I felt I could leave that scene now. I could continue on my walk. I was back in the shadows of Furness Lane when I remembered with striking clarity what a model, a nurse, once said of sitting for the American painter Andrew Wyeth: ‘I feel the colour going right through my face. That’s the intensity. My nipples were erect three-quarters of the time.’
Colour, face, intensity—all that I was comfortable with. Nipples, though. I thought perhaps I had missed something and went back to the window for another look, just to check.
Of course it was ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous. You could argue, rightly, I think, what business is it of mine if Frances’s nipples choose to react? You could argue I shouldn’t feel so bloody proprietorial about it. You can run all these things through the chamber of cool reason in your brain and still you march forward to press your nose against the windowpane. You simply have to see. You need to find out.
For several generations the factory produced only paint, a fact we find embarrassing today. It brings other anomalies to mind, factory workers arriving on bicycles to car assembly plants, vegetarian butchers moving past swaying carcasses on the chain at the abattoir. It does seem crazy now to think that when we swam in paint we didn’t know what to do with it. We used it for all the wrong things. We used it to cover up our lives. We were quite open and forward on this. We spoke about the need for a coat of paint. Paint was something to pull around our shoulders, take refuge in, use to cover up. But no one could say, truly say as our advertisements boasted, that our paint knew local conditions. In truth, it only knew itself as a fast-bonding chemical adhesive that came in a number of colours, though pleasing to the eye. This isn’t paint as our early forebears knew and understood it. In the caves of Lascaux a colour chart is not as important as the rendered figures of bison and mammoth. Closer to home, the pre-European rock art on the limestone escarpments worn away by grazing cattle still make sense of the moa and their prehistoric hunter. Along the shore where NE Paints used to host their picnics, thin men in hair knots and rain capes used to stalk these huge flightless birds. It was an unfair contest—wit and prior knowledge versus the witless—but one which has given us our most enduring art. The giant birds with their small heads look very much like women on all fours under hair dryers. One year while digging a hangi the men uncovered a pit into which the stick men had driven the giant bird. All of us kids were hauled over to stand at the edge of the pit and gape down at the white markings of the moa, its flight plan ensnared in clay sediment built up over centuries of windblown deposit and floodwaters. How sad it looked in its spina bifida arrangement. The mayor and other dignitaries were due soon, so the men shovelled in another layer of dirt, dropped in the oven stones, and lit the fire. Hours later when they hauled up the sacks of steamed chicken and pork and kumaras, the thought of the giant extinct bird heating up another foot down wasn’t as remote as some of us would have liked. We picked at our kumara and left the chicken wings on paper plates to rot in the hot January sun.
Sometimes I like to think, what if the paint management was to come back? What if that row of generals in shiny off-the-rack suits and fleshy faces were to stand in the doorway scratching at their freckled scalps to see these old walls once covered in calendars and pinups now covered with the portraits of various wives, ours and others, Rembrandt’s Saskia with pearls in her hair, Madame Bonnard in her shallow bath, half her body washed away. In one corner the hissing and roaring potbelly that sees us through the dark winter nights. Along one wall we are growing a handsome library. And among our choice of mentors we all have our favourites. Bonnard is one. Chagall another. Matisse’s Interior at Nice lends a more cautionary note to our aspirations. Is it his wife? I’m not even sure it is. I imagine it could be. Let’s assume it is Matisse’s wife, this woman who sits in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. It is as if Matisse has said to himself, I cannot understand this woman. I cannot know her. However, I can understand the kitchen in all its surface simplicity so I will place this woman on the edge of what is understood.
One night Alma produced Hilary to sit for us. She looked a bit like Queen Victoria, but that isn’t something to share out loud. When you draw, comparisons are unhelpful. All the same it was hard to shut out thoughts of Queen Victoria as we concentrated on that red rumpled face and folds of heavy curtain material.
The curtains had come from the Boyers. A year ago, after the Gondwanaland fiasco, the Boyers sold up and announced they were moving to Ireland. Ireland! ‘Ireland!’ we gasped. We tried to think where in Australia there was an Ireland. But they meant Ireland Ireland. It gets wilder. The Boyers hadn’t actually been to Ireland but they’d seen Ireland in the movies. In other words, the passing-ship view. A glimpse. A taste. The Boyers didn’t care. Ireland’s was a go-ahead economy. It was booming, in major forward-thrust mode.
So off they went leaving us with their cast-off furniture, some oddities in amongst it all.
A cannon ball from Waterloo. I said to Jamie Boyer, ‘How do we know it’s from Waterloo?’
