by David Malouf
It was all green trees or bluish-green clouds – it was difficult to tell which – with a chink of brilliant light under them that was the horizon, and another stroke of light, in a jagged diagonal, that might have been a thunderbolt, but could also have been a figure diving. I couldn’t see what had caught my father’s eye in it, and guessed he had pulled it out of the series at random and was as surprised as Harland was at his achievement.
Frank Harland shuffled. He considered the thing. He wondered if two pounds would be all right; then shook his head as if he had taken advantage of my father’s generosity.
‘No, no,’ he said, pushing the picture away, ‘I can’t take anything for it. It was your eye picked it out. It’s yours. Let me give it to you.’
But my father was already taking the notes from his wallet. He set them down on the trolley, and I could see that he was disappointed. He had expected to pay more; either because he wanted to give Harland money and buying the picture was a way of saving the man’s dignity, or because he genuinely wished to believe that the work was good and expected the painter, in naming a price, to make his own high claims for it. Two pounds was neither here nor there.
‘Oright then, you win,’ Frank Harland said to cover his embarrassment, since he was clearly in need, ‘I’ll sign it for you.’
He set the picture down, and with great care, now that it was my father’s, composed his initials into a curious and beautiful monogram, working the pen very slowly, like a boy doing a copybook exercise, and pushing his tongue out at the corner of his mouth. He retouched and blotted it, then laid it aside.
I was more impressed by all this than by anything the painting itself had revealed to me. It was the hand linking the quite ordinary initials into a complex pattern that struck me; the two letters, beautifully entwined, of the artist’s signature, marking so clearly the claim of self. I immediately accorded him, as an artist, my whole-hearted belief. I had thought him odd before, though likeable (he was shy enough to make me feel at ease), but was convinced now that my father, for once in his life, as in the case of the little painting itself, had discovered the real thing.
I wandered off to look at the other things he had discarded, rather as I might have gone through a pile of cast-offs and old junk that my mother, in one of her cleaning fits, had thrown out of our spare room. I had an eye in those days for what I thought of as ‘treasures’, objects, that is, that I found evocative and which others had no use for. It had led me, on Saturday mornings in Brisbane, to take my shilling pocket money and go off early to the two junkshops in Melbourne Street. And it was in the mood now in which I might have pushed open the door of Old Ned’s in the expectation of a cut-glass scent bottle, or a silver button-hook or a postcard of a lady with real hair, that I drew from a pile of sheets against the wall the portrait of a woman and turned it casually to the light.
What I saw drew a gasp from me, perhaps even a little cry, and I wondered at first if it wasn’t the spirit in which I had picked the thing up – that mood of going off to the junkshops, first Old Ned’s and then Old Knack’s – that made me believe I knew the woman. It was her attitude I recognised rather than the face, which was barely suggested by two or three pen strokes under a stack of wispy straw – the way she was settled in the striped deckchair. I saw immediately now what the picture was that Frank Harland had been at work on and what those figures were engaged on in their wash of red.
My cry must have been real. Frank Harland and my father had turned, and Harland was frowning. He had seen at once that I knew the woman. He coloured, gave my father a quick glance, then stared at me with his innocent eyes wide open, waiting for me to tell.
What he had seen in my eyes was shock, but there was no shock in his. Only a pained sadness.
My father stepped forward and took the picture from me. He looked at it with approval, then passed it back. It meant nothing to him.
We left soon after, and if I was more silent than usual, my father, with the little landscape tucked away under his buttoned coat, might have put it down to the driving rain.
It wasn’t that. It was the woman, so largely and beautifully and warmly alive again in the striped deckchair.
