Prochownik's Dream E-Book

Alex Miller

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

What is true for one relationship, for one painting, is not true for another... each possesses its own strange inevitability that resists us and we can never finally know what it is we are doing until the work is finished... It is as if the picture paints itself through us, the story tells itself through us, has a larger existence of which we know nothing... Toni Powlett is an artist in the grip of a crisis. Since the death of his father, Moniek Prochownik, four years earlier, Toni has been at a creative standstill - until Marina Golding, the wife of his former teacher and mentor, Robert Schwartz, contacts him, and everything changes. Toni finds in Marina the perfect companion for his life in art and his creative energies are re-awakened. But Toni's newfound inspiration and artistic energy come at the direct expense of his relationship with his wife and daughter. The more dependent for his art he becomes on Marina, the more potentially destructive become the tensions between himself and his wife, Teresa. Toni's dilemma is how to reconcile the transgressive nature of his imaginative life with the daily life of his family, who he loves. Robert Schwartz's dying father, Theo, warns him not to confuse art with life. But by what means is he to achieve such clear-sightedness? Immensely satisfying, Prochownik's Dream is a work of great subtlety, strength and intellect. Its examination of the artist at work is complex and completely absorbing. But at its heart, very simply, it is a book about love.

Leseprobe

Prochownik’s DREAM

Alex Miller

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

This edition published in 2006 First published in 2005

Copyright © Alex Miller 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone:      [phone] Fax:         [phone] Email:       [e-mail] Web:        www.allenandunwin.com/uk

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Miller, Alex, 1936– .    Prochownik’s dream.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 74175 013 3E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 608 5

1. Artists—Fiction. I. Title.

A823.3

Set in 12/18 pt Requiem HTF by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Stephanie &To the memory of Max Blatt

We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in our past as requirements.

Simone de Beauvoir

Contents

1 The Mistress of Trees

one

two

three

four

five

six

2 The Third Hand

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

3 Prochownik’s Dream

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twenty-one

1

The Mistress of Trees

one

I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late. The phrase arrested his attention and he stopped reading and looked up from the book. He was standing in the doorway of his studio, posing for his daughter, who was sitting at her little table within the shadows of the studio’s interior. She was drawing a picture of him with her coloured pencils, her black and white Snoopy Dog propped in front of her. When he looked up from the book the little girl also lifted her head and studied him, raising her hand and shading her eyes from the light, her expression serious and concerned. ‘Are you all right, Daddy?’ she asked.

‘Yes, darling, I’m fine,’ he reassured her. He was touched by the earnestness of her inquiry.

But perhaps she was not reassured after all, for she continued to examine him for a long moment before returning to her work, her head bent close to the paper, her free arm around her drawing, shielding it within the circle of her embrace. ‘You can move now, if you like,’ she said.

He looked at the book in his hand, wondering if he might go on reading it. He had picked it up at random from the table by the door, to occupy himself while he posed for her, and had not registered either its title or the name of its author. It was one of many that had belonged to his father. On the cover there was a reproduction of a familiar painting by Salvador Dali, The Triangular Hour. The unearthly glow of the yellows and greens of Dali’s imaginary landscape. He read: A novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being. Inside the front cover at the top of the page, above the brief biography of the author, his father had pencilled his name, Moniek Prochownik. He could see his father now, seated on the couch in the evening, exhausted after his shift on the moulding line at the Dunlop factory, staring vacantly before him, the book face down in his lap, lost in the thoughts inspired by the words in the book, at that time of the evening needing only one good phrase in order to surrender himself to the uncertain universe of the book. His father’s apologetic smile on such occasions at finding himself caught gazing absently into space.

He stepped out of the sunlight into the studio and stood looking down with distaste at the pile of old clothes and timber racks that filled his workspace. There were overcoats shagged with use, frayed skirts and blouses, dresses stained and un-hemmed, the dark trousers and jackets of men’s suits; and, here and there among the grown-up things, the small garment of a child. The summer heat was drawing from the old clothes the dispiriting smell of napthalene. It was a smell that reminded him of the closets of old people and of their preoccupation with the preservation of their things against the inevitability of decay, as if by preserving their most intimate belongings they might thereby contrive the preservation of themselves. His wife had urged him weeks ago, a touch of impatience in her voice, Why don’t you begin a new project? Take all this stuff back to the op shops and forget about it, or it will depress you. Although he knew that it was good advice, he had been unable to summon the resolve to act on it. He was still troubled by a resistant element of these dismantled installations, something unremembered that tugged at him and awaited resolution. He had been unable either to continue with them, or to conceive a convincing new project to take their place. The smelly pile of old clothes had begun to sicken him. He realised it was beginning to stand in his mind for his failure as an artist. Teresa was right, he must get rid of it.

