Paint Your Wife Page 6

  For these women in whom youth had already passed there was a pleasant and exhilarating feeling of resurrection. Now—and come to think of it, it wasn’t just Hilary, I’d noticed other women doing this—Hilary turned her face very slowly from the painted one in the window. The thought was there, so long as she didn’t rush it or make too sudden a movement, she might take that younger face off into the world with her.

  During the day men in farm vehicles pulled over and got out to saunter up to the painted shop windows and search for certain faces known to them. Family members, obviously, sons, daughters, grandchildren in tow. I caught myself doing the same thing. If no one was in the shop I found myself wandering across the street to stare at the portrait of my mother sitting on that set of porch steps. Here, she is not yet my mother. She is a woman whose history is still mostly in front of her. In the portrait she is at least fifteen years younger than the son staring back at her.

  A week passed, then another. Yet there was no good reason to take the portraits down. For one thing, Alma had waited nearly forty years for this exhibition. For another, the portraits were beginning to attract out-of-town interest. Who were these women? How had the portraits come into being?

  3

  In the years 1941 to 1943, Alma painted a whole community of women. He had completed thirty-seven portraits by the time the men came back from the war, and another five hundred and eighty sketches of my mother, Alice Hands, as she was known then.

  I suppose the sketches amount to slices of life. Hurried drawings of women on all fours as they weed and tend to their gardens, of them hanging up the washing or idling at a window alone with their thoughts. Their tinkering inquisitiveness, as they lift the lid on the letterbox, hope fading. On occasion he liked to employ props. His explanation was that certain accessories extract a look that would not otherwise avail itself. The mere touch of something precious and a face will come alive. Place a teapot in a woman’s hands and look at how it heightens the shoulders and drops the head. And yet as much as he sketched the women of the district in their everyday activities, more often than not it was the formal pose that they requested. They were impatient with the three-quarter perspective where one eye is half concealed by the bridge of the nose. They wanted to be looked at, which is hardly surprising, I suppose, since their men were away at the war. Innocently, Alma did not imagine any reciprocal joy until Hilary James told him, ‘You know something, Alma, when you are drawing I feel like you’re touching me.’ The shining, earnest look in Hilary’s eyes scared him into laying down his pencil. He told her, ‘I can stop if you like, Hil?’ But, of course this is not what she meant or wished to hear.

  Not all the men went off to war. Some of them stayed back, men of a certain age, let’s say, together with those who were wedded to the land, some of whom were deemed crucial to the wartime economy. Not only farmers but also bushmen who no one kept tabs on. The first category lived on remote farms the way others occupy distant countries. They and the bushmen rarely entered the women’s lives.

  After the men in the district went off to fight the women were left with the potholes of their old existence—farm machinery, trucks, a rusting idleness. Horses stood in paddocks awaiting their riders. Grass grew over the cricket pitches. When the crossbar fell off the goalposts in a storm no one fixed it. The doors to the hotel in town grew sullen and the bars ever gloomier.

  Soon the women forgot to lower their eyes. Bashfulness slipped from their skin. They showed up in town hatless and laughing. With the younger ones, though, a dullness spread across their faces. At times it looked like a sheet of disappointment, as if they were asking, Is this all there is? In their wondering…well, they could not see the edges of their wondering. Certain gestures and intuitions came naturally but they were less sure of what they were connected to. Smiles of vanity tend to leave faint traces around the reach of the nostril and in the corner of the eye. On the inside they create an almost mindless sunburst which the outer features struggle to contain. Such a smile disappeared during those years of the war.

  On the beach as well a freer spirit ruled. One low tide Alma happened to venture around a point that is inaccessible during high water and there he came upon two women sunbathing without a stitch on. Alice was sure Alma had seen her and Victoria. He had looked and then looked quickly away. At thirty-seven Victoria was ten years older than Alice. My mother sat up and pulled a towel around herself. Victoria didn’t bother. What was the point, after all? Alma had already looked.

  And besides, Alma was regarded as harmless. For a man just turned thirty this is not especially flattering. But it was known that his life had been touched by tragedy. Alma had lost a young wife in a train accident. His decision to live alone seemed both sad and honourable, as though having tried that other life which had ended so badly, from now on he would tread more carefully. For another thing, his interest, this near-obsession with drawing, made Alma seem a less-than-dangerous male. A male without horns. He was also the local teacher out at the country school with a roll of half a dozen farm kids. Five miles from town or in those days thirty minutes on a bike. Today the school is a café and the surrounding countryside has been swallowed up by the explosion of suburbia in the sixties, the rich years of NE Paints, the tip, and the new bypass. Everything considered, if a man had to stumble upon my mother and her friend sunbathing in the nude you couldn’t go past Alma, a man in an old straw hat who carried his flat tin case of pencils along with his ratter’s gear in a canvas knapsack.

