On the porch, Jack said, ‘The bush was an open place when I was a lad. We’d go running through the trees on the way to school.’ He turned to Tom. ‘There were four farms along this road before the war. I’m the only one left now.’
The old man spoke with a survivor’s pride. But what he was remembering was the sensation of flight. He had emerged from the bush and gone racing down a hillside, unable to stop. He remembered the wind in his face, prickly grass underfoot. He shouted at cows and shocked trees. At the hurtling future.
It was always the worst hour, night coming on, and the dog missing from the circle of firelight. Nothing was said between them, but Nelly lit the lamp and placed candles about the kitchen while a lurid sunset was still smearing itself across the horizon.
With her hand on the blind, she paused. ‘Cows. I always want to go over and talk to them. It’s something about their faces.’
‘You could tell them how terrific they’ll look on a plate.’
He had not yet quite forgiven Nelly her assessment of Mick Corrigan.
When they were eating, she said, ‘It used to be solid dairy country round here. Then one day Jack sold off his herd and got sheep in. He’ll tell you that all of a sudden he couldn’t bear to watch cows he’d known all their lives go off to the yards.’
She said, ‘He didn’t sell them all either. One of them, Belle, was still around when I got to know the Feeneys. She ended up with the rest under Jack’s old potato paddock.’
‘So what’s that mob doing out there?’
‘They’re Mick’s. He got them in when wool prices were down. Jack doesn’t really want anything to do with cattle, which is why they’re up here.’
‘Because sending sheep to the abattoir is a different thing altogether.’
‘Yeah, I know it doesn’t add up. And everyone pointed that out, Jack’s wife, the neighbours, everyone. He was a joke throughout the shire. Like it still comes up when people talk about him.’ Nelly said, ‘I’m sure he hated being called sentimental. And irrational. But in the end he wasn’t ashamed to be those things.’
In bed Tom lay thinking about the power of shame.
On learning that he intended to keep searching for the dog, Audrey had said, ‘There’s a limit to how much you can do.’ She was attuned to limits, especially other people’s. Patting the back of her hair, she added, ‘It’s not like losing a kiddy, is it? Count your blessings he’s only a dog.’
Love without limits was reserved for his own species. To display great affection for an animal invariably provoked censure. Tom felt ashamed to admit to it. It was judged excessive: overflowing a limit that was couched as a philosophical distinction, as the line that divided the rational, human creature from all others. Animals, deemed incapable of reason, did not deserve the same degree of love.
Now Tom wondered if the function of the scorn such love attracted was to preserve a vital source of food: because to love even one animal boundlessly might make it unthinkable to eat any. Bodies craving protein justified their desire as a matter of reason. But perhaps the limit at risk was in fact the material distinction between what was and was not considered fit for consumption.
It was a topic that aroused unease. When eating out with friends, Tom had noticed a fashion for naming the animal that had supplied a dish.
I’ll have the cow. Have you tried the minced
pig?
An ironic flaunting was at work: I know very well that this food on my plate was once a sentient creature, and that doesn’t bother me. Euphemisms are symptomatic of shame; to avoid them was to deny shame, deflecting it with cool.
Another familiar urban scenario: on seeing a beggar, Tom’s first impulse was to reach for money. Then he would imagine being observed in the act of placing a coin in a hand; a sentimental act, an act of feeling. The shame this occasioned was so strong that it triumphed over charity. He would walk on, ignoring the beggar.
Now he realised that what he risked in showing empathy was to appear unironic. Irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a reflex with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode; the twentieth-century mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date.
He came awake all at once, and knew he was alone.
In the kitchen, the fire was out. He went into the passage, where his torch showed the yard door ajar.
It was not as cold as the previous night; still, Tom was glad of his jacket. He stood by the water tank, and eventually urinated. Then he walked up the drive.
There was a sound; he realised it had been going on for a while, growing fainter all the time, the motorbike heading down into the valley. The stars glittered, fixed as a malediction. After standing at the gate for some minutes, he went back into the house.
In the kitchen, he stumbled over something propped against a chair. Nelly’s bag appeared in the wavering circle of his torch; and peering from it like temptation, one corner of a small cardboard folder.
