Ellie & the Shadow Man

by Gee, Maurice

  Ellie repaints the rainbow on the letterbox. She paints over Audrey’s name with her own. ‘Fan,’ she says, ‘you can start teaching me now.’ ‘Just like that?’ Fan tries to snap her fingers and fails, which makes her cross. ‘Yes please,’ Ellie says. ‘I’d like to start today.’ ‘Oh ho, would you?’ ‘Not what to paint, I know that. Just how.’ ‘How to hold the brush?’ ‘Oh yes, that especially.’ Ellie laughs.

  They work daily in Fan’s studio. ‘If you think you’re doing painting straight away you can think again,’ Fan says. ‘I’ve been drawing all my life,’ Ellie protests. ‘You’ve been making marks on paper all your life.’ They get on badly a lot of the time. ‘No, Fan, not still life,’ Ellie says. ‘I want to see an apple like an apple,’ Fan replies. ‘If you think there’s an easy way, I’d like to know what it is.’ ‘But I want to use colour. I want to do hills.’ ‘I want, I want,’ Fan says, ‘just how old are you?’ So they go on, through that year and the next. Ellie paints the hills, she paints the sea, paints apple trees, pine trees, using watercolours and later oils. She is never satisfied but remains excited – a low-level excitement, filling with her confidence. They’re like a floor she stands on, tongue and groove. Her question is how she can make something happen in her work. She understands well enough how to put paint on canvas – even Fan admits it, but says, ‘These good things you do are accidental. Another day it might be something else, or nothing at all. You’ve got to learn to get what you want deliberately.’ Ellie likes the idea of accident, but likes rules too. She wants to be open to one while held fast by the other.

  1984. Muldoon gets drunk and calls a snap election. Labour beats him. Ellie claps her hands. ‘Now,’ she says.

  1985. Ellie describes herself as a painter when people ask. (Artist is pompous and imprecise.) She’s alone much of the time in the studio. Fan hopes she might do something herself but cannot work side by side with Ellie. Besides, her hand is trembling; she is suddenly, after an autumn sickness, aged to a little stick-thin desiccated elf. Ellie tries to give her space (John has taken Audrey’s studio as his room, so she can’t go there) by driving out to beaches, valleys, hilltops, photographing, sketching, but Fan is not working when she comes home. She sits in the sun and reads and listens to music – preparing all the while, Ellie believes, gnomic, irrelevant, maddening remarks. ‘You are lost, my dear, somewhere between matter and spirit,’ Fan says. ‘Oh Fan, just tell me what I did wrong’ – but Fan only smiles: ‘It’s the only proper place.’ ‘Fan, please. Did I do the under-painting not dark enough? Is that why it’s just not there?’ ‘Time and interconnectedness,’ Fan says, ‘or colour and light. Which do you choose?’

  Meanwhile politics, betrayal. Ellie is furious, eroded, devastated. She had thought the people she voted for were socialists. Strange objects appear in the foreground of her paintings: river boulders not worn by water, shapes deformed. Appear as if by chance, become deliberate: Douglas and Prebble, and Lange who lets them get away with it. No faces, no human attributes. Behind tangled gorges the hills are slipping, the hills are dead. Ellie knows these paintings are a mess. But they’re an improvement too; she has moved past something that blocked her way. She does not show Fan but stands them face to the wall. Ellie works on …

