Paint Your Wife (18 page)

Hilary was the perfect sitter. She did not see the world off to the sides—she looked
ahead
into
the window of a former paint shop where her reflection was broken up
by
shop
lettering.

Alma finished and we saw Hilary hold out a chubby hand
for the sketchpad. She would
have seen the elaborate arrangement of folds in her dress, the high-lit arches and
splintered shadows; and little sign of the filthy cotton dress covering her knees.
Alma let her have the drawings, and the next time I saw her in town she had pinned
one of the sketches to her dress, as if to invite passers-by to make up their own
mind on which version they preferred. Once we could have believed that she had turned
herself into a public wall that a dog might piss up against, but now here was a picture.
Here was another version. Here was a reason to look twice and wonder.

There is still another version of Hilary, and it's this one I prefer, her reddish
brown hair on fire from the sunshine splashing in the classroom windows.

She has been talking about first impressions, the folly of allowing first impressions
to rule our judgment. To make her point she has told us about a Russian explorer
who while passing our coast in the 1800s wrote of ‘a frozen sea, inland'. He would
have seen snow-capped mountains and thus concluded. We did not think of ourselves
as living in a cold place. We shifted uneasily in our seats while Mrs Phillips wrote
the name Bellinghausen up on the blackboard. It was the longest name any of us had
seen—it stretched spectacularly across the blackboard in that Russian way.

Bellinghausen, Hilary went on to say, had come within a whisker of discovering the
great white continent only to tragically mistake the distant ice shelf for fog. Comically,
he changed course to avoid contact with what he was looking for. He had seen one
thing and thought the other. He'd made the mistake of seeing what he expected to
see, what he was used to seeing.

At this point a gap opened up between what Hilary wished to share and the ability
of the class to hear and comprehend what she was saying. So Hilary had fallen back
on some quirky detail to crank up our interest. She spoke of Bellinghausen's stop
in England and his efforts to recruit some of Captain Cook's key men, especially,
Joseph Banks, the botanist. These days his is the face on our banknotes as well as
the name of an investment bank (‘wealth begins with a seed'), but back then he was
a man whose gifted eye might have seen the ice shelf for what it was and known the
difference between that and fog.

Bellinghausen couldn't persuade Banks to join the voyage and all the Russian managed
to leave England with were tins of pea soup, then a new invention crucial to the
future exploration of the great white continent.

Canned soup. It seems so contemporary; so hard to place with wooden sailing ships.
On my way home I tried to remember what Mrs Phillips had to say about can-openers.
Did she even mention openers? Or was I on to a question to stun the class with?

There are always going to be different levels of appreciation. Hilary's was more
intimate. She could become breathless at times, for example, when reading aloud to
the class from a novel that she got caught up in. She was like that with the new
and unexpected subject of Bellinghausen. She spoke softly as if to underline privileged
access. ‘The facts speak for themselves. One third of the world was known when Bellinghausen
set out across that vast tract of lined ocean, one popularly imagined to contain
serpents and sea monsters, but also one that a reasoned mind concludes must wash
up somewhere. It didn't just stop there like a ruled line in space.'

We all snorted to show our sophistication.

‘If the ocean washed up on a northern shore it must naturally follow that a shore
existed to the south in order to hold the ocean. Think of a shopping bag.'

We thought of a shopping bag.

‘Well,' she said, strolling between the blackboard and the windows, ‘containment
is important to any notion of space. A painting needs a frame. God Almighty holds
all existence in the palm of his hand. One enclosure,' she said, ‘follows another.'
Furthermore, for the sake of tidiness and notions to do with beauty there has to
be two of everything.

‘It's written in the Bible, remember?'

No one did. Our eyes scratched the floorboards between the rows of desks.

‘Two of everything,' Hilary repeated.

