‘Absolutely,’ I insisted. I couldn’t have him do it for nothing.
Guy’s face turned red when I mentioned money. His eyes shot up at the stag head. ‘Well, I’m happy to do it for nothing, Harry. I wasn’t meaning to hit you up for anything. There’s plenty here to keep me occupied.’ His eyes flitted across the shop and hesitated at the beaded curtain.
On our way out to the Eliots’, Alma got me to stop at the supermarket. He came back with tea bags, milk, biscuits; things which he aimed to pass off as morning tea and leave with Violet. Alma often looked cross with the world. Alternately, he could just as easily seize up if you said thank you. That was the case when he put out the biscuits and tea at the Eliots’. As soon as Violet began to thank him he looked around for a distraction. He found me heading for the door.
‘No point you leaving Harry. We’ll be here an hour, that’s all. You might as well join me.’
He was inviting me to draw. Was this what I was hearing? In all the years I’d known Alma, all the times he sat with a sketchpad perched on his knee drawing my mother in our house, I’d never known him to extend this invitation. It was an obvious one when you think about it, rain falling against the window, a boy restless in the house.
A funny awkwardness came between us, as though Alma had just logged on to my thoughts.
‘The fact is, I can’t draw.’ But he heard that coming.
‘Everyone says that, Harry.’
I said I hadn’t drawn anything since primary school. ‘People say that too.’ While this conversation was going on Violet was looking from one to the other; now that it was decided—since Alma had decided for me, I was still standing like a limp rag with a big loopy grin—she said, ‘Will that mean extra?’
Alma looked at me.
‘How much?’
‘Ten dollars is the usual going rate,’ he said.
Violet seemed happy with that; there was a skip in her tail as she gathered up the goodies Alma had picked up from the supermarket.
It shouldn’t be so threatening—pencil, paper. You can look at a sheet of paper and find yourself thinking ludicrous thoughts such as, ‘I’m bigger than it is.’ Or catalogues of past work drift out of the back rooms of memory. Pictures of brown boats sailing on blue seas, a perfect mountain cone in the background, a blob of snow on top. Round faces with yellow hair and hands like small thickets suitable for firewood. I had grown up with the neighbour drawing my mother so there were certain things I already knew about drawing. I knew the breathy silence, the scratchy sound of pencil on paper. I knew that strange practised stillness. I knew how to move around it. But I knew it as an audience knows a scene in a play, never as one who harbours a burning ambition to enter the scene himself.
Now as Alma took a free hand in moving furniture around, organising where we would sit, a chair for him, one for me, a place for Violet, I found myself trying to remember if there had been another time, just once, when Alma urged a pencil or piece of crayon on me. I began to feel strangely nervous, and as I do on such occasions I reminded myself that I am the mayor. We are the modern-day Hercules holding up the pillars of our little communities from ill winds of economic glut and ruin. We are the unseen, unsung glue, I often think…
‘If you’re thinking of making a mark on that sheet of paper you’ll need to pick up a stick of charcoal, Harry,’ Alma said then.
He was smiling to himself; enjoying himself, I think. Violet’s mood was more like my own—apprehensive. Alma gave some instructions. First to Violet; he wanted her to adopt a number of poses. He demonstrated. He dropped his chin on to his chest and hung his arms so that everything about him had a downward flow. Next he placed a hand against the wall and leant his weight in that direction. He showed her two or three more poses and told her she could change whenever she got sick of one—apparently we were just after some quick gestural things. And then he told her, ‘When you’re sick of those, Violet, you can come up with your own.’
Then he directed his attention to me and explained what he meant by a gestural drawing. The body is hardly ever at rest. Weight hardly ever sits square as in a statue or a porcelain object. He showed me with a few quickly drawn lines what he was after and it came as a relief that I wouldn’t have to get down to the detail of faces, eyelashes, mouths. He just wanted lines indicating the way Violet’s body fell.
The hardest thing was to make that first mark. While I was dithering Alma picked up my wrist and crudely moved my handheld charcoal against the paper. ‘There, now you’re started.’
He worked quickly, dashing off one drawing after another. Ripping out sheets of paper that he’d obtained on the cheap from Persico’s fish shop. Quid pro quo. Jimmy had asked for some fish drawings. Alma had said, ‘How about drawings of your customers?’ And now the portraits of Jimmy’s regulars were pinned up to the wall next to a large chart of various fish species plus a very old NE Paints landscape calendar.
