21

Years, looked back on, could concertina flat, as if there had not been any space or breath in them, no fluctuating light, no atmosphere. No jubilation, desperation or shifting chameleon states of mind. No contemplation of the moment.

It was the case too that, from outside, a woman’s life not furnished with a husband and child rearing would appear bleak, brittle, to most. In a magazine that Louise had left at the house, Clarice read an article by a famous author on how the fight for women’s freedom had gone too far. Men, he believed, had been left emasculated, without faith in themselves, because women had no faith in them, fought them, would not give up fighting for freedom. She had not really been able to make sense of the anxious argument. It was logical to her that if freedom was fought for, then this was the result of it not as yet having been won—not being secure and able to be counted on. She did not recognise herself here. When she thought of freedom, she thought first of the freedom to paint. If she had turned her eyes away from the common shape of a woman’s life, it was in order to fight her true opponent: her art. The author found the Woman of today an unhappily severe creature, with her brief attire, short hair and aggression, a kind of soldier, and hers an unfulfilled, impoverished femininity. He clearly did not believe that a fighter, a soldier, could be enriched by her own cause.

She was continually surprised by the confidence with which many were ready to determine the self-fulfilment of others. With bemusement or exasperation, she realised that in the dozen or so years after it ended with Arthur, little happened to her that most would have considered eventful. But those were fertile, full years, with a fullness eluding words, as fullness does. Years dense with work for which her paintings would have to speak, if they could; if someone would listen.

A person she had not seen in a long while would ask, with a little tragic frisson, ‘Clarice, my dear? How have you been?’ Telling her she was indeed judged a sorry, reclusive figure, an object worthy of compassion. If you dedicated yourself to observation, you were viewed as isolated and sorrowfully inert. An outrageous misconception. Seeing what there was to be seen was far from passive; having your eyes and self open was surely the opposite of isolation—how could you be more connected to life? She and Herb had discussed this once, many years ago, before he left for the Continent.

‘Active contemplation!’ he exclaimed, triumphantly.

‘Precisely,’ she said, feeling they had a lot in common.

She completed hundreds, thousands of canvases and boards; a good deal more boards, which were cheaper. She got them, along with all her materials, from W & G Dean, in the city; they gave her a special price, understanding that those were hard times for artists, for almost everyone, of course, and sometimes even threw some in for free, bless them. The walking—journeying through landscapes on foot—was inseparable from the art. She was so much on the move, there being so much ground to cover. At night, she went home to cook, eat and sleep in her parents’ house, but that was only her official residence, her domicile fixe, because in reality, she inhabited the outdoors. She was a wanderer. A nomad.

Returned from her travels, her shoes would be thick with dust; upturned, sand rained from them. In bare feet, she winced to take a step. Blood pounded in her feet and the bones of them felt tender; she examined with pride the sturdy calluses that clung to her big toes as barnacles cling to a pier. In bed, her left hip or right knee turned fretful. Asleep, she dreamed of walking. She drifted along Flinders Street, or made her way languidly over sand, as if walking through water. Her trolley sometimes figured in her dreams, but instead of being drawn along behind her, it usually hovered in the air above, like an overgrown balloon on a string or an odd cloud she was suspended from. She was so grateful for walking she almost felt guilty, as though the men on crutches or in wheelchairs, their mobility incomprehensibly disrupted by war, were reproaching her for glutting herself on smooth movement. On rare occasions, however, feeling a kind of kinship with the disrupted men, she thought of her trolley as a prosthetic limb.

She was promiscuous in her looking, wanting to see everything. Every caress light bestowed on the city and the people it sheltered and exposed. Many of these were exposed, destitute. Disenchanted. Passing silently among them, she sometimes felt like a shade, only she was very much alive, with her robust body and toughened feet, and obscenely fortunate. Perhaps, on occasion, when she painted a landscape bare of people, it was in fact a sidelong portrait of a person she had spied on the street.

She venerated streets and roads, however modest. They refused inertia, being an opening, a kind of door, always saying, ‘You see, things could go this way. Or that.’ And the motorcars that circulated in them, with their lovely silhouettes, boxy or aerodynamic. A certain Mr Fitzhugh, a critic who wrote for The Argus and seemed not to disapprove of her, conceded that no other artist had portrayed the motorcar as she had, with a sort of harmonious beauty. She took this as a terrific compliment. Motors were a blessing. Even the dangerous smell of their petrol exhaust was magnificent, as it mixed with the other loud ingredients in the scent of the city’s life, the potent heat of carthorses, or men in the dole queue who were sleeping rough, the coal smoke lifting from factory boilers against the slow falling of birds.

The buildings, to her mind, were close, inscrutable friends, who turned splendid or a little sinister at nightfall, when they tossed light across the sleek Yarra. Those dribbles of light were a coded message that would always be beyond her grasp. Studying it, she was content—in her deep ignorance, in the long reverie before a revelation— and could have remained by the river indefinitely, herself a night reflection trembling towards dissolution. She could not stay out after dark as often as she would have liked, Father insisting she be back by a Reasonable Hour, but at calculated intervals she transgressed. She followed the electric lights along the night’s confidential passageways, into its velvet volumes. Sometimes, she passed a place like the Latin Café, where there might have been people she knew or had known, a cluster of Meldrum’s former students hotly debating art and philosophy. An odour of beer leaked out. Some jazz, perhaps. If a bearded, shaggy type whom she recognised emerged into the street, she looked quickly away. She only wanted to watch and, in this way, to take the city’s pulse.

By squinting at the circle of light in a street lamp, you transformed it into a many-pointed star. Under the headlamps of passing motors, telegraph wires were revealed, briefly, as the silver threads of a great spider web. And there was the clean, fresh privilege of mist. Melbourne in the mist. Tucked between substance and mirage, her city of shifting presences. There was surely nowhere else more alluringly ghostly. She seldom felt alone. Clarice and Melbourne were joined; the paintings of her city were love poems, a consummation.