  1986–88 … and works on. She begins to understand the demonic single-mindedness that drove Neil Higgs but is better controlled. The hills in her paintings flatten out. She sees it as a response to the gravitational pull of the world in her head. What’s inside changes what’s out there, and vice versa. She is less angry and her colours, her composition, are better for it. She wrenches out allegory from her paintings – wrenches it out – wanting only nature, wanting the world, but knows that she is in nature herself, that what she believes and feels is natural too. A place for it? On the canvas. Where’s the place? A painting starts from the roots up, she is learning. It implants a shape and you grow into it, discover where the perimeters are and the centre is – and Fan, in Ellie’s head, cries, No, no. Ellie sends her away. She locks Fan out of herself, out of her work. She paints, day long, week long, flattened hills above empty plains, light streaming invisible from the sky, which is only a source, a smear of blue. Everything else is ochre and brown: the plain full of itself, the low hills there. She puts people in, simple brushstrokes, darker than the plain, featureless, leaning like burned matchsticks, with bowed heads, as they move obliquely, right to left, into the distance. She turns from it, walks away, closes the door and will not let herself go back, knowing that what is wrong will strike her like a blow, and not wanting it, not wanting the pain (although it will tell her what is right). Ellie walks in the garden. She pulls some weeds, carries a basin of waste water from the kitchen to the parsley bed (it’s another dry summer), smiles at John doing homework in his room (when did he come home?), lays vegetables on the bench to prepare for tea; then goes back, confronts it, lets her eye move around, and nothing jars. It is complete. And it is good. She sighs and sinks on to her stool, overcome with pleasure.

  ‘Fan,’ she says next day, ‘can I show you something?’ Fan looks hard, and does not like it, but stretches her mouth and nods, recognising that this is what Ellie will do. I can never be as pure as Fan, Ellie thinks. She will be only half as good. But this is her way, this is her work. ‘Political,’ Fan says. Ellie is surprised. She thinks more of Fan saying ‘time and interconnectedness’.

  Ellie paints a series haunted by the world she knows. The Waimea plains bake in the sun, dry hills slope on either side (sloping up? sloping down? she cannot decide). The real world is a shadow behind the substantial one she makes on the canvas (Belgian linen: Fan has taught her to use only the best). People trek – purposeful or defeated? – towards a distant place where a river runs, or might not run. Why the near diagonal? Why the figures undefined? She does not know – only knows it has to be that way or she isn’t moved, she’s not engaged. There’s a question of balance and colour, but her mind will not respond: the painting itself is the answer she can make. And no, she insists, it’s not allegorical or political; it won’t take on distortions from meaning of that kind. Fan sighs when she looks. She concedes, ‘You’ve got the light.’ Ellie says, ‘Do you mind if I just like your paintings, Fan, but don’t listen to you any more?’

  She has an exhibition in a gallery in Nelson – ten paintings, $150 or $200 each. Crowther, she signs them, perhaps too boldly, at the bottom left or right. Nothing sells at the opening, even though Fan, whose fame increases, comes along; but two red stickers go up on the second day and Ellie sells four paintings by the end. She takes the others home and stores them in the spare room, where Fan has a dozen of her own put away. There’s a quiet singing in Ellie’s head. She’s a professional, and look at the company she keeps.

  1989. ‘In your nineties you turn into a freak,’ Fan says. It’s her way of saying that she’s ready to die. ‘Ellie, dear, let’s talk about money,’ she says. ‘No.’ ‘Oh yes. I want you painting, not wasting your time in some silly job.’ Fan owns the house and five hectares of land, a portfolio of shares (worth less than they had been because of the 1987 collapse – ‘which seemed to amuse you,’ she says acidly), sixteen of her own paintings, including ten she thinks of as her best, three Woollaston watercolours, an early McCahon (kauri trees, owing something to Cézanne?), a Louise Henderson, a tiny drawing by Dufy and a thousand books. It’s all for Ellie. ‘There’s no one else,’ Fan tells her. ‘Nephews, nieces somewhere, they don’t count. It’s you and John.’

  In midwinter she dies quietly: the end of her busy opinionated life. Ellie grieves; and grieves for George, who dies in the same month. Cries for him because he seemed to give his life away while Fan lived hers right to the end. George, her mother, Derek, make a complicated knot, but she and Fan are like two strands of wool turned around each other.

  She speaks at a memorial service for Fan in Wellington, describes her life and Audrey’s at Ruby Bay – the house above the orchards and the sea, the hard work in the stud
io, Fan’s single-mindedness, her puritan hatred of ‘lazy paint’, her decisiveness even when she rested (her teacup did not tinkle on the saucer, it clanked), her belief in objects, landscapes, things, which, if painted right, can be effortlessly shared, her belief that a painting was ‘a place to go’, where, in forms and colour, a still centre can be found, her hatred of too much explanation. Ellie says that she has learned all she knows from Fan, but sees people thinking, Who is she? and, What does she know?, so steps down from the lectern for more important speakers, but is happy with what she has said; and thinks of things she might have added: that with Fan, through her own work, she has found again the clarity she’d known at fourteen; and that she has regained her past – which is strange because she’s not aware of putting it in her paintings.

