Joan Makes History (15 page)

Until at last that, like my disguise, was too good. Who would have thought I could be too good? But I became bored with my skill with six plates, and everyone else was more impressed than I was with my grasp of detail about gravy, and my memory for the details of chops and faces. I was bored with myself and with my excellence.

It was then that I began to think of Duncan, imagined him down for some livestock show or other, stiff in his awful tweed
coat and the tie he looked choked in, his city rigout. He would be happy after a day of looking at the hairy swinging tassels of bulls and the imbecile cows with their ballooning udders: down for the sales and making the best of things, having had a laugh or two with a mate or two in a bar or two, and later, by himself, in need of a chop. He would be a man content with his life, after a fashion, but with a set of furrows on his face put there by the precipitous departure of Joan some time before. He would be a man smelling of a few beers and the sweat of a day of bulls, and he would turn into this convenient corner chophouse and not glance up in giving his order to the waiter. Or perhaps he would, perhaps he would glance up at the waiter, standing there with the order book in her hand and the pencil grown cumbersome in her fingers: perhaps he would glance up and history would be made afresh. Such were the stories I allowed myself as I stacked plates along my arms, pushed shouting through the swing doors into the kitchen and lounged against the wall when the rush was over, flicking at flies with my napkin.

To be loved, I was beginning to see, was a kind of history too: and to be alone, secretive, a presser of my palm against glass panes, looking out at life, was history of a kind I did not much want to make. I saw all the people passing and sitting and talking and eating their chops and wiping their moustaches, and I saw the way their mouths turned down, and I was afraid mine might be starting to. They were unloved, or unloving, or both: they were those whose wives had made fools of them and cuckolded them in their own beds, they were those whose husbands had tired of them and courted their angel-skinned young sisters: they were those whose fathers had abandoned them, whose mothers had banged their infant heads against the wall, those whose parents
had never smiled, but had prayed overmuch and run the world on sin and retribution.

Those eaters of chops, lonely men who did not know how to do for themselves, bumbling bachelors with their buttons hanging by threads, seemed to have few stories of bliss and requited love, or did not wish to share them with an expressionless waiter holding a grubby napkin. But they had tales of betrayal or rejection, and I listened to many of them.

There are no rational reasons for loving,
my regular Edgar announced. He was a good tipper and a late night customer, so for those reasons he was a chop-eater I listened to as he held forth to the faceless waiter. Edgar, a pale pudgy type of man, greasy of cuff like most of the chop-eaters but younger than most of the sad beaten men here, and with something of passion in his eyes, had thought in detail about love.
If you love,
he told me, gnawing on his bit of singed chop bone,
let me tell you what can happen, logically speaking. The object of your love can ignore or reject you. Result: misery. Or she can accept you until you are helpless with love, and then turn on you. Result: misery. You yourself can tire of your love and have to disentangle yourself. Result: guilt if you are a gentleman, inconvenience if you are a cad. Or she can accept you and go on doing so, and you can go on loving her. Result: dread of the death of your loved one, or her change of heart. Net result of any of these: a negative balance or debit. Who would love, then?

His eyes, rather too far apart for the comfort of anyone looking at them, seemed filmy with the hopelessness of his logic, and as a mere waiter, keen on a tip and tired at the end of a day full of plates and faces, I had no answer for him.

The more right he seemed, though, the more wrong I felt him to be. Other men wept openly into their cups of sweet tea
and their chops, and told me their terrible stories of pain at the hands of love, and somehow they were more right than chalky Edgar, ticking points off on his sharp fingers and wiping the grease off his mouth in a conclusive sort of way.

