Spirit of Progress (17 page)

A
t first, Rita doesn’t recognise her. Aunt Katherine is not quite a different woman, but Rita had to look twice to confirm that it was, in fact, Aunt Katherine. For this is an Aunt Katherine that she has never seen before. And neither has Vic, for that matter.

The hair, which always looks as though it has simply settled wherever the wind has blown it, is brushed and combed and tied at the back into a white-and-grey bun. A bun that Rita can imagine Katherine wore when she was a girl, and as a young woman. The sort of bun that women from the age of Queen Victoria would have worn. In fact, Aunt Katherine is a kind of echo of the portraits of Queen Victoria that still hung in classrooms even when Rita was a school girl. And the face. There’s powder on her face, Rita observes (in the light of the hallway where she is standing, staring at Aunt Katherine). And lipstick. And something around the eyes. Not much. Not showy.
But just enough to make a different Katherine. Enough to make Rita look twice.

And the clothes. Gone are the dark sacks she always seems to be throwing over herself — or, perhaps, it is always just the one sack. They are gone, and in their place is a long, black skirt, ankle length, and a black, button-up top. Both of which, like the bun that her hair has been brushed into, have the appearance of clothes out of another era. The sort of clothes that women don’t wear any more. But it is clear that Katherine once, on special occasions, wore them, and is wearing them again. They are
her
clothes, from her era, and she stands before Rita in the doorway like a perfectly maintained and outfitted Victorian lady of a certain age.

And while Aunt Katherine could never have been called attractive, she is what the age that bred her might have counted as pleasantly plain. Modestly so. In short, respectable. Which is the last way that Rita would have described her, until now. And it is a lesson. That people can surprise you. That they have different faces. That people might easily contain people, who contain people, who contain more. And Aunt Katherine may very well be one of those.

For a moment she reminds Rita of those bush women in the stories they read at school, who dress in their Sunday best for no one, and walk bush tracks, promenading for no one, because it keeps them in touch with the way they once were. But Katherine is not dressed for no one. And she is not sad like the women in those stories. Rather, she is impressive. A Victorian lady, with all the authority of her
kind, standing on Rita’s doorstep, even a touch of the regal in the tilt of her chin, her face in half-profile. An expression that says she speaks plainly, and will accept no nonsense; the same no-nonsense bearing that once spoke for an empire that isn’t any more. For it has been swept away by the sad and violent years, and only the legacy and the left-overs of it will continue into this post-war world that Vic and Rita are entering, and which Aunt Katherine will not.

And Rita is not sure how long she has been standing in the doorway staring at Aunt Katherine, at this figure that seems to have just popped out of History. And what’s more (and, she knows, ridiculously so) there is a part of Rita that is not quite sure how to address this figure. There is almost an impulse to curtsey. So she doesn’t know how long she’s been staring at Aunt Katherine without speaking, but it must have been long enough, for she suddenly hears Aunt Katherine’s voice informing her in the plain-speaking manner of the Victorian madam that she doesn’t intend standing in the cold all night. And, with the voice, the familiar Aunt Katherine returns.

In the kitchen, Vic, too, is struck by the transformation in Katherine and watches his aunt, as he has never seen her before, sit at the table and delve into a shopping bag she has with her and extract a pair of black leather, ankle-high shoes. Her best shoes. Shoes that she must have had for years and worn rarely, for they are the sort of shoes you don’t see any more, but which look, nonetheless, new. The shoes she is wearing, Vic notes, are caked in the mud of the paddocks, the sodden ground upon which her tent sits, and the dirt tracks that call themselves streets and roads
along which she would have walked to get to the station. These shoes she now removes and replaces with her best.

