Paint Your Wife (13 page)

By mid-February, some progress was evident. Alice could see a new hill rise in the
sitting-room window, while in another place the old hill was being lowered. The view
across to the ranges was slowly erased and this gave the house an odd sinking feeling.
When George came in at night his eyes were half-closed with fatigue. Every bit of
muscular effort had been drained from him. But Alice heard no complaint. She was
hoping that once he realised the immensity of the undertaking he would give it up
of his own accord. For now, though, there was still no sign of that happening as
he plonked himself down in his evening bath. Once after a particularly gruelling
day, George fell asleep in the bath and my mother had to reach down and find the plug
between his ankles and drain the water around George's sleeping torso in case he
drowned in his dreams.

He was never too tired to eat. He wolfed down whatever she put in front of him. Afterwards
he would sit back in a glow of satisfaction and watch Alice clear away the dishes.
As she set a cup of tea before him he might say, ‘A hundred and forty-eight barrow
loads today, Alice.'

My mother would have to try and remember the previous day's figure.

‘That's thirty more than yesterday.'

She'd realise her mistake as George smiled modestly down at his tobacco pouch.

‘Actually, it's forty more.'

The time to have spoken out and insist he drop this insane project was at the beginning.
My mother had taken him too
lightly at his word. Only once in passing did she manage
to say, ‘Honestly George, I don't mind the hill the way it is…' but he hadn't responded.
Perhaps he didn't hear in that way megalomania is said to be indifferent to dissenting
voices.

Already it was March, and too late to stop him. Too many yards of soil had already
been shifted on Alice's account. Between this calendar month and George shrugging
off his invalid's dressing-gown, people had died, others had been born. A man raking
his hair with a steel comb had been struck by lightning. Throughout it all George
chewed away at the hill. And it has to be said, as George's defenders claimed, at
times it felt like there was just too much seriousness in the air.

There is something to the idea that idleness has its season. Standing in long wet
roadside grass is not conducive to watching a man wheelbarrow a hill away. In June
and July, as the days shortened and rain fell with grey urgency, the crowd along
the fence line dropped away.

A great-uncle of George turned up for a brief stay. He was a heavy man who hobbled
around on bad hips and wore an office shirt tucked into farm trousers. The uncle had
made a strong impression on George as a small boy. The older man had taught him how
to fish and, on family visits, would slip George a small glass of beer. The same loud
boisterous figure kept him up long after his mother said it was time to go to bed.
Now it was the turn of the favourite uncle to persuade George to lay down his shovel
and leave the damn hill alone.

Others had tried, well-wishers, friends of the extended family. They just ended up
walking beside George and his
barrow between the old hill and the new one. George
couldn't just stop for any old chit-chat. With new hope my mother stood at the sitting-room
window and watched George's uncle pad across the paddock with a chair he'd taken
from the kitchen. No one had done that before. There was an innovative air about
George's uncle that was promising. He didn't look the kind to give up easily. Alice
watched him park his chair and arrange his tobacco and tea flask. Obviously he was
there for the long haul.

The uncle had told my mother that what he had to say to George was perhaps best kept
to themselves. He did indicate, however, that he wasn't one to stride into lecturing
mode. Rather, his style was to let the words fall about George and soften him up
like persistent rain. ‘Trust me, Alice,' he told her. ‘Nagging doesn't work. It just
turns a man's head, if you see what I mean.'

Across the paddock Alice saw George hesitate with his implements—there had been no
advance
notice
of the uncle's visit—there was a handshake, some words, the uncle
good-naturedly
waving
him on. George seemed to give a grateful nod before hurling
himself at
the
hillside. The uncle turned round and gave a nod in the direction of
the
house.

Throughout the day, whenever Alice checked at the window, the scene was the same.
Persistent rain, she reminded herself, and to be patient. George was shovelling and
running, with new vigour if anything, back and forth between the old hill and the
new one. Every now and then the uncle uncrossed his legs to reach down for his tea
flask or tobacco. It was getting on for dusk when she thought she'd check once more.
This time there was George with his barrow moving at a spry trot
towards the open
gate, the fat uncle trailing behind, his hand raised as if to make another point.
Alice fell back from the window, discouraged.

The uncle drank a lot that night. He'd brought his own whisky. At dinner he told
stories and risqué jokes. The talk seemed to provoke his appetite, and gloss over
his failure. After he'd cleaned off the roasting dish he started on Alice's leftovers.
George didn't say a lot. He kept his uncle going with a word here and there. Otherwise
he sat up like a polite child who knows that if he keeps his head down he will pass
unnoticed. At a certain point he looked over at the window covered with night and
condensation. He moved a hand to his mouth as he yawned and excused himself from
the table. He had a big day starting in the morning. He smiled at his favourite uncle
and winked at Alice and took himself off to bed.

Later, while my mother was doing the dishes, the uncle came up behind her and pinched
her bottom. She leapt from her daydream; a cup and saucer flew up in the air and broke
over the floor. George's adventurous uncle backed away with his hands raised, his
remorseful eyes shifting to the end of the house where George was already tucked
up in bed.

In the morning Alice heard George get up and shuffle about. It was very early—still
dark. She got up and went to the window in time to see George walk his barrow across
the paddock and disappear into a thick mist. She let the curtain go and went back
to bed. Another two hours passed before she got up and returned to the window, this
time to see the uncle totter out, this time without a kitchen chair. She'd put out
some breakfast but he must have passed it up. She had an idea he was on his way to
say goodbye to his nephew. At least she hoped
that was so; she didn't want to see
him again. She locked herself in the bathroom and sat on the toilet with a cigarette,
staring at the peeling blue paint. In another ten minutes she heard the uncle's car
start up.

