The Sitters

by Alex Miller

  A while later, two or three years later, I got the news of her death. She had two boys. One of them, the oldest, wrote to me. Mum often spoke about you to us. I’m only sorry we never had the chance to meet you. You must have been great mates together during the war. She was ill for three years off and on. She had two operations. It was breast cancer. And so on. I put the letter aside and went on with my work. I was working on an oil study for the Tan Family. I was working up to the big one. I was working from notes and information spread all over the studio. I was well into it.

  I put the letter from my sister’s son to one side on my painting trolley and went on applying paint to the canvas. It was as if my sister had crept up quietly while I was working and had closed a door, trying not to disturb me, trying not to interrupt my work with her bit of news, trying not to draw attention to herself, to her death, not wanting to waste my time. The catch on the closing door just making that last click that gives the game away. I could see her creeping away cursing herself for her carelessness in distracting me from my important work.

  By lunchtime I realised I hadn’t been thinking about the Tan Family but had been laying the paint on all morning as if someone else was doing it for me. I’d been talking to my sister and watching someone else do the painting. The Tan Family surprised me. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I knew I’d done something good. But I hadn’t been aware of painting it. I’d been acknowledging my sister in the gallery in Mayfair. We were laughing and embracing and saying what a great thing it was and who would have thought when we were kids in the flats that we’d be doing this one day. And there was her husband and her two boys — whom I’d never had the grace or the generosity to meet in real life — and I was taking them all to dinner at the Savoy. I could still feel her little body hitting that wall. Trembling afterwards. Taking the blame for something I’d done, I’ll bet.

  I set up my easel and the rest of my gear in the open passage outside her bedroom door and that’s where I began to paint my first study. She called to me from inside the room, half-joking, in the half-light, the room resisting the light in that way that was to interest me. ‘How do you want me?’ she called.

  ‘On the bed,’ I said, half-joking.

  ‘Like this?’ she suggested. And suddenly we were children playing a game together. I looked in to see what she was doing. She was sitting on the side of the bed in half-profile, the light dancing along the edges of her. The short sleeve of her blouse and her arm again, pale and luminous and pushing itself towards me, turned at the shoulder. She was exaggerating herself. Posing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You look great. You look really great.’ She did. She looked like the kind of woman every woman hopes to become. Herself.

  But she wasn’t in it. That first study was of her absence. That’s what it turned out to be. The room through the door seen from the passage. Vertical, enclosed, dark. The door frame an additional frame within the simple composition. Cramping the perspective. Forcing the viewer to look more searchingly, more inwardly, into the narrow vertical enclosure. The bed a short section of horizontality, stopped, blocked at either end, pushed up and curtailed tightly. I kept her right out of it.

  I didn’t mean to.

  I was painting something else. But you never know what you’re doing till you’ve done it. Till you’ve challenged the first offer.

  ‘You paint the figure in afterwards?’ she asked, coming round to see what I’d done, pleased to be surprised by this novel idea. Ready for anything.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’

  I was packing up. I went on packing up. She just stood there looking at it. She didn’t say a word. The lack of a figure where she’d been prepared for the first image of herself in oil, sitting there posed on the bed all morning. ‘It’s not the portrait,’ I said, falling into the trap of explaining myself. ‘I can’t do you yet. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing. You seem to think I’m planning things. I’m not. I’m just trying things out. I’m putting things down so I can erase them. I’m still at that stage.’

  I sounded impatient. I was impatient. I was unsure of myself, so I didn’t tell her I was pleased with the picture. I was accustomed to painting the portraits of strangers. This was different. ‘I wouldn’t have a bloody clue, Jessica,’ I said. ‘It may not work. I’m not unhappy with this. It looks okay to me.’ Which I suppose she hears as take it or leave it.

  We stood there in the passage outside her old bedroom looking at the picture. I could hear her mother in the kitchen, poking and scraping in the hearth. ‘I’ve done something. It’s a start. That’s all.’

