Night Street (18 page)

Conscious that the senses of a good woman were supposed to be dull and incurious, Clarice had sometimes in the past tried to bar the gate on hers, hyperactive as they were— invariably a vain enterprise. Now she allowed herself to receive the infinitude of sensations offered with an accepting heart. She often hummed Debussy, that slyly delightful music she had not heard in an age.

She did what she could to avoid Father's nurse, who visited every day and seemed to relish being omnipresent. If Clarice was lingering quietly in a room, Mrs Marks infallibly made it her business to enter that room on an obscure mission. Sternly, the nurse advanced, with a slight forward tilt, as if determinedly crossing the deck of a ship on a troubled sea. If Clarice rushed in from work in a flap, wild-haired and stinking of turps, Mrs Marks was waiting; her nose twitched and her gelid, censorious gaze perused the intruder, whom she obviously judged sorely lacking in daughterly virtue. At these moments, Mrs Marks made unilluminating yet dour pronouncements of the kind: ‘What your father
really
needs is rest.' Clarice appeared to represent an obstacle to this rest. She would limit herself to a faintly ironic ‘yes indeed,' or a ‘quite'. Mrs Marks was not interested in talking, though. Her lips remained tight with disdain. Clarice saw the word
eccentric
pass through the nurse's appalled mind, trailing a freight of sauciness and depravity.

However, if Mrs Marks got on her nerves, Clarice was now more at ease with Father. His uncompromising nature had, if such a thing were possible, been distilled. But there was also a wavering quality to him that had not been quite visible before. And his gruffness was almost like some prickly old friend. She realised that his voice no longer echoed in her head. Not needing to make a fortress of herself, she could be generous with him. He wanted her at home, assuring him unmolested quiet; she was, during the times of the day when his need for her was most acute.

She hardly saw or heard from Louise, indeed she saw no one, really, outside the domestic sphere. Almost no one.

Though they had glimpsed one another by the bay more days than not for some twenty years, Clarice had waved only once or twice to the man she thought of as the Doctor. They knew one another purely by sight, but she felt they were curiously connected, as fellow worshippers of the religion of daily walking. She was planning to address him.

He had a stately and composed bearing, appearing closed inside the enjoyment of his exercise; she liked to infer that the outdoors was sacred to him. His stride was leisurely or patient, not without ambition but having nothing to prove. The evening hour was his favourite. And hers. Morning was an instinctual communion with nature. Evening was mature introspection, maybe philosophy. She thought he was an evening creature.

From rumour filtered through Mum, she had learned his specialisation—cardiology—and in which street he lived behind which façade, and that he had a quite successful clinic in East Melbourne. His wife, who was ailing, was almost never seen by anybody, but on Sundays he regularly took his two girls on an outing into the city. The girls had recently come out and were much admired, both reputed to be charmingly lovely, though one, Clarice gathered, tended to be fretful and the other a bit flighty. She imagined the Doctor was a doting father, to a fault.

A good deal of space had always separated them. One evening, she eliminated it.

‘Hello. We're always passing one another, aren't we?'

He accepted the greeting as she had thought he might, unstartled.

‘What is that you push around?' he asked with a certain inevitability.

‘This? This is my painting studio. You haven't ever seen me working?'

He paused. ‘Of course. How couldn't I? The lady landscape painter.'

‘The batty bluestocking?' How odd that after a long silence there was suddenly this flow of words linking them.

‘On the contrary—you're thought of as a talent. They say you exhibit.'

‘I've had my moments,' she said a little archly, studying the back of her not-very-dainty freckled hand.

‘You're a local legend,' he continued, and now in his voice there was something subtly reckless. Their faces did not change; they seemed to have known the conversation would take this turn, becoming private. ‘They say you keep to yourself.'

‘Ah? Do you call this keeping to myself?'

He smiled. In the distance, a small dog frisked into view.

‘I've very often seen you painting. You seem so absorbed. I was curious about that.' He lifted his walking stick and pointed again at her cart.

