Paint Your Wife

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘High school sweethearts?’

  Violet guessed she meant the twins were thereby the product of this. Any other explanation was too long-winded, so as a matter of convenience she nodded.

  The woman looked delighted. She said, ‘Oh, they are the best, the absolute best. Fierce and uncontrollable.’ She shuddered when she said that and shook her shoulders, and Violet laughed. She was pleased to have the approval; well it was more than that.

  ‘You can sit down if you like,’ Violet said.

  ‘May I? Thank you.’

  She made it sound like it was Violet’s bench, hers alone. That it was her own personal space and that she had just opened the door to welcome the woman inside. On second thoughts she approved of that idea. And she was glad for the company.

  Emboldened, she asked the woman if she was married and if she had kids of her own, and then if she herself had married her high school sweetheart. With a great display of arms and teeth, like a giant bird hovering, she laughed. ‘Oh no. No. No. Guy came later. I found Guy lost in the toiletries section of the supermarket. That should have told me everything I needed to know right there and then.’

  The woman’s mood changed. The tide went out in her face. She swung her foot under the bench while she gazed off into the distance. Still, Violet wondered if there was someone who’d come earlier.

  ‘High school. Let’s see,’ she said. She became thoughtful, as if looking back inside herself. ‘There was someone. But he didn’t look at me. I wasn’t much to look at it. A skinny kid with crooked teeth. I used to follow him around at a distance. He was so popular. All the girls adored him. Douglas. Dougie. I would watch him at parties. And years later too I would close my eyes and dream, and then, guess what?’ Violet sensed the woman’s itch to tell and at the same time felt her examining eyes upon her.

  The woman sat up. She folded her arms, and leant forward. ‘Okay. This is strictly between ourselves. Girls’ stuff. Top secret, understood?’

  Violet nodded eagerly.

  ‘About four days ago, we met. It was at a funeral for a man who lost his legs in the war. Poor Dean. He was such a nice man. At lunchtime at school we used to go into his shop and he’d show us his knives from Borneo and bits of World War Two shrapnel. It’s funny a bomb couldn’t get him but something like leukemia could which at his age, sixty-something, apparently is more unusual.’ She stopped and Violet felt the woman’s eyes on her. ‘Sixty is no longer old. It used to be, but believe me, from where I stand sixty is no longer old. You find yourself taking stock around my age. What have I done? What have I failed to do? The failings sadly leave everything else in their shadow. Anyway, Miss Maudlin me, I was telling you about Dougie. So, anyway, as expected I run into Dougie at the funeral. We’re old friends of course and after the others have filed into the church we find that we’re the last ones left outside under the trees, just talking. Anyway, we have a cigarette. Over the way is the hearse and from where we stood you could see the hydraulics of the hearse. Ghastly. Yuck. Anyway, just then music comes pumping out the church doors. Not just any old music. Not anything you might expect, say a church organ, but Edith Piaf. Can you believe? The pallbearers grin back at the church. One of them stamps out his cigarette and goes in. The others follow. Then it’s just me and Douglas Monroe who I adored at high school out there, beneath the trees. We’re the last ones left.

  ‘The next part I’m not so proud of. I hear this song in my head and I start to sing. I stop, because suddenly I’m weeping. These tears. I mean, my God, Kath, get a life, please. Dougie gives me his hanky. I tell him, Carole King. That’s who I want at my funeral. Well, by now Edith Piaf is winding down, and that’s when another Carole King melody comes to me. I stop there because I need another cigarette. I dig around in my handbag without much success. Then I lay the bag on a gravestone. Eloise. Eloise Sim. That’s whose grave it is. I just remembered that. “Excuse me, Eloise,” I say, “while I have a cig.” Dougie has one too and we sit on the gravestone, smoking, then he leans forward with a song of his own. And he starts singing Louis Armstrong’s “Stormy Weather”. Not my choice for a funeral. Definitely not, I tell him. I want people to cry at mine. Louis Armstrong would just have them dancing in the aisles. No one’s crying. None of the shits care because they’re singing “Stormy Weather”. Well, screw that. Then I see all the faces at my own funeral. I see them sitting there. I can see my coffin up the front. And it’s so, so awful, so awful that I start crying, and Doug puts an arm around my shoulder. He puts his face against mine. Then he kisses my cheek.

