by Gee, Maurice
‘One set all,’ James said. ‘Eric, do you want to change? You can take Charlotte’s place. She’s not much help to me today.’
‘Eric, please do. I’m exhausted,’ Charlie said.
Father and daughter, as dissimilar as greyhound and labrador. And when you consider Violet, how had the parents made this child? She’s as thick-waisted as a woman who has borne a family, with arms, hips, legs — how shall I put it? — too prominent, although not in an animal way but, rather, with the weight of clay. One longs for the liveliness her painting inspires in her, making her as shining as the moon. She achieves a kind of beauty from the workings of her mind.
She went into the house to wash and change, while Elsie, breaking into a new sweat each time she wiped the old away, and Freddie — I haven’t mentioned him, but one doesn’t nowadays, his charm is gone, he’s rather like paper that has curled up at the edge — carried their tea and scones out of Vi’s line of sight. They were sensitive enough to know how they distressed her.
Eric changed and came out looking like a grizzly crossed with a polar bear. He too distressed Vi, in all sorts of ways — his ploughman’s face and thick-fingered hands and hairy forearms, hairy chest too on that day, sprouting like cocksfoot at the throat of his tennis shirt. His untutored voice and wide-open laugh. She would never listen to my account of his distinction — in astronomy, moon studies, popularisation (Eric describes himself as a vulgarisateur, after one of his heroes, Camille Flammarion) — and would not allow his newspaper column any importance, but complained in her boring voice, ‘It’s boring.’
James noticed her agitation. ‘Violet needs to go inside. Girl!’ — expecting Charlie to appear when he needed her.
‘I’ll take her,’ Rose said. She joined hands with Vi and eased her to her feet. The chaise longue creaked like stairs, then squealed in its joints as Eric sat down. Rose wrapped Vi’s shawl around her shoulders and helped her inside. We relaxed.
‘She’s no better?’ I asked James.
‘No,’ he said, closing the subject. I had wondered if his reticence about his wife’s health was a way of pointing to the cross he bore — had suggested it to Rose, who said no, James was too much the gentleman for that. All he wanted was for Vi not to be noticed.
Reticence and coldness were weapons of attack. The little he said he said precisely, underlining decisiveness by shortness, which he also made the sign of probity — quite a trick, that one. It was only on the hustings that he raised his voice and peppered his speech. He became unconvincing with vulgarisms. In the House he compelled silence, out-waited abuse, said his few words and sat down. It had surprised me when Gordon Coates made him Minister of Lands. ‘Lands’ seemed too broad and generous for James, who, as lawyer, saw acreages in terms of conveyancing.
He lost his seat in 1928, when Coates and Reform took a beating, and declared himself glad to be ‘out of all that dogfighting on the hill’. He was, of course, not glad at all. He went about in what Eric called his pinched-nose state. He held his back straighter and used, if it’s possible, shorter words, more dismissively. No, he said. Quite, he said. There was a squeak of pain at the back of it, if you had the ears, and Rose said that James was crying inside. May said his self-conceit was twisted and there was no harm in having it wrung dry.
Seven years later, was he seriously thinking of standing again?
I did not want to ask. I did not even want to be interested; but was sorry for James, who was guilty of misjudgement and, for once, bad taste. But my years in the Press Gallery, sniffing out stories, following leads, had grown a political organ in me that twitched with curiosity whether I wanted it to or not, and I said, ‘What’s this I hear, James? You’re going back for another dose of punishment?’
‘Not today, Sam. Tennis today,’ he replied. He did not care for my phraseology — which was careless, I agree.
From the day I had first met James, he had flickered between convincing and unconvincing for me. There had been times when my opinions changed simply because he told me they were wrong. It was not that I believed he had special knowledge as a politician and cabinet minister, although he was privy to things I could never know, but that his certainties rose from a sense of self that overcame mine, unless I was careful. I had to step back and set myself, inducing coldness in my intellect and warmth in my blood to combat his uncombative forward step. He was master of the imperative in his nature, and seemed to have no need to try. But there were times when it fell away, when James became a poor thing, like a tree thin in its trunk and weak in its hold on the soil. You saw him then as bossy, overbred, long in his opinion of himself, short in his sight of other people, and caught in a turning about — mind and body both — that fretted with a sense of deference not paid and ambitions not achieved. Then one might hear that squeak of pain.
