Prochownik's Dream

by Alex Miller

  ‘He had to go in to the university for a meeting.’

  He was nervous now and was anxious to know whether she had decided to sit for him. He set the two sketchbooks side by side on the table between them. He found that he was already trying to solve the problem of her likeness, searching her features for keys, reaching for her story with the hungry painter’s eye. She smiled. Grey-blue eyes, her lids half-closing as she turned away, her fingers going to her blue-striped top and picking at a stray thread, evading the direct scrutiny of his eyes. He considered telling her about the compelling omen of the cane chaise, but instead he reached and turned towards him the book she had been reading. ‘The House in the Light,’ he said, reading the book’s title aloud.

  ‘You’ve read it?’ She was ready to share her feelings about the book with him.

  ‘Teresa read it,’ he said, as if Teresa reading the book made up for his not having read it himself. ‘It’s been out for years.’

  ‘I never manage to read books when they’re first out.’ She might have been confessing a forgivable weakness, or admitting something charming about herself.

  He decided then that she and Robert must have had a talk last night and reached one of their collaborative decisions; a decision, in other words, that would have been principally Robert’s. He felt sure they had decided that Marina would not sit for him. She was too light. There was nothing weighing on her mind. If she were going ahead with the project, she would have been nervous, as he was himself. Now that he was with her, her resolve would have been shaken by anxiety about what she might be getting in to. She would be ambivalent and uneasy. She was, he decided, too relaxed for a woman who was proposing to risk something of herself. He felt angry with Robert for not supporting his project and disappointed with Marina for not having the strength to make her own decision.

  ‘I nearly rang you this morning to put you off,’ she said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘This was all beginning to seem an unnecessary complication in my life just now.’

  ‘So have you decided whether you’re going to sit for me or not?’ The manner of his question, he realised, was blunt and aggressive.

  She smiled at his anxiety. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

  He felt a shot of adrenalin in his chest. ‘You’re saying you’re going to do it?’

  ‘If you still want me to.’

  ‘I thought you must have decided not to go ahead with it.’

  ‘Artists always sit for their friends,’ she said with an exaggerated mildness, repeating his own words to him. She laughed softly, faintly sardonic. ‘Robert thinks it’s a wonderful idea. So do I.’

  The waitress came to their table and he ordered coffee.

  When the waitress had gone Marina said, ‘Can I look?’

  He pushed his old Macedon sketchbook across the table. So he was to have his project! They believed in him! They were trusting him to come up with something good for their first important show back in Melbourne. He felt, suddenly, the responsibility of what he was about to undertake, his responsibility to them as well as to himself. For something like this, something in the main game, unlike the installations, failure would surely be the only alternative to success. He watched her handling his sketchbook, her long fingers, her skin glossy and pale, as if she had been careful to keep herself away from the sun, a life spent in the unnatural light of her studio, labouring alone in her perfumed gallery to turn Robert’s ideas into beautiful paintings that deftly sidestepped the historical banality of their medium. If only he could have touched the pale silk of her fingers, have closed his eyes and visualised an instinctive sense of her; the image of her in his mind shaping itself through touch and avoiding the complications of sight . . . The truth was, he had to find a way to paint her. That was his reality now.

  She brushed at the table with the palm of her hand before laying the book flat. She might have been handling a precious object from the archive, incunabula, the earliest text. She examined each drawing with evident interest, turning the book sideways to look at the horizontal then back again when the drawings were vertical. Taking her time, turning back a sheet or two every now and then to look again at a particular drawing. She said nothing.

  Watching her, he wondered if she might elude him after all. She was, he decided, an undamaged woman. Unlike the women in the flats with whom he had grown up, and with whose ways he was familiar, Marina seemed to him to have come through unscathed, her dreams intact, even untried, the beliefs of her young womanhood transformed in middle life into a complexity that would escape him. If her inner life remained opaque to him, then his paintings of her would fail. Artists took on projects that proved to be beyond their talents and in the struggle to do something good and great they overreached themselves and became bogged in the quagmires of their own egos. Perhaps he would take some black and white photos of her and work from the simplified tones. Take the direct route. His father would not have approved. For his father, art had been to find himself in his subject, to test his own capacity for love, and for that there could be no simplified route, only the endless, assiduous contemplation of a devout. Without art we are nothing, his father had once confessed. To pin up a photograph was Robert and Marina’s way.

  She was looking at the drawing of herself asleep in the conservatory at Plovers, her manner serious and engaged. ‘You never showed them to us. We had no idea.’

  She was going through the book again. ‘Effie, my mother, me, Robert, my father. We’re all here. It’s extraordinary. There’s enough information in this book for a portrait of my family. The Golding Family,’ she said. It might have been the title of a painting. She held up the book. ‘But not yourself? No self-portraits? You kept yourself out of the picture. But it’s the house that really astonishes me. It’s Plovers. I can’t believe you got the house the way you did. I can smell it, something of furniture polish and dogs.’ She laughed, as if through his old drawings of her home and her family he had become a puzzle to her, had surprised her. ‘I wasn’t sure I liked you that holiday,’ she said. ‘I thought you self-absorbed and arrogant. You didn’t seem to be sensitive to anything important. You seemed to be ignorant of all the things I found interesting. But the person I thought you were then couldn’t possibly have done these drawings.’ She studied him. ‘I suppose I must have been mistaken about you, mustn’t I? You couldn’t have got Plovers like this without falling in love with that house.’