He looked away. Out in the courtyard the water was spilling from Teresa’s stone fountain and splashing into the sunlit basin: the courtyard and the house in the sunlight, the tall windows of the kitchen and the French doors reflecting the studio. How carefully, how lovingly, Teresa had planned it, speaking of it as their home and as his place of work while it was still little more than an idea in her mind. She did not reproach him, but he knew that he had not fulfilled his portion of her dream. He had begun to wonder lately if it might be the very perfection of the conditions she had organised for him that had silenced his imagination. He had felt a traitor for even thinking it. He hated and feared the silence in his mind, but he could not pretend to work when there was really nothing there. He could not do that. Not even for Teresa’s dream.

His daughter called to him and he turned from the doorway. She was standing behind her chair holding her drawing by its top corners for him to see. He beckoned to her with the book.

The little girl crossed the studio and handed him the drawing, then she stood in front of him, watching him examine it. Her manner was expectant, reserved and attentive. She had drawn the figure of a man, the man’s outline rendered by a single firm blue line. There had been no attempt at a likeness of himself, no reference to his pose in the doorway. The figure had no hands and its pointy feet were poised, like a ballet dancer’s feet, on a green sward of spiky grass. It leaned to one side from the waist up, as if it were being bent by a powerful wind, or was about to execute a difficult leap that would test its agility to the limit. Spears of red hair issued from its head like flames—its hair anticipating the violent energies of its intended leap, or perhaps the panic in its mind. Above the portrait, in black pencil, she had written the word Dad. The confidence of her line astonished him, and he envied her the unconsidered liberty of her pencil. There were no crossings out, no correcting, no second thoughts. The image must have stood whole and complete in her imagination before she made her first mark on the paper.

‘It’s wonderful, darling,’ he said with feeling.

‘It’s you,’ she said, the certainty of her work in the assurance of her gaze.

The telephone rang and he reached past his daughter and lifted the handset from the wall by the door. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Is that you, Toni? It’s Marina Golding.’ There was a slight pause, ‘We’re back.’

He was very surprised to hear from her. ‘Yes, it’s me. You mean you’re back in Melbourne?’

‘We’re back in our house in Richmond.’

‘You’re living here again?’ He held his daughter’s portrait of him at arm’s length and smiled. It was so absolutely right. Her Dad was a perplexed and desolate pixie with his head on fire and no hands to beat out the flames.

‘For the moment, yes,’ Marina Golding said. ‘I’m sorry, Toni, we should have been in touch sooner.’ Her apology for their neglect was sincere. ‘We thought you might have heard by now. We’ve been back a few weeks.’

He wondered why it was Marina and not Robert who had called. It was a year, more, since he had heard anything from them. ‘How’s Robert?’

‘Robert’s fine. He’s incredibly busy. He says to give you his love.’ She allowed a pause. ‘I’m interrupting your work?’

‘I’m in the middle of getting a big new project under way.’ It was a lie, of course, or rather it was a joke, but a joke addressed to himself. A private irony he was unable to resist.

She made an exclamation of satisfaction. ‘Robert was sure you’d be working on something big.’

Marina had taken him seriously, but he let it go. Within a month of Robert and Marina going to Sydney four years earlier, his daughter had been born, his father had died, and he had given up painting and turned to installations. His world had changed forever. Now, suddenly, Marina’s voice on the other end of the telephone, reminding him of those years of hope and excitement that they had shared.

‘We’ve got some news,’ she said. ‘Can you come for lunch? Say next Wednesday?’

‘I’d love to. Wednesday would be good.’

‘Come about one.’

His daughter tugged at the pocket of his jeans. ‘Can we go to the swing park now, Daddy?’

He cupped the phone and leaned down to her. ‘Yes, darling. In a minute.’ He straightened. ‘I have to go now. I’m taking Nada to the swing park.’

‘She must be four already. Is she at school yet?’

‘She’s at kinder. We have this bit of time together before Teresa gets home.’

‘And how is Teresa?’

‘She’s fine. Busy.’ He resented the forced, unnatural, stilted manner of the conversation with Marina and wanted to say something that would provoke a bit of reality between them. He could think of nothing that would not sound crass and pushy, however, so he said nothing.

Marina said, ‘I saw your installation at Andy’s.’

He waited. He would not ask her what she had thought of his work.

Nada dragged at his pocket with both hands, her head thrown back, presenting the pale curve of her throat, pulling away from him with her full weight.

‘It was powerful,’ Marina said. ‘I found it very disturbing.’

Powerful and disturbing! He let the book drop to the floor and transferred the child’s portrait of him to his telephone hand, then he leaned down and took hold of her wrist. Bending to her level, he begged her, ‘Wait for Daddy a minute! Please, darling! I’m coming!’ The puerility of his eagerness to hear what Marina had to say about his work shamed him.

‘There was no one else there. It was a weird feeling being alone in that vast space of Andy’s with your crowd of faceless people. I could smell them. They seemed to be standing there sweating and waiting for me to do something. I felt I was being accused. Of inaction, I suppose, was it? Something like that? A failure to acknowledge their plight? Is that what we were supposed to feel? Were they supposed to make us feel guilty? Well I felt guilty anyway. But perhaps that was just me. Though we’ve all got this guilt nowadays, haven’t we? About everything. I don’t know whether that’s what you meant. I should have called you before this and said something. There was a kind of eerie silence about it.’