He sat in his wicker chair and sipped his tea. Exercise had raised blood in his cheeks. I thought, James is fallen, and did not know which sense I meant it in. I saw that he must try to lift himself and that winning at tennis might be a way of getting in shape for contests in other spheres. I was, perhaps, a little confused and out of my depth; saw Ousted Politician clearly enough but had no more than a glimpse of James as Fallen Man.
Sip sip he went at his tea (while Eric sucked his like a road worker), then he fished a blue handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed his forehead, patted the bony ledges beneath his eyes. Was there moisture leaking from his nose? It was unlike James. He cleaned himself fastidiously.
I have seen other men of his physical stamp lose their handsomeness as they grow old. Their faces, losing flesh, lose definition — the starving dog not doglike any more but only pathetic: is that too strong? I’ll change the figure. He had had a youthful handsomeness of the racehorse kind, and the last thought one would have of him now was starved nag, but he had a shivering quality, he was bared and antiseptic — too white in his skin and fine in his hands and clean in his face. His ears sat close to his skull and seemed all cartilage. His nostrils were slashes in a barely fleshed nose.
I am licensed for this civilised violence against him. But James, let me say, was a handsome man. He could make me feel dwarfish and ill-shaped.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Shall we finish our match? Eric, if you’re Charlotte, perhaps you can curb yourself.’
‘Wait, I’ve got to have a wee wee,’ Elsie cried. She ran into the house.
‘Which gives me time for another scone,’ Eric said.
James walked down the lawn and stood with his back to the house. ‘Ah, James,’ Freddie said, following him. I do not know what he said to make up for Elsie’s gaffe, which was more artless than ill-bred. Freddie will try with James, and fail, until one of them dies.
May came out of the house and started clearing the afternoon tea away. It was Mrs Hearn’s job but May is Tolstoyan about such things. Rose sat upstairs with Vi, making, I supposed, those little platitudinous bolstering remarks that were all that conversation with Vi could be.
When the two pairs moved on to the court I found myself alone with Charlie. She took Eric’s place on the chaise longue.
‘Tired?’ I said.
‘Exhausted. You know …’ Her gesture took in upstairs and the court.
‘How is she really?’
‘Unwinding like a clock.’ Charlie laughed, not with mirth. ‘And he’s winding up.’
‘Is he serious, do you think? Standing again?’
‘Yes, he is. He let it pass last time, in a kind of sulk, I suppose.’
‘Achilles in his tent.’
‘If you say so, Sam. But maybe not a sulk, a kind of rage, although I don’t know, I wasn’t here. Now he’s turned it round. He behaves as if he hears some sort of call. You can almost see him standing with his hand up to his ear. Don’t let’s talk about this. I get pulled into it from so far away. I don’t mean just coming home, but far away. I have to change my nature from butterfly to bee.’
‘You’re no butterfly, Charlie.’
/> ‘No, I’m not. What I’d like to be — a moth. Some sort of plain brown creature that sleeps in a corner and is left alone. Oh, listen to me, Sam. You didn’t come for this. I’ll end up no better than Mother, I sometimes think. Would you like … ?’
I thought it was a walk among the roses she offered me but when we reached the end of the gravelled path she turned towards the implement shed built like the foot of an L on the back of the garage. James had allowed her to make it over as a studio and had approved — reluctantly, no doubt — the building of a skylight in the ceiling. Charlie rarely offered to show her paintings but was not coy about them if one asked to see — which I avoided as a rule, because not only did they not please me, they offended me. I have — how shall I put it? — a strong sense of morphological rightness, in hills, in trees, in people, in all things, and Charlie and her kind are intent on creating shapes inherently wrong, defying nature. I cannot see it as other than sinful. In her defence I’ll say she’s not extreme, does not work at the outer limits of this fashionable and cruel — yes, it’s cruel — madness. Yet she has gone too far for me, and lost the true balance that allows beauty to be found through art.
