He took her by the wrists. ‘How many murders, Boo, are ever proved?’
‘Exactly. Very seldom the ones we know anything about: that other case, for instance.’
‘Which other case?’ He could hear his voice progressively rising on the slack, evening air.
‘The prostitute’—Olivia’s voice had grown equally discordant—‘who fell—or threw herself off a cliff—I forgot where it happened. ’
He was too tired, or too old, to defend himself against false accusations. ‘But Hero died of cancer, didn’t she?’ He had found the strength to shout that.
It was surprising none of the elaborate figures in Mrs Mortimer’s illuminated living-room broke. Olivia Davenport recovered enough of her social conscience to hold her breath, to turn her head, to find out; but the guests were too involved in spinning ‘charm’ and reflecting ‘brilliance’ to notice or hear the regrettable maniacs on the beach.
‘Cancer,’ Olivia had become so blatant she too was now positively shouting the forbidden word, ‘is sometimes only the coup de grâce; and suicide, more often than not, is another kind of murder.’
In more objective circumstances he might have agreed with her. At the present moment, with the livid landscape pressing too close, and the limp air an extra skin, he could only hate Olivia.
She said, without great concern, it seemed: ‘Do you want to break my wrists?’
He immediately dropped what he had forgotten he was holding, but couldn’t divest himself of his accuser.
‘Of course I didn’t know the prostitute,’ she was saying, ‘only what I’ve been told. But you—
we
—might have saved Hero if we’d been a little less technically accomplished, slightly more experienced in living.’
His breath whistled. ‘I believe—or I think I believed at the back of my mind—that a condemned soul might help save another. ’ What had he ever believed, when he wasn’t painting? If he knew, he might have finished the inscription on the dunny wall. ‘Anyway, we tried—didn’t you know? dragging all the way to that island of infallible saints; but the saints had left, and God was a millionaire her spiritual pride wouldn’t allow her to make use of.’
‘Oh, husbands,’ Olivia mumbled, ‘no gods ever died so quickly or so easily.’
She was looking at her feet, and now he, too, noticed that the tide had come in and was washing over the tops of their shoes, stirring a scum of weed and straw, lifting an empty sardine tin and a used condom. They should have moved, but couldn’t: their feet mightn’t have belonged to them.
‘Always at my most desperate, or cynical,’ Olivia said, watching as the sea continued sucking round their ankles, ‘when I’ve most hated men for their lies and presumptuousness, and their attempts to reduce love to a grotesque sexual act, I’ve felt that somewhere there must be some
creature,
not quite man, not quite god, who will heal the wounds.’ She raised her head and drew down the corners of her formal mouth. ‘Perhaps that’s why we look to artists of any kind, why we lose our heads over them.’
‘Possibly!’ He took her lightly by the hand. ‘But better wait till they’re dead. What they have to tell or show improves with decontamination—if it doesn’t go up in hot air, or sink into a wall.’
When they reached the drier sand Olivia Davenport began moaning like an elderly woman. ‘How wet! I wonder whether I’ll catch a cold? At least they won’t notice in there: everyone will be too drunk by now.’ She prepared to return to the rout he no longer felt in any way committed to.
He walked along the beach looking for a way back to the road, his shoes squelching under him. There was still a smear of crimson staining the membrane of sky: it made his blood quicken. He was not yet destroyed, or not the artist in him: the flat monochrome of a world beneath the crimson sky-mark was his to recreate in its true form, visible, it seemed, only to himself.
On the third evening after his harrowing but necessary encounter with Olivia he was cleaning some brushes in the bedroom-studio overlooking Chubb’s Lane. A placid golden light and the practical rather humdrum nature of his job encouraged a belief in compatibility. He tried to imagine how it must feel to inspire respect, as opposed to adoration, mistrust, or hate: if you were a joiner, say, or a locksmith, or watchmaker, even a grocer. Not a grocer. Grocers, he remembered, could have an affinity with evil and with artists, which threatened the harmonies the bland evening was pouring out.
Along the lane there was not a discord: certainly the sounds of life, but broken bottles were temporarily debarred; or had the minutest splinters of grassy conflict already begun to fray the curtain of moted light?
