Paint Your Wife (7 page)

On Beach Road we carried on as far as Big Bay where only half of the cruise ship
people left the bus. The Englishwoman was one of them. Her husband slumped back in
his seat, his sports jacket flung back over his head so he could sleep. When I stood
outside the bus and looked up at the windows I thought all the other tilted faces
were asleep. Most as it turned out were reading.

I led the party of stragglers down to the beach. The fur seal nursery is about a
hundred and fifty metres from the car park.
After five minutes the complaints started.
The shelf was too steep. Shingle kept getting in their shoes. In grim silence we
soldiered on, until the Englishwoman piped up. She said somewhat discouragingly
that she had been to the Galapagos Islands where she had seen over five hundred fur
seals. Five hundred! I was simply hoping old Bess would be there to save the day,
a scarred veteran of the sea with an obliging manner and a vanity for having her
photo taken. The rain returned and that sent everyone running for the bus.

On their way back to the port everybody came alive. One older woman actually began
to clap her hands. They were on their way back to the cruise ship, back to civilisation
and maybe even lobster. Hereafter, everything smacked of haste. Their swift exit
from the bus. The quick handshakes. The words that held no meaning given between
the gritted teeth of a smile.
Yeah, nice to meetcha. You bet. Hang on in there.
They
didn't want to know us. From their great balustrade they hardly noticed us in our
cramped lifeboat waving our white handkerchiefs.

That evening was to be our surprise, our crowning effort, our big hurrah. As the
Pacific Star
sounded her foghorn, along Beach Road in dozens and dozens of parked
cars we tooted our horns. We tooted and tooted until the white sugar lump melted
into the pale horizon.

Along the beach fires were kicked out. People began to move away. Cars started up.
To the last there were a few drunken toots, then all was quiet. The night reared
up. We heard a wave roll up the beach and the pebbles roll over.

The next day the fliers with their flora and fauna information floated soggily across
the bar. A few days after that the first of Dean Eliot's test tubes of saltwater and
fresh air were washed
ashore. We were back to life as we had known it before the
visit of the cruise ship. We were back to our gaudy selves and that would have been
that, put it all down to experience, had not a strange thing happened.

The night the cruise ship put out to sea and for several nights after that, along
Broadway, they arrived like moths in the night—women my mother's age, a few younger
ones as well, come to find themselves in Alma's crowd scene painted over the derelict
shop windows.

The portraits were based on sketches Alma had done more than forty years earlier.
There was one of my mother sitting on a set of porch steps. She looked so young.
Painfully young. She must have been in her twenties. In those days she was married
to George. In addition to my mother I counted twenty-five other faces. Now the original
sitters of these paintings wrapped themselves up against the night and walked slowly
with their faces turned to Alma's portraits. Some who had already spotted themselves
in previous visits went directly to that section of the crowd. It was a big mural;
as I've said, I'd asked him to produce something that would stretch over three shop
windows. During the following days the paintings drew a lot of attention and comment.
I watched from my shop door. It was fun to observe those women who were seeing it
for the first time; the way they crawled along the pavement with a deliberate shopper's
eye. Some had to dig around for their glasses. These women would lean closer and
try on different faces. It was like someone rifling through a lost property box. Word
must have spread far and wide because people who had moved away from the district
years ago turned up out of the blue. Celia Merchant was one. She arrived in a late-model
car,
lined up her younger self with a camera flash and ran back to the car and drove
off.

When I reported this to Alice she said in a critical voice, ‘That's Celia.' Then
she asked, ‘Who else has been down there?'

I said, ‘Hilary Phillips,' and she answered, ‘Poor Hilary.'

Hilary was the only woman who could put up with the shamelessness of staring at herself
in broad daylight and not give a damn. There were people who refused to believe that
this large, unhealthy-looking woman with emphysema and tiny screwed-up eyes was the
same person as the alert face leaning forward from the crowd of painted women, a
fresh face on the end of a delicate neck seeking engagement. Even the older Hilary
looked doubtful at times. She could even look like she was cross with that young
person. Sometimes you actually heard her talk back to the young woman on the window.
Once I saw her rock back on her heels with laughter at a shared joke. Hilary didn't
care that anyone was watching. She didn't give a toss for what people might think
of her. She was past that, and yet when I saw her stand before her younger self she
could look puzzled and worried as though that younger face belonged to a scrupulous
bank clerk with news that she didn't have as much money in her bank account as she
had thought.

