How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  ‘It’s what your mum would have –’

  ‘My mum! Jesus, Anne! Haven’t you got enough on your plate with your own mother?’

  She kept her eyes fixed on her glass.

  A small silence. ‘Look, Anne, I just need . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not this. I feel like I’m backed into a corner; I’ve got no room to move any more.’

  She looked at him – his round, boyish face, his too-long curly hair untouched by grey – and she heard Tom’s voice. ‘We were her men,’ he’d said. ‘And we failed her.’

  What about her men? Andy and Jake were gone, never to return, and Matty? He was so slight, so frail, a thing of straw and dry leaves and dust; how could he hold her, keep her? How was it that she’d never realised? He would be gone soon, as well. He would blow away in the wind, and she’d be left alone.

  Then she saw something else, an alluring glimpse: just a quiet room in an endless autumn afternoon; a beautiful room with no dust, no clutter, and the falling of petals from an overblown rose registered like an avalanche.

  ‘Anne?’

  She lurched back into the agonising present. He was looking at her, and there was nothing in his face that she recognised. He had his car keys in his hand. He was going? Where was he going?

  ‘They’re all invited, Matty.’ She began to cry. ‘They’re all turning up for Albie’s birthday.’

  ‘All right. Okay. I’ll be there. I know how much you care about it.’

  Anne blew her nose and wiped her face. ‘Are you going to her now?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m just putting the ute under cover. I’ve got some plants in the back and it’s not too late in the year for a frost.’

  She listened. She heard him start the engine, back around to the carport, stop. And then – she timed him – he sat out there in the dark by himself for an hour. He didn’t have his phone. It was in his denim jacket; she looked. He just sat in the ute in the dark, and she sat at the kitchen table with the light on.

  HOW BRIGHT ARE ALL THINGS HERE

  There’s a shadow across my face.

  ‘. . . visitors . . .’

  Sunny’s voice hangs in the air, vibrating like a struck glass, then falls to the ground and smashes into pieces that lie trembling in a kaleidoscope of glitter and refraction. Here are familiar eyes and jawlines, profiles and brows. It’s as if some vandal has hacked into a portrait gallery with scissors.

  ‘Alec?’ His grey eyes are imperturbably calm. He’s seen it all. But he won’t stay, and here is Gerald, reassembled from the shards, complete with springing dark hair and sardonic smile.

  Gerald. My husband, all intellect and struggle, for whom every single grain of life was hard and unyielding. He comes into the room, leaning over my shoulder, his hand heavy on my neck, and says, ‘Very pretty, Liza. Very nice.’

  Go away, Gerald. I do not enjoy thinking about you. Out! Out of my room which rhymes with ‘tomb’ and what else? Universal and self-explanatory; I don’t need to go there, or do I? Endings and beginnings, Stoke Newington cemetery and you having me furiously upon the funereal ivy right under the nose of a marble angel. Blessed be the fruit of my womb, but can’t you see you’re not wanted? It’s wrong of you to come here when surely, at the end, I deserve a little consideration . . . I was going to say ‘kindness’, but precious little of that did we have for each other. It is hard to give when you need so much.

  I wonder if you’re having a last laugh at my expense. The French have a saying; one returns always to one’s first love. Like a dog to its vomit, in our case. Oh, my dear, I did love you, you know. Is that what you came to hear? You were my first love, yes, but if I let myself remember that, does that mean I’m stuck with you for all eternity? I don’t believe in God or a heaven but I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. I think of those Victorian graves housing one husband and multiple wives – serial monogamy was almost a given with all those births, all those deaths – and wonder if the stern Papa which art in heaven is actually a polygamist. Or is it first in, best dressed? Surely those wives can’t hang like clothes in a wardrobe, existing simultaneously, in the same small space that is the human heart. I could never love again as I loved you, my dear. There. I have said it. And I am sorry – not that I’m admitting fault, you understand. I am sorry it was wasted in bitterness and anger. And I am sorry I denied you your son.

  ‘. . . any visitors . . .’

  It’s like Flinders Street Station in here. There’s a queue at the foot of my bed. The children and the grandchildren, James and his pretty wife, Edward raising one eyebrow to find himself in such company, Lucie, Felix, Gerda Butterworth, poor Miss Eales with her teeth like piano keys . . .