‘Yes, well. It holds my kit. I made it myself.'

‘Really?' A faint amusement, but no surprise.

She did and did not want to be the topic of conversation. ‘And you're a doctor, who likes to walk.'

With convivial self-mockery, he said, ‘My constitutionals.'

She observed that he chose to be enhanced rather than diminished by his years; he had an air of dignity, but he played the part of the conservative elderly doctor—it was a performance he was accustomed to, though able to drop.

‘Now we're friends, maybe you'll show me one of your paintings, some time?'

She stood ramrod straight. ‘I'll do better than that. I've been wondering if I might paint your portrait.'

The Doctor looked at her quickly, obliquely. Then his gaze travelled to some point on the sea.

‘Please assure me,' he said in a soft voice, ‘you don't paint from the nude.'

She had a troublesome sprightly feeling and laughed flatly to create a smokescreen around it. ‘Not generally. We're not in Montmartre.'

‘Indeed, we're not,' he said, looking at her again. ‘I'm comforted.' His head was tilted, his chin a little lifted. ‘Flattered. But I'm not sure I'd be a very good subject.'

‘I didn't have a traditional portrait in mind. It'd be done in the open. I'd set you against a landscape.' She added, ‘It would be very masculine.'

‘You're poking fun at me. Which is disrespectful. Haven't you been taught to respect your elders?'

‘Yes, but I'm not all that good at obedience.' Had she expected this would be so light and fast? The wind off the sea was powerfully perfumed, mild.

‘Do you paint at home too?' he asked. ‘Or just out here?'

‘A little at home . . .' She hesitated. ‘In the kitchen, at night.' She watched his eyes stealthily; he was paying attention, she thought. ‘I've envied other artists—men, really—their studios. But I've had this, haven't I?' So much talk, and it felt unnaturally honest. ‘If I were reincarnated and had to choose between this and a different artist's life, I'd probably wind up with my exact same fate again.' She chuckled. ‘I'd be back here over and over, pushing this silly old beast around.'

‘Old beast,' he repeated, appearing to like this. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, then?'

‘I'm coming to think I believe in most things.'

The Doctor's eyes were direct and speculative. Clarice realised that they had not introduced themselves, as if they were already too familiar with one another to bother. They took the steps, half-solemnly, that this dance required. And while they waited for him to agree to entrust himself to her brush, the night laid itself slowly out for inspection.

26

Because it was so difficult, Clarice painted the Doctor twice, the second painting following the first with hardly a pause, just the time to get him settled in the new position and for her to half-heartedly clean her brushes with a rag. The paintings were a surprise and at the same time confirmed something.

He was not at all sedate, in paint. A thickset man in his early sixties, he was distracting; you would have to say ominous. He threw you off balance, seeming more a tenebrous night bird than a human being. Given the choice, you would surely not trust him. He stood in nature in her paintings, but he was unmistakably the star of the show.

The colour in the first was lurid by her standards, brash, with slathers of biting yellow-green, and the man leaned against the railing of a small white bridge. He was appraising the viewer—possessively, arrogantly?—from under the brim of his hat. A cane hung from his arm. He had something but not everything of the grumpy old man. His eyes were a dark band across a face in which just the tip of his nose and his mouth emerged into light. And the darkness deepened as your eye journeyed over his figure. One arm and most of his torso were virtually black, the black continuing down to his thighs, where it abruptly stopped—making him appear an amputee, miraculously standing on the memory of legs.

For the second painting, she had positioned him at the end of a pathway bordered by trees. The trees' shadows fell across the path and he too was a shadow, a gloomy form, whose ponderousness was relieved only by the slight blue filigree of ocean discernible through the trees over his left shoulder. This glimpse of water gave the impression of serving as some kind of laughable talisman or prayer.

