The Sitters Read online

  He was still accusing me of something after all those years had gone by. Twenty years. And it was related to sex, of course, sex that he’d never had and that I’d had. He was still thinking about it. Still nursing this little injury, this grudge. It was long after we’d ceased to be friends. I was living over in Paris at the time, visiting the art museums, and my mother was off on a trip to Spain with my sister and her husband. My sister was paying for the trip. It was my mother’s first holiday outside England. They’d invited him too. But my father had refused to go with them.

  While I was over there in Paris enjoying myself I thought of him alone in our old council flat in London. I hadn’t paid a visit for nearly ten years. So I went over to see him. I probably had some nostalgic illusion about it. The old place. Home.

  I was nervous about seeing him. It wasn’t nothing to me. It wasn’t easy for me to visit him.

  He was drinking watered whisky from a tumbler like the one he’d kept his teeth in on the bathroom shelf when I was a kid. And he was attending to his books, the kitchen table littered with bits and pieces of material and this odd sort of repair kit of tools he’d put together for himself, pretending he was a craftsman. He didn’t offer me a drink. Other men his age were out looking after their allotments or putting on a bet, which was the kind of thing he despised more than anything. Gardening, gambling, the ordinary things. He’d never had a friend. He made no pretence of welcoming me. He didn’t want to see me. It was as simple as that. He wanted to be left alone.

  He’s got his glasses on the end of his nose and his hat on to keep his head warm and he’s bent over the table dabbing oil or glue or something on the spine of a book. I’m standing there watching him and wishing I hadn’t come over, when he says, quiet and intent on dabbing at the book, ‘That girl came to see us you know.’ And there’s a pause while he goes on dabbing and I register that he’s said something to me.

  ‘What girl?’ I say.

  He looks up at me, just a quick assessment, his eye gleaming out from under the brim of his hat, and he adjusts his glasses with his finger and sniffs. I understand something I’ve never understood before. He hates me. There’s a small cold place in my chest where I realise this. It’s something that’s just grown in him over the years. Maybe he’s only just realised it himself. It’s not his fault. It’s a tumour. A tumour of hatred. It will kill him. He doesn’t want it treated. He doesn’t want to recover from it. He wants me to know I’m killing him. He wants the tumour of hatred to kill him. He wants me to know that all the time I’ve been living in Australia, ever since I emigrated on my own as a boy, ever since I escaped, that I’ve been killing him. He blames me. His son. Who else? For the failure of those old dreams. The enormous tumour he carries is my fault. Now I’ve come back to have a look at him and he doesn’t want me to see him. It only makes things worse. I’m spoiling his party. His private party with these old books and the whisky and his paraphernalia. I’m looking into his secret, and it’s empty, and he doesn’t know how to defend its emptiness from the destruction of my gaze.

  ‘What girl?’ I ask him. Even though I’m remembering. There was only one. I’m incredulous. I’ve realised what he’s talking about. It’s twenty years ago. He dabs at the book and while he waits for the glue to season he rolls one of his cigarettes and sniffs a couple more times. He’s satisfying his hatred of his son.

  ‘She sat over there,’ he says, licking the cigarette paper and pointing over his glasses towards the gas fire.

  ‘Your mother gave her a cup of tea.’

  His smell is sour. Rancid. He’s like some leftover shoved to the back of the pantry and forgotten. Where’s the lovely aromatic walnut and paints and sharpened pencils now?

  I was fifteen and she was eighteen. I’d left school and was working for a farmer in Somerset, in a village near the edge of Exmoor, before emigrating to Australia. She worked with her mother in the late-night sandwich caravan at the bus station in Taunton. That’s how I met her. I’d started going in to Taunton on a Saturday afternoon to look for a bit of relief. I’d go to the pictures then hang around the Blue Dolphin watching the loving couples. Then I’d catch the last bus back to the farm.

