A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  He closed his eyes and pictured Elsie: Elsie holding their children, holding their grandchild, feeding the kookaburra that landed in their yard; worried for that blessed crow. He swallowed. Had he ever done a thing to enrage her so much? Had she ever sat across from him and plotted some revenge? He took a breath. It wasn’t that he couldn’t know: there was nothing to know. They trusted themselves with each other. They had nothing like this.

  The professor shook the handkerchief into its great white square and blew his nose again. ‘There’s no way around it, is there? There’s no way of loving someone who thinks that’s a reasonable thing to do.’

  Clem shook his head, a nasty stale taste in his mouth. ‘My father shot a crow once—no reason, just because he could. It seemed so cruel. I wished him dead himself for that, I think.’ Another previously unspoken thing said.

  ‘Tantamount to murder, to take the life of some sentient thing,’ said the professor, wiping roughly at his nose. ‘You wouldn’t have another of those beers, would you? I could well wash that story away.’

  But Clem shook his head again, reaching forward to pick up the bird’s coffin. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. But let’s get this one buried, and then come up for a cuppa. That’s the best I can do.’

  In the yard, Clem set his foot against the top edge of the shovel, willing it to find a weakness in the hard, dry winter soil. They were down by the back fence where he’d buried the baby crow years before, and where the swamp had the most chance of seeping through the dirt. The shovel eased in, and Clem set about digging a small pit.

  ‘I almost think I should say a few words,’ the professor whispered as he placed the coffin in its grave. ‘This little frame, and the ability to fly: an amazing biological culmination.’

  Isn’t all life? Clem thought a little wildly. It felt like a moment of epiphany. He wanted nothing more than Elsie by his side right now. She’d have a better thing to say than come up for a cuppa; she’d have a better thing to say about the bird. She did the caring and the saying in their world.

  Above, in the trees, fruit bats muttered and squawked, and a baby possum made its careful way along a telegraph wire. The other rosellas, the ones who should have cried and called for this bird, they’d all be asleep in their nests, thought Clem.

  He leaned forward and scraped the dirt down onto the box.

  ‘There now,’ he said as he stood up, clapping his hand on the professor’s shoulder. ‘Come in and I’ll fix us a brew.’ And he led the man up the familiar slope of his own back lawn, wondering at the strangeness of his coming, and the bird, and the pool game, and the night.

  Sitting across from each other at the kitchen bench, each man stirred the sugar in his tea. Did you ever ask your first wife about it? Clem wanted to ask. Did she apologise, explain it somehow? He watched as the professor positioned his spoon carefully on his saucer and took up his cup, saw the way his hand shook and the tea spilled a little. He’s older than I thought, Clem realised: maybe sixty or more. Wandering around his old neighbourhood, looking for his past.

  Where would I walk, without Elsie? he wondered, sipping at his own hot sweet tea. Would I stay here or move on? Would she leave me, ever, Elsie?

  But she would never leave him; he would never leave her. People like us, he thought, well, we don’t. He couldn’t see himself without her anyway, and she must feel the same. Till death us do part—they’d made that promise. Clem pulled his shoulders back, proud of keeping his word.

  And then he thought about the noise and the mess and the exuberant frenzy of the music she was listening to—now, he thought, probably right now. What if some man there—? He couldn’t even imagine. But what if some man there—and his shoulders slumped.

  ‘Does she often go to these sorts of concerts, then, your wife?’ the professor asked out of the silence.

  ‘Never a one before this,’ said Clem. ‘She makes me try an orchestra sometimes, or some paintings at the gallery—well, you’d know about that, with Mrs Lewis. It’s like she wants to look into another world once in a while.’

  ‘And what do you do, Mr—?’

  The question of Clem’s name was so impossibly belated that he almost laughed in reply. ‘Me? I’m Clement Gormley. I’m at the university, Professor—maintenance, mostly; bits and bobs for the caretaker, around the grounds. I recognised you from there, as much as from around the corner.’ It hadn’t occurred to him that the professor might not recognise him. ‘Apologies, my apologies,’ the older man said, setting his empty cup carefully on the saucer and trying to still its rattle. ‘Those notions of absentminded professors—they’re true, of course. They’re true.’

