The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  When Yu informed Lien gravely, The literary painter Huang Yu-hua is waiting for the Lord of Death. You will soon be surrounded by your father’s weeping relatives, who will surely wish to claim their property, Lien realised she could depend on no one but herself to redeem the situation. She had already understood that no question can have only one side, and that no person can be only one and solitary. So she went to her father’s study and she ground ink and painted a small handscroll depicting a fragment of mountainous scenery in the pure manner of the Sung scholar Sung Hui-tsung, permitting herself no gesture which might identify her own style. Alongside the image, with a small and unpretentious brush, she wrote, How foolish it is to rejoice in our own draughtsmanship when the masters teach us all we know. And, as a coda above her seal, she added – henceforth an ironic maxim for her in which the unhappy outcome of her project was to be endlessly recapitulated – Any girl can learn to draw. Then she dressed in her finest green silk gown and decorated her hair with her most precious ornament, and she went into her father’s bedroom and kowtowed to him before presenting him with the handscroll.

  After this she set about establishing her authority with the servants, and soon became the undisputed mistress of Huang’s household. No one, not even Yu, ever referred again to her great gift, and it must have seemed to everyone that she had capitulated. Privately Yu was not convinced of this. It seemed to him that the demon of such a gift as hers must be of the spirit and therefore immortal, and if one entrance to expression is stopped up against it, then such a demon will busy itself burrowing to make another.

  Lien proved to be a harsh mistress, exercising the prerogatives of a woman without the tempering quality of compassion. There was even cruelty in the manner of her rule, as if she wished to see everyone suffer a little for the sacrifice she was herself forced to endure. And so things continued uneasily for a number of years. Until the Shanghai banker, C.H. Feng, came to the provincial capital one day on business, and encountered the daughter of the literary painter, Huang Yu-hua, under Locking Waves Bridge.

  PORTRAITS

  Except for a headscarf or bandeau, like the one my mother sometimes wore about the house, she was naked. This ‘scarf presented the only point of cheerful colour in the painting, the remainder being cold flesh against the brown drapery of a curtain. She was pale and sharp featured and her head was much too large and too old for her child’s body. Her left hand held a towel pressed to her side, and her right hand, and indeed the whole of her right arm, was held back out of sight behind her, so that she appeared to be thrusting forward with her bony chest and belly. She was looking directly into the eyes of the artist, and her examination was derisory. Her expression reminded me of newspaper photographs I’d seen of wartime women in London’s streets. She had decided there was no more to be expected from men.

  I realised it was a bath towel, not a scarf or a bandeau, round Victoria’s head. It was a towel wrapping her wet hair. As soon as I’d decided this, the situation of the painting’s composition suggested itself to me. She had, of course, been returning to her room from taking a bath. She had been wearing the larger towel, which she was now pressing to her side, as a covering. She had met the artist on the landing of the stair. The meeting had been foreseen by her, for she had known he would be there, drafting the dimensions of the upper hall for her mother.

  She had begun her secret project with him a year earlier, just after he had arrived. Initially she had stood before him in the open air while he had sketched, positioning herself so that her presence had inhabited a corner of his composition, and persisting until his repeated measuring glances had included her. With the passage of time, and with the increments of further adjustments, she had here at last come to occupy his entire canvas, had come to comprise his only subject, and no doubt to take possession of his entire life. In the portrait her project was complete. No more was to be expected of him. Their relationship had been intricate and strained beyond belief, for him an exquisite and cloaked desire, a mortification to her eight sisters and a torture to her mother. He had rendered her skin grey and cold. He had not signed the painting. Her derision had been reserved for his despair.

