Night Street (6 page)

She became aware that the men were snickering, while at the back of the disorderly group, slightly apart, she noticed someone she had never before set eyes on. He was leaning against the wall, not participating in the laughter. He was tall and his face was tanned.

‘We're not making fun of you,' said Henry, battling to be sober but breaking into mirth again. The tall man glanced at the floor, as though offended. ‘It's that we were discussing it, when you came in—the very same bridge.'

He did not mean anything bad, Henry. He was one of several boys who passed the role of joker around; he was not fashioned for seriousness. Mostly nobody paid Clarice too much attention, except when Meldrum mentioned her technique. Then their mouths might twitch into slight smiles, which could have meant scepticism. Still, by and large, she appreciated the others because they cared for art; this somehow unified them all. But she kept to herself.

She was out of the painting now and looked levelly at Henry, which made him ill at ease.

The tall man's eyes touched her as she said, ‘What were you saying when I came in? You can let me in on the joke.'

Like most of the class, Henry was perhaps ten years her junior. He was immature, though it was not his age. He made a stunted, comic gesture.

‘That Princes Bridge is an eyesore. With those horrid palms.'

They laughed because she had chosen to paint what they deemed unworthy of paint, the refuse of blemished modern Melbourne. It was always newly startling to discover that her subjects were considered unsightly or irrelevant.

The tall man was still not laughing and it appeared to her that he had quiet, uncommon ideas of his own.

Clarice did not want to explain to Henry what she had seen: the ingenuous trees, their tops like unmanaged morning hair, and the rhythm of their vertical offerings to the horizontal bridge, which was itself a homage to the horizon. The optimism of it, the fallible humanness. She reddened. Clarice's and Henry's ideas of beauty were incompatible.

Her smile was diluted. ‘It took my fancy,' she said.

Someone giggled.

‘Oh, leave her alone,' Henry mumbled, but burst into strident laughter, the others joining him.

Clarice laughed for a moment too, then noticed a spot of paint on her cardigan. Ultramarine. It would not come out.

‘You're unimaginative,' said the tall man to those who had laughed.

It was a clever insult to direct at artists, a dire pronouncement, and they were shamed. He had taken revenge for her. As though he were offering her an arm for support. She had a sense of accepting the arm and standing up straighter beside him. The room had been pacified, now harbouring softly cloudy light. His authority animated it, each detail of the space made significant by its proximity to him. He was closer to her in age, she thought, than to the younger ones.

Meldrum made his usual decisive entrance, on a mission. They moved to their places, metamorphosing into mute students, acolytes.

Meldrum stopped by the tall man, addressing him respectfully, ‘Arthur.' It was the first time she heard his name in anyone's mouth.

The two men shook hands; as Arthur gave his right hand, she saw the wedding band on his left. A ring—that cool, conclusive statement of ownership. Of fate decided.

And she heard the other name. ‘It's good to see you here,' Meldrum continued. ‘How's Bella?'

The question constricted her chest, somehow more than the ring. She felt bitterness for that bouncy bubble of a word,
Bella
. It was at this point that she weighed her desire, so overblown it must be the blossoming of a longing that had always been in her, growing; simultaneously, she understood how it could be thwarted.

After class, a bunch of them decided to walk to the station together. Henry sidled over to Clarice, by way of an apology for before, and asked if she would go with them. She was rubbing futilely at the paint stain on her cardigan. She had overheard that Arthur would be among the group. They were all taken with the novelty of him.

‘I'll tag along,' she said. ‘Thanks.'

She dawdled, packing up. He was behind her.

She turned and . . . yes. He—Arthur—was at the back of the room, leaning towards the panel she had hung to dry. He was studying it.

She thought he blushed as she came near.

‘You have quite an eye,' he said.

8

The low sky thickened, like a white sauce reducing in a pan. Clarice and Arthur walked behind the others. Wisps of conversation reached them, a mention of Freud. Someone was doggedly analysing last night's dream.

‘You have an umbrella,' Arthur said. ‘Do you have far to go at the other end?'

