The Sitters

by Alex Miller

  No one liked the picture. None of Henry’s other friends. And his wife wouldn’t look at it. We’ve never spoken to each other since. She’s not like Henry. Henry would have understood. And if he hadn’t understood he would have forgiven me. They said it wasn’t Henry. That it was too cold. Too grim and too austere. He’d never been like that, they said. Never. What did I think I was trying to do? Was this some kind of iconoclasm? If I’d thought of Henry like that why hadn’t I had the courage to say so while he was alive? And so on. I defended myself. I said, ‘That’s how I saw him at the end.’ They said I must be losing my touch, that I was falling away. But it was Henry who’d fallen away, not me. I never sold it. No one wanted it. It’s hanging in my bedroom. I’m considering showing it to Jessica. But maybe it’s too soon for that yet. She might take fright. She might wonder what I’m up to. I don’t know what I’m up to. I’m guessing.

  He’s not lying in bed. He’s sitting up. He’s slipping sideways. He’s falling away. Falling through the gauze curtains that were there to keep the mosquitoes off him. The likeness of a dead man. That’s what confused them. The likeness. I should have provided them with a set of notes. I should have explained myself. I shouldn’t have left things in that unexplained state.

  But that’s what I do. It confuses people. They think I’m trying to be smart. They take offence. Who does he think he is? they want to know. It puts them off. But I don’t have an explanation for them. I’d have to make one up. I’d have to invent something soothing. It wouldn’t do any good. They’d argue back at me. An explanation from me would be an invitation to them to negotiate a new picture out of me. I’d never hear the end of it. Can’t you make him a bit warmer looking? I mean, Henry, Jor Christ’s sake! You remember our Henry don’t you? An explanation wouldn’t help. So I say nothing and they take my silence for arrogance.

  Every now and then, after the lapse of a few minutes of stillness, an eddy of air sets the leaves of the big redgum in motion. The redgum is a tree Jessica remembers from her childhood. She had forgotten it. But now she remembers it. ‘It looks just the same as it did when I was a child,’ she tells me. ‘That tree hasn’t changed,’ she says, marvelling. ‘A branch or two has fallen off. That’s all.’

  It’s an ancient tree, you can see that. It was here hundreds of years before the first Keal woman from Devon, her ancestor Amelia, knocked out the wattles and got this garden and these little paddocks of grazing going, while the men were off looking for gold in the valley and the women were taking care of food and shelter and the upbringing. And they’ve had their peculiar history, the Keal women and the garden, ever since, their eccentric story of persistence. Till Jessica’s desertion. And when her mother dies that’ll be the end of it. The tourists can move in and take over then. The tourists can discover the hidden beauties of Lower Araluen, the picturesque and the rustic, the few remains of another Australia that no one really belongs to any more, but which is still there, hanging on in places like this, and managing to believe in itself by dismissing everything else.

  Every now and then an eddy of air sets the leaves of the redgum in motion and the light passes back and forth unsteadily across her features, the way light might pass mysteriously across the bed of a river, its hues diluted and made more lucid and slowed by the weight of the water. Back and forth, the shadow of someone’s hand at the window. A gesture from outside. An invitation. A summons. Someone calling her out of herself. The leaves of the redgum hang down in great airy clusters from an enormous height and they bend back and forth in the warm eddies of air, glinting. Finely beaten tin.

  Set in motion by the intermittent breeze, the leaves of the redgum are signalling.

  When a bird cries once from a branch in the tree, then again, and abruptly falls silent, its cries set something new in motion in the room, in the mind of the woman who is sitting on the bed and to whom there has been this mysterious call from outside. The silence hangs during the interval after the bird’s cry, waiting for her reply, until the bird calls again, now from farther away. The sound of the bird’s call is being swallowed by distance and light as it flies further away from the house. It is becoming hollowed and echoing and more imaginary the further away it gets. It no longer calls for a reply. The cry of the bird is becoming part of the elaborate silence of the stringybark forest and of the woman’s thoughts, her uncertainty, her inability to reply. As it grows more indistinct and imaginary, for the woman who is sitting on the bed the call of the bird becomes a kind of lamentation for what is lost and cannot be recovered. She might have followed the call of the bird. A cry in which there is also a note of mockery, which makes the woman on the bed a little afraid, which has made her hesitate. So that fear has begun to be present in the room. When the bird has retreated and merged into the distance and into memory there remains, in the darkened room with the woman, a stirring complicated silence that might be difficult for her to distinguish from the sound of her own blood. This is a silence of strain and fatigue and worry. It is an undifferentiated silence. It is a silence that is the opposite of calm, graceful or beautiful music, and is not just the absence of such music. It is a silence in which the woman’s uncertainty, her diffidence, has n to oppress her. Her failure to decide. To make begu a decision, the way she has been able to make decisions throughout her life. To perceive her direction. To leave when it is time to leave. To know these things. To exercise her will and her intuition, her sense of what is right for herself. Now it has become a dilemma. She is surprised and dismayed and she is thinking, It has never happened to me before. Why am I like this? And the click and scrape of the steel hoe against the stony ground is reminding her of her mother. To locate this sound from her childhood. To deal with it. Her mother at work in the garden.