Afterwards, Tom made himself look at the photographs again, shining his torch on each in turn. There were thirteen of them. They lay on the table like an evil tarot. Nelly’s Nasties: they were before him at last. Most of all he was aware of wanting to protect his gaze with his hand; to filter the force of what he was seeing through his fingers.
He resisted the instinct. But it trailed an ancient horror.
On a long-ago morning, Tom had caught sight of a paperback beside his father’s chair as he crossed the verandah on his way to school. So his first view of the book’s cover was glancing; and then, when he looked again, at once he looked away.
That evening he returned to it, and the next day, and the next. On each occasion his methodology was the same: a sidelong approach, followed by flickers of vision. It was seeing and not-seeing at the same time. The child felt that to behold that picture in its entirety would be his undoing. But as long as it exceeded him, he was compelled to return to it.
Wholeness was in part what was horrifying about the image. A furry black face filled the cover of the book. Raised by the table, it loomed close to Tom’s own face. He was six or seven at the time.
Among the words on the cover was one that was larger than the rest. The child associated it with excretion; with what was at once necessary and repellent. It was spelled out plainly in thick dark letters: P-O-E.
Patterns of light on the verandah shifted with the sun’s journey across the sky. Brightness and shade worked their own dissection of the image. Tom took it in in glimpses. A slice of black fur, a sectioned snarl. Perception was jerky, a series of shudders. Straight after the flash, his eye lowered its shutter. If it happened often enough, he might assemble what he had seen; hold it steady in his mind.
On that night in Nelly’s kitchen, the trace of an old dread persisted in Tom’s desire to place his hand over his eyes: a child’s protective gesture.
The fireplace was silent and cold. Tom rocked gently back and forth, and wrapped his arms about himself. Opposite him was the window, with the blind down. After a little while, the notion came to him that something was pressing its face to the glass. The idea gathered strength, swelling to a conviction that kept him nailed to his chair.
At last he tore free. When he turned around, a figure was watching him from the door.
Nelly did practical things: lighting candles, getting the fire going, pouring whisky into glasses.
‘The photos fell out of your bag. I kicked it over and . . .’
‘It’s OK.’ She said, ‘Obviously, they’re not for general view. Nelly’s Nasties, like they say.’
Tom said quickly, ‘They’re great.’ But his gaze slipped to the image closest to him. There was something of Fuseli’s
Nightmare
behind it; something also of
The Night of the Hunter
. Yet the stance of the man in the photograph might have been protective, and the Akubra shading his face made it impossible to read. And who could say why the girl, on the edge of the scene, had flung up her head? But there was a carousel horse, gaily coloured, with a flaring eye. Situations revolved in the mind. Altogether, it was not an image Tom wished to look at for very long.
Nelly gathered up the photographs and replaced them in their folder. Then she sat at the table. Said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘They frightened you.’
Tom refilled his glass. ‘What went on with you and Felix?’ he asked.
‘I got married so young.’ She held her glass between finger and thumb, rocking it on the table, and repeated, ‘I was so young.’
Tom waited. She spoke patiently, as to a fool: ‘That was
it
.’ For a moment she was frightening again, jaw hard, eyes slitty. ‘That was what he liked,’ said Nelly.
It was Posner who introduced her to Atwood, said Nelly. The two men had been at school together. When she realised she was pregnant, ‘Felix was the one who wanted to get married. He was so happy. Well, we both were.’
She said, ‘It began when I started to show. I didn’t for ages, not until about six months. Then I disgusted him.’
Tom understood long before she had finished. The old Polaroid pinned up in the Preserve: he remembered thinking how much younger than her age she had looked.
Scraps of what she was saying lodged in his brain. Atwood had liked to buy her clothes. At first it excited Nelly. Her husband dressing her up the better to undress her. But she quickly grew bored with his taste; with pintucked frocks of English lawn. ‘I mean, all the artists I hung out with were in torn black.’ She began refusing to wear the garments Atwood bought; or wore them incongruously, a baby-doll nightie pulled over a long-sleeved flannel vest, a Peter Pan collar half-hidden under a polyester shift or a safety-pinned T-shirt.
