Night Street (4 page)

‘Come here for a minute.'

She left her hat, coat and sketchbook on a chair and slowly approached Louise's bed.

‘Sit down.'

She almost missed their old life at home, where at least Louise had had a variety of people to focus on. She hesitated, then sat.

‘Don't go out in the cold at this godforsaken time.' Louise grinned devilishly. ‘I've got a wild idea. Go back to bed. We'll have a sleep-in for once and play truant today. I'm thoroughly sick and tired of school. We'll have biscuits and tea for breakfast in our pyjamas. I've got a packet of shortbread creams stashed away. It'll be fun! We could even invite Thomas if you want. Or would it be better with just us girls? Then we'll go into town. I need a new dress. So do you, badly. We'll go to Myers. It'll be great.'

‘I don't like missing classes.'

‘And that's why you should. Come on. Just for this once. Don't be so boring.'

Louise was holding her arm, and Clarice felt her sister's energy, her will. Her warm morning breath, sweet and sour.

‘I'm going out to draw.'

‘You're so
studious
. You make me feel old.'

‘We are old, for students.' No one ever guessed they were twenty-seven and twenty-three. They were both young-faced.

‘Speak for yourself.' Louise leaned forward, naughty eyes flashing. ‘What are you wearing?'

‘What? A jumper.'

‘
My
jumper.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.' But it was, in fact, a little large on her, a little wrong, somehow. Louise's camel-coloured jumper. ‘Oh, for heaven's sake. I obviously couldn't see what I was doing, getting dressed in the dark so the light wouldn't wake you.' Louise was having a wonderful time. ‘Anyway, you must have left it on my side of the dresser. You're not going to be such a hypocrite'—maddeningly, Clarice had now started to laugh at her own hauteur—‘as to refuse me the use of your clothes?' Louise ‘borrowed' Clarice's clothes very often, feigning ignorance, to get under her skin. Clarice sputtered, the sort of hysterical laughter that exhausts itself only to start again. Louise kept triggering it with her high-pitched giggles that always set other people off, making trivial situations irresistibly comical. Clarice often thought Louise's states of extreme amusement forced, but just then, laughing, she thought, I'm sometimes too stiff with her. She noticed she was tired, a slight dizziness and irritation at the corners of her eyes. And Louise looked tired too, her merry eyes puffy and the skin of her cheek bearing the diagonal imprint of a rumpled pillow; Clarice had an uncharacteristic sensation of older-sisterly concern.

‘Go back to sleep. You need more rest.'

‘I do. I really need my ten hours.' This was not laziness, Louise claimed, but biological necessity. Maybe. People were so different from one another. Still, Louise had a way of protesting, insisting on her own special rights.

‘I know you do, dear. Lie down.'

Louise lay docilely back, enjoying being mothered. If Clarice did not go quickly—she felt, without being able to explain why—she would not escape.

It was still well before sunrise when she stationed herself on St Kilda Beach and began to sketch, blind. It was crucial to her training, this struggle to create a likeness without being able to discern in the conventional way either her subject or the marks she was making on paper. Approval and rejection suspended, the movements of the charcoal in her hand were cushioned by darkness, by the sound of the waves. Art, maybe, was this honing of instinct, a process so intimate as to be almost invisible. Nothing was more real.

She started to make out what she was drawing, or thought she could. The pools of seawater strewn on the sand by the tide now held a white marmoreal light. The clouds were in infinite soft banks, the moment in loose parentheses. An insomniac dog walker passed her, but respectfully they did not disturb one another. When she had finished, she squatted to examine a huge yellow starfish, dead and light. With the toe of her shoe, she teased the unclouded perfection of a bluebottle till it trembled violently. Near the shore, the water was crystalline, the air warming and brightening; she turned and saw the first lemon hint of sun at the horizon.

She recognised Thomas's long form, hatless, coatless. He was at the end of the beach. He had followed her.

He had trespassed. She did not want a witness.