She looks about the kitchen, from Rita to Vic — Katherine: the wild, pioneering woman who lives in a tent on the fringes of the city, who has pitched her tent all over the country, wherever the fancy took her, and always gone her own way, outside of, even indifferent to, society. And Katherine: the complete Victorian madam, from bun to shoes, what the age that bred her might have counted as pleasing while not pretty, even plain, but imposing all the same, carrying in her bearing and manner, and in her upright carriage as she now stands to leave, the full weight and authority of an empire that no longer exists.

I
f anybody notices the elderly, Victorian-looking woman, it is only in the form of a passing glance. For the gallery is crowded, the walls are covered in images of the city and all that the sad and violent years have thrown up, painted by as many artists as there are paintings on the walls, and the spectacle of an elderly, Victorian-looking woman warrants, if anything, only a passing glance. Somebody’s grandmother. Even when she stands directly in front of the portrait of the wild-eyed, grey-haired woman and her tent, nobody gives her a second look.

Which suits Katherine because she is free to stand in front of the thing and study it, without being studied herself. The Katherine in the painting and the Katherine standing in front of it are, it seems, two separate people. Enough for the subject not to be noticed, even when she is standing this close. And even taking into account that this particular painting occupies the most prominent place in the gallery. It is not, Katherine observes, the first
painting you see as you walk in, but it does command your attention the way the most significant works in a gallery do. And Katherine is in a position to make such judgments, for not only is she a reader, she has also seen the most important (and the less important) galleries in the country during her travels. And this painting, this woman and her tent, is clearly one of those paintings that demands a prominent place. And she takes immediate pride in this. It is, after all, her. And those who have come to the exhibition (and there are many) file past and pause before this painting, and for a considerable time. But Katherine goes unnoticed.

The newspaper photograph has been pasted onto the wall beside the painting and she can see immediately that the artist has copied the photograph. At least, that is her first impression. But as she compares them she notices the differences, especially the patch of blue sky that isn’t in the photograph that the cheeky — no, rude — photographer took without asking that morning, just a couple of days before, when her peace was first disturbed. As she further studies it she comes to the conclusion that the differences between the photograph and the painting go deeper than that. This young painter has done things to the scene. Things you can’t quite put your finger on, but which are there all the same. And although she doesn’t really have much time for these new-fangled paintings, with people’s faces all over the place as they never are in life, she is beginning to think that this nosy young man, who disturbed her peace and trampled all over the trust of Mr Skinner as he did Mr Skinner’s
paddock (and for which she will never forgive him), just might be very good at what he does. For he has done things that make the painting different from the photograph, and it’s not just the blue sky.

And as she stands before it, as the subject gazes upon the subject, she gradually concludes that the woman in the painting (whom she sees as herself, yet not herself) is not so much striding across her land, as she remembers she did that morning, but seems almost to be floating over her land. Not quite on it, or even
of
it. And soon she is deep in thought, to the extent that she wouldn’t even notice if someone was staring at her, pursuing this question of floating — of the old woman (who is both her and not her) floating over her land the way … what does? And it is then, when she asks herself what floats the way she imagines the old woman is floating, she answers: a ghost. That’s it. For as much as Katherine might look solid and
there
, as if she might keep striding right off the painting and into the room, there is also a touch of the ghost about her. That is what this young man has done. And she looks quickly at the photograph to see if there are any ghosts there, and she can’t see any. No, but there’s a touch of the ghost in the painting, even if she can’t put her finger on it and even if nobody else sees it. It’s there all right. This is what Katherine sees. And she doesn’t have to wonder too long why she finds this, well, disturbing. No, more than that. Creepy. Chilling. And she is suddenly seized by the impulse to shiver, the way people are said to do when somebody walks over their grave. That’s it. He’s painted her as though she’s already
dead. No, not already dead but soon will be. That’s what he’s done. She doesn’t just look old, he’s painted her as though she has entered that hazy zone between living and dying, and in which the ghost that she will become and which will be released upon death is preparing itself to float, weightless, through eternity. Yes, he has painted her as though she is about to leave this sodden, solid world that gave birth to her and made her, and float away, just as that world, too, is about to float away into the ether of the past — and what once was will be no more, except in portraits such as these.