  In 1908, as a woman of thirty, Victoria might have written of herself then, as a child of eleven:

  The girl who stands at the edge of the thin, dry forest observing the artist at work on the green sweep of lawn before her, keeps a private journal of her own. Into its pages at night, when she is alone in her room at the top of the house, her thoughts of herself and her findings concerning the northern hemisphere are written. She writes of the English painter carefully, deliberatively, with the kind of loving and solitary joy of a writer. She is accurate with her observations and careful to resist the proffered image. She is aware of the temptation to become fanciful and knows the dangers are real. Fiction, she has discovered, though it is conducted in the isolation of the mind, cannot be permitted to become madness. She does not know what her researches will reveal. She does not know the end of her story. She writes not with an end in mind but with a desire to make the material of her scrutiny her own, to possess it by means of the location of herself at its centre. She enters it by degrees. She insinuates herself. She is in fear of and is fascinated by her power to entice and to mock the artist. She composes fragments: From the verandah outside my room I watched my mother walking in the garden with him after dinner when he was newly arrived and talked of nothing but Monsieur Legros and the Slade, as if these had been his own inventions and he not simply one of their less gifted students. That night a yellow moon was reflected in the slow brown waters of the Yarra River. My mother and he did not enter the summerhouse, but hesitated when they drew near to it, unsteady with the closeness of its concealing darkness. My mother’s voice was clear and round and sad in the night as she enumerated the features of her domain to him, her left arm extended, pointing sweeping in a half-circle from the bank of the river to the remnant of native bush. I would like you to paint all this, she told him. A nocturne would be most acceptable. But first I must have the interior views we have spoken of. And then they walked once around the summerhouse, sailors circumnavigating a mysterious island. They did not venture as far as the boatshed – as real sailors might have done – but behaved as if it was not there. Yet, as they left, I saw him turn and look towards it, to where the willows made Vs in the current and the vacant shell of the boat invited thoughts of taking passage with a woman.

  The girl, who is myself, remained upon the high verandah and observed the smoke and the white columns of steam rising from the chimneys in Richmond on the other side of the river, where the poor of the city live and work. On the lawn below her the darker trace of her mother’s gown and the painter’s footprints mapped their journey upon the dewy grass. She thought of him, and by the light of the moon began to enter her material.

  His pose was of a decided superiority as he painted his sombre, uninhabited interiors. But she persisted and in the open air, removed from the house, he admitted her at last to a large oil which was to hang on the east wall of the dining room. The composition was horizontal and extensive, broken in the middle distance by the summerhouse with its oriental eaves and its elaborate finial pointing towards the sky. Beyond this feature of the middle distance were the slim native trees. The attentive eye, led away by these toward a suggestion of less civilised regions, might pursue the meanderings of the river. And here, where the river slid away into the distance, he inserted a dab of alizarin crimson. A solitary figure, it must appear, stood at the edge of the trees.

  He permitted her to understand that he had included her merely to gratify her desire to be noticed by him, that he had humored the daughter of his employer. The truth was more sad and more romantic. The truth was that her image within his picture mitigated for him, in a most secret and precious way, the pain of his larger failure, the cause of his unhappy exile. For at the Slade School he had been misplaced. His fellow students had not struggled as he had been required to do in order to
comprehend the mysteries of drawing and painting, but had shone effortlessly, a society of gifted luminaries for whom art and literature and Society were but Nature’s way, an accessible and effortless path to be illuminated by works of extraordinary generosity. He had not been vouchsafed their largesse of spirit. The best he had been able to manage had been a letter of introduction from Eugene von Guerard, an artist of some past standing who had once held the position of curator of the National Gallery of Victoria, and had been the Principal of its art school until his retirement and return to England in 1881.

  He knew he was not, as his mentor had been, an adventurer, but was an exile. He knew he would never see his beloved England again. In this Hawthorn house he found a certain kinship, he was invited to court a friendship with the solitary girl who gazed at him with her mysterious oriental eyes, as if she alone of all the world understood most sensitively the difficulties and disappointments of his life. As if, indeed, she shared his exile from the Northern Hemisphere.

