Clem was reading the paper when he heard a man say, ‘Hello?’ and a knock on the door. As he crossed the room, he tried to make the sound match his adult son’s voice. It was a rare thing that Elsie was out—with their daughter, and to hear a band, of all things, that Elaine had so wanted to hear. Who else but Donny would knock on a Monday evening?
‘You right?’ Clem said, flicking on the porch light, one hand on the screen-door’s handle.
The visitor was a tall older man with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low. He nodded a greeting.
‘Found this bird down in the gutter—isn’t it a beauty? Pale-headed rosella, I think—gorgeous little thing. Must’ve run into something, and I wondered, would you have a box I could put it in? It might just have stunned itself. Might be right to go again in a bit. A shoebox? Or a carton? Would you have a thing like that?’
Pushing the door open, Clem stepped onto the porch and peered at the bundle of feathers in the man’s hands. Birds were so light and frail, and this one was quivering. The movement shook the colours of its feathers towards a greater luminosity.
‘Come with me and I’ll have a look,’ Clem said. He led the way down the stairs and around to the garage door underneath the house. ‘I usually keep things like that, in case they come in handy.’ He found a pile of small cartons and selected one with a lid. ‘Like this?’
‘Like that. There you are, little one.’ The man went to set the bird down and paused. ‘What about a towel? Or a bit of fabric?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Clem, reaching for a tea towel that Elsie had demoted to an under-house rag. ‘This’ll have it feeling better in an instant,’ he said with a smile. The tea towel was printed with bright pictures of birds—lorikeets and parrots and big white cockatoos. He watched his visitor settle the little thing in its small soft nest.
‘D’you live around here?’ Clem asked then, wondering that the man didn’t have his own garage or shed from which to source a container.
‘I used to, up in the next street. Moved away a few months ago; came back to see the old place.’ The man shifted his hat a little, and Clem saw that it was the artist’s husband, the professor. What had Elsie said, something about their divorce, and the two of them moving away? Clem frowned, trying to think of something appropriate to say.
‘I recognise you—you’re at the university; something to do with flies? My wife knew your wife I think.’ He wasn’t sure if he should refer to the portrait, as if it might be illicit or suspect. That was how he felt about it, he realised, as though it was some liberty taken; some intimacy assumed. He cleared his throat. ‘I was sorry to hear—’ But that sounded too much like someone had died.
‘I’ve failed twice at marriage,’ the professor said bluntly, two fingers cocked as if they wanted a cigarette. ‘Not a thing of which I’m proud. I don’t fail at much as a rule.’
Clem scuffed his feet, uneasy about these words. Pass and fail were things to do with school, not marriage. This man had his box; he should go.
But the professor had stepped forward, resting the box on the bench that held Clem’s vice and lathe. Beyond the bench was Clem’s billiards table.
‘You know,’ said the professor, nodding towards its wide green surface, ‘I haven’t played for years. In the war, in New Guinea, we came across a coffee grower’s house, near Sangara. Beautiful place, and exactly what we’d all been yearning for: big verandas, comfortable beds, books and glassware and views across the foothills. And this billiards table, a huge great thing with the most impeccable cloth. We only had two nights—a little respite from the mud and blood and noise. But we had a championship going, twenty-four hours, as if we knew to make the most of it. I never played so well as I played in that place—to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever played since.’
Clem cleared his throat: here was his quiet night, at home on his own. And the world had offered up a companion for billiards. It was all he could do not to smile.
‘If you don’t mind my racking the balls, Professor, I could stand you a game.’ Clem flicked on the bar of light that hung directly over the table, gesturing towards the cues at the side, and the professor dipped his hat and rubbed his hands, briskly, glancing at the bird.
‘Rack them up, then, rack them up,’ he said, giving the bird’s feathers a gentle pat. ‘I’d have been here years ago if I’d known that I’d a billiards fiend for a neighbour.’
