by JH Fletcher
For all the notice Dave took, Cal might not have opened his mouth. He wandered around the studio, inspecting each painting in turn, until that, too, made Cal wild.
‘Well?’
As though it mattered what the critic, what anyone, thought.
‘They’re strong. They’re harsh. The technical use of —’
‘You don’t like them.’ Flat, like an accusation.
‘No one could like them.’
‘The symbols of a sick society?’ Cal jeered. ‘Isn’t that the politically correct thing to say?’
‘They’re nothing to do with society,’ Dave said. ‘They’re about you. Your heart upon the canvas. It’s always been your greatest strength. And weakness.’
Cal told himself he welcomed Dave’s rejection, that it made him strong. Yet, in his heart, did not believe that.
Now Dave was studying the incomplete painting on the easel, the slashes of black and red like a symphony of death and blood. Almost casually, he discarded it.
‘New York won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole,’ he said.
‘I haven’t sent them to New York.’
‘It’s the same. Since you came back from Paris —’
‘I’ve been painting my heart,’ Cal said savagely. ‘As you keep telling me. Nothing has changed.’
‘Everything has changed.’
Cal would give no ground. ‘Are you saying there’s no room for hatred in art? What about Goya? George Grosz?’
‘They hated what they were portraying. Cruelty. Selfishness. Bigotry. The firing parties. The porcine officials. “There,” they were saying, “there is your enemy.” But the artists themselves … Always, always, they were on the side of truth. Of goodness. Of what humanity can become.’
‘Wagner? The anti-Semite?’
Deliberately Cal brought in the composer’s name, knowing how Dave shared his admiration for Wagner’s music.
‘But the message was sublime. What you’re doing is glorifying the hatred itself. The darkness.’
Especially to himself, Cal would not acknowledge that Dave might be right.
‘I paint the truth.’
‘No.’
‘As I see it.’
‘Not even that. That is in your earlier work.’
‘Chocolate box,’ Cal repeated.
Dave turned away, stared through the open doorway. ‘That rumour I warned you about … I hear the Stuyvesant’s definitely having second thoughts about your show.’
‘They can’t. We’ve got a contract.’
‘With an escape clause. There’s always one of those.’
‘I’ve heard nothing from Angela.’
‘I’ve a nasty feeling you will.’
It would certainly be a blow. Cal told himself that artistic integrity was what mattered. But without a market …
He had the need to savage himself through the medium of someone else. Dave made a convenient target.
‘Why don’t you keep your beak out of my affairs?’
‘Because I feel responsible.’
Which was a bit bloody cool.
‘To me?’
‘To art. I’ve always believed you have the potential to be one of the great artists of the twenty-first century.’
‘Freudian slip,’ Cal said unpleasantly. ‘“I’ve always believed …” You saying you don’t, any more?’
‘I think you’re off target. What happened in Paris —’
Fury clenched its fists. ‘Leave Paris out of it, okay?’
‘The talent is still there. But you’re going in the wrong direction.’
Cal’s voice was jagged, with blades. ‘And naturally you plan to re-direct me?’
‘It’s not for me to do anything. You know the truth as well as I do. It’s up to you what you do about it. But the way you’re headed at the moment is wrong. Wrong for you, wrong for your art.’
Rage like a coal, burning. ‘Thank you so much for telling me. And if I say you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about?’
Would have said more, gathering the words like spittle around his tongue, but Dave beat him to it.
‘I’ll do a deal with you.’
‘Deal? What are you talking about?’
‘You mentioned Wagner …’
‘What about him?’
‘I’ve got a spare ticket for Rheingold. I thought you might like to have it.’
The Ring Cycle was being performed in Adelaide for the first time. Cal had thought to go, but hadn’t got around to booking. It was a generous offer; the tickets cost a packet.
Cal was suspicious. ‘Why? What’s the idea?’
‘Just to come with me to the opera. Nothing else. Maybe it’ll do you good to immerse yourself in the work of another great artist.’