The dark side and the lit side, she went on to say. The proportions of a face neatly
measured up by a vertical line. (I'm more or less paraphrasing now I don't remember
her exact words.) The same applied to any understanding of land mass. A mighty continent
such as Russia must have its companion piece to the south. In the mirrored rooms
of the Russian Admiralty all this made sense, but in New Egypt primary school Hilary's
class sat dazed.

That night when Frank asked me in his usual perfunctory way what I'd learned at school
that day I was able to tell him, ‘A Russian explorer once described our place as
a “frozen sea”.'

‘Right,' he said. He got up with his plate and walked to the sink. He said as casually
as he could, a disarming flight of words over his left shoulder as he rinsed off
his plate, ‘I left something at the plant. I'll be back in an hour.'

My mother didn't ask what he'd left; she closed her eyes and clung on to a faint
smile.

The next day Hilary led the class down to the beach where we stood in readiness to
spot on the horizon a wooden sailing ship bobbing south past this ‘frozen sea'. Hilary
rose on her toes. She held back a strand of hair that kept falling across her face.
And as she strained to see over the tops of the swell falling against the horizon
I shifted to a spot behind her where I could see around the sides of her face a line
curving into a tiny pit of regret etched at the corners of her mouth. It was a look
so closely approaching sadness that I wondered if she really had expected to see
Bellinghausen's ship.

On our way back to school a man got out of a car parked near the school gates. I
was pretty sure this was Jimmy Phillips. As we got closer we could see his car packed
with things. Cartons, pillows. It was impossible to walk up Endeavour Street and
miss the car or the man and yet Hilary gave exactly that impression. It may have
been that her mind was on other things, that she might even be considering becoming
a gymnast or a vet or maybe she was wondering if Persico's fish and chip shop would
be open by the time she finished marking our homework later in the day. Jimmy didn't
stop grinning.

At the school gates things took their inevitable turn. Hilary stood to one side as
we filed through. She told us to go to the classroom and wait there.

We did what she asked, some of us with backward glances. In the class we moved as
one to the windows. By then Jimmy had placed his hands on our teacher's shoulders.
Now she placed her face against his chest. We understood this to be a farewell. No
one spoke until Jimmy crossed the road to get in
his car; the way Hilary's arms had
fallen at her side was the saddest thing and one little girl at the window said,
‘He's leaving her.'

When I passed all this on at home and reached the part where Jimmy drove off, there
was a sustained silence and it was left to Frank to think of something to say.

‘What kind of car was Jimmy in?'

I couldn't remember the make. ‘A blue one,' I thought.

‘Probably the Cambridge I saw him in last week.'

Without a word my mother got up and left the room. Frank's sigh of relief was audible
as it was long.

Questions were posted over the blackboard.

What kind of man becomes an explorer? What qualities might a man (or woman) need?
Why would a man give up one life for another that didn't necessarily promise anything
better?

We heard later that Jimmy had gone to work on one of the big hydro projects.

He was never gone for long, as I recall. Soon we got used to seeing the blue Cambridge
car parked outside the school with no one in it—a kind of calling card that made
Hilary smile. Jimmy was home again.

It was obvious she never knew when he'd be back; the decision was his alone.

There is nothing like longing to wear down the insides. In the absence of Jimmy,
Hilary's interest switched to Mrs Bellinghausen. Now we heard about the white nights
of Leningrad, and how neat and composed the world will appear when in fact it is
completely at odds with itself: she invited us to imagine, outside the window on
our burnt playing field, a
crust of snow; below that, ice; and beneath the cracks
the shiftiness of water.

School broke for summer and we forgot about Bellinghausen. Instead there were farm
chores, days at the beach, and at home the sad figure of my mother. I longed to tell
her about Frank and the woman from Wages, of what I'd seen. There was no way of knowing
if she already knew; and if she did, then I'd make things worse. If she didn't know,
well I wasn't sure that I wanted to be responsible for what then might follow. Some
bleak survival instinct told me that a gloomy household was better than no household
at all. And I didn't want to be responsible for things getting worse than they already
were. The only thing to do was to pretend that I didn't know anything.