  In the summer of ’42 there was a rat infestation on an unprecedented scale. In broad daylight rats were seen running up trees and crossing the road. Houses and barns were overrun. School finished in December and didn’t resume until February. Over the intervening period Alma was out every day on ratting business. He would sprinkle his blue trails of poison and return the next day to pick up the corpses. It was not exactly glamorous work but there are few things he says he’s done in life that were appreciated as much.

  A dead rat is a slightly worse spectacle than a live one. A dead rat conjures up the bubonic plague, bodies piled into carts hauled up medieval streets. And while a live rat is little more than an insult to our idea of civilised space, an infestation is something else again. The only information my mother gleaned from her own mother leading up to her marriage with George Hands were tips on keeping a house clean. Cleanliness and wifeliness went hand in hand. The sight of unhurried rats inside the house struck at the moral heart of what my mother and her generation thought important.

  She remembered what George had told her to do. Get hold of Alma. In those days he was the nearest neighbour for miles around, though she still hadn’t visited him at home. She left a note in his letterbox.

  Alma came down the hill that evening and laid his poison. He was back in the morning to collect the corpses. There wasn’t a room without a dead rat. The most Alice had heard was some scratching noises behind walls and out at the kitchen at night. She thought Alma might catch one or two but never these dozens. As he stood there with brown paper bags filled with dead rats she tried to pay him. But he wouldn’t hear of it. So she offered to bake him a cake. A banana cake, she said upping the ante. He dithered but in the end decided no, he couldn’t accept that either. ‘I would Alice, a smart man doesn’t ordinarily turn down banana cake, but I don’t want to establish a precedent, if you know what I mean.’

  He said, ‘I can
only eat so many cakes.’

  ‘Well, that may be so, but I still want to give you something.’

  ‘You could sit for me,’ he said. ‘I’d like to draw you, if you’re comfortable with that.’

  My mother was lost for a reply. Although Alma had caught her by surprise it wasn’t like he was asking her out, though it was close, very close indeed. To be drawn is to be singled out.

  Alma must have sensed her inner conflict because he pressed his lips together thoughtfully and said, ‘I was thinking in lieu of payment.’ It was the gentlest pressure he applied. My mother noticed his smile. It was a nice smile. In lieu of payment. There was obviously nothing threatening about it. Other men spoke loudly, as if they wanted a third party to hear and mark them for wittiness. They stumbled over kindness of course, wiped a kind remark from their mouths like it was spittle. So when Alma said ‘in lieu of’ there was just the gentlest hint of—of what exactly? Services rendered? She didn’t know Alma well enough to judge. She’d been married for little over a year when George signed up with the armed forces. Over that time George had had the most to do with Alma. There was that one time before he left for overseas that they’d had Alma down for a card evening. He’d shown no guile at cards. He didn’t know how to be tricky—not like George with a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Still, she had to beat out all the usual bush fires thinking he might mean something extra. Now she rounded that bend of suspicion she came into a more generous understanding. This was Alma, a man who had lost his wife and his memory, and of whom George had said, ‘For God’s sake, if anything goes wrong get hold of Alma. He knows the drill and I’ve told him to expect a call from time to time.’

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the sitting-room mirror; she was touching her hair and blushing.

  ‘I’d have to wash my hair first,’ she said.

  That seemed to amuse him; again the warm smile pegged to that creased line over his forehead.

  About now she thought to look down at her bare feet. She’d been outside collecting cowshit for the garden.

  ‘Look at me!’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I’m asking to do,’ he replied.

  The next morning Alma showed up with his tin case of pencils and his sketchbooks. She showed him through to the sitting room. She had an idea that a sitting was a formal occasion and in preparation had gone around the room straightening cushions and pulling off furnishing covers. She had dressed herself up in her Sunday best, a black skirt and red blouse. She had been toying with putting a flower in her hair when Alma turned up.

  It is hard to know what to do with yourself the first time you sit. You are suddenly aware of your arms and legs, too aware, and as soon as that awareness slips into place it’s as if those limbs were never really an integral part of you at all, but clumsy add-ons. My mother had expected some direction from Alma but he just stood there looking at her, moving a pencil back and forth across his chin. He might have been taking an interest in the view outside the window or gazing at a slow-moving river. A river is unconsciously what it is. It does not know how to be anything else. A river does not suffer embarrassment. My mother didn’t know what to do with her arms. They had never felt so alien. She tried folding them. Now she unfolded them. She felt herself grow clumsy before Alma’s gaze. ‘Just relax,’ he told her now. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’ She told him she felt silly. But it was as if he hadn’t heard.