He raised his hand in an ill-defined wave and she tried to smile, but it would have been impossible for him to be sure of her expression at that distance. He had to be cold, dressed so incompletely. He was threatening the self-absorption that she needed; that time must remain pristine. Turning back to the water, she thought, dimly: understand what is happening here.

No verbal offer was made by Thomas, but his following her that morning constituted, at least in retrospect, the most eloquent proposal she ever received; and her turning away an unambiguous answer.

For years after, from time to time, Clarice saw the homely tableau they would have made: him reading in an armchair, her reclining on the chaise longue as she gazed out the window, through the palm trees, to the water. She liked to think she would have known how to accept his goodness and repay it. They promised to write, of course, when she left Elenara to live at Beaumaris with her parents, but that was just to be polite.

5

It was an excellent, indispensable thing, the mobile easel, a veritable studio on wheels, practical and liberating for those who worked
en plein air
. She was one of the first of Meldrum's students to adopt it; many of them followed her example, seeing the convenience and freedom it afforded.

Father would not allow her a studio in the house, but a painting trolley he could hardly say no to. Especially as she went ahead and constructed one herself. As it turned out, the trolley was better than a conventional studio, because it had you continually out in the elements. She had never fathomed nor respected the notion of ‘poor' weather. Poor? Where most people saw something dismal, Clarice revelled in the quiet sumptuosity, or moody turbulence of greys. In general, grey was so little appreciated—but what of the curiously luminescent bark of gum trees, the ocean turned to mercury by the moon, the simple reflective wonder of a wet road? The lowered light of overcast skies, rain or fog was good for painting, making it easier to distinguish tonal differences. Full bright sun did not show you their delicate divergences, but rendered everything stark and hard-edged, so you were not quite sure in what order you were receiving nature's impressions.

Aside from going proudly into bad weather, the trolley was a superior studio, because—obviously, but not trivially—it was not stationary. It worked thus. The body of the cart held your materials (boards, brushes, paints and so on), while extending vertically up from this was the mast of the easel. The handle was comfortable to use, both for drawing the trolley along when you were on the move, and then for shifting the easel back and forth once, a spot decided on, you were in the thick of work. A lot of going back and forth between the observation point and the subject was another of Meldrum's teachings that she liked and made her own. The trolley very nicely enabled you to bring the board right up alongside the subject, so they could be compared from the observation point. An active style of work that to a non-initiate must seem a puzzling little dance.

She savoured it, the dynamism, and all things considered, her trolley served her better than a studio, spoiling her with air and space.

The house in Beaumaris was bought after Father's retirement—prompted by his delicate nerves—from the Colonial Bank. Louise married after a brief courtship and gave birth to a baby boy. Overjoyed to see her younger daughter so finely established, Mum grew visibly worried when Clarice, unmarried and at home, passed the age of thirty. She never came at the subject directly, but often enthused over the beauty of Louise's little Ron and the ample satisfactions of motherhood. She imagined, she said, that Clarice must be looking forward to having her own family, and once asked about the existence of a male friend. Never having learned to confide in her mother, Clarice fairly effortlessly avoided any invitation to do so.

Louise and Mum did confide in one another, however, and between them they cooked up the scheme of bringing together Clarice and Stanley, a close friend of Louise's Ted. Clarice had met Stanley at Louise's engagement party and at the wedding, and Louise had reported dryly that he thought Clarice a beauty. Clarice had nothing against him. He seemed affable, but somehow her mind slid right over him; she had trouble remembering what he looked like.

Then he came to the house with Louise and Ted, the three of them dropping by, artificially casual, just after Clarice and her parents had finished a stodgy Sunday lunch.

Finding herself alone with Stanley in the dining room and feeling obliged to say something, Clarice inquired after his work. He was a furniture maker. This aroused her interest, because she had respect for manual work and, thinking of building herself a painting cart, she wanted advice. She explained how the cart had to function and, after some puzzlement on his side, a rather intense conversation ensued. By the end of it, Clarice was holding a sheet of paper on which Stanley had drawn a diagram of her cart in its stages of assemblage and written her a list of instructions. She had thanked him warmly. Excited by the idea of her cart, she had not stopped to consider that the enthusiasm she was seeing in Stanley, his livening face and pell-mell sentences, might have been the result of something other than professional interest.