His words set me to dreaming, though, and Duncan's face came to me in those long nights. In my dreams I saw that he was dryer, sandier, skinnier and more angular than ever, his ankles loose in their sockets. In my dreams I watched from above as he walked up to my front door, and I could see a furrow between his sandy eyebrows that had never been there before. I watched him hesitate at the door and glance behind him, hitch up his pants like a person who has to remind himself of his manhood, and quickly, as if in fear of changing his mind, reach out to press the doorbell. What a pealing and ringing echoed around me! And where was I, that there was no door from this room so I could descend and open the door to my Duncan? And when I turned from seeking a door, where had the window gone? The pealing clashed around me and I could hear Duncan calling:
Joanie, Joanie,
with a melancholy sound like wind, but from my dry mouth not the smallest sound could be made to emerge, to answer him. I woke in tears of despair, trembling in the dawn, with the image of Duncan gone, never to return.
Come back, Duncan, come back!
It was a grief and anxiety like to choke me, and I had to spring from that suffocating bed and stand watching the grubby dawn above the roof across the way.

I had despised love and had turned away from it when I had had a glut of it: I had not suffered. Now, in the grip of dreams of regret, I began to know what I had spurned. Each morning dawned and I woke alone, each evening fell without my soul having touched the soul of another: I was free, I was a woman
of independent flight, I could walk along any street and, from my splendid start at the Galaxy, I could invent any destiny I pleased for myself. All that was grand, and I treasured it: but it was hollow too, and at the heart of that life there was nothing more than I, Joan, a soul spinning quite alone.

It is women who are supposed to moon and languish and fill their days with love and scheming, but it was as a man that I softened and grew fluid, reconsidering the notion of love. I was a man with a cross face (I caught glimpses of myself in the windows of shops and saw how surly I looked) standing in a smell of roasting chop with a soiled napkin over his arm, concealing his heart from the world as he concealed his breasts.

I waited for Duncan to hanker for that chop, but he seemed not to fancy it, or was eating it elsewhere, and the day came when I was oppressed past bearing by the whole dark paraphernalia of being a man. It seemed like no kind of history at all, just another meaningless folly of pride, and I was pricked at last to take action.

It had seemed desperate and urgent while the pen was putting words on paper, but when the letter had slid into the slit and I had heard it fall with a silky sound on to others, bills and
billets-doux,
I wondered. I wondered if he would consider replying to the invitation of his remorseful but perhaps unforgivable wife, who had made such a fool of him in front of his stockmen and blacks, and had humiliated him as only a wife can humiliate the husband who loves her. I wondered if Duncan's face had grown bitter under his hat, rasped daily by thoughts of his wife, whose image—my image—was perhaps now one of loathing and gall.

I consoled myself, though, with the thought that I had spared
him the worst, most degrading memories. In sliding away from between jars of peas in brine, I had made a fool of him, yes. But I had not subjected him to the memory of having begged, pleaded, gone down on his knees and clutched me to make me stay. I had not debased him that far. I had reduced him to tears, no doubt, but private ones, hot tears shed in the pain of empty rooms. He did not have to remember weeping and shouting, begging me to stay, and he did not have to remember any expression of distaste or pity on the face of the stony-hearted wife waiting for his pleas to stop. I was glad to have spared him that, for there is dignity in grief, but there can be no dignity in the degradation of one begging with tears on his cheeks for a woman to stay who has made up her mind to go.

Nights began to be endless and white, dawns became unforgiving. I stood in my boarding house room listening to the world wake, to birds making their rackets from trees, dogs warning off dew, the quick smug footsteps of early risers along the road. I stood, and even more than in the stretches of the interminable night I could not imagine what it was all about. I thought of Duncan at those times, and thought of my letter being unfolded by his fingers, and read by his eyes. I remembered all the violent dawns I had witnessed from his window, and found myself uttering small moaning noises of reconsideration, of regret and remorse.
What is it all about?
I whispered to the window.
What have I done?
My despair fogged the glass, and I could remember that someone, some earnest person or other in my madcap youth, had asked me the same question, and had inspected my face at length, exhaustingly, waiting for an answer. And what had I answered? I wished I could remember now, because I could remember that I had found an answer in the end that had satisfied us: but
in my madcap youth I had had answers for all the hard questions, while now I seemed to have none at all.

Standing in a black bag would never have been my idea of a life. There I was, though, in a dusty black bag with my eye to cold glass, inspecting faces as they stood before me.
Chin up,
I called, my voice muffled by all the black fabric.
Chin up, thanks, and relax that left hand if you don't mind.