It was the one extravagant thing Clem Gormley owned, inappropriately ostentatious. A mate had told him of a hall closing in the city, all the tables priced to clear, he said, and Clem had found himself carried along to the auction, hardly keen or interested, and going home with fifty square feet of souvenir, wondering how to explain it to Elsie.
‘Your wife won’t mind?’ The professor was chalking his cue, and Clem shook his head.
‘Out with the daughter,’ he said. ‘That show that’s on; those Beatles.’
The professor laughed. ‘World gone mad,’ he said. ‘I read in the paper about some woman passing a sick child over to those young layabouts, as if they were saints or shamans. You want to be careful of your wife getting caught up in something like that. Music.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t see the point.’
Clem shrugged, this time defensive. ‘She likes her music, Elsie, lovely singing voice. When my daughter said she wanted to go, well . . .’ Elsie, zipping herself into that special silver dress, the one he liked, and dusting at her cheeks with a flat pad of rouge. He’d have gone with her if she’d asked, whatever he thought of it. But Elsie had tickets for herself and Elaine, treating them as if they were invested with the power of reconciliation.
Elaine: her teachers had always said she was a bright one—‘a head for learning,’ one had said—and Clem wondered sometimes if they’d done enough with that. But she’d never said, his daughter. She’d never said a word about such things. She grew up and got married and had a baby, exactly as Elsie had hoped she would. And she hated it; Clem could see that. She’d hated it from the get-go, and still did.
It flummoxed Elsie; Clem could sense it at night, when she lay staring at the ceiling, doubtless winding back through every moment and permutation she could think of to try to explain to herself her daughter’s inexplicable behaviour. He could feel the way her fingers played across the texture of the chenille bedspread as if she was trying to trace a path towards some exquisite point where a different thing might have been said, or done, or initiated, and Elaine would emerge, blissful and content and reconstructed in the present. Then Elsie would sigh, and worry at her pillow, and whisper, ‘Sorry, Clem,’ and, finally, sleep.
It would have been easier, Clem thought, if his daughter had moved away altogether. Except for Elsie fretting at not seeing the little one, Gloria. She was some sort of blessing.
But it ate at him, the way Elsie threw herself at any tiny enthusiasm Elaine might want to share—like a dog after scraps, he’d thought once, not proud of the analogy. And he knew Elsie would’ve paid for the tickets, although Elaine’s smart young husband, Gerald, was high up in mining. Not that you ever saw his hands dirty, thought Clem.
He blinked at the sound of the professor’s cue against a ball and the triangle exploded across the smooth green surface.
‘There’s nothing like it, is there?’ the professor said quietly, and Clem saw the same look of satisfaction that he felt on his own face.
‘Could you use a beer with it?’ he asked, setting out two yellow cardboard coasters etched with Mr Fourex, and turning for the stairs.
‘Again,’ said the professor, taking one of the two glasses Clem brought down from the kitchen, ‘I must now rue that we’re no longer neighbours.’ And he clinked his glass against his host’s. ‘To perfect breaks,’ he said. His throat made a strange glugging noise as he swallowed—it reminded Clem of water running out of a bath.
They played four games—three–one to the professor—and drank four glasses each, and all the while the little bird lay in its box, each man standing by it as he waited for the other’s shot. But as the professor potted the last ball, Clem caught the edge of a different movement in the rosella’s feathers, and he touched his finger lightly to its breast.
‘Professor?’ he said gently. ‘I think it’s gone.’ The bird’s head had slumped, its eyes vacant. Clem flexed his finger slightly against its body.
Coming around to the bench, the professor picked the bird out of its makeshift refuge and held it to his cheek. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. We saw it all the time, around the corner—Ida’s studio had glass on three sides, and the poor birds used to try to take a shortcut. That terrible thump, and then a tiny bundle of feathers on the grass. Sometimes they were just stunned—but mostly . . .’
Clem looked up, and saw the other man wipe at a tear.
