It was the photograph that drew her. The newspaper is spread out on the kitchen table. And there, at the centre of the front page, is the photograph. Mr Whitlam smiles at the camera (but, it seems to Rita, it is not a convincing smile), and on one side of him is a gallery owner who is familiar to Rita because she is a society figure these days as much as anything else, and on the other side a painter. Something about the painter is familiar. But what? It’s a puzzle. Possibly the name. Possibly the face. Why should she feel as though she knows him? Or has met him. Or, if she’s never met him, why should she feel some sense of their paths having crossed? Somewhere, sometime, long ago.
It is while she is reading the article that accompanies the photograph that the puzzle solves itself. The painter, who lives on a farm in Kent, has returned for what they call a retrospective. And it is while she is reading a list of some of the paintings in the exhibition that she comes across the solution to the puzzle: ‘Woman and Tent’. Aunt Katherine, of course. She has never been told the title of the painting (or has no memory of being told, or has just forgotten anyway) but she is convinced that this is the painting of Aunt Katherine. And there, standing beside Mr Whitlam, is the cheeky young painter who disturbed Katherine one morning in that long-ago world that was still hovering between one thing and another, between what went before the war and what followed. And she tells herself she must remember to let Michael know later in the day when he finishes teaching, little knowing that he has already seen the painting at the exhibition the previous evening.
So this painter did become famous. Famous enough to be seen on the front page of the newspaper talking to a former prime minister, a former prime minister preparing for one last election with a confident smile across his face that doesn’t convince Rita and, she regrets, won’t convince many others either. But it’s not just the painter. Aunt Katherine has achieved a kind of fame too. Aunt Katherine, who only ever wanted to be left alone, will now have to put up with strangers staring at her. Gawking, even. Grinning at this curiosity. And, trapped within the painting, she will be powerless to stop them. Or shoo them away. For strangers will stare and gawk and grin at her forever now, and the only recourse left to her will be the waving arm of protest, snapped by a newspaper photographer all those years before, caught by the painter in one go, and now frozen in time.
And it is while she is contemplating this that she suddenly decides to go there. To see Aunt Katherine. One final visit. It is also a way of filling her day, and Rita is increasingly conscious now of the need to fill her days. For since she stopped working, the days that are not filled with something seem, somehow, aimless. And so, instead of History calling upon her, she will call upon History.
There are few people around and she is free to wander. She passes lines of paintings of landscapes and outlaws and outback types. And she is surprised to realise that she is familiar with them, asking herself as she strolls if this is a measure of fame, that we are familiar with someone’s works without knowing who did them.
Then, there she is. From the moment she sets eyes on the painting she is immediately back there: the newspaper photograph, the table upon which the paper sat, Vic, the weight that would become Michael, the kitchen of that small weatherboard cottage they lived in that winter, the street, all the streets and all the houses, and the cranes from the wharves clawing at the sky — all spring up around her. And she sees Vic, whose ashes now reside in a small urn in a crematorium near that subtropical town by the sea to which he fled and where he spent all too freely and all too quickly the last years of his life, as he was that evening over thirty years before, Aunt Katherine sitting opposite, her request that he visit this painter having been made, and Vic, with resignation written all over his face, knowing that he had no choice but to go. All those years ago, but as clear as yesterday.
The power of the painting to do that, to conjure up that world to which she is both irresistibly drawn and which she never wants to see again, is quite a jolt. But with the jolt comes the thought that others, these strangers who gawk and grin, may look upon this portrait of an old woman (whom, she notes with the hindsight of the years, was a lot more fragile than she let on), but they will never know it the way Rita does. Possibly even this painter himself, who lives far away, and has possibly forgotten all the details. But all Rita has to do is look upon the painting, and all the details, the big and the small facts that constituted their world then, are returned to her. And with this comes a sense of possession. The painting itself may not be hers (and it never could be for it is quite valuable now, she assumes), but the world it so effortlessly conjures up will always be hers. Others, strangers, may gawk or grin at this curiosity from the past, caught by the painter (as Vic always said, and Rita now agrees) in one go, but Rita will always see another portrait altogether, one that includes the world beyond the frame.
It is this world that she takes with her as she leaves the gallery and walks towards the station and the train that will take her to the villa (and she smiles at the flowery language of the real-estate agent, for it is really just a sort of flat with a garden) in which she now lives. And although her villa is not a tent and although it is not on the edge of the city, she lives there by herself, and there is this vague feeling of carrying a little bit of Aunt Katherine back with her. Aunt Katherine and all those sisters, who could command rooms with their sheer presence and their talk, and who unnerved her so when she was young, but from whom she now draws surprising strength.
And she takes that strength with her as she boards her train and looks about the carriage, vaguely wondering if she has now entered that phase of living where, in the eyes of others, you become a kind of History, a picture of things past, as, indeed, Aunt Katherine was for the short time Rita knew her.