Nada released her grip, suddenly, and his hand slipped from her wrist. She walked over to her little table and began putting away her coloured pencils, her manner poised and self-sufficient, her head down, concentrating on her task, ignoring him.

‘Robert didn’t get to see it?’ He was dismayed to hear the self-pitying resentment of his tone.

‘It’s not been easy, Toni. The move back, I mean. It hasn’t been straightforward. There’s nothing wrong between us, it’s not that. It’s just that Robert hasn’t had a minute. He meant to go. You can’t imagine. He just didn’t get a chance. Then you’d dismantled it and taken it away.’

‘You needn’t explain. It’s okay.’

‘It’s not okay.’ She allowed a pause. ‘I’m sorry, Toni. We seem to be like strangers.’ There was another pause. ‘Robert’s father has come to stay with us. So that’s complicated things as well.’

‘I thought Robert’s father lived in Germany?’

‘He did. He’s ill. He’s dying.’

He watched Nada put her pencil case in the drawer of her desk and close it. She picked up her Snoopy Dog and, holding the toy to her chest, set off towards the door.

‘Sorry, Marina, I’d love to talk but I’ve absolutely got to go. See you Wednesday.’

‘See you Wednesday, Toni,’ Marina said. She sounded disappointed. ‘It’s good to at least be in touch again.’

He hung up the telephone, stepped across the studio and swept the little girl into his arms. ‘Gotcha!’

She cried out with delight, ‘Daddeee!’ She clung to him and bit his shoulder hard.

He set her drawing of him on her table, then carried her across the courtyard into the house. On the way to the front door along the passage he paused beside a small framed gouache that hung on the wall. It was a modest tonal image of a straight-backed chair and the corner of a kitchen table with a jug and a bowl.

Nada pointed at the picture. ‘Granddad!’

‘Yes, Granddad, darling. He would have loved you like crazy.’ At the door he set Nada on her feet. ‘Let’s have a really big swing.’

They went out through the gate and walked hand-in-hand along the footpath. At the main road he scooped Nada up and waited for a gap in the traffic, then he ran across with her held against him. On the other side he set her down on the grass. ‘There’s no one on them!’ he shouted. ‘They’re ours! I’ll get there first! I’ll get there first!’

She screamed in terror and excitement and ran from him across the dry summer grass towards the safe ground of the empty swings. He followed her closely, watching anxiously as she clambered onto the swing. Marina’s phone call was a distracting resonance in his mind behind his anxiety for his daughter. What was Robert and Marina’s news? Did they want to share it with him? Did they want to pick up the old friendship where they’d left it four years ago? He could see them both: Robert’s faint smile, knowing something. Marina standing by his side admiring him. They were focussed people. A successful team. He had never known them to be without ideas and projects. The telephone call puzzled him. What did they want? He caught Nada on the back swing and pushed her away gently.

‘Higher, Daddy! Higher!’ she demanded.

He caught her and pushed her higher, the tails of her red jacket flying out behind, the wind of her flight lifting her brown hair, her friend Snoopy Dog clutched against the chain of the swing. His heart contracted in his chest with love for her.

two

A little after midday on the following Wednesday he bought a bunch of expensive out-of-season Iceland poppies at the florist and drove across town to Richmond. It was hot again and his car was not airconditioned. He worried that the delicate flowers would wilt before he reached Robert and Marina’s and thought that he had made a mistake buying them instead of robust proteas or natives; except that there was for him something emblematic in the vivid fragility of the poppies, and their name, Iceland. In the relentless heat it seemed like a message of hope.

Before he reached the river he turned out of the traffic into a side street. Three blocks later he turned right again and pulled up at a small square of park tucked between a row of houses. He sat looking through the windscreen, gathering his thoughts and remembering the park. Theirs was the last house in a terrace of painted brick and timber cottages, dwellings that had once been the homes of factory workers but which had been expensively restored and redesigned to accommodate young professionals. The scene before him was unchanged from his memory of it. The withered oleanders in the park and the small patch of bleached grass shimmering in the heat, the solitary palm tree, and beneath the palm tree the bench, still broken . . .

That summer night four years ago, Robert and Marina’s friends had spilled from the lighted house into the park. Robert Schwartz and Marina Golding, the brilliant collaborative team, were relinquishing their position of influence in Melbourne’s art scene for the vertigo of the great metropolis. That, at any rate, had been the understanding, a sense that it was Robert’s largeness of vision that compelled them to go. A feeling that it wasn’t so much that they had decided to go as that they were being drawn along the golden path of those who had found success in Syd Of being abandoned even. And, for a few, no doubt the departure of Robert and Marina for Sydney must have seemed a confirmation of their own failure. For the older ones especially. For it was what they had all aspired to. So there was a certain envy among the less-generous spirits. Despite their worldliness, despite their fervent scepticism, they had all privately clutched at a shamefaced hope of that sign of a divine care that placed upon a body of work a recognition that was not disputable.

