How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  Nests, warm and safe, and sheltering wings – that was Rob and Judith. It was not Gerald. Not at all. I kept glancing at him, and he knew it. Under his lashes he met my eyes and then looked away with a ghost of a smile, saying nothing, giving nothing away. Banked fires, still waters. Something about him made me tremble. I was very young, and I had just drunk my first glass of champagne.

  We left together. Down the stairs and into the dark street was an eternity of longing. My hand accidentally brushed his. He took my arm to cross the road, as men did in those days, and my skin fizzed as if the champagne was in my blood.

  ‘Does anyone call you Liza?’ he asked as he helped me into my cab.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I will be the first,’ he said.

  Rob and Judith had said, ‘Come again.’ They said, ‘Just call in.’

  I did. Shyly at first, but before long I was bouncing up the steps to their flat, smiling in anticipation, visualising the geranium in a pot on the windowsill, the long table with its clutter of library books, papers, magazines and galley proofs, the bowls of lemons or onions. Rob would be cooking or drawing, and Judith reading. They’d smile. A cup of tea? A glass of wine?

  ‘No, you aren’t interrupting.’

  ‘Gerry will be calling by later. Why don’t you stay for supper?’

  The culmination of my scholarship year in London was supposed to be a painting, to be acquired by the Society and donated to some suitable institution, showing Woman in Any Phase of Public Life. Weren’t they dear old things? Old-fashioned and – with their strenuous upholding of the equality of women – quaintly suffragette-ish to my young eyes. Most of the previous winners had produced portraits of prominent female academics, administrators or philanthropists, or else tableaux with Victorian connotations. Nurses were a favourite, though during the war there were also farm workers, signallers and drivers. Another resident at my boarding house was a young French cellist, and I’d done a few preparatory sketches. Her silky blue dress, full so the cello could fit between her knees, gave great scope for folds of cloth. Like Aunt Emu, I enjoyed drapery.

  I asked Judith, Rob and Gerald what they thought.

  Rob thought the hands were very good. Gerald agreed, but then said, ‘Is the subject perhaps a little elitist?’

  I had to ask him to explain. He said he would show me and, once again, I felt like a child. That politics could or even should underlie a painting was a relatively new idea to me and I duly appreciated the gravitas of the exhibitions he took me to. Building sites, slum children, dirty kitchens, sad old men and their dogs; there was even one memorable depiction of a lavatory. Though secretly I wondered why the ravaged or broken were more real than the undamaged and whole, I lost confidence in my cellist. I asked Gerald for his advice.

  Eventually we decided on women office workers taking their break in the gardens in front of Temple Station. There was some kind of symbolism to it, I suppose, involving the grand facades of buildings founded on oppression, injustice, even slavery, contrasting with these women, small cogs in the great heartless machine of commerce, eating their sandwiches in the pale sunshine. At any rate, I took photographs, I drew, I got Judith and my cellist and anyone else I could rope in to pose for me. I even got as far as a full-sized cartoon which I traced onto my prepared canvas. Concurrently Gerald and I were falling in love. After he asked me to marry him, I realised I couldn’t paint the picture. And I didn’t care.

  Aunt Emu wrote telling me I would have to pay back the scholarship money, but that there was more than enough from my mother’s estate for that purpose. She was arranging it with her lawyers. My allowance would continue. I wasn’t to worry, she wrote. There was a postscript.

  Enjoy your new life, my darling girl. Don’t feel you have let us down. You are our pride and joy whatever you do.

  We were married, rather prosaically, at Caxton Hall Registry Office. The ceremony was held at eleven o’clock in the morning with Rob and Judith as our witnesses. Though I was still a virgin, I didn’t advertise. I wore a pale blue suit with a Peter Pan collar – very pretty, I thought at the time – and a little flowery blue hat with a hail-spot veil. I had shoes dyed to match my suit and a white handbag with a blue chiffon scarf tied to the handle. I carried a posy of baby’s breath and white hothouse roses, and I was, as they say, floating on air. As Rob, Judith and I turned the corner, I felt unreal, surreal, as if a breath of wind could have wafted me up, up and away from my waiting groom, above the reluctantly unfurling leaves on the street trees and the raincoated people and the stiff iron railings, through the grey London sky and over the hills and far away. Rather like that famous Chagall of the floating bride and groom, the one that Gerald hated and I loved.