  Outside she smoked a cigarette and watched me while I packed up. Why did you let me sit there all day thinking you were doing my portrait? You could have said. You could have said something. 1 feel such an idiot. That’s what she was thinking. I could feel her thinking it. Her silence was a test of character which she was imposing on herself. I’d rather she’d have come straight out with it.

  ‘I’m doing your portrait, Jessica. Okay?’ I said.

  ‘It’s how I work.’ My back was aching. I needed to sit down and lean against something hard. In the studio I sit on the floor when it gets too much and press my back into the solander. I press my back hard into the brass drawer handles of the solander and that eases the pain.

  ‘There’s something in you being there when I painted it,’ I said. ‘I can’t explain and I’m not going to try,’ I said, trying to explain. ‘Can I have a drink? Did we bring some wine this time? Where did we put the bag with the wine in it?’

  I carried my stuff out to the car and put it in the boot. I laid the wet painting on top. She was in it. For me she was in it. I was in pain. I was angry. I was disappointed. We paint landscapes from our sense of loss and alienation from the real landscape. We paint portraits from our alienation from people. It’s nostalgia for company we don’t have and can’t have. Absence and loss. People we’ve lost. We’re haunted by our memories of them, of ourselves with them. We’re always dealing with these things. How to deal with them, that’s always the problem. How to visualise them in their absence. We never know what we’re doing. Anything heavy-handed defeats it. I know I’ve missed it if I do what I’ve been expecting to do. I don’t hesitate to destroy that stuff. I distrust it. I’d rather do nothing than understand what I’m doing while I’m doing it.

  She was trying to get through it without being difficult. But I hated feeling all that puzzlement and anger from her at this stage. I wanted her to say something. I wanted us to get our anger out and have a good row. But she held on. Not a word. We were both tired.

  I said to her, ‘You’re like your mother you know.’ I meant holding on and being silent. But she just thought I was being conventional. I let it go. My back was hurting. I had to sit down.

  She looked into the boot of the car at the picture.

  I was down on the grass, sitting with my back pushed hard against the rear wheel. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the cold hub pressing into the muscles of my back, the pain gradually losing its urgency, spreading out and thinning down to a sensation that was almost pleasant, a background wash.

  ‘If you want to give it away,’ I said, ‘I don’t mind. We can stop now and there’s no harm done.’

  When there was no reply I opened my eyes. She was half-way up the hill. She was carrying a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses. I watched her. This was her country. She was walking up the hill towards the walnut tree. The sun on her back. I hadn’t known I was going to leave her out of the picture till I’d finished it. All along I intended to put her in. But I didn’t know how to start painting her. I couldn’t find a way of beginning. Every time I made a mark it killed what I was doing with the rest of the picture. So I kept putting the problem off. Then in the end I began to like the fact of her absence in the picture. Looking at her sitting there on her bed I could feel her absence growing in the painting. Then I realised that’s what I was painting. Her absence. That�
�s what this picture was about. It wasn’t just a bedroom, it was the absence of Jessica Keal in her own childhood bedroom. It didn’t matter if no one else could see that. I could see it.

