The Ash Burner Page 7

  ‘No.’

  ‘He wanted to understand people. He didn’t have all the answers. That must have been refreshing in the fifties, when everyone had become so sure, and so frightened at the same time. He once said that if you wanted to know how things stood in a country, you spoke to women first. That was the best insight you could get. Not many religious people thought like that in those days.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were such an admirer of his.’

  ‘Hammarskjöld was a good man, and it is a wonderful thing to read his thoughts in that book. But I’m not sure you should concentrate on great men. Listen to your own world, this world around you, before you spend too much time imagining another one. Life is on the ground around you.’

  ‘You know, Auden translated Markings?’ I knew Dad had read all of Auden. He trusted him as a poet, one not overly captivated by the moon.

  ‘Perhaps it was because he was gay.’

  ‘Auden was gay?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Dag, his sympathetic view of women. Sometimes gay men have a clearer sense of women.’ After a pause, my father returned to my question. ‘Auden had a fascination for all things northern. He and Hammarskjöld corresponded. But, yes, Auden thought Hammarskjöld was gay, like himself. I gather the translation wasn’t popular in Sweden – they found it too free, too focused on Hammarskjöld’s private suffering and loneliness. You heard people say that it cost Auden the Nobel Prize.’

  ‘For saying that Hammarskjöld was gay?’

  ‘For saying it, yes. Everyone thought it. But these things usually go unsaid.’

  ‘Things are changing,’ I said.

  ‘You might think so,’ he replied. ‘But how well does Anthony cope?’

  We were only gone for a week. We stayed at a modest hotel on Glebe Point Road. Dad worked every day at the university, while I spent the mornings reading and the afternoons walking near the harbour, mainly around The Rocks. I found art shops and a book exchange, and eventually my own copy of Markings, a hardback edition with a black-and-white cover photograph of a stone, seemingly modern but also very clearly inspired by the rune stones of Hammarskjöld’s Sweden.

  Reading his work, I couldn’t find much evidence that Hammarskjöld was gay or otherwise, only that his busy public life as UN secretary-general hadn’t relieved him of the harder task of filling in his nights. This, I thought, was less Anthony’s problem than my father’s.

  When I got back to Lion’s Head, Claire came to visit, and surprised me by saying that she’d missed me. My father and Anthony were talking about a book Anthony had read while we were away – The Stranger by Camus; a beach novel, Dad joked. Claire left them and asked me to join her on the veranda. What had I thought of Sydney? She said she couldn’t wait to move there.

  ‘It’ll suit you, and Anthony, as well,’ I replied. ‘I bought some books and some oil pastels for him. Oh, and by the way, Dad told me he thought Anthony was gay.’

  Claire seemed prepared for this. ‘That’s just a parent thing about boys,’ she said. ‘Parents always worry about male friendships. They don’t think of girls’ friendships that way.’ She laughed to herself. ‘We’re allowed to be sensual with our friends.’

  I hadn’t realised that Anthony was sensual with me. Before I could think much of it, I asked, ‘You don’t think he’s gay, then?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  My main thought was not about Anthony, but simply that it was getting harder to speak to Claire. It was hard to say anything without revealing everything, hard to match the direct way she examined me when we were alone. On the drive to Sydney, the conversation about Anthony had stopped, and in that moment I’d dismissed Dad’s view of my friend. But in the days that followed our arrival there, in the afternoons that I spent walking by the harbour, I found myself returning to Dad’s question, and introducing a new one. Who was Anthony in love with?

  I looked at the shadowy green at the back of the dune. The sound of the ocean was ever-present, and I liked how voices sometimes got lost in it. They couldn’t hear us inside. But if Claire and I stopped talking, I tried to catch the sound of Anthony and Dad together. I could just see them at the back of his office, standing at the bookshelf.

  ‘I wonder why they get along so well?’ Claire said.

  ‘Dad loves a curious mind.’

  ‘Is that why he avoids me? Am I not curious enough?’

  ‘You’re very self-contained, I’d say. It wouldn’t ever occur to anyone like Dad to try to help you. He wants to help Anthony.’

  I could have mentioned that she was just the type to frighten my father, even the type he would once have interrupted had he found her reading by the river.

  I added, ‘You have a happy father.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘imagine a life with one of those! I get to worry about the two of you, instead.’

  For my own part, I’d decided to follow Dad’s advice and not Eric’s. I would study law and become what Eric had predicted, a mediocre lawyer rather than a master boat builder, or, what I hoped I might manage even better, a writer. I knew that I wasn’t bright enough for the law, and that I’d have to study hard to get in.

  Claire, too. She said she was less sure of her painting than Anthony. She hadn’t yet heard from the art college.

  ‘Do you worry about his results?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the main thing is that he paints. He’s not getting ready for anything. He’s there already.’

  ‘He showed me the pictures of you.’

