by Alex Miller
Teresa whispered, ‘I went off the pill. I could be having our next baby.’
The dream had possessed the force of actuality, the emotion of it so strong he was convinced his father had passed to some other life for the dead . . .
‘Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry. I’m just a bit surprised you did it without saying something first.’
‘You’ve been so busy. I was afraid the time might slip by. These things have their moment. Hey? That’s what you said, they happen when they’re ready.’
‘And you said they only happen when we make them happen.’
‘I would have told you, but you’ve been sleeping out there,’ she murmured. ‘The same way you want your painting, you know, it’s the way I want this little brother or sister for Nada. We can’t explain these feelings, can we? We just have them. Anyway, I’ve been feeling we’re not a real family with an only child. You remember how gorgeous she was as a baby?’
He kissed her. ‘She’s still gorgeous. She’ll always be gorgeous.’ Teresa’s cheeks were wet. ‘Don’t cry!’ he said gently, kissing her salty cheeks. ‘Why are you crying? I hate it when you cry.’ Her tears made him feel accused. As if he had committed a crime against his family. A crime against morality itself, against normality. As if he were guilty of a dereliction of his duty towards the family and humanity in general. Her tears always had this completely unsettling effect on him.
She gave a big sniff. ‘I’m just crying,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not crying about anything. It’s just that since you started painting I feel as if I’m drifting with this whole thing on my own.’
He kissed her wet cheeks again.
She sniffed and squirmed around and reached under the pillow for her handkerchief. She blew her nose. ‘I’ll be ratshit in the morning.’ She laughed and lay down again and cuddled up. ‘When you’re painting I don’t know where you are. It’s like you’ve gone somewhere.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t follow you in there. That’s all. Your painting shuts me out. Even when you’re with us you’re not with us. I’m not blaming you, but it’s lonely.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s not just you and me now. Now it’s you and your work.’ She was silent. ‘And her.’ She studied him in the half-dark. ‘See! You’re doing it now! I can feel you still thinking about your work! I should be happy you’re working. You’re doing what you love to do. You’re being a real artist. But you don’t share it with me.’
‘I just had a dream about Dad. It was as if he’s still alive out there somewhere.’
‘I have to say this, but your dad’s another thing coming between us. Your dad is your work too. It’s always been as if you were keeping him in a special secret place, as if you were afraid to share him with me. But I understand now that your dad is with your work. I’ve only just understood this these past weeks. Your dad and your painting are in the same place for you. It’s not something I knew before you started painting again. I’m sorry, but I have to say it. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. Some things we keep to ourselves. You said that.’ After a while she asked in a small voice, ‘Do you want our next baby?’
‘Of course I want it! How could I not want it?’
‘If we were sane, we’d wait until we’ve got more money.’
‘Everything gets ruled by money,’ he said. ‘The travel business will pick up and Andy will sell my pictures. These things go in cycles. We have to believe in ourselves.’
They lay in the silence in each other’s arms.
He had telephoned Marina in the middle of work the other day. He had not told Teresa about the phone call because he was not sure that he understood his motive for making it. He had been working on the figure of Marina when suddenly he was visualising her alone in her studio over at the house in Richmond, seeing her there on her own doing her work, just as he was alone doing his work, and he had felt an urgent need to hear her voice. ‘You’re working?’ he said when she picked up.
‘Yes. And you?’
‘Yeah, I’m working.’
Then there was a long uncertain silence.
‘What is it, Toni?’ she asked. ‘Why did you call me?’
Another silence, only smaller. His awkwardness with having given in to the impulse to telephone her. ‘I just called, that’s all. I felt like calling.’ He could not say that he missed her. But in a way that was it.
She said, ‘It’s good to hear your voice.’ As if she understood exactly why he had telephoned her.
Teresa said, ‘I never wanted to have children before I met you. It just wasn’t there for me.’
In the night silence the bell of the town hall clock struck the hour.
‘It’s good you want them now,’ he said. ‘Imagine life without Nada!’
‘Don’t!’ she said.
ten
He had set up The Schwartz Family on the easel and had opened the back door to the studio. For the first time he was seeing his painting flooded with natural light. He did not feel he could do any more with it. Either it was finished or he must scrape it back to the bare canvas and begin again. There was an enchanted quality about the three figures, however, which he felt he could not hope to achieve again, for he did not know how he had achieved it this time. The figures had the appearance for him of having been painted not by himself but by an unknown artist, and there was in this a precious sense of the elusive and the mysterious that he did not want to risk losing. It was the background that was the problem. It had remained grounded merely in an illustration of the facts of the setting at the Richmond house and had not been enlivened by the same spirit as the figures. He took the phone from its cradle and dialled the Richmond number.