  Who’s that? Is that you, Rob? What is it you have in your arms?

  He comes closer and I see that it’s onions, silverbeet and carrots still with their feathery tops. His arms are full of vegetables, but what for? There will be none of his peasant soups where I’m going. No compost.

  ‘It’s all grist to the mill.’

  A Robism, as usual. So many years, and so much grist. What is grist, anyway? Grain, I suppose, in its hard, unpromising, original state. The grain that makes our daily bread.

  I’m glad you’re here, Rob. If I can’t have Alec, then you. I need – another baking metaphor here, isn’t that clever of me, darling? – some leaven in the heavy loaf they serve. Paula is taking it all so sadly, but it is only death, after all. I can see you now, with your tightly curled hair like an astrakhan collar, your sly darting smile and your faun’s eyes full of wickedness. Make me laugh, Rob. Whisper a joke or two, sing ‘Daisy Bell’ for me.

  I wonder now how you kept painting all those years in the wilderness. Did you tell yourself that every kick in the pants, every punch in the guts, every casual blow and dismissive remark was character-building? You wrote me a long letter once a month for thirty years, until Parkinson’s kicked in, and even then I received in the mail the occasional scrawl. Your letters sparkled with love and liveliness, just like you, and yet you had bad reviews and hostile reviews and then no reviews at all. Gallery openings full of poor friends, embarrassed and getting drunk, and no red dots. And a very successful wife.

  Now you’re dead and highly collectable. A painting of yours hangs in the NGV next to one of Gerald’s arid almost-abstractions of suburban anomie. Does that make you laugh? Is it some kind of justice? You would say no. You would say, ‘Swings and roundabouts, Bliss.’ You would say, ‘All grist to the mill.’

  But back to me, Rob. There’s no point now in grist or grinding. I am made, and this is who I am at last. C’est fait. The last me, lying here in this last room, set apart from the others but handy to the nurses and the personal carers, handy to the door where the doctor comes in. A few special things – John’s Gothic foot and the shells and the portrait of Anne – have been brought in here, but for the most part it is restfully bare, with cream walls and ceiling, grey carpet, grey drapes. I am so glad to be rich, darling, and not to have to slum it as I go down. The view from my window is taken up entirely by a japonica bush with lipstick pink flowers like magic on the bare sticks. It would be lovely to paint. In watercolour. I think of my elegant wrist, the lush paper, the veils of wash upon wash concealing and revealing the bright paper beneath and the vivid pink petals staining outwards from my brush, blossoming and expanding under my hand, all careless, thoughtless joy.

  ‘I don’t think she knows if she has any visitors or not.’

  But I do. They just come and go, uninvited.

  ‘You can just sit with her. We can bring you in some lunch if you need. Do you have to go to work later?’

  ‘No. I don’t have to go to work.’

  One morning Ivana and I watched four ladies, one fat and three thin (and I wondered if there was some symbolism in that), perched on couches discussing ‘work–life balance’. We never had such a thing in our day; it hadn’t been thought of. We managed, we improvised, w
e did the best we could. Some of us failed. Some of us fell.

  There’s a tiny ballerina on the knife-edge tightrope highwire teetering on one pointe. Careful, careful . . . but there she goes, skirts of snowy tulle fluttering around her white-stockinged legs. How very florid. Is it the morphine, or am I for some reason remembering Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes?

  I saw the film with Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie at a cinema in Collins Street. The aunts were ballet lovers but they hated its message that a woman must choose between Art and Love, for – torn between her vocation and her lover – Moira solved the whole thing by jumping under a train. But this cinematic melodramatic Love was, specifically, Married, and Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie had attained something approximating that anyway by flying right under the radar. Or above it. I heard them agreeing with the deliciously sinister impresario. ‘Sorrow will pass, believe me,’ he said, urging the ballerina to dedicate herself to the dance. ‘Life is so unimportant.’

  But it isn’t, is it? And we don’t all have it in us to make the hard choice. Well, I didn’t jump, but I let Gerald kill me, all the same. ‘A woman can have talent but not genius,’ he told me. ‘Eggs, flowers, fruit,’ he said. And the coup de grace, ‘Why bother?’