  Jessica’s mother, Enid Keal, is a deeply silent woman. she has said nothing to indicate that Jessica isn’t welcome. She’s made no sign that she doesn’t want Jessica around the place. But all the same, Jessica feels certain that her mother doesn’t want her hanging around being a visitor. She’s sure her mother feels as burdened and overwhelmed by these recurrent visits to the valley, after all this time of absence, as she feels herself. But she can’t talk to her mother about this. Her mother, she believes, is only interested in hearing one thing, and Jessica is not able to decide or to talk about that. The problem between them is the same problem that was there when Jessica was eighteen and won her scholarship. Her mother believes in the garden and in the care of its soil.

  The window in Jessica’s old bedroom, where she slept every night when she was a bright little girl, is so diminutive it might have been made for a pantry rather than for a bedroom and it is positioned oddly low down on the wall. To see out of the window into the garden Jessica has to lean forward and duck her head. This action makes the shadow across her back heavier. It increases the volume of her form and fills and deepens the picture plane. She leans forward in this way and watches her mother toiling in the garden and her breasts seem darker and heavier and to pull her shoulders down and to round the line of her backbone. After a while Jessica eases her position on the bed, which squeaks. She is resenting her mother for still being out there. It might be that her mother has wilfully survived. That her mother has waited a whole lifetime, her persistence an intentional provocation, a denial of change, holding things up that should have moved on and become wan and distant and mellowed with the passage of time and forgetting. Jessica is prevented, by this lack of change, from experiencing nostalgia for her past. It is a past that has been prevented from becoming mysterious or spiritual for her. It is a past that is still just real.

  The weather is warm again and Jessica is wearing a sleeveless blouse in a deep blue cotton. So there is this sudden division of light and dark. The light falling across her bare arm makes it look like an arm cast in some resilient metal, yellow bronze. Her arm, which is towards me, is more suggestive than her features, which are rather lost. Like the room her features don’t accept the light but shunt it back against the w
indow, so that there is this obliterating effect, rather than modelling.

  In Canberra the following week she talks to me about her mother again. I’m drawing her and she starts talking, as if her mother is always on her mind. She says, ‘When she picks up a handful of that soil and sniffs it the way you saw her doing, she’s sniffing herself. That’s all a Keal woman’s supposed to know. Soil improvement! Improving the soil on that stony little patch of ground. That’s all that’s ever mattered. It was the point of everything when I was a child. It was all that was ever talked about. The condition of the soil.’

  There’s impatience and anger and resentment in the way Jessica speaks about this. She apologises and says she must be boring me and promises not to speak of it again. But she can’t keep this promise. She’s sitting in the studio looking out the window at my almond tree and the neglected orchard and she’s got nothing to do but think about these things that are going on in her life.

  ‘I was bending over the bed unpacking,’ she says, breaking the silence again. She promises not to go on too long but to just say this one thing. ‘It was that first day. I’d just arrived. I was planning on staying with her for a few days. I was bending over the bed unpacking my things and putting them away in the chest of drawers and I glanced out the window with this sudden realisation that she’d still be out there, just as she had been the morning I left, when I went up the hill with my bags to wait for the mailman to take me into town for the last time, and I looked back and she was bending over in the garden. A weed had caught her eye and I had to call out so that she’d look up and see me wave to her for the last time.

  ‘And she was there.

  ‘Then I realised she’d always been in my mind. That she’d always been in my mind in this way, waiting for something from me that we’d never talked about. Waiting for me to see something her way. I stood there in my old bedroom for the first time since I was a kid, bent over the bed looking out the window at her, and I had this feeling that she’d waited for me to come home and solve this thing for her and for myself, whatever it was, for thirty years. And I started to see that she’d always been this active, this powerful, presence in my mind and that I’d never really got away from her at all. I nearly repacked everything and left right then. It frightened me. You know what it’s like down there, that enormous silence, that continuous crackling and buzzing. There wasn’t anyone to talk to about it. I tried writing to Caroline. But writing’s never the same as talking. There are some things you can’t write. I hadn’t thought about any of this. I hadn’t expected anything like this when I decided to come back. I thought I’d been pretty clever getting this visiting fellowship in Canberra, close to the valley, where I could quietly organise something. I was going to sort things out for her. I was going to find a nice place for her. Then settle up my affairs and just go back and get on with my life in England.’

  In April we got the first touches of frost. I like the cooler weather. I was glad the summer was over and I was feeling more optimistic. I’d done a few promising pieces. The only work I did was on the project with Jessica. For fun I even did a few drawings of Caroline. They were based on slim evidence. Jessica was amused. ‘Not a bit like her,’ she said. T must have given you the wrong impression.’

