The Sitters

Alex Miller

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781741142273
• eBook ISBN: 9781925576092
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A sensuously written, peculiar novel about the relationship between a painter and his subject. A narrow, vertical painting, tightly enclosing the scene. Her pale arm and her pale thigh. Viewed at a diagonal through an exceedingly tall doorway... just a glimpse of something... An ageing portrait artist meets a woman who unsettles him, yet inspires him to paint her. Reluctantly, at first, they are drawn together. The ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Miller's subtle, sensuous narrative. The artist must watch and wait to trap the shy beast. For the skill of portraiture is in seeing beyond the face, beyond the likeness.

When I was old and could no longer hope for new friendships, one of the saddest episodes of my life began to come back to me and to offer me my greatest joy. Under the influence of this memory, revisiting me in its new disguise, I was able to paint again. For the gift had left me. I don’t believe I’ll ever suffer such a paralysis of my will again. Now I’ll go on painting until the end. Which must be the hope of every artist. Simply to work.

And that is what she gave me, Jessica Keal, the subject of this altered memory, a memory entangled with certain family likenesses and forgotten moments of my childhood; her roots and mine mysteriously grown together. That entire episode is contained for me in a single image. And although there’s only one figure in this image — for it’s my portrait of Jessica that I’m talking about — it’s an image in which I’m content, for once, to recognise myself. As I remember her, I remember myself and am able to approach the last enigma of my life — my family and my childhood. That cold legacy of silence and absence.

I first saw Jessica in Canberra at a university function put on by her department to welcome her. They weren’t my people at the function and I hadn’t been invited to attend it, but I happened to be passing and saw that food and drink were available in the common room, and as it was almost lunchtime I went in and helped myself. She was already the centre of attention and was surrounded by a curious and animated group of women and men on the far side of the room.

In my memory of her that day Jessica has dark hair that gleams with an auburn light and falls in a soft line at the nape of her neck. There are purplish shadows of fatigue and uncertainty beneath her eyes. She’s wearing a summer dress. The dress is a fine one, an expensive dress — as if it is to be her confidence on a day when other things may fail her. The dress is made of some dark material. It may even be black, but it has a motif of some kind in a silvery colour that relieves the sombreness and the stillness of the fabric. The straps of the dress press into the flesh of her shoulders. Her bare arms give an impression of strength but also of refinement, for she holds herself erect and looks about her with a detached curiosity. Of course, she’s a visitor and has just arrived, which might explain this look of detachment. But it’s also something that belongs to her. She’s like that. Observing her you might imagine there’s something Mediterranean in her ancestry, perhaps even Spanish. This, and her air of detachment, remind me of the woman who in my youth convinced me that the artist’s occupation could be a noble thing, for she had been like that, handsome and aloof and troubled. Jessica looks directly at the person who’s speaking to her but gives the impression, nevertheless, that she’s not with that person. She’s withholding herself. She is wary, of the company and of her situation and of herself. In her left hand she holds an unlit cigarette, which she looks at every so often but does not light. Her ambivalence and uncertainty add to her charms for me.

I stayed longer and drank more wine than I’d intended. She must have been aware of my scrutiny, and eventually she turned and looked directly at me. Her gaze was filled with enquiry and challenge, and even with a certain enmity, as if she thought that in me she’d detected the cause of her predicament and unease. Well, what is it you want from me? her look demanded, though naturally she didn’t actually say this. It was no more than a fleeting moment. A strong look from across the room letting me know of her annoyance. Then she looked away.

The wine had by then had a considerable effect, and I laughed at my own discomfort. You can’t feel that tremor inside you, however, that signal that something deeper than usual has been touched by another person, without believing the experience to have been shared. So although I left the common room that day without speaking to Jessica, I continued to think about her for several weeks, and whenever I was at the university I looked out for her. Then eventually I began to forget her, the way we do when nothing further happens to make vivid once more an encounter that has disturbed us and left us feeling restless and dissatisfied. An experience that has reminded us that happiness is absent from our lives. By the time I saw her again I’d more or less given up expecting to see her. I was caught off-guard and didn’t manage that meeting very well either.