  When the painting of the lawn and the summerhouse was finished, when, that is, the dab of alizarin crimson had been inserted, she made him wait upon her and chose with care and numerous hesitations and revisions her own disposition in certain of his canvases. She grew and matured as his most favoured subject. Until the picture of a girl playing a piano, which her mother’s friends commended so enthusiastically. With this picture, which required many sittings, she came to her ambition of a full-length portrait, to the ambition of being herself his entire subject matter. To sustain herself upon him, just as the dark mistletoe sustains itself upon the weak branches of the gumtrees along the river, and as he drew her to draw from him her fiction of the Northern Hemisphere. And what then? What when she had done with him? A child is immortal. She was not concerned with the end of her story but with its process. She would travel yet to China on her orange and green horse.

  It was two o’clock in the morning but still she wrote and did not notice the chill of the night air until the first cloud from the south-west passed across the descending moon and darkened her page.

  Victoria’s portrait had been resting against a china cabinet in the front room of Lang’s house since the night we’d brought it from Lindner’s. He interrupted my reflections on it with a petulant request that I come and examine one of his own paintings, the only painting of his hung in the house so far as I knew. That’s not a good painting, he said, gesturing with his wineglass at the naked Victoria. You shouldn’t be wasting your time with it. Jokingly, I accused him of being jealous.

  I had begun, in fact, to think of the house as being as much Victoria’s as his. I’d begun to experience it through a combination of my readings of her Winter Visitor and my own new preoccupation with the attempt to recast his parents for him from the accounts of them he’d given me. An uncertain project, which was not entirely his nor quite my own. What in February I’d regarded as a state of genteel neglect, a result of Lang’s lack of sufficient funds for repairs – a condition which endowed with a certain elderly charm a number of the other large houses in Coppin Grove – by the autumn I’d seen to be the result of several decades of Victoria’s studied disregard for the upkeep of the place, her conscious neglect of her mother’s old domain, and her single-minded allegiance throughout her long life to the concerns of the other-world of fiction. Lang had increasingly begun to seem to me to be a late and somewhat incidental occupier of what was essentially Victoria’s house.

  The view of the house that was presented as one drew up to it along Coppin Grove was of a once stately residence of the early boom period which had been severely tampered with. The taste for renovation was evident not only inside, in the choice of the second-rate works of the English artist, but outside even more strikingly in the vaulted Gothic portico which had been built on to the fine Victorian facade. Over time a wilderness of shrubs and trees and climbing vines, which festooned the verandahs and leaned against the walls, had rendered the clash of styles less violent. Under the inspiration of Victoria’s neglect a purple bougainvillea luxuriantly dominated such less aggressive species as Clematis clycinoides, the traveller’s joy of Eastern Australia, and a fragrant jasmine, which had managed to retain a corner of the ground-floor verandah. A temporary equilibrium, as of exhausted wrestlers, had been established between the garden and the house; between the contending influences of mother and daughter. In this mise en scene Lang’s was not a determinative presence.

  When I accused him of being jealous of the close attention I’d been giving to the work of the English painter he made an irritated noise and turned his back on me, standing as near to the gas heater as he could without catching alight and looking pointedly at the painting which hung above the fireplace, too vexed to offer a response.

  Among the dozen or so paintings and drawings in the room, besides Victoria’s, there were three other portraits of young women. One was of a girl viewed from behind, seated at a piano. The interpretation was colourful and decorative, but it was unmistakably the work of the English painter. Then, between the windows, there was a head and shoulders of a young woman in a flowered hat, the subject contre-jour in the manner of Sickert. Lang claimed it was the work of Nan Hudson, Sickert’s friend. He considered Sickert himself to have been, along with Whistler and Degas, one of the greatest painters of his time. He argued that the relative neglect of Sickert’s work marked exactly the degree to which the world of Western art had gone off in the wrong direaion, a development he placed at the beginning of the First World War. He defended this view at great length, and in doing so revealed a detailed knowledge of the period. Despite his persuasive scholarship, after I’d heard the argument a few times I got the feeling that in defending Sickert he was, in some sort of disguised and elliptical way, really offering a defence of himself as a neglected artist. The undisclosed argument invited a parallel between himself and Sickert, in which the undisclosed purpose in recasting his parents became a rehabilitative biography of himself, the Australian/Chinese painter Lang Tzu, who was absent from the record.