‘No, not far.' She heard her voice, feeble and intent on lightness. ‘Anyway, I don't mind rain.'

‘I'm the same myself. People are always complaining about the weather. I like any weather.'

She nodded. It was necessary, safer, to be sparing with words. As if they were spies, every element of an exchange and the interplay between the elements had to be evaluated. She had not felt this before with a man. He seemed to be trying to adjust to the rhythm of her stride. She listened to the city, people packing up shop, heading home or for a drink, rushing to catch trams or trains, pausing at doors that were entrances or exits, depending on the direction of one's intention.

Up ahead, Henry was evoking a dream in which he was a king. He expounded on the kingly trappings, fine clothing, jewels and several buxom wives. It did not have the feel of a true dream. An inaudible, evidently bawdy detail provoked guffaws. The party atmosphere was Arthur's doing. It was his confidence, his casual splendour. They were not brave enough yet to talk freely to him, but he agitated them.

‘I wouldn't know how to tell a dream,' Clarice offered. ‘To put words to it.'

‘No. Probably wiser not to.'

She watched a man catch a hat the wind had pulled off his very smooth, bald head.

‘We have a daughter,' Arthur added, after a while.

‘Oh. And you enjoy painting?'

‘I don't know if enjoy is the word. It's new for me.'

She had begun to tremble earlier at the studio, when she sensed him behind her and then saw him looking avidly at her board. But the trembling was moving to her knees, spreading through her abdomen and chest, her hands and even the bones of her face; the breath in her was distressed. Though she could not have imagined it, she saw now that she had been waiting for this, for something elemental to take command of her body. Was this love?

‘I live with my parents,' she said. ‘I sort of look after them.'

They had been facing straight ahead, but—briefly—he glanced sideways at her. She wondered whether her eyes were greener or browner at that moment, if it mattered, what kind of a woman he glimpsed.

9

A month had passed since his arrival in the studio. Already, though they were only cautiously friends, she knew much about him, collecting facts. He was a shy painter. Painting appeared to be the one area in which he was shy. He was unhurried, loose in himself, most of the time. His stance related easily to the ground beneath him. He walked strongly, seeming to expect a steady flow of good luck. He observed the moving shapes of the sky in the way of country people. He took control of a room without trying. He was a relaxed talker and a teller of stories, loving to entertain a group and quite humorous when the mood took him. Not talking was not a problem for him, however, as it can be for those whose talk is smooth. Silence flattered him like a high-class suit, a generously positioned lamp.

‘Out there', as he sometimes said, he was a lawyer and you imagined him in this role as trenchant and formidable, always winning his cases. In fact, it turned out he was rather renowned, his name often in the newspapers. Whereas in the quieter world of painting, he was an unknown and a neophyte, feeling his way. It caught Clarice's attention: he had reduced himself to this. He chose to be unsure, to proceed unarmed, surrendering to the experiment. He was humbled and perhaps a little afraid with a paintbrush, which he held solemnly and also self-mockingly, as if it were a mast bare of flag and he could represent only his own dreamed country. Arthur the man, keen to be a schoolboy again in Meldrum's classroom. He was both a natural and a self-trained watcher, the good kind; he had sensitivity and maybe a scholar's humility.

And she had seen his wife. Bella. In a spotted, black-belted dress. Not the child, thankfully. But the Mrs in her spotted dress, the wifely existence of whom could not be denied. His other half—which was not right, as he was so frighteningly whole on his own. Whole, yet questing, his gaze bruising what it passed over.

Arthur was a whetstone keeping her sharp, over-alert, perverting her nights so they became a wakeful, sickly, queerly self-satisfied torture. The nights could be difficult. But they ended with a morning-to-be like this one, the fragrant world latent in the reddish dark and the cart in her hand rolling single-mindedly on its wheels towards the sea. When Clarice got to Black Rock, the waves were gentle, nocturnal yet, almost soundless. And she was besotted. Besotted with the sea and besotted with Arthur Blackburn.