  I got up and opened the boot and looked at the picture again. There was the sense of someone there you can’t see, like the window you can’t see, where the light’s coming from, or being resisted. But it’s there. No one doubts that. Like Michael’s facial features are there and the expression in his gaze, even though he’s got his back to you. They haven’t been dealt with literally but they’re there all the same. It’s a way of putting it to have the subject of the portrait with their back to the viewer. Having them absent is just one step further along that track. What would the judges of the Archibald think of this? Portrait without figure. Jessica Keal withheld. They’d think I was having a lend of them. They’d think I was trying to insult them. I would be. They’re touchy about their dignity. For good reason. So they’re always on the look-out for smart-arse tactics from the painters. But this is a private thing for me. I know it’s not the final job. It’s a private study. A preparation. I never thought it would be the end. It never occurred to me to think I was working on the final portrait. How many times did Velasquez paint the portrait of Pope Innocent X? Six? Seven? A dozen times? Did he tell anyone how many goes he had at it? Which one are we talking about when we say Velasquez’s portrait of Innocent X? They’re all over the place. In Rome. In the Prado. Everywhere. Did he paint one with no one on that throne? We’d still know it was Innocent X. The absence of Innocent X! We’d know that throne anywhere. We think we know everything but it’s hindsight. We know exactly what happened, but it’s all in reverse order. We think we can reach the truth of events by unravelling them backwards. But the first event was done in the absence of the events that were to follow it. It was done in the absence of foresight. Putting something down in order to erase it. It’s dealing with absence. It’s an isolated event. The blankness at the heart of the work of art. That’s what we lose with our obsession with cause and effect. With the logical order of beginning, middle and end. The absence and the isolation of things. We forget that. The silence that surrounds everything we do while we’re doing it. Always. The silence we work in. At the centre. Working with the absence. Our anxiety. Trying to bring something into being there. Hoping to coax it out. Holding our breath. Waiting for that first httle sign of presence. That offer. The first shuffling movement in the dark. Through the screen. What’s in there? What are we looking at? And then the happy accident, the distraction of our thoughts, the way the paint begins to go on while we’re thinking of something else, and suddenly it’s happening. It’s not our intention. But here it comes. We’re alone. We’re in the great isolation. Alone with the great absence. It’s always the same. With the mute nothing. Just that faint shuffling in our ears. The rushing of our blood. Then it’s greeting us. And we’ve never seen it before. It’s the same old thing and we’ve never seen it before. It’s new. It’s completely new and unexpected and we know it and we’ve always known it. It’s the trace of ourselves. Look at that! Nodiing makes you feel better. It’s a drug. It goes through you like a dose of amphetamines and suddenly you’re light-headed and lighthearted. You’re happy. Just for a little while you’ve surprised yourself and you’re tired but happy.

  She was sitting up there in the shade under the walnut tree. I went up the hill after her. I was going to explain to her why she was absent in my picture. I walked up the hill with the explanation ready in my mind. My explanation was going to link us up. I wanted her to see the process the way I saw it. But when I got to the tree I didn’t say anything about it. I sat on the ground beside the mound of her grandmother’s grave and she handed me a glass of wine and started telling me about the walnut tree and how it had given them this wonderful crop of nuts every year.

  ‘Our cash crop,’ she says, looking up into the branches of the tree. ‘It never failed. And it’s still going. And when it dies the timber will be worth a little fortune.’

  We sit there in the shade of the big tree, and when she’s finished telling me about it we look down the hill at her mother hoeing in the garden. And we drink the wine. The Keal place laid out below us. Her place. This little clearing here by the creek flat. A chance survival. Rustic. Enchanting. Picturesque. All that. And I know I’ve got something. I’m not thinking about the Keal place, I’m working along at the painting in my mind. I’m doing the project of her portait and it hardly needs her. I can’t do without her, but she’s not the main thing. I’m the main thing. Recovering myself. I can never explain this link to her. I’m scared she’s going to tell me she’s pulling out of it. Maybe she heard my offer after all. She’ll say she’s run out of time. She won’t say she’s run out of patience. She’ll say it’s the pressure of work. We drink the wine and sit there looking down the hill at her mother’s place and I wait for her to say something. I can feel it coming.

  ‘When I left for England,’ she says, ‘the night before I left. We came up here, me and my gran, and she gave me a little bag of nuts from this tree and asked me if I’d take them to our relatives in Devon. That’s where this tree came from. My great grandmother brought it out with her. It was a seedling. She had it growing in a potato on the voyage out. So I promised Gran I’d take the nuts back but I never did. They’re still in a drawer somewhere at home. In my desk, I think. I haven’t seen them for years. But I’ve never chucked them out.’

  She says this then she’s silent.

  ‘I meant to take them back. I just never did. I’ve often been in Devon. It used to make me feel guilty thinking of those nuts in the drawer at home.’ ‘You could still do it,’ I say. ‘You could still take them back.’