I had seen her often. She was the woman who lived with Knack, the second of my two junkshop-keepers; so that I had, as it were, been on the way to her, first Old Ned’s, then Old Knack’s, when I lifted the sheet off the pile. She was a big, lazy, sad-looking blonde, very white, with painted nails and hair piled high on her head that was never quite tidy, and which she kept patting with a plump and rather grubby hand. She sat with her legs crossed, in a frock without sleeves in summer and the same frock with a cardigan in winter, in a passageway between shelves stacked deep with books, and did not move. If you wanted to know the price of something, a silver-plated eggcup, a spoon and pusher, a china sugar basin with a transfer picture of Rockhampton on it, or a miniature Toby jug or a little bakelite stud-case with an initialled shield, you had to take it up to her and she would enquire how much you had. ‘Well then, love,’ she’d say, ‘that’ll be sixpence to you.’ Or ninepence or fourpence ha’penny or whatever saved her from having to move and get change. I liked her, and couldn’t imagine why she had chosen to live with Knack.
Difficult to think of Knack, with his immense stoop, and his accent, and a skull that looked as if it had never had hair at all but had always been polished and bald, as anything but a monster. He had a habit of standing in the doorway to his shop with a little zebra-striped love-bird on his shoulder or perched very prettily on the back of his hand, or (but I don’t believe I ever saw this, I only imagined it) on the bald crown of his head, as on an enormous egg it was trying to hatch. I used to watch him from the tram or from the other side of the street, and would go into the shop at last only when the woman was lolling in the deckchair and he was clearly away. He scared me; and when he smiled, showing all his teeth and adopting a pose that was meant to make him, in the eyes of a small boy, a kind of clown on stilts, I lost all power of speech and was more fascinated and frightened than ever.
So it was no surprise to hear one morning, that in the little flat behind the shop, whose lilac and green wallpaper I had glimpsed behind the woman’s head, he had first killed the woman with two shots from a Luger pistol, then turned it on himself.
It was the merest chance that Frank Harland’s experience and mine should have crossed in this way, and that I should have come upon his drawing of the woman in a place where I was accustomed, week after week, to make the jump from reality to some other, more abstract dimension. Anywhere else I might have missed the connection; and even now there was something in the larger painting that I failed to catch. I saw clearly enough what those linked figures were doing, what the red was, and the madness and pathos of those streaks of blue, but I could not understand why the thing was so joyfully undismayed. It was as if all that red – as Frank Harland conceived it – were something other than blood.
None of this could I have put into words that day. I put it into silence. It was a silence, along with other things, that I felt I shared now with Frank Harland.
My father walked beside me, hugging under his coat the painting he had bought, which was all innocent green play; confident, in the way of fathers, that I knew no more than I revealed, and was just what I seemed to be.
[2]
My grandfather was dying, but he was doing it in his own time, and that was the time, day by day, that we all lived in. So long as Grandpa is still dying, I told myself, we will go on living here. So that when I think now of my changed life and all the ways in which its old patterns were disturbed – of my father no longer being head of his own house, my mother no longer cooking for us, of our no longer being a family of three but a minor branch of a larger and more complex household, of my having no room of my own and being cut off from all my old schoolfriends, the one child in a house of aunts and uncles, and of the intense sensations and disco
veries of that year, the way my body fitted into the real air, or penetrated or rubbed against or pounded or brushed the objects of the ordinary world – then I think of this too as being part of Grandpa’s dying, which was not at all a negative activity but something positive and engrossing.
Grandpa’s day, which had previously been idle, given over to walks and conversations on the Front with people he never brought home, or to slow games of dominoes and the rereading of his favourite authors, was pinned down now in real time to hours as regular and unbreakable as business appointments. He was, for the first time since I had known him, fully employed.
There was the hour of his early bottle, which my mother brought in at six and which the old man turned aside to use while she fussed over his tray. There followed the hour of his wash and shave, his pills, his first feeding with a mush that had to be spooned into him as one feeds a baby, then the hour of his morning visits. First my Aunt Ollie just risen on her way down to prepare breakfast, then my father on his way to the train and me on my way to school; then my other aunts – last, as usual, Aunt Connie – followed by the hour when my mother read to him. At ten my grandmother made her appearance, bringing an air of brisk impatience and a scent of musk from the little pastilles she sucked to cover her breath, and with the rather haughty demeanour before my mother of a grand lady making an inspection and finding nothing to fault. Then, when he got up at last, the youngest of the family, Uncle Gil, who slept in a shed at the bottom of the yard. Then lunch, the bedpan, the thermometer, Grandpa’s afternoon nap. Then in the late afternoon, after my return from school, an hour in which I sat at the end of his bed, high up on the lace cover, and read a book, while my mother slipped away to rest. Rigorously organised and filling every available hour of the day, his dying gave form to the household.