‘In opera?’
‘Emotion.’ The word fierce, a votive offering to a god of great yet unknowable power. ‘Bathe yourself in it. Surrender yourself to it. Who knows? It might help get you back on track.’
‘And if I agree?’
Dave laughed. ‘I won’t badger you any more.’
A good deal, indeed. Too good; Cal remained suspicious. Yet the idea of immersing himself in another man’s artistic experience had an odd appeal.
What the hell, he thought. What harm can it do?
‘Good on you, Siegfried,’ he said. ‘Just don’t try marrying me off to any Brunnhildes, that’s all.’
Dave was rounded, soft, with an apologetic moustache, a rotund joviality that he sprayed like spit. Anyone less like Siegfried would have been impossible to imagine, yet heroic elements remained. As now, come to beard Cal in his den.
Cal turned suddenly and caught the critic watching him with an expression at once concerned and apprehensive, as though Cal had been wired to explode at any moment.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’
The Arts Centre beside the Torrens River was spilling with people. Some had come to see, many to be seen; there might even, thought Cal sourly, be one or two who had come for the music.
Beyond the refreshment tents, starched-looking and brilliant against the emerald lawns, the river reflected the imploring branches of trees. The evening sunlight gilded the bandstand on its little mound, two racing skiffs slid downstream and, beyond the cricket oval already announcing the dates of a forthcoming Test match against England, the twin spires of the cathedral pointed the road to heaven.
Cal walked with Dave Holt at his side, a glass of free champagne in his hand and the music of Rheingold’s first act thundering in his head. Soon the bells would summon, they would return to the twilight world of myth and truth, heroes and frailty, an emotional intensity that stripped the skin from his susceptibilities, bringing them raw and bleeding into the light.
It was too much. Cal had a sudden longing to be away from here, to be alone in a canyon walled with stone and silence, the rocks as red as heat and pulsing in the light. From nowhere, standing beside the cool river, the gritty fire of the Red Centre summoned him.
He thought, Perhaps there I can regain my peace. More important still, my sense of mission.
Sidney Nolan had done it. In his own way, so had Russell Drysdale. Aboriginal artists without number had produced paintings that reflected their personal vision. Cal felt the urgent need to follow them, to seek contact with the spirit of the land in the same way that Wagner had created from legend a universe of mystery and myth. It was no more than a fleeting glimpse, a glint upon the rock to hint at what might lie beneath, but he turned restlessly, staring down at the tranquil river.
Now the sun had set. The city’s buildings shone golden in the dying light. It was still hot; along the river the trees looked cool and inviting. Cal stood amid a clattering chatter of people as a flight of ducks planed in from nowhere to land upon the water in a gash of foam. Again Cal wished he could be away from the city loud with voices and traffic, to escape the pressures that had squeezed all hope and creativity from his spirit. The Centre’s red heart flared
between the willow trees, along the olive coolness of the water. The darkening sky shone with the first blink of stars, yet, above the theatre’s yellow lights, it was still blue, pulsing with heat and ardour, a sense of awakening purpose. He felt the lust and hope of renewal.
Dave cried, ‘I don’t believe it!’
And stood staring, hand clapped theatrically to his head, his other arm outstretched to embrace the figure of a young woman who had paused in front of them. She was wearing a white dress that reflected the last of the light; her suntanned face laughed beneath a cap of dark, short, gleaming hair.
‘Where have you sprung from?’ Dave asked. He turned to Cal. ‘My niece. Kathryn Fanning. I’ve mentioned her to you often.’
Cal knew that Dave had never mentioned her at all, but smiled anyway.
‘The truth,’ Dave said. ‘Your name is ever on my lips.’
Kathryn smiled, tolerant of her uncle’s ways.
‘Enjoying it?’ she asked Cal.
‘Very much.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it,’ she said. She turned back to Dave. ‘I was keeping a lookout for you. I thought you might be here.’