When the last guests were leaving, Robert entreated him to stay with them in the park under the stars. It was he whom Robert had chosen to be the very last to sit with them on the grass, drinking wine and talking far into the night—Had it been that he and Marina could not bear to arrive at that moment when they would be alone with their happiness and without a witness to its splendours? Now they had returned.

Today the park was deserted.

He reached across to the passenger seat and picked up the bunch of flowers. As he lifted the blooms a scatter of petals was left on the grey nap of the seat. He was nervous now at the thought of seeing Robert again. He stepped out of the car, locked it and walked the few paces to their verandah. He pressed the bell and stood waiting.

Marina opened the door. ‘Toni! How lovely to see you!’ She stepped forward eagerly and embraced him lightly, touching her hand to his arm, touching her lips to his cheek. She moved away and examined him. ‘It’s cruel the way the critics ignored your show.’

‘It’s okay. It’s their loss.’

‘Exactly. And you’ve got your new project. Good for you.’

He handed the flowers to her.

A gust of wind tore off a scatter of bright petals. Marina exclaimed and sheltered the flowers protectively in her arms. ‘You remembered! I love being given flowers. And Iceland poppies are my favourites.’ She was moved. ‘Thank you.’

So the Iceland poppies had been for Marina after all. He had not remembered, but had imagined himself to be choosing the flowers at random.

‘What is it?’ Marina asked. ‘Have I changed so much?’ She was older than he, by as much as ten years, slim and dark, her short hair freshly styled.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed at all.’

She smiled, enjoying the exacting quality of his attention.

The passage was narrow and she walked ahead of him. The disconcerting sensation of stepping back into their world, the familiar, elusive, clarified smell of their lives, a smell of cleanliness and good order. Today she was being welcoming and encouraging. Previously she would have stood aside, her manner silent and interior, observing him with Robert. Marina had seemed to him in those days to be in Robert’s shadow. A faithful collaborator, content to be the apprentice of Robert Schwartz’s studio. Perhaps, after all, she had stood within the shadow of some private inhibition of her own, an uncertainty too intimate to be disclosed. And of course she was older now.

She said over her shoulder, ‘Robert’s running late. He apologises. He rang to say he’ll be in a meeting. We’ll have a minute or two to catch up before he gets here.’

He followed her through the archway at the end of the passage into a lofty rectangular room. It was cool in here, the light filtered through pale blinds. The faint background hum of an airconditioner. An old man was sitting by a wall of books on a set of folded library steps. His loose cotton robe had slipped from his shoulders. He was barefoot, craned forward unsteadily over the book that he was holding open on his knees.

Marina stood beside a circular table in the centre of the room, the vivid poppies held against the white of her blouse, the tips of the fingers of her free hand touching the table beside her, steadying herself. She watched him, interested, her feet neatly together in smart Italian sandals.

‘You have changed,’ he said.

‘Yes. I’m older.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

The table was set for lunch, a chair at each of the four places. On the table were breads, Greek dips, a green-glazed bowl of olives. There was the faint aroma of dill.

‘What did you mean?’

‘I suppose we’re bound to have changed,’ he said. ‘In some ways. All of us, I should think.’

‘You’re being evasive.’ She laughed. ‘Come and meet Robert’s father.’

The old man did not get up but stretched an arm around Marina’s waist and drew her to his side. It seemed to Toni to be a gesture of possession rather than of fondness. He was trembling, his head jerking and nodding. The lower lid of his left eye drooped, disclosing the livid weeping membrane. ‘I’ve come home to die,’ he said and laughed, his breath catching in his throat, his glance quick and amused. ‘I shan’t be around to bother you for much longer.’

‘This is Theo Schwartz,’ Marina said. ‘Robert’s father. Toni is an old friend, Theo. He was one of Robert’s most gifted students.’

He took the old man’s hand, catching a whiff of body or bowel rising from the gown where it fell open. As he stepped away his eyes were drawn involuntarily to the gape of the material, his eyes encountering a glimpse of what he should not see, a mound of coiled and yellowed flesh, the inadmissible disaster of old age and disease.

Theo Schwartz smiled and released Marina. ‘Gifted and in his prime,’ he said in a tone of mild irony. ‘Did you know that Nero murdered his wife and mother, Toni? People do such things.’ He patted Marina’s arm. ‘My son’s wife.’ He might have wished a connection to be registered by them between the present situation and Nero’s murderous violence towards the women of his household, the idea that murder, giftedness and youth were commonplaces of existence.

Toni read the title of the book. It was a German edition of the diaries of the artist Paul Klee, Klee’s Tagebücher, the spidery inked lines of an illustration between blocks of text, Klee’s occult signs and portents. Toni considered making a comment, but Theo turned his shoulders away and re-entered his reading, lifting one hand to them in gentle dismissal, preferring the company of Klee’s immortal journal.

