Toni was sitting on Robert’s library steps in the dining room at Richmond drawing Robert, Marina and Theo. The three of them were seated around the circular table finishing lunch. Robert had worked at home especially for the sitting. He was looking tired. Toni kept thinking to himself that it was not a good day for Robert to be having his likeness taken. Misty was crouched at Theo’s feet, gnawing an anchovy the old man had slipped to her. Lying on the table at Theo’s right hand was the black sketchbook which no one was allowed to see into, not even Robert. Robert would have loved to have seen what his father was doing in the book but Theo waved him away. It’s just the doodlings of an old man. The book was held closed with a thick elastic band and a draughtsman’s pen was pushed between the band and the cover. It looked more like a ledger for keeping some kind of accounts than an artist’s sketchbook. Toni had no doubt his own likeness had found its way into the book.
There was just the click and scrape of their cutlery on the plates, and the distant murmur of traffic along Bridge Road. Theo leaned and spoke to the cat, his voice a sudden distraction in the elaborate silence. ‘We’re posing,’ he explained to Misty throatily, and he coughed. ‘We can’t help it. It’s the vanity of the self-image. We want to look our best, but we’re pretending to Toni we don’t care.’ He coughed again, or laughed, a throaty catch in his voice.
Robert looked at his father, a brief smile lightening the expression in his eyes, then he looked away.
Toni stopped drawing and began writing in the margin of the paper. His day was going well. A week ago he had been tense and anxious, but now he was enjoying drawing again and good things were starting to happen for him on the page. He wanted to set something of this tone for himself in a kind of diary entry alongside the drawings in the hope that it would inform the oil painting when he came to work on it. He wrote carefully with a sharpened stub of pencil, so that he would be able to read his notes back to himself later. It was a kind of story that he was putting together, something to link him to the continuity of today’s rhythm, a lifeline to his present mood in case things ceased to go well once he was back in the studio on his own, faced with the problems of the painting. Marina has thrust a handful of white daisies with golden centres into the yellow and blue Picasso vase on the small table under the window. The effect is more confident and relaxed than if she had arranged the flowers with care. This is so like her on certain days. Then, on other days, her confidence deserts her and she spends her time nervously readjusting everything that she has arranged the day before . . . A few lovely white petals and a gilding of pollen have fallen at the feet of Geoff Haine’s bronze running man. It is a good piece, and they cherish it. The anonymous bronze figure might be their house deity and the flowers an offering to the fugitive god of art who they worship . . . Marina’s painting of the naked man adrift in space leans against the pale wall on the mantelpiece behind the silent diners, the wrinkled soles of the man’s feet, the anatomical detail photographic and precise, as if his deathless pallor comments on the mortality of the living . . . The viewer of this painting is drawn to look closely in order to see how it has been done, the illusion of flesh in-depth persisting until the eye is close to the paint surface . . . This is the high craft of the artist’s sleight-of-hand and Marina is its master . . . And once the viewer is close enough, he sees with surprise that the appearance of depth has been a trick of the light after all . . . and so the viewer steps back and exclaims, Astonishing! . . . It is the invited response . . . Marina’s image is more real than reality . . . It is a realism that is unreal, the realism of dream, so precisely focussed it disconcerts perception and prompts the viewer to turn back and look again, and wonder what it is that eludes and attracts him . . . Marina has achieved the heightened realism of an intense familiarity, which must incite the question in the viewer: What is it I am really seeing? That is Robert’s idea, and she has translated it perfectly, and in the translation the picture has become her own . . . So it is no longer necessary for Robert to paint . . . They are true collaborators, these two . . . The union of their ideas and their practice is seamless . . . This is who they are. And without Robert, Marina cannot be fully visible . . . Nor Robert without his father . . . Nor Theo, perhaps, without Misty . . . And so on . . . It is all an arrangement of relationships . . . Light and shade . . . Marina’s likeness in isolation from these two is without depth or ambiguity and is an idealisation that is not interesting . . . So why, then, was I able to paint my mother without my father beside her? Surely my mother and father belonged together even more deeply than do these two? . . . These are questions to which I shall never find the answers . . . what is true for one relationship, for one painting, is not true for another . . . Each possesses its own strange inevitability that resists us and we can never finally know what it is we are doing until the work is finished . . . It is as if the picture paints itself through us, and has a larger existence of which we know nothing . . . I don’t know anyone who would agree with these observations . . . Only my father, if he had lived.