I had tried it myself, of course. I had felt my neck go rigid against the headrest and my face go wooden as I stood with my hand on the broken plaster column or sat in the imposing carved chair that was held together at the back with a few brave pieces of string. I had itched with wanting to move, and from behind the black cloth I had heard Alfred's muffled voice:
Chin up, dearie, and stick out your front a bit more.

It was a sideline, Alfred's suggestive cards, and it was the condition on which I had got the job.
Can't abide to have a female working for me,
Alfred had said.
But you'll do if you'll pose, dearie.
I stood then, showing a bit of ankle, a bit of rounded shoulder, a coquettishly thrust bosom (covered, I hasten to assure, with a certain bead-fringed tasselled bodice that Alfred had found to have inflammatory effects on those who handed over their cash for my poses, and cunningly padded to give a bit of what I lacked in the way of endowment). Being plain of feature, I had been
astonished when Alfred made his suggestion to me, assuming in my innocence that a comely face was essential to the satisfaction of the unknown gents who clutched my image in front of them in the dim privacy of their bedrooms. I soon enough discovered, though, that faces were not important to those men: what mattered was the angle of the knee and ankle as I bent forward over a carelessly revealed stocking top and a troublesome garter, or the smooth curve of my shoulder as I half-concealed and half-revealed behind a large feather fan.
Your face!
Alfred had exclaimed with a rude laugh, early on, when I had expressed wonderment that my face would be suitable for this task.
You do not think, dearie, that it is your face they are looking at, do you?
I swallowed my feelings: for a few mad moments I had thought my face, my plain bane all my life, had found an appreciative audience, and I was only slightly pained to learn how totally irrelevant it was to anyone, possibly, but myself.

I did wonder, at times, if my poor abandoned Henry ever consoled himself with the small round-cornered cards from which Alfred made such a profit. If he did, had he ever looked at the face there on the pose, as well as the thigh or shoulder? Had he stared, wondering if to an abandoned man every face resembled the one he had lost? Did he have to throw the cards away in the end, his mood of pleasure snapped by a face that looked too much like one he had known?

The posing was not a pleasure to me, as it might have been to another, and Alfred told me that it was to my advantage that I did not relish it.
The sluts that love to flaunt themselves are unworkmanlike,
he said.
They will not keep still, and they fancy themselves to have temperament,
Alfred snorted.
I cannot abide them,
he said with feeling.
I loathe them.
Alfred was most workmanlike at his
posed cards, and it was clear to me early on that he was an expert, with a cool judging eye for a provocative detail, because he himself was quite unprovoked by female flesh. Whether the flesh of boys or goats was capable of inflaming his pasty flesh I did not care to ascertain, but it made the whole chilly process of flesh-flaunting more tolerable, to know that he saw me as nothing more than a pattern of light and shade that would bring him a few more guineas.

Posing, then, was part of it, but I felt the other part to be more worthy of me: the hours spent hovering seductively over my garter were tedious, but those spent in the back room or under the black cloth were not. In the back room, mixing the collodion for the plates, I felt I had a hand in the machinery of life, as I never had as simply the wife of Henry.

It was not all that different, I had to admit: it was kitchen sort of work, mixing and stirring, spreading and pouring and wiping, but with substances less friendly than flour and sugar. The gun cotton was explosive, the acid could strip flesh from bone, the fumes of the simmering nitrate-of-silver made my head ache, and the cyanide for the fixing made me half sick. It was dangerous work, and smelly, and necessitated a stained leather apron, but I was proud of the hallmark of my profession, my nitrate-blackened fingers, and felt myself part of a special secret aristocracy of people who knew how to catch a bit of the world and make it stick to a piece of glass.

Alfred saw no magic in it now, if he ever had, but I watched as he fiddled with the rosewood box where the transformation of chemicals into visible soul took place, and he saw my interest. On dull grey days when the light was poor and custom was slow, he showed me all the mysteries of levers and tiny brass gimcracks.
You are quick to catch on, I will say that for you,
he said, and seemed pleased to let me fiddle on my own, and then take a portrait or two of himself, leaning on the back of a chair looking peeved, for that was the expression his face took in repose.