Marina said, ‘Let’s put these in water before they wilt. They’re beautiful.’

He paused to inspect a bronze figure of a running man that stood on a small table. He grasped the heavy figure around the waist and picked it up, turning it and examining it. ‘This is new. Whose is it? I have a feeling I should know it.’

Marina said, ‘You should. It’s Geoff Haine’s. His show followed your installation at Andy’s. We were at his opening. We thought we might see you there.’

He remembered the preoccupied, offhand greeting of the famous Sydney artist when Andy had introduced them. He set the heavy figure down on the table. ‘I met him.’

Marina reached over to adjust the figure’s line of flight, as if she knew its secret destination. ‘Robert wrote a piece on his sculpture for Art & Text. Geoff gave him this by way of thanks.’

‘Haunted,’ Toni said unhappily. ‘Isn’t that the word they always use for Haine’s work?’ He stood looking at the bronze running man. He recognised it now as the figure that appeared and reappeared in the artist’s monumental post-industrial landscapes, a solitary fugitive human presence in vast wastelands of rusting machinery and empty office towers aglow with the unearthly light of the end-of-days, visionary scenes calculated, perhaps, to impress the viewer with the towering moral authority of the artist himself. They had been hanging Haine’s pictures at Andy’s when he was carrying the last of his own dismantled installation out of the gallery, his arms filled with the wooden racks and old clothes, a rag-and-bone man. He had been feeling dismantled himself that day. Helpless. Gutted. Angered by the deathly silence with which his work had been received. He turned away from the sculpture, the enormous weight of Geoff Haine’s reputation too much for him to deal with generously.

‘So Sydney didn’t work out for you two, then?’ he said. ‘We all had the impression you were doing brilliantly. I’m sorry!’ He apologised quickly. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’

‘No, it’s all right. I know you must be wondering.’

‘I was thinking earlier of that great send-off we had for you two on your last night in Melbourne.’

‘Wasn’t it terrific! It was like being students again.’ She spoke with enthusiasm of the memory. ‘You stayed and we talked in the park until dawn.’

‘Teresa was ready to kill me when I got home.’

‘Of course. Teresa wasn’t with you. I’d forgotten.’

‘She was home with Nada. Nada was only a few weeks old.’ His guilty reluctance that night to leave Robert Schwartz’s magic circle. Staying until dawn, knowing Teresa was alone with their new baby waiting for him. Teresa had made plain to him her satisfaction that they had seen the last of Robert and Marina. They’re not our kind of people. He had defended himself with the claim that they were his friends.

‘It’s funny, but I always picture you on your own,’ Marina said. She smiled to soften her remark. ‘I mean, we don’t seem able to separate what we actually remember from what we invent about other people’s lives, do we?’

She might have observed that it was not possible to ever know one’s friends except through one’s own imagination. A comment on the slight awkwardness between them, the lapse of time and the failure of the friendship suddenly being reversed.

Theo cleared his throat and turned a page.

‘This house is still very much you and Robert,’ Toni said. Their lives childless and mess-free, the assurance of their fastidious idiom persisting.

‘I’m glad you feel that,’ she said.

The room was bare of ornament except for Haine’s running man and a solitary canvas leaning against the wall on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.

She turned to him. ‘We did do well in Sydney. And of course we had that wonderful six months of Robert’s residency at the university of Minnesota. He finished his book. Lots of good things happened.’ She considered him. ‘I missed Melbourne. How frivolous does that sound? I only realised once we’d left how deeply I belonged here. I still remember our first night in the apartment in Glebe, looking out the window at the lights of Sydney and knowing, suddenly, I was never going to be at home there.’

He looked at her.

‘I couldn’t possibly justify such a feeling, so I didn’t try to. I didn’t say anything about it. Sydney was very beautiful and everyone made us welcome. And I was supposed to rejoice at being there. After all, wasn’t Sydney where everyone wanted to be? I went along with the idea that I’d eventually get used to it, but I knew I was never going to. I should have had the courage to say so that first night. I should have said, I can’t do this, we have to go home.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Robert loved it. It had taken him an enormous amount of energy to plan the move. I could see that Sydney was everything he’d hoped it would be. He had his job and his connections. For Robert, Sydney is the heart of the world. It’s where the main game is. It always will be. But I knew that in Sydney I was not in my right place and that I would be cast as an onlooker for the rest of my days. Anyway I don’t know that I belong at the centre of things. Not everyone does. The main game! What a pompous idea that is, really. As if anything can be the main game for everyone. Last Christmas I told him I needed to move back to Melbourne for a period. For a few months of each year. I need to feel at home somewhere at least for some of the time. I didn’t insist he come with me.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘After a very long silence he said, If that’s the way it is for you then we must go back together or this will become a trial separation for us. Neither of us wanted that. So here we are. Trying things out in Melbourne again. It’s not fair to be unloading all this on you.’ She turned away. ‘I’ve needed to tell someone. I must sound terribly selfish. Robert’s Sydney friends are convinced I’m being manipulative. But I’m not.’ With a sudden impatient fling of her hand she indicated the painting above the fireplace. ‘Well, what do you think of it?’