  You know what? I have said for years that I let Gerald kill me as an artist, and now, lying dying with nothing to lose, I have to say I’ve been kidding myself. When I got to London, I wanted Life, not Art. Perhaps Aunt Emu knew that. Perhaps that’s why she set me free. I liked painting. I was clever and facile; it was fun. But it’s about love, isn’t it? Alec helped me to understand that.

  Alec loved dams. He loved planning and designing them, drafting, calculating, estimating. He loved supervising their construction, consulting with the site managers, the explosives experts, the men who drove the great machines, even the men who used pick and shovel. After he died, when I cleaned out his darkroom, I found the last photograph he ever developed, still pegged on the line. Paula, Tom and Caroline are posed on the spillway of a weir, and behind them are the great ramparts of a dam wall, with turrets and observation towers and a walkway peopled with tiny ant-like figures across the top. Tom and Caroline are turned towards each other, smiling at a private joke, but Paula, in a pleated tartan skirt and hand-knitted jumper, is looking straight at the camera with her teeth and gums bared. ‘Big smile!’ he must have said to her, and her whole face is alight. Click! and she will run into his embrace.

  He must have taken the photograph in the fifties, and I puzzled over why he picked that negative, of all the many. He had photographed Cardinia and Sugarloaf and Maroondah and the rest in the line of work, but also the Snowy River and Tasmanian hydro projects, and the big earth dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Perhaps he chose it at random. Or perhaps, at the end of his life, he simply wanted to remember his children as they were in far-off times of black-and-white innocence, when he himself, camera in hand, was young, strong, optimistic, ensuring that the new suburbs had water for hot baths and green lawns and sewered toilets. He never joined the RSL, did you know that? He never marched on Anzac Day, he never even collected his medals. It was me who sent away for them after he died. He was neither proud nor ashamed of his war service, but it was over. We were at peace. He wanted to be a builder, not a destroyer.

  Before he was desk-bound by seniority, he often spent the whole week on site and would sometimes, to give Nina a rest, take the children there on the weekends. ‘Camping,’ they called it, but Paula remembers staying in a little hut, and going to a dance one night at the hall in the workers’ village. I can see her, a little girl with straight blonde hair in a full-skirted frock and neat white socks, whirled around the hall by young men from the boot of Italy, all dark-haired, dark-skinned, lively on a Saturday night with the accordion music and the dancing, flashing their liquid brown eyes and their white teeth.

  There was such a shortage of manpower, Alec told me, that when the ships came in, he used to go down to Station Pier to recruit labourers. Those Italian farm boys were the best, he said. Strong and willing and knew how to handle a shovel. Lovely boys, he said. And yet, when the thing was done, finished, massive, as marvellous in its way as the crusader castles he’d seen in Syria, a symbol of prosperity, progress and tap water; when they held the grand opening, performed by the governor, Sir Dallas Brooks, with all the board there and their wives in floral dresses and best hats; when there were speeches, applause, cups of tea and pieces of cake – they were not invited. There was no picnic, no party, no celebration. It struck him, he told me. All this, he said (we were on one of our little tours) as he waved his arm in a wide gesture at the water, the dam walls, the pumping stations, the gravelled car park. They deserved to be thanked, he said. They deserved their day off.

  Alec loved his work. When he retired, I thought he would be unhappy, but they were wonderful years – too few, of course – in which, if I can use the word in reference to such a man, he blossomed. It happens to some men in later life.

  He adored Paula’s son Sam, and Anne’s oldest, Andy. He took the boys for rides on Puffing Billy, to the football and the tennis, for holidays at the beach house, out fishing in the bay. And driving, of course, to look at dams. He’d always been a keen photographer and we set up a darkroom for him, purpose-built and not rigged up in the laundry, and then, in search of subjects, we travelled. We went, my dear, here, there and everywhere in our little teardrop caravan. Have I mentioned the caravan? How Bridget would have laughed! I called those trips our misty adventures for the beautiful effects of fog and water vapour Alec learned to capture with his lens. Early morning was best. We stopped at dams, reservoirs, lakes, rivers, creeks, irrigation channels and water races, but before you think that I was a martyr to all this water I will tell you what I discovered. Or rediscovered. In those years – as I said, too few – I had my swan song.

