Prochownik's Dream (10 page)

He propped the toy with its back to the wall. ‘There! You'll be okay till we get back. You don't think he might change his mind while we're out?' he asked her.

‘He can't hear
you
,' she said.

‘See you later, Snoopy.'

They went out and down the path. He tried to take her hand but she wouldn't let him. She walked ahead of him along the footpath, being independent; he stayed a couple of paces behind, reprimanded.

She stopped abruptly and looked back at her heel.

He squatted beside her.

The ribbon on her pink imitation ballet shoe had come loose. She did not say anything but stood twisted around, frowning at the trailing ribbon. He leaned her small body into him and retied the ribbon. She watched, making sure he was getting it right. ‘How's that?'

She resumed her solitary progress, siding with her mother.

•

Toni and Teresa were standing together in the open door of Nada's bedroom looking in at their sleeping daughter. They had been curled up on the sofa all evening, drinking wine and watching a movie. There had been no big talk between them. They had been keeping to the privileged intimacies of the small stuff, staying within the safety zone.

Nada was lying sideways across her bunk on her back, the sheet thrown aside, an eerie glimmer of the whites of her eyes, her lips parted, her arms flung out as if she had been tossed, weightless, through the firmament by an elemental force and was no longer their little girl but a small stranger embarked on a journey that was not their journey.

Teresa whispered, ‘Should we straighten her up, do you think?'

He stepped into the room, took hold of Nada and eased her around so that she lay lengthwise along the bed, retrieving her from the wildness of her dreams.

She frowned but did not wake.

‘Don't wake her!' Teresa whispered at his shoulder.

They pulled the sheet and the summer doona up around the little girl's chin, placed her arms in under the covers and stepped back. She twitched but stayed straightened. Their little girl again. No longer flying away from them.

‘That's better,' Teresa whispered.

They watched her, held by the fascination of their intense feelings for their child, a sense of their own frailty, the fragility of the link that was carrying them along together.

‘We should give her a little sister or brother,' Teresa said. ‘It's not fair to leave her on her own.'

‘We're not leaving her on her own. She's got us.'

Teresa turned to him. ‘Do you remember when you were her age?'

‘No.' But he did remember.

‘What happens to our first memories?' Teresa wondered.

He looked down at his daughter. His first memory was vivid; he had been Nada's age. He and his father were standing by helplessly watching his brother Roy fighting his father's tormentor in the entrance to the flats. The man going over backwards, his head hitting the kerbstone with a crack like a beam snapping. And they had stood, appalled, in the apocalyptic silence, knowing the man was dead and everything had changed for them . . . ‘She doesn't need a brother or sister,' he said. ‘She's okay the way she is.'

Teresa looked at him. ‘An only child is not a real family,' she insisted quietly.

‘I need a drink of water,' he said.

‘Get me one too.' She touched his arm.

He turned and kissed her gently on the mouth.

She went down the passage and into their bedroom, and he walked back through the house to the kitchen. In the half-light of the living area his father's dark jacket hung on the back of the chair, as if his father were there working in the night hours, bending over his paints in his shirtsleeves and braces, lovingly disclosing the quiet beauty of the everyday in their lives, surprising them by making art of his wife's kitchen utensils. The wonder of how he did it. The whisper of his own childhood voice,
What are you painting, Dad?
The beautiful smell of his father in the night. His dad portraying his love for them through the objects familiar to their hands. He remembered a small rectangular watercolour of his mother's ironing board and iron, an image as poignantly the woman herself for those who knew her as his own carefully crafted portrait had been . . . He was not sure whether Marina knew the story of his brother's imprisonment. He could never remember who knew their family story and who did not know it. He went into the kitchen and filled two glasses with water from the tap and carried them back to the bedroom.

Teresa was under the sheet, her bedside light off, turned on her side, her face to the wall. He set the glass of water beside her.

She murmured sleepily, ‘Thanks, darling.'

He undressed and climbed into the bed, and lay on his back beside her. Minutes passed and he was drifting into sleep when she turned to him, her voice coming out of the dark, husky and anxious, as if she had been building her resolve to put the question to him. ‘Were you two lovers?'

He came out of the haze of his half-sleep. ‘
Who
?'

‘You and her—Marina Golding? Back then, at her place at Mount Macedon? Before my time?'

‘No,' he said firmly. He was alert now.

‘How can I be sure?'

He thought about her question. How could she be sure? She had never sought such a reassurance from him before. They had never questioned each other's word. Now, suddenly, the certainty of each other was no longer there. He spoke carefully. ‘I didn't like her back then,' he said. It was true. ‘I was just doing a drawing.'

‘And now you
do
like her?'

He measured his response. How to negotiate this sudden maze of uncertainties. How to reinstate the simplicity of their trust. He did like Marina now. She interested him. He had been surprised by how much he liked her, by how easily he had shared his memories of his father with her. It was important to him. ‘Marina has changed,' he said. He was remembering her saying,
That young woman at Macedon is not
me anymore, you know
. It was true. ‘None of us is the same person we were back then.'

An empty gravel truck bounded over the railway crossing like a sudden beating of drums in the night.

When the echo of the truck had passed Teresa asked, ‘So you
do
like her now, or you don't like her?'

He was slow to reply. ‘I think she's probably more ambitious now—for herself, I mean, for her own work—than she used to be. That's bound to make someone more interesting. Even to themselves. I don't really know Marina all that well. She and I were never close. She was often there, but it was Robert and I who were friends in those days. Marina was content to go along with whatever Robert's plans were. Now she seems to be taking more of a lead. But I don't know. I'm only guessing. It seems to have been her decision that's brought them back to Melbourne.'