He said, ‘I would have thought being cast as an onlooker is something you allow to happen to you, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t! Please! Look at the painting! Tell me what you think.’

He turned to the large two-metre square unframed canvas. It was an image of a naked man falling upward into a sombre sky of deep lustrous black. The figure sharply defined against the sky, suspended in a place without atmosphere. The luminous blue curve of the earth infinitely distant below. The man’s body foreshortened, viewed from underneath, a perspective from the Sistine ceiling, his genitals and grey skin chilled by the life-neutralising forces of outer space, the wrinkled soles of his feet presented to the viewer. He was not dead, it seemed, but was a man adrift. An ironic ascent of man. A suggestion of crucifixion, but without the cross. Below the wrinkled soles of the naked man’s feet a trompe l’oeil of an open book, the deckled edges of the pages casting a delicate filigree of reflected light onto the black sky, so that it appeared as if an actual book had been artfully attached to the canvas. Toni recognised the complicated ideas of Robert, the exemplary theoretician and assiduous practitioner of the contemporary, the post-postmodernist absenting himself from his works. His pictorial images a comment on the outmoded act of putting paint on canvas. The painting was a beautiful, sardonic self-apology for the abstracted hand of the artist, the absent master of his own designs. Robert’s generous, calm and reliable good sense behind the carefully articulated idea of the painting. He could see Robert now, considering Marina’s nervous announcement that she wanted to return to Melbourne, soberly reflecting on the realities of their situation and concluding that his choice was either to lose his beloved Sydney or to lose his beloved wife.

‘You two have always been serious about wanting people to enjoy looking at your pictures,’ he said and moved in close to the painting to examine its surface. He turned to her. ‘But is it still both of you?’

‘You guessed!’ She was pleased. ‘No. It’s just me. Robert doesn’t paint any more. I do all the painting now. The subjects are still Robert’s. The ideas are still his, but the brushwork’s all mine these days.’ She laughed. ‘That was very good, Toni.’

‘Your technique’s fantastic,’ he said.

‘I love painting.’

‘You were always good, but you’re way ahead of where you were four years ago. It doesn’t look like a painting by someone who is unhappy.’

‘Oh, I’m not unhappy! For goodness sake, don’t think that. Please!’ She turned to him, reproaching him gently. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

‘It’s brilliant.’

‘You don’t like it, Toni. Why don’t you say so? Or can’t we tell each other the truth anymore?’ She watched him. After a moment she asked, ‘Why did you never come to Sydney to see us in the early days? You promised solemnly that last night that you would come and visit us. It was almost a sacred vow. Do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘You and Robert swore to remain friends forever.’

‘We’d all been drinking pretty solidly that night.’

‘That wasn’t all it was.’

Did she believe, he wondered, that the neglect of his old friendship with Robert had been deliberate? He was silent for some time, meditating on the injustice of such a view. ‘Once you’ve got a child,’ he said, ‘you can’t just drop everything and go whenever you feel like it.’

‘No, I suppose not. I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. We’re such incredibly selfish creatures, aren’t we? We only see the complications in our own lives.’

‘I often thought of coming up. Teresa wouldn’t have minded. It wasn’t that.’ But in fact Teresa would have minded greatly if he’d ever suggested going to Sydney to stay with Robert and Marina.

Marina held up the poppies and said, ‘I’d better go and put these in water.’ She turned abruptly and walked out of the room, as if she were leaving him to consider what had been said.

He did not feel invited to follow her. Robert’s father gave his cough; the dry metallic comment of a sceptic. Toni turned and looked at him. There was something in the old man’s style that attracted him; his age and his nearness to his end, no doubt. There was an uncanny likeness of father to son in the shrunken frame of Theo Schwartz. It might almost have been Robert himself present in the room in the transfigured form of his dying father, Robert’s features locked in behind the mysterious mask of old age and sickness.

Marina called from the kitchen, ‘Come and see!’

As he went out the door he was unable to resist a backward glance at Theo. The old man was watching him.

There was a short passage. On the left side of the passage a closed door, on the right an open door. He might easily have walked past the open door and gone straight through to the kitchen and on to the studio, where Marina would be waiting for him. He paused and stood looking into the room. Framed in the mirror of the dressing-table was the reflection of the single bed in its old position, pushed against the wall behind the door. Toni’s room they had called it in the years before Nada, before Teresa, before the installations, when he was still living at the flat with his mother and father in Port Melbourne and tutoring part-time under Robert at the art school. He had been a painter of pictures in those days, before his father’s sudden death. Now, as he stood looking in at the room, he might have been a traveller from the future then, his presence unsuspected by the young man asleep on the bed; a young man without self-irony, trusting implicitly to the necessity of success and to the potency of his gift. Toni could almost taste on his palate the pungent memory of that young man who had been himself then, crashed on the bed in the grey dawn light after talking and drinking all night with Robert and his friends, his head reeling with the effects of alcohol and the delirium of ideas. Something of him was still here in this house, something of his own life persisting in their lives, a sense of something unfinished between them.