  Where was Gerald? At first I couldn’t see him, and I wondered fearfully whether he would turn up. The previous night when we kissed, deeply, dizzyingly, I would have, in the words of the day, ‘given myself to him’ in an instant, but he held back.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Let’s wait.’

  I slept badly, and dreamed that I had to walk to the registry office all alone along an impossibly convoluted route through dozens of tube stations, up and down escalators that ended over sheer drops, in a mad Piranesi cityscape. And when I got there, Gerald had married someone else.

  Gerald gave Rob’s tie a critical glance and greeted me with a peck on the cheek. Then he took my hand in a hard grip like a handshake.

  ‘You look very lovely,’ he said, without meeting my eyes, and then he quickly turned away. ‘I’ll see if they’re ready for us.’ He strode up the steps two at a time.

  By then, Rob was in one of his mad March Hare moods, hyperactively jolly and singing ‘Daisy Bell’. It’s an Edwardian music hall song. You must know it; everyone does.

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!

  I’m half crazy all for the love of you.

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat,

  Of a bicycle built for two!

  ‘Shut up, Rob!’ said Judith. ‘Give her the sixpence.’

  ‘The what?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s for “old”. You’ve got new and blue. Here’s borrowed.’ She handed me a lace handkerchief and said dryly, ‘For your tears of joy.’

  ‘And here’s your lucky piece,’ said Rob. It was a very thin sixpence, with the head of the young Victoria on it; Victoria with a long neck and firm chin and hair caught up in ringlets at the back of her head.

  ‘All the best,’ said Rob, giving me a smacking kiss full on the lips. ‘Break a leg!’

  At that moment, Gerald reappeared at my side.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  I slipped my hand into his and looked up at him, blissful and ignorant.

  ‘Ready for anything,’ I said.

  These details of the wedding are, as you know, mere delaying tactics. Let’s get on with it, shall we? The sex.

  Nothing could have prepared me. Perhaps for most young girls of my class and era, sex was a bit of a shock. Some took to it like ducks to water. Once, an upper-class young Englishwoman asked me, when we were leaving our coats in the hostess’s bedroom, how long I had been married.

  ‘Two months,’ I said.

  ‘Lucky you!’ she said. ‘You’ll be getting lots and lots. I simply adore fucking, don’t you?’

  Actually, I didn’t. Not then, anyway, though for weeks after our wedding night, I was drunk with the intensity of physical sensation. Gerald, my dark-eyed lover, my Prince of Darkness . . . When he came, it was with a long sobbing groan and in that instant, I knew my power. This is life, I thought. At last, I am living.

  As I’ve said before, I was very young.

  THE ARTIST’S WIFE

  Paula never nags me, but Anne! Every visit now, we have the same tussle over food.

  ‘You’re not eating enough, Bliss.’

  ‘I’m not hungry, darling.’

  ‘Well, n
o wonder, when all they give you is sandwiches.’

  ‘I chose the sandwiches,’ I tell her gently. ‘I could have had risotto or chicken salad. Or pea soup, like Ivana.’

  Ivana is drowsing over a bowl of greyish, greenish sludge.

  ‘It looks disgusting. Really, I don’t think the food here is good enough, not for what they charge. I still can’t get over the party pies.’

  I’m afraid I let out an audible sigh. Last Friday, when she saw a half-eaten party pie on my plate, she was ready to make a formal complaint until I explained that Collingwood v Hawthorn was the big match that evening.

  ‘Pies are on the menu during the football season,’ I told her. ‘Think of it as a cultural reference, darling. I do.’ I could tell she was barely convinced but I pressed on. ‘I have no complaints, none at all. We’re all very lucky.’

  Lucky to have the money for risotto or half a sandwich, dry sheets and – this is writ large on a plaque in the reception area – Respect. They manage quite a lot of it in this price range.