Sinful is a strong word. I’ll let it stand, although plain Charlie, sweet Charlie too — butterfly or moth or bee — was, is, exists, by dint of true affections, in a state of grace. Sin and grace. Strong words, yes, and I use them improperly, but they turn within an orbit — hers and mine, James’s too, and Eric’s and Vi’s, and the other actors in my story — that allows them a kind of propriety.
She had transformed the room that had once housed spades and rakes and watering cans into a bright clean factory of art. Hangings, perhaps Mexican, adorned the back wall, covering the door that opened to the garage. For the rest, it was business: the potting table pressed into a corner where it served, under a new unhooded light, as a bench for the tools of her trade — the brushes, tubes of paint, stacked canvases, virgin still, the pencils and folios and sketch books, and the unshelved stacks of books that told the histories and methods, and reproduced the work, of the great practitioners she believed she followed — on, perhaps, bloodied knees, as the poet says.
Her own paintings stood upright against the wall, most of them face in, two face out. They were Hutt River scenes, moderately pleasing from the distance I looked and in the poor light. The rest were things she had done in London and shipped home. I knew there were naked figures amongst them and was nervous that she would turn them round, but she stepped past her easel, which faced away from me, and drew the curtain back from the small end window, then pulled the cord that controlled the skylight blind and the room was ambered with light.
‘This isn’t the sort of place you’d find a moth,’ I said.
‘Oh, forget that, Sam. Come and tell me what you think of this.’
It lay flatter on the easel than was usual, it seemed to me; uncomfortable for working, but perhaps it was her way to paint bent over her work, peering and pricking like an anatomist, instead of in the long-armed imperious way painters take in photographs.
I moved beside her and was shocked, not by method, not by truth, for it was true, but by her ability to paint clear-eyed, steady-handed, and show this thing. Which was, encapsulated on the canvas, James and Vi: their natures and their marriage and the ruin of their lives. Yet it was simple and, to the unfamiliar eye, innocent. A summery picture — and she had not yet been home for a summer so the colours came from memory — full of sunlight and dappled shade and flowers and trees and lawn, with the brick wall closing things off beyond the stream. It was paradisal. This garden was made for happiness, although realistic in its constituent parts, entirely so — and James and Vi realistic too.
There was, all the same, something faery-like about her, with diaphanous scarf, yellow and blue, and flowered dress. She lay on her chaise longue as though floating — was there a borrowing here from Millais’ famous painting of Ophelia drowning in the stream? Surely that was a work Charlie would not approve of? Vi held a red rose limp-fingered, slanting down. Her face — here the faery likeness vanished, and the likeness to Ophelia too — was emptied out: of vitality and hope, almost of humanity. It seemed like china, a white plate, although a very fine plate indeed — and now I’m reading in, perhaps, instead of taking out, employing my familiarity. Viewed without that knowledge, Vi was prettily done, although in that style of smudge and blur Charlie and her kind will use.
James stood facing away at the very edge, wearing his black suit — politician’s, undertaker’s suit? At his side a rosebush grew, cruelly pruned. That was all: his fine profile and thin hands and the amputated plant. I had never known Charlie admit meaning into a canvas so plainly before.
I said, ‘Black’s a dangerous colour, isn’t it?’
‘It sucks up light,’ Charlie said.
‘Well,’ I said, after a while — one must say something — ‘you’ve got the garden, everything there. It’s very pretty.’
‘But not painted in the way you like?’
‘I have to say, no. You know I can’t pretend about it, Charlie.’
‘Of course not. But what about … ?’ She meant James and Vi.
‘There’s too much there, I think. It’s not the way you like to do things, is it?’
‘No, of course. But how else?’
‘And it’s rather cruel.’
‘I know that. But how do I show what’s going on here? The thing that’s happening in this house? Oh, this is no good. I’m not blind, I can see. It’s a bad painting. I hate it. And no one’s ever going to see it, Sam. I shouldn’t have shown you. I’ll take it out and burn it in the incinerator tonight. But I had to paint something like that, I had to say.’
‘Show Eric, see what he thinks. And burn it after that. I think that’s best.’
‘I hated doing it. I hated it. I felt as if they were squeezing me. Usually I can come in here and what I do — it turns me away from them, I can see without them getting in the road. But I had to do that.’
I make her sound hysterical. She was calm.
‘So now it’s done, are you all right?’