He turned and walked along the passage. Marina had never taken part in those nights of drinking, but had gone to bed early and let them get on with it. He had thought her then too self-effacing, too lacking in enthusiasm, too comfortably in the shadow of Robert’s vivid intelligence to be interesting. But perhaps she had merely been bored with the frantic adolescence of their ambitions and had preferred the company of a book in her own bed to the company of her husband’s admiring ensemble of young friends.

The passage opened into the kitchen.

The Iceland poppies stood in a yellow and blue Picasso vase on the benchtop. Beside the flowers was a dish of antipasto covered with a membrane of cling-wrap.

Beyond the kitchen he emerged into a long room. The smell was intense; a mixture of Belgian linen, damar varnish, turps, paint extender and the faint essence of cedar. It was Duchamp’s olfactory art. His own craft that had fallen silent in him on the day of his father’s death. There were no windows. The panes of a lantern roof dispersed an even illumination from above: the controlled light of illusion with which to seduce the eye of the beholder. A timber easel and side table stood at an angle against the end wall. An oil painting in-progress was mounted on the easel, a coloured photograph from a newspaper pinned at eye-level to the right-hand upright of the easel. On the side table the paraphernalia of the craft. A hard-backed chair by the left-hand wall, and two prepared canvases. Behind the chair a white-painted cupboard. The chair faced the easel, as if it had been placed there for someone to observe the artist at work.

Marina was standing beside her painting.

She might have been testing her own presence in the composition, or posed with her work for a publicity photograph—see the artist, see her work. She did not step forward and stand beside him to view the painting with him but remained where she was.

A menacing young man confronted Toni from the centre foreground of the large canvas. Above his tight blue jeans the young man’s naked torso was soft and feminine. He gripped a stone in each clenched fist, a black bandanna masking the lower half of his face, the likeness of another man, but of calm expression, printed in white on the bandanna. The crazy eyes of the half-naked young man blazed above the calm face of the man on the bandanna. Behind him, flames lit up a disordered streetscape in which the indistinct forms of fighting men struggled in front of burning buildings. Red, yellow and green points of light struck suggestively through the smoke above the struggling figures. The painting lacked the detail and finish of the painting in the other room.

Marina watched for his reaction, as if it were she herself who was on display.

The image, he saw, was a greatly enlarged copy of the newspaper photograph. CHAOS RULES was written like a title or a headline across the top of the canvas in pale letters, a simulacrum of the graffiti in the photograph.

There was a movement of air and the distant sound of the front door slamming.

‘Robert’s home,’ Marina said. She walked across to stand beside Toni.

A moment later Robert came in. He was holding his father by the hand, his manner solicitous, respectful and deeply attentive towards the old man, who was having difficulty walking without his son’s assistance. Robert looked across at them, acknowledging them with a lift of his chin and a quick smile. When Robert’s father was seated on the chair facing the easel, Robert came over to them. He held out his hand. ‘Toni,’ he said. ‘It’s really good to see you. I’m so glad you could come.’

‘Welcome back,’ Toni said. ‘It’s going to be great having you two in town again.’

‘You’ve met Dad?’ Robert half-turned towards his father and said with mild astonishment, ‘He came home.’

They stood looking at Robert’s father, as if he were with them by some freakish twist of fate, an object of their peculiar and intense curiosity. Theo looked at the painting on the easel before him and might have been unaware of them.

‘My dad,’ Robert said, a tenderness and something of regret in his voice. He might almost have said, My son.

Robert was a lightly built man of fifty. He was youthful and alert. His thick greying hair was cropped close to the dome of his skull and he was wearing an expensive grey business suit with a black silk shirt and green silk tie. An ample handkerchief of the same material as the tie flopped from the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Marina’s been looking after you.’ His tone and his manner were friendly and encouraging, but behind the lenses of his spectacles his pale eyes were hooded, tired and distracted. ‘Marina told me you’re working on a big new project. I knew you would be. That’s wonderful, Toni.’ Without waiting for a response to this he kissed Marina on the lips, then turned and faced Toni, his arm through Marina’s arm, holding her to his side much as his father had. ‘Has Marina told you?’

‘I haven’t said anything,’ she said.

‘You remember Oriel Liesker?’

‘Sure. Of course.’

‘Oriel’s partly our reason for coming back to Melbourne just now.’

Marina said quickly, ‘Not the whole reason.’

