by JH Fletcher
‘Will there be painting classes?’
‘Most certainly. All young ladies should be taught how to paint. It is one of their most important accomplishments.’
Seven-year-old Marie thought that in that case things might not be so bad, but a glance at her sister’s rebellious face warned her to keep her mouth shut.
2
Three months after the wedding, their mother came to see them. Or for something.
The children sat side by side in the garden, feeling her presence in the house behind them, its shadow threatening their lives. They heard Martha and Eugénie talking. At first the voices were no more than murmurs, calm and understanding, but, little by little, they became shrill. Behind the closed doors, outbursts of rage flickered, like lightning.
Marie shivered, feeling the blasts of fury at her back. She looked at her older sister, seeking consolation or at least guidance. ‘Did you mean it?’
‘Mean what?’
‘When you said you’d run away?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’
‘You said you would.’
‘I said I might!’
‘You said would!’
They were French, but no-one would have known it, two Aussie kids squalling under an Aussie sky.
Yet neither had the heart for a real stoush.
‘Where would we go?’ Marie asked. And got no answer, which was answer enough.
They sat silently, eaten by trepidation, battered by the clash and clatter of voices. That went on, it seemed, for hours. At last the house door slammed back and Eugénie came down the steps towards them.
This was a mother they did not recognise, and not only because it was so long since they had seen her. Until now, despite her prolonged absences, she had remained the focus of their lives. Even though she lived in Sydney and they in the mountains, even though they saw her only one weekend in three or four or six, she was still their mother, the person to whom they were connected more closely than anyone else on earth.
No longer.
Now she was different: in manner, in clothes, even in the way she smelt. She had gone so far away from them that they knew instinctively that, even if they continued to see her every day for the rest of their lives, their true mother was gone and would not be coming back.
It was something that Eugénie apparently did not understand.
‘Come and walk with me,’ she said, holding out her hands to them.
They went, Aline reluctant and suspicious, Marie following her lead. Both were freighted with the truculent air of those who comply only because they choose to do so. They walked amid a blaze of autumn dahlias which, for all the attention Eugénie gave them, might have been as grey as ash. ‘Your Aunt Martha thinks I have been neglectful in not coming to see you before. I hope you do not think that?’
It was strange to be talking in French, after so long. Not exactly a foreign language, not yet, but one more difference on top of all the rest.
Neither child responded. Instead, they trailed their fingers through the tender flowerheads that lined the path.
‘Have you nothing to say to me?’ A tinkle of sound that they supposed might have been a laugh.
‘What do you want us to say?’ Aline addressed her question to her boots, resentfully scuffing the gravel.
‘I hope, that you are glad to see me,’ Mrs Pearman said reproachfully.
They reached a stretch of open lawn from which they could see the tiered slopes of the ranges, the distant congregations of gum trees talking together in the light wind.
Marie, constricted by words that seemed to conceal meanings she did not understand, longed to be free, to run with outstretched arms. But Eugénie held her hand tight, while the fanged questions snapped their jaws about her as she walked, so decorously, upon the yielding turf.
‘You are happy here?’
‘You like your school?’
‘Is Martha your friend?’
‘Is Victor your friend?’
The safe answer, in every case, seemed to be yes.
Until Aline decided that enough was enough. ‘Are we going to have to go away with you?’
And Eugénie gathered them together, crouching down to their level to look at them both, and said, ‘How would you like to go on living here?’
So they were saved.
Aline said, ‘She’d made up her mind all along. She doesn’t want us, any more.’
Marie preferred to believe that their mother had permitted them to stay because that was what they wanted.
‘She asked all those questions …’
Aline was angry, although she, too, had wanted to stay in what had become home. ‘Just talk,’ she said.
When they returned to the house, Martha seemed to think the same, although she expressed herself differently. ‘Your mother has to do what her husband wants.’
It seemed that Mr Pearman did not want another man’s children climbing over his new furniture.
‘Good,’ Aline said, daggers in her eyes. ‘I am glad.’
Their mother had been away so long; this parting should surely have made no difference. Yet it did; a gap remained, always, even after its cause had ceased to bite.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ Martha said after Eugénie had left them to go back to the city. ‘Your mother has given me some money for you.’
Now Eugénie’s financial circumstances had changed, Martha had felt it right that the new Mrs Pearman should contribute to her own children’s upbringing. This had been the cause of the argument that the children had overheard, or one of them. Eugénie had informed Martha that Henry was not prepared to pay what Martha thought reasonable, but that she had persuaded him to make a small concession: a lump sum in return for invisibility.
In one way, Martha was delighted with the offer; she had dreaded the thought of losing her two girls. Yet felt it was not right that it should be so. Eugénie, she feared, had grown selfish.
‘You are abandoning them,’ Martha accused her.
Eugénie seemed to think that the children had become Martha’s responsibility simply because she had cared for them, and financed them, for so long.
‘Think what you like,’ she said.
Ferocious words, and thoughts.
‘Although I am sure your mother will still come and see you whenever she can,’ Martha told the children, after Eugénie had left.