He liked her in pigtails, so she had her hair cropped and gelled into spikes. She dropped a clutch of white cotton knickers into a vat of magenta dye.
Her resistance infuriated Atwood. What began as a mild squabble expanded into one of those sour conflicts that leaves both sides drained yet resolved not to yield. Nelly’s clothes— her appearance, her image—became the site each struggled to control. It was ludicrous and deadly. Sometimes, in the early stages, an argument collapsed because they would catch each other’s eye and begin to laugh. She didn’t speak of the lovemaking that followed, but Tom guessed its edgy mixture, the desire to punish leaving its tang in the syrup.
Nelly’s elastic young flesh sprang back within weeks of giving birth. But her milk-gorged breasts repelled Atwood. ‘He wanted me to bottle feed. He’d leave the room as soon as I undid the first button.’
It had phases. In one of them he bought concoctions of silk, or lace, or gossamer French chiffons, an armful of extravagant, feminine wisps one or two sizes larger than Nelly required. Slipping from her shoulder, a dress emphasised the slightness of her frame. There was also the dress-up aspect: lipsticked, hung with flashing paste jewels, she was a child essaying a sexual disguise.
Each mustered their weapons. Nelly’s income was minimal. Rory left her exhausted, with neither the time nor the stamina needed for painting; in any case, in those days only Posner collected her work. Atwood settled the household bills and did so unstintingly, but no longer paid a fortnightly sum into Nelly’s account.
He withheld treats: a line of cocaine, a trip to Venice. In bed he aroused her until she whimpered; at last, pinned beneath him, she would consent to his scheme. Arrayed in whatever
She shaved off her hair. ‘It looked terrible. My skull’s that lumpy kind. I’d get around in these old Doc boots I bought at Camberwell, looking like the love child of Johnny Rotten and a Buddhist nun.’ She searched op shops for matronly castoffs and paraded them at formal dinners. ‘Those corporate occasions where all the men wear their wives.’ Atwood told his colleagues she was suffering from post-natal depression. ‘Anything I did from then on was down to being
hormonal
.’
She thought Posner guessed. ‘Sort of. He was friends with us both. But he’d known Felix for years. And been in love with him from the start. It was really important to him that things worked out between us.’ She said, ‘In a way, it was like I was his proxy.’
The manoeuvres husband and wife practised on each other were misleading. They lent the thing the aspect of a game. That was one reason Nelly stayed. Besides, there were stretches of calm. There was the delight the child brought into the world. They might be drinking cold wine on daisied grass while he crawled over a rug between them, and she would relish the ordinariness of these pleasures.
There was the eroticism that still reeled her in to Atwood. She said, ‘He had perfect ears.’
Nelly had no aptitude for narrative. But that night it poured from her. Tom was of no account in the spate. There was something unnerving in her indifference to his reception of her tale.
She spoke with scarcely a pause. She grew repetitive, elaborating on avowals, coiling back over explanations. She told a pointless story about a mothers’ group she had attended with Rory. She was prolix. A draught set the candles flickering and carried the smell of wax around the room. The tiny kitchen filled up with words.
At some point, quite early on, she must have grasped the significance of Atwood’s preferences. What she failed to imagine was that they might encompass other beings. Nelly was accustomed to the cluster of fantasies that she drew from men. With the egotism that is a symptom of innocence, she believed it was her singularity that triggered Atwood’s response.
In this way, her knowledge of what her husband desired was tempered. It was seeing and not-seeing: the perfect mechanism for controlling dread. Nevertheless, what made its way into her paintings was fear.
Atwood began spending longer at work. He was often away. There were meetings in Sydney, in Hong Kong, in Singapore. When he had a free weekend, he would drive to the house in the bush. Usually he went alone. Their skirmishes might have turned wholly vicious but grew routine instead.
At the time, the dwindling of his attention brought Nelly relief. It was only long afterwards that she began to imagine what it might have meant. At once the void left by his lack of interest in her filled with childish forms she had never seen. She pictured flesh so immaculate it measured each caress in damages.