The White Body of Evening (13 page)

“You have done more for me than I could possibly repay, Anna.”

She kissed him and he wrapped his arms around her, still confident that he could do so with the zeal of one much younger.

By the time Paul was lodged at the Gallery School, Winton had found a potential match for Ondine. It was the edge of winter, 1910. Ondine had another six months of school and was about to turn seventeen. Winton foresaw a lengthy and gradual courtship in keeping with the legacy he’d given the girl, and hoped to see her engaged by her eighteenth birthday.

The young man in question was Ralph Matthews, the son of a retired grazier who still held a property in New South Wales, but who now lived comfortably with his wife and son in Toorak. Winton had met Bruce Matthews and his son Ralph at a private club in the city and decided, with a mixture of benevolence and malice, that the lad was handsome and wealthy enough to be acceptable to Ondine, but that he also had an edge to him, a touch of brusqueness that might finally unnerve the girl. Deep down Winton wanted to punish her, ever so slightly, for her rejection of his friendship and generosity. Perhaps this urge was unconscious. He certainly didn’t confess it openly to himself. But when he thought about Ralph his approval was inevitably tainted by this impulse. In this young man’s money, his unpretentious patriotism and in his love of the land, Winton saw Ondine’s future and imagined that it might not be completely forgiving of the delicacy and cultured sensibility she’d developed since moving away from Brooke Street.

The news that Winton had invited Ralph Matthews to St Vincent Place for lunch the last Sunday in May put Paul on edge. He knew that Ralph had not been asked for his benefit. What interest could he possibly have in a grazier’s son? The information had been directed at Ondine, who barely seemed to register it as she sipped her tea.

This ominous intrusion, combined with his first few months at the Gallery School, succeeded in making him despondent. The School of Painting was tiresome and conservative, full of diligent but weak-minded students who had effortlessly assimilated the director’s distrust of the imagination. At his insistence, the tenor of the school was oriented almost exclusively to portraiture. Paul felt the point of the school was to bore students senseless with months of rigid discipline and then, when their spirits were broken, turn them into professional lackeys, trained like dogs to flatter society matrons and politicians.

The path from charcoal to monochrome sepia had been painstaking. And then, if one’s creative instinct were not already defeated, there were weeks of still life to be endured. It was only near the end of a full term that the students were allowed a brief flirtation with a full set of oils, as long as they understood that this was a luxury not to be taken for granted. How could Paul’s frustrated ambition not get the better of him?

Lindsay Bannister, the director, looked at his first canvas disapprovingly. While the other students with any ability used unobtrusive brushstrokes, drab colours and subtle variation to represent the model in the centre of the room, Paul’s painting had sacrificed precision and control for wilder brushstrokes and a garish use of blues, green and reds knitted into the flesh to give the body a morbid, diseased appearance.

“It’s not really working, is it?” the director said, as if he could gently warn Paul away from what he evidently regarded as a dangerous tendency.

“I don’t follow you, Sir,” Paul replied.

“We encourage a certain discipline here, Mr Walters,” Bannister said. “Look at Priestley’s canvas, for comparison.”

The other first-year students tried to conceal their interest in this ritual of humiliation as Bannister directed Paul’s attention towards the second-year student’s easel on the opposite side of the studio. It held a beige portrait of a middle-aged woman sitting rigidly on a chair, hands folded on her lap, set against a window out of which one could see a nondescript landscape of brown and faded green. The woman was expressionless, her dress was a chocolate colour, to match her hair, and her face was the colour of oatmeal.

“There is a certain level of control, which I find admirable. An orderliness, I suppose.”

“But it might as well be a photograph, only a photograph would look sharper, and be more exact,” Paul said, feeling his blood boil at the injunction to take seriously such a mediocre painting.

“Oh, I disagree. Photography has no room for the artist’s hand and eye, for elegance and form. It is merely art for the masses, with no regard for the genius, the unique vision of the painter. The camera is purely mechanical, the photograph a function of the machine. That’s one of the things we must guard against, Mr Walters. This painting, by contrast, is controlled and tonally realistic, but also distinguishes itself from a mere copy in the complexity of its workmanship.”