‘It’s birds, you know, something moves me about birds.’ The professor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, hard. ‘I always hoped to study birds, but I landed with flies—fruit flies, diptera, all those other things with wings. I still miss my birds—their colours, and their songs. I’ve stared a long time at a lot of diptera and I don’t find much of beauty compared to these splendid things.’
Instinctively, Clem swatted an imaginary bug.
‘Now that’s what I should have studied, of course,’ said the professor, laughing. ‘The time it takes between the first mention of a bug in a conversation to the instant someone’s convinced they’re being dive-bombed. It works with fleas too—and lice, I expect. The power of suggestion: it’s some thing, the human mind.’
Clem slapped again. ‘What about your bird, Professor?’ he asked, scratching at the side of his head. ‘What shall we do with your bird?’ The man still had its body nestled up against his cheek.
‘I had a hummingbird in the house once,’ he said at last. ‘I was visiting a colleague in America, and I dozed off at his place one afternoon. Woke up to the strangest sound in the room—I could tell it was a struggle, but it was so delicate. And there it was, this exquisite hummingbird, flying from one picture rail to another. It must have come in through the window and not known how to get out. I caught it, you know, and I held it for a second. An amazing thing: it was like holding beauty, or life—an abstract thing made real. And then I sent it back into the world.’
‘Can you change what you do? Can you change to be a birdman?’ Clem almost blushed. It seemed a presumptuous thing to ask, but here was this man, in his garage, drinking his beer, shooting his billiards, and holding a bird against his cheek like a kiss.
The professor laughed. ‘In a lot of ways,’ he said, ‘that bird brought me nothing but trouble.’ He laid the rosella’s body back in the box, and his fingers rested on its feathers. ‘My American colleague, he had a daughter. She came in while I was holding the hummingbird, and we stood there, the two of us, in that moment. It felt like the most significant piece of time I’d ever experienced. We were married before my sabbatical was up.’ He shook his head. ‘Brought her back here—to Sydney. It was the thirties, and she hated it. We found a little place in Newtown; I had a job at the university. And I loved Newtown. I set out a garden for her, all the flowers blue—it looked lovely in the twilight—and I built a little aviary for a couple of birds, two blue-faced parrot finches. Gorgeous. There was the most splendid gum tree in the yard too, and a tall rangy camphor laurel—they’re useless things, block off any chance of anything else having a foothold. But she loved it—the shiny deep green leaves that looked the way leaves were supposed to look, she said. Not like a eucalyptus.
‘I told her it’d have to go, because it’d starve out the rest of our garden. I told her I’d wait a year, so she could enjoy it, but that I’d need to take it down after that—they grow so fast, you know. At the end of the year, I told her it was time. Had a chap come with a saw, and we got it down between us, poured some kero onto the stump, and that was that. When I went in to pull a couple of drinks out of the ice box, I saw that she was cooking something on the stove.’
He stopped talking then, and stood swaying a little from side to side, his fingers still touching the dead rosella’s chest.
‘I never told this story to a soul, but it was my birds there in that pot. Fair trade, she said, the finches I loved in exchange for her tree. I couldn’t speak—damn near packed her on the first boat to America, but what can you do? What can you do? Must have been the end of 1938, because as soon as the war came, I was off. Got myself out of her way. When I met Ida, it was easy to stay away.’
They stood facing each other, two tall men in the clutter of Clem’s garage—although Clem was staring at the other man with a look of horror on his face. Birds in a pot? Pets in a pot? Who’d even think of a reprisal like that? It felt evil—and that your wife, the woman you loved, would do such a thing. Fancy realising you’d married someone who did a thing like that.
He closed his eyes and pictured Elsie: Elsie holding their children, holding their grandchild, feeding the kookaburra that landed in their yard; worried for that blessed crow. He swallowed. Had he ever done a thing to enrage her so much? Had she ever sat across from him and plotted some revenge? He took a breath. It wasn’t that he couldn’t know: there was nothing to know. They trusted themselves with each other. They had nothing like this.
