Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  Frank agreed. Anything to get away. He bundled the drawings up, still blushing, and tied them with the singlet, while the woman jollied someone – a man, you could tell that ­– on the telephone. And since he had steeled himself once, and because he knew that in what he had long been preparing for himself it was a moment of great importance, he walked the three streets, past warehouses and open pubs where men were drinking at windowsills, to where the art teacher had his studio at the top of a narrow brownstone building beside the river.

  He wasn’t used to lifts, and this one was an elaborate cage, so he climbed the stairs and arrived at a landing with three wooden doors, all exactly alike.

  He knocked lightly at one, and guessed from the sound and the lack of response that it was a cupboard. He felt foolish. It wasn’t a lucky sign. But the second, after a distant cry that sounded like a man falling down a well, was opened by a tall, severe figure with gold-rimmed glasses, a walrus moustache and a loop of watch-chain under the belly of his three-piece suit. He was drying his hands on a bit of towel.

  Frank was disappointed. He wasn’t romantic – he had grown out of that during long years of his father’s talk – but to his eyes Hopkins, no more than the woman, looked like one of those figures he had expected, here in Brisbane, to have charge of the antechambers to life.

  ‘Well then, let’s see what we’ve got,’ the man said, leading the way.

  The studio too was not what he had expected, or not at first glance, but he recognised and immediately respected a place of work: benches stacked with old paint-tins, brushes in dirty bottles, stiff bunched rags. Stuck to the walls at eye level were snapshots that had curled at the edge round a rusty drawing pin and many illustrations from magazines. A low sink. A kerosene heater where a kettle boiled. And in the corner of the room, where the best light fell, the easel, with a stool before it on which you could have sat to milk a cow, and a wheeled tea trolley on whose surface Hopkins mixed his paints.

  Hopkins, quite unsurprised by the singlet, had unwrapped the bundle and was examining the drawings, some quickly, some with his chin drawn down into his stiff collar. Once or twice he glanced up at Frank over the rim of his glasses, and huffed.

  ‘Well, son,’ he said at last, pushing the drawings away and folding his hands over his belly, ‘what is it you want?’

  ‘I want to learn how to draw.’

  ‘You know how to draw. What else?’

  The boy blushed. He couldn’t have said it.

  ‘All right then, here’s what I have to say. You know how to draw, but there’s a lot of other things you don’t know. I’d be willing to teach you. How does it sound?’

  ‘I haven’ got any money,’ Frank told him. He had no idea how things worked in this place. ‘I’m up for the Show.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Exhibition. I’m with Mr Mackay, my boss. We’re showing a bull.’

  The art teacher thought this a joke. He kept his mouth shut but his jaw wobbled and his eyes were screwed up with mirth. ‘Well, boy,’ he said, when he had sobered up, ‘my proposition is this. I can get you a job – nothing grand, but good enough to start with – advertising art work. You can do it standing on your head. Probably best done that way. Can you stand on your head? – No, no, boy, don’t worry – it’s a joke, I can’t help it, might go barmy otherwise. What do you say, then? If I arrange it, can you start Monday? The classes will be free. You won’t charge me, I hope! No, no, boy, joke!’ He was tying up the bundle. He drew out the singlet and made a good knot. ‘I’m glad to see,’ he said, ‘Harland – Frank, isn’t it? – that you’re not short of undies. It’s a good start.’

  *

  He wrote:

  My dear father,

  I am settled in to my work now and can handle it pretty well, so am taking this opportunity to write to you and my dear brothers. I trust you will understand why I have decided to make a start on my own. I think of you all and am very lonely at times, especially for Pearse and Tam, but must stick to what I have chosen, it’s the only way. Mr Hopkins is very good to me. He is a funny sort of bloke, but kind, and gives me a lot of help. He is an Englishman and has studied at a famous art school in London. He knows all the tricks. I have a good room now but moved a few times because I wasn’t too shook on the other boarders. This room is good but, only two others and all clean. No more for a bit as I am dead beat after work. Please write, and ask the kids to, I want to hear all their news. I hope you got the bit of cash I sent. I wish you could come down here, or would send Tam or Pearse. Hoping this finds you in good health and happy as ever.

