by David Malouf
Gerald, at the window sill, followed his uncle’s movements with intense interest; as if he couldn’t quite see what he was up to or guess the meaning of so much affability. He made me a series of gestures, not all of them convincing, that said, See? I told you.
At last Frank Harland had found what he wanted. He rested three or four pictures against the wall and piled the remainder into the cupboard. ‘Here,’ he said, and turned one to the light. ‘That’s something I did then. A series, see?’ And he drew out another and set them side by side.
They were studies, highly finished, of a boxer, a thin, crouched, half-caste youth. In one he was hugging the punching bag as if he were hanging on hard against forces that might tear him away. In the other, despairingly baffled but not yet defeated, he was shadow-boxing with it, lunging wildly at the shadow while the bag itself, slack and puffy with evil, solidly passive, simply hung there and half-obscured him, pushed him out to a corner of the frame. There was a naked globe. And all around stood the silent watchers: tree-trunks or house-stumps or transmogrified elders or wooden gods.
It was the hunch of the boy’s body, its coiled energy turned in upon itself, already hopeless, and the savage light in his eyes, in the whites of his eyes, that struck me. Was it the same boy? It must have been. Somewhere out of frame there would be the dancing white man, the punch-drunk father, and further out again, my father and myself.
The painter had grown sober. The pictures had subdued him. They imposed themselves. Gerald let himself down from the sill and for a moment only came closer. Had he seen these pictures before? I thought he hadn’t. He too was impressed. The struggle was so uneven. The young half-caste brought his whole body to bear; he strained, he screwed himself up, he called on every last ounce of will and muscle, he drew his passions to a fist and bravely, despairingly struck out. But the enemy, just because it refused to declare itself, was always more powerful. He was done for before he began. But his courage somehow stood. It drew not only on itself but on what it was pitted against, and would be seen at full stretch only at the moment of inevitable defeat.
There was an odd stillness in the room, and I felt again what I had felt years ago at the occasion itself, the presence of a darkness that the naked globe on its cord was powerless to dispel.
‘Yairs,’ Frank Harland was saying. He reached out and touched the paint with a forefinger. ‘They’re – all right. They’re all right.’
Slowly, shaking his head, he withdrew them and they were turned to the wall.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is more like it! You’ll recognise this.’
I felt the blood rise to the roots of my hair.
It was my Aunt Ollie and Della, I knew them at once, though there was no attempt at a likeness, except perhaps between the women themselves.
Their large bodies were entwined. The pattern of interlocking, intercircling lines through which they emerged from the surface of the board, and which boldly contained their arms, breasts, shoulders, necks, heads, first caught the eye, then confused, then satisfied it. They floated but were anchored to the earth – it might have been by a million grains of flour on the arms of one of them that had once been seed-cells and before that sunlight and earth, or by the thickness of the paint itself that was metal and earth. They leaned together. They mirrored one another. They moved in and out of each other’s forms but were always themselves. They communicated through a play of shared lines; presiding, in ordinary mystery, over a blue, ball-like, tunnel-like space that could have been simply an area of the picture that no line had had power to cross, but might also be an entrance into the further depths of it, or if palpable, a not-quite-rounded entity that the two women, by patting and pounding and passing it back and forth between them, were shaping into a fate.
I was astonished by the virtuosity and daring of the thing, but also by the delight it gave me, which had nothing to do with my recognising the two figures, or with my believing I knew something about them which another viewer might miss, or with any affection I had had for Aunt Ollie, or my having been allowed to share at times the two women’s affection for one another. It lay in something purer than recognition or even knowledge. In the painter’s joy in what he had been at work on: his ‘Two Fates’, as the picture was called, of which the unmade space the women were presiding over was the inchoate Third.
‘Yairs,’ he said again in a long-drawn breath, considering the picture from his oblique, close view. ‘That’s the one!’
He sank into himself as he considered. After a time, without further comment, he set the Two Fates aside.
‘Just one more, eh? I call this one – I call it “The Iceman”’ – he paused, producing the boyish grin – ‘“as Heavenly – Bridegroom”.’
Easy to see why he regarded it, in the presentation, with such wry humour. Though as before, as soon as it was fully displayed he turned solemn, he too was struck.
It was a self-portrait, the face all fragments. A force from ‘out there’ that was irresistible but might not, in the end, be destructive had struck it to splinters that met the flat board at every angle, so that the figure emerged simultaneously in many planes. Turning one shoulder to the viewer out of ice or stone that had already disintegrated, and at the same time turning away, the figure was immediately recognisable. So was the pose. I would see it often in later years, in the reluctance he always showed to come in from his own distance. He would stand exactly like that: side-on to the occasion, only obliquely in view.
But there was something else, a more humorous reflection. It was of the iceman himself – Della’s iceman, to whom my aunts in their jokey way had once likened him: the suitor who called but did not propose; who had never (as I could have told him in Della’s case) popped the question. He saw himself in that comic light. As an imminent but un-annunciating angel.