He stopped writing and started working again on the figure of Robert. He drew quickly, with energy, almost violently, with large sweeping gestures, then suddenly close and with minute touches, the stub and two fingers, the drawing block resting on his knees. In his hand he gripped a rag, with which he occasionally scrubbed at the drawing, as if he were trying to rub through the surface to a shape or figure beneath. How to see? How to draw? These were the great questions. It was not, after all, a rational procedure to seek to create on the blank page these figures seated at the table. The three of them. A trinity. The Holy Family. The irresistible asymmetry of the triptych. Something like that. His perception of them. Not them, in the end, but himself. Such things could never be matters for precision.
Theo nodded in Robert’s direction and confided to the cat, ‘My son is tired this afternoon, so we are eating our lunch in silence. This is our penance. This is something he learned from his mother, not from me.’
Robert said, ‘Oh, come on, Dad!’ and he smiled indulgently. ‘Mum and I used to have great conversations.’
‘Tell me about them,’ Theo said. ‘What did you two talk about? The absent father? I’ve no right to ask of course.’
‘We often talked about you, Dad. And you have every right to ask.’
Robert was looking older than his fifty years. Toni was intrigued by the grey patches of slack skin under his eyes, his cheeks tight, his features sucked in around the dome of his skull. He had begun to see that in his drawing Robert was becoming an effigy of his ailing father. The unforseen effect intrigued and excited him. The comparison of father and son was being stated and made apparent on the page with the blunt stub of charcoal. He realised that the drawing was an image of a man who was struggling. And as he drew, Toni was moved by a deep feeling of respect and affection for the older man.
Robert glanced up at Marina, as if he expected her to say something.
She did not speak but smiled and put her hand on his.
Theo observed these silent communications between husband and wife with amusement. He was steady today. His nerves smooth. His drugs doing their job. He had good days and bad days. Today was a good day.
They had forgotten to pose.
‘So what happened yesterday?’ Marina asked Robert. ‘You didn’t tell me in the end.’ Her tone was gentle, almost coaxing, and she kept her hand on his.
‘Here we go,’ Theo said softly to the cat at his feet.
‘What happened?’ Marina repeated, gentle but firm.
Robert breathed and glanced at his father, and rested his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. ‘The vice-chancellor reallocated the funding earmarked for my guest lecturer program without bothering to tell me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to cancel the program.’
‘But can he do that?’ Marina asked.
‘It’s the vice-chancellor’s discretionary fund, darling.’
‘But not to tell you? Why would he be so rude?’
‘Our vice-chancellor’s not a he. Miriam Stewart believes being brutal is an efficient way for her to behave.’ He smiled. It was a smile that was without warmth or mirth. ‘It’s not like the old days at the college. It’s not like that anymore. People with only art on their minds getting along with each other. That’s all gone.’ He picked up his knife and fork. ‘Maybe I shall have to become like them.’ He resumed dealing with the last fragments of his meal.
‘You could never be like that,’ Marina said.
Theo asked the cat, ‘Who knows what we’ll do to save our skins?’
Marina persisted, ‘You care too much about people to ever be rude or brutal.’
‘That’s what I’ve always believed.’
Theo confided to Misty, ‘He’s forgetting the critical style he was so proud of. Some of those reviews he sent me! Phew! They were hot. This boy has burnt the pants off a few artists in his day.’
‘Why does this woman dislike you?’ Marina asked, ignoring Theo.
‘It’s not personal,’ Robert said. ‘Her behaviour is routine. Her methods work. And, anyway, she can be very winning. You’d probably find her a charming woman, if you met her. You’d wonder what I’m talking about. She’s got power in the system, and within the system people are afraid of her and so they do her bidding.’
‘But you’re not afraid of her?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t think you quite understand my position, darling.’
Was he accusing her of a lack of sensitivity? Once upon a time he had been resilient in the face of trouble and had flourished under pressure.