  Your loving son etc.

  He lived in a cheap boarding house at Red Hill or Dutton Park with other lone men, young and old, who worked as motor mechanics or factory hands or clerks in insurance offices. He grew the thin reddish moustache he would have for the rest of his life, and developed the self-sufficient ways, the capacity to clear a space around him in a crowded room, of men who live in boarding houses, often sharing, for whom privacy is a thing to be insisted on. He wasn’t unsociable but he had no friends. It was a lonely life. He worked day and night at his painting and was never satisfied, but when Hopkins sent half a dozen canvases to a gallery in Sydney three of them were sold. He posted the money home. Each week or fortnight at least, he sent part of what he earned to his father, writing with a stiffness of expression that came partly from the books he was reading to improve himself but more deeply from the effects of life and hard times on a nature that was already serious to the point of severity. He agonised over these letters, but they never expressed even a shadow of what he felt: his loneliness, his love, the deep longing he felt for his brothers and for their old life.

  He wrote:

  Dear Pearse,

  Thank you for writing such a clean letter. It made me laugh a lot, especially the bit about Jellybean and the toads. I don’t think I got such a good letter or such a good laugh for ages. I miss you all. Am finding good use for the pen-wipers as I have a lot to do with ink at the agency and you know how messy I am – ink all over my fingers, up my nose, round the back of my ears – people must think I dip my nose in the inkwell to see how deep it is! – paint all over my clothes. Not like Mr Hopkins who is a real artist, always clean-looking in a suit and vest and with a kind of blue apron he pulls over his head, you’d laugh to see him. He makes good jokes but, and you would love some of the things he has! Big plaster noses and eyes – separate – that I have to sit down and draw. Can you imagine? An eye plonked there on the table and staring up at you, or an ear as big as a foot? It gives me the creeps sometimes. Anyway, as I said, the wipers have come in handy. Most of the ink is on them now instead of on me.

  Love to Clyde and Tam. Tell them they should be able to write to me if you can. I want to hear their news. I am sending you all a little present, nothing much but just so you will think of your brother now and then. Love to Jellybean. Water my little bit of garden, Pearse, and don’t forget the sweet-peas at St Patrick’s. Love to Puss and Boots – I think they are very clever names for kitties! Write soon.

  Your loving brother etc.

  *

  His evenings in the various boarding houses (he moved frequently, sometimes before he had discovered a pattern in the worn linoleum or solved the smells from the kitchen) were spent on the steps down from the front verandah waiting for the sea breeze to arrive, chatting with others as lonely as himself, or watching, in those suburbs of unpainted weatherboard and rusty downpipes, the figures of women in floral house-frocks as they gossiped over a fence behind which the sun was setting in a melt of gold; or leggy girls playing hopscotch, or a fellow lovingly at work on his image in the bonnet of a car, polishing and repolishing it till the dullness shone.

  He got used to Hopkins’s jokes. He spent five years in the poky little office of the advertising agency, doing drawings of models in cheap clothes and ugly lounge-room furniture, and l
earning from Hopkins the rudiments of a craft that had a long history of skills discovered with difficulty and passed on from master to pupil. It delighted him that what he had vaguely apprehended, and hit upon by accident or luck, was also a system with rules. He was freed into discipline, then freed again into his old happy state of dream-like self-discovery, but with a new sureness of touch in which the adventuring mind moved out now into uncharted spaces, over horizons that were merely notional and had to be passed with no conscious knowledge of what latitude you were in and with nothing to guide you at last but a firm hand, and the assured, all-risking, ever-watchful and untiring spirit.