‘And now you’ve found us.’ Dave spoke as though it were the most astonishing thing. Again he slapped his forehead. ‘My dears, please excuse my manners … Kathryn, this is my dear friend, Cal Jessop.’ He defined him further, speaking in capital letters. ‘Cal Jessop. The Artist.’
As though Kathryn would have the slightest idea who that was.
Astonishingly, she did. ‘“Coastal Sequence”,’ she said.
It was the one thing everyone remembered, the series of paintings that had brought him to the attention of the art world, first here, then overseas. What had started as a series of coastal studies had developed to embrace the spirit of the land. Those who had come first and their successors; the coastline at first denying and separating, then uniting, casting a noose about the land and all it contained; the people one amid a flight of X-ray birds and fishes, enfolded by the encompassing sea. As Nolan had sought to define the country through his paintings of Ned Kelly and Bracefell the Convict, so Cal had sought a unifying definition of the land, comprehensive and entire, by painting the coast.
The ‘Sequence’ had brought him his agent, friendship with Dave Holt — even, it now seemed, a name beyond the world of art. The next step had to be a new and still more profound expression of identity for which, since Gianetta’s death, he had been searching without avail.
‘“Coastal Sequence” was five years ago,’ he said shortly. It irritated him that no-one ever seemed to think beyond the past. ‘I’ve moved on since then, let’s hope.’
Although doubted whether he had. A doubt that it seemed was shared by others, in particular by the Stuyvesant Gallery in New York.
‘Cal is a great artist,’ Dave said. ‘At least, in the making.’
Cal smiled, razor-edged. ‘Your uncle’s great at giving compliments and a slap in the face at the same time.’
He did not want to talk about it to this stranger. He studied her with his artist’s eye. Grave, attentive face, slender arms darkened by sunlight, the combination of warm skin and cool dress seeming to encompass both aspects of the dying day: the sunlight and the shadows flowing like the river itself between the motionless trees.
She said, ‘I’m sorry.’
For her to apologise for his rudeness was too much.
‘For what? I’m the one should be sorry.’ He heard the sharpness in his voice and forced a smile. ‘Please … Let’s start again. Tell me how you’re enjoying the opera.’
And was relieved to see her smile.
‘At the beginning I wasn’t sure,’ she said, ‘but once I got over the bare stage and modern dress, I thought it went very well.’
The warning bell began to ring inside the building.
‘Heading for the last round-up,’ Cal said. He found that he did not want to lose contact so quickly with this woman. ‘You rushing away afterwards?’
Her dark eyes regarded him gravely. The crowd began to flow in a chattering tide towards the entrances. The febrile noise made their own silence all the more intense, and he found himself wanting very much to see her again.
‘We could have a coffee,’ he offered.
Again the silence hung between them, while in the background was the maddening, insistent clamour of the bell.
‘That would be nice,’ she said.
He was delighted, unreasonably so, as his earlier irritation had been unreasonable.
‘I’ll meet you by the bandstand,’ he suggested. ‘We’ll be out of the mob there.’
She smiled, touched his hand with a butterfly brush of her fingers, then turned and walked away through the press of people. He watched her go, the slender back and long, coltish legs, the gleaming cap of dark hair, and was very glad that he had asked to see her again and that she had agreed.
‘We’d better get in if we don’t want to miss the rest of it.’ There was what sounded suspiciously like a laugh in Dave’s voice.
Cal grinned at him. ‘I’d forgotten all about you.’
‘So I saw.’
Cal laughed outright. They walked back into the theatre, the music kindled its incandescent images and, all the time, behind Cal’s eyes, the vision of the Outback pulsed, raw and vital and compelling, the means of restoring vision and spirit to his work.
The final curtain. The applause. Euphoria soaring in the auditorium’s enclosed spaces, the air grey with the exhalations of the audience yet alive and crackling with the fulfilment of the music. Cal tried to see Kathryn in the crush but could not.
Outside, the cool night lay like dew. He turned to Dave.
‘I’ve got to thank you —’
‘Thank me in your work. You have a date. Enjoy it.’