She had hoped he would be a complicated subject and she had sweated as she worked, but Clarice was certain of the extent of the challenge only when she saw him on her panel, remade in light and shade. She shivered, thinking that perhaps you could confide things, dark things, to the man in these paintings without shocking him; or the dark things would not need to be spoken, they would just sit, almost calmly, between the two of you.

‘I'm uglier than you expected?' He was quick.

‘No. You're magnificent.' He was.

She had not tried to pin a character to a board since the early, green portraits. To attempt it was always arrogance: at best, you got only a sliver of your subject into paint. If you were lucky, however, the sliver turned out to be raw—it came from the quick. And perhaps she had finally come close to luck, with the Doctor; too soon to tell. Not quite sure what to make of these new works, she thought she might like to continue painting people—him, at least—investigating further. Clarice wanted more of this thrilling cocktail of power and subservience. His shoulders sagged once she was finished and he turned deferential, hollowed. But she did not think he was unhappy.

He would not be persuaded in for a bathe, despite the closeness between them, such that forms between model and artist, a mysterious reciprocal knowledge not born of language. From the water, she watched him reclining on the sand. It was a day of rare, loose freedom reminiscent of Anglesea. She savoured her own buoyancy and primitive mistrust of the waves; here, on occasion, even strong swimmers had been carried out to the depths.

She had told Father she was meeting Ada, the old pretext, and had no idea how the Doctor had achieved his day's leisure. They were twitchy when they met, secrecy always heightening an atmosphere. Not long after she began work, they both stilled.

She waved to him on the beach and he did not wave back; his eyes might have been closed. His appreciation of the outdoors, she was learning, did not involve admiring views or geography. He praised fresh air for its healthful properties, believing it generated fortitude and oiled thinking. She was fascinated by this, by his not living through his eyes.

It seemed criminal that she had not swum in so long. Ocean swimming, soothing a tired, over-excited intellect, was the panacea for the artist's taxed brain. This was the effect of painting: it depleted her just as it left her with an excess of energy. She noticed that physically she wearied more quickly than she used to, though she was still able to stay out there till her breathing slowed, and her heart was strong, steady. Sky and sea were the two halves of the universe, the lower oddly flexible and varyingly opaque.

There were chaste times, when your ideas might be called
pure
. There were days when you were a saint, nothing fresher or neater than the inside of your mind, and days when you were rather wicked. Need was like this shifting ocean, now tormented, now quiet. As sure as it retreated, it would advance again. It seemed that, for better or worse, she found married men the more interesting or appealing. She was drawn to them. It may have been a coincidence. Or their married state suited her, allowing her to belong to herself. There could be deliciousness, of course, in prohibition and contravention; in frustration and covert happiness. Pain, too. She looked now in herself for guilt, something resembling the guilt she had felt with Arthur, and was relieved not to find it: she seemed to have surpassed that. And she was aware of none in the Doctor. The air between them was clear. Floating on her back for a moment, she thought, the history of one's lovers is somehow linked to the history of one's art. Both art and love are openness, the lowering of the walls that protect us from the world. Also true, perhaps, that art and love are forms of absurd hope in the face of tragedy and banality. Absurd or not, you continue hoping, try to hope convincingly, to open further.

She arrived at his feet dripping and silly-limbed.

His hat was over his eyes, his head resting on his folded jacket; he was probably dozing. She found even his sense of his own intelligence agreeable, as it did not prevent an interest in others. This might have had something to do with being a doctor, a servant of humankind.

She prodded his leg with her wet toe, feeling it tense.

‘I'm off to get changed.'

She grabbed her things and turned her back on him quickly, wondering if he had taken the hat from his eyes to contemplate her very slender but forty-eight-year-old figure in bathing attire. How would he find her? There was no predicting what he would see.

It was a simple picnic of bread and cheese, some pickles she had taken a chance on with unusual success, an orange each and cordial to drink.

‘We don't have any alcohol at home,' she apologised.

‘Actually, I have some brandy.' He drew a flask out of the pocket of his jacket.

‘Good,' she said. Then, ‘Was it as traumatic as you expected?'