  Fan’s dealer, David Shea, overtakes her outside the church. He offers to take her on, show her work. Ellie says she’s not sure she’s ready for Wellington. She suspects David is after her Anerdi paintings and becomes sure of it when he talks about her duty to let them be seen. ‘If you’d like to do a retrospective, David,’ she says. But it’s selling them he wants, not showing them. She tells him that nothing is decided. They part with smiles. Ellie flies home. She wants to keep all Fan’s paintings all her life but wants to show them to other people. She walks in her garden, wondering about possession, pleasure, duty. She wonders how much she is worth. It’s not the money that interests her. Change ‘th’ to ‘k’: worth is work. She decides that she will keep Fan’s paintings, show them to whoever wants to see, privately and publicly, sell them one by one when it’s necessary, and get on with paintings of her own – sell them too if she can.

  Ellie walks to the back fence and looks down the valley at the coastal road and the little town. The sea is grey, the sky is grey: lovely colours, lovely light. She could skate on that surface and turn on the hidden horizon, slide back, head down, on the pearly sky. Drop on her feet again at her own back fence. Ellie laughs. She turns and looks at her studio and her house. She breathes deeply, bares her throat, opens her arms.

  ‘Thank you, Fan,’ Ellie says.

  Gethsemane

  Ellie left her flattened hills and forward-bending figures behind. It puzzled her that as she achieved freedom, thanks to Fan, she should find herself painting landscapes empty of people. She brought weight into her palette with blue and green, painting creeks and solid-seeming bush and steep hills remembered from Golden Bay – the range across the inlet from Collingwood, the Aorere with sharp elbows and deep groins. It took her half a year to become convinced that she was heading somewhere with all this. She tried impasto, which her subject seemed to ask for – more weight, less definition – but rejected it, finding in herself some of Fan’s dislike of excess. Slowly she began to simplify – less fracturing, less jumble, cleaner lines – warning herself to stop before tree and hill became mere notation; but found that she wanted to go back the other way, to complicate – but with what? She waited for the missing element to declare itself, and painted meanwhile half a dozen pictures that pleased her sufficiently to show. She placed them in a pottery shop in Nelson but wasn’t sure the people who bought them were not taken in by their combination of prettiness and threat. David Shea made no further offer of an exhibition, although he telephoned several times about what he called ‘the Anerdi collection’, refusing ‘your’. Ellie continued to put him off.

  She turned from her easel one day and found a man watching her from outside. He stood close to the window, with his eyebrows raised in a question; and Ellie, after the lurching of her heart and shrinking, almost blanking out, of her consciousness, thought, He’s still a silly bugger, still doing it wrong. She took a deep breath, stilling her anger, and went outside.

  ‘Hello, Mike,’ she said, closing the door. She did not want him in her studio, or in the house, even on the section. He’s got no claim. I don’t even know him, she told herself.

  ‘Long time, Ellie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is. I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’

  ‘I didn’t. Didn’t mean to anyway. But I thought I’d try the back door, then I saw you painting away. Hey Ellie, do I get a kiss or something?’

  She had two fears: that John would somehow turn up from Christchurch, and that Mike had Boggsie in his car.

  ‘You should have telephoned. I’m in the middle of my working day. How did you find me?’

  ‘I was driving through from Mot. I’m looking for work. Then I thought I’d take a look at the orchard – where we met, eh? I saw your name on the gate. So here I am. We still friends, Ellie? We had some good times once.’ His smile showed the brown stub of his filed-down tooth.

  Twenty years and all he’s got is older, she thought. His hair was turning silver and was tied in a ponytail. There was a pathos in it she did not want to feel.

  ‘Have you got anyone out in the car?’

