by JH Fletcher
‘The operation, undoubtedly.’
She went out into the sunlight. It was autumn. The heat and humidity of high summer were past. Now the chenar trees were a glory of reds and golds, the virginia creeper that grew across the facade of the cottage hospital a brilliant crimson. The beauty of the mountains, clearly visible again after the haze of summer, moved her so intensely that it was all she could do not to weep.
Then and over the next weeks, she stared at the mountains, the lake, the air itself, in particular the light, trying to absorb them into her skin, to create a treasure trove of sensation from which, perhaps, she could draw consolation in the years ahead. The black years. She despised herself for being morbid but had lived all her life through her eyes. To be an artist, and blind …
Her life had been one of searching: for fulfilment, an endless seeking for the unattainable. Now, she saw, she would have to learn a new form of submission. No longer to art; she must acquire the grace to humble herself before the demands of life.
She told Mark what Carson had said. ‘I am going away.’
‘Where?’
‘Up into the mountains. To think. Alone.’
He looked at her with understanding, this man who had loved her so well for fifteen years. Whom she had loved, and still loved. He had dominated her and set her free, the combination that she had believed she would never find. Yet this she had to do alone. The decision touched the essence of herself and no-one, not even Mark, could be permitted to approach that.
‘Will you be away long?’
‘A day. Perhaps two.’
Dragging things out would not help.
She went to Pahalgam, hired a pony and rode out along the track that led towards the remote Kolahoi glacier. She rode through beautiful woods, with fine views of the mountains on either side. She saw no-one, yet was not alone. The Murray River; the Buddhist shrine with its silence and the wind; the slow and sinuous movements of her sister’s body seen past the partially-opened door; the choking darkness at the beginning of recollection; Major Carson’s angry voice saying Cataracts … All accompanied her.
The endless circle of existence, the numbered spheres of Kabbala, by which knowledge could be achieved.
I have sought truth in the minuscule, she thought, and in the world around me. Now I know that it is only in myself that it is to be found, the void in which there is no division between knower and known, only the eternal is that is God.
The prayer wheels, spinning amid the high hills. Om Mane Padme Hum.
She spent the night at Liderwat, in a wide meadow fringed by trees. A violent storm blew up. The mountains sent the spirits of the wind howling to defend their citadel: so, later, she described it in the journal that she had begun since her arrival in Kashmir. A fanciful description, she thought, to anyone inexperienced in the unimaginable ferocity of Himalayan storms. But she did not care; she had written the words, and they would remain. The storm passed, leaving her battered but unharmed. In the morning, she rode back down the track into the valley.
‘I shall have the operation,’ she told Mark.
‘Both eyes?’
‘Both.’
* * *
Her courage was rewarded; the operations were a success. Her palette regained the pigments of her earlier years, the sunlight bathing the world in a brilliance of blue and green light.
After her eyes had recovered, she sat on the bench under the chenar tree, enjoying the wonder of sight renewed. Sometimes, Mark came to join her. He was an old man, now, and walked with difficulty, using a stick. His mountain forays were a thing of the past, but he did not seem to mind. They sat side by side, in tranquillity. They had seldom been closer. Looking down, Marie inspected the minuscule grains of earth about her feet. They seemed as large as boulders, while a millipede, scuttling through the inch-high grass, loomed as large as a tiger on its multiplicity of feet. The proto-kangaroos of history and myth, extinct within a few generations of the first arrival of human beings in Australia, moved from one shadow and the next.
The following year, between one breath and the next, Mark died at the age of seventy-four. He had gone onto the deck to luxuriate in the view, as he did each morning. A few minutes later Marie came out with his cup of tea, slopped milk sticky between her fingers, and found him stopped, with his face to the mountains.
2
‘It must have been terrible,’ Alan said, and Marie could see that he did not know what else to say.
‘It was a shock,’ she acknowledged. ‘He hadn’t been feeling well, but death … It always comes as a surprise; to the dying most of all, I daresay. To think, This can’t be happening to me … So, yes, it was a shock. But terrible? No. At that moment, I was closer to him than I had ever been. I was him, living and dead, which is the same. Knowing that gave me joy, not pain.’
‘He’d lived how he wanted to live,’ he offered, floundering in his sea of incomprehension.
‘Certainly, and that was good. But that alone did not give me joy. It was because I was able to accept what had happened.’ She looked at him, bird-bright. ‘I had spent my life wandering from one place to the next. I hadn’t even been sure what I was looking for. With Mark, I thought I had found it. And so I had, yet it was not Mark alone. It was the discovery that the search itself was what mattered: something not to be striven for but immediate, in each instant. That was the essence: to be, not an observer, but a part of all things.’
‘You never painted Mark, like you painted Katie.’
‘That was why. There was no need. With Katie, I was trying to capture the moment; with Mark, I was the moment.’
After the funeral, she was unable to sleep. In the middle of the night she went ashore and sat on the bench beneath the chenar tree. At her feet the silver water stretched away. Overhead, the moon was snared amid the branches. Marie turned and placed her palms flat upon the tree’s cool bark, sensing its silent suspirations. To be as the tree, she thought, sturdy-rooted, bridging the space between earth and sky … Yet even trees, it seemed, could fall.
