Rembrandt accompanied his favourite model, his wife, Saskia, right to her deathbed with sketchpad in hand. Chagall and his wife, Bella, are another example. Bella flies from the hand of the artist, though Double Portrait is more relevant here. In this painting, Bella sits at his knee in a wedding dress and watches his work in progress. Her life is being drawn as she lives it. She lives as she is being drawn. She lives to be drawn. All three probably describe the arrangement between Alma Martin and my mother.
In the earliest years of her marriage to Frank Bryant, Alma didn’t like to intrude for the long periods of time it took for a proper drawing session, and instead would take his chances as they turned up and snatch at whatever lay to hand for purposes of a quickie—the back of an invoice slip, old envelopes, in the margins of the sports pages, once on the back of a matinee ticket when the film broke down and they had to wait twenty-five minutes (Frank was doing overtime at the plant). Once, memorably, he drew on the back of an egg carton—tiny miniatures of my mother crowning each cardboard bump, a class of desk-bound Alices.
Frank couldn’t talk to Alma, and Alma couldn’t talk to Frank. They were like two dogs who come around a blind bend, stop and regard each other just long enough to register the futility of further engagement and move on past each other. Whenever talk turned to matters of paint, of the kind that ends up on canvas, Frank was up out of his chair and reaching for his hat. On house paint, Frank might have offered an opinion. But it never came up.
I was thirteen when I discovered his secret. A woman walked at the edge of the sea, a shoe in each hand, her blonde hair grainy with sunlight. She may have been smiling. She was too far away for me to tell.
This was during the NE Paints picnic. A group of us kids are sitting in the sandhills. Kath Wheeler. Douglas Monroe. Guy Stuart. Raymond Pierce. Diane Huxley. In the near distance a group of men stand around the side of the hangi pit. Kath’s dad. Dougie’s with the soggy smoke. Kath’s is the smaller wiry man checking the time on his watch. Frank is there but not really part of proceedings. He has a leather flap on his watch and he’s holding it open like time is a secret and slightly scientific thing to manage. It turns out that Frank and Kath’s dad are comparing the time.
From our hollow in the sand dunes we study these strangers who are our fathers and who conform to some rough notion of themselves, approximate and fumbling.
Now Frank comes sauntering over the dunes, larger than life in his NE Paints-issue overalls. A good-looking man—that’s what I hear everyone say, and never in a tone of approval but with the voice people use to warn of a rip. I can smell Old Spice, sweat and various tinctures from the mixing bay of the paint factory. Frank’s boots are covered in limonite used to make yellow paint. It spills off his white overalls, a powder as fine as sulphur.
‘Harry boy,’ he says. ‘Where’s ya mum, mate?’
‘Haven’t seen her,’ I say.
The other kids are watching Frank, the way he’s raised his head to look around. He looks testy but it’s hard to tell. Frank could be about to pat me on the head or tick me off.
‘Having a good time?’ he asks.
‘It’s all right.’
‘Good,’ says Frank, and now he looks around for another face to ask the same question of.
‘What about you, Kath my girl?’
‘Yep, fine Mr Bryant. Thanks,’ she says.
Then the rest of them.
‘Yep.’
‘Yep.’
‘Yep.’
‘Dougie, what about you, son?’
‘Yep,’ says Dougie, staring at the sand and swallowing hard.
‘Well, that’s good isn’t it?’
Now he rises to his full height and looks down the beach as far as the rocky point. His gaze pokes around in that direction. Smoke and ash drift from his fingertips.
‘That’s good,’ he says once more. He draws on his cigarette, holds the smoke in and removes the cigarette which he turns in his fingers, studying it. He releases the smoke. He says, ‘I hope none of you kids have snuck down here for a smoke.’
‘Nope,’ we say quickly.
‘Harry?’
‘Nope.’
‘Because if you have it’ll rot your lungs. You do realise that, don’t you? Smoking’s a mug’s game.’
With that he drops the cigarette in the sand. The other kids look away so they won’t have to see my father littering.
There’s some activity over at the hangi pit now. The other fathers are hauling up the wire baskets of food. The steam is thick and figures in overalls ghost in and out of the steam and sunlight, some coughing as they laugh.
My mother has been handing out wet towels. Now she has one towel left. She looks around for someone to give it to and there is Alma Martin. He must have said something funny, maybe possibly even shocking, because my mother puts a hand to her mouth as Mr Martin drops down a sandhill with a pleased look on his face. About now my mother spots us and starts over.
‘Harry, I see your father has done his disappearing act again just as we’re about to eat. Hallo Dougie. Kath. Raymond. Diane. Guy.’
‘Hallo Mrs Bryant,’ they chant back.
‘Harry go and find Frank, will you.’