‘The picture’s finished,’ he said bluntly when Marina picked up. ‘Do you and Robert want to come over and have a look at it?’
‘You sound a bit grim about it,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m thinking of scraping it back and starting again.’
‘You don’t mean that?’
‘I mean it.’
‘Well for goodness sake don’t do anything until I’ve had a look. I’m coming over.’
He considered telephoning Teresa at the office and letting her know Marina would be with him in the studio again. But in the end he didn’t call her. A phone call from him in the middle of the day was more likely to startle her than to reassure her.
When Marina arrived he went out into the lane to meet her. She greeted him and came into the studio. They did not say anything but stood in front of the painting. He was nervous now that she was with him. The three figures seated at the round table gazed fixedly out of the picture plane upon a scene that was evidently of disquieting significance for them. Robert was seated to the left of Marina, his hooded gaze implying a magisterial judgement upon the events he was observing. Theo sat on Marina’s right, a familial likeness between the two men, as if father and son might have been the haughty generations of a declining dynasty. The pale fingers of Theo’s left hand caressed the silver cat, which sat on the table beside him. Theo’s gaze was amused, watchful and interior, the crimson slash beneath his eye arresting the attention. Seated between the two men, Marina was upright and still, as if she waited to hear important news. She occupied the centre of the composition. Something of his original idea had survived. The painting was not what he had proposed when the idea had first occurred to him, but it was still principally her portrait.
‘It’s very powerful,’ Marina said. ‘It’s beautiful. You mustn’t even consider scraping it back.’
He was finding her presence unsettling. The trouble was, the painting had gone beyond them and become something they were unable to sum up or control any longer, an object risen out of their ideas, their experiences and their desires, but larger and more complex than their expectations for it. He lifted his hand to his brow, the reflected sunlight from the floor in his eyes. He sensed Marina react to his movement, as if she too w
ere on edge. ‘We should close the door,’ he said. ‘The sunlight’s too harsh.’
Fixed to a wall bracket above the plan press was a new lamp on a fire-engine red swivel. He had set the lamp at an angle so that at night it would light the painting obliquely. He had also hung a drop sheet over the window to the courtyard to control the light from that direction. He stepped up to the painting and brushed at it with his hand. It was an impatient sweeping gesture encompassing the space behind the seated trio, his open palm and the spread fingers of his hand skimming the surface of the paint as if he would solve his problem with a wave of his hand. ‘I don’t like the background.’
Marina stepped up and stood close beside him.
The tension between them was unexpected and distracting. Something had changed; a remainder of disquiet from his impulsive telephone call to her of the previous week. Something unstated between them now that had not been there before, as if his phone call had established an expectation. He caught her warm breath, the delicate waft of her health, the sweetness of her inner body. Could he paint an internal portrait of her? Would they know her? Pink lungs and purple viscera? Or are we all the same once we pass the barrier of the skin? Our likenesses all alike deep down? Carcasses on the hook? The brutality of fact, Francis Bacon’s phrase for it. Dismembered by experience. Would we know our beloved’s internal organs if we saw them? Spread them with our hands as the Roman augurs spread the vitals of the sacrificial goat; divining the omens, presentiments of one’s own fate in the bloodied remains. How deep could one go with a portrait? Where were the limits? I foresaw my fate in my lover’s heart. Seeing things. Prognostications and tokens of unease. A heady liberation from the daily insistence on the governing norms; an acknowledgement that one’s creative decisions and motives were generated in a place of which one possessed no practical knowledge and over which one exercised no conscious control—an imaginary place, in other words, without the morbidity of accumulated responsibilities. He let his gaze rest on her profile, remembering suddenly the optimism of their day together on the island.
She frowned. ‘It’s always the problem of knowing when something’s finished,’ she said. She might have been referring to more than the painting. ‘I agree with you about the background. You don’t suppose it’s just too Richmond? The mood, I mean? Having our painting-within-the-painting? That sort of thing always reads as such a cliché, don’t you think? It’s a false note here. I know it’s not what you meant. But it’s a distraction from the figures and is just the kind of cleverness you don’t go in for.’ She turned to him. ‘I really think you have to do away with this background altogether.’
But he was elsewhere with her: a shift of the light, a sound in the distance, a sudden cool drift of air. It seemed at times the direction of life must be governed by such tokens as these, and one knew one was helpless to resist . . .
She put her hand on his arm, claiming his attention, offering reassurance. ‘You mustn’t panic. It’s impossible not to believe in the world of these three people. There’s something quite eerily intriguing about the way you’ve represented us. I couldn’t possibly have predicted it.’ She took her hand from his arm.
