Night Street (19 page)

‘Very, yes. It'll take me a while to recover. I guess I should gracefully accept that you can't have art without suffering.'

‘You poor thing.'

‘It's not very sporting to tease me. It was about time I was immortalised for posterity.'

She was happy that he entertained her. ‘Don't you think you look distinguished?'

They studied the paintings that were drying, one against the cart and the other on her paint box, two additional members of their party—silent, possibly the more eloquent.

‘A bit grim. Frightening, even. Do I really look like that?'

‘I discovered that as I was painting.' She could not be sure that she had not intuited those things in him well before the first time they spoke. But she had
seen
that face by looking straight at it, squinting; it had been too late by then to avert her eyes, though she would not have missed it. The paintings were not peaceful depictions of a proud medical professional, an upstanding citizen and father. No.

Looking away from them and from his vague discomposure, she reached for the flask and took a molten sip. They were quiet.

As they were finishing their meal, the Doctor said, ‘This has made me feel young. Can I prescribe myself this medicine again, Clarice?' He spent a moment fitting the lid to the cordial bottle and added, ‘Will you want to paint me again or has the subject been exhausted?'

She pouted pensively, an expression she had seen on Louise. ‘There's always more work to be done.'

‘Glorious day.' He was jolly now. ‘Despite my sufferings for art. You know, I have a huge respect for you bright, modern girls. Your generation. Faced with so many new ideas, the new times . . . I wonder about growing up hearing stories of the war and seeing men going off and not coming back. Or coming back in pieces.' He had turned sober, but rallied. ‘And having so much more independence than your mothers did. Yours is a very different world.'

She took this to mean that their worlds, hers and his, were so entirely different as to be incompatible and it was a miracle they had come together at all. Maybe, too: Poor dear, you'll never marry. Though the compliment and the curiosity, she felt, were real. She was not displeased that he had spoken of her as a girl or that she baffled him.

27

She got more comfortable on her side, propping herself up on one elbow, and gazed at him from the shelter of her good hat. There was only a thin strip of bare sand between them. Other people are enigmas; he was miraculous. The food or the brandy had brought out the red in his lips. He was a lot older than Arthur and it showed, his body more solid, less supple. He was not so much paternal as avuncular, though, with something subtly debonair about him and a deadpan sort of humour. He reasoned deliberately, seeming to trust logic to clarify and resolve.

His face said he did not love her, not yet conclusively, or it preferred to remain unread; she was not at all bothered. Waiting for love was like waiting for a revelation. You had to be patient. And, on that glowing afternoon, she was pleased to consider herself not the marrying kind. An artist had to bring to the craft a free spirit, a spirit capable of falling in love continually with everything, everyone, and devoting itself to the daily labour of this love. How could such a woman's spirit sustain itself tethered by law, religion and duty to one man?

She took up his reference to the war: ‘Were you a soldier?'

He made a rapid little gesture, adjusting his hat. ‘As a doctor.' She did not expect he would talk about it and he did not. After a while, he continued, detached, ‘We've all lost our innocence.'

‘Were we innocent before?'

Brusquely, he leaned over and touched her arm.

She caught her breath and remarked, ‘After painting, you feel terribly lazy. You turn into a sluggard who just wants to be waited on. You think how nice it would be to have a slave or two.'

‘With palm fronds to fan you with and so on?'

‘Exactly.'

His hand remained on her arm. The salt on her skin was a light, fizzy burning. She took the flask from him.

‘We've almost finished it.'

In fact, there was only one mouthful left; she swallowed it.

‘Would you know what it was to be waited on, if it came up and tapped you on the shoulder?' he asked.

‘I'm very keen to learn. I'm sure I'd have considerable aptitude.'

‘I imagine you would.'

He kissed her palm. His mouth was soft. Still cool from the water, her skin tightened into gooseflesh.

‘What can this humble servant offer you, Madam?' he inquired croakily.

It was a good game. Perhaps it had been many years since he had known romance, but he had not lost the necessary vivacity, had not given up on its return. Nor had she.