I don’t know where he is. But I know how to find him. That’s easy. I follow the trail of limonite through the sandhills. Now there are yellow sprinklings on the flat stony part of the beach. Blackened sea necklace dried to a crisp has the same yellow dusting. In an area of hard sand I catch up with a footprint made from a pair of NE Paints-issue boots. The trail of limonite peters out on the rocks, but all arrows seem to point to the cave entrance and as I come around the corner I am stunned to see the bare buttocks of my father with his paint-splattered overalls gathered around his ankles, and without fully seeing who she is, I remember the woman I saw walking along the shoreline with a shoe in each hand.
The tip opened the same year as Frank ran off with the woman from Wages.
It was through the tip that I came to work for George. The tip was in the vee of the hill one around from the farm, and George paid me for a few hours after school each day to comb the tip for other people’s discards—doing much what I pay Alma to do today.
Sometimes, and without advance notice, George would turn up at the tip for a few hours and the two of us would call to each other like fishermen on either end of a dragnet whenever we pulled something of interest from the smouldering layers of disintegrating filth. There was a lot of rubbish rubbish, there’s no denying that, but there was a lot of good stuff as well, and the status of some things moved between those two points of assessment. A tossed-out vase turned into something precious in George’s hands. He used his spit to rub away the grime, and it is through George that I first came to develop a contempt for those who would shun and discard so carelessly.
You can see the rub of the pre-loved in everything if you look hard enough. What tends to happen is this. It gets a little shiny, develops signs of wear—a rip appears, and it’s on the scrap heap. The very thing you wrapped your arms around and just loved to pieces is shown the door and tossed unceremoniously on the back of the ute destined for the tip. Well, you tell yourself, the stuffing
was coming out, the fabric had worn. It was depressing to look at. It made the room look shabby. It made you feel shabby. And yet, once you strip away the old worn fabric more often than not the innersprings of the pre-loved object and what we might call here new love—if that isn’t too cute—are much the same. In the case of an armchair a spring might need tightening. Maybe a new protective layer is called for.
After Frank left, it didn’t take more than a slight adjustment to think that together with household stuff, you could lump the household, you could lump the family, the wife, the kid.
Still, if Frank is good for something, perhaps it is this. His vote-catching smile was to pass on to me. I’ve always had this ability to appear like I was smiling at some deep thought which any moment soon I would stun the world with. It has served me well at endless council meetings. Ophelia at that London club had commented on my smile. ‘You have nice eyes, Harry Bryant.’ Though that was before she twisted out of the corner I had baled her up in and disappeared into the crowd with her drink. And on the tug bringing the people ashore from the Pacific Star I believe it was this same expression of mine that had had a calming effect on everyone when we rolled and pitched over the bar.
11
My mother wouldn’t let Alma near the tip while the newspaper people were here for the story on the portraits. It would be undignified, and she was right to point out that Alma was the hero of the moment. He alone had managed to attract out-of-town coverage, a goal we spend most of our winter months in council pursuing, dreaming up new schemes, plans to bring people here. What if we were to have a treasure hunt and fill a paint can with silver coins? What if we were to open a paint museum? It’s always been a struggle to see our way past paint, and even the interest in Alma’s portraits wasn’t such a distant cousin to those other schemes we thought up.
The problem continues to be one of geography. The road south passes away under our sills. It careens away from us in polite horror. You see the small cars of tourists bobbing into a head wind; usually it will be a retired couple, him or her with the map spread over their knees. You see them slow down and glance up, wondering. Is this it? Have we arrived? We smile back and shift to one side of the window sills. Just our short-haired dogs stare back. We wait to one side of our curtains until we hear through our thin walls their jumpy foot on the pedal followed by a tinny burst of acceleration.
When people come here to live, like the Eliots, it means they’ve reached the end of the line. There is nothing after this. When they wonder how they got here, by what road, they find themselves thinking, surely not that meagre two-lane broken-up strip? How and at what point did the glorious highway they were on downsize to such a narrow strip?
I’d spoken with the reporter on the phone. Sally somebody. I saw them pull up outside the store. Nervous expectation hung off the ends of her eyelashes. She saw me and pointed with her finger, ‘You are…?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded back.
I’d done a bit of ringing around on the newspaper’s behalf. I wanted everything to be easy for them. No hiccups. The newspaper’s idea was to have the sitters by now well advanced in age to pose next to the portraits of their younger selves. A caption story—and that would be nice; it would put the town up in lights. Something positive for a change instead of the usual casualty stories.
At first glance, though, I wouldn’t have blamed the newspaper people for thinking Alma Martin was one. His clothes were old and patched. His hair is grey but in some mad and desperate bid to recapture something of the past, perhaps in anticipation of the newspaper interest, he’d tried out a sachet of dye he’d found in a perfectly good toilet bag tossed out at the tip, and now his hair featured a raccoon strip down the middle and over his right temple. If you looked closely you saw that the dye had stained the tops of his ears. It invited all kinds of comment that could not politely be said aloud. Alma did not look the kind of human being who speaks lovingly on end about Pierre Bonnard.