  I’d begun to get together some images that I could sustain a bit of belief in. I painted a Hammershoi, the Dane who painted portraits of women in dun-coloured rooms, reading, their features concealed or with their backs to the viewer. A tonalist. That’s what I did with Jessica’s mother. The little story she’d given me. A small private vertical oil, seventeen by nine centimetres; the unperturbed figure of her mother in her antique garden, bent over in the steep light, hoeing her earth, the brim of her oily tan fedora concealing her features. The black and gold hills billowing around her as they have always billowed around her at evening. It was through the frame of the window. The puzzle of Jessica’s childhood. The dry sound of the hoe, the deepest sound of Jessica’s childhood. Something precious offered and withheld. Intensity retreating as she advances towards it. The silence. The unattainable. Something like that. I don’t know whether Jessica believed any of this or not. I never mentioned it to her. The story’s my secret. How else can you do it?

  I’d be tempted to paint with only black and grey if it weren’t for the need to sell my pictures. Poor old Henry is black and grey, except for the dab of sepia that people stupidly mistake for a pocket handkerchief. Why is he sitting up? And of course the mocking yellow slash that’s not understood as the daffodils that were in his room that day. Poor old Henry’s friends. He was a good doctor who loved life. A low-risk candidate for heart failure. He had a perfect life. A perfect career. One marriage, two children, a boy and a girl, and three grandchildren before he died without getting any warning. A perfect shining life that was a model for everyone’s envy. Except you couldn’t envy Henry for long. He wouldn’t let you. He welcomed you. He shamed you into liking him. He understood your envy and he forgave you and he drew you in to his pleasure and you became part of it. He was modest and utterly brilliant and he knew it and it delighted him and embarrassed him a little. He wasn’t sitting up, he was slipping sideways. Plunging! Going over the edge. When they complained about my picture, I should have reminded them that a portrait’s always a portrait of the artist. Except that nothing’s ever as simple as aphorisms. Whenever we’re tempted to try them on, we discover that their general truths never quite fit our particular realities. All the untidy bits are left hanging out, the important bits, the inexplicable stuff that nothing resolves, and we discover again that those explanations don’t help because they don’t belong to our present reality but belong to something in the language, to that other dimension. The cover-up.

  The wisp of silver smoke rises from the log in the wide hearth behind her mother and passes up the chimney through a shaft of sunlight, the kitchen fragrant with the smell of burning redgum and autumn sunshine. And beneath it the smell of earth. Her mother’s hands are large and knobbly. Clubbed roots at the ends of her sinewy arms. Bronze and supple as the roots of old roses. They tell us everything about her. Her head is large. Enormous. She’s shrinking. She’s closing down around her skeleton. The veins coming out into the open. The work of all those years coming out of her at last. It’s coming out of concealment. The past eroding out of Jessica’s mother as we sit here drinking tea from porcelain cups with roses on them in her smoky kitchen, our little speeches floating about, joyless in the deep silence of the Keal house, a magpie warbling intricately on the verandah, distant and from another time. In the hearth behind Jessica’s mother the silver smoke drifts up from the log. And now and then the log creaks, its fibres being eased apart by the greater strength of fire. Talking. Things easing out. And the sound making us look round at the fire.

  The ruins of the past eroding out of Enid Keal. It’s an antique city poking up out of the desert, elaborate, desiccated, abandoned. Her hands lift the blue teapot, her right hand gripping the handle, her left hand holding the lid so it won’t slip off. Dark mottled things, the veins bulging and straining on the surface. And when she’s finished pouring she tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear and lifts her face to me, to look, once, with her crumpled mouth and her apple-pale eyes, into mine. Not curiosity, not inquisitiveness, but a message. She’s not interested in having me around their place.

  There’s no limit to our vanity. We’re all impersonating the person we’d like to be like. We’re surprised when someone we consider to be extremely ugly or stupid is as vain about their appearance as we are about our appearance. But we shouldn’t be. We even want to look good on our deathbed. You can’t tell what people are thinking by looking at their faces. The face is a mask of vanity. We practise it all our lives. We’re good at it. This is the paradox. It’s our art. Concealment. Deception.

  After tea Jessica takes me down the track behind the house and shows me the creek. Once we’re out of the house she cheers up. The weight goes off her and she lights a cigarette. At t
he creek she squats down by the edge of the stream and stares at the water running over the stones.

  ‘This is it,’ she says with feeling, reaching her hand out and letting the water run through her fingers. We’re under the canopy of the sweeping branches of the casuarinas. The air’s cool and fragrant with the water and the trees. We’re below the house and the garden. We’ve crossed a grassy flat with black wattle trees and rabbit holes and blackberries. Jessica takes her shoes off and rolls her jeans up and she steps into the shallow water. She gives a little gasp and grabs my arm to steady herself. But we avoid looking at each other directly. We avoid each other’s eyes. We make a point of that. It’s a signal that we’re not taking any diing for granted. That there’s nothing to be taken for granted. We’re letting each other know that we’re not asking for anything. So maybe we’re asking for everything. It’s not easy to tell. She wades out into the stream. Little brown fish dart around her ankles.