‘It was only then I wept,’ she told Alan. ‘But for beauty and gratitude, not loss.’
‘And then you came back to Australia.’
‘I loved Kashmir. I still love it. It gave me so much. Yet I had stayed there to be with Mark and, after he died, knowing that he would be with me always, I decided it was time to come home.’
3
‘They say there’s going to be a war,’ Alice said.
She had met Marie off the boat. There were spikes in the air as they smiled at each other, and went through the motions. Contact between them had been broken after Laura had refused Marie’s invitation to come to Europe but, urged by Mark and perhaps her own inclination, Marie had started writing again some years before. They had corresponded intermittently, Alice very punctilious when it came to Christmas Days and birthdays. She was married now, with a son of her own: Alan, aged two. He was not there, but would be waiting at home, with the nurse.
They took a taxi to Double Bay, where Alice lived with her husband, Cyril Lassiter, whom his friends called Chumps: not, Alice said, that he was a fool, but because he was what she called a man of physical stature.
Fat, thought Marie, and feared that the reunion would not be a success, although she who, sadly, had felt so little for her own child, was delighted with her grandson. Who was not permitted to remain with the adults for long.
‘Time for his nap,’ decreed Alice, and he was gone.
Marie had hoped that confidences would be possible, but saw at once that there would be no question of that. She could not speak to this stranger of the manner of, or reason for, her leaving Alice’s life, or of the aftermath, the tormented fits of mania that had cursed her for so long and that might still return, now that Mark’s protective shield had been removed. She saw that neither reason nor effect was important; what mattered was the going.
So she sat and smiled, helplessly, in the living room of the Double Bay house, and wondered what
she was doing there. While Alice talked, she focussed her attention on an earlier life and evenings spent in a neighbouring street, with Katie Vanning, with Brett and Donna Samochin, and how at dusk the trams had issued gusts of violet sparks as they ran past.
‘You will want to hear about Grandma,’ Alice said.
‘Yes.’ She was not sure she did, but was willing to be subservient to what was expected.
‘She did not suffer, any more than Father did.’ Because Neil, too, was dead, of a stroke.
Neil and Brett and Mark. And Katie. All my lovers, Marie thought. Dead but not dead, alive as long as I, too, am alive. As Martha, dead for twenty years, was alive.
‘She died in her sleep,’ Alice said.
Marie had known that and now listened more to her own thoughts than Alice’s recital of death, and arrangements.
Eugénie had seemed indestructible. She, too, had written systematically, discharging what she clearly saw as her duty by a recitation of the facts, but never the emotions of her life. Even Henry’s cessation of breathing, confirming the death that had destroyed him years before, had been simply another fact to be noted. Perhaps it was; it had certainly seemed to make no impact on Eugénie’s life. She had stayed on in the same house, had lived in the same room in the house, had dwelt as always in the memories that made up her being.
Nothing had made any difference to the widow of the artist Desmoulins, to the mother of the artist Desmoulins, or to her detestation of the art that had always seemed to her to exact too high a price.
She had established a relationship, of sorts, with Alice, but never again with Aline, who knew how to enjoy a grudge. After she died at last, on the very day that Marie underwent her second cataract operation, the only members of the family to attend the funeral had been Alice and the children.
‘Chumps would have come,’ Alice said, ‘but couldn’t spare the time.’ Because Chumps had a business which, with the country still in the grip of depression, demanded all his attention. Fortunately, Alice said, she had inherited something from her father, but not what she had hoped; Laura had finally produced the hoped-for son, and Cliffie had scooped the pool.
‘At least you don’t have to worry about a quid,’ Alice said, and laughed, while her eyes would have done credit to an accountant.
‘I’ve had expenses, too,’ Marie said, joining Alice in the laugh, thinking how, in all her years with Mark, they had never once discussed money, or the spending of it.
‘Not much to spend it on in the mountains,’ said Alice. ‘Dunno how you could stand it, a dump like that. What did you do with yourself?’
‘I worked.’
And was — with Mark, with all things. But she said nothing of that. She had expected a stiffness, but this … We live on different planets, she thought.
‘Do you have an agent in Australia?’
‘Not any more.’ Because Stanford Harris, too, had died years before. ‘I shall have to do something about that.’ And she spoke no more of art, or her past and present aspirations, because Alice would not have understood.
By contrast, Aline, when she visited her, understood very clearly, but would not accept. She had turned into a little old lady with her teeth in the world.
‘I’ll say this for you,’ she said. ‘You’ve certainly lived a most … interesting life.’
No glad homecomings, there.
It was her own fault, Marie told herself. She had grown apart.