As she is about to turn from the painting, she also ponders the old woman in it and wonders if this is the way the world sees her. Wacky and wild. A curiosity. It is odd seeing yourself the way others do. But why, she’s asking, why should it be true just because others see you like that? Just as she has never really seen herself as old, for she has been active all her life (and yet she looks old on the wall), she’s never seen herself as wild and wacky. Or a curiosity. But simply as who she is: Katherine. The Katherine, who, even as a child, went her own way. Who didn’t require other people to go there with her. The Katherine who, when she was young, was said to have ‘go’, and — what was the phrase? — an independent spirit. Now that she’s old though, she’s wacky. And just because she doesn’t like her peace being disturbed, does that make her wild? A difficult woman? Even cranky? Or hard of heart? When she knows — as the last few days have reminded her — that her heart is too easily moved. By books and life. But she’s learnt, over the years, not to
show her heart to the world. For she’s lived through a world and a time in which displays of the heart were displays of weakness, and so she learnt not to show her heart to it. She thinks she might have shown it to Mr Skinner given the chance — an old woman ready to display her weakness. And she knows that she has always answered when her sister called, when she was needed, and that when his mother wasn’t there for Vic it was Katherine who was. Days that she recalls with complete clarity, even now, and which, when recalled, swell her heart like a touch of poetry before sleep. The same heart of which (unlike the ghost) there is no hint in the painting. Only, she muses, the crank and the old woman.

And the tent. If it weren’t for the tent, nobody would have come for her. And if she weren’t, in their eyes, old. But the combination of age and tent, is, it seems, worth coming for. Worth disturbing someone’s peace. And they did come, one after the other. Until she felt like a curiosity. And now there she is on the wall. The way the world sees her and how future worlds will see her — a cranky old woman in a tent. Cold of hands, feet and heart. And it will never cross their minds that she was once a young woman, pitching her tent for the first time, drinking tea and looking out over a farmer’s fields, eyeing the horizon, in the days when her world was wide and her life was all before her. No, that will not cross their minds. All they will see is a cranky old woman. Wild. Beyond the pale. A pioneer in an age when her kind of pioneer has all but disappeared. History found her useful for a time. But History has moved on as History does, and left her an old
woman in a tent. And a battered tent at that. One that looks as though it could be blown away in the next wind. Unsubstantial. Ready to float away, like the hint of a ghost that hovers around her in the painting.

With this thought, Katherine turns quietly from the painting, for she’s seen enough, the curiosity of the curiosity has been satisfied, and she is ready to leave. As she turns, her eyes straining round the room for Vic, she bumps into a woman standing behind her. Katherine offers a brief apology and receives a brief response in return. Then this woman turns her attention back to the painting, to the woman and her tent.

Tess pays little attention to the elderly woman who has just bumped into her. The woman apologises, Tess nods. She could be anybody’s grandmother. Tonight it is not simply the paintings that occupy Tess’s thoughts but also the letter she wrote that morning, which she decided not to post and which is in her coat pocket right now, ready to be pressed into Sam’s hand if only she could find him. At some stage during the day she decided not to post it. Decided that posting was too impersonal. Sort of official. Even bureaucratic. A dispatch. No, she wanted none of that. It is the kind of communication that must be delivered by hand. And Sam must see her eyes (which will always have a hint of regret in them) as she passes the envelope to him, must see, written in her eyes, as surely as it is written in the letter, that she means every word she says. And she must have the satisfaction of knowing that he sees this. And this meeting of the eyes, like the letter,
will be a communication. But it is a risk. For although there is talk and although this talk is finding its way into Sam’s ears, it is, she suspects, only the talk of a few at the moment. And although some may be aware of their affair and some may be suspicious, it is another thing to be spotted and announce it all to a crowded gallery. To confirm what the wagging tongues of the town may merely suspect. But, even more important, there is the risk of being condemned as, well … a desperate woman. Driven to furtive exchanges. So she must be quick. She must be decisive. And nobody must see. If only she could find him. The gallery is not so large that somebody could lose themselves in it or not be found, and she is rapidly concluding that he is not here. That he has either not bothered to come or is deliberately avoiding the place. By which she means deliberately avoiding her. Then she sees him, on the far side of the gallery, talking to the painter with the goatee who looks like Toulouse-Lautrec, and with whom he gets on well enough, depending on the day and depending on the mood. But tonight they seem to be getting on well. At least, they’re laughing. Which could mean anything.