  Except for one or two stragglers like me the bus station was deserted at that time of night. There was just this van where you could get a ham sandwich and a cup of tea. I sat out in the dark in one of the shelters and watched her. It was a little drama. A private theatre. She and her mother in the lighted van serving the stragglers, framed by the enormous dark allotment of the deserted bus station. I’d go to the bus station early just to watch her. Her fresh white apron over her blouse and her bare arms, her dark hair loose over her shoulders, tossing back and forth as she worked, its lights going this way and that, fascinating me. The way her mother glanced sideways at her, proud and afraid. Stern and yielding. I’d think about her all week while I was working on the farm and on Saturday afternoon I’d have a bath in front of the stove and dress up in my suit and catch the bus to town. And there she would be. The tea and sandwich girl.

  Before I spoke she’d sensed my fear. She laughed and looked triumphantly at her mother. The cool night and the rain. Our poverty, which we were not aware of, and which was as pure as our youth. We were innocent and cruel. The enormous night. Our bodies. I don’t remember the sequence. Maybe there wasn’t a sequence. Maybe you forget these passages the way you forget the seconds immethately before an accident. I can hardly see into it now. When I was to emigrate to Australia and had returned to London, I told my father I was going back to Taunton for my last weekend. He said, ‘You’re not leaving some girl in trouble are you?’

  I scoffed at such a possibility. But he knew. We were having a beer together. Men. For the first and last time in our lives. I wanted him to give me one of his old-fashioned hugs and to see his eyes light up with possibilities for me before I went. But he’d stopped dreaming he was me.

  ‘I’m going to say goodbye to my friends,’ I told him, swallowing the beer he’d bought me.

  ‘What friends?’ he wants to know. It’s his turn to scoff. ‘I’ve never heard you talk about any friends.’ He warns me then against causing suffering. He’s serious about this. It’s a lecture. He wants his son to be a good man. A decent man. Moral and upright. As he has never been able to be himself but has always wished to be. We’re standing at the bar in the railway station and we both know I’m only going back for one diing. There’s a disgust and a hopelessness with this knowledge between us that has never been there before. It establishes our lives. Our futures. We see how sordid we are. We’ve both failed already. The little dream of childhood gone. His and mine. We can’t admire each other. It’s all over. And when I leave to catch the train we shake hands and avoid each other’s eyes. The seed of his tumour has already germinated. I feel the weight that it will grow to in twenty years as I walk away from him down the platform.

  I’m excited by her tears. Her nakedness. The way she lies on the bed with her back to me, curled away from me, curled into herself and into her despair, her bare thighs glistening in the blue light from the street and the rain. My power to abandon her increasing me, oppressing me. I reach out and touch her shoulder. I am lost. I feel my loneliness for the first time in my life. I am longing to be my old self.

  ‘I’ll come back in two years,’ I promise softly, thrilling to the lie. Her dark hair is filled with unusual light. She is my first woman. I hadn’t expected this. The slowness and the gravity. I can’t wait to be gone and to have her complete, as my memory. Light and safe. I promise to write from Australia’s outback. She clings to me when I try to leave and weeps, promising a life, vowing it, like a knight-errant vowing fidelity to a sovereign, faithful until death. Her humiliation is so compelling I almost decide to stay.

  I get dressed and go out the door and down the stairs and I leave the house where she has her room. I am a meaner and a grander version of my old self. I no longer know what I am, or what I am to become. I am grown and diminished
. And as I walk away, suddenly her insults and her hatred are streaming after me into the darkness. Gratifying me. Lashing the air. A storm beating down on me. Making me duck and run. I’m being cursed. I become a man with a curse on me. It never leaves me in all the years I wander around Australia. It never leaves any of us. The curse. God’s curse. Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! Three times to make it stick. And we deserve it.

  ‘That’s right,’ my father says, dragging out his message, dragging on his pungent cigarette, inspecting with the cracked tips of his fingers the state of the glue, the repair he’s making to the spine of the worthless book, then gesturing at the room he’s lived in for fifty years. ‘She came here to see us and sat over there and your mother gave her a cup of tea.’