When school resumed the appearance of Hilary was a shock. Her face had grown flabby
and despite it being summer her skin was pale. Her eyes were red. She looked like
someone who had been up all night three days running. When she brushed by our desks
we smelt the nicotine. Her hair was untended. She'd always been fluent, and as I've
indicated, excitable when a subject aroused her. But now she lost the drift of what
she set out to say. In silent reading we heard her crying very softly at her desk.
No one dared look up.

The headmaster who I remember as a fair-minded man with two vertical lines folding
the skin between his eyes had shown patience with his star teacher. Maybe he'd been
aware of a problem before the rest of us because now there was a definite sense of
Hilary being on report.

What had happened was this. One of Jimmy's absences had been unexpectedly long. He
had meant to be home for Christmas, then at the last moment sent word that he wouldn't
be. Something had come up. Over the summer break Hilary responded by contriving to
put on weight. Some will have issue with the word ‘contrived'—it sounds a bit strong,
as if she knew what she was doing. In retrospect though I believe this to be the
case. Hilary ate fearlessly, and this fearlessness of hers grew into an amazing appetite.
Even in class she had food on her desk. She ate when marking our homework. On lunch
duty she patrolled the playground with a paper bag of sandwiches and cakes. With
the benefit of hindsight her plan becomes more clear. If Jimmy could remove himself
from her life and distance himself whenever he so willed, then she would do the same.
She would bury the person Jimmy knew inside a roll of fat. She would place that person
Jimmy had once known and loved right back on the edge of memory. She would teach
Jimmy what it felt like whenever he willy-nilly removed himself from her life.

There was that final absence and that was it. Jimmy forgot to return. And eventually
we would forget the man with the long legs who used to lounge up against the blue
Cambridge outside the school gates. Hilary had grown to such a size she couldn't
fit her swollen feet into shoes any more. She had to make do with rubber jandals in
all weather. She carried a string bag for her groceries. She wore a shapeless cotton
dress that angled out from her enormously flabby arms like a pup tent. And because
of the great depths at which she had buried herself she seemed indifferent to cold
or rain.

She wasn't up to teaching any more. We heard it said she had lost her mind. When
Alma finally had to get her out of the cottage he found a chair-bound woman surrounded
by a pile of rubbish that seemed to pour like the tide down from the walls to her
bare toes.

There was a time at high school when those of us who were lucky enough to once have
had Hilary as a teacher would stop to talk to her. But that time passed. We had grown
and changed ourselves and our old teacher, we hoped to God, would no longer recognise
us. She sat on the bench muttering to herself, the rain pouring off her red face.
She wore a plastic see-through coat that she couldn't button up. The weather lashed
at her bare legs. She had become just too embarrassing to recognise any more.

12

It was nice to see Alma and the women in the newspaper. The ‘old and new fruit' headline
was a bit unfortunate. Alice wanted to write a letter but I stopped her. The important
thing was the photo. It showed that we were alive and well, still kicking. It was
timely because as usual, after the
Pacific Star
fiasco, I was feeling down in the dumps
and as it does on such occasions, the thought came to me that maybe Tommy Reece hadn't
done such a bad job after all. Down at council during the review of the ship's visit
I had to look up at Tommy's sober black-and-white portrait and when I thought of
the frilly soft porn I'd pulled from the tip that day and cleaned up with a damp
cloth for resale, it was hard to resist the thought that all mayoral dignity had
drained away with Tommy's death.

There are times when I wish I could stand in the door of the shop and gaze down the
street and find a canyon of office buildings with lines of yellow cabs double- and
triple-parked for women to step out of like spoilt pelicans into expensive department
stores. There are times when everything here is just insufficient and everywhere else
is better. I must admit
when I get down like this I tend to pop through to the section
behind the beaded curtain and pull something off the shelf to lift the spirits.