He was admiring the curve of her neck below her short hair, the line of her shoulder. He was drawing the line of her in his mind, seeing her differently today. He would do a fresh set of drawings of her. Drawing had always been the most intimate, the most revealing and the most precious aspect of his work. And the most private. The thing he loved most. The naked portrait of her he had thought of when he had first seen the cane chaise in the auction rooms had arisen in his mind as a drawing, a dark, closely worked study in light and shade. But a naked portrait was not something he could suggest to her at this moment. To go from the mundane and the ordinary to a place of magical possibility with another person— one could not adopt a strategy for that. Apart from the naked portrait, however, he had no idea what the arrangement of his next picture would be. He said, ‘Why don’t we leave it for now? I should put it away and forget about it for a while and start work on my next picture. Come up to the house and I’ll make us some coffee.’
She turned to him with interest. ‘What’s the new picture going to be?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it just yet.’
She turned back to The Schwartz Family. ‘I don’t think leaving it is an option for you, is it? If you’re going to have three paintings ready in time for the island?’
He stood beside her, looking unhappily at his painting, his energies for reconsidering the background blocked and cold.
She said, ‘There is a solution.’ She did not look at him.
‘What do you mean?’
She did not speak at once. ‘You could let me paint a new background for you.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘I knew you’d react like that!’ she said, her voice filled with disappointment. ‘That’s exactly how Geoff Haine would react if anyone ever dared suggest they might help him with one of his pictures. You’re all the same!’ She was angry. ‘You think you’ve got to control every last detail yourselves. You’re too precious about it. Everyone gets help at some time. Even the great messiah Picasso accepted help from his friends.’
‘I haven’t said a word,’ he objected, amused by her anger. ‘I need a minute to think about it.’
‘You don’t have to say anything. You think collaboration is beneath you. You don’t see how childish such an attitude is. We’re all collaborators. All of us. None of us does this completely on our own. You need to free up a bit. You’re still hanging on to the attitudes you had before your installations. You can’t just revert to being who you were then. You were a different person four years ago. We all were. We have to move on. We have to open up to new boundaries in our practice or we just repeat ourselves. When Picasso didn’t like the background to his group portrait The Soler Family, his friend Junyer Vidal painted a new background for it. It was the figures in that picture Picasso cared about, just as it’s the figures in this picture you care about. You’re a figure painter, I accept that. We all do. No one’s arguing with it. Your figures are wonderful. But you just don’t care enough about this background to ever give it the magic you’ve managed with the figures.’ She waved her hand impatiently, dismissing his objections as tedious. ‘But I think you know all this.’
He did know it. And he knew she was right. Setting was always a problem for the figure painter. He found her argument compelling. Almost a relief. He stood facing The Schwartz Family, trying to imagine what her backdrop to his figures might look like. He was intrigued by the sense of possibility in her offer, a lightness in it that surprised him, almost an inevitability about it, as if she really had seen the only true solution to his problem. He turned and looked at her. He was aware that for the first time he was being seriously challenged by her, and he felt a new depth of admiration for her. ‘So just supposing I did let you paint a new background for it, what do you think it might look like?’ He knew already that he was going to take the risk. He had already decided, if being drawn into her challenge could be called deciding. He might be risking everything. But perhaps that was what he had to do. Perhaps it was time to risk everything. Perhaps this was what every artist had to do at some point, to gamble it all at the critical moment. ‘If I do agree, what do you think you’d do?’
‘I’d do trees,’ she said without hesitation, and she laughed. ‘You should have guessed.’ She turned to him, excited now. ‘Do you really think you might let me do it?’
He was trying to imagine what effect her trees might have on his figures.
She stood close at his side. ‘Robert and I only have one more picture to do for the show and we know exactly what that’s going to be. So I’ve got plenty of time. You haven’t.’
‘What sort of trees?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘I think I might. You’d do those trees around your old house at Macedon. Winter trees. Bare and black.’ He made shapes in the air with his hands. ‘Those big el
ms against the mountain. A night picture, with the three of you sitting there gazing out from that weird interior light of your lives.’ He laughed. ‘That’s not something I could do. It’s something you can do. I can see you doing it.’
She studied him uncertainly. ‘Are you sure you can trust me with it?’
The moment was one of intense clarity for him. It was a moment he knew he would look back upon and remember. ‘You’re the only person I could possibly trust to do this.’
‘Toni!’ she said with feeling, and she reached and took his hand.
‘There isn’t anyone else.’ The surprising familiarity of her hand in his, her fingers smooth and cool as he had imagined them to be that day in the café. The colour had risen to her cheeks. ‘Since that drawing I did of you asleep in the conservatory at Plovers, in a way you’ve always been a part of what I’ve been doing with my art. I don’t know what I mean by that.’ He looked at her hand in his.