Late August. A lightness in the sky. Signs that winter was passing. If you stopped
absolutely still and held your breath you could feel the sun crawl and settle over
your face, neck, arms. A passing milk truck driver mulling on these things wouldn't
have given it another thought at that hour, a barefoot woman in a raincoat standing
in the middle of a paddock, a line of heifers looking on between the woman and where
a man was shovelling. The heifers seemed to be waiting for George to turn around
and discover his wife. A mob of sheep in the next paddock looked as one along their
grubby flanks at the woman. The sun moved serenely behind cloud and a huge shadow
spread like a stain over the half-bitten hill; when the sun re-emerged it was brighter
and more dazzling than before. There was a dark flash of shadow against the hill as
George speared the shovel head. He picked up the handles of his barrow and balanced
his way along the planks to the new hill site. He had only to turn his head a little
to the left and he would have seen what the heifers and the sheep and the line of
birds on the pylon could see. If only he'd put his calculations to one side for a
moment.

From his deck Alma Martin saw George lay down his barrow. He thought, here we go,
George boy, your day is about to turn. But no, what does George do? He brings his
tobacco out of his back pocket. The heifers, his wife, the sheep, the
birds and the
rest of the world wait patiently while he rolls a cigarette and then stoops to pick
up the handles and run the barrow the rest of the way to the tip face. The large
heads of the heifers were the only ones to turn when George came back the other way
with his empty barrow—they did so in a neat choreographed line as he ran back and
picked up his shovel to resume his battle with the hill.

The woman in the raincoat turned up at Alma's door a few minutes later. She was unbuttoning
her coat as she came through the door, and as Alma had guessed, she was wearing nothing
underneath it.

It wasn't the same as it had been. It wasn't like when George and the others were
away at the war, when it felt like they were the only two inhabitants left in the
world. Now they were like compatriots who meet in a foreign place to share memories
of how things used to be. They talked a lot about earlier times. And then in the
way it always did these days, talk would turn back to George.

By the end of September he had made such inroads that they began to talk about the
end of the project, and what would happen then. My mother was resigned that one day
it would come to that—she had begun to imagine the moment when George would fling
down his shovel, wipe his forehead and turn to her with a look of sweaty accomplishment.
And then what? What would she say? ‘Thanks very much, George'?

My mother would have left George had Alma Martin asked her to. She'd have given up
the farm for the fire-watcher's cottage on the hill. There was plenty of opportunity
for Alma to take the bull by the horns and propose something. But inertia is Alma's
failing. His way is to respond rather than to
initiate. And for all his sharp observation
and dedication he failed to see my mother's gradual slide away from him.

In the sketches of her during this period, the heightened eyebrow betrays irritation
that Alma should think to sketch at a time such as this. She could well believe he
had just sat in his seat as the train left the tracks.

7

What is important in life? If you ask a man without the use of his legs he will answer—legs.
The same question asked of a legless man with a pencil and paper in his hands will
produce a different answer. He wishes only to see more clearly. This was Alma's idea—his
hope for Dean's salvation from immobility.

These days when Victoria left Dean drawing he didn't seem to notice her tip-toe departure.
Mind you, Victoria would say Dean didn't seem overly aware of her presence in the
first place. Pencil, eyes focused to an almost mean-spirited extent, he looked prepared
to be surprised by what he was drawing—in this instance, a lemon tree—in case it
turned out to be not what he thought it was. Victoria, on the other hand, didn't
have time to discover that a lemon tree, as it turns out, is, by the way, a lemon
tree. And there it is on paper, more or less how it looks in the garden. It was such
an idle and pointless discovery when elsewhere around the house there was work to
be done, rat carcasses to dispose of. Still, it was better this way. She didn't mind
leaving him when he was so engrossed in what he was drawing. It was preferable that
he stare at that lemon
tree than lie back in bed translating damp areas over the
ceiling into various countries. She could leave him to draw, mount her bike and move
out into the world.

But then Alma had to get Dean on to portraiture. And now along with being Dean's
legs, Victoria had become his sitter and this captivity was the worst she had known.
Eventually Alma was to see the problem. He told Dean it was time for a history lesson.

The woman in Cézanne's life was a comely woman with piled brunette hair. The artist
stared at her more than he did at the sky or the family or the moon or the sailboat
on the blue horizon. She was his constant subject—forty-four portraits in all. That's
a lot of staring. But give credit where it's due. That's also a lot of patient sitting.
In the portraits hers is a face worn by silence. She sits as one would sit in the
dark. Her face is closed down. She begins to look fed up. She looks like she would
rather be out dancing. She looks like the nineteen-year-old she was when she and
Cézanne first met, someone who knows it is time for something else but who is unable
to rise from the chair.

Here too is Victoria's predicament. She is stuck in her chair. She sits and sits.
Then at a rogue thought her shoulders might find occasion to drop as she sighs, and
Dean will look up with annoyance when he sees that she has shifted her expression.
He tells her that it's like trying to nail a fast-moving cloud to the one spot in
the sky. ‘Hopeless if the sky is moving about too.'

For hours on end she sits for her invalid son to draw her, a hostage to Dean's needs—she
already washes his clothes, washes him, holds him up over the bowl so he can piss.
It is excruciating for them both. A grown man with legs of jelly writhing
inside
her strong arms. The stern sound of Dean's piss against the porcelain bowl. ‘Are
we there yet, Dean?'

There are certain things that Alma could congratulate Dean for achieving in his sketches
but perhaps they have been achieved too well. His mother's misery is not something
he wants to draw attention to. It's time for a change of plan.

‘Dean,' Alma said, easing forward on his chair. ‘I think it's time we gave landscape
a go.'

They were sitting outside and Victoria had cleared Dean's drawing materials from
the card table to make room for the teapot and cake.