Alan
I have no substantial memories of that first meeting; I was only two, after all. Yet something remains: a mist, a presence without form. Perhaps it is only in my imagination, conjured by my later awareness of my grandmother’s tangible existence. Even then, there was something not altogether real about it. Because, from the first, she was elusive. Firstly, there was the fact that we saw her so seldom; she and my parents were never intimate. The rituals of Christmas and birthdays were observed, my mother being a great one for family occasions, but the jagged edges of the past were never entirely smoothed away. Yet there was more to it than that; even when I did see her, I felt that she was apart, not because she wished to be, but because she was famous. Marie was the last person to put on airs but, in my mind, she was apart because her fame made her so.
Looking back at those years after she returned to Australia is like remembering three people. There is my grandmother, who I believe loved me and whom I came increasingly to love; there is the famous artist whose output remained prodigious, both in volume and quality; there is the woman haunted by darkness.
Because what she called the forerunner of hell never left her; even in Kashmir, she told me, it had come upon her from time to time, although with less severity than in earlier — or later — years.
I have her journals stacked upon the desk beside me as I write, have read them all. I am not a man for easy tears, yet there are sections of those books that have me blubbing like a child.
So many facets of her nature come through.
There was her astonishing fragility, in which none of her superficial acquaintances would have believed, knowing her confident-seeming, even abrasive, personality. It was a facade behind which she protected herself from the world, so expertly constructed that I believe she was not always aware of it herself.
Her poignant yearning, so often repeated, for the day when the darkness would be gone; her despair at the knowledge that it would be with her, always. Anger, too; there are sections in the journals containing nothing but the word WHY? scrawled in ever more haphazard capitals across the page. WHY? WHY? WHY? On and on.
Why, indeed. As far as I know, there is no history of madness in the family, but the trauma of the escape from France would have left permanent wounds, and the necessity to sacrifice herself, and others, to the tyranny of art did further damage. It was not in her nature to be callous or indifferent to others, but her commitment to art gave her no choice, and that commitment exacted a terrible price. In sacrificing others she sacrificed herself, most cruelly; selfishness had nothing to do with it, although there were many people who said it did.
‘I do not exist,’ she told me, on more than one occasion. She meant it literally. It troubled her, increasingly, that she should have sacrificed everything and lost her individuality in the process. She thought of herself as wandering, a living ghost.
Which was why, towards the end of her life, she recruited the services of the private detective.
Marie
1
One day, feeling once again the dreaded stirrings of the birds within her brain, she decided to do something about it. Perhaps, if she worked very hard, it would pass her by. She knew there was no chance of it, that the most she could do was to delay the attack a little, but it did not stop her doing what she could.
She drove into the city and visited the office of a private detective whose name she had taken from the telephone directory.
Even before she had opened her mouth, the detective decided he knew what she wanted. He used the plumage of fancy words to disguise the innate seediness of his expectations, and himself. ‘I take it this is a marital situation?’
‘Not at all.’ Marie explained what she wanted.
He sucked his teeth, giving her a sideways glance. ‘Unusual …’
‘If you’d rather not handle it —’
‘I’ll do it, all right. If you’re sure that’s what you want.’
‘It is what I want.’
She left him and went about her daily business: to the shops, to Perkins Cooke, the local agent she had appointed, after all, to handle her affairs. She fought the claws scraping and rattling in her head; she went home, to pace and pace. She wrote in her journal.
I am frightened of the teeth of angels.
And again:
There is a box and I have opened it, which is forbidden. Inside I have seen shadows, mysteries, perhaps even truth. Which is also forbidden. I have closed the box and never speak of it, but it is too late. They know by my work what I have done,
they are coming for me and shall come forever I am doomed I am doomed I am …
She came out of it, briefly. She received the detective’s report that described, in detail, how the subject had done this, and this, how she had crossed this road at this time, gone into this shop, bought tomatoes and jam and, from another shop, art supplies. How she had walked and walked.
It was a painstaking report, meticulously prepared. The subject: herself. To prove, through the eyes of another person, that she existed.
Once again the box. Secrets and darkness. So dark. I try to catch hold of my soap-slippery mind. Two times two. Four times four. Seventeen thousand three hundred and three times … Too hard. Try again. I must control my thoughts, repair the unravelling sense of self, of life, of … alphabet. ZYXWV I shall retain control. I. Shall. Retain. Control.
On and on.
2
She bought a property in the Ranges although, more and more, honouring the commitment that she had made when she was little more than a child, she spent time in the Outback.
Alice scolded her — ‘you are too old for such adventures, Mother’ — but she had no intention of being hog-tied by her years.
Now she went, not to the green and liquid world of the Murray, but to the fire of the Centre; the red blaze of the Simpson Desert featured increasingly in her work. She was enchanted by the rock paintings of the York Peninsula, spent days with aboriginal artists who were willing to explain to her at least some aspects of their traditions.
As she said to Alan after one of her trips: ‘I paint the land and the people as they may have been.’ And gave him a radiant smile. ‘It’s my secret plan, you see.’
He went along with the game. ‘Plan?’
‘If I delve into the past, I become one with it. Which means I lengthen the span of my own past and therefore of my life. By the time I’m finished, I shall be the most ancient artist in history.’ Her smile widened, self-mockingly. ‘Sometimes I think I’m that, already.’