The professor shook the handkerchief into its great white square and blew his nose again. ‘There’s no way around it, is there? There’s no way of loving someone who thinks that’s a reasonable thing to do.’
Clem shook his head, a nasty stale taste in his mouth. ‘My father shot a crow once—no reason, just because he could. It seemed so cruel. I wished him dead himself for that, I think.’ Another previously unspoken thing said.
‘Tantamount to murder, to take the life of some sentient thing,’ said the professor, wiping roughly at his nose. ‘You wouldn’t have another of those beers, would you? I could well wash that story away.’
But Clem shook his head again, reaching forward to pick up the bird’s coffin. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. But let’s get this one buried, and then come up for a cuppa. That’s the best I can do.’
In the yard, Clem set his foot against the top edge of the shovel, willing it to find a weakness in the hard, dry winter soil. They were down by the back fence where he’d buried the baby crow years before, and where the swamp had the most chance of seeping through the dirt. The shovel eased in, and Clem set about digging a small pit.
‘I almost think I should say a few words,’ the professor whispered as he placed the coffin in its grave. ‘This little frame, and the ability to fly: an amazing biological culmination.’
Isn’t all life? Clem thought a little wildly. It felt like a moment of epiphany. He wanted nothing more than Elsie by his side right now. She’d have a better thing to say than come up for a cuppa; she’d have a better thing to say about the bird. She did the caring and the saying in their world.
Above, in the trees, fruit bats muttered and squawked, and a baby possum made its careful way along a telegraph wire. The other rosellas, the ones who should have cried and called for this bird, they’d all be asleep in their nests, thought Clem.
He leaned forward and scraped the dirt down onto the box.
‘There now,’ he said as he stood up, clapping his hand on the professor’s shoulder. ‘Come in and I’ll fix us a brew.’ And he led the man up the familiar slope of his own back lawn, wondering at the strangeness of his coming, and the bird, and the pool game, and the night.
Sitting across from each other at the kitchen bench, each man stirred the sugar in his tea. Did you ever ask your first wife about it? Clem wanted to ask. Did she apologise, explain it somehow? He watched as the professor positioned his spoon carefully on his saucer and took up his cup, saw the way his hand shook and the tea spilled a little. He’s older than I thought, Clem realised: maybe sixty or more. Wandering around his old neighbourhood, looking for his past.
Where would I walk, without Elsie? he wondered, sipping at his own hot sweet tea. Would I stay here or move on? Would she leave me, ever, Elsie?
But she would never leave him; he would never leave her. People like us, he thought, well, we don’t. He couldn’t see himself without her anyway, and she must feel the same. Till death us do part—they’d made that promise. Clem pulled his shoulders back, proud of keeping his word.
And then he thought about the noise and the mess and the exuberant frenzy of the music she was listening to—now, he thought, probably right now. What if some man there—? He couldn’t even imagine. But what if some man there—and his shoulders slumped.
‘Does she often go to these sorts of concerts, then, your wife?’ the professor asked out of the silence.
‘Never a one before this,’ said Clem. ‘She makes me try an orchestra sometimes, or some paintings at the gallery—well, you’d know about that, with Mrs Lewis. It’s like she wants to look into another world once in a while.’
‘And what do you do, Mr—?’
The question of Clem’s name was so impossibly belated that he almost laughed in reply. ‘Me? I’m Clement Gormley. I’m at the university, Professor—maintenance, mostly; bits and bobs for the caretaker, around the grounds. I recognised you from there, as much as from around the corner.’ It hadn’t occurred to him that the professor might not recognise him. ‘Apologies, my apologies,’ the older man said, setting his empty cup carefully on the saucer and trying to still its rattle. ‘Those notions of absentminded professors—they’re true, of course. They’re true.’
It made Clem bristle, the other man’s casual claim of social ignorance, but he was courteous all the same.
‘To be honest, sir—’ the honorific slipped out before he could stop it, and he knew the other man would take it as his due, ‘—perhaps I haven’t done so much work in your building. I’ve certainly never rehung your door or eased your window jamb.’ Offering the man an excuse, a way out. And then, because he couldn’t resist the jibe: ‘You’d probably not have noticed me if I had.’