  ‘Well, we both have a list of songs we want played at our funerals. We start sharing those. He wants Bob Dylan singing “Ballad of a Thin Man”. But then he changes that for Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”, which in my view I don’t really think is appropriate. Too much on the driving side. He agrees and says, “Maybe something soft and gospelly then?” And just like that, without a signal, we both start to sing, “I Bid You Goodnight”. So that is what we’re singing, not loudly or obnoxiously, just quietly on Eloise’s gravestone, Eloise Sim born eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, when we see the pallbearers coming out of the church. They glance across the churchyard and we both bounce up as if we’ve been caught out, which we have in a way. I pick up my bag, dust the leaves off my black funeral dress. Now, listen to this. Dougie threads his arm through mine and draws me across the yard away from the entrance. Nothing’s been said. Not a word. It’s as if we are being guided. We cross the lawn beside the church. We can hear the shuffling of feet, the sharper noise of a pew moving, someone’s cough. We have forgotten poor crippled Dean. I know where we’re headed before I actually see where we’re headed, if you follow me. Across from the church is a KFC. Beside it, a SKY TV-winking vacancy. Vacancy. “Hello? This way.” That’s what it might as well be saying. So Doug, he gives my hand a little press, and at the first gap in the traffic we’re pulling each other across the road, then we’re hurrying across the flagstone parking area.

  ‘Our room is on the street side, and there’s that nice downy light of curtains closed in the afternoon. While Dougie undresses I pull the curtains back a whisker. It has started to rain and the funeral people milling around the hearse have put up umbrellas. Poor Dean must be in the hearse because I see this white-gloved hand reach up and close the rear. There are faces in that crowd I’ve known from high school, one or two I have kept in touch with. But the one I desired back then, twenty-five years ago, is raising my funeral dress over my shoulders. I don’t look pretty. I mean, the youth has gone. My boobs sag. There’s a bulge of white flesh tumbling over the waistband of my panties. Oh God, it’s not pretty. There’s a long scar from a caesarean. Another scar on my thigh is from an op to wind up my veins. My body is a battleground, let me tell you. So I let go of the curtain and I say to Dougie, “Tell me I’m not ridiculous.” That’s the word I use. Ridiculous. And he says, “You’re not ridiculous, Kath. You’re lovely.”

  ‘Lovely,’ she repeated. She smiled, mysterious, enmeshed in all kinds of complexities of belief, make-believe, faith. She may not have believed Dougie but she’s glad to have heard those words, and especially that word, lovely.

  ‘So, we make our way over to the bed and you’ll never guess but by some weirdly strange coincidence we both start humming Carole King. See, the melody was just to get us across the carpet and under the be
dcovers. The rest you don’t need to know about. Except this. Later, much later, I’m talking about after we’ve left the motel unit now, in sunglasses and with an unspoken vow never to see each other again, at least until one or the other’s funeral, we all die, after all, I’m picking up pasta in the supermarket, bumbling along with my cart, thinking, What the hell were we doing? Just what were we doing running from that funeral? I’m sure we must have looked like we knew. To those people in their cars going by, all that traffic, I’m sure they thought we knew.’

  She looked up sharply into the corners of the sky, a funny look lightly sketched on her face, now a quick exploratory look at Violet.

  ‘What do you think? What do you think was going on there?’ She spoke slowly, almost with exaggerated slowness, and watched carefully the impact of each word on Violet’s face. She said, ‘You know something? It’s like watching a jug fill, to hear me and watch you.’

  18

  The world is off-balance most of the time. You can never see it in its entirety. All you really ever manage to obtain is a glimpse, an angled view, three-quarter, quarter view.

  This is what you get to hear if Alma Martin is your teacher and you are into your second or third drawing lesson.

  Here’s another. When sketching your wife there are always three people in the room with you at the time. There’s yourself, the artist, your wife who is the subject, and there is the figure emerging on the canvas.

  The first time I heard that was in the car on our way to the Eliots’. The second time was at my mother’s place. Doug and Guy and their wives were in attendance, Guy with a look of apprehension, Doug with his raised smile, like he’s along for the ride to see what will happen.

  Diane was sitting rather testily doing her best not to look Doug’s way. Kath, as it appeared, was also trying not to look Doug’s way, and at the same time finding it hard to look back at Guy. Frances was smiling back at me as if to say, Isn’t this a hoot? Only my mother was in professional mode, silent, moving quiet as a shadow into position while the old master held court.

  Alma gave me a searching look and held it on me as he explained the next part. ‘The trick is to make sure that the woman sitting for you and the woman emerging on canvas are the same person.’

  Doug gave me a nudge. Alma saw that and switched his attention to Doug.

  ‘Douglas, how well do you know your wife?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  A scoff from Diane.

  Now Alma found Guy.

  ‘And you, sir?’ He’d forgotten Guy’s name.

  ‘We’ve been married seventeen years.’

  Alma’s eyes twinkled while he considered that answer, unexpected you would have to say, possibly misunderstood by Guy, but Alma decided to let it pass. He still didn’t know Guy that well.

  ‘And Harry, of course,’ he said. But that wasn’t a question. It wasn’t anything in particular but it had the effect of making me feel guilty all the same, especially when Frances raised her eye my way.

  Nowadays this is a sample question from Alma’s introductory classes on portraiture. ‘How well do you know your wife?’ It’s designed to disarm.

  You’re not supposed to actually answer. The question is the preliminary step to finding out.

  At my mother’s house that night Alma invited Doug and me and Guy to take a final look at our wives (the ‘end-of-the-pier view’ Alma calls it). Then he asked us to go into the next room and draw what we think we saw.

