from one day to the next they did not know what, or even if, they were going to eat, it was a more serious problem.
‘We could have starved through their ignorance,’ she told me indignantly.
For those three years, they almost did. By 1910, conditions had become so desperate that Marie thought of turning to prostitution; probably the reason she did not had less to do with morality than with the practical consideration that, at thirty-nine, she might have had a hard job attracting customers. Whatever the reason, it never happened, but she always insisted it had been touch and go.
It should have been the worst of times yet somehow, from the way she spoke, it never was. She had experienced such trauma during the months before Katie’s death and in the period following it that her entire world had turned black. She had lost her way, not only in the world, but within herself. She had been adrift, despair her only companion. Now, no longer alone, in a relationship that demanded little of her, that changed.