  He is merciless and without dignity.

  I remind him, ‘Remember when we used to go on the Greenline bus and paint, Dad? Out into the country?’

  ‘We went onceV he shouts. His truth denies everything. I’ve betrayed him. He is already mad. He wishes to remind me. He has possessed no influence with me. She came to see them. She was eighteen. I’ll never remember her name. She had no existence except my existence. I remember only her nakedness, cool and pale and glowing on the bed, as I leave. She’s still with me. There’s the guilt, the secret joyful guilt, and there’s this faint arousal, like an old song carried to me then lost.

  Jessica brought me some family snapshots. ‘That’s all there are,’ she said. They were in an old tin from her mother’s place. There were one or two letters and some postcards in the tin as well as the snapshots. The postcards were from her from London, addressed to her mother in the Araluen Valley. I pinned the photos on the wall above the solander and we looked at them. A proof of the etching I’d done for the journal was lying on the solander. While I pinned up the photos she examined the proof, turning it round in her hands, holding it off, squinting at it, trying it this way then that way.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I asked, observing her, wanting her to like it. It was the first time an artist had taken her likeness. She didn’t know what to think. It disturbed her to see this image that was her and not her. Seeing herself as strange, flat and familiar for the first time. Disquieted by the little gulf of detachment opened for her by the print. The printed drawing. The intimate sign of my hand moving across the page. A touch she’d scarcely felt. A reproduction. Once removed. Twice removed. She didn’t know how to approach it. Screwing up her face in an effort to see into the likeness a feeling of herself in there. The two-dimensional image calling her in and warding her off at the same time. The likeness getting in the way of seeing anything at all. Nothing to see. The likeness being unforgiving, revealing everything. Concealing everything. Her eyes were like cold discs. It was another woman. She wanted to ask me if I really saw her this way, if people, if everyone, saw this woman when they saw her. But she held back the question and kept it to herself. I watched her.

  She turned to me. ‘Perhaps you get used to it.’

  ‘It’s only a likeness,’ I said, and I took it out of her hand and slipped it into the drawer.

  Portraiture is the art of misrepresentation. It’s the art of unlikeness. That’s why it’s so difficult. No one really knows how to do it. It’s all guesswork. You’ve got to avoid the authority of the likeness. You can’t afford to be trapped by that. You’ve got to slip past the likeness and close your eyes to it. You’ve got to reach into the dark and touch something else. The problem is always to visualise the person. Portraiture is an act of faith. In portraiture it’s the shy beast you’re after not the mask. Beauty and the Beast. You’ve got to entice the beast out of hiding into the open, past the gentle contours of the familiar. You’ve got to be patient and wait till it makes a move. If you rush things you’ll scare it and it’ll never come out. You have to gain its trust. You have to put yourself in danger. You have to offer it something of yourself. You have to take a risk.

  That’s not the whole truth, of course.

  Portraiture’s a dangerous business. It’s fraught with misunderstanding. I slipped the etching into the drawer. I didn’t offer to give her an impression. I didn’t want her likeness coming between us. That’s the mistake we make, to look for the perfect image. That’s Greek philosophy. It’s the antique error. The error of monotheism. It gets you nowhere. The longing for a fixed truth resident behind the reality we’ve brought into being ourselves. That’s futility. The fallacy of the Western intellectual tradition, the idea of perfection. As if our reality is going to hold forever, in there somewhere if only we can get to it, if only we can dig deep enough, a hard impermeable kernel of truth that will hold out against the apocalypse of our loss of faith.

  I closed the drawer. ‘It’s the signature they want from me these days,’ I said. ‘Likenesses are all alike.’

  She wasn’t sure whether I was mocking her or not. That’s how careful you have to be. You have to think before you speak. It takes two to make a portrait. And one of them’s always yourself.