‘Well,’ he growled now, no longer amused, ‘that’s about it, I reckon. Enough for one day.’ He shot a quick glance in the direction of the sill, then set himself to returning the pictures to their stack, and seemed not to notice when Gerald, letting himself down like a gymnast, slipped quietly away.
But Frank’s eye missed nothing, I was sure of that. For all his absorption in the pictures he had been keenly aware of my reactions and keenly interested in them; there was an assured cunning in what he had shown. I was to be drawn into his world, though for what reason I couldn’t yet tell; and Gerald, perched so lightly on the sill, looking so easy and pleased with himself but also puzzled – it was just the sort of expression that had put me off when I used to observe him at Aunt Roo’s – had been playing the role of procurer. There was, between them, a clear understanding about why I had been brought here and the conditions under which I might be tempted back. Gerald had left on cue.
Frank Harland turned now and had something to say. He assumed, I was amused to see, the sidelong pose of the self-portrait, half-facing me but looking away. He coughed, shuffled, and indicating a portable record player that had till then been hidden by the cupboard door, informed me, as if he felt a need to account for the thing, that it was a present. ‘From an admirer. A lady from Melbourne sent it.’
He gave a grin, a mixture of embarrassment and almost childish vanity, and stood looking at the machine as if he couldn’t fathom its use.
‘I didn’t see her, of course. Couldn’t! I don’t see people. But she heard I was fond of music and had it sent. From Chandlers. It was very nice of her. People can be kind, it’s surprising.’
He continued to study it, clasping his hands behind his back, rocking a little on his heels, and began softly, tunelessly, to whistle: then said abruptly, without turning: ‘I’d like you to come again. Now’n then I’ve got business to be done, you could be a help. I don’t really understand these things. I need someone I can trust.’
He did look at me now, fixing me with his deep blue eyes. ‘There’s no one – no one I … Here! Take a look at this f’r
instance.’
Turning sharply away, he took from his pocket a sheet of notepaper and thrust it towards me. ‘No, no, I want you to read it! I want you to see the sort of thing –’ He swallowed hard on what he saw as the perversity, the hard injustice of things.
It was a letter. It began in a small neat hand but degenerated almost immediately into passionate scrawl:
Dear Frank,
I am writing again because I can’t help it, I’ve got no faith in your so-called heart, so don’t expect this will do any good – no more than the others. I got the letter you asked that lawyer to send me. Why I wonder? Do you think I am a fool and don’t know already what sort of a position I’m in? You are a coward not daring to face me yourself. This is a personal matter between us, not lawyer’s business. I wasn’t writing about what the law says but about what my heart says and what yours would say if you had one. I wrote as a mother! I’m talking about nature, Frank – not the law. Do you know the difference? Gerald is my son – my son and Jim’s – nothing can change that. You had no part in it and never can have. Till the day I die it will make me closer to Gerald than you can ever be – and Jim too, a dead man, since he is the boy’s natural father. I gave him up to you because I had no other way of keeping and educating the boy and you know that. Out of the kindness of your heart – what a joke! – you offered to adopt him and see he was sent to a decent school. In the state I was in, with no family to turn to and no means of support except hard work, who would blame me if I was tricked. After all you were family, Jim’s own brother, and blood is thicker than water they say. What I didn’t know was that you haven’t got any blood in you, Frank, not a drop! You had to steal the boy from me, right from the start, and make of him what you can’t make yourself – that’s the real truth of it, that’s why you had to steal and bring the law in and let lawyers make a son for you. Well I don’t accept it. There’s also nature Frank, you can’t twist that. Thirty-two hours of labour – that’s what Gerald cost me. You wouldn’t know but it makes a difference. Let alone the nine months. You will never understand that, no matter how hard you try. It’s beyond you and always will be, flesh is flesh. As for your so-called love – and what you want to make of him – the boy himself has told me what that means, if I didn’t know it already. It means trying to twist him to the way you see things, because you think you own him. A man hardly sane! – that’s the truth, I am a woman, Frank, you can’t hide from me – with no love for anyone and no power to make the boy love you. I don’t have to beg for love, Frank. That’s a mother’s power. Let your lawyers write what they like, with their high-falutin words no one can follow and their whereases and in due terms – I’ll see you dead Frank, you vampire! Pretending to be a good brother and a helping hand in need. You’re a monster. If no one else will tell you I will and it’s the truth. If you knew the times I have sat here and the curses I’ve worked on you, you wouldn’t sleep. I curse you now, at this minute. I hope you can feel it. I spit on your lawyer’s letter and I spit on you . . .
There was more. The last page was almost indecipherable and gave way to obscenities. I guessed the letter had been started in a sober state and finished in a drunk one, but it might only have been overpowering emotion. It ended in a delirium of witch-like imprecations that had a weird and chilling power, as if words so rarely spoken retained in some mouths, and on some occasions, their original magic. I gave the letter back.
‘Well, you c’n see what I’ve gotta put up with,’ he said in a low voice. He had, I knew, been following every word as I read it. He knew the letter by heart. His chin was drawn down into his collar. He was stricken. He cringed under the woman’s scorn.
‘You c’n see what sort of – I mean, does a decent woman use words like that? Obscenities?’
