Paint Your Wife (15 page)

8

In the late spring of that year, the view from my mother's sitting room slowly enlarged.
The sky seemed to reach down further, bending at the shoulder. There was a day in
November when for the first time she could see the sunny clay base of the coastal
hills curling northwards. The promised sea view from the window was still to reveal
itself but in the crystallised light hovering on the edge of the farmland there was
a hint of things to come.

If we are to call this George's composition then we can think of my mother as the
sitter, the bored sitter, and like Cézanne's model, showing signs of falling from
her perch. Signs even of going a little mad.

She found herself taking issue with the sun. From where she stood, the sun seemed
to be playing favourites. It was clearly on George's side, the way it would sit on
his shoulder as he ran his barrow along the planks. It may seem a stupid thing to
resent but not if you thought, as Alice did, that the sun actually liked George.
It liked George more than it did her. The way it sat so companionably on George's
shoulder compared to the
way it spoke to my mother at the window: ‘See what an idle
life you lead, Alice. Look at George!'

But who looked after the chickens? Who had shifted the heifers? Who looked after
the sheep? And who washed George's bloody clothes and looked after the damn house
and cooked the meals?

George could quietly point to two things as his daily contribution. The gradual
elimination of one hill, and the creation of another. As pointless as washing clothes
in order to get them dirty again, you could argue. And while the new hill obliterated
the swamp, to the naked eye it didn't look right. Part of the problem lay in knowing
how it had come into being. Even the sheep couldn't be fooled. They wandered around
its base, raising their black snouts at it, but that is as far as it went. They weren't
about to be conned into climbing its sides. The cow lay in the paddock patiently
waiting for the hill to leave and for things to return to what they used to be. The
magpies never landed on it either. Cows for the day, the magpies stood in the paddock
trying to stare the hill down. Even the windblown rain refused alternatives and
tried to land where it had always fallen, which is to say on the swampy paddock that
now lay buried under a mountain of relocated dirt.

My mother was back to thinking about the future. She had started to contemplate that
defining moment of completion when the finished work would slip in like the new day.
She imagined the moment—stooping to pick up one of George's socks from the carpet,
there in the window she would find a glittering blue line with a white sailing boat
at the edge of the bottom paddock. More optimistically she saw George hanging up
his shovel and resuming his farm duties. They would be
outwardly happy, of course,
because that would be part of the deal. Officially she would be obliged to show joy
because look at what George had done for her. Other women would make admiring noises
and complain about their lazy bastards of husbands. That was one option. To share
her life with Alma Martin was another. A third and completely unforeseen option availed
itself that spring.

My mother was in town on her way to Franklin's to pick up some mousetraps. Around
the pub she ran into some upgrading work to the footpaths. The area was roped off
and she was obliged to detour along boards that were still wet from earlier rain
when she slipped and was about to fall as a hand reached out and steadied her.

‘Oops, caught you,' said the man.

Meeting our life partner often results from such a trifling incident. Tui Brown née
Waverley was standing at the end of the wharf when a gust of wind lifted the hat
off her head and blew it out to sea. Stan Brown saw the whole thing happen from the
beach. Next thing, Tui sees Stan rowing out in a dingy to where the woollen hat floated
soggily just beneath the surface, like a purple jellyfish. At a dance Jimmy shouldered
his way across a crowded floor until he reached Hilary, and there he remained, silent
but smiling hard, waiting to be discovered which he duly was.

Frank Bryant's good points are all neatly congregated into that singular moment where
he sticks out his hand to prevent my mother's fall. Frank's grasp was firm and sure
of itself. Once she regained her balance Alice noticed he had nice brown eyes. They
regarded her back with surprise. Just that morning Frank Bryant had picked up a coin
from the footpath, and now this.

‘I was just about to pour a cuppa,' he said.

So he was quietly confident around the opposite sex. That appealed to my mother. She
followed him to his truck. In the cab he got out a thermos. He had an extra cup which
prompted her to say, ‘So you were expecting me?' And he said jokingly, ‘I always
carry an extra cup just in case.'

So he could play along. Pick up the thread of a line. She liked that, too. He had
enough milk only for himself but when he learned that she also took milk he happily
forfeited his share. While they drank their tea my mother asked Frank Bryant a few
questions about himself.

She'd already guessed he wasn't from around here. At least she hadn't seen him before.
‘The Hokianga,' he said, and he hooked his thumb in a certain northwards direction.
‘I was sent down to Ardmore to learn to fly, then the war ended, and so here I am.
Just in time, it would seem.'

His smile was a handsome one.

‘Well Mr Bryant, I owe you two thanks.'

‘Frank,' he said.

‘Frank,
frankly
…'

‘People say that too.'

So he wasn't without wit.

‘Thank you for saving me from my fall and thank you for the tea.'

He gave a military salute and my mother replied with a girlish curtsy and off she
went. A man who caught her knew how to fly. It was an attractive package. And later
as Alice was leaving town, whose truck should quietly rumble up behind but Frank's.
He must have watched in his rear mirror and noted the direction she took; it was
a pleasing thought. Now he leant
across the gear lever to offer her a lift. Over
the noise of the engine she fibbed and said she was expecting someone along any minute.
She was sure Frank would have heard about George's epic undertaking. She didn't want
him to know that the quest to shift the hill was for her benefit, that she was the
woman whom people presumably spoke of, when in fact, as she was happy to discover
and surprised too she would later say, she was quite pleased for Frank to think of
her as unattached for the moment.

