Night Street (13 page)

They strode by the estuary, eyes on the larger body of water they were approaching; it looked utterly black and enormous. The tide had come in, the waves arriving fast and furious. She had a flash of horror. The estuary by day did not quite reach the sea and it was easy to cross from the camp side to the long beach over a generous expanse of sand; she adored it there then, a boundless middle place between land and water, damply shining.

Now, sunset over and night begun, there was no dry route across. The rising tide had sought out the little river and claimed it.

‘Oh,' Arthur muttered.

It would have taken too long to go back to the road and follow it around to the beach. Far too long. Staring into the obsidian ocean, she was dismayed; her imagination slid into a lightless region.

‘Difficult to judge the water,' she said.

‘It's very shallow, I think. We'll run?' He was begging, as if suspecting she would refuse.

‘We'll run,' she agreed, but she would have to act immediately.

She took off, feeling fatalistic and bizarrely balletic. They stayed close to each other, without holding hands. Arthur and Clarice were not united anymore and bore no resemblance to old lovers. They were separate entities on the run, fleeing back to civilisation, to the present. He was right: the water only came to their ankles, but the terror that followed her as she ran into the dark, cold water, into the unthinkable, imprinted itself on her soul. The euphoria, too.

18

Some questions were quelled, others left echoing. The brush jumped in her hand like it was of her own flesh. It was important to stop at this first, tenuous sign of calm, as the board was taking charge of itself, not the product of chance, but always meant to be this way. Her spine straight and exultant, she contemplated the results critically. She had returned to paint the sandy in-between place she and Arthur had seen reclaimed by water. Now it felt inviolate; the tide had barely begun to advance.

‘You scared me.' He had come up on her from behind.

A child was sitting a way down the beach, but Arthur's arms came around her all the same. They had been heedless since they woke burnt-skinned under the night sky. He sought her out as often as he could and came to her tent each night. People knew, though no one was saying anything to Clarice's face; they were not unkind, but amused, perhaps, looking deep into her eyes, or disappointed, avoiding them. She had suddenly become very human to them and this was looked down on. There was much talk of a new, more open morality, new ways of living, but beneath this, they remained conservative, their Victorian values firmly entrenched. She did not enjoy being an object of attention. However, their disapproval did not sting as much as she would have expected. The attitudes of others seemed to be becoming less important. Bella was the exception, of course. Arthur maintained that she did not know. ‘She would never believe it of me,' he said once, staring at his feet. His wife was keeping to her bed, sick with the cold that would not go away.

Clarice stretched her left arm that had endured a crooked position so long, holding palette and brushes. She was beginning to wilt.

He did not apologise for startling her, but said, ‘You work so quickly.'

Still and reverential, he looked at her painting. There might have been a slight, competitive tension in him.

It was a sunset view of the place they stood in. This and her painting of the hot sunrise were companion pieces, she thought, holding possibilities and progressions between them; they formed a whole. They might be some culmination for her. She needed to believe it. Today's painting was less victorious. The pink cast onto clouds and sea by the lowering sun—out of the frame—was a final-hour warmth.

The prelude to night was breezy. She closed her eyes so she would not see that scene anymore and also to smell Arthur better; she wanted to commit his smell to memory. She recognised the odour of his van and perhaps a little of Bella's lavender eau de cologne. His fingers were against her ribs and, just as strongly as this, she could feel the wet board to which she had been joined for hours, though she was no longer touching it either with brush or with gaze.

‘Will you give it to me? Can I have it?'

‘You always want them.' She opened her eyes. ‘How would you explain it?' She stepped out of his arms. ‘It's for my exhibition, anyway.'

She stared the painted scene into meaninglessness, a void. The sea darkened behind it. Arthur took out his tobacco and papers and began the slow rolling of a cigarette. A distance off, the child, until then seated, unfolded, elongated and became kinetic: a small figure running away from the beach. Clarice noticed in herself a growing interest in the human form; perhaps physical love did that to you.