Teresa did not interrupt. When he fell silent, she said, ‘That drawing you did of her on the island today. It's not
just
a drawing.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘It's suggestive.'

‘What makes you say that?' What he had seen on the island this afternoon, Teresa was seeing now in her recollection of his drawing. In the mind's eye seeing is believing, the voyeur disclosing the hidden storyline whether he intends to or not. His own vivid recollection of the dimple in the back of Marina's knee, inviting his eye into the shade of the silver wattle where she lay on the grass.

‘It's suggestive,' Teresa repeated.

He said nothing, the word spinning through his head.

‘Do
you
think it's suggestive?' she persisted. ‘Or not?'

‘I drew what I saw,' he said. ‘What seems suggestive to one person might not seem that way to someone else.'

The sounds of the night beyond the window, always somewhere a dog was barking.

Teresa said tightly, ‘I couldn't bear it. You know that.'

He put his arm around her and kissed her on the mouth. ‘You don't have to bear anything. Don't be silly! There's nothing to bear. I love you.'

She kissed him back. ‘And I love you too. But I'm jealous of her. I can't help it. The thought of her makes my stomach crawl. It's not my fault. It's just how it is.'

‘There's nothing to be jealous about.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure. One hundred percent sure.'

‘I wish you weren't planning on doing pictures of her for this show. I wish it was someone else.'

‘Nothing's settled. The island show is a great opportunity for me. It'll attract a lot of attention. I could make some money at last.'

‘I don't care about the money. You don't have to make money. I'm the one who's making the money while you establish yourself. That's what we agreed. I married an artist. I know what I did. I believe in you. You didn't promise me money, you promised me you'd do your work. You have to do what you have the feeling for or there's nothing for either of us. Don't get sidetracked by money now. That's what Dad's waiting for. He's waiting for the day you dump your dream and go after the money like the rest of them, so he can say he told me so.'

‘It's not your dad I'm thinking about. It's you. If you really don't want me to paint Marina, then I won't paint her.'

She propped herself up on her elbow and gazed down at him in the night glow from the window. ‘It's no good talking like that. You're fired up with it. I can feel it. I told you weeks ago to take all that stuff from your installations back to the op shops and get on with something new and now that's what you're doing. And here I am complaining when I should be happy. What do you suppose you're going to do if you don't do this? If you drop this, you'll be at a loose end again.'

‘I'd find something else.'

‘No you wouldn't. Listen to you! I know you better than that. I'm happy that you know what you want. There are hazards, that's all, with knowing what we want. There always are. How many people know what they want? They don't look it in the eye the way you do. That's what I love about you. I see them every day. They wander in off the street and sit in front of me looking at brochures of Tanzania with dazed expressions, distracting themselves from what? They've made their money and now they're wondering what they can get from life with it. Like they finally earned enough frequent flyer points to buy anything they want, only they don't know what they want. So I tell them to buy a digital camera and go on safari and look at lions. Then they come back and they're still lost and they start to feel cheated. How come Tanzania wasn't the answer? It's a conundrum for them. So I say,
Maybe
you should have gone to Paris instead of Africa
. I know all they're thinking about is escape, getting away to some place other than where they already are. And thank god, or we'd be broker than we already are. Staying home just makes them think of getting old and dying. Staying home they worry all the time.' She leaned and kissed him. ‘I love you. You know why? You know what you want. It's not a conundrum for you. That's your gift. You'll have it till you die because it's you. That's your real gift, not drawing. You know what you have to do. You don't want to escape from it, you want to focus on it and do it. Sometimes it scares me. I felt good when you were doing your installations. I didn't understand them, but I felt good about you doing them. I always thought it was about your family, your love for your dad. That's what it was, wasn't it? I saw you putting those things together with love. And you never talked about making money or having a big opportunity or any of this stuff that you're talking about now. I'd look out the kitchen window and see you out there lost in your work for hours, and Nada sitting there in the courtyard with you doing her own thing. And when you two came in for your dinner you were both tired and happy.' She gave him a long kiss then pulled away. ‘When I saw you at Andy's party that night I knew you at once. I knew who you were. Meeting you changed me. I was dancing with poor old Lang but I was only seeing you from the minute you walked in the door. Until then I was always going out with artists and wondering why I did it. When I saw you I realised I wanted you to live your dreams through me. I don't have that passion for my work that you have. But with you I'm part of it. We're a team. We're a family. When I saw you I knew I'd found the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I could stop fooling around. I wanted to support you in your work.' She was silent a long while, then she said worriedly, ‘This is not a trap for you, is it? The way I've set things up for you? Jesus, if I thought that . . .'

‘Of course it's not a trap. Hey! Don't say that! How could it be a trap?'

‘It's not me just keeping control over you is it? You never feel like that about us, do you? I couldn't bear it. There's always a price for these things. I know that. We don't get away without paying the price. It's not as simple as we think. That's what Dad always says. Sometimes I wonder how we can ever be sure of anything.'

‘Don't talk like this,' he said gently. ‘You're going to work yourself into a state again.'

She took his hand and placed it on her belly. ‘I never liked those two. You know that. Of all the people you might have decided to paint, it would have to be Marina Golding! I think they're bloodless, the pair of them. I never worked out what you found interesting in them. I was glad when they left. Is it fate they came back? What is it decides these things? Why them? Why not someone I like? Why not your lovely brother, Roy? Roy's a man with a story in his face. That's what I always think. He is a man who has suffered and said nothing about it. If I were an artist, I'd paint a portrait of Roy and everyone would see his story in his eyes. In the old days in Calabria, when my dad was a boy, Roy would have been a hero.' She was silent a while. ‘The idea scares me.'