He had made no impression at all in the old days. Nobody had consulted him. His younger daughters’ practice at meal-times had been to treat his every word with tolerant amusement – they had learned that from their mother. Disregarding him had become such an established habit that they barely noticed what they were doing. Their taunts lacked all cruelty save the power to wound, and originated most often with Grandpa’s favourite, Aunt Roo.
‘I feel awful,’ she might announce, ‘it’s this heat! I’m sticking everywhere. I could throw every stitch off and just go bare. I don’t know why we don’t, in a climate like this. Like the abos! It’d make more sense.’
Aunt Roo was strident and fearless of proprieties. She protested with every jerk of her angular shoulders and slewed expression of mouth against the aridity of things. Her protests were useless. They were ascribed not to her view of other possibilities but to her character: her weak grip on reality, her unhappy tendency to make ‘scenes’.
‘That’s enough, thank you,’ my grandmother would say quietly. She did not look at me but I was plainly in her mind.
‘Well I’m melting! Doesn’t anyone else feel it? Well, don’t you?’
‘I feel it,’ Grandpa said.
‘Oh you, of course you’d feel it, all dolled up like that in a suit. It’s ridiculous. You’re not going anywhere.’ Grandpa looked startled. ‘Where do you think we are anyway? It’s eighty-five in the shade.’
‘Gloucestershire,’ Aunt Connie suggested. Being herself on most occasions the family butt, she would say these things out of cowardice, to ingratiate and protect herself. She blushed for her own boldness now and was ashamed.
‘Ollie,’ said my grandmother, observing that Grandpa had put his spoon down and pushed away his plate, ‘I think this pudding could do with more sugar. I don’t mind, but your father has a sweet tooth. So does Phil.’
Aunt Ollie agreed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She had been distracted by the postman.
Grandpa shook his head. It was only Aunt Roo who could hurt him.
We had taken him for granted in those days; he was barely present. Now, when he was permanently out of sight upstairs, he was never out of our thoughts. With his papery skin all covered with blotches, the worry about bed-sores, the warmish enamel bottles I had to carry out under a white cloth, he was entirely, unavoidably real.
But if his dying made him actual in a physical sense, then the process of his abstraction (for it was also that) could only, I thought, be a matter of spirit. I saw it as a withdrawal to England, where he had originally come from, a place whose manners and habits of speech had always cut him off from us. Each day, with his extreme whiteness and fragility, and the precision with which he now shaped even the simplest words, he was getting further towards it; he was being refined of everything local and ordinary; he was being ‘taken back’, and had begun to resemble, with his fine white hair and clipped moustache, old English gentlemen as I had seen them illustrated in books. Colonels. Though Grandpa in fact – and even this was long ago – had never been anything more than a dandified and unsuccessful insurance salesman.
Dying, it seemed to me, was a process of becoming your essential self, of moving into some realm of a lighter, clearer identity, that would cut you off at last even from those who were closest to you, your children and grandchildren, while at the same time imposing upon them the fullest possible awareness of your presence as it involved a weight to be lifted aside while the bed was made, and the most intimate, but after all unavoidable and in no way shameful excretions. I felt closer to Grandpa now than when he had taken me on walks and gruffly pushed lollies into my palm, or insisted that I face up to dogs; or when, a weak and formal presence at the head of his own table, I had seen him joshed and humiliated.