Toni was enjoying himself. He was in the zone with his work and only vaguely conscious of the tensions that were surfacing in the conversation. He flipped the sheet and switched from Robert to his unfinished drawing of Theo’s head . . . The old man might have been scanning Robert and Marina’s interior reactions through the livid blaze under his left eye, the privileged powers of a parental aperture. Seeing through a father’s eye what no one else sees. The bright red slash like a wound in the softly weeping tissue of the father’s face. A wound that was never going to heal. Not now. It was too late now for healing. It had become a permanent disfigurement, a chronic ulcer written off by his body’s overloaded immune system. Almost a badge of old age worn with a certain bravado; My body may be dying but my mind is still on fire! Defiant in the face of death. Was that Theo? He liked the mystery of the old man. It intrigued him to think that Theo had made his home in Germany for forty years or more and had now returned to die. Did he feel as if he had come home or had he returned to exile? Clearly Theo did not have much time left to bear witness to his son’s life. It seemed unlikely he had decided on something heroic and unselfish at the last minute, I’ll do what I can for the boy, a near-deathbed conversion to fatherly love after decades of indifference. The last thing on Theo’s mind, it seemed to Toni, was to make amends for having abandoned his family when Robert was a boy of seven. What had he expected to find in his son on his return? A man like himself? And wasn’t there something of the bully in Theo? A tendency to offer ridicule in the face of his son’s present difficulties? Was this a sign of impatience? A failure to appreciate the peculiar achievements of his son? Or was he jealous of Robert’s youth and his relationship with Marina and, perhaps, of Robert’s inner calm despite the hazards of his present situation—that quiet reassurance one always felt from Robert that, no matter how great the crisis, he would not give up on his private values? Was Theo jealous of his son’s strength, or was he impatient with his son’s weakness? . . . It was a nice question and Toni was only guessing its answer; putting these few cues together to form his picture of the man. He was aware that his own view was not a fixed or singular truth. Through his art, after all, these three were to become his fictions. He had no choice. They could not remain merely themselves. For in art, and they all knew this, it was the perfect lie that was generative of the perfect meaning, not the literal truth. There was no place in art for the literal truth . . .
A breeze lifted through the open window.
Marina said, ‘Shouldn’t you be picking up Nada, Toni?’
For an instant he wondered who Nada was: the name intensely familiar. He stopped drawing and looked up. The three of them were watching him. ‘Teresa’s friend Gina’s picking her up with her own daughter these days,’ he said. ‘Teresa organised it. She calls in at Gina’s place on her way home from the office.’
Marina said something, then she stood up and began gathering the dishes.
Toni struggled on for a moment longer with Theo’s head. There had been a glimmer, then nothing, the illusion of likeness surfacing then sinking away through the matrix of scumbled charcoal, the ghostly presence of Theo Schwartz a drowned likeness in the depths, elusive and tantalising, a faint message from a dead man: Here I am! Then nothing. The reverse likeness of father to son was not working. The son might resemble the father, but the father did not resemble the son. Some things could be made up, others refused to be invented and had to be uncovered, one delicate layer at a time, with great care. And perhaps Theo was enjoying playing a game with him? Cat and mouse. Hide and seek. The old man seeing him and getting his likeness. He was wondering how he might get a look into Theo’s black book. Perhaps the pictures held the key to the man?
Robert took a sip of water then replaced the tumbler on the table. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and sat looking up at Marina. ‘You’re smiling?’ he said. His manner was faintly cross-examining.
Father and son watched her.
‘I was just thinking how good it is to be back in Melbourne.’
Robert said nothing to this but stood and began helping her clear away.
Theo confided to the cat, ‘As a boy, we can be sure he was never a trouble to his mother.’
Misty miaowed and stood on her hind legs, gripping the table edge with her needle claws.
Robert said mildly, ‘You shouldn’t feed her at the table, Dad. She’ll scratch it.’
That word, Dad! Resonating in the lofty room. They all looked at the cat.
‘I’m not allowed to feed you at the table,’ Theo said, playfully dabbing his hand at the cat. ‘Only Marina is allowed to do that.’ He suddenly grasped the cat’s head and gave it a shake.
Toni rose from the library steps and began packing his drawings and materials away in his folder. He would not show them his work. His drawings were private documents. He would probably show Marina a couple of them next time she was sitting for him alone, but that was all. He fastened the ties on the folder and straightened.
The three of them were watching him, as if they expected him to say something to them after the concentrated silence of his work. He smiled. ‘Thanks. That was terrific.’ He wondered if he might be beginning to find his fictions of them more interesting than their realities. Something insistent in the way they stood that silenced his imagination. The Schwartz family, he thought, and realised at once it was the title for his painting. He was impatient, suddenly, to get home to his studio and begin work on the picture. He owed them something, at the very least a few minutes of conversation before taking his leave. But he had no energy for talk. Their curiosity would have to wait.
Robert went with him to the front door. ‘It’s good to see you working,’ he said, and stood and watched him go down the street to where his car was parked. At the car, Toni turned and lifted his hand in salute. Robert returned the sign and went back into the house.