Jamie looked suitably put out. He said he knew because his dad said it was from Waterloo, and his dad before him. Family history is always the last thing I rely on when matters to do with provenance come up. On the other hand it doesn’t pay to fool around with family history. To mock it or doubt it is to play with fire.
After thinking about it, I decided, well, the cannon ball could have come off the fields of Waterloo. Then we came to that difficult point in any negotiation. I laughed out loud when Jamie mentioned the price.
‘Well it is from Waterloo,’ he said. He had me there, and suddenly we were back to discussing origins and matters to do with authenticity. I pointed out that while I was happy to accept that the cannon ball came off the fields of Waterloo it didn’t mean the next customer would see it in the same way.
‘You see my point, Jamie.’ In my game value depends on proof.
Things became heated. Julia Boyer said it was this very small-mindedness that was driving them away. In the end I talked them around to a price reflecting the value of a cannon ball that might have come from Waterloo. No sooner had I done that and I began to have second thoughts.
Who would buy a cannon ball? For what purpose? A cannon ball is a bit kitsch these days. I could feel myself getting cold feet. The Boyers also sensed my waning interest, and panicked. They were so determined to see me buy that cannon ball. They glanced around their living room for another chattel to throw in with the cannon ball.
The curtains! Of course.
‘Tell you what, Harry, why don’t you take the curtains and the cannon ball.’
I could see the determination in their eyes. It scared me to tell the truth. If I declined, what then? A brick through my window?
As it happened, Doug picked up the cannon ball a week later for a bit more than what I paid for it—reflecting the fact this was a cannon ball that may have rolled off the very fields of Waterloo. The curtains were a bit more of a problem. Long heavily braided drops that no one wanted or came near for months on end. Occasionally someone would rub the material between thumb and forefinger while I stood behind the counter, holding my breath.
The morning of our session with Hilary
, Alma came in and sniffed around. He said he didn’t know what he was after until his eye fell upon the Boyers’ curtains. For tax purposes I put the curtains down as a community donation.
At the paint factory Hilary sat compliantly as Alma wrapped her in curtain. He could have wrapped her in seaweed and she wouldn’t have minded. He spent some time with the lamp until Hilary was side lit. Some instruction followed.
‘I don’t want anyone to draw for ten minutes.’
We were just to sit and look at the crumpled face of our old schoolteacher, a woman who, as the expression goes, was once pretty as a daisy, and who had once lied to Alma that she had a rat in her kitchen just so he would draw her, and she would get to feel the sunshine on her body while her Jimmy was away at the war.
We saw the cheap foliage of the curtains, their second-hand wretchedness. We didn’t see a movement from Hilary, not a breath. Only her eyes moved. At first her gaze went over the top of us. Then she seemed to reel it back to her frontal lobe interior. For five minutes we stared. I remember several years ago, plans for a historical route. There was talk at council and the subject of Hilary came up when we paused to consider what our visitors, hungry for local experience and history, might see, and it went without saying that such a historic route would have to get around the public ruin of Hilary. One suggestion was to relocate her as you might a public building, or walk her to a bench inside the Garden of Memories. The idea was abandoned, and some blamed Hilary. She was an embarrassment to us all.
I looked at the Boyer curtains. I saw how comfortable she felt in them, as if they were years she could feel against her. If you looked carefully you could see her mouth move. Hilary was shaping to speak and when she did it came unexpectedly and ghostlike, as though a mummified corpse had suddenly found its voice through all those bandages.
‘I thought I saw Harry Bryant out there?’
I stuck up my hand.
‘I’m here, Hilary.’
‘And little Dougie Monroe? Is that you?’
‘It’s me, Mrs Phillips.’
Guy had his hand up though she hadn’t mentioned his name. But then he stood and introduced himself. He said, ‘I remember your lessons on the Russian…’ He couldn’t remember his name.
‘Bellinghausen,’ I said, and Hilary moved her head my way.
‘And what do you remember, Harry?’
Her voice was firm and gentle as it had been all those years ago.
‘I remember a man who was looking for the Great White Continent and who mistook the ice shelf for fog.’ And I did what Doug had done and called her Mrs Phillips.
A tear ran down her cheek. She sniffed, then looked down, possibly for something to wipe her eyes with. We all waited for Alma to do something. He seemed unsure of his role and chose the easel for refuge. In the end it was Guy who got up and lumbered onto the stage with a handkerchief.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Guy. ‘You were always such a nice boy.’
Guy beamed—he turned around to see we had heard that.
In the coffee break I said to Alma, ‘Hilary’s changed. She seems transformed.’
His eyes went still.
‘Hilary has, has she?’
Okay. Point taken. The world never disappoints a jaundiced eye. Alma still tells newcomers that it helps to actually like your wife if you’re planning to draw her. Otherwise, how you feel will show. There’s no way to keep that out.