‘Oh, just leave me to sleep, won't you? Be gone.'

She stuck out her tongue and rolled onto her back. He waited a moment and then laughed, placing his hat over her face. She stayed beneath it, acquainting herself with the sweetly oily scent of his Brilliantined hair. When her lungs knew it, she passed the hat to him and the immense sky spread across her vision.

If desire were low, impure, then why did it feel holy, shooting up through the other layers till it broke free? Naturally, it entailed the risk of perdition, the undoing of the Family, and this was why it was ignored or shunned. Because it revealed many marriages as a lie or at least a half-truth. It was an ideal, a blindness, maybe even a sort of self-annihilation, and these things were dangerous.

Was then the powerful current of desire in the human a mistake, something the superior intellect of the
homo sapiens
should have overcome—but had not—during the evolution that brought him forward? Was it a kind of vestigial limb with no proper function? Yet there was the temptation to use the limb. Man lived with it uneasily, willing it invisible; nothing controlled you so forcefully as what was invisible.

‘I think I'm drunk,' she said.

Her eyes swelling with the sky, Clarice wondered if the culmination of physical pleasure felt like a small death because it was a moment of grace in which the tragedy of life's end was shown to be beautiful. Yes, what if desire were not low, the sorry mess of corruption they would have you judge it, but rather the highest force, the lushest thing—not what religion was required to repress, but religion itself, the true face of God, the superbly ruthless machinery of existence?

‘I get giddy,' she observed and, turning towards him, ordered, ‘Come here.' Graciously, he obeyed.

In his disoriented surrendering, she caught a flicker of Meldrum, the day he properly noticed her. The Doctor and Meldrum were both Older Men and Important Persons, but until then she had not compared them. She acknowledged that they had in common a quality of being unusually substantial; without being touched, they were tangible. Arthur had been like that too, in his way, though she had learned to see his bravado, the masked desperation. The man beside her was more quietly, less gregariously attractive than either Arthur or Meldrum. To begin to feel it, you had to look at the Doctor side-on or paint his portrait.

28

They had been intimate for a number of weeks, and she had thought about it but always managed to stop herself in time—until she did not. She got the number from the operator and rang the Doctor's clinic. She put this illogical behaviour down to her interest in the other side of him, the illuminated side that others saw.

‘Can I help you?'

Hearing the strained cordiality in his secretary's voice, Clarice took a dislike to her. Was it jealousy? Knowing she spent each day close to him?

‘I wanted to make an appointment.'

‘Yes. Can I ask the nature of the problem?'

She was momentarily stumped. There was no problem—or was there a problem? ‘I need to see the doctor,' she got out.

‘Could you be a little more specific?'

This struck her as impertinent and she replied, perhaps testily, ‘It regards my heart.'

‘The doctor
is
a cardiologist.'

It went without saying, of course, that her problem should be a matter of the heart. But still, there had been no need for sarcasm.

‘Well, that's perfect then! Could you make an appointment for me, please? The name is Jane. Jane Young.' She enjoyed this banal alias, and the tingle it produced gave her an insight into why a person might want to run away, to be someone else. ‘Shall I spell that for you?' she asked courteously.

For her shady excursion to East Melbourne, she wore a dark skirt and a white blouse. Hidden under her sleeve, a bracelet: a trinket Louise had given her one birthday, with exuberant bottle-green ovals of Czech glass.

In the waiting room, she tried to read a magazine. Her attention strayed.

At last, the secretary invited her to stand. A door was opened for her. And she was in his office.

The Doctor. At work. Decorous in his suit, serious, a touch tired, head to one side. She knew that angle of his head. He was sitting behind a mammoth desk; the desk was like his own island, or maybe a raft he was floating on.

He lifted his eyes. They reached her, saw—froze. He was good at dissembling surprise; something in his eyes recoiled, his face staying expressionless. She did not speak.

‘Miss
Young
?' he asked, after a moment.

‘That's right.'

A pause. ‘What can I help you with?'