For these women in whom youth had already passed there was a pleasant and exhilarating
feeling of resurrection. Now—and come to think of it, it wasn't just Hilary, I'd
noticed other women doing this—Hilary turned her face very slowly from the painted
one in the window. The thought was there, so long as she didn't rush it or make too
sudden a movement, she might take that younger face off into the world with her.

During the day men in farm vehicles pulled over and got out to saunter up to the
painted shop windows and search for certain faces known to them. Family members,
obviously, sons, daughters, grandchildren in tow. I caught myself doing the same
thing. If no one was in the shop I found myself wandering across the street to stare
at the portrait of my mother sitting on that set of porch steps. Here, she is not
yet my mother. She is a woman whose history is still mostly in front of her. In the
portrait she is at least fifteen years younger than the son staring back at her.

A week passed, then another. Yet there was no good reason to take the portraits down.
For one thing, Alma had waited nearly forty years for this exhibition. For another,
the portraits were beginning to attract out-of-town interest. Who were these women?
How had the portraits come into being?

3

In the years 1941 to 1943, Alma painted a whole community of women. He had completed
thirty-seven portraits by the time the men came back from the war, and another five
hundred and eighty sketches of my mother, Alice Hands, as she was known then.

I suppose the sketches amount to slices of life. Hurried drawings of women on all
fours as they weed and tend to their gardens, of them hanging up the washing or idling
at a window alone with their thoughts. Their tinkering inquisitiveness, as they lift
the lid on the letterbox, hope fading. On occasion he liked to employ props. His
explanation was that certain accessories extract a look that would not otherwise
avail itself. The mere touch of something precious and a face will come alive. Place
a teapot in a woman's hands and look at how it heightens the shoulders and drops
the head. And yet as much as he sketched the women of the district in their everyday
activities, more often than not it was the formal pose that they requested. They
were impatient with the three-quarter perspective where one eye is half concealed
by the bridge of the nose. They
wanted to be looked at, which is hardly surprising,
I suppose, since their men were away at the war. Innocently, Alma did not imagine
any reciprocal joy until Hilary James told him, ‘You know something, Alma, when you
are drawing I feel like you're touching me.' The shining, earnest look in Hilary's
eyes scared him into laying down his pencil. He told her, ‘I can stop if you like,
Hil?' But, of course this is not what she meant or wished to hear.

Not all the men went off to war. Some of them stayed back, men of a certain age,
let's say, together with those who were wedded to the land, some of whom were deemed
crucial to the wartime economy. Not only farmers but also bushmen who no one kept
tabs on. The first category lived on remote farms the way others occupy distant countries.
They and the bushmen rarely entered the women's lives.

After the men in the district went off to fight the women were left with the potholes
of their old existence—farm machinery, trucks, a rusting idleness. Horses stood in
paddocks awaiting their riders. Grass grew over the cricket pitches. When the crossbar
fell off the goalposts in a storm no one fixed it. The doors to the hotel in town
grew sullen and the bars ever gloomier.

Soon the women forgot to lower their eyes. Bashfulness slipped from their skin. They
showed up in town hatless and laughing. With the younger ones, though, a dullness
spread across their faces. At times it looked like a sheet of disappointment, as
if they were asking,
Is this all there is?
In their wondering…well, they could not
see the edges of their wondering. Certain gestures and intuitions came naturally
but they were less sure of what they were connected to. Smiles of vanity
tend to
leave faint traces around the reach of the nostril and in the corner of the eye.
On the inside they create an almost mindless sunburst which the outer features struggle
to contain. Such a smile disappeared during those years of the war.

On the beach as well a freer spirit ruled. One low tide Alma happened to venture
around a point that is inaccessible during high water and there he came upon two
women sunbathing without a stitch on. Alice was sure Alma had seen her and Victoria.
He had looked and then looked quickly away. At thirty-seven Victoria was ten years
older than Alice. My mother sat up and pulled a towel around herself. Victoria didn't
bother. What was the point, after all? Alma had already looked.