  More precisely, he learned to draw with charcoal on coloured canvas and to seal what he had done with a fog of turps and resin mixed up in a milk-bottle. He worked with oils on burnt sienna, using white to indicate the lights and black for shadows, till a form emerged, background and figure coming to life in the same instant but in different planes; then, when all was dry and had been oiled for fluency, he spread his glazes – translucent gold ochre, a touch of rose madder for cheeks, ears, lips where blood flows close to the surface, a trace of terre verte under the chin. It was pure sorcery. It had something of unholy deception in it, of alchemy and dangerous play with essences. These were the tricks of the trade. But even as he used them and worked the changes he could never quite catch the moment when magic took over. It was as if he had dozed off for an instant and some other power had intervened.

  One day, without telling him what they were to do, Hopkins took him out into the country. They went on the train to Dayboro. Hopkins was bubbling with some little joke at Frank’s expense that the boy at first resented, though you couldn’t be resentful of Hopkins for long.

  It was a new game the man wanted to show him. Nothing much. Just a cardboard square with black felt laid over it.

  ‘All right boy, prepare yourself. Card up to the eye like Lord Nelson, that’s it! Now focus on that clump of trees back there.’

  He did as directed and the effect was stunning. He thought Hopkins had pulled some stunt while he wasn’t looking – the black square was a diversion. But it was all real. The card and his own eye had done it.

  So now he knew how to pull the trick on others: darkening yellow by using its complement, giving green a red shadow and orange a blue one, presenting things as they never looked so that you would see them as they were. He learned all the dodges and deceptions; then at last, without contempt either for the rules or for moments of magic and carefully staged illusion, to make his own way in the dark.

  He wrote:

  My dear father,

  Your letter this morning. It has upset me more than I can say. This is a terrible blow! I am fond of Clyde and have been afraid for him. He was always the weak one amongst us – I don’t blame him for that – unwilling to accept the world as it is and expecting always to get things easy, and as far as work is concerned, with no staying power. But as I say, I don’t blame him. It is hard to be the underdog and he is so full of energy. That’s the trouble, really, he’s burning up with it. He wants so much out of life and circumstances have always been against him. I would have done anything to save him from this, but what could anyone do? Maybe this time on the boys’ farm will do him good – at least it is in the open, and with animals and a life that he knows, not a real prison. But I hate to think of him there. Didn’t any of those people see what he is like, how easily led, and how soft if you treat him the right way? I will try to visit him one weekend but it is a fair stretch. I have no spare cash, and the work I am doing knocks me out. Anyway, will do what I can. I can’t bear to think of him boxed in. My love to you all – especially to Tam and Pearsall. Write to me, Pearse!

  Your loving son, etc.

  He wrote:

  Dear Father,

  I have been to visit Clyde on what they call a farm. He looks well enough, from the exercise and from being out in the sun, but his frame of mind is another matter. It scares me.

  Farm sounds as if it was a place you would recognise. Well, I didn’t. In spite of the animals and machinery. I had no idea there could be such a place! Not that I saw anything direct. It was more like a smell – the guards and men in charge! And the boys! It would break your heart to see poor Clyde among them. He looks so young and so much like his dear self, and the others are already so hardened and brutal looking – but maybe I could not see them with a brother’s eyes.

  It is Clyde’s attitude that scares me. He blames everyone except himself, and is still skiting and trying to impress people with talk. Only when I got him alone did he seem as soft and affectionate as I know he is underneath. What is happening to him? I know he has always been weak. Always trying to win others to him some easy way – by toughness, or by bribing them with presents and things. We did nothing because we said he was young and would grow out of it. I worry now that it is too late. I felt I could not speak to him. Everything I had to say seemed weak and old womanish – I know that is what he was thinking. He looks down on me for having no fight, but it isn’t true.