‘I could make it for you,' he said. ‘Otherwise. I'd be happy to. It'd be no bother. None at all.'

His cheeks were flushed and there was a patina of triumph in his eyes. She had encouraged him; he felt they had arrived at a new intimacy.

This unfortunate impression was confirmed by Mum a few days later, over breakfast, after Father had gone out for his stroll. ‘Stanley wants to start a family, you know. He's tired of being a single man. He told Ted.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. The furniture business is doing very well and now he finally has time to think about his personal life.'

‘That's good, I suppose.' Clarice poured them each a second cup of tea that would have a bitter aftertaste.

‘I'm not at my best this morning.'

‘No? In what way?'

‘A bit tired. Exhausted, really. It must be my heart.' Mum suffered from a weak heart, as her mother had. It was believed that Clarice did too, although she herself considered this an improbable piece of family lore: she had never felt remotely weak of heart. Mum smiled gently. ‘It's affecting me more these days. Dr Broadbent told me it would, as I got older. Of course, I haven't been the same since your brother.'

It was unusual for Mum to talk of Paul, who had ended his own life ten years previously in the asylum at Kew. After the initial shock, his name had very rarely been spoken in the house—even less than during his two years in the ‘hospital'. There had always been a great silence around Paul, as if it could have been capable of cocooning the unexplainably odd kernel of him. Since he had passed on, Mum mentioned her heart more often, this was true, and perhaps did seem more fragile.

‘You should take it easy today, then. Rest yourself.'

‘He's a nice young man, Stanley. We've invited him over this weekend. For afternoon tea.'

Clarice was looking through the window at the lovely blue-purple mess of wisteria draping the shed at the end of the garden, which housed her paintings.

‘And so you and he can have a bit of a chat,' Mum continued. ‘Get to know one another. He admires you. It'll be quite informal. Louise and family will be there.'

Clarice scraped at the burnt corner of her toast.

‘Is that alright with you, love?'

She did not make a scene. ‘It sounds like everything has been arranged.' Despite her anger, which she struggled to repress, she perversely did not refuse the afternoon tea. Perhaps to spite the meddlers: because they would be pleased with themselves, and then disappointed. They would learn it was a mistake to try to direct her behaviour.

This was, of course, misguided, and the repercussions of her passive outrage were entirely awful. The suitor invited to tea. All of them gathered, stiff and ludicrous, in the drawing room, the air pervaded by the family's approval of him as a fine prospect. In their tension, she thought they resembled hopefuls assembled for an audition on which a lot is riding. She pitied them; pitied herself. They drank their tea with frequent small sips from the special china, a blue and white fantasy of pastoral England wrapping itself around the cups, spreading over the saucers, like an extravagant rash.

Stanley's eyes, boyish and self-congratulatory, not even a little melancholy or doubting, kept going to the photograph of Clarice at her coming out, positioned strategically on a cabinet by Mum. The photograph, some twelve years old now, showed her from behind, glancing sideways. A romantic profile genteelly embellished with a lace collar, pearl earring, softly piled hair. So feminine. Clarice attempted to ignore it.

She choked down weak tea on a chair beside her mother, feeling horribly exposed, regressed to childhood—which was appropriate, as that whole civilised disaster was the result of an invisible tantrum. She had had to dress up, sucking in her breath to get the top hooks into the eyes of her best skirt; when it moved with her steps, the black silk made a slight whispery music she liked, though the firm waistband alerted her to the nervous action of her ribs.

Stanley's expression showed a steady trust in his own wishes, in a convincing story he was telling himself. She esteemed this, to a certain extent. He saw them—he and Clarice—shoulder to shoulder aboard the great ship of matrimony. They were ageing good-naturedly as the mysterious shoreline of her deep self receded. There was a fatalist momentum to it and she would not succumb. She noted a new resistance in herself; living with her parents again was bringing out in her something disobedient and wiry.