  She had discovered what he had only recently discovered himself—that she, her birthplace and her life, had a place in the history of his art. She had in her hands all the proof they needed that his new project really had been written into their lives a long time ago, and was not just some random idea he had come up with on the spur of the moment. It was evidence enough, for himself at any rate, that the project possessed its own necessity. That his old sketchbook linked the three of them and their art to his return to painting in a way he could not have foreseen or contrived was as much a reassurance for him as the coincidence of his discovery of the cane chaise at the auction house. The link of the past to the present in the sketchbook was something his father would have recognised and understood. ‘I didn’t love your house,’ he said truthfully. ‘You’re bringing your own love of the old place to my drawings.’ He could remember feeling no special fondness for her parents’ house. All he had cared about in those days had been getting his drawings of people right. An endless striving after the accurate observation of the human presence, that was what he remembered. It had been an obsession. He had laughed at the criticism of his fellow students when they told him he was out of touch and was being merely illustrational. Then, as now, he had never striven after an originality of style. With his father, he had believed style was content. He had looked as hard as he could and had struggled to draw what he saw. That had been problem enough for him without anything else. And that is what Robert had called his gift.

  ‘Thanks for having confidence in me,’ he said.

 
‘Don’t be so silly, Toni!’ she said impatiently. ‘Of course we have confidence in you.’

  ‘I want you to know that I do realise how important this island show is for you and Robert. I mean, it’s your chance to re-establish a presence in Melbourne, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all right, Toni. Really! Robert and I don’t know anyone we’d be more confident about having in the show with us than you.’ She frowned and placed her hand flat on the table and leaned to pick up her bag from the floor beside her chair. She took out a sketchbook with marbled boards and handed it to him, a modest formality in her manner. ‘My old Macedon sketchbook from that holiday. I’m afraid it’s just trees. All I did was trees. It won’t interest you.’

  He took the book from her and opened it. There was sheet after sheet of dark, heavily worked pencil drawings of trees; studies of trunks, limbs, foliage, shadows, trees alone and bunched together, trees close and distant, silhouettes and entanglements of trees, thick trees and thin trees, tall trees and small trees, solitary trees in the distance and obsessively elaborate studies of interwoven branches. The human presence was absent from her work. ‘You’re the mistress of trees,’ he said and handed the book back to her. ‘They’re very fine drawings.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She took the sketchbook from him and put it back in her bag.

  He saw that she was not troubled by the failure of her drawings to engage his interest. It was evidently not her art that was at risk with him.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and she set her bag on the table in front of her. ‘We’d better make a start, hadn’t we? You’ve only got two months. You’d better come back now and do some studies of me working on Chaos Rules.’

  Her suggestion took him by surprise. ‘I didn’t bring any materials. I thought we’d probably just be making a decision with Robert today.’

  She observed him coolly, as if she considered an interesting problem presented by the angles and planes of his features. ‘You can use my materials. There’s everything you’ll need in the studio.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course.’ She stood up. ‘Theo will be there. He still does a bit of drawing and often comes into the studio for a time during the afternoon while I’m working.’

  ‘And does he draw you?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, he does. When his tablets are working.’

  He paid for their coffee and they went out into the street. He offered to give her a lift.

  In the car he said, ‘So you’re already Theo’s model?’

  ‘Theo’s been an illustrator all his life. He’s very modest about the scope of what he does. He works in pen and ink. Occasionally watercolour or pastel. I think he’s keeping a kind of visual diary of his last days with his son. Something for Robert to remember him by. I’m not sure. He hasn’t said as much, but that’s my feeling. He’s another one who won’t let anyone see his drawings.’

  He drew up beside the park.

  She turned and looked at him and smiled. ‘You’re nervous. I can tell. That’s good. It’s always a good sign to be nervous when we’re about to attempt something important, don’t you think?’

  As he stepped out of the car he was suddenly remembering Teresa’s need for another child. He realised now that there was not really going to be a serious discussion between them about whether or not they would have this child. They would have it, there was no doubt about that. For although it had not yet even been conceived, it was clear that for Teresa this child already existed; it compelled her imagination and was for her one of her family. He wondered now why he had resisted seeing this. As he followed Marina into the house he promised himself he would reassure Teresa tonight that he wanted their second child just as much as she did. He retained a small private guilt, however, at the thought of his ambivalence; as if the unborn child might detect it in him, his less-than-perfect paternity. What troubled him was the thought that Nada was to be displaced from her unique relation to him. To think of the new child was, for him, to contemplate the end of a particular period in their lives and to look towards the deginning of something new; towards the unknown, in other words, that Teresa feared, though she had not meant the child, but the possibility of his success and the hazards of his place in that other, larger family of the life of art.