I was lucky, having fallen on my feet with Alfred. Because I did the posing, which brought him in so many guineas, as well as all the mixing and measuring, and because he was a man with an unusual sense of fairness, he paid me a sum sufficient to keep body and soul together. I thanked Providence, for I knew that most employers feigned to think such a thing against nature and the laws of commerce, and claimed that the world would collapse forthwith if a woman were able to feed and shelter herself from nothing but her own labour. I counted myself absurdly lucky, knowing that without such an eccentric employer I would be slaving over needles and poor thread far into the night and slowly starving, like most females who lived without a man.

We did all manner of people in our studio: we did fine society folk in satin and silk, squatters in toppers, and any number of wooden brides clutching posies. We did grocers and paperhangers, we did the Fire Brigade cricket team and the St Jude's Memorial Brass Band. But the ones I relished most were the rough fellows from the bush with their angular wives and open-mouthed children.

A whole tribe of them clattered up the stairs to the studio one day, several large bearded men with wide leather belts holding up their moleskins, several women as skinny as myself, and a troop of children. They were from up
Glenrowan way,
they told us, as if we were interested, and the oldest woman, a gaunt creature in black who might once have been an Irish beauty, put
a handful of notes on the table and said they wanted them
took, the whole gang, separate and together.

They were not quite the usual kind of customer: they did not take us aside to insist how we must conceal their saucer-like ears, or their children's gigantic noses, but they were also vain in their own ways, and were determined not to be made small by any mere machine.

The tallest of the young men was the first to face the cold eye of the camera. He seemed somewhat the dandy, in a primitive way: with his moleskins he wore an incongruous green sash that he was at pains to display, and he had been careful to wet his hair and comb it up from his forehead so there was no missing his rather fine eyes. Alfred showed him all our backdrops and props.
I can recommend the sylvan glade, sir, for a country gentleman like yourself,
he urged, but this rustic was not going to be made mock of by Alfred. He wished to face the camera from the Gentleman's Library, with its square of dummy books behind him, an elbow on a gilt-edged volume of Shakespeare, and the ornate gilded legs of the desk concealing the stand of the headrest.
This is a nasty contraption,
he said when Alfred guided his head into it, and seemed unable to abide the feel of it around the back of his neck.
Allow me, sir,
Alfred said, and settled him against it again with his rather finicky gestures, but that made the customer push him off and get his head into the metal by himself, and stand there straddle-legged leaning on Shakespeare and sizing up Alfred with bold contemptuous eyes, so that the poor man became somewhat flustery and had to take refuge under the black cloth.
Just relax those hands, sir,
he called from the safety of his cloth, but this fellow with the sash seemed a man forever on his guard, and when the shutter clicked his fists were still clenched.

The older woman seemed to be doing this for posterity rather than pleasure, and stared grimly out of the sylvan glade as if about to be executed. Alfred had a bit of palaver for when his female customers chose the sylvan glade, but he did not try to tell this thin-lipped stony person that she was for all the world like a wood nymph. The young women, who in spite of their best silk skirts moved with heavy efficient cow-herding steps, like men, entered into the spirit of the thing, leaning against the chaise longue smiling somewhat stiffly, with a palm behind them and a fan throttled in their large capable hands.

The children were rough creatures who had been buttoned and strapped into frills and sailor suits they were plainly new to and plainly loathed. They could not get the hang of looking natural with one foot up on a lobster pot, or leaning against a plaster pillar. The family cajoled from the sidelines, urging with shouted witticisms that made the children look more cranky than ever: even the reminder that future generations would pore over these photographs did not cheer up those children.

They were a hard morning's work, this lot, and when they had taken their loud voices and heavy boots down the stairs, Alfred lay for a short while on the chaise longue while I tidied the chaos of lobster pots and fans, and made up more glass plates, for this family from up
Glenrowan way
had used our whole supply.