Violet finished Alma’s repertoire of poses and began to explore a number of her own. She tried sitting on a chair, tapping her shoe. Alma told her that drawing a tapping foot was a bit beyond us, and after that she slid off the chair on to the floor and sat with her back up against the wall, her knees tucked against her chest, her face at a moon-gazing angle. Once more that glass dome of concentrated effort fell over us. Violet was away in her own little world, spinning to a distant corner of the galaxy. In her face I saw assembled various depths, layers, shadings, all kinds of cravings that I had no idea how to ever get down on paper. For the most part she appeared to be in a kind of reverie, then the circumstances would waken her and she’d look with that same mildly troubled look sometimes found on customers who come into the shop clutching something worthless that they nevertheless hope I will buy.
‘You doing fine, Violet. Just fine,’ Alma said at one point. Our eyes met and she glanced away and fell back into the former planetary arrangement of drawer and sitter. What a privilege it is to look at another’s face, to explore it without causing offence. Of course you are free to stare at Robyn’s blonde vulva out of the glossy glare of a magazine, and there are places in the world where it is possible to shuffle through a curtained-off area to sit and observe the same thing live as it were. But in the end that is just voyeurism without any useful outcome. My mother once asked a man in a picture theatre to stop staring at her. This was before the war, before George’s drunken advances, back when my mother lived in a world of neutered desire. Drawing validates what that man in the picture theatre was ticked off for; it lets you get away with a lot more. In a street or inside a shop or in a train it is possible to look at the person at your side or in front of you or across the aisle but it tends to be a stolen opportunity. A quick glance which turns and runs. The bounty is all smash and grab—a neck view, the back of the head (grey hair, a neck wart, skin soft, puce-like, and you return to your newspaper). Eventually an impression forms and we race to fill in what we saw with words—happy, sad, forlorn, moody, anxious, idiotic. But these words are of no use whatsoever when you draw. Things are simply what they are. Neither the shadow beneath the chin nor the drawn one hold strong opinions about themselves.
After an hour the Eliot twins woke. I was pleased for the interruption because drawing all that time was tiring. Violet unscrambled herself and jumped up to get them. They emerged, pink, sleepy, bl
ack-eyed, over their mother’s shoulder. For a while they were content to roll around on the carpet in pissreeking napkins while Violet went off to make the tea and put out the biscuits Alma had bought her.
We were all feeling strangely skittish. Violet, I guess, because the exercise wasn’t as daunting as she had worried it might be. I shared some of that self-congratulatory mood. Violet and I, together, had come through the first session. Touch wood. Alma looked smug. Things appeared to be working out. When Violet returned with the tea tray Alma asked her how she was finding the experience. She gave a happy shrug. ‘I don’t know. It was kind of hard to get used to, you two staring at me…’
‘Staring…?’ Alma took issue with that. We weren’t staring, he said. We were seeing. ‘There’s a difference. For example, hills stare. Hills are like faces in a crowd.’
Without a blink Violet asked him, ‘How about the sea?’
‘The sea glances.’
‘Trees?’
‘In high winds a tree will show an interest in its surroundings. Otherwise, in my experience, trees are reliably discreet. What they see is instantly forgotten.’
I don’t know that Violet was hearing any of this, whether any of it sank in. She just wanted to keep Alma going.
‘And the beach?’ she asked.
‘Ah, the beach.’ He stopped to think for a moment. ‘Pebbles on a beach are completely innocent. Pebbles as we know were blinded at birth which is why a female bather will happily undress in their presence.’
Violet gave a delighted laugh and for the first time in weeks, since we glanced up at the tip to observe her get out of that orange Datsun, we saw a happier, intelligent face.
Now she asked Alma where he’d learned to draw. Surprisingly this was a question I’d never really thought to ask, since what Alma did seemed eternal like the hills and sky and every other part of the world I’d come into; you’d no longer think to ask a question like that of Alma than you would of the sky as to how it had come to be there. Now I was glad Violet asked the question.
There were the drawing classes in hospital all those years ago. I knew about those. But now Alma dismissed those lessons. The man who really taught him was the patient in the next bed along from his own. A thin-lipped watercolourist in for a cataract operation.
This all happened years ago, after the train tragedy. For the next half hour he went back to that time and place, to a moment when his life as it had felt then was in the balance and he drifted about in a semi-conscious state while occasionally surfacing to voices around the next bed.
‘You know I hate fruitcake.’
‘No, Neil. It’s sultanas you don’t like. This fruitcake doesn’t have any.’
‘In that case, why bother? Why make fruit cake without sultanas?’
Silence.
‘Edith? Hallo, Edith? Are you still there?’
Alma said the watercolourist was a crotchety old bastard with bandages over his eyes. By his own account he was also the man who had probably saved Alma’s life.