‘Come now, I’d like to think I’m a better man than that,’ the professor said, puffing out his chest with attempted bonhomie. He caught sight of the kitchen clock and shook his head. ‘Well, I’ve taken too much time from you—and given you a strange kind of night to report. Thank you for the box, and the game, and the beer, and the tea. I might stop by your back fence, if I walk this way again, and have a word or two with that pretty little bird—we all just want to be remembered in this world.’
‘Are you a church man, Professor?’ The words were out before Clem had finished thinking them, and he flushed as he heard them, wondering at his nerve.
‘Presbyterian, in the main—high days and holidays, that’s all. Why do you ask?’
‘The way you talk about this bird—“all creatures great and small”, I guess. It’s not what I thought went with science.’
The professor smiled a very small smile. ‘Biology can still seem wonderful even as we try to prise it apart,’ he said. ‘In New Guinea, I saw birds of paradise—the King, the Emperor, the Greater; I never made it far enough west to see the Wilson’s. The Wilson’s has blue skin on its head so bright it glows in the dark—you can’t help but be amazed by something like that.’ He spread his arms wide to make a T-shape from his body. ‘There I was in New Guinea, seeing men on their short way to dying—bullets and bayonets—when all I wanted was to sit and gaze at these extraordinarily bright coloured feathers. I met Ida up there, you know, a nurse—but an artist too amongst it all; I watched the kinds of beauty she could make. We’re not so hidebound, in science, to be completely blind to beauty.’ And he pushed himself out of his chair.
Following his visitor through the house to the front door and down the stairs onto the grass, Clem wondered if the professor meant the beauty of the birds, or of the woman who became his second wife. Because she was beautiful, Mrs Lewis, he thought, and was surprised by his certainty. But he’d watched her—in the street, in the shops or coming up the hill from the train—and there was a kind of beauty about her that he’d assumed had to do with the work she did, the constant creation of something. It seemed a risky thing to think—although Elsie was prettier. He had no doubt about that.
‘We were sorry to see you go,’ he said, nodding up the hill towards the professor’s vacated house. ‘I used to see Mrs Lewis going by—she always had a smile and a wave.’
‘Very friendly, my wife, very friendly,’ the professor agreed, ‘and so very good at what she did. I was proud of how she changed what she wanted to do—she was a very fine nurse. She was a very fine artist. She was a very fine woman—you know.
‘I don’t miss the arguments, but I miss being able to stand and watch her work. That was something, you know, really something—watching a picture come into being where there’d only been blank canvas before. I never tired of it. Still . . .’ He ducked back into the open garage for his hat. ‘She made one painting of me, as if I was back in the war, and looking every inch the soldier, which I never truly felt I was. She’d got the colours just right—every shade of green and brown, and nothing else. Even my lips were green, and my skin; I could feel the wet weight of the jungle in that frame.
‘I asked her if I could have it, when we were breaking up our house. I asked her if I could take just that one—and she said no. I thought it mine by rights, being of me, but she said she’d made it, and it was all of me she’d have. She did give me another painting, a portrait of a woman—no one I knew, although for a while I tried to tell myself it was a painting of Ida herself. Her rich red-brown hair. Knew it wasn’t. I hated it at first, kept it turned against the wall. But when I took these new rooms, I hung it up—for the company—and it’s growing on me. The woman’s smiling, just a little, and looking off to one side.’
Clem smiled: he knew that look—Elsie had it, and Elaine too, although neither could ever see a similarity to the other. And then he wondered: where was Elsie’s portrait now? The thought had never occurred to him; he’d always assumed that the painter would still have it with her.
‘My wife—’ he began, cut off as the other man went on.