  He had his tin case open on his knee and was sorting through his pencils. A beast lowed in the paddock outside the window. She wished she was out there. She said apologetically, ‘This doesn’t seem to be working, does it.’ Again Alma didn’t answer. She said, ‘If I’m no good just say. I don’t want to waste your time.’ He said, ‘You’re not,’ but he didn’t tell her what to do either. He glanced back at the window, and remarked casually, ‘Looks like rain.’

  This mention of the weather switched her thoughts to the drainage canals that still needed to be dug in the far paddock. She might have asked Alma to help if she hadn’t used up all her favours with the rat business. If she didn’t ask, she could at least make a start. She knew that she would be visible from his cottage up on the hill and that he’d let her swing on the end of a shovel for no more than half an hour before he’d race down the hill. She was thinking about that swamp. She was thinking about that shovelling. She was only dimly aware of Alma. She could hear him breathing—now she couldn’t as she dropped back to a place deep within, back from the flashing exterior of the world. The erotic experience Hilary reported would come later.

  That summer every poisoned rat in the district decided to make life hell for Alma. The rats chose out-of-the-way places to die. He had to dig a passage under two houses and feel around in the cobwebbed dark. There were walls to lever open. Women screamed at their children to get away from where he was working. A need to quench a terrible thirst is the last act of a dying rat and usually they will crawl under a water tank to die.

  At Victoria’s house he arrived to a terrible stench. It wasn’t a hot day but every window in the house had been thrown open. Vengeful rats like this one of Victoria’s will crawl inside walls where they fester and rot.

  Alma tied on his ratter’s scarf. Sure enough, he found what he was after down by the skirting of the wall that contained the open fireplace. In a worst-case scenario he would have to pull a wall of scrim apart, but on a day when luck and skill are equally favoured what he preferred was to make a small hole in the wall, just large enough to poke his hand through. With a deft angler’s wrist movement he could flick a leadline with a hook and reel in a decomposed rat. But Victoria’s was one of those houses where nothing had ever gone easy—not the portraits that came later or the recovery of this corpse. After five or six failed attempts the stench stuck in his throat. He told Victoria he would take that glass of water now.

  They went out to the garden where they could breathe. He cleared his lungs and after the break he found he was getting better length and a few minutes was all it needed before he had his corpse. Alma took it outside to bury in the patch of weeds. Victoria was embarrassed about that too. Her late husband had always been the gardener.

  Now they went back inside the house and checked in all the rooms. They sniffed the air in each before returning to the sitting room. More adventurously, Victoria took herself over to the wall where the rat had crawled inside to die. She sniffed. She sniffed again, and smiled with relief.

  She opened her purse to offer a payment. Alma told her it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘But Alma, I couldn’t sleep while that thing was in the house. You smelt it. You have to take something.’

  ‘Well, there is something,’ he told her.

  Everyone whom Alma was to sketch or paint can thank the rat epidemic for bringing him into their lives. The sitter’s payment was negotiated for Mrs Swain, Mrs Long, Meg Wyatt, Meri Thorn, Mrs Black, Jill Christophers, Beryl Knight, the Hasler girls, Tui Brown, Ginette Fields, Gracie Brewer, her mother Augusta, the Healy sisters Joan and Kate, Bronwyn Rapson, June Fairly and her daughter Joyce, and Hilary Phillips.

  He didn’t get to Hilary’s until a few days before Christmas. Hilary was vague. She thought she’d heard telltale noises in her bedroom ceiling. Alma poked around and couldn’t find anything. He lowered himself down on to the steps she was holding.

 
‘False alarm,’ he told her.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘But I saw one,’ she said, and this news pricked his interest. She hadn’t said so earlier. She hadn’t said she had actually seen one.

  ‘Yesterday’ she said. ‘Yesterday morning. It ran across the kitchen floor. A huge brown grey black thing.’

  Alma followed her into the kitchen. He looked behind the stove. There were no droppings that he could see. He searched through the pantry—nothing there. By now he was shaking his head. She’d led him on a wild goose chase. To oblige her he checked along the skirting but he was simply pretending. For whatever reason, Hilary’s place was the only one in the district to escape the infestation. Alma told her she should feel lucky. She didn’t look lucky. She looked disappointed to hear that, as if she wanted rats, wanted them verified so she could be part of things, part of the infestation. It didn’t make any sense. In the end he told her he’d lay a trail, ‘Just to be on the safe side. Just to be sure.’

  ‘Yes, definitely,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘I know I heard something and isn’t it best to be on the safe side, as you say, Alma?’

  Hilary’s cottage was set at the end of a finger of sand on the town side of the estuary, separating off the wharf area. She had all the windows open to the glittery view of the sea. If the rats hadn’t found her cottage by now Alma was sure they wouldn’t but he laid the poison that Hilary so desperately seemed to want.

  As he began to pack up his gear he was aware of Hilary standing over him. She had something in her hand and without looking up he knew what it was.

  ‘There’s no cost involved, Hilary,’ he said.