  One day, for something to do, I took my old camera with me. I snapped away. Trees, leaves, bark – patterns, you see, which were always my thing. But when Alec developed them they fell so far short of my intention that next time I took pencils and a sketchbook. Alec suggested an easel, a little stool, paints, all the accoutrements of the plein air artist, but I said no. ‘I’m not a landscape person,’ I told him. I was happy to perch on a rock and draw. I filled sketchbooks with leaves and tree trunks and shards of bark. I was never bored for they were always different and I was as absorbed as I had been at four or five making strips and stripes and bars with the old atlas on the floor beside me. Alec asked me to have a couple of them framed, but apart from those two, they were never shown. That might surprise you, for you know how much I liked praise, but they were not done for anyone, not even Alec. They were done because it was in me to do them. They were done, I suppose you could say, for love alone.

  And how you would have laughed, Gerald. Back to eggs, fruit, flowers; tiny themes, little things. Very pretty, very sweet. But not Art. The consensus in my day was that Art was made by an Artist, who was of course a protean male – a Picasso or a Pollock or a Gerald Grady. Many are called but few are chosen, but I’d like to plead that we’re all needed, the artists of war and peace, chaos and love, of intellect and high-powered critical perception – and those whose subjects will fit into their arms or on a windowsill. I make a special plea for the minor masters.

  Bless them all, bless them all, the long and the short and the tall . . .

  Bless those who never stop painting, because they cannot. Rob, wasn’t it you who told me that Renoir, old, half blind, crippled with arthritis but still with more paintings in him, had his servants wheel him out into the garden, where they placed him before an easel with the brushes tied to his hands? Didn’t you keep painting still, year after year, to the deafening roar of silence and indifference?

  And I was so happy, so complete, with my gum leaves and bark, absorbed, self-forgetful, that in the end I can say that the paintings Elizabeth Adair never painted, that were never hung in galleries and august collections, are so much flim-flam, flapdoodle
. . .

  So much bullshit, as dear Caroline would say.

  ‘Mrs Henderson?’

  Who is this? Another doctor? As if there’s anything they can do.

  ‘Mrs Henderson, can you hear me? You can just make a sign. Move your hand.’

  ‘She was conscious this morning. She spoke to me.’

  ‘Mrs Henderson . . . What’s her name?’

  ‘Bliss,’ I say.

  But the other one says, with the sound of clipboard and paper, ‘Elizabeth.’

  Why should I answer? Bliss is the name I called myself when ‘Elizabeth’ was too hard to say. It is the name my parents called me, the name I blurted out to Alec in the mirrored P&O saloon. Bliss is my original name. Like a poem by William Blake, or a Zen Buddhist koan. I began in bliss, but I end in this . . . room? Womb? How sly these rhymes are. Tomb.

  ‘I’m here, Bliss.’

  Paula.

  ‘You can go, Bliss,’ she whispers. ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to . . .’ Her voice trembles a little. ‘Daddy will be there, Bliss. You can go. Alec will be there.’

  Bless her, she’s been reading some treatise on death and dying. Oh, my dear Paula. You were always my staunchest ally, weren’t you? Uncomplaining, taking for granted your place behind a beautiful Anne, a divine Tom. The meek shall inherit the earth, but I can’t even favour you in my will. Why have I always fussed so about definitions? If this isn’t love, what is?

  She takes my hand. ‘Bliss, it’s all right.’

  No, it’s not. Not really. You see, in my naivety – you could also call it egotism – I’d thought that since I’d given up everything for Alec, I’d somehow struck a bargain, there in the Minster with the doves and the glass heart and the music rising like incense to heaven. A bargain with what, with whom? Not with God, even though I was in what they call His house. I thought I had made a bargain with life. There in the glow and colour of the stained glass, I suddenly saw with a cold eye. The shrines, effigies, box tombs and cartouches all sang to me of how vain a thing is man, that vanity, vanity, all was vanity, frippery and frou-frou, from swaddling bands to winding sheet.