  She looked at me, I think to confirm my embarrassment, not because of any that existed on her part; to check that the discomfort was in my eyes as well as my voice. ‘The nudes, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like them.’ She was still staring at me.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t mind you seeing them. Not at all. But his paintings of me are so hard – they’re not even pictures of me. He’s always saying women are more beautiful than men. “Women are the only beautiful objects for a painter.” Then he paints me like I’m a man.’

  ‘You don’t look like a man in them.’

  ‘He knows he’s good. You know he’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what his paintings are full of – his confidence.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘When he paints me, he paints himself. That’s why they’re so hard. His pictures of me are brutal.’

  I replied that this was just Anthony’s way of meeting his subjects, of finding them. It could seem hard, but a better word was conflicted. He didn’t know how to paint the surface alone.

  To myself, I wondered how Anthony saw Claire, that is, other than in her role as the perfect subject, a perfect conflict in the matter of beauty. Better than anyone, he saw her beauty. But I still wasn’t sure he understood that it demanded something back, and that he wasn’t giving it to Claire. Beauty did not exist just so that you could gaze at it, but to ask you what you had to give in return. Claire was here, I thought – right now, she was fully here, and I wanted to tell her that I was hers. She sat next to me still, and in her stillness was such a current.

  That summer, Anthony painted only her. He continued to exaggerate certain features – the angle of her elbows, the length of her arms – as if to contradict the truth, which was that her silhouette, her outline when she walked and moved, was always very even. Instead, he brought her into the world of jagged edges, a truer world if not a truer Claire. When I asked him about it, he said he was spending too much time looking at books of Picasso’s blue period.

  ‘Books that your father lent me,’ he added.

  ‘Start learning about other artists, then,’ I replied, ‘maybe Degas. Isn’t he interested in women even when they aren’t performing for the artist?’

  �
�No man gets to have that view.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what Claire wants to give you,’ I insisted.

  ‘She can’t.’

  I tried not to let the paintings change my own impressions of her. Maybe it was too late. At some level, they were formative, like memory moulds, and can now never altogether be separated from those days, or how I first saw her body. Her pointed shoulder blades and slim neck. Even her way of walking in front of me, my eyes drawn across her shoulders and her middle back. Things Anthony taught me to see. When she grew her hair longer, I followed its reach as it wound unevenly around her neck and down her back.

  Anthony made my life harder by forever compiling an inventory of her body, a reference list of visual memories that he shared and analysed. He was obsessed with her collarbone. He said he spent an hour tracing it with his finger, and then, after they’d made love, he tried to draw it better than before. Or it was the fineness of her arms, or her nape, or that spot a little higher where the neck first begins to reach the ear.

  What was that spot called, he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When she puts her hands on my chest. She has small lateral muscles – she’s not very strong. But when she pushes down on me you see her muscles there. I want to paint that muscle, but I want to paint it at just that moment. I want to stop her. It’s so perfect.’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’ I said. ‘Do you think Claire wants you to talk about it?’

  ‘She knows I talk about us. Only to you.’

  I wasn’t so sure Claire knew that. But then, the next time the three of us were together, Anthony invited me to sit in on the sessions while he painted her, and Claire said she’d like it if I joined them.

  She looked at me and added, ‘You’ve seen a hundred paintings of me.’

  But Claire wasn’t a painting anymore. She was naked in front of me, posing. I tried to adopt Anthony’s artistic view: she was a study, an example of a certain kind of beauty; perhaps of too much beauty, as well.

  No: I decided she wasn’t too beautiful.

  My bedroom was small, and I sat on the bed, underneath my window. The view was out the side of the house, across the road as it curved in from the beach, to an unused field of low pine trees and the sandy clearings between them.

  When I turned from the view, I saw Claire as she stood with her arms above her head, the same pose that pressed her ribs against the skin of her side and gave her pelvic bone the peculiar angularity that Anthony wanted. I said to myself that, if I’d painted her, I would have waited for the moments when she relaxed that pose and when her outline, the shape of her waist, was allowed to stand uncorrected by art or design.

  It wasn’t a bright room, either – the pine trees cast the light in spots. I tried not to sit in the shadows. But as the space dimmed further, it seemed my task was to study not only her but the light, too – to observe how a hidden source found its object.

  Her body was a figure of the wind: when the pine trees moved, a different part of her was lit. The pulse of her stomach when she stood with her side to us; and, when the trees swayed again, the rim of softer skin on her lower back appeared.

  For a brief moment, I wondered what I was doing there. How did I know that they wanted me?

  Perhaps you can never be sure. But then after all we were here in my room; later, we’d walk along the beach and sit on my part of the dune, the section I’d once run over before I went swimming. There was something assuring in that. We listened to one another, and each knew how to wait in a way that allowed the others to say what was on their minds. In those longer moments, I knew we were three together, not two and one.

  Over the slow final weeks, it seemed we focused entirely on promises that we made to each other about the future. We needed them before the future could begin, because they gave us a way of saying goodbye. Maybe that’s what the paintings were: preparations for the days when we’d want to remember each other in a very particular light, the light as passed through the pines of Lion’s Head.

  Claire said Anthony was going to stay with her at the farm for two weeks before they moved south, and asked whether I would come, too. In front of Anthony, she added, ‘I’m not sure I want him for that long on his own.’