  It made Clem bristle, the other man’s casual claim of social ignorance, but he was courteous all the same.

  ‘To be honest, sir—’ the honorific slipped out before he could stop it, and he knew the other man would take it as his due, ‘—perhaps I haven’t done so much work in your building. I’ve certainly never rehung your door or eased your window jamb.’ Offering the man an excuse, a way out. And then, because he couldn’t resist the jibe: ‘You’d probably not have noticed me if I had.’

  ‘Come now, I’d like to think I’m a better man than that,’ the professor said, puffing out his chest with attempted bonhomie. He caught sight of the kitchen clock and shook his head. ‘Well, I’ve taken too much time from you—and given you a strange kind of night to report. Thank you for the box, and the game, and the beer, and the tea. I might stop by your back fence, if I walk this way again, and have a word or two with that pretty little bird—we all just want to be remembered in this world.’

  ‘Are you a church man, Professor?’ The words were out before Clem had finished thinking them, and he flushed as he heard them, wondering at his nerve.

  ‘Presbyterian, in the main—high days and holidays, that’s all. Why do you ask?’

  ‘The way you talk about this bird—“all creatures great and small”, I guess. It’s not what I thought went with science.’

  The professor smiled a very small smile. ‘Biology can still seem wonderful even as we try to prise it apart,’ he said. ‘In New Guinea, I saw birds of paradise—the King, the Emperor, the Greater; I never made it far enough west to see the Wilson’s. The Wilson’s has blue skin on its head so bright it glows in the dark—you can’t help but be amazed by something like that.’ He spread his arms wide to make a T-shape from his body. ‘There I was in New Guinea, seeing men on their short way to dying—bullets and bayonets—when all I wanted was to sit and gaze at these extraordinarily bright coloured feathers. I met Ida up there, you know, a nurse—but an artist too amongst it all; I watched the kinds of beauty she could make. We’re not so hidebound, in science, to be completely blind to beauty.’ And he pushed himself out of his chair.

  Following his visitor through the house to the front door and down the stairs onto the grass, Clem wondered if the professor meant the beauty of the birds, or of the woman who became his second wife. Because she was beautiful, Mrs Lewis, he thought, and was surprised by his certainty. But he’d watched her—in the street, in the shops or coming up the hill from the train—and there was a kind of beauty about her that he’d assumed had to do with the work she did, the constant creation of something. It seemed a risky thing to think—although Elsie was prettier. He had no doubt about that.

  ‘We were sorry to see you go,’ he said, nodding up the hill towards the professor’s vacated house. ‘I used to see Mrs Lewis going by—she always had a smile and a wave.’

  ‘Very friendly, my wife, very friendly,’ the professor agreed, ‘and so very good at what she did. I was proud of how she changed what she wanted to do—she was a very fine nurse. She was a very fine artist. She was a very fine woman—you know.

  ‘I don’t miss the arguments, but I miss being able to stand and watch her work. That was something, you know, really something—watching a picture come into being where there’d only been blank canvas before. I never tired of it. Still . . .’ He ducked back
into the open garage for his hat. ‘She made one painting of me, as if I was back in the war, and looking every inch the soldier, which I never truly felt I was. She’d got the colours just right—every shade of green and brown, and nothing else. Even my lips were green, and my skin; I could feel the wet weight of the jungle in that frame.

  ‘I asked her if I could have it, when we were breaking up our house. I asked her if I could take just that one—and she said no. I thought it mine by rights, being of me, but she said she’d made it, and it was all of me she’d have. She did give me another painting, a portrait of a woman—no one I knew, although for a while I tried to tell myself it was a painting of Ida herself. Her rich red-brown hair. Knew it wasn’t. I hated it at first, kept it turned against the wall. But when I took these new rooms, I hung it up—for the company—and it’s growing on me. The woman’s smiling, just a little, and looking off to one side.’