  He said, ‘Take your time but don’t take too long about it—the National Gallery isn’t holding its breath.’

  We pushed into the dining room with our pencils and sketch pads. By dint of the sessions out at the Eliots’ place, I knew the drill. I said, ‘Don’t procrastinate and fart about. Just get it down.’

  Doug started to say something—I cut him off: ‘…and don’t talk.’ We scribbled in silence. Once Guy cleared his throat and half stuck up his hand for my attention. He asked if he could start again. ‘There are no rules,’ I told him. ‘Just get Kath down on that sheet of paper.’

  ‘How much time is left?’ he asked.

  I told him, ‘There’s no time. A sketch doesn’t know time.’ Though less than a minute later Alma opened the door and invited us back in for step three, which is: Take your sketch back to the other room and compare it with the woman sitting/reading/eating an apple in the model’s chair.

  Alma waited until Guy was through the door. Guy would rather have stayed in the dining room and closed the curtains and hid behind the couch.

  ‘Now ask yourself. Are there two different women in your life? No? Really?’ (Smirking now.) ‘Okay, let’s put it this way. Is the woman who sleeps in your bed and who bore your children the same woman you carry around in your head? Let’s find out. Harry, let’s start with you. Let’s see your drawing.’

  It’s a cheap fairground trick designed to rattle and alarm, but effective, because it sets the student up for the first lesson. Memory is unreliable. Secondly, seeing is not the same as looking. And in learning how to draw what you really learn is how to see. Once you learn how to see, good or bad or better doesn’t come into it. Yearning just flies out the window. The only thing of consequence is what sits before you.

  In recent weeks there are things I have wondered about the old rat-catching days of Alma’s ‘in lieu of’ arrangement. I can’t understand why it didn’t catch on. Why, in those first uneasy truce-making months of soldiers returning to their women after an interval in some cases of years, why drawing classes weren’t introduced. Imagine if drawing had become an activity with a community focus? Imagine if Alma had wandered up to George in the early days of his quixotic hill removal exercise and tapped him on the shoulder and led him back to the house, sat my mother down and put a pencil in George’s hand. The one and only explanation is that he was in love with my mother and he couldn’t give her up as he almost certainly would have had he shown George in which direction both to look and focus his efforts. Far better to watch George labour day after day on that hill and have his wife to himself. Of course Frank Bryant was a surprise; he never anticipated that event happening. Yet I can’t help think that if Alma had put my mother to one side he might have killed that yearning for better things that spawned in the years following World War Two.

  Still, it is never too late to make amends.

  The day I changed my mind about Dean Eliot was the day I led him back to the Garden of Memories where Violet was waiting and somewhat unexpectedly talking to Kath Stuart. They were sitting on the same bench, the Eliot twins playing on the grass by their feet. Violet was first to see us. Then Kath looked up. She rose to her feet, smoothing out her skirts. She kissed Violet on the cheek, gave me a little wave and started to move to the far gate. She was out to avoid me and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  ‘Kath,’ I called out. ‘Why don’t you come down to the shop? Guy’s there.’

  She stopped to think. There’s surely a dozen reasons why I can’t do that. She must have had a total mind block because at the moment when she so desperately wanted an excuse she couldn’t think of one.

  I made another discovery ten minutes later back at the shop. No matter how much you may want to, you can??
?t force people into doing what they don’t want to do.

  In retrospect I blame my heady success with Dean. Flush with that, I thought I could now wave a magic wand over Kath and Guy and make things better between them. Moreover I was convinced that I knew how.

  As we came into Pre-Loved, Guy was touchingly shining up some bronze doorstops and that immediately enamoured me of him, especially after Kath’s attempt to slide away from me at the gardens. I had heard whispering. I gathered something had gone down between her and Doug. I didn’t know the details and didn’t want to, and I hoped I was wrong. Still, if I had the feeling that something had happened then I’m sure Guy was also well aware of it.

  He looked up from the brass doorstops, pleased to see me. Then he saw who I had with me and suddenly he looked unhappy. His eyes started blinking. For an awful few seconds I thought he might cry. Kath looked away. She’d just discovered the child’s zebra rocking-horse. In retrospect I was a bit too loud, forceful, eager to make things happen after my success with the Eliots, still bathing in the warm feeling of seeing them drive away to the beach—in my van, I should add, reflecting the new cooperative spirit between me and Dean. He said he would bring it back and walk back out to the beach. I told him, no, he could return it in the morning and even Violet looked surprised. I was still feeling bad for slapping him. All the same, it was a good result. Well, anyway, for all that I felt like I was on a roll; that of all days this was one where I might be invincible. I should have just bought a raffle ticket and been content. That’s what I should have done.

  Instead I said to Kath, ‘Why don’t you draw Guy?’

  She gave me a crazy look. Guy stopped blinking. I said, ‘Sure. It’s fun.’