In between times of wakefulness he would drift back to a staging post where the accident repeated itself over and over, with the night sky swimming in his vision, yellow trees flashing up at the windows, the sideways angle of the carriage, the surprise of the trees, he said, and their surprise at seeing him. The trees seemed to know. They seemed to know half a second before he did that the train had left the tracks. The trees were trying to point this out to him when he woke to another conversation.
‘Is he awake, Edith?’
‘No. He’s out,’ said the woman’s voice.
‘What does he look like?’
‘Young. Thirty. He’s got a wire running in and out of his jaw.’
‘Well look at his clipboard at the foot of the bed. They’ll have the whole story down there.’
‘No, Neil. I am not going to look at another patient’s notes. They are private and I am not going to…’
‘All right, Jesus, Edith, keep your hair on. Let’s not broadcast to the world…’
It was weeks before he was allowed up. The morning arrived they pulled the drip from his arm and to celebrate his new-won freedom he and the watercolourist had got up out of bed and taken a walk in the hospital grounds. Up till now the man in for the cataracts was reliant on his wife, Edith, escorting him over the grounds. Now it fell to Alma to direct the blindfolded watercolourist by his elbow across the lawns to the lily ponds where patients in hospital bandages perched between crutches or slumped in wheelchairs.
It was a few days after this that he heard about the drawing classes from Carmichael. Actually, it was one of his colleagues who came in to give them. Carmichael said he wasn’t much good; that in fact Alma would be better off with himself as his teacher. They were out in the grounds sunning themselves when the watercolourist became suddenly excited. He’d just had a brilliant idea, he said. It was too good to tell there and then; he urged Alma to lead him back to the ward and got him to look under his bed for the carton of drawing materials and an easel and a stack of paper. The huge eye pads over a bald skull made the elderly watercolourist look like a bull ant. He trembled with excitement. He said, ‘Now let’s take a crack at that palm tree Edith tells me is outside our window.’
This, Alma said, was the first drawing he ever did, with the watercolourist holding on to his wrist and riding shotgun for the journey through the tree. The watercolourist wasn’t an easy passenger. He became angry at one point and barked at Alma, ‘I’m not interested in what you think a tree should look like. I’m only interested in the one outside the window.’ And once at the start when Alma stalled, which came as a relief to me to hear, the watercolourist told him, ‘You’ll have a heart attack pondering the wherefores of getting down the detail. Concentrate on the spaces in the branches, draw them, and bingo—the rest of the tree will come into play.’
Soon, within days, hospital staff were crowding the door to watch a man who couldn’t speak learn how to draw from a man who couldn’t see.
Now Violet put her hand up to ask something.
‘Where is he now?’
‘The watercolourist? Dead.’
‘So sad,’ she said, and hurried forth with her next question. ‘What then?’
‘Well, he talked a lot. Here was a man who couldn’t draw for the moment. He couldn’t see for the bandages. So he would talk. He would talk all night about his favourite artists.’
It would begin with a soft croaking inquiry in the dark.
‘Alma, are you awake? Just give me a sign if you are.’
And Alma said he would have to think for a moment. Was he awake? Could he be bothered with being awake? Then he’d decide, okay, he could be awake. He wasn’t exactly doing anything such as sleeping, so he’d bring up his hand and lightly bang the bed head.
‘Remember earlier, Alma, I was banging on about Rembrandt. Of course Rembrandt never painted flowers except in pictures of his wife Saskia. Interesting, don’t you think? He painted her as Flora, the goddess of love and the goddess of whores. If you like I can get Edith to bring in a book with some nice plates. In a couple of them you can see Saskia looking sluttish. There’s one, now let’s see, think…Jesus, my mem
ory’s deserting me…that’s right. The Prodigal Son in the Tavern. In this one Saskia is perched on his knee, the slut as tavern trophy. Before them is a peacock pie which according to all the commentaries was a contemporary symbol of pride and sensual pleasure. Twenty years on and all that mischief behind them, Saskia is more elegantly presented. She’s in borrowed furs, feathers, lace and velvet. With these props he’s levered his wife out of the gin palace and into the monarchal class.’
Silence.
‘Well, they had fun together. At least you can say that. You know what Cézanne used to say of his wife? “She likes nothing but Switzerland and lemonade.” In his portraits he pays her back with a cold blue palette, adding a fluey red to Mrs C’s cheeks. She in turn pays him back with a drawn mouth; her left eye is flooded with an unkind thought. She’s probably thinking, Your socks smell, your breath stinks. When you look at a portrait like that, you can hear the cross words whizzing about the studio, and yet, poor Hortense, well this is what you hear: she was said to sit for her husband for hours without moving or talking. Model and painter locked in a death silence like a slow-moving train…One of those marriages where the two combatants are handcuffed to suffer a long, slow suicide.’