Paul bit his lip. He could sense the others secretly laughing at him. But what rubbish, he thought. Priestley’s painting was barely art at all. It was a bad copy of a banal moment that had no business being recorded in the first place. He’d rather work on the photographer’s book of beauty, with the fake backdrops of the ocean or the Alps, than participate in the sycophancy of portraiture and the farce of good taste.

“Beauty is what we strive for, but beauty is also a matter of restraint and precision,” Bannister said, leading Paul back to his own painting. “Art is, after all, a discipline.”

Paul was ready to explode, outraged at the presumptive ignorance and gross insensitivity of the man. He began to imagine some of the ways in which he could use photographs in his paintings in order to travesty the dogma of the studio. He wanted to deface Priestley’s horrible, dead picture, slashing at the canvas with streaks of red so that it bled through its lacerations.

“Bad luck there,” the student at his side whispered. “Bloody awful of the old bloke if you ask me.”

Paul looked at his neighbour’s painting. It was a badly proportioned botch-up. The upper part of the body was so large that the legs and arms had to be shrunken in order to fit on the canvas. There was no anatomical logic to it and the features of the face, painted in a series of monochrome blocks, were merely gestures towards the generic forms recognisable as eyes, a nose and a mouth.

Paul couldn’t wait to get out of the place. He’d arranged to meet Hamish at Fasoli’s later that afternoon, and by the time he got there he was wet with rain, exhausted with the frustration of it all and light-headed from hunger.

Fasoli’s was their established meeting place, even though it would have been far more convenient to meet at the Limerick Arms or the Railway Hotel. It was a little restaurant on Lonsdale Street where, so it was said, one might be able to imagine oneself in Soho or Montmartre. A narrow hallway led off the street into a cramped, dilapidated room and, out the back, an asphalt courtyard surrounded by ferns. As night fell the place filled with a motley collection of characters. Students, artists, journalists and assorted bohemian night-birds drifted in to eat richly sauced pasta dishes served on cracked plates and to drink red wine from glass tumblers. In one corner a couple of Italian girls lounged about inscrutably, blowing smoke rings into the air as they pursed their coral-red lips, occasionally rousing themselves to deliver some food or to wipe down an empty table.

Hamish was already seated, his wet hair plastered against his oversized head. Paul sat down, eager to unburden himself.

“Bannister will be the fucking death of me,” he blurted out. “The man is a bloody philistine who imagines us feeding off Toorak mansions, painting portraits of old crones. And the students there! My God, you couldn’t imagine the utter lack of talent.”

“Actually I could,” said Hamish. “I’m surrounded by a lack of talent most of the time.”

They ordered a bottle of wine, which restored Paul’s energy. Hamish was on the verge of mentioning the satchel he’d found. When they’d arranged to meet that was what he had on his mind. He couldn’t think of a better place to broach the subject than Fasoli’s. But as Paul launched into a tirade about the Gallery School, something held him back and he realised that, for a while at least, it would be prudent to keep its contents to himself.

“I don’t know if I can stick it out for three years,” Paul said.

“How onerous could it be?” Hamish said. “You could be pushing corpses about the Homoeopathic.”

“Did you send the poems off?” Paul asked, realising he was getting painfully self-absorbed.

“Yes. I expect I’ll hear within a few weeks, though I really don’t know if they’re the sort of thing the
Bulletin
is looking for.”

“Why not? I thought they were fine.”

“I don’t know,” Hamish said despondently. “Besides the Red Page all they publish these days are eulogies to the nation, satires or bush vignettes.”

“I suppose. Perhaps that’s why artists are fleeing Australia like rats from a sinking ship. It’s hard to feel grounded here. Nobody really feels like they belong, not in that Henry Lawson sense, anyway. ‘Natives of the land’ and all that.”

“Lawson’s ‘natives of the land’ are a lot of rot. But we are grounded in a different way,” Hamish said, gulping his wine in a manner that suggested his interest had been piqued. “Right here. In the city where we’ve grown up. It’s just that there’s not much room for heroism and romance in the city. What people will find here is likely to offend them.”

He was thinking about Albert’s poems as he said this and wondered whether Paul had any inkling.

“Maybe. You’re forgetting that Ondine and I, well, I’m not sure what we are. Not Australians, not Germans either. We’re caught in the middle, which is nowhere.”

