18

Some questions were quelled, others left echoing. The brush jumped in her hand like it was of her own flesh. It was important to stop at this first, tenuous sign of calm, as the board was taking charge of itself, not the product of chance, but always meant to be this way. Her spine straight and exultant, she contemplated the results critically. She had returned to paint the sandy in-between place she and Arthur had seen reclaimed by water. Now it felt inviolate; the tide had barely begun to advance.

‘You scared me.’ He had come up on her from behind.

A child was sitting a way down the beach, but Arthur’s arms came around her all the same. They had been heedless since they woke burnt-skinned under the night sky. He sought her out as often as he could and came to her tent each night. People knew, though no one was saying anything to Clarice’s face; they were not unkind, but amused, perhaps, looking deep into her eyes, or disappointed, avoiding them. She had suddenly become very human to them and this was looked down on. There was much talk of a new, more open morality, new ways of living, but beneath this, they remained conservative, their Victorian values firmly entrenched. She did not enjoy being an object of attention. However, their disapproval did not sting as much as she would have expected. The attitudes of others seemed to be becoming less important. Bella was the exception, of course. Arthur maintained that she did not know. ‘She would never believe it of me,’ he said once, staring at his feet. His wife was keeping to her bed, sick with the cold that would not go away.

Clarice stretched her left arm that had endured a crooked position so long, holding palette and brushes. She was beginning to wilt.

He did not apologise for startling her, but said, ‘You work so quickly.’

Still and reverential, he looked at her painting. There might have been a slight, competitive tension in him.

It was a sunset view of the place they stood in. This and her painting of the hot sunrise were companion pieces, she thought, holding possibilities and progressions between them; they formed a whole. They might be some culmination for her. She needed to believe it. Today’s painting was less victorious. The pink cast onto clouds and sea by the lowering sun—out of the frame—was a final-hour warmth.

The prelude to night was breezy. She closed her eyes so she would not see that scene anymore and also to smell Arthur better; she wanted to commit his smell to memory. She recognised the odour of his van and perhaps a little of Bella’s lavender eau de cologne. His fingers were against her ribs and, just as strongly as this, she could feel the wet board to which she had been joined for hours, though she was no longer touching it either with brush or with gaze.

‘Will you give it to me? Can I have it?’

‘You always want them.’ She opened her eyes. ‘How would you explain it?’ She stepped out of his arms. ‘It’s for my exhibition, anyway.’

She stared the painted scene into meaninglessness, a void. The sea darkened behind it. Arthur took out his tobacco and papers and began the slow rolling of a cigarette. A distance off, the child, until then seated, unfolded, elongated and became kinetic: a small figure running away from the beach. Clarice noticed in herself a growing interest in the human form; perhaps physical love did that to you.

‘She helped me clean my brushes before,’ she said. ‘Her name is Sonia. She was watching the ocean all afternoon. She’d pick up things we don’t—things we’ve forgotten to see.’

‘Maybe. This is frighteningly close to utopia. Are you coming to dinner, then?’

‘I’m starving.’

‘You have to keep your strength up, with the way you work.’ He liked to think of her eating.

‘I’d stay out here forever.’

He touched her wrist and held it loosely. His grip softened and released. ‘Can I help you clean up?’ His eyes searching for a rag.

She was already opening her turpentine, its perfume like a scream. ‘No. I’m fine.’

He turned away.

‘Productive day?’ she asked his back.

‘I was just messing around.’ He had withdrawn. ‘I’ll see you.’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll be along shortly. And I’ll see you after.’

Nights in Clarice’s tent, they tried to muffle their incoherent voices by stuffing balled clothing between their teeth; she felt like an animal, not wild and free anymore but tamed, a docile horse chomping on its bit, or like some prisoner, bound and gagged. Once she accidentally reached for her stockings—their tint was called Rose Morn—which tasted of the powder she had dusted on her legs and were oddly elusive in her mouth. Other times, they silenced themselves with their hands (whose hand over whose mouth?), as if this were not love but suffocation, a shared demise just averted. Even muted, the noise made the night crack down the centre. Tilting her head and lowering her lashes, she could almost see the shards of the broken night, the glittering of their slicing edges.

Once, Arthur jerked the fabric from her lips, determined to hear.

Her involuntary cry astounded her.

When she was breathing quietly again, she observed that the wind had lifted and rain pattered against the tent; there was going to be a downpour. She pulled a twig from under the sleeping bag where it had been worrying at her and, for comfort, stroked her own arm with it.

‘You’ll get rained on,’ she told him. ‘Stay a bit longer.’

‘Right-o.’

Arthur wanted her to look at him. She would not. He had said that this place was almost utopia. Indeed it was. They had the holy trinity of art, nature, love. But their love had become a public spectacle, and now when Bella’s face appeared in her mind, it was graver, a touch ashen. Surely she knew. Could she be oblivious, really? The camp was paradise, both before and after the shameful knowledge of nakedness. The very intensity of it made Clarice wonder if whatever they were to one another could last, if this were not a desperate holding on to something that could not be held.