XV

THE HOUSEHOLD FOUND ITS WAY into its own peculiar form of dailiness. There was an architecture to it. Not precise, but an architecture nonetheless, as if everyone was a door or a window pulled from old houses and assembled into a new one. It had a ramshackle functionality.

When the routine of school resumed, the girls and I woke at seven. We walked softly past Evan and Helena’s door, left ajar by Evan when he got up to begin work early. Helena was always nested in cushions, her dark hair spread out across the bedding. By then, Evan was usually in the studio. We padded down the staircase, with its carpet strip of faded roses that continued into the upstairs bedrooms. Laughter, the smells of cooking, were already in the kitchen, waking up the pots and pans from their bat–like sleep, dangling by their handles above the bench.

The light was pale, filtered through leaves before it reached the windows. Ugo never switched the lights on, said it was good for his painting to watch objects put on their daytime colours, shed the pewter skin that the dawn slicks across everything like frost. Heloise and Maria sat at the bench, watching Ugo, who was juggling oranges. As each one rose, it hung for a moment in a sunbeam. Maria rested her head on her folded arm.

‘Where is the tea lady?’ Ugo asked.

‘Coming,’ said Bea, walking up behind us.

In the first weeks of the school year Ugo and Maria would be sitting, drinking the coffee that Ugo bought from an Italian man on Little Collins Street, while we made our lunches, glancing up at the production line of girls: Heloise at one end buttering the bread; me at the other end pressing down on the sandwiches to keep them together and sliding them into brown paper bags.

‘Where is your breakfast?’ Maria would shout in mock horror as we banged out the kitchen door. Then one morning we woke to the smell of butter frying in a pan, and there was Ugo with a cooked breakfast for us. Instead of eating in the middle of the morning, as they had previously, Ugo and Maria joined us as we stood around the kitchen mopping up egg yolk with toast or cutting into the ‘bread in a coat’, as Ugo called French toast. He served it sprinkled with salt, rather than spread with jam, and with a bowl of pickled cucumbers to share. It became an unacknowledged routine.

Bea became shy around Ugo.

‘Let me make the tea at least,’ she said.

‘I don’t do it right, do I?’ he asked teasingly.

‘Well, no, but ... that’s not what I meant.’

He saw her embarrassment, her eyes that did not leave the sink.

‘Thank you, Beatrice. You can be the tea lady. I don’t drink it anyway – don’t like the smell. Like flower water. Like old ladies.’ He gulped coffee, bent his knees in exaggerated pleasure. ‘But this . Mmmm.’

She smiled at him.

Ugo linked everyone together, always noticing the person left out of the conversation and drawing them in. He and Maria came to feel like the centre of this tacked-together family. They both shared the European sense of food as affection and did most of the cooking.

Jerome, too, befriended us in his own way. He was good with Heloise, over whom Evan and Helena had thrown up their hands. Heloise was thirteen, but still a child. She held the tears behind her eyes the way a man fingers a knife concealed in his pocket. They were her weapon, carried through from childhood.

She began to refuse to go to school. There was crying every morning as Beatrice tried to drag her out the door. Heloise held on to the leg of the table while Beatrice prised open her fingers, white with clenching. No one knew how it started.

Evan came in, angry and unhelpful, from his painting. ‘She can stay home with me today.’

Beatrice glared at him and let go of Heloise. ‘Fine.’

Then Helena arrived, wrapping a kimono over her nightdress. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Heloise won’t go to school,’ said Beatrice over her shoulder as she jolted the screen door open.

Heloise began to stay home frequently. She seemed happy.

‘School is not for everyone,’ said Evan. ‘I know I hated the place. You’re just too much like your father, aren’t you.’ He cupped her determined little chin in his hand, and she smiled up at him. ‘Next you’ll be inventing schemes to make the people of the neighbourhood part with their money.’

‘But, Dad,’ said Bea, ‘she can’t just stop going to school. How will she learn?’

‘It won’t be forever,’ said Evan. ‘And we thought we’d teach her a bit at home, for a little while at least, until she gets sick of it and wants to go back to school.’