‘She helped me clean my brushes before,' she said. ‘Her name is Sonia. She was watching the ocean all afternoon. She'd pick up things we don't—things we've forgotten to see.'

‘Maybe. This is frighteningly close to utopia. Are you coming to dinner, then?'

‘I'm starving.'

‘You have to keep your strength up, with the way you work.' He liked to think of her eating.

‘I'd stay out here forever.'

He touched her wrist and held it loosely. His grip softened and released. ‘Can I help you clean up?' His eyes searching for a rag.

She was already opening her turpentine, its perfume like a scream. ‘No. I'm fine.'

He turned away.

‘Productive day?' she asked his back.

‘I was just messing around.' He had withdrawn. ‘I'll see you.'

She hesitated. ‘I'll be along shortly. And I'll see you after.'

Nights in Clarice's tent, they tried to muffle their incoherent voices by stuffing balled clothing between their teeth; she felt like an animal, not wild and free anymore but tamed, a docile horse chomping on its bit, or like some prisoner, bound and gagged. Once she accidentally reached for her stockings—their tint was called
Rose Morn
—which tasted of the powder she had dusted on her legs and were oddly elusive in her mouth. Other times, they silenced themselves with their hands (whose hand over whose mouth?), as if this were not love but suffocation, a shared demise just averted. Even muted, the noise made the night crack down the centre. Tilting her head and lowering her lashes, she could almost see the shards of the broken night, the glittering of their slicing edges.

Once, Arthur jerked the fabric from her lips, determined to hear.

Her involuntary cry astounded her.

When she was breathing quietly again, she observed that the wind had lifted and rain pattered against the tent; there was going to be a downpour. She pulled a twig from under the sleeping bag where it had been worrying at her and, for comfort, stroked her own arm with it.

‘You'll get rained on,' she told him. ‘Stay a bit longer.'

‘Right-o.'

Arthur wanted her to look at him. She would not. He had said that this place was almost utopia. Indeed it was. They had the holy trinity of art, nature, love. But their love had become a public spectacle, and now when Bella's face appeared in her mind, it was graver, a touch ashen. Surely she knew. Could she be oblivious, really? The camp was paradise, both before and after the shameful knowledge of nakedness. The very intensity of it made Clarice wonder if whatever they were to one another could last, if this were not a desperate holding on to something that could not be held.

19

Ada was painting very near the place where she had thought she would set up her own easel. Attempting a stealthy retreat, Clarice heard her name called out.

‘Hello,' she said demurely.

‘I'm not in your spot?'

‘Not at all. I was just heading over there.'

‘Would you like to see what I'm doing? I'd love to have your opinion.'

‘Yes, of course.'

For the first time, with a strangely soft feeling, Clarice saw what the others meant when they said Ada copied her. The half-finished board, quite light, had an airiness she almost knew. The painted landscape did not show the real but gave a
sense
of it. The gentle pinks and oranges were familiar, as were the apparent looseness and the concealed restraint. It was evident, however, that a hand other than her own had done it. Perhaps Clarice could have, some years earlier, in another life. Noticing the board's potential, she felt a certain egotism.

‘It's beautiful,' she said. ‘I wouldn't do anything differently.'

‘Really?' Ada turned, smilingly confused, gushing, ‘I can't believe I showed you. I admire you so much.'

She was disturbed by the idea that Ada might not continue painting, might abandon it, as so many did, when it was such an aid for survival. And she could have talent— whatever that was. Suddenly stern, she said, ‘You shouldn't be self-deprecating. You're committed to your art, aren't you? Willing to take it as far as you can?' The girl may have been of a kind whom doubt would limit rather than galvanise; worse, she was intelligent and would probably realise it. Clarice gazed at her a little furtively, as if staring at doubt.

Ada did not sidestep; her pleasure over Clarice's approval left her unguarded. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘It's hard for me. You make it appear easy.'