  Clem smiled: he knew that look—Elsie had it, and Elaine too, although neither could ever see a similarity to the other. And then he wondered: where was Elsie’s portrait now? The thought had never occurred to him; he’d always assumed that the painter would still have it with her.

  ‘My wife—’ he began, cut off as the other man went on.

  ‘It’s funny, you know, but I feel like there’s some sort of camaraderie between me and this woman—two people who sat still for Ida, somehow brought together on either side of a frame.’ And he coughed, stepping back towards his host, and reaching out his hand, ready to shake. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you for all of that. And if they ever do send you to fix my door or my window, make sure you remind me of your name. I won’t mean to be rude, but I probably won’t place you away from here. It’s been nice to meet you, Mr Gormley. And thank you again for . . .’ His wave took in the billiards, the garage, the dark space in the yard where they’d stood together to farewell a little bird, the deep blue night sky above. ‘That’s the colour, the backdrop of my painting. An inky blue. A colour that’s good for the soul.’ He waved again, and on he went.

  Clem stood a moment, watching until the other man disappeared around the corner. From across the gully he heard a train, and he wondered when Elsie would be home—he wanted to tell her about his night, and the professor, and the bird.

  How did marriages fail? He’d never given it much thought—although his mother’s had, he supposed, before it was resolved by his father’s death. She’d never spoken of how she thought about her husband, nor of the possibility of marrying someone else.

  He heard the train again as he pulled the garage door to and headed back up the stairs—he should put the kettle on again, in case Elsie was near. She’d come in, full of life and excitement, looking ten years younger in that pretty silver dress.

  It wasn’t for him, this noisy modern life.

  In the living room, he flicked the switch on the record player, swept the dust off a disc in wide arcs. Frank Sinatra—now there was a singer. He positioned the needle, letting it drop at just the track he wanted, and the house filled with the mournful reminiscence of the middle of the night.

  A world without Elsie; if she ran off, went away. If she went out on a night like this and something happened that meant she never came home—he wouldn’t let himself think it might be the end of life that separated them. They were young still, and they were healthy. He’d hang onto that.

  If I was the bloke in the song, sat up in some bar at a quarter to three in the morning, singing for my missus . . .

  It was too much like a movie. If something happened to Elsie, Clem would be mowing the lawns and clearing the gutters and trying to make his own steak and kidney pie. He’d be dandling Gloria and painting the handrails and pottering about in his garage. He’d be doing all the usual things—even if no one was calling from the house, ‘Clem? Are you down there? Are you right?’ He’d be Clem, but somehow less so. Elsie sparked him into life. What more could a man ask than that?

  The song finished. He walked into the darkened bedroom, and felt around for the neatly folded flannelette of his pyjamas, right where Elsie placed them, every day, beneath the pillow on his side of the bed. Enough; he’d leave the door unlatched, and hear about his wife’s adventure in the morning. Almost asleep, he saw the infinite possibilities of a racked triangle of pool balls scattering after the break shot. He saw Elsie, painted and framed, with the sky as the professor had described it, that rich and brilliant blue behind her head.

  And in the fug of half-sleep, more dream than waking knowledge, he could see the professor’s painting so clearly, and he suddenly knew why. He sat up with a gasp.

  That man was gazing at Elsie.

  I should have bought it from Mrs Lewis. I should have paid any price. This unbearable thought: someone else was living with his wife.

  He could see the man, hat tilted, sitting and gazing in blank adoration. Thinking who knew what, doing who knew what, while she stared out beyond him.

  Clem reached the bathroom and spat into the basin, catching sight of himself in the dimness of the mirror as he raised his head again. There was a wildness in his stare. He splashed cold water on his face—again, again—and made himself calm down. Other men would have seen this consequence unspool from the madness of letting their wives sit for an artist. Other men would have known what to do.

  One last cold sluice of water. He didn’t even know where the professor now lived. And he could hardly march around to his office and demand his wife back. He wouldn’t know what to say. As for Elsie, what the devil could he say of it to her?

  Clem dabbed his face dry and held his own gaze in the mirror. He remembered the physicist’s words from the ferry, on the day when the pitch drop fell: and there wasn’t a blessed soul there to see it.