  In a way, of course, it was his own fault if I was spending more of my time attending to Victoria and her painter than I was to him. It was he who’d first drawn my attention to her by convincing me I ought to read The Winter Visitor. Now he refused to discuss the book, or evaded by every possible means discussing either it or the English painter. It was as if he were afraid that by attending to Victoria’s affairs I might be led to fashion a parallel not between himself and his hero, Walter Sickert, but between himself and the sad English exile for whose despair Victoria had reserved only her derision at the completion of her own project. Ironically, it was Lang’s very fear of this that drew my attention to its possibilities.

  Above the gas fire, a position which, in the circumstances, bestowed an unlikely authority on the picture owing to its prominence overlooking the other pictures in the room, hung the third portrait of a young woman. Lang had painted it when he was twenty-five and in love with the subject; or, perhaps, in love with the idea of being the companion of such an ideal creature of the Western world as she appeared to have been. It was a picture of a beautiful Englishwoman in the luscious early manner of George Lambert. If it had been painted in 1910 instead of in the fifties it would no doubt have aroused some interest in the young Australian/Chinese artist who’d painted it. I could see nothing of Lang in it, however, and when he’d told me it was his I’d had to disguise my disappointment.

  He blew a cloud of smoke at the picture. Do you know why I keep her there? She was my wife. He laughed and coughed thickly, doubling forward and spilling wine on the hearth. For a year, he added gaily, parodying the way some people might boast of having had in their possession for a time an expensive car or a racehorse they couldn’t afford. When he’d recovered, he came over and took me by the arm, gripping me just above the elbow and urging me along, the way one might encourage a blind person to enter an unknown place. The strength in his fingers was surprising. I’ll show you something that will interest you, S
teven. He propelled me towards the dining room.

  Occupying the centre of this room was a mahogany table of magisterial proportions, around which was arranged a matched setting of eighteen balloon-backed dining chairs with their original buttoned leather seats. Where had Victoria been seated the evening she’d opened her father’s gift? The family gathered here in this room and seated at dinner, the mother’s Tibetan carpet draped across a chair and the colourful Hangzhou silks for the other daughters. Their attention on Victoria, waiting for her. The last to open her present. Had the painter been seated here too? Near her? Next to her? But an image of them that evening resisted me. To visualise them I had to refer to my recollection of her account in the book.

  The curtains were drawn across the windows and the air was stale. Completely covering the ample surface of the table, to a depth of half a metre or more, was a disordered heap of unstretched oils and watercolours and sketches and books and catalogues and other marginalia relating to Australian art; a collection, a hoard really, which Lang has been amassing indiscriminately since his student days in art school at Ballarat thirty years ago.

  Look at it, he said. I’m ashamed of it. He was boasting, he was proud of it, it represented plunder, the life’s gatherings of a bandit. A pirate’s treasure trove harvested from auction rooms and junk shops and private houses and from expensive galleries like Lindner’s: whatever had turned up; the individual items in it connected only by their Australianness.

  Lang poked at it, securing bits of paper that were threatening to fall out, lifting the corner of a painting and releasing a breathy exclamation of recollection. Still holding my arm, he turned to me and looked into my face, examining my features as if he were searching for attributable painterly characteristics, his warm breath touching my cheek, his cold right eye observing me, unmoved and disinterested. Her stuff’s under this. He waited for me to absorb the information, then released my arm and laid the flat of his hand emphatically on the pile before us. Under here, Steven, that’s where she is. Under my stuff.