His mouth was prim. He had narrow views of the proprieties, however daring he might be in imagination, and whatever ‘savageries’ he was capable of when it came to paint.
‘Should I expose a boy I’m responsible for to the influence of a – of a mouth like that? I can’t tell you what a scourge that woman’s been. I adopted the boy. Ten years ago! Not a squeak out of ’er then. Only too glad to have him off of ’er hands. So she’d be free to see a bit of life as she called it – men! Now she accuses me of turning him against her, of alienating his affections, because I prefer him not to see a woman who’s no better than a harlot.’
He half-swallowed the word, astonished perhaps that he had allowed himself to use it.
‘She spoiled him silly as a kid. Taught him to expect things, as a right, that you have to work and struggle for. Made ’im believe he was all sorts of things. It’s taken me years to put a bit of ordinary backbone into a boy who might have had character if his mother hadn’t tried to buy his affection, or make up for her own foolishness and the desire to be out seeing a bit of life, by indulging him. Bribing him with sweets and toys and God knows what till he’s come to think life is a sort of Christmas tree where gifts’ll just keep falling at his feet. He resents me, I know that. He thinks I’m hard. It’s because I want him to be something. To realise that life is serious. To make something of himself. Not to trade on – sensitivity, and some belief he’s got hold of that life is his for the asking and that he can miss out on the sweat and the grief. I know he sees her. I can tell the minute he walks in. He gets that smug look on his face – of being made special again by all that false love she ladles over him, all that sticky sweetness. Of course he goes to her! Who wouldn’t? I can’t give him that because it’s a lie, it’s the sort of unreal easy stuff he’ll drown in. Our family’ – his voice rose in a long moan; he was speaking now out of an ancestral grief – ‘is dogged by weakness or bad luck – I don’t know what it is, but it’s gotta be fought. One of us has to break out of it! I’d rather lose the boy than have that woman ruin him. He’s the last of us.’
He closed his mouth hard now and his eyes were like flints. But he was beaten. His voice, when it came, was harsh with self-mockery.
‘He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love or a whore’s oath. Do you recognise that? It’s Lear – the Fool. I was as ignorant as a stone when I was a young man, all – sensitivity. But I educated myself. Not to know Lear is to be unprepared for life. Up to this point I have been spared the wolves and the horses.’
[3]
Over the next months I got to know a little of what it was he had for me to do; but either he himself did not know the full extent of his resources, and of the purchases and exchanges of property he was committed to, or a natural secretiveness, allied to old fears of being betrayed or swindled, made it impossible for him to be entirely open with me. He kept things back, then slowly, a little shamefaced at his own duplicity, revealed them. There was always something more. I came to know, from his shy looks and sly attempts at evasion, when he was keeping something from me that might be essential to what we had in hand, but real frankness was beyond him. He didn’t consider himself untruthful; after all, it was his business, he owed me nothing, and he had the highest regard for truth. It was a form of protection. I suspected him of hiding money in the house, no doubt in the most obvious places. He certainly had deals afoot that he had not declared, and there may have been others that he had lost all track of.
Since he had always dealt through agents, avoiding his own name if possible, it was difficult to determine what he owned and how much, over the years, he had paid for it. I was frequently exasperated. He would sit then twisting his knuckled hands, apologetic but unrepentant, only a little anxious as a child might be that he had gone too far and lost me. I was astonished at his innocence, his impracticality, mixed in as it was with native cunning and a tendency to cover his evasions either with a look of blue-eyed wide-eyed naivety that really was false, or with little attempts to flatter or please that I immediately saw through.
‘We get on well together, don’t we?’ he said once.
I laug
hed. It was one of those days when he had been most defiantly perverse. It had taken me a good hour to worm out of him the details of a land deal I knew he had made and which he was determined to deny.
‘Frank, you’re impossible,’ I told him.
‘Am I?’
He was delighted, but sweetened any bitterness I might have felt by presenting me, before I left, with a valuable and carefully chosen book.
He himself was never resentful of my victories. On the contrary, he seemed refreshed, relieved by them, as if I had cleansed him of a stubborn untruth. Or he was pleased with me for having demonstrated a strength of character and persistence that he genuinely admired and which proved his own wisdom in having chosen me.
There was, to all our dealings, this aspect of conflict and drama, of confessions wrought with difficulty, of a battle in which temperament was revealed and set at play in a struggle of wills; though why this should have been necessary when I was, after all, only a servant of his needs, I could never fathom. Perhaps an engagement of this sort, over public and impersonal issues, was the only relationship he felt safe in. There was anyway, as I saw, a degree of real passion in it, in all meanings of the word, that gave to the practice of the law, which had not originally attracted me – it was my father’s choice, not mine – a dimension that for the first time commanded the span of my interests. I was variously puzzled, rewarded, exasperated, moved, amused; drawn deep into his world, then roughly pushed off again, dazzled by the largeness of his vision and brought up hard against some pettiness in him, some small-minded fear or superstition, that in no way fitted the boldness and scope of his thinking or the nobility of his dreams.