She manoeuvres her way through the crowd towards him, and as she does she catches his eye and she could swear that there to be read in his eyes (and no doubt hers) is the old longing that brings with it the old feelings. Not so old that they can’t be seen in a look, as now. But still distant enough to be recognised as old feelings. Familiar enough to bring back a world of urgent meetings (for everything was urgent then) as well as the
hours (which are all they ever had, never a night) and the urgent minutes that were always so valuable because there were always so few of them. And which always went, as a consequence, so much more quickly than the minutes of ordinary living. Familiar enough to bring all of that back.

And suddenly she is seeing herself completely naked, strolling easily through his studio one afternoon (easily, because this moment the memory has triggered was well after the affair started), eyeing his paintings, while Sam watched, holding two cups of something or other. And, for a second, she is convinced that this is precisely the memory that Sam, too, is reliving as he watches her approach; that they are two people with precisely the same memories of the same time to the extent that they could be one person. And, at the same instant, like those dreams that leave the dreamer naked in a city street, she suddenly feels as naked as she did that afternoon in Sam’s studio as she moves through the crowded gallery. Such is the power of old feelings, and of the memories, crisp and clear and as urgent as the days in which they were lived that these old feelings bring back with them. Yes, she muses, familiar enough to do all that. But also distant enough to be somebody else’s feelings now. Old ones.

For in being old (and old, in this sense, can be yesterday’s feelings as much as last year’s), she is also acknowledging that she no longer has the right to feel them. For feelings can become old within hours, and the love affairs that give those feelings validity because there
is someone to share them with can end in a flash and be lost in minutes. The line that separates what
is
from what
was
can be that thin. The past, she tells herself, is a completed act, whether it be five minutes or five years ago. This is the grammar of old feelings. So it is not so much that she doesn’t have the right to those feelings any more but rather that those feelings were once valid (in other rooms, other times) but aren’t any more.

Nonetheless, the look, which she is convinced is as much on her face as on his, brings back these feelings, at once familiar and distant, lost and suddenly retrieved, and all in the few crowded seconds it takes Tess to cross the floor of the gallery and to find herself standing next to Sam. But how to press the letter into his hand and how to tell him with her eyes that she means every word, without being observed? The letter that she wrote this morning, the letter that, above all, will put things right. For you can’t part thinking the wrong things about each other, otherwise all those feelings that are both familiar and distant, lost and retrieved by a look, will be soured. And she won’t have that. These feelings, which are all that are left to them, are too important. Which is why this letter is in her pocket, and why she is distracted even as she talks, because she is looking for the right moment to press it into Sam’s hands without being observed.

And just as she imagines the opportunity will never arise, the painter with the goatee is called away, and she is, for a second, alone with Sam. And, quick as a bird, her hand flies from her pocket to the nest of Sam’s hand and delivers its message. Then she is gone and Sam is left
holding the letter, looking down at the object and then up at the retreating figure of Tess.

He pushes the envelope into his coat pocket and places the remains of his drink on a nearby table. And she watches as he leaves, knowing that he is either going back to his studio or just outside, to read the letter. And when he has, everything will be put right and all will be well. And those feelings, both familiar and distant, and which are all that is left to them, will not be soured. And will remain with her forever.