‘No, not the whole reason.’ Robert frowned. ‘But I don’t think we’d have actually come back, would we, darling, if Oriel hadn’t been so persuasive?’ He turned back to Toni. ‘Oriel’s been working on us for a while. We’ve finally been seduced. She’s curating the new Bream Island sculpture park and art space.’ He allowed a moment for effect. ‘She’s offered us the inaugural show.’ He paused again. ‘It’s going to create a lot of interest. Sydney’s jealous.’ He looked at Marina, as if he asked for her confirmation of this improbable claim.

‘No wonder you came back then,’ Toni said. ‘Congratulations!’ He shook hands with them both. ‘I’ve heard a lot about the space. It should be brilliant.’ Robert insisting on a purely professional reason for their return, their move back to be viewed as a considered opportunity in the advancement of their careers, rather than merely satisfying Marina’s vague need to feel at home.

‘So you’ve been out to the island?’

‘No, I’ve just read about it.’

Robert waited for the space of two heartbeats. ‘Marina and I would like you to join us. We’d like it to be a group show. The three of us. Our paintings and your installation.’ They watched him, like parents who have given a favourite child a present. The collaborative team of Schwartz and Golding, seduced back from the main game to lead this minor advance in the artistic life of their mother city. They might almost have not been away, Robert’s manner implied, their absence from Melbourne an unsettling dislocation, this the steadying reality. It seemed that Robert would rejoin the fractured ends of the disjointed narrative of their friendship, as if nothing, after all, was to be irrecoverable.

‘That’s incredibly generous of you,’ Toni said. He was perplexed by the offer. He had not expected anything like it. He should tell them now that he was in fact without ideas and his work at a standstill. He did not want to relinquish the attraction of the situation, however—at least not just yet. ‘But is Oriel okay with it? She doesn’t know my work.’

Robert said firmly, ‘Oriel’s fine with it.’ He stepped away from Marina. ‘Let’s go in and have a drink. The opening’s in two months. You can have something of your new installation ready by then, can’t you? A section? An aspect? We’re putting in three paintings. These two you’ve seen and another one.’ There was something just a little bullying in Robert’s brisk tone now, something of the dean of the faculty demanding his own way, insisting his plan be adopted by his subordinates without modification.

Toni wondered if he had been Robert’s first choice of a partner for the show. ‘I’m flattered, Robert. Really. Thanks.

It’s wonderful of you.’

Robert smiled slowly. ‘Good!’ He was the concerned teacher once again, their old leader at art school pursuing the project of his vision, ever proposing to his students and his staff the sense behind what happens. A man of high certainty and composure, the person whom they were glad to have in charge in a crisis. Against all the prejudices and fashions of the day, it had been Robert who had opened out a moment in their lives when it had been possible for them to believe in something they might have called authority, something, in an earlier age, which they might have been content to refer to as his school. But that was in the past now and would not be recovered, Toni was suddenly sure of it, though it seemed Robert had not noticed, or would not notice. And yet, almost against his will, Toni wanted to believe in the idea. The Bream Island Inaugural Show—Schwartz, Golding & Powlett. It was seductive.

Robert said, ‘It’s a great opportunity for all of us.’ He held both hands out palms up, considering two weighty objects. ‘The space needs a three-dimensional installation, or a sculpture, to bring it up. Our paintings would be lost there on their own.’

Over Robert’s shoulder Toni could see the old man, his hands gripping his knees, his head craned forward, his jaw slack, his body jumping and jiggling, his attention anchored to the floor.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it to your show. Truly sorry,’ Robert said. ‘It was just impossible for me to get there.’

‘I wasn’t expecting either of you to get to it.’

‘Marina told me I missed something important. I believe no one reviewed it? If things hadn’t been so chaotic, I might have written a piece for Art & Text. Have you got photos or studies? Perhaps I could still do something.’

‘No. I just put it together. I knew what I wanted. I didn’t do any studies.’ Toni found that he did not want to talk about his last installation with Robert.

Marina said, ‘I couldn’t decide whether you meant them to be a crowd of victims in need of help or a sinister mob.’

There was a silence.

Robert said, ‘You’ll have to see the island space before you can finally decide whether you’ll do the show. Marina can take you one day next week, if that suits. What do you think, darling? There’s that business of getting the keys from the park ranger. Can you organise it?’

Toni realised that his viewing of the island was to be purely a formality for Robert.

They turned at the clatter of Theo Schwartz’s spectacles hitting the floor.

They watched Robert hurry across the studio and lean to pick them up, one hand on the old man’s shoulder.

Marina said, ‘Why don’t we go in? He won’t be a minute.’

In the room where the table was set for lunch she moved from place to place, adjusting the position of a knife, a glass, brushing at the cloth with her fingers. A sleek silver-haired cat emerged from the passage and pressed itself against her legs. She bent and picked it up, cradling it in her arms like a baby. ‘You’ve abandoned me, haven’t you, darling?’ She set the cat on the floor again. ‘Misty’s fallen in love with Theo.’

They watched the cat patrol the room.