And besides, Alma was regarded as harmless. For a man just turned thirty this is
not especially flattering. But it was known that his life had been touched by tragedy.
Alma had lost a young wife in a train accident. His decision to live alone seemed
both sad and honourable, as though having tried that other life which had ended so
badly, from now on he would tread more carefully. For another thing, his interest,
this near-obsession with drawing, made Alma seem a less-than-dangerous male. A male
without horns. He was also the local teacher out at the country school with a roll
of half a dozen farm kids. Five miles from town or in those days thirty minutes on
a bike. Today the school is a café and the surrounding countryside has been swallowed
up by the explosion of suburbia in the sixties, the rich years of NE Paints, the
tip, and the new bypass. Everything considered, if a man had to stumble upon my mother
and her friend sunbathing in the nude you couldn't go past Alma, a man in an old
straw hat who carried his flat tin case of pencils along with his ratter's gear in
a canvas knapsack.

In the summer of '42 there was a rat infestation on an unprecedented scale. In broad
daylight rats were seen running up trees and crossing the road. Houses and barns
were overrun. School finished in December and didn't resume until February. Over the
intervening period Alma was out every day on ratting business. He would sprinkle
his blue trails of poison and return the next day to pick up the corpses. It was
not exactly glamorous work but there are few things he says he's done in life that
were appreciated as much.

A dead rat is a slightly worse spectacle than a live one. A dead rat conjures up
the bubonic plague, bodies piled into carts hauled up medieval streets. And while
a live rat is little more than an insult to our idea of civilised space, an infestation
is something else again. The only information my mother gleaned from her own mother
leading up to her marriage with George Hands were tips on keeping a house clean.
Cleanliness and wifeliness went hand in hand. The sight of unhurried rats inside
the house struck at the moral heart of what my mother and her generation thought
important.

She remembered what George had told her to do. Get hold of Alma. In those days he
was the nearest neighbour for miles around, though she still hadn't visited him at
home. She left a note in his letterbox.

Alma came down the hill that evening and laid his poison. He was back in the morning
to collect the corpses. There wasn't a room without a dead rat. The most Alice had
heard was some scratching noises behind walls and out at the kitchen at night. She
thought Alma might catch one or two but never these dozens. As he stood there with
brown paper bags filled with dead rats she tried to pay him. But he wouldn't hear
of it.
So she offered to bake him a cake. A banana cake, she said upping the ante.
He dithered but in the end decided no, he couldn't accept that either. ‘I would Alice,
a smart man doesn't ordinarily turn down banana cake, but I don't want to establish
a precedent, if you know what I mean.'

He said, ‘I can only eat so many cakes.'

‘Well, that may be so, but I still want to give you something.'

‘You could sit for me,' he said. ‘I'd like to draw you, if you're comfortable with
that.'

My mother was lost for a reply. Although Alma had caught her by surprise it wasn't
like he was asking her out, though it was close, very close indeed. To be drawn is
to be singled out.

Alma must have sensed her inner conflict because he pressed his lips together thoughtfully
and said, ‘I was thinking in lieu of payment.' It was the gentlest pressure he applied.
My mother noticed his smile. It was a nice smile.
In lieu of payment.
There was obviously
nothing threatening about it. Other men spoke loudly, as if they wanted a third party
to hear and mark them for wittiness. They stumbled over kindness of course, wiped
a kind remark from their mouths like it was spittle. So when Alma said ‘in lieu of' there was just the gentlest hint of—of what exactly? Services rendered? She didn't
know Alma well enough to judge. She'd been married for little over a year when George
signed up with the armed forces. Over that time George had had the most to do with
Alma. There was that one time before he left for overseas that they'd had Alma down
for a card evening. He'd shown no guile at cards. He didn't know how to be tricky—not
like George with a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Still, she had to beat out all the
usual bush fires
thinking he might mean something extra. Now she rounded that bend
of suspicion she came into a more generous understanding. This was Alma, a man who
had lost his wife and his memory, and of whom George had said, ‘For God's sake, if
anything goes wrong get hold of Alma. He knows the drill and I've told him to expect
a call from time to time.'