Often, when I had to lean close to attend to one of his wishes (his voice in my ear came as from a great distance, as if he had slipped back into some remote time, his own childhood perhaps, or to some lost place in England), I would feel his skin against my own as no longer quite human, as having the scratchiness of bark or the papery quality of an insect’s wing. This too seemed part of the process. As the body began to change for death it would naturally reveal, it seemed to me, what it shared with other creatures or with the earth. I saw nothing frightening in it. Touching my grandfather’s skin and thinking, he is close to death, seemed much like bringing my fingertips into contact with the scribbles on a tree trunk. It was uncanny, that was all. Mysterious.
It was from my mother that I had inherited this easy matter-of-factness. I was often her assistant in that room, and it was me she had chosen to replace her when she slipped away each afternoon to snatch an hour’s rest. I liked nothing better than to curl up at the end of Grandpa’s bed, my back against the brass rail with its row of china balusters, and with my feet tucked up under me and my head in a book, watch over him while my mother slept.
Grandpa dozed and snored, propped upright with pillows. I went splashing through the Canadian marshlands or swashbuckled my way through the moonlit alleys of d’Artagnan’s Paris. Occasionally he would speak, odd words or phrases that were not always addressed to me. Sometimes it was my father or my Uncle Gil he had in mind, back when they were my age; or two Gloucestershire lads, Jim Hodge and Will Burnley, who had been the companions of his youth; or Felix Pickup, his first partner at Lightning Ridge, who was a ‘decent cove’ and never appeared in Grandpa’s stories under any other rubric.
Grandpa did not always live in the present. Or rather, his present was a layer of several decades that could replace one another with startling rapidity and in no sort of chronological order. A shouted warning out of his sleep might be intended for the Decent Cove, Felix. The beginning of a reminiscence, a ‘Say lad, do you remember . . .?’ might be meant for Jim Hodge. Or it might indeed be my presence he was anxious to be assured of when he whispered ‘You still there, boy?’ and reached out his hand to be touched. I replied anyway, for myself or for the others, and he seemed content. He would settle back into his slow breathing, his gentle snores, or he would suddenly be awake and ready to talk. I was happy then to lay Dumas or Northwest Passage aside an
d hear what he had to tell.
His stories, which were all of his own life, had a deep attraction for me. His odd, old-fashioned manner of narration gave them the quality of folk or fairy tale, so that he, as chief character, seemed already to belong to a time that could be thought of as ‘the olden days’ and to a place that was unreal and far off, even when it was as familiar from the map as Gloucester or Lightning Ridge.
He and his Gloucestershire cronies, Jim Hodge and Will Burnley, were all three great drinkers of cider, great cross-country night-walkers. They might tramp all night sometimes and then seek out a farm kept by some lone woman where they could wash up at a pump and get a good breakfast of porridge and eggs. They knew all the history of places going back under doomsday fields to the Romans and beyond, and Grandpa especially, who had a taste for the weird, was an expert on tales of murder and other dark doings on local farms, of which he knew all the names and believed all the hauntings: how on this one a cord from which a sailor had hanged himself could be heard creaking from a beam, and on another a ghostly hammer, all wet with blood, would turn up on the sill of an upstairs window, its handle pointing to the village, miles away on an opposite hill, where the suspected murderer lived, though nothing could be proved against him.
Will Burnley, with Grandpa to work the shovel, had dug up a whole sackful of arrowheads from the mounds on Crickley Hill, as well as sherds from the Roman villa at Witcombe and a Saxon earring. He had an eye, Grandpa said, that could see through six inches of turf. He went off at nearly forty to the Boer war and died there, just making it into the new century, and had sent Grandpa a letter, nearly twenty years after they had last set eyes on one another, from a place called Walling Koep. Grandpa still had it – he had read it to me. It was full of savage facts about the fighting but had romantic descriptions as well of the southern skies. They had reminded him, he wrote, that his old pal, Jeff Vernon, was also down there somewhere in the bottom half of the world. The letter came the same week Grandpa was married and gave him deep pause, recalling as it did all his youth, and drawing so to speak a clear line under it.