‘Obviously, it's my heart,' she said, sheepishly.

He nodded. ‘Obviously.' She was not sure if he was angry. ‘Could you change into this smock, please? And we'll . . . have a listen.'

He stood and turned to the window. Apparently, it had started raining; she had not anticipated that. Perhaps he wanted to hypnotise himself, watching the rivulets against the pane.

She went behind the screen. Her elbow knocked it as she fumbled with her buttons.

‘Remove everything on top, if you will. Including the brassiere.' He said this with absolute detachment.

Her blouse had caught on the bracelet. She battled with it, trying to free the fabric from the brass chain that pinched the skin of her arm. The blouse would not come free; her face was growing hot. He must have been able to hear she was having difficulties, but though he knew how to assist in her undressing, he did not come to help. With a desperate final tug, she liberated herself from the blouse, ruining it and not caring. A cluster of white threads hung from the bracelet.

She came out in the smock. He turned away from the rain's even inward light. It was gloomy in his office, and his face, beyond the small reach of the desk lamp, was saturnine. They considered one another.

Then he said, ‘Right'—a trace of vengeance in his smooth tone?—and stepped towards her, holding a stethoscope. She lifted her chin.

His hands had not felt so cold before. He parted the smock and placed the frigid metal on her chest; knowing he was a witness to it, her heart raced. She avoided his eyes, after that.

He listened, saying nothing. She watched the whey-coloured window. Glad to have forgotten an umbrella, she craved the moment when she would be out in the rain, her clothes heavy and defiled by water. From out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that his hands were now empty; he had finished with the stethoscope.

But it was not over. He opened the smock once more and his fingers returned to her chest, to below her left breast, touching without tenderness. This method of palpation was absent, expert—gentle and cold.

‘The heart can be felt through the body?' she asked.

His forehead was tight. ‘It can.'

His fingers continued their purposeful work, raising the flesh of her breast out of their path, as if wanting to burrow between her ribs to something more tender and essential than bone. She had a painful urge to laugh. She glared at the veiled window, but there was nothing for it and she heard herself chuckle. He did not reciprocate her reprehensible mirth and made no attempt to put her at ease. She laughed more, dissolving, gasping. Perhaps she felt a pulse in his fingers—or was it hers? She overcame the laughter. In his attentive absent manner she recognised something, suddenly, from her own painting self. Ah. This was how an observer might look. So alert and dispassionate. He and she both knew how to be there and not there, this wonderful disappearing act.

He took his hands away and stored the stethoscope in a neat, slender case. That case might have held an expensive gift—a man's pacifying offering to his wife. It was over.

Soon after, to his secretary, he murmured, ‘There will be no charge.'

They never spoke of the incident. That side of the Doctor did not talk to the side she knew. Or only rarely. Once or twice since, he had again felt her heart through a soft gap in her ribs, his fingers walking a tightrope between power and submission. Was he measuring his effect on her? Was there a warning in what he felt? Had he discovered a hereditary trap waiting to spring, or some other danger? He never told her what he learned; perhaps he was not able. She would have resisted the examination, squirmed away, only she was transfixed by his face. She had looked into it, as if finding herself with a looking glass, as honestly as she could.

FOUR
The Storm

29

She drifts the way a person considered dreamy drifts, afloat but vaguely aware of the censure of onlookers. At the Moira Private Hospital, the days have the confounding texture and aftertaste of dreams. Doctors and nurses labour to keep the patients enslaved to the laws of the material world with rites of nutrition and hygiene, social niceties, polite conventions, when all the while the edges of things are so indistinct, Clarice herself might have painted them. Quite often, she could swear she was standing behind her easel.

Today her chair has been wheeled into the solarium, where she is listening to a Chopin Nocturne. However, there is no sign of a gramophone and nor does anyone appear to be playing a piano. She checks the faces of the few other patients present; if they hear the music, it does not seem to affect them. But note surrenders to note. The Nocturne is shallow and limpid, dipping occasionally into obscure depths.