Cal ran down the steps and across the grassy slope to the birdcage framework of the bandstand. The music pulsed and roared within him, a lingering surge of energy and emotion arching triumphantly between himself and the glittering compassion of the stars.
There was no-one by the bandstand. He watched while the river slid silently. One or two people passed, some coming from the opera, their voices loud with the echoes of Wagner. The sound dwindled. Harsh-breathed, a jogger pounded along the footpath. A distant drifting of figures.
She has changed her mind.
Cal paced a few steps, restlessly; came back again.
The grassy expanse was still empty. He waited.
A figure emerged from the shadows beside the opera house. He watched. Pale dress. High, coltish stride. As it approached, he saw the dark hair shining in the darkness.
Kathryn came close. A gleam of teeth as she smiled.
‘I met someone I knew. Couldn’t get rid of them.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Nor did it. Even to himself, Cal would not acknowledge how certain he had been she would not come, the happiness he now felt at being proved wrong.
‘Do you mind if we skip coffee?’ she asked. ‘It’s a lovely night. I’d sooner walk.’
So they did, making their way slowly along the path beside the river, past banks of reeds where waterbirds stirred with liquid plash and stammer of wings. He felt her presence, the slender, sun-brown arms, the column of her neck, the glint of light in her eyes, felt …
He did not know what he felt. Only that, in the communion of silence, there was a warmth and fulfilment he had thought gone forever. He wanted her to speak yet was glad she did not, silence more eloquent than speech.
Until at length, where the river narrowed, they stopped as though by unspoken agreement and looked at the water, the light running in veins of silver upon its dark surface. He felt her presence beside him, the warmth of her arm and body, yet did not move, aware how their senses were touching although their skins were not. It was a good feeling; a sense of gratitude that, after the strident day, the enriching music, the soft, slow flooding of the stream, he had emerged from turmoil into an unexpected place
of rest.
She smiled at him and, again, he saw the gleam of light upon her teeth and eyes.
‘Peace after storm,’ she said.
For a moment the words, so much in keeping with his thoughts, startled him; then he understood she had been talking about the music.
‘Right …’ Peace after storm, indeed.
They paced slowly back the way they had come, while the river flowed silently beside them, barely visible between its banks of reeds.
Now, as though her words had unlocked the silence, they talked. Of the music and the evening’s performance, of nothing and everything. Cal and the girl whom he did not know, yet to whom he spoke as though to an old friend. In no time they were back at the opera house, shuttered now against the night, and he found himself regretting very much that the evening was coming to an end.
‘Where are you parked?’
Now that they had reached the point of parting Cal, who had never been short of words with a woman in his life, found he had nothing to say. By her car they turned to face each other. With something close to desperation, he said, ‘It’s been nice …’
The words died weakly in the silence.
‘There’s an exhibition,’ she said. ‘Ancient instruments. I thought, if you were interested —’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. Eleven o’clock.’
She told him where the exhibition, in which he had absolutely no interest, was being held. He recognised neither the street nor the building, but would find them. Nothing was more certain than that.
He had not planned on staying in town and had nothing with him. Now, after midnight, it was too late to do anything about it, so he drove back to the coast as though he had never met Kathryn at all. It didn’t matter. The night was cool, the air like silk; he drove with the windows down, the rush of air lifting the hair from his forehead. It was over an hour’s drive and, in the morning, he would have to come all the way back again, a journey that in daylight would be clogged with traffic. And it did not matter at all.
Beyond the city the countryside was dark, yet in his mind Cal could see the tranquil paddocks stretching away, the undulating contours of the distant hills, the sea at journey’s end burnished beneath a sickle moon. Apart from the rush of wind, the engine hum, it was quiet. There was no other traffic at all and, for the first time since Paris, a sense of peace began to heal the jagged edges of his mind, soothing away the hatred and loss. The moon rose over the distant ranges and shone upon the sleeping land and, in his head, was the reverberating wash of the sea and the girl’s slender body, watching.