In the meantime, there was the question of what to do with the money.
‘I would like a doll,’ Aline said.
Marie did not know what she wanted; she was not much into dolls.
‘There will be a doll for both of you,’ Martha said. ‘But a lot more than that.’
The children looked at her, and waited.
‘Art lessons,’ Martha said, and clapped her hands. ‘With a real artist.’
Well, in reality it was a lady who painted watercolours that her friends thought nice. But the two girls were ecstatic.
‘Painting is my best thing,’ Marie said.
She loved the colours: crimson lake, mallabar, vermilion, cobalt blue. She loved everything about it: the smell of the paper, the feeling of the brush when she held it, the way the paint spread, obedient to her wishes.
She liked to paint flowers, gaudily, in primary colours: reds and blues and greens marching like soldiers across the white paper.
‘Very nice, dear.’ Miss Dorkin laughed indulgently. ‘I will show you how to mix your colours. How to make them, shall we say, a little less brash?’
In most things Marie could be led, because she did not mind one way or the other. About painting, however, she had her own ideas and was stubborn.
‘I like bright colours.’
‘Of course, dear. But we want our pictures to be ladylike, don’t we?’
Perhaps they did; Marie did not know what a ladylike painting was. She knew she preferred the savage life of undiluted colour but was frightened that, if she did not obey, she might lose the lessons altogether. So was a good gi
rl, and painted as she liked, after Miss Dorkin was gone.
Aline was as different in her painting as in her personality. Her pictures were neat and tidy and formal, with brushwork so fine that the individual strokes were almost invisible. Her draughtsmanship was remarkable for one of her age; she could draw a house so that you almost expected the door to open when you looked at it.
Marie mashed the paint across the page, threw it and splattered it. Her pictures looked like nothing you had seen in your life, but were alive, vibrant. Even the warlike columns of flowers carried the scent of the paddocks within their jewel-like brilliance.
Martha could not get over them, could examine them for hours without understanding how a young child could achieve such effects.
It was nonsense to think of technique, in one so young. She showed the brilliant paintings to Miss Dorkin, who gave a teeny shudder, thinking them vulgar.
‘She is very young, of course,’ she conceded. ‘But an instinct for taste is, I think, inborn.’ She shook her head dubiously. ‘In Marie’s case …’ She was not sure about Marie.
But Martha was. ‘Her pictures are so alive…’
Miss Dorkin smiled, the very epitome of taste. ‘I think one should ask: are they the sort of work that we should be encouraging?’
An excess of life might not be a good thing. And was most certainly unladylike. Life might get out of control, and then where would the world be? She was more comfortable with Aline, whose instincts were to be just so. Although in her case, too, she was concerned that the child might have an unhealthy amount of talent.
After eighteen months she confided her doubts to Martha Shawcross. ‘They are both very good, of course. Very good, indeed. But I wonder whether their work is altogether suitable?’
‘You are saying they are too talented?’ Martha asked, dagger-eyed, protective of her children in this as all things.
‘Perhaps.’ But she would not commit herself; it was unrefined to be sure and Miss Dorkin was a very refined lady, as her own watercolours made plain. All the same, she knew when to make a stand. ‘I think, perhaps, I have helped them all I can.’
The children might have been devastated, but were not.
‘She was no good, anyway,’ Aline said, although not to Martha, who had been kind enough to arrange the lessons for them; Aline, far more than her sister, was delicate of others’ feelings. Marie, less considerate, threw her opinions, like her paints, splatter-slap across the page.
‘She smelt,’ she informed Martha after Miss Dorkin had gone.
‘Smelt?’
‘Smelt funny.’
It was true; now Martha thought about it, there had been a distinct flavour of camphor. Perhaps of age, too, of flesh unused and unusable, although it was unkind even to think such things.
Aline said, ‘Perhaps she couldn’t help it.’
She was still the older sister and, from time to time, inclined to remind Marie of it, but the difference in age mattered less now. They were ten and seven when their mother remarried. By the time Miss Dorkin left, they were twelve and nine and closer than they had ever been although, within a year, the gap had opened once again.
‘What’s happening to you?’ Marie asked, intrigued. ‘Why are you different?’
Aline took refuge in loftiness. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I might.’
But it was not a subject Aline wished to discuss.
Marie admired her sister’s changing contours. ‘Let me see.’
‘No!’
For a time, Aline took to walking hunch-shouldered.
‘I wish I had them.’
‘You will, one day. When you grow up.’
‘I want them now.’
But for the moment, Marie had to accept her exclusion from the adult world, at least in the matter of breasts.
Eugénie dropped in from time to time, like a rich lady visiting the poor; she, too, had learned to condescend. She brought gifts — scarves, dolls, a china cat — and asked how they were doing. She made a fuss of them, smiling above the splendour of her society gown. Once, on the way to a friend’s establishment, she brought her husband with Horace Ingersoll, a business acquaintance with whom he hoped to deal.