‘If we’re gunner play, why don’t we play?’
‘Come on! We’re playing, aren’t we? What’s wrong?’
He could see the first speaker: her sweaty concern; the brown-ringed, brown eyes: big floppy cerise bow crowning the black frizz of hair against the opposite palings of the lane. Her companion of cooler voice remained invisible, closer to his side. At one point he caught sight of what must have been the cause of contention: a ball rising high above the hooded dunny.
The voice of the concerned girl pursued the soaring ball: ‘O-
ohhh!
’ in the long arc of a moan.
‘You wanted to play silly old ball, didn’t you? Well, I’m playing! See?’
‘We mighter lost it.’
‘I caught it, didn’t I?’
‘Wasn’t your turn.’
‘You’re not mature, Angela, wanting to play at silly ball. I wanter go home and study.’ The cool voice narrowed, and he recognized the code of priggishness.
‘Go on then! I’ll play by meself. Who wants to study? I’m gunner get married soon as I can leave school.’
‘My mother says I mustn’t think of getting married too soon.’
‘Mmmm. Who’s gunner pay for yer if you don’t?’
Three or four driblets of the tossed ball punctured the silence that had formed.
‘Not yer father!’ Angela tried out.
At once the ball rose so high the sun turned it into a burning replica.
‘What’re you up to, Kathy? I’m gunner lose me ball—me new ball!’
‘Your father’ll buy you another one.’
Voices hesitated after that: time paused; till the molten ball, cooled by its descent, began to re-form, thumped solid, rebounded, and thumped again in somebody’s back yard.
‘You’ve lost me ball!’ Angela moaned, her ripe-banana skin sweating worse than ever.
‘We can go in and get it can’t we?’
‘Not in there! I’m not gunner go in there. He’s funny.’
‘He’s only an old man.’
‘Some old men—I’m not goin’ in there!’ Angela’s cerise bow flackered past the metal-bound palings as she moved up Chubb’s Lane. ‘You only done it—lost me ball—because you wanter go home and study.’
‘You’re
obsessed,
Angela!’
‘I’m what?’
For an instant a glistening plait raised itself above his dilapidated fence, as though to strike.
He watched the ball settle by shallow bounces at the roots of the
Bignonia venusta
which crowned the dunny. Then he began to go downstairs, very quickly, youthfully, breathing deeply. He could move with ease because he was still wearing the dressing-gown he had put on that morning and which one thing and another throughout the day had prevented him improving on. At the same time he knew that improvement wasn’t necessary: his returning the ball had been prearranged; nor would he appear as the bogy which troubled the stupid Angela’s imagination: for Kathy he was only an old man. The fact that she could already perceive some, if not all of the truth, made her his spiritual child of infinite possibilities.
Reaching the yard he picked up the now motionless ball out of the dregs of yellow light. The felt was still warm. As he explored its form with his hand he was relieved to be able to tell himself the ball belonged to Angela, not to Kathy, and that anything he might say, probably of an uninteresting and mundane nature, would be directed at the owner of the ball. Any exchanges between himself and Kathy would be conveyed by implication and silences.
But nobody came. He waited holding the tingling ball: till he could no longer bear the felted chugging in his side.
The situation was going flat, when a hand appeared, tackling the latch through the cut-out in the gate. Then she was standing in the gateway as she had stood at the door the other morning when she came with the billyful of soup looking for Mrs Angove. She was wearing that slightly cold, expressionless expression some children can put on, and which is the most complete of all disguises.
‘The ball landed in the yard,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to fetch it, because I shouldn’t have known where to find you, to return it.’
‘It doesn’t belong to me,’ she replied, accepting it with mysterious concentration. ‘It belongs to Angela Agostino, who I play with sometimes.’
She continued looking strangely at the ball in her hands: it could have been a homed pigeon. At any moment she might start stroking what was neither a pigeon nor hers.
‘To Angela,’ he repeated. ‘What is
your
name?’ Although he knew, he wanted to make her say it.
‘Kathy.’
‘Yes.’ He was burning to know more, if not everything. ‘But your other—your family name.’