  Poor Beatie. Green Willows was not cheap either, but respect wasn’t on the menu back then. Kindness was available, though in short supply because it takes time. The aides and nurses were always in a hurry, running in and out with medication or disinfectant or clean sheets. If I tried to gain their attention for Beatie, they invariably answered me with an edge, ‘I do have others to see to, Mrs Henderson.’

  Cheerier were the women who came through with trolleys, clattering the crockery, dispensing tea tasting of coffee and coffee that tasted like tea from the spouts of vast metal pots. When Beatie first went there, we used to laugh about it together. ‘Hot brown drink,’ she called it. I brought her teabags and shortbread and chocolate Hobnobs.

  Then she took a turn for the worse and was shifted to another wing. The whole place smelled of cooking fat and urine. Lost souls, shrunk to skin and bone and a hank of hair, wandered and mumbled and stared. I hated going there because it frightened me, but towards the end I went – as darling Paula does – every day. That was after I realised that her meals were going back to the kitchen untouched. Not that I blamed her. Once, when I removed the plastic cloche, there on the plate in all its bald obscenity was a crumbed sausage.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to her, as Anne says to me. ‘You need to eat.’

  I dabbed it in the gravy, but she wasn’t fooled. Beatie could no longer really speak, but she could still refuse. She died a month later.

  Rob, like Beatie, developed Parkinson’s. For many years after I moved back to Melbourne Rob and I met every three or four months for lunch. Long before the diagnosis I noticed the tremor and the changed voice, but I thought he was just getting old. It was later, when he developed a strange blank stare, that I realised something was seriously wrong. Rob, my Rob, was a faun, a trickster, forever young – so who was this masked man struggling with his cutlery, not smiling at my jokes, not smiling at all? Judith nursed him so that he died at home. I like to think of her spooning into his mouth purees of gorgonzola, garlic, parmesan – all of his favourite things – sardines, new asparagus, baby broad beans . . .

  When I was a young wife, Rob taught me to cook. Judith and Rob were both good cooks, although according to Rob, Judith was hampered by her Englishness. Her forte was baking, and I took comfort in her Swiss roll, which reminded me of Mother, but the years of rationing had made her careful about quantities and inclined to substitute. They’d had the opposite effect on Rob, and he was especially lavish with garlic. Sometimes poor Judith would come home from the library to tell him that some genteel borrower had commented. Then she could be found chewing parsley, cleaning her teeth with grim ferocity, even gargling with diluted eau de cologne.

  While Judith was working, Rob took me with him through the Italian shops – Delmonico, Parmigiani, Lina – in Old Compton Street, to street markets and Covent Garden, to Cadec in Greek Street for the essential omelette pan, to Harrods to play at being rich. He’d ask for a taste of cheese or salami, he’d test the fruit, he’d squeeze and touch and smell.

  ‘You must shop like a peasant,’ he used to say.

  Rob’s version of peasantry was humorous and rather flirtatious. All over Soho he knew Signora this and Madame that; they laughed, smiled, flashed their dark eyes and told him in broken English that he was a naughty boy, a rogue, a tease. Some of them probably thought I was his wife.

  I shopped and cooked and cleaned, playing in my doll’s house. I began to work from home, too, using a table under the window in the room that was Gerry’s studio. Judith had wrangled an interview with the art director of her women’s magazine, and I quite happily churned out illustrations. Though the ambitious scholarship picture was permanently frozen, I nevertheless did a little painting of my own. A bowl of fruit or eggs, some flowers, the view from the window that faced the gardens, the mothers and children and perambulators. I wrote to Aunt Emu that I was still painting.

  That is good to hear, she wrote back, and added, dear old spinster aunt that she was, but don’t neglect your duties. Remember you are a Wife.

  And after a while, my few brushes were left standing stiffly in their jam jar, gathering dust.

  The Artist’s Wife. My naked self on a wall, in public.

  People talked about me. ‘Good draughtsmanship; he really can draw, can’t he? And an almost sculptural quality of form.’

  ‘It’s nothing new, of course, but it’s rather lovely all the same. Picasso in his “neo-classical” period . . .’

  ‘Piero della Francesca.’

  ‘Didn’t Grady study with Bernard Meninsky?’