As he said this he realised he’d touched upon the basis of their bond. In his sister he recognised a creature of his own blood who, like him, was rootless, trapped between two worlds, suspicious of the ease with which Australians so loudly proclaimed their kinship.

As they spoke, an older man called out across the room, his mouth sucking in a loose strand of spaghetti.

“’Scuse me. ‘Scuse me,” he said. “Either of you blokes know about the Kulin?”

“Afraid not,” Paul replied.

“Thought as much,” the old bloke said. “Heard you talking about being grounded. Well it’s pretty bloody hard to be grounded if ya don’t know nothing about a place’s history, ain’t it?”

“What’s he on about?” Paul said, looking at Hamish.

“Haven’t the foggiest.”

“I’m talking about being grounded, ain’t I?” the old man said. “Ah, never mind.”

Concentrating on his meal the man lost interest in them and resumed eating.

“Well, tell us about the Kulin, then,” Hamish said.

“Nah, never mind about it.”

“He’s talking about the Abos,” a man sipping coffee in the corner said, putting down his newspaper. “Ain’t ya, Les?”

“Never mind. Never mind. I ain’t a bloody history book, am I?” Les said, shaking his head.

“The five tribes of Port Phillip were the Kulin nation before Melbourne was settled. The Bunurong and what not. That’s before you blokes were even born.” The man in the corner smiled at them.

“Too right, Peter. Before youse was even born. That bloody long ago,” Les croaked through his laughter.

The man in the corner returned to his paper, Les returned to his food and a waitress with piercing black eyes and a Mona Lisa smile stood over Paul and Hamish ready to take their orders. They both sat in silence, puzzling over the thought of Melbourne before there was a Melbourne, when the city was the violence of its own becoming, building itself out of blood and bone.

They didn’t order any food, but got another bottle of wine. In the meantime the man in the corner settled his bill and gave Les a friendly tap on the shoulder as he left.

“You know, I meant to ask you over to lunch Sunday week,” Paul said, rousing himself. “Winton has some screwed idea that he’s going to start introducing suitors to Ondine. He’s lined up some bloke from the bush.”

Hamish felt himself colouring and hoped that Paul hadn’t noticed. Of course Paul’s invitation was a calculated one. He hoped that Hamish would come to nullify the presence of Ralph Matthews and maybe even fight him off altogether. He didn’t dwell on it though, affecting an air of casualness that aroused Hamish’s curiosity and left it so unsatisfied that he couldn’t help but accept the invitation.

By the time they were getting up to leave, the old man, Les, was quite drunk and making a bit of a goat of himself with the waitress, who sat him down again in his chair and offered to bring him a cup of coffee.

“Kulin nation, young fellas!” he shouted out after them as they stumbled out onto Lonsdale Street.

“What about that old bloke, eh?” Paul said.

“Suppose he has a point,” Hamish said. “A hundred years ago there was none of this. No city I mean. It’s like the whole place has been dreamt up almost overnight. It might vanish just as quickly.”

They walked through a decrepit arcade, a dark, deserted cavern that sold a bit of old furniture and bric-a-brac, and then made their way through Little Bourke Street and the Eastern Market, which but for a few peepshows and a tattoo parlour was closed up for the day. The occasional forlorn figure skulked about in the drizzle or vanished through a door. Stray cats prowled about the rubbish and fought over the odd morsel of offal, disturbing the gloom with their hissing. Hamish thought about Albert’s poems, which had conjured the city as a place of cruel dreams and obscene fantasies written, he imagined, in blood and semen and shit. At the same time Paul remembered the day Albert had taken him to the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities and the whore who’d stumbled down the Eastern Arcade.

“So you’ll come Sunday week?” Paul asked again, wanting to be sure.

“Yes, I’ll come.”

At Swanston Street they climbed onto a tram and headed back to South Melbourne. It was already dark and as the tram rattled over Princes Bridge they both imagined, as they often did, a body in a train conductor’s uniform fading through the water.

T
he family was already seated for lunch, and Mrs Norris was on the point of serving, when the doorbell rang again. Ralph Matthews looked so sheepish sitting opposite her that Ondine nearly laughed into her serviette.