  No, thought Clem, standing straight and squaring himself in the mirror. There was. This blessed soul. And what did it matter, where a picture hung? He had the real Elsie; he had her by him.

  He felt the room’s walls solid around him. This house, his wife, his kids: that was what defined him. He sought no purchase on the world beyond these things.

  18

  The photograph

  Elsie woke, her head hot and her bones aching. In the four weeks since she’d been to that concert with Elaine, she’d felt on edge—it was almost a relief to be properly ill at last. She’d known Clem wasn’t right to put it down to too much excitement, although the noise—the music, the screaming—had been so loud.

  It was late on a Saturday morning and quiet in the house. The bedroom was wonderfully dim. Sitting up, Elsie saw a cup of tea gone cold on her bedside table and a note there too from Clem. Gone to help Donny and Carol. Their new house needed a bathtub. Clem was on the job.

  I’ll take over some lunch later on. Elsie tried to swing her legs out of bed but then had to lie back straight away, exhausted. She sipped the painfully cold tea and settled down again. Something gave way with a crackle behind her, and, patting the bed, she found the newspaper he’d left for her as well, folded as neatly as if he’d ironed it.

  Exceptional Pictures Relayed of the Moon, she read. She shook her head: they’d crashed another spaceship onto the surface of the moon, and this time it had managed to send back some pictures. Thousands of images, she read, costing millions of dollars. She closed her eyes and remembered Ida Lewis talking about this mad mission as though it was magic. Bet you never thought you’d live to see a thing like that, she’d said.

  It’s some world, isn’t it? Some world, this modern world. Still, it was better than poisoning and war and plane crashes. And how would the moon look up close? What would the photographs show? It was a funny thing with photographs that they never looked quite right—the more she thought back on the portrait Ida had painted, more than two years ago now, the more she thought it was her best and truest likeness.

  Mrs Lewis. Elsie still blushed to remember the pressure of the other woman’s fingers on her shoulder, the softness of the other woman’s fingers on her lips.

  Sh
e squirmed herself straight in the bed. I looked myself. I looked complete. She wished she had asked for a photo of it after all—but would a photo of a portrait be any better than a photo of a person, or would it also somehow diminish how the thing had really looked?

  She sneezed, and her body relaxed. She tried not to think of the artist, the sitting, too much. Clem mentioned the portrait sometimes, wishing he’d bought it. But Elsie laughed at the suggestion. As if a house like theirs could hold so grand a thing.

  ‘I should’ve come as your chaperone,’ he’d said just the other week, and she’d liked that idea—there she was, posed, with the artist looking at her from one direction and her husband from another. Or would Clem have found the painter painting as mesmerising as she had? Elsie didn’t like that idea quite so much.

  ‘Clem, it wasn’t that bad,’ she’d said, her face warm just the same.

  She heard footsteps on the front stairs and thought for one mad second it was the artist, Ida Lewis, come back to visit. She blushed again.

  You sort yourself out, Elsie Gormley, she thought, while she waited for a knock on the front door.

  ‘Mum? Are you in there?’ Elaine’s voice.

  ‘In here, Elaine—just push.’ She couldn’t tell if Glory was there too—but in she came, tripping over her own tiny feet and bouncing onto the pillow next to Elsie with all the instant chatter of being two years old.

  ‘Why are you in bed, Nan?’ the little girl asked. ‘It’s time to get up.’

  ‘Is it, love? Did you see the sunrise?’ Elsie stroked the small girl’s hair as if she were a cat.

  ‘There aren’t too many mornings that she’d miss.’ Elaine was standing in the doorway with a frown. ‘You all right, Mum? I wanted to ask if you’d look after Gloria.’

  Elsie coughed and the aches in her bones and joints sharpened another notch again. She held her breath, to make herself sound better than she felt. ‘Of course, of course. Just let me get myself dressed—we’ll be fine.’ She’d have a quick sponge-down and face the day. A bit of talc, a bit of scent: she’d be all right.