  I spent the whole time on the train back to Brisbane – it is three hours – going over and over it, sometimes out loud, trying to make him hear. This is real torture to me, not to be able to reach him! I spent the whole journey mumbling to myself and shivering with fright.

  What has happened to us? There is more than one sort of courage, surely. But it is a terrible thing to love someone and feel held off and unable to –

  This letter he tore up. It was never sent.

  People thought him odd, a tall, spare cove, not old enough to be so old-looking, with a gingery moustache and mild, milk-blue eyes. Little girls in faded frocks skipping rope beside a fence would stop with the rope in a limp arc, puzzled by what it might be in them or in the stopped game that had caught his eye; and were not convinced when he smiled weakly, shoved his hands in his pockets and sloped off. He spoke to cats that rubbed his ankles in back alleys, and on Sunday afternoons sat on a seat in the park to hear band music from an iron rotunda. It wasn’t much of a life.

  Occasionally, parting the half-doors on noise and sawdust, he would push his way into one of the Valley wineshops. In engraved and bevelled mirrors under a ceiling of moulded lead, among lightbursts out of the depths of bottles, black women and men not yet derelict but on a greasy slope made a company whose harsh laughter was softened by the breath of fellowship, and their mouths, bunched round obscenities, by a haze of smoke. This was the pit, but he thought of its creatures as his own. There was nothing degrading in it. Passages of darkness under smeared tabletops, legs wetly parted; occasions of knuckle and bone; other, bloodier encounters in which a passing insult might develop an edge of bottle-glass. He took things as they came, preferring places where he was a stranger like the rest.

  Hopkins, who lived at the end of a tramline where bush ran down to an abandoned quarry, could have shown him another sort of life. He had a wife and three clever, half-grown daughters. But he didn’t want that. Though not much more than twenty, he had begun to develop, in the cramped proximity of boarding houses and in low pubs and wineshops where he never drank more than a lone glass of port, the habits of singularity and a lifelong solitude.

  He wrote:

  Dear Clyde,

  I am sorry you sent me that letter. I know things are bad for you, they’re not too good at this juncture for any of us, but we’ve got to battle through. You must let go the belief that there is some easy way. There isn’t any. I have found out that at least.

  I know it is hard to look about and see so much you want is always out of reach – flash clothes, if that is what appeals to you – cash, a car etc. I have no desire to play the nag, or the old man wise and superior, which I am not! – but am in despair about the way you are going, being so fond of you and of all my brothers, and willing to do anything in my power for you.

  But you must not take advantage of me with threats. To hint and
threaten as you do is a child’s way. It is an old weakness. You ought to have given it up by now. You must know what desperation it puts me in.

  The fact is we are all too close. We find it hard to stand on our own two feet – I’m no different, only determined not to be beaten down.

  Clyde, this time I am sending what you ask for. Not the lot, because I can’t manage it, but what I can spare. I don’t grudge it, but I have to think of Tam – he is a hard worker and wants to make good – and of Pearse, who must be kept at school. I know things have been hard for you and that you get discouraged, but you must not always put the blame on others or on ‘the unfairness of things’. I can’t write more now but will scribble a few lines soon and send you another pound or so, if I can, at the end of the month.

  Your affect. brother etc.

  He wrote:

  Dear Tam,

  I am sending straight away what I have by me at the moment. The doctor’s got to be paid and Pearsall looked after as well as poss. I do not want this to make a gap in his schooling. A broken leg is not the end of the world. The rest of us have had to do without education at a time when I see it is the only way of getting on in the world. I want Pearse to finish school and get out of this mire of working always so hard and in such misery as the rest of us. It is that more than anything that has affected Clyde. It is my one hope that he will have some sort of profession. He is a clever kid, I know, and not sulky or rebellious. My only fear is that he may turn out to be a dreamer like Clyde, who can’t seem to face up to any sort of reality. He writes me terrible letters from Cairns, where he is doing an animal’s work cutting cane, but I am in no position. My own plight just now is desperate . . .