  She’s a fourth generation Australian. She tells me this as if it’s something for her to be proud of, something she’s required to feel modest about. Four generations, her gaze looking off into the past as she says it. Her ancestors came from Devon. But first she tells me her mother lives in the Araluen Valley. I’d heard of the Araluen Valley but had never been there. It’s two hours drive. People in Canberra often spoke to me of the Araluen Valley. They always said how beautiful it was, as if they owned it, or as if it owed its beauty to their appreciation of it, as if knowing about it made them superior to me for not knowing about it. Being able to tell me about it confirmed them in their good opinion of themselves. As if they were responsible for the beauty they were acknowledging. So it had never occurred to me to go to the Araluen Valley.

  ‘Have you been to the Araluen Valley?’ It’s the first question I’d ask whenever there was an overseas visitor around. I’d get in before the others had a chance. ‘You’d better go there,’ I’d say. ‘It’s not to be missed!’

  Her mother’s place is not exactly in the Araluen Valley. It’s several kilometres past the main part of the valley, where the peach orchards are — which is the part that everyone knows and has told me about, the beautiful part, the picturesque part. Her mother’s place is further down the Araluen Creek towards the coast, where the valley closes in and the road winds along up on the side of the hill through the forest, it’s down towards the junction with the river. Her mother’s place is concealed from the road by the stringy-bark forest. You wouldn’t know it was there if you were driving past along the road. We have to take a side-road through the forest to get to it. Here we’re among the underbrush and dry ground-cover. Then we come out onto a slope covered with thin native grass, a small paddock that runs down towards an unpainted split slab and weatherboard house surrounded by a fenced garden. Beyond the house there’s a couple of outbuildings then a sense of a steep bank and a creek. Casuarinas rise above the line of the roof of the house and the outbuildings, their foliage light and moving, the sky behind them glinting as the breeze moves them back and forth. The light of the day is sharp and clear. The grass and the trees shine with it. The surface of the close-cropped paddock is polished. A wisp of silver smoke rises from the chimney at the far end of the house. A woman is in the garden, bent over, chipping at something. Beyond the house and the garden and beyond the creek and the casuarinas, hills close off the distance, soft with the forest. Magpies walk about near the perimeter of the garden and stab at the ground for insects. They pause in their search to examine us, and they warble in a quiet, interior way, conversing with themselves. When we pull up, the woman in the garden continues to chip at the earth. She hasn’t heard us.

  Jessica switches off the motor and we sit in the car. It’s as if she’s made a decision. As if she’s arrived at a decision to stay in the car. It’s possible we won’t be getting out of the car. It’s possible she’ll give me a look at the old place from where we are then drive back out to the road again, like
strangers who’ve taken a minute to decide they’ve driven into the wrong place. I can hear her breathing. I can feel her uncertainty, her tension after the long drive.

  Then she says, ‘The Keal place.’

  Presenting it to me.

  ‘I don’t know why you had to see it. It isn’t me any more.’ She makes an impatient noise in her throat, acknowledging that she’s never going to find the words to explain the significance of this place to me. Or to herself. On the drive down she’s told me her story. It’s a kind of reverse of my own story, though I haven’t remarked on this because her telling is complicated by certain other things, and because to have mentioned myself would have been to deflect her from her own story, which I was eager to hear. She left this place on a scholarship when she was eighteen and went to live in London. She was, she says, the only person from Lower Araluen to ever do this. In the valley it gives her the distinction of someone who sold out. A traitor. A renegade.

  ‘They don’t get over that,’ she says. ‘They don’t forget that kind of thing in a hurry.’ What’s thirty years, after all, when you’re talking about four or five generations? But they might, she suggests, boast about her going to London even though they’ll make her pay for it. She’s given them a certain distinction. She’s lived in England for thirty-one years and she’s become a distinguished professor. Now she’s a visiting fellow at the National University. But as far as they’re concerned she’s still accountable to them. I understand that them really refers to her mother. She still has responsibilities in the valley. It’s her birthright.