So our next customer took us by surprise, walking up the stairs silently and coming across Alfred taking his ease. I was behind the camera with my chamois, but I could hear this customer discussing his needs with Alfred, and I went stiff behind the box and looked hard at the way the groove in every tiny brass screw that held it together had been aligned perfectly vertical, and I thought of the satisfaction some tidy dry-handed man had enjoyed,
getting every screw right, and at a very great distance I could hear Alfred saying,
Full-length, then, is it sir?
and the reply:
Yes, full length, it is to send to my mother back Home, and she will not believe unless she sees my entire person.

It was I who had created this situation, but in spite of that I wished Alfred would send me to the back room to mix or cut or wash, and himself stand behind the camera and take his gentleman's whole person for his mother back Home. Just this once I had no wish to arrange hands and cane and feet at the right angle, and position the headrest so it did not show, and call out encouragingly about looking into the middle distance and not breathing.

I slipped away to the back room and tried to busy myself among the shelves and jars, although there was nothing to do there, and could hear Alfred getting his gentleman in position, being polite about taking his chin in his fingers:
Chin up a fraction if you please, sir, and relax, you do not want your mother to see you looking too grave about it all, do you, sir?
I heard laughter as he tried to set the gentleman at ease, and I stared at the dishes where I mixed the collodion, feeling how very cold my fingers were, and how hard I was suddenly finding it to breathe: how, although I had pictured this moment often enough, now that it was upon me I had gone numb and uncertain.

It was not like me to remain in the back room when a customer was present, since I was a person of curiosity, and Alfred knew how I enjoyed the pushing and prodding of hapless folk, gone limp before the camera's cold eye, into stances suitable for recording forever. He gave me a look when he came in, but I busied myself with a cork in a jar and he did not remark on anything as together we prepared the nitrate and the developing
box. But before he dipped the plate in the nitrate he said,
Joan, just go and see that he is still in position, would you be so good?
and with my frozen brain I could think of no pretext for not going, no pretext except falling down in a faint, and that would be sure to bring the customer in to help, and I would be further into my problem.

I went out, then, feeling that my heart would pound its way out of my chest, and got under the black bag as swiftly as I could, and without looking at the man standing on the puckered rug. Under the bag, looking out through the lens, I began to breathe again, panting so the glass fogged over and I had to move back, but I had seen that the position in which Alfred had put this gentleman was in profile to the camera, for he was possessed, of course, of a fine profile, and being a conscientious sort of man—oh, how conscientious and careful!—had obeyed what Alfred had said, and not moved a muscle. He stood, then, staring sideways off into the middle distance, and had not even allowed his eyes to swivel around when I came into the room.

Many muddled things went through my mind, a blur of thoughts too quick to catch, like the blur of head that Mrs Ramsgate had been when she had sneezed at the vital moment: out of this blur I wished to speak, and wished to make the profile turn to me.
Very good, sir,
I called at last.
Excellent, just hold that, sir, for a minute longer.
My voice emerged muffled from the thick black cloth and the gentleman on the rug did not move: there might have been an additional stiffening of his already stiff figure, but I could not be sure of that, and in any case Alfred had come out from the back room, impatient with the delay, and bustled me out from the camera, and then there was the whole fast business of the nitrate-dipping, and the speeding of the plate to the camera, the
crackling flare of the magnesium, and the racing of the plate back to the developing box.

You watch it, dearie,
Alfred said,
and I will unlock the poor gent.
I was left alone in the back room with the glass plate in its box, and as I put my eye to the peephole, there, sure enough, faint as a ghost but becoming stronger as the moments passed, were the boots, the cane, the large firm hands, the best wing collar and tie, and yes, there it was, the face which I could not bring myself to look at immediately: the face of my Henry. When once I had made myself look at his face I could not then make myself stop, and was still crouching over the peephole when Alfred came back in.
Is he not cooked yet, Joan dearie?
Alfred asked, and nudged me aside to look:
Goodness, he is well and truly done,
he said, and made haste to remove the plate from the box.
Do the money, would you please Joan,
he said, and like a machine I went out to Henry.