  ‘That beautiful line; the shoulders and neck . . .’

  No, it was Gerald’s hand on my shoulders and neck. His eyes, his brush. In that first year of marriage, knowing that he was sitting a few feet away tracing me with his brush was powerfully exciting – God, it was practically foreplay – and by the time he’d washed up and come to join me in bed, things were so erotically charged that we both went off like firecrackers. Something the National Gallery of Victoria’s London adviser could not have known when he bought The Artist’s Wife by Gerald Grady and wrote that it was ‘especially suitable for a public collection’.

  Gerald had energy, and he had discipline.

  He worked four days a week, teaching art at two different boys’ schools, and then painted on his day off, on weekends, on holidays, and well into the night. He was contemptuously dismissive of his fellows who were too artistic to earn a living, who cadged and borrowed amid a welter of bottles and unwashed dishes. He was most emphatically not a bohemian.

  Nor were Rob and Judith, not really, though they were more informal than he, and more generous, and it was their flat that had become a sort of gathering place for Australian artists in London. Rob and Judith’s on a Saturday night: little pottery bowls of olives and radishes and garlicky bean purees – Rob’s minestrone – French bread, French cheese. And then Judith would puncture the Mediterranean mood with an English pudding oozing marmalade or jam.

  After the food, talk. The artists’ wives usually ended the evening at one end of the table brewing pot after pot of tea. In spite of the paint and the garlic, we were at heart conventional middle-class women, and so our conversation was neither intimate nor even particularly personal but rather an ongoing half-humorous Antipodean complaint against the rank smelliness of the tube, the scarcity of eggs and meat, the endless colds, the fog, the longing for home. Once a wife broke ranks to tell us that her husband had boils on his bottom, and another (who was shortly to be deserted) spoke, briefly, of her unhappiness. However, revelations were the exception, and anyway, our quiet talk was constantly interrupted by male voices.

  At first the arguments worried me.

  ‘They sound so angry,’ I said once.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said one of the more experienced wives. ‘It’s just men.’

  ‘They’ve been through the war,’ said another wife, as if that explained things.

  ‘And we ha
ven’t?’ asked Judith.

  ‘Well, at home . . . I mean, we weren’t . . . there was Darwin, I suppose.’

  The male voices grew louder. ‘Abstract art leads, logically, to the blank canvas.’

  ‘Anyone who thinks like that is – automatically – artistically dead.’

  ‘Really? I can’t see that proposing an intellectual solution for what is, at its core, a spiritual problem –’

  ‘Spiritual? Oh, spare me!’

  A fist thumped the table, and our teacups danced. The thumper’s wife was very young, younger even than me, but cynical.

  ‘Should we tell them to play nicely, d’you think?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Just listen!’

  Yes, listen. What is art? What is it for? What is it about? What should it be about? Realistic? Non-figurative? What is the socio-political relevance of formalism and abstraction? Expound, at tedious length and in your loudest voice, on your interpretation of aesthetic humanism . . .

  My ears only pricked up when they slipped into character assassination – that appalling clique out at Heide; the noxious Bert Tucker; the mob at the Swanston Family Hotel – but they were back too soon to internationalism and nihilism and materialism, to art as an ideological construction or a capitalist myth. Their ideas were lit and burned, discarded and scattered like so many spent matches; so far from my own experience in front of a canvas that I was struck dumb with bewildered admiration, with a kind of reverence. These are Men of Ideas, I thought. Especially my husband.

  It was a long time before I realised they were mostly talking shit.

  ‘You know, Gerald,’ I said one night when we were walking home through quiet streets, past leafy squares. ‘I think there are some artists who really shouldn’t talk about their own work.’

  ‘Do you mean me?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Gerald was still a divining rod of wisdom to me then.

  ‘Who, then?’

  I chose as my example a painter – and, later, critic – who was new to our circle. Neil Offren and Gerald were then at the very beginning of their friendship; I had a sense of him lurking and peering at the edge of our lives but he hadn’t yet intruded. He was an ugly man, and I wonder if I would have disliked him less if he hadn’t had wet red lips and a crust of dried spittle always at the corners of his mouth.