Frank drove off and she walked on with a smile. Soon she reached the farm. Across
the paddock there was the stick figure in a black singlet running a barrow-load of
soil along a network of boards. The hill was in two sections now. George had bored
right through the middle to create two smaller termite-like crags. He was on the
homeward leg to completion. My mother says she can remember stopping at the bottom
of Alma Martin's drive and thinking she could go up there and maybe he could draw
her; maybe he might even run away with her. And without consciously deciding one
thing or another she found she'd moved on. By the time she crossed Chinaman's Creek
her thoughts were filled with Frank Bryant, his handsome brown face, his simple eyes.
He was obviously not too set in his ways either. After all, he could lay concrete
and fly. The other thing about this man who had caught her when she slipped was that
he actually looked at her with desire. That was the thing about Alma. Too often Alice
was left with the empty feeling that he was seeking only information. She might as
well be the night sky with Alma's eye fixed to the end of a telescope. Or else she
was a bowl of fruit, interesting to look at in all its shape and configuration. Whereas
Alma would draw it, she
had a feeling Frank Bryant would want to reach for the fruit
and take a bite.

She stopped at the back door and looked dejectedly across the wet grass. There was
the washing she still needed to bring in—George's digging singlets and socks, and
the white blouses Alma liked her to wear when she sat for him. She found herself
thinking of the time Stan Brown dropped his cigarette and ground it out in the sand
before picking up someone else's dinghy and carrying it like a beetle on his back
to the water's edge. Where was her hat? Where was that helpful gust of wind that
would give shape to the future? This impatience of my mother's is responsible for
giving direction to everything that happened thereafter.

The day after she met Frank Bryant she thought to bring him a bottle of milk for
his tea and other eventualities. Now the story had two strands that they would enjoy
telling to each other. The time the young flying ace had flung out a hand to catch
her, and the time she brought him a pint of milk just a minute after he realised
he'd run out. The spirit of reciprocity was cementing itself, and before long Frank
was holding my mother's hand on secretly taken walks around Big Bay to that end of
the shingle beach where famously the fur seals clamber ashore for summer.

Once in a tipsy moment my mother told me Frank wasn't much as a lover. In her opinion
he was too practical. He was the kind of man for whom elaborate directions for putting
up a tent bring a certain joyless satisfaction. She didn't like his dirty fingernails
either. The other thing about Frank was, frankly, his limitations.

They were sitting on the shingle beach at Big Bay laughing
as they told one another
yet again the story of how she had tripped and he had caught her by the hand. Of
course it wasn't as if their own chance encounter lacked for precedents, and one
immediately sprang to mind—Bonnard and Marthe, the point at which they are still
strangers nudging towards each other in the crowd waiting to cross the busy Boulevard
Haussmann.

‘Haussmann,' said Frank. He picked up a pebble and flung it past the toe of his workman's
boot.

This was the first time she properly noted the bristling of his eyebrows.

‘Paris, Frank. This happened in Paris, France.'

With a glimmer of exasperation Frank's face closed down in the understanding that
this wasn't something he had to know after all. At the same time my mother sighed
as one who recognises she has just entered a cul-de-sac, and perhaps a life with
Frank required some reconsideration.

‘Bonnard was the artist,' she explained, but Frank had been distracted by something
he'd just noticed floating in the tide. His face came alive. He rose to his feet with
a handful of stones, and for the next few minutes he took pot-shots at the bobbing
log. The stones pocked the sea around the dark log until at last there was a wooden
sound—Frank let out a whoop and raised his arms in triumph.

A slip on the pavement planks had brought them together. Now a story about a famous
artist and his wife was about to draw them apart.

As soon as he sat down from throwing stones into the sea Frank seemed to realise
that something was deeply wrong, that something was vitally changed.

‘I should be getting back,' said my mother.

On the drive into town Frank didn't know what to do about my mother's silence.

‘I feel like I've said something,' he ventured.

My mother didn't see any point in explaining. Why feign interest after such a demonstration
of indifference? It wasn't right. It was a mistake. When she got down out of the
truck she thought she was saying goodbye for the last time.

She walked slowly home, taking the alley by the hardware shop that leads across the
playing fields—just in case Frank was of a mind to follow. She claims she felt relieved.
She was sorry for Frank, though. It hadn't turned out so well for him. She was the
firefly that had caught his eye and now he was left clutching thin air. Well, too bad,
she thought. It's always best to find out these things early in the piece.

Within days she was back to gazing across the paddock to the flying elbows of George;
the still back of the cow, the slavish wheelbarrow which just that morning in the
stillness of dawn had woken her with its creaking wheels. She took out a compact
mirror and searched her face for anything that Frank might have left on her. She
noticed a few grey hairs and that another wrinkle had joined the others crowding
the corner of her eye. She was a changing vista. She was landscape in the making.
Alma Martin couldn't remember his wife. This was how all this business had started
in the first place. Now she wondered if George had a mental picture of her as he toiled
away, and if he did which one it was. If she was to die tomorrow, which version would
pop in to his thoughts and make him smile in the shower?

The question forced her to consider the last time they had had fun together. The
eve of his departure when they'd made
love all through the night? Then on his return,
amongst the resentment and hurt, there had been one fine day when they'd gone to the
beach and swum out beyond the buoys to way over their heads, and George had swum
underwater pretending he was a shark, and she'd squealed deliriously in anticipation
of the shark's teeth biting into her bum—which is exactly what George had in mind
when he dived down.

It was heartbreaking for her to watch George slog his guts out, move an entire hill
in the mistaken belief it would declare his love over and above any normal human
exchange such as sharing breakfast together, or a bath, or even a bed. And she thought
maybe just a small thing had to happen, something as small as this time it being
George who slipped on the wet planks and her hand taking
his
hand. But even as she
was thinking these thoughts the die was cast. My mother's future was more or less
decided. She didn't know it right then, at that moment she stood in the window watching
George battle the hill. But she would know a month later when she would discover
she was pregnant to the man she thought she'd already successfully shaken off.