Henry was fatter than he had been, his grey face burdened with the weight and responsibilities of wealth. In the vastness of mountains and trees he did not know what to do with himself, although he would not admit it. While the women talked, he shut out the landscape by discussing business with Horace Ingersoll and pacing about the lawn, beyond the range of children.
Henry had hoped for a son of his own, to establish the dynasty for which he deceived himself he worked. So far he had had no luck, but had not given up hope and visited his wife’s room regularly, to prove it. Meanwhile, his mother, stubborn as teak, watched and silently condemned, or so his conscience told him, the folly of marrying outside one’s circle.
Martha prevailed upon Eugénie to stay for lunch. ‘Your children see you so seldom …’
So Eugénie eased her conscience by complying. Henry objected, pointing out the miles they still had to go, but his opinions were less important than they had been.
It was not a success. The children were silent, which pleased Henry, but not their mother. Eugénie herself talked too much, while Henry was as cosy as a roo in a four-poster bed. Only Horace Ingersoll seemed at home, a man who knew how to use his charm and did so now, particularly in conversation with Martha Shawcross, to whom he spoke as easily as though she had not been scarred at all.
When they left, Martha was flustered, touching her hair here, and here, and watching from the doorway as her visitors drove away.
A week later Horace was back. After that he called regularly while the girls watched, fearing that something bad might be about to engulf them.
Six months later Horace Ingersoll was still a regular visitor.
Aline had been watching, and prophesying, throughout. ‘She’s going to marry him.’
‘What will happen to us?’
‘She will turn us out, just like Mama did.’
Martha did the one, but not the other.
‘Mr Ingersoll and I are to be married,’ she told them. Her face was flushed, her mouth nervous, but her eyes were happy.
‘What is going to happen to us?’ Marie repeated her question, nervously.
‘To you? Nothing.’
‘Aren’t you going to turn us out?’
‘Of course not.’ She gathered them both in her arms. Aline thought she was too old for such behaviour and tried to resist, but Martha would have none of it. ‘No-one is going to turn you out. How could you have thought it? This is your home.’
‘Will Mr Ingersoll be here, too?’
‘Naturally. This will be his home, too.’
‘And we shall stay?’
‘Of course. Mr Ingersoll is very kind, and we have spoken of you both. Nothing will change.’
Once again, Martha was right — and wrong.
Mr Ingersoll had no intention of living in a cottage. Instead, he had a stone palace constructed a mile down the road, to which they moved.
The rooms and outlook were very fine, the grounds landscaped. But …
‘Sometimes I miss the old place,’ Martha confided to her girls.
So did they, but Horace had consulted none of them. Nevertheless, he was kind, as Martha had promised, within the limits of what he considered proper for a man of his standing. Of course, certain things could not remain as they were. The house was one; then there was the question of education.
The local school was clearly inadequate; Aline and Marie were sent away to a college for young ladies in another part of the Blue Mountains. To console them, perhaps, Horace arranged to take them all away during the winter holidays, to the snow-covered mountains of the south. Both of them brought back memories: skies as blue as indigo above the snow, sunshine reflecting in white and silver fire from the fields of ice, the intensity and glory of the alpine light.
&nb
sp; At college they were taught many things, but little stuck; the art teacher thought they were particularly inept. One thing they did learn, however: how to survive in this new life to which they had been forcibly introduced. Only in later years did they understand how useful that knowledge was.
Aline, being older, finished college three years before her sister. On her eighteenth birthday, Marie returned home to wonderful news.
3
A‘tlas Pentecost?’
Unlike Miss Dorkin, Atlas Pentecost was an artist: a real one, quite famous. Aline told Marie that he had come to live not five miles from Woonga, in a house like a wizard’s fortress on top of a cliff of green and copper rock that blazed like wonder in the sunlight.
‘They have arranged for us to have lessons with him,’ Aline announced, while Marie clasped her hands, breathless with wonder. ‘Real lessons, this time.’
It had not been easy. Horace entertained serious doubts about art and those who wasted their time with it. He did not pretend to understand it; no man worth tuppence did. It might be an acceptable amusement for ladies, as Martha kept telling him, but he was determined that there would be no bohemian nonsense in his family. Yet Martha had kept on and on, and had prevailed.
He warned the girls what was expected of them. They lowered their eyes and deferred, most dutifully — and in their hearts danced a ninety-mile-an-hour jig. An artist! A real artist! Now, at last, the doors of the future creaked open for them both.
But Horace’s concerns remained. To ease his mind, he went with the girls to give this Pentecost the once-over.
The name, for starters. What kind of man was called Atlas Pentecost?
A fleshy man, with a face that proclaimed appetite, Horace feared, for more than food. A mane of silver hair, eyes a disturbing violet with a needle power to slide effortlessly beneath the skin and be amused by what they saw. A robust man who, nevertheless, spoke as mildly as a curate.
‘Never fear, Mr Ingersoll, I shall take good care of them.’
Horace was not to be won by words alone. ‘Do you have an example of your work?’
‘Of course.’