A visual imagination can be a scourge and, with her mind's eye, she saw scenes she would rather not have been privy to: Bella's hair being brushed by lamplight, the ripe swelling of her belly with his child, their rapturous intimacy. It seemed unfair that a woman should have a name meaning beautiful, as if she had the monopoly on beauty. Clarice had not found Bella stunningly attractive, not even particularly comely, however she doubted her own perception. There had to be rare loveliness in a woman with such a lucky name and destiny. Perhaps it lay in a detail not immediately obvious. The sinuous volumes of her thighs. Her warm, private smell. Or—painful to consider—some quality of her heart.

Clarice was wretched from wrong, incessant thinking and under its spell. She was often cruel to herself in those days, vindictive, punishing herself in little, secret ways, pinching the flesh of her own arm or biting her tongue that threatened to speak. She was brutally exacting with her art, hating most of her paintings, once they were complete. But she was still too self-indulgent and undisciplined to rein in her truant mind. She was really only tranquil when properly in a painting; that was her respite.

She settled into a spot on the beach, separating her feet the right distance, stretching her toes inside her shoes. Mercifully, extraneous thoughts were dispersing, dropping away. The dawn began and she lifted the cart's lid, entering the usual strange meditation. She emptied so she could fill, or was it feel
—
differently, calmly? She rubbed her hands together, getting the blood flowing. Looking. Impressions travelled towards her like wave fronts through a kind of ether. Her brush in a loose grip, she was part of a design larger than her own, deeply scientific or inscrutably holy.

Afterwards, slightly cold, she stood in her bathing suit close to the sea. When pictures of Arthur returned to surround her, a dense fog, she jogged into the water.

Swimming, she followed for a while the cool, majestic progress of an ocean liner, vaguely curious about the intrigues and inner lives of its passengers. The mindless gliding of gulls held her attention longer, as did her astonishment at how a lone body, hers, could disturb and alter a wave, so subtly. Time was soft and the universe fecund. She discovered, putting her chin to it, a strand of seaweed on her shoulder, verdant and fishily alive. It stayed where it was, amiably claiming her. And there was more of the plant floating about, like her own marine hair. Those were her long, luxuriant tresses: she had intermingled with the watery element. She was anaesthetised.

But here was Arthur again, bringing back the new ignited Clarice. Coming in, chilled and shaking, she found Herb on the beach. He waved and she approached. He was sitting drinking tea and smoking, pleased with himself, carefree, irreverent. ‘I've been round at Sandringham,' he said. ‘What a day for it. I drew the fishermen with their nets. Magical thing. You'll have a cup? I've got a fresh pot brewing.'

The morning was getting on and there was not long left, the minutes shrinking quickly. ‘Lovely,' she said.

He looked her up and down. ‘You'd better get some clothes on.'

In the caravan, her damp nakedness was preternaturally white. She dressed, and forced her hand through her tangled hair. There was a sketchbook on the cot. She thought of the airiness of fishing nets, which Herb—with that weightless quality of his—would know how to convey, but she did not open it. He sometimes asked for her opinion on something and she was always reluctant, thinking it better not to look at a friend's work that way; she might be hard on it, as she could be on her own. But she had seen a few of his paintings, and liked the pioneer hunger they had in them. Where would this take him? Back in the expanding light, she was shivery, jerky.

‘I must be coming down with something.' She watched the swirl of milk on the surface of her tea, a white spiral staircase slowly undoing itself.

They sat for a few minutes, the sun hot but not quite easing her chill.

As if apprehending the drift of her thoughts, Herb said, ‘You should get yourself a boyfriend. It would do you good.' He glanced away. ‘I hear on the grapevine that someone has rather taken to you.'

She had jumped a little in her chair, unmasked. She laughed—a husky, staccato attempt at subterfuge. She saw that it had been unsuccessful. ‘Oh, really? He has a wife. Didn't you know?'

‘I hadn't noticed.' Herb slurped his tea. ‘The little problem of marriage. Would it be a problem, though?'

She had a twitch of irritation. He imagined that the lives of others should be as easy and light as his own. They were all masters of their own fate; surely they all enjoyed the luxury of improvisation. And he did not consider how different it was for a woman. Conspicuously, she ignored him.