  ‘No, just me. It’s nearly lunchtime, Ellie. I could do with something to eat. I’d have brought a couple of beers if I’d known I’d find you here.’

  Ellie looked at her easel through the window. She felt another fear: that, jerked away, she would not find her place when she went back.

  ‘Just let me clean my brush, Mike. No, stay outside.’ She did not look at the painting; cleaned her brushes and palette, went back out. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t like people in my studio.’

  ‘Sure. A kind of sacred place, eh?’

  ‘No,’ she said sharply, and led him into the kitchen. ‘I’ve got some fish stew. Will that do?’

  ‘Great. I’d love a beer.’

  She got a can from the fridge and handed it to him. Poured stew from a basin into a pot, turned on the stove. She looked at Mike to see if John was in his face, saw nothing and felt a relief that made her smile. ‘What have you been doing, Mike? After Good Life, I mean.’

  ‘Do you want a full breakdown?’

  ‘No. What do you do now?’

  ‘Ah’m a travellin’ man,’ he said, showing his stump of tooth.

  ‘Does that mean nothing? I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be rude. You told me you’d go into school teaching one day.’

  ‘Trouble is –’ he grinned – ‘I can’t stand kids.’

  ‘No? Why didn’t you get your tooth fixed, Mike?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, not liking it but forcing good humour, ‘I got my manhood, I got my health. What’s a tooth? And one of them’s still there anyway.’ He began a grin to show her, then covered his mouth. ‘You were always pretty stroppy. Let’s just say I’ve got my priorities right.’

  ‘Good times?’

  ‘Yeah, good times. What’s wrong with that?’

  Ellie put bread and butter on the table. She laid plates. ‘I enjoyed Good Life for most of the time.’

  ‘Yeah, so did I.’

  ‘How long did you stay?’

  ‘Coupla months after you left. You stole my car!’

  ‘Did you and Boggsie get your crop harvested?’

  ‘Huh,’ he said.

  ‘What went wrong?’

  Mike watched her cautiously. ‘You don’t know, eh?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘OK. Someone went in and sprayed all the plants. I thought it must be, what’s their names, Annie and so on, but they don’t use poison. Boggsie reckoned it was you. He was all for finding you but I called him off.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She tried to sound light. ‘Where is Boggsie?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sydney. He got in with some pretty heavy dudes. Boggsie always had some deal worked out. He thought he was sharp.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They found his body, that’s all. Burned in his car. You must have read about it.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Do you mean he was murdered?’

  ‘The cops thought so. They never caught anyone. Too damn clever, those boys across the ditch. Anyway. That was Boggsie.’

  ‘Were you in Sydney?’

  �
�I got out quick. I don’t go for all that heavy stuff.’

  Ellie went to the stove. She found that she was trembling, and did not know whether it was from horror or relief – Boggsie, who had haunted her, gone; but in that way, burned in his car. Mike frightened her too and she had to glance at him to discover he was no threat – except in a time-wasting, importuning way. She found a sudden grief in her for John, who was his son, and a confusion about what she should do. What would John want? Should she give him the choice of knowing, even if it hurt? Wasn’t her duty more to keep him safe from Mike’s world – from the squalor that he wore like a snail shell on his back?

  ‘The old sheila that owns this place still here?’ Mike said.

  ‘No. She died.’

  ‘Her name’s on the gate.’

  ‘I haven’t painted it off yet. Stuff still comes for her.’

  A tremor seemed to run through him, a subtle alteration. ‘So,’ he said, and drank from the can, ‘what’s the score, Ellie?’

  ‘Score?’ she said, although she knew.

  ‘How come you live here?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, but I mean, who owns the place?’ He grinned, watching her. ‘You, eh? Nice going.’

  She felt as if he’d thrown a bucket of dirty water on her. Instead of making her angry, it defined her: untouchable. She saw how far she’d moved, how Mike could never come close. Sure and self-possessed, she ladled stew into the bowls.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I? It’s yours,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it’s mine.’

  ‘So, you’d be able, say, to put me up for a couple of nights?’