  ‘It’s too late. I always resisted making the connection. Between us and them. Here and England. I never made the connection. I still haven’t. Mum expects me to stay and look after the garden when she’s gone. She thinks that’s why I’ve come home.’ She’s silent for a bit then she turns to me. ‘Everyone’s got something like that in their family.’ She watches me for a bit. ‘It’s our refusal to connect things up, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can hardly remember anything about my childhood.’ I look at her. ‘D’you want to go for a swim?’ She doesn’t reply. I’ve said this very quickly. Without thinking. Getting away from the subject of my family. I think she’s not going to reply.

  Then she says, ‘I’ll show you the swimming hole where Gran and I used to have our bath.’ We finish the wine and she props the bottle in the fork of the tree. There’s a shimmering in the light now with the wine and the air. There are the grave mounds of her grandmother and her great-grandmother. The Keal women. It’s all coming to an end here. All that. We walk down the hill together, the last of the sun in our eyes dazzling us, and there’s the click and scrape of her mother’s hoe. Our shoulders bump a couple of times, our arms touching, her cool bare arm against mine. The wine has made me a bit breathless. We’re unsteady. I say, ‘Christ, listen to those bloody insects,’ and she laughs and we let our arms touch again. We’re tense and self-conscious and alert and clumsy with each other now.

  She’s gone. Back to England. Just for the break, she said. But I had the feeling even then she wouldn’t be coming back. I promised her I’d go down to the valley and check on her mother. I was surrounded by Jessica’s images. My studio was covered in them. Drawings, etchings, linocuts, watercolours, oil studies, gouaches, those little black and white snapshots she gave me. A picture of her grandmother and herself standing by the gate to the garden ready to catch the school bus to Braidwood, the post-and-rail fence upright and straight. She’s a schoolgirl. She’s wearing a pleated tunic over a white blouse with short sleeves and she’s not exactly smiling. There’s something wistful and beautiful about her in this one. She’s got her hair in plaits. Vulnerability, that’s what it is, to time. The quick leap of time. It gives me a tight feeling in my stomach to look into this little picture of her. You can already see the build-up of her dec
ision to leave her mother’s garden and Lower Araluen. Her expectation of life. The uncertain outline of plans gathering in her expression. Her teachers telling her she’s got a bright future. Otherwise she’s the fourth Keal woman and is stuck in the valley forever. I can just make out the bed on the verandah behind them. I know her father’s lying on the bed on the verandah outside the kitchen. There’s just this one glimpse of her father. A blurry pale splodge. It’s the only image she gave me of him. He’s lying on this canvas bed and is facing up the hill towards the road and the walnut tree, as if that’s where he’s hoping to go when he recovers, not when he dies. Only he’s not going to recover. His upper body is propped nearly to the vertical by a pile of pillows and rolled blankets. He looks as if he’s about to launch himself in a last desperate leap. His face is all hollows and shadows. His cheeks are sucked in, his eyes are sunk far back in his head, there are dark cups at his temples, and a thin last wispiness of hair is on the point of becoming detached from his scalp. He’s grey and unshaven and he’s struggling to breathe. I’m remembering all this from what she’s told me. Though it’s surprising how much of this detail you can actually see in the photograph when you know what you’re looking for. Beside him on the sill of the window there’s a radio. A midweek race meeting is being called. Jessica was twelve when he died. He was in the bed on the verandah for years. She can’t remember him any other way. He was an English seaman who jumped ship in Newcastle and made his way to the valley with the idea of working on the gold dredges. ‘We lost contact with all our relatives,’ she tells me. ‘Mum and I are the last. There were no boys. Or there was one. No one knows where he got to. The men were temporary at the Keal place.’ She says this with a laugh. ‘In the beginning the men went after the gold, then they worked for the dredging companies, then they got jobs on the shire. They never did anything in the garden. Eventually they always left. Or maybe Gran kicked them out. She was never married to my mother’s father. They weren’t missed. My father was the only one who stayed. He had to take to his bed to do it. That’s all I remember about him, the sound of the races on the radio or the cricket and him wheezing and struggling and staring at me as I go past.’