Bea gave a huff of false laughter.

‘And what are you going to teach her?’

‘Enough, Beatrice,’ said Helena. ‘We don’t need to have this conversation with you. We are the parents, remember?’

‘Forgive me if I forget that sometimes,’ said Bea, getting up from the table and gathering up plates.

Heloise the truant.

‘How are you enjoying destroying your future, Heloise?’ Bea asked often after school.

‘A lot, thank you. Jealous?’

‘Not at all. You’re the one who’ll be jealous when you grow up to be a housewife or a secretary while I travel the world as a diplomat.’

One afternoon we arrived home to find Jerome seated at the kitchen table with Heloise, her maths textbook open between them.

‘See, you can do it,’ Jerome was saying.

‘Only when you explain it to me.’

‘No, you’re actually good at it. I can see that. You just don’t know it. Anyway, school’s over, I suppose.’

Jerome got up from the table. He had on loose, well–cut trousers and a white shirt, its top buttons undone, revealing a white singlet underneath. His skin was smooth and perfectly matt, as if he never perspired.

‘I was going to ask,’ he said, his eye settling briefly on Eva, ‘whether any or preferably all of you ladies would be willing to sit for me.’

To pose for Jerome Carroll, rising star. The sisters gave no thought to the request. Their father had made hundreds of sketches and paintings of them as they grew. I had dreamed that one day I might find my way into a painting, like Alice through the looking glass. I imagined it in the same way: a new land. Before being painted and after. Evan had made sketches sometimes of Eva and me as we played, but these were not even studies, merely a way to keep his hand moving. He had boxes of black-bound sketchbooks in the roof above the studio.

‘Wear a strappy top if you have one,’ Jerome instructed us. ‘I want shoulders, bone structure.’

He assembled us, seated on the Persian carpet in the studio. Patrick was in there too, shaping a wax model for a sculpture. We clustered together, jostled four sets of limbs until Jerome was happy. I recalled our outdoor baths together years before. The same shifting attempts to fit bony shoulders and ankles around one another. He began to make sketches. It was a warm afternoon. We were by a large window, dozy in the late afternoon sun. Dust somersaulted through the air.

‘So, another question,’ said Jerome. ‘Feel free to tell me I’m a pervert, but I would love it if any of you felt inclined to remove your upper garments ...’

There was a pause.

‘In all seriousness,’ he said, ‘you know I’m not a pervert. I’m an artist. Unfortunately not with much training in life drawing. I wouldn’t ask you individually, but I thought all together perhaps. But not to worry. Maybe I can convince Vera,’ he said over his shoulder at Patrick, who let out a grunt of laughter from his place across the room.

‘I’d probably rather not,’ said Bea. ’I don’t pose for Dad anymore.’

‘That’s fine, absolutely fine.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘It’s probably a silly idea,’ said Jerome.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Eva. She shrugged, her eyes almost challenging.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Heloise.

‘Alright, terrific,’ said Jerome. ‘Or, on second thoughts, do you think we should ask your father first. I obviously didn’t give this much thought.’ His awkwardness made him trustable.

Heloise and Eva removed their tops.

‘Do you want us to go?’ asked Bea.

‘No, not at all, stay where you are,’ said Jerome.

Heloise still had no breasts at all to speak of, only puffy flesh around her nipples. Eva’s breasts were also small. Without enough weight to drag them down, they were round, like half oranges. Her nipples were tiny and pink.

We held still as the sun slunk away across the floor. Maria and Ugo came into the studio. Eva instinctively put an arm across her chest, and then dropped it again.

Maria approached Jerome, glancing between us and his rendering of us on paper. ‘Very beautiful,’ she said, though it was not clear whether she meant us or the drawing. Ugo busied himself with his own paints and canvas, his body angled away from where we sat.

I could feel Eva shift beside me.

‘I’m cold,’ she said.

‘Shall we stop?’ asked Jerome. ‘Probably too much of an audience anyway.’ He glanced at Maria, who shrugged and began to walk away.

‘I have seen them sit for their father,’ she said.