Clarice snickered. ‘I'm sorry if I gave you that impression. It can be torture, actually. Of course, I don't compare the suffering to . . . the real suffering of a soldier, say . . .' Though, sometimes, she did. ‘It's a delicate kind of torture,' she said, wanting to send herself up. ‘Tiring. Discouraging, often. You hate yourself and then you start again. You mustn't waste any time admiring me.' She looked at her hands, at her trolley that would soon reveal what it was hiding. ‘The easy part is the way you go somewhere . . .
else
, where you can be,' she grappled, her eyes moving to the water, ‘if not your true self—I think I said that once, I was clumsy—then merge with some sort of truth.
Merge
.
Truth
. How grand. Just in flashes. When I say easy, I mean a relief.'

Something happened with the light that distracted them, a darkish opal gleam as the sun made its withdrawal felt. When she looked into Ada's face again, it was fragile and thoughtful and Clarice regretted never having invited her to the house or sought her out; but she did not really do friendship, not like that. It had to be very spacious.

‘I'd been hoping we'd get a chance to chat,' Ada said. ‘We hardly ever see you. Except from a distance, when you're working.'

‘At a distance, working.' She laughed. ‘That's my natural state.' She had the distinct impression that Ada knew about Arthur and did not judge her.

‘I'm still boiling about that blasted review.'

‘Oh, yes.
The lady has no right . . .
It'd slipped my mind.'

They both laughed briefly, but somewhere the conversation had taken on a mournful atmosphere. There was a silence.

‘Galleries should be buying your paintings, not just friends,' Ada complained.

Clarice imagined this happening, dreamed of it, though only at night, when her visions were more grandiose or desperate. Such ideas never occurred to her on a beach. But she realised now there must have been gossip about who was and was not buying her work.

Ada made as if to put her hands on her hips, then thought better of it. The paintbrush in her right hand had the cheeky elegance of a cigarette holder; slight and unassuming, she was elegant. ‘You don't paint as a Lady Painter should.' She had said it before, on the phone.

Clarice glanced again at the board, which became more magnetic, the more you looked; it undeniably had something. ‘Nor do you.'

After a moment, Ada said, ‘You have to leave your mark.'

She did not understand: whose mark? How so? And then she grasped it. ‘For posterity? In the annals of art history?' She was laughing and they laughed together again, better this time, though there was still that sombre edge; they met each other's eyes.

‘When you stray from flowers,' Clarice told Ada, ‘when you turn your back on decoration and try to find your own way out here, you're done for. As far as
They
are concerned.'

‘But you keep on.'

‘You keep on. Ada, you have to.'

20

On the second-last day of the camp, he wanted to take her on a bushwalk. She accepted. It was after lunch, in the space between her two painting sessions, a drowsy lull during which many of the others napped.

He knew the trail, having done the walk before, alone. Arthur could not get enough of nature; it never sated him— they had this in common. They set off by a farm, skirting the property, then crossing one of its fields before picking up a stream. It guided them into the bush. Three kangaroos were reclining by the stream, princely and unperturbed. She liked the leisurely shapes of them and their fuzzy, warm colour.

Quickly, as if she and Arthur had drifted to sleep and discovered themselves in a dream, they entered a rainforest's low, dappled light. And he began to tell the romantic story of a white man who had lived with native people around those parts. They were walking single file, Clarice behind, so she missed the odd detail. She was also distracted by the forest—it seemed to be some peculiar blend of outdoors and indoors. It was very moist, luxuriously green and disarmingly close; secret. She was floating along a shaded yet luminous corridor between walls upholstered in bark, moss, leaf. This curiously internal nature amazed her; there was something to be learned from it. Arthur's story was another sort of corridor and she floated through it too.

Well over a hundred years before, William Buckley escaped from a convict settlement in Sorrento. He was found on the brink of starvation by the Wathaurong people, who accepted him into their tribe, thinking they recognised in him one of their own warriors come back from the dead. Buckley lived among the Wathaurong people for thirty-two years. It was powerfully attractive, this idea of an imprisoned man escaping captivity and flourishing in nature, amid native men. She was envious, and wondered about the influence on the mind of never leaving a forest, of living enclosed in its myriad greens and wet arboreal air.