The jaundiced eyes sees the poor wager slumming it for extra cash in the Christmas parade. The kids see Father Christmas.
Just supposing one day I had sat down with her on that bench outside the video store, leant forward with my head hanging between my legs, grinning back at the pavement cracks, would I have heard a sane voice? There’s no way of being sure, but I doubt it. The paint factory made it possible. The light. The circumstance. Even the Boyers’ curtain fabric. The moment, shall we say. Our collective gaze stripping away the crust we’d all had a hand in building down through the years, and at last the long-suffering inmate inside of Hilary feeling it was okay to venture back out into the open.
20
There have been other successes. Another story is on its way, I’m afraid.
I don’t think I will mention names except to say of this young couple (which will almost certainly give the game away, but discretion in this instance is outweighed by the lesson learnt so public good wins again), one was always coming and going. He had come and gone. Now it was her turn. This was mere prelude to a future tearful reunion where they would cling to each other and wonder how they could have ever been so stupid to wander off when they did. Briefly, a kind of domestic balance was achieved. You’d see them out and about, hand in hand or cuddling each other in the Garden of Memories, laughing and having a good time. She with her tee-hee Maori laugh. Him with his Pakeha snigger. They couldn’t have kids of their own. They. Well, it was her. She couldn’t have kids. Something to do with her Fallopian tubes, some past injury she was vague about. It was a shame, a great shame after everything they had been through, because like everyone says, what else are we here on earth for?
The unfortunate thing is, of all the places to shove blame they chose to blame each other. For a while it was his sperm count that came under fire. It was low, and some who’d worked with him at the fish plant thought that was likely as he was a lazy bugger, always drawing and scampering off in his lunch hour to ‘some other place’. It was devastating for her to discover the real problem; though a let-off for him, you might imagine. She threw herself into work with glue-sniffing street kids. She was always palming off her own kids while she took herself off to a distant hui. It was amazing where she rang back from—the Far North, and once, memorably, Hong Kong. It was a spur-of-the-moment madness that saw her board the plane. Now she had phoned to say she was working in a nightclub which, he said later, explained the jukebox in the background. Eventually when she came back from Hong Kong she looked very smart, her hair was done up differently, there was a wardrobe of black skirts. She was home for a fortnight and then he ran off up the coast.
It is this couple that comes to mind whenever the grounding effect of drawing classes comes up for discussion.
When she sits for us she smiles. She holds her knees together, one foot on the floor, the other foot dangling in a way that puts us in mind of a Hong Kong bar stool. Still, we are left with the feeling that she is finally where she wants to be, with all of us looking at her. Her smile beams only in one direction, however. Craftily, he pretends not to notice.
On the subject of Dean…There have been some more changes down at the paint factory. A community arts board gave us another grant and with Guy’s help we’ve built a proper studio space. Dean runs the downstairs art supplies area. Aisle upon aisle is filled with tubes of paint, sketch pads, crayons, pencils, charcoal. Customers creep up and down the aisles on their private shopping missions.
Newcomers are prone to feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to start. They tend to thrust a sheet of paper with its list of items across the counter, then Dean might say, ‘I see Alma has you working with charcoal. I see he neglected to put down the HB 6 pencil. Shall I add one of those? I have a set
on special.’ And so it goes. Dean enjoys his expertise. He’s developed a range of frowns and purse-lipped deliberations to go with his newly acquired know-how. ‘About the pencils,’ he’ll explain. ‘You will want the darker and heavier lead for hatching. I know Alma favours the HB 6 but that’s not to say you can’t go darker.’
21
We’re up at the tip one afternoon when the rain comes. It is sudden and violent. And across the tip face the rats scramble for shelter. Alma and I make a beeline for the Eliots’ old banged-up orange Datsun. When we sit in it, shuttered into that confined upholstered place, it is almost possible to hear the spluttering of the Eliot kids in the back. You can feel Dean’s white-hot silence, and the gentle corrective glances of Violet from her side of the car. It is just a passing sense, a sniff as we close the doors and silence walls up around us, quickly followed by the aromas of the tip.
‘This woman Ophelia. That’s all over now, is it?’
There are any number of ways to answer this. The easiest thing in the end is to say, ‘Yep. It’s all over.’
Alma is pleased to hear that. His fingers tap on the steering wheel. His face livens up.
‘I’ll tell Alice. She’ll be relieved to hear it.’ He turns his face to look at me. ‘That is, if you don’t mind, Harry.’
‘If you need to,’ I say.
‘I don’t like your mother feeling burdened…’
We watch the rain fall.
In a while Alma says, ‘That Douglas is a strange fish, isn’t he?’ And so it goes.