‘As much as I can be. I’ll just cover this.’ She threw a piece of cloth over the painting. ‘What will happen to them, Sam? Mother and Da?’
‘They’ll go on. There’s nothing new.’
‘Yes there is. I thought that too, they’ll go on, but since he’s decided to try for Parliament again it’s as if he’s set something free in himself. He’s opened up a room and let something out. He’s got other rooms, Da has, and some of them with things in them that aren’t very nice. Stop me, Sam.’
‘How? Why?’
‘Tell me I can go away from this.’
‘You can, you know, any time, Charlie. James has got plenty of money for a nurse. But …’ I wanted to know what she meant, a room opened up, and what she’d seen, or sensed, emerging. ‘James has always been ambitious. And at his age — I’m there, you know — you can get overtaken by a sense of unfinished business. Things you should have done, and still can do. It’s no more than that, probably.’
‘Did you know there’s someone called Oliver Joll who wants the nomination? Da found out this morning. A man came to tell him — on New Year’s Day, that’s how important it is.’
‘I thought Joll might want a seat when he stood down from Council. What did James say?’
‘He opened the door and showed the man out. And then he stood still for a while. He said, “Very well”, almost as if he’d moved something in his mind, or as if he was bringing it out, or saying he would. I can’t explain. I just knew I shouldn’t let him see me, his face was so —’ she flipped the cloth back from the painting — ‘like that, like I’ve done it there.’
‘He probably just meant he’d fight for it. You don’t know Joll. He’s full of bounce. Big head, big long nose, talky sort of mouth. He rolls out the talk, it’s a kind of tide. I thought once he wanted to be mayor — but Parliament, eh? Joll’s in his forties. James is go
ing to be too old.’
‘Can you stop him, Sam?’
‘Me? No chance. Not if he’s made up his mind.’
‘Eric, then?’
I shook my head. ‘James is too snobbish about him. And you know where Eric stands in politics. Why don’t you just go away, Charlie? Does Vi really need you?’
‘Anyone would do. Other people, we’re undifferentiated for her.’
‘Yes,’ I said, although, trying to comfort her, I might have disagreed — but we were in truth-telling mode. ‘What you do is paint. I don’t have to like it; others do. Eric likes it, doesn’t he? And May? James will use you up unless you go. You’ll turn into a moth all right.’
‘Two things, Sam.’
‘Yes?’
‘I love them, you know?’
‘Love them from a distance.’
‘And I’ve got no money.’
‘Be a charlady then. Or teach in school. Can’t you be an art teacher? Or train as an office lady. Anything.’
But I had no answer that would satisfy her love; and none to replace the studio she had made. Whatever went on in the house — or failed to go on — she could come here; whatever James demanded, she could, in the intervals, take her saving stance and paint; take out from her head the thing that moved her, express what she had learned of beauty and truth — cut off from me by the manner she went about it; wash herself clean. Going back then to James and Vi must turn the coloured coat she wore inside out, exposing patched elbows and grey sleeves.
I took all this from her saying simply, and indicating with her hand, ‘Where else could I have a place like this?’
‘Does James come in?’
‘Oh, he looks in the door. Then he frowns and goes away.’
‘He musn’t see this painting.’
‘No, I’ll burn it. Will you and Eric try, at least? I just think something bad will happen.’
I promised I would talk to him, and persuade Eric to add his weight. She covered the painting, closed the curtain and the blind, and we went outside. A tennis ball came bouncing towards us and she shot out a hand reflexively, quick as a cat, plucked it from the air and lobbed it back over the wire. Nothing, I thought, could illustrate her hidden qualities better. She was a live person, full to the brim with abilities unvalued in James’s house, where she was Girl, where she lay uncoupled from herself. But that’s nonsense, I tried to say, Charlie paints in her studio, and she’s free. This mewling about poverty and love is something she can cure herself of like snapping that ball out of the air. She can wear her hidden colours turned right way out. No one needs to be a prisoner, we’re not back in Victorian days — and so on, rehearsing arguments, while we stood at the court entrance and watched the match progress. Nonsense too, I thought, to talk of James opening a dark room in his head and letting out some creature prisoned there. Oh dear, oh dear. Charlie must get away, we really must persuade her.
