20

On the second-last day of the camp, he wanted to take her on a bushwalk. She accepted. It was after lunch, in the space between her two painting sessions, a drowsy lull during which many of the others napped.

He knew the trail, having done the walk before, alone. Arthur could not get enough of nature; it never sated him— they had this in common. They set off by a farm, skirting the property, then crossing one of its fields before picking up a stream. It guided them into the bush. Three kangaroos were reclining by the stream, princely and unperturbed. She liked the leisurely shapes of them and their fuzzy, warm colour.

Quickly, as if she and Arthur had drifted to sleep and discovered themselves in a dream, they entered a rainforest’s low, dappled light. And he began to tell the romantic story of a white man who had lived with native people around those parts. They were walking single file, Clarice behind, so she missed the odd detail. She was also distracted by the forest—it seemed to be some peculiar blend of outdoors and indoors. It was very moist, luxuriously green and disarmingly close; secret. She was floating along a shaded yet luminous corridor between walls upholstered in bark, moss, leaf. This curiously internal nature amazed her; there was something to be learned from it. Arthur’s story was another sort of corridor and she floated through it too.

Well over a hundred years before, William Buckley escaped from a convict settlement in Sorrento. He was found on the brink of starvation by the Wathaurong people, who accepted him into their tribe, thinking they recognised in him one of their own warriors come back from the dead. Buckley lived among the Wathaurong people for thirty-two years. It was powerfully attractive, this idea of an imprisoned man escaping captivity and flourishing in nature, amid native men. She was envious, and wondered about the influence on the mind of never leaving a forest, of living enclosed in its myriad greens and wet arboreal air.

By the waterfall called Phantom Falls, she stood on a flat river boulder and stripped off her clothes. She was getting efficient at this, almost cocky. She crouched and lay back on the cool, eroded rock, staring at a patch of tree-hemmed sky. Everything leaned against the unbroken music of water thrown from a great height.

Arthur approached her. He was learning to wait, starting to understand the rhythms of her moods or at least to calmly accept them. Hands on his hips, he gazed down. The redness of his skin was sobering into a tan that gave him a dramatic air of wisdom, of life lived. She had to choose between watching him or the sky. She reached for his hand and pulled him down, to have both. Their bodies, demanding, combative and slow to yield, fused on a black stone bed in the middle of a river. Later, would her fingers find blood along the ridge of her back?

They did not. And this was fitting and unsettling. There had been a feeling of fantasy to the urgent, ungentle coupling. She and Arthur might have been primordial beings or gods, essences rather than people, distillations of spirit. If she was right to suspect that he could not continue for long to live so divided, that such strong sensation could not be sustained, then soon, they would be making love only in the back rooms of her imagination, where the cuts and haemorrhaging were intangible. This time seemed already to have arrived. The moment was too exotic and sharply defined, still, somehow, in its violence; it had to be an illusion, magic of the mind. As they moved in the multicoloured light, her eyes latched onto a green like the mossy green of Bella’s soft or soft-seeming dress. She shut them, after a while.

Rainforest. Rain forest. The paired words like the heart’s twin drum beats. Rain forest. Forest of rain, a sublime, completely unrelenting image.

After Anglesea, her rabidly nostalgic memory reached over and over for their bushwalk. She preferred remembering this to Flinders Street station. Their last conversation.

It was some weeks later. The platform was nearly empty and the creamy sky was cryptic and cold. Her ears were freezing. His hands turning nervous, Arthur was explaining that his life with Bella was a good one. Even. Without certain highs and lows. Ever so good.

‘Good?’

He did not speak of his daughter; he never did. He likened his married life then to a domestic garden. Tended, nurtured over the years. A symbiosis. A contract. She had not asked that he choose between his family and her, had not demanded justifications. She understood but detested this talk of the garden, its civilised tepidness. The choice it implied—of comfort over passion. The correct choice, for him, no doubt; she did not dispute it. He was trying to be open, talking this way—though, suddenly, she was tired, wearied by justifications and the apologetic, hangdog shifting of his hands. Her ears, her body was growing colder and colder in the unreadable light; it was that cold that alarms the blood into a retreat, resembling burning. He wanted their ‘friendship’ to continue. When he said friendship, she found that she could not remain near him. She could no longer stand to provoke in him such guilt. At times, the guilt had seemed to spread by contagion, from him to her; at others, to originate in herself. She saw that only in ending it would they have peace, be done with this turbid compromise.

‘We mustn’t see each other again,’ she told him, smoothly, carefully, gauging his shock.

For a moment, he appeared to hold his breath. She felt a blockage in her own chest and the old pull towards him— fainter now. He knew she was right. She would have said something more had she been sure it would not have come out surly or stricken. Why should it be such a treacherous thing, the showing of emotion? And when and how to show it a matter of such complexity that it froze you? She might have given him more. She offered a face as impenetrable as the sky.

At Anglesea, the end had been approaching. But their love had always contained a fatal flaw, the suspicion of immorality. Perhaps passion always did.

Someone had insisted Bella stand with them for the photograph Arthur took on the day of Mrs Hamlin’s party. Probably she would have preferred not to, because she came out looking distracted. Clarice never did discover just how much his wife knew, though she had believed Bella knew. Clarice kept the photograph in the drawer of her bedside table. They stood together, a motley crew joined by their commitment to tone, the conviction that this was the key to sight: the life of a subject was in the mingling of light and shade. In her own face, joy. She could not have hidden it from Arthur, who was watching from under the camera’s dark skirt. She would not pretend to be depleted when she was full, her ecstasy having no tolerance for the usual duplicities.

She had used to picture a moment between Arthur and Bella, when the penny had dropped for her.

Oh. Our love is beyond resuscitation.

And another moment when, looking at Arthur, Bella saw that someone else had filled him up right to the brim with new life.

This is what Clarice had imagined. It had made her unhappy and also gleeful. But it was not wise to make assumptions about what people saw or understood, suffered or were indifferent to; it was surprising what could be missed. And most likely, it had not gone the way she had thought between Bella and Arthur at all.

She cherished the photograph, thinking of the French term chéri that began the word cherish, with its hint of bed-warmth and sweet red fruit. Or she resented its thinness, its cool surface and hard edges for being the only niggardly embodiment of him—on so many nights—to fill her hands.

He did not, of course, appear in the photograph. He merely haunted it in the haunting way of absence, as intimately and invisibly as a maker haunts his creation. He was its gaps and hollows, its longing and its emptiness.