She didn’t want to tell it, it seemed; then she said or mumbled: ‘Volkov.’
‘Kathy Volkov. Are you Russian?’
‘No. Australian.’
‘But your father? Where is he from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are there many of you?’
‘There’s my mother. I must go now,’ she said, still looking at the strange ball in her hands. ‘Mother will be wondering where I am.’
‘Is your mother Russian, too?’
‘No.’ She began to sound sulky. ‘She’s Scotch—
Scottish!
’
‘And Australian.’
‘No. Mother will never be anything but Scottish.’
Along the lane the light was wilting like the marrow flowers on dusty beds in back yards.
Kathy Volkov said: ‘I must go. I’ve got to practise.’
‘At what?’
‘The piano.’
‘Ah! So you’re a pianist—an artist!’ He spoke gently: he didn’t want to mock, but to test her. ‘Are you going to be a good one?’
She looked at him. ‘Mr Khrapovitsky says I will be.’
‘Yes. But you’re the one it depends on in the end. You’re the artist.’
Her face appeared to grow more opaque. She had blue, but by no means passive eyes.
‘Have you the will?’ he asked.
She was pouting, and wouldn’t answer; so he saw he had gone too far; he said: ‘I hope, Kathy, you’ll come and see me again. It’ll do us good to exchange ideas.’
She could have been glad she had the ball to hold.
‘You don’t agree?’
‘My mother mightn’t let me.’
‘What about this father of yours? Doesn’t he make any decisions? ’
‘He went away.’
‘Then I hope your mother will let you come.’
To encourage everyone concerned he put his hand as kindly as he could on her back: he was conscious of the shoulder-blades, and above them the modest beads of her vertebrae; but she rid herself of the hand by a few quick shrugs.
How could he appease her? In desperation he began looking around: in his yard not even a dusty flower.
‘Aren’t you the painter?’ She spoke with abrupt formality.
‘Yes. I do paint.’
A little smile was creeping on her face. ‘My mother says she would never let a painter paint her, because then you are at their mercy, worse than the mercy of a husband. A husband goes away. But the painter has painted the painting.’
‘Yes, the painting. And you are your father’s child. Hasn’t that occurred to your mother?’
Instead of answering, she was preparing to manage the ramshackle gate.
‘You must feel close to your mother.’
‘I have to help her: she needs me, and then—she’s my mother.’
‘It’s very fortunate if you can feel close to your parents. So often one isn’t really theirs.’
‘What do you mean?’ She was frowning, nostrils twitching: she was clutching the ball so tight she had deformed it.
‘I mean one can be so remote in spirit from one’s actual father—or mother—it’s as though one doesn’t belong to them. Spiritually, ’ he dared, ‘one can be someone else’s child.’
It probably sounded too highflown and muddled for her to understand; though certainly she seemed more tranquil, even drowsily acquiescent.
His own bliss caused him to make a regrettable slip. ‘To be truthful, I don’t believe the artist can belong to anyone.’
She glanced at him quickly as though he had reminded her of something, but looked away again at once. ‘I never felt for long that I belonged properly to anybody—excepting my own room.’
She started blushing: a radiance the last of the light helped fix on a space waiting for it in his visual mind.
‘How old are you?’ he asked irrelevantly.
‘I was thirteen last Friday.’ With equal irrelevance she gave a short snicker.
They parted gravely, politely: the latch continued tinkling in his head.
That night he started work on the flowering rosebush. Each of the big scalloped saucers of single roses was given its tuft of glistening human hairs. It was natural that the face should flower at the centre of the bush, humanly radiant amongst the not dissimilar roses, and not all that unnatural for the bush to be growing at the sea’s edge, under a livid sky.
When morning came he felt surprisingly fresh standing in front of his finished painting: only his eyelids, dry and fragile, might have been segments of ping-pong balls.
After he had rested a little, he began to draw what became during the days which followed a more abstract version of the ‘Flowering Rosebush’: the face at the heart of the bush reduced to an eye, its remote candour undazzled by its setting of rose-jewels; the original seascape dissolved in space by fluctuations of gelatinous light, in which a threat of crimson was still suspended.