‘It’s funny, you know, but I feel like there’s some sort of camaraderie between me and this woman—two people who sat still for Ida, somehow brought together on either side of a frame.’ And he coughed, stepping back towards his host, and reaching out his hand, ready to shake. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you for all of that. And if they ever do send you to fix my door or my window, make sure you remind me of your name. I won’t mean to be rude, but I probably won’t place you away from here. It’s been nice to meet you, Mr Gormley. And thank you again for . . .’ His wave took in the billiards, the garage, the dark space in the yard where they’d stood together to farewell a little bird, the deep blue night sky above. ‘That’s the colour, the backdrop of my painting. An inky blue. A colour that’s good for the soul.’ He waved again, and on he went.
Clem stood a moment, watching until the other man disappeared around the corner. From across the gully he heard a train, and he wondered when Elsie would be home—he wanted to tell her about his night, and the professor, and the bird.
How did marriages fail? He’d never given it much thought—although his mother’s had, he supposed, before it was resolved by his father’s death. She’d never spoken of how she thought about her husband, nor of the possibility of marrying someone else.
He heard the train again as he pulled the garage door to and headed back up the stairs—he should put the kettle on again, in case Elsie was near. She’d come in, full of life and excitement, looking ten years younger in that pretty silver dress.
It wasn’t for him, this noisy modern life.
In the living room, he flicked the switch on the record player, swept the dust off a disc in wide arcs. Frank Sinatra—now there was a singer. He positioned the needle, letting it drop at just the track he wanted, and the house filled with the mournful reminiscence of the middle of the night.
A world without Elsie; if she ran off, went away. If she went out on a night like this and something happened that meant she never came home—he wouldn’t let himself think it might be the end of life that separated them. They were young still, and they were healthy. He’d hang onto that.
If I was the bloke in the song, sat up in some bar at a quarter to three in the morning, singing for my missus . . .
It was too much like a movie. If something happened to Elsie, Clem would be mowing the lawns and clearing the gutters and trying to make his own steak and kidney pie. He’d be dandling Gloria and painting the handrails and pottering about in his garage. He’d be doing all the usual things—even if no one was calling from the house, ‘Clem? Are you down there? Are you right?’ He’d be Clem, but somehow less so. Elsie sparked him into life. What more could a man ask than that?
The song finished. He walked into the darkened bedroom, and felt around for the neatly folded flannelette of his pyjamas, right where Elsie placed them, every day, beneath the pillow on his side of the bed. Enough; he’d leave the door unlatched, and hear about his wife’s adventure in the morning. Almost asleep, he saw the infinite possibilities of a racked triangle of pool balls scattering after the break shot. He saw Elsie, painted and framed, with the sky as the professor had described it, that rich and brilliant blue behind her head.
And in the fug of half-sleep, more dream than waking knowledge, he could see the professor’s painting so clearly, and he suddenly knew why. He sat up with a gasp.
That man was gazing at Elsie.
I should have bought it from Mrs Lewis. I should have paid any price. This unbearable thought: someone else was living with his wife.
He could see the man, hat tilted, sitting and gazing in blank adoration. Thinking who knew what, doing who knew what, while she stared out beyond him.
Clem reached the bathroom and spat into the basin, catching sight of himself in the dimness of the mirror as he raised his head again. There was a wildness in his stare. He splashed cold water on his face—again, again—and made himself calm down. Other men would have seen this consequence unspool from the madness of letting their wives sit for an artist. Other men would have known what to do.
One last cold sluice of water. He didn’t even know where the professor now lived. And he could hardly march around to his office and demand his wife back. He wouldn’t know what to say. As for Elsie, what the devil could he say of it to her?
Clem dabbed his face dry and held his own gaze in the mirror. He remembered the physicist’s words from the ferry, on the day when the pitch drop fell: and there wasn’t a blessed soul there to see it.
No, thought Clem, standing straight and squaring himself in the mirror. There was. This blessed soul. And what did it matter, where a picture hung? He had the real Elsie; he had her by him.
He felt the room’s walls solid around him. This house, his wife, his kids: that was what defined him. He sought no purchase on the world beyond these things.