When it came time to organise the group portrait Hilary proved to be difficult. The others waited while my mother spoke with her. Nervous glances were sent in the direction of the newspaper people. We didn’t want them to give up on us. Finally my mother got Hilary up from her bench and pushed and sweet-talked her across the street to the painted shop windows. But, as soon as the photographer tried to place her in the group, she bolted. My mother shrugged and looked at Alma.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
We watched him limp across the road—in bad light at the tip the night before his foot had gone right through a sofa he was standing on to get at an expensive-looking leather bag. We saw him crouch down and speak with Hilary. He was like that for a few minutes before he stuck up his hand and waved over my mother. She crossed the road, spoke briefly with him, and went over to his bicycle and opened a saddlebag. She got out his drawing gear and hurried back with it. For the next ten or fifteen minutes the group of the original sitters and the newspaper people stood whispering among themselves while Alma sketched Hilary. In a way it was nice for the newspaper people to see this, that Alma’s portraits weren’t just a thing of the past.
Hilary was the perfect sitter. She did not see the world off to the sides—she looked ahead into the window of a former paint shop where her reflection was broken up by shop lettering.
Alma finished and we saw Hilary hold out a chubby hand for the sketchpad. She would have seen the elaborate arrangement of folds in her dress, the high-lit arches and splintered shadows; and little sign of the filthy cotton dress covering her knees. Alma let her have the drawings, and the next time I saw her in town she had pinned one of the sketches to her dress, as if to invite passers-by to make up their own mind on which version they preferred. Once we could have believed that she had turned herself into a public wall that a dog might piss up against, but now here was a picture. Here was another version. Here was a reason to look twice and wonder.
There is still another version of Hilary, and it’s this one I prefer, her reddish brown hair on fire from the sunshine splashing in the classroom windows.
She has been talking about first impressions, the folly of allowing first impressions to rule our judgment. To make her point she has told us about a Russian explorer who while passing our coast in the 1800s wrote of ‘a frozen sea, inland’. He would have seen snow-capped mountains and thus concluded. We did not think of ourselves as living in a cold place. We shifted uneasily in our seats while Mrs Phillips wrote the name Bellinghausen up on the blackboard. It was the longest name any of us had seen—it stretched spectacularly across the blackboard in that Russian way.
Bellinghausen, Hilary went on to say, had come within a whisker of discovering the great white continent only to tragically mistake the distant ice shelf for fog. Comically, he changed course to avoid contact with what he was looking for. He had seen one thing and thought the other. He’d made the mistake of seeing what he expected to see, what he was used to seeing.
At this point a gap opened up between what Hilary wished to share and the ability of the class to hear and comprehend what she was saying. So Hilary had fallen back on some quirky detail to crank up our interest. She spoke of Bellinghausen’s stop in England and his efforts to recruit some of Captain Cook’s key men, especially, Joseph Banks, the botanist. These days his is the face on our banknotes as well as the name of an i
nvestment bank (‘wealth begins with a seed’), but back then he was a man whose gifted eye might have seen the ice shelf for what it was and known the difference between that and fog.
Bellinghausen couldn’t persuade Banks to join the voyage and all the Russian managed to leave England with were tins of pea soup, then a new invention crucial to the future exploration of the great white continent.
Canned soup. It seems so contemporary; so hard to place with wooden sailing ships. On my way home I tried to remember what Mrs Phillips had to say about can-openers. Did she even mention openers? Or was I on to a question to stun the class with?
There are always going to be different levels of appreciation. Hilary’s was more intimate. She could become breathless at times, for example, when reading aloud to the class from a novel that she got caught up in. She was like that with the new and unexpected subject of Bellinghausen. She spoke softly as if to underline privileged access. ‘The facts speak for themselves. One third of the world was known when Bellinghausen set out across that vast tract of lined ocean, one popularly imagined to contain serpents and sea monsters, but also one that a reasoned mind concludes must wash up somewhere. It didn’t just stop there like a ruled line in space.’
We all snorted to show our sophistication.
‘If the ocean washed up on a northern shore it must naturally follow that a shore existed to the south in order to hold the ocean. Think of a shopping bag.’
We thought of a shopping bag.
‘Well,’ she said, strolling between the blackboard and the windows, ‘containment is important to any notion of space. A painting needs a frame. God Almighty holds all existence in the palm of his hand. One enclosure,’ she said, ‘follows another.’ Furthermore, for the sake of tidiness and notions to do with beauty there has to be two of everything.