  ‘What’s going to happen in Sydney, then?’ I said. ‘Won’t you be stuck with each other all the time there?’

  ‘Oh, Sydney’s full of things,’ she answered. ‘And we’ll house-share with some other people. He won’t get to annoy me.’

  My role when I joined them in Sydney would be to keep them sane. Further on, I would fund their art. It seemed so obvious that one day I’d be a lawyer with money, and equally obvious that any money that Anthony or Claire earned would always be spent the day they got it, on art supplies, books or music – but in Anthony’s case I suppose also on the temptations of the other world he joined when we weren’t meant to be watching.

  He didn’t exactly hide it from us that he was using harder drugs now, but without being asked he withdrew himself from our company whenever he wanted to get high, coming back in the morning when he was sober. We didn’t get to meet his suppliers or his companions, but he wouldn’t have denied they were there.

  When I told Claire that I wished he’d stay in on those nights, or at least let us in on this second life, she replied that he couldn’t. ‘He thinks you’re strict,’ she said, ‘or more high-minded than he is. He’d be embarrassed if you saw that he was hooked.’

  ‘We could try to stop him.’

  Her anger, then: ‘What do you think I’m doing every day?’

  In the mornings, if he’d been out all night, he’d tap on my window, and when I opened it I told him to use the door. But he’d insist on coming in through the window. ‘I don’t want to wake your dad.’

  ‘You already have.’

  ‘Not properly. I don’t want to wake him properly. If I come through the door he’ll think there’s a visitor.’

  ‘But you are a visitor.’

  I made coffee for us, and we pretended that we hadn’t woken my father. After that, it would be impossible to get Anthony to bed. He would still be lightly high, and wanted most to talk about Sydney. I understood it, and that sitting talking to me was the easiest way to watch the clock winding down.

  He knew that he could be hard work. But I didn’t mind; in fact I craved his company when he wasn’t there. He overcompensated for his strong views on pet topics by complimenting me on everything I did. He said he loved the poetry that I’d begun to write; he would use my poems in his next paintings. He said that I was getting more handsome. He corrected himself, elaborated: ‘But you’re small-town handsome. You’re good-looking, nice-looking, but not properly handsome. Really handsome men are more striking than you are.’

  Like so many of our conversations, this one was a little ridiculous. It was alright that he’d come home in the morning, woken me up. He didn’t need to tell me these things. I asked him whether he wanted more coffee. But he had a way of going on. He said, ‘The other day, Claire asked me, “Isn’t Ted very handsome?” Don’t you think it’s strange that she’s asked me that? What would you do if your girlfriend told you how handsome somebody else was?’

  ‘I’d have a better idea if I had a girlfriend.’

  ‘She’s got a crush on you. You know I don’t mind, don’t you? I don’t love her any less for it. I’m not angry. I was thinking about it: the two of you would be wonderful together. I can actually see it. There’s something I love about the thought of you together. I told her that. Maybe she’s talked about it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I told her you’d make a good lover. A caring lover. I told her that I could imagine you together. Isn’t it funny: the thought of it makes me happy.’

  ‘You’re full of shit sometimes,’ I said, ‘especially when you’ve been out all night. You’re making this u
p as you go along.’

  He was indignant but not put off. ‘I’m not making it up. I’ve thought a lot about it.’

  ‘One of your theories. I don’t see the point of talking about it.’

  But he had to have the last word. ‘It wouldn’t hurt me if you did it. It would be beautiful.’

  11

  Claire’s parents had left Greece after the war. Like my father, before they left they hadn’t properly thought through what it would mean to live so far from Europe. The farm they’d bought in Australia was a hundred kilometres inland. But visiting it was like going back to their home in Karoussades, the village in northern Corfu where they were brought up. They’d arrived and planted olive trees and tomato vines, which they still harvested for the Saturday markets, and they grew their own grapes to make watery lunch wine.

  Two weeks before Christmas, we met Claire outside her school gates, and then Nikolas appeared in a white delivery van to take us all out to their farm. During the drive, Anthony and I took it in turns to sit in the back on empty wooden crates, beside coils of rolled-up netting. Nikolas was rather quiet, but he’d brought cold drinks and bread, and every time we passed a shop or a service station he asked whether we wanted him to stop to buy us more food.

  ‘I think we’re fine,’ I said.

  ‘I have cheese as well,’ he said, and as he drove he reached across Claire to a paper parcel in the console. I picked it up for him. ‘Yes!’ he called out. ‘Open it for you boys. Claire doesn’t eat!’ And then we laughed, as though all was solved.

  Claire put her hand on his forearm and replied in Greek.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I told him that you two don’t ever work hard enough to get hungry.’

  She was right, but during the two weeks that followed I discovered how pleasurable it could be to rest the mind and use the body, to work hard. As, to our surprise, did Anthony. He suspended his views about local farm practices and agricultural imperialism, and with me woke each morning dazed by a bodily weariness that neither of us had experienced before.