  2

  The Third Hand

  seven

  Toni was sitting on Robert’s library steps in the dining room at Richmond drawing Robert, Marina and Theo. The three of them were seated around the circular table finishing lunch. Robert had worked at home especially for the sitting. He was looking tired. Toni kept thinking to himself that it was not a good day for Robert to be having his likeness taken. Misty was crouched at Theo’s feet, gnawing an anchovy the old man had slipped to her. Lying on the table at Theo’s right hand was the black sketchbook which no one was allowed to see into, not even Robert. Robert would have loved to have seen what his father was doing in the book but Theo waved him away. It’s just the doodlings of an old man. The book was held closed with a thick elastic band and a draughtsman’s pen was pushed between the band and the cover. It looked more like a ledger for keeping some kind of accounts than an artist’s sketchbook. Toni had no doubt his own likeness had found its way into the book.

  There was just the click and scrape of their cutlery on the plates, and the distant murmur of traffic along Bridge Road. Theo leaned and spoke to the cat, his voice a sudden distraction in the elaborate silence. ‘We’re posing,’ he explained to Misty throatily, and he coughed. ‘We can’t help it. It’s the vanity of the self-image. We want to look our best, but we’re pretending to Toni we don’t care.’ He coughed again, or laughed, a throaty catch in his voice.

  Robert looked at his father, a brief smile lightening the expression in his eyes, then he looked away.

  Toni stopped drawing and began writing in the margin of the paper. His day was going well. A week ago he had been tense and anxious, but now he was enjoying drawing again and good things were starting to happen for him on the page. He wanted to set something of this tone for himself in a kind of diary entry alongside the drawings in the hope that it would inform the oil painting when he came to work on it. He wrote carefully with a sharpened stub of pencil, so that he would be able to read his notes back to himself later. It was a kind of story that he was putting together, something to link him to the continuity of today’s rhythm, a lifeline to his present mood in case things ceased to go well once he was back in the studio on his own, faced with the problems of the painting. Marina has thrust a handful of white daisies with golden centres into the yellow and blue Picasso vase on the small table under the window. The effect is more confident and relaxed than if she had arranged the flowers with care. This is so like her on certain days. Then, on other days, her confidence deserts her and she spends her time nervously readjusting everything that she has arranged the day before . . . A few lovely white petals and a gilding of pollen have fallen at the feet of Geoff Haine’s bronze running man. It is a good piece, and they cherish it. The anonymous bronze figure might be their house deity and the flowers an offering to the fugitive god of art who they worship . . . Marina’s painting of the naked man adrift in space leans against the pale wall on the mantelpiece behind the silent diners, the wrinkled soles of the man’s feet, the anatomical detail photographic and precise, as if his deathless pallor comments on the mortality of the living . . . The viewer of this painting is drawn to look closely in order to see how it has been done, the illusion of flesh in-depth persisting until the eye is close to the paint surface . . . This is the high craft of the artist’s sleight-of-hand and Marina is its master . . . And once the viewer is close enough, he sees with surprise that the appearance of depth has been a trick of the light after all . . . and so the viewer steps back and exclaims, Astonishing! . . . It is the invited response . . . Marina’s image is more real than reality . . . It is a realism that is unreal, the realism of dream, so precisely focussed it disconcerts perception and prompts the viewer to turn back a
nd look again, and wonder what it is that eludes and attracts him . . . Marina has achieved the heightened realism of an intense familiarity, which must incite the question in the viewer: What is it I am really seeing? That is Robert’s idea, and she has translated it perfectly, and in the translation the picture has become her own . . . So it is no longer necessary for Robert to paint . . . They are true collaborators, these two . . . The union of their ideas and their practice is seamless . . . This is who they are. And without Robert, Marina cannot be fully visible . . . Nor Robert without his father . . . Nor Theo, perhaps, without Misty . . . And so on . . . It is all an arrangement of relationships . . . Light and shade . . . Marina’s likeness in isolation from these two is without depth or ambiguity and is an idealisation that is not interesting . . . So why, then, was I able to paint my mother without my father beside her? Surely my mother and father belonged together even more deeply than do these two? . . . These are questions to which I shall never find the answers . . . what is true for one relationship, for one painting, is not true for another . . . Each possesses its own strange inevitability that resists us and we can never finally know what it is we are doing until the work is finished . . . It is as if the picture paints itself through us, and has a larger existence of which we know nothing . . . I don’t know anyone who would agree with these observations . . . Only my father, if he had lived.

  He stopped writing and started working again on the figure of Robert. He drew quickly, with energy, almost violently, with large sweeping gestures, then suddenly close and with minute touches, the stub and two fingers, the drawing block resting on his knees. In his hand he gripped a rag, with which he occasionally scrubbed at the drawing, as if he were trying to rub through the surface to a shape or figure beneath. How to see? How to draw? These were the great questions. It was not, after all, a rational procedure to seek to create on the blank page these figures seated at the table. The three of them. A trinity. The Holy Family. The irresistible asymmetry of the triptych. Something like that. His perception of them. Not them, in the end, but himself. Such things could never be matters for precision.