It was late one evening and I was going home from the university. The end of a harrowing day for me. I was feeling old and angry, shuffling along to the lifts with an image of myself in my mind as a caved-in grey old man. Not the kind of person strangers go out of their way to talk to. Someone was coming along the corridor towards me. She stopped in front of me and I expected a question, expected her to ask directions from me.

She was wearing a jacket and jeans and she had her hair done differently. I didn’t recognise her.

‘Hullo,’ she said.

It took me a couple of seconds to realise it was her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’ I asked her how she was settling in and she said things were going well for her. I went along to the lift. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t hang around. I left her standing there. It was partly due to the decrepit self-image of the moment.

It wasn’t until I woke in the early morning that I admitted to myself there’d been this little place of trust, this little offer, between us at our chance meeting in the corridor. And then I had the time to reflect and I realised I’d missed the sequel to the common room encounter. I’d let it go by. And an enormous feeling of regret came over me.

I lay in bed listening to the sounds before dawn and thinking about her. I elaborated what might have been the possibilities of our meeting if I hadn’t scuttled away like a scared hermit. I sought out a sense of her gravity, the genuine loneliness of the person who doesn’t lie to themselves about this, and it made her deeply attractive to me, the person I was imagining. Her detachment a kind of grandeur. A quality I admired more than anything. I saw her turn towards me, her bare arms, the straps of her dress pressing into her shoulders, her fingers holding the unlit cigarette. And I saw her turn away again. The withholding of herself that was the foreground of something of great substance, some unshakeable purpose, a private and unspoken intention that she had dwelt on with care and singleness of mind over the decades of her life. I played with this idea and drew it out and pursued it. And I did this at that hour of the morning when it’s possible for me to believe that suicide is my most rational course for the day. I regretted my failure to acknowledge the little pool of trust between us, the offer that could never be repeated, arising from circumstances peculiar to the moment. And I watched that woman, Jessica Keal, standing there in the corridor at the university waiting for me to recognise her.

I saw there had been a feeling then that she’d wanted to put her hand on my arm, perhaps to say something to me. Something reassuring and intimate that would have given a lift to our spirits and brought us together. The remembrance of seeing her in the common room and then leaving without speaking to her. That open connection between us swirling around with my regrets. And I wondered what she’d seen this time. An old man coming along the corridor. Crumpled. Devastated by all those years of feverish work and ambition.

I didn’t get up at my usual early hour and go in to the studio and begin work. Instead, I stayed in bed thinking about her till the sun was well up and shining through the blinds into my room. Her dark eyes with the soft purplish shadows beneath them and their suggestion of some deep inner trouble and their aggressive question to me still hanging in the air unanswered, What do you want from me? I wanted the chance to deal with all that.

I never painted the members of my family, either my old childhood family in England or my new family in Australia. I left my home when I was fifteen, and although I revisited my people many times over the years, even working in England for a time, I was never able to paint their portraits. This blindness with regard to my intimates always struck me as a severe limitation of my vision, a real handicap, and even as something that might finally cripple me and invalidate altogether my entire work as a painter of portraits. And it wasn’t something that was overlooked by the critics either. I didn’t like to think about it. It was too large an absence. I was never able to deal with it, this unpainted childhood. No one ever mentioned it to me without me getting angry and defensive. I could never see a way of breaking the deadlock of it. I’d lived away from my parents and my sister for most of my life, and my Australian wife and son had left Canberra years ago. I didn’t know who any of these people had become. My family was represented by this remarkable silence in my work. It was something I never tackled. Most of the time I didn’t think about them. Whenever something happened that required me to consider them, I’d be troubled and unhappy until I could distract myself from them again by returning to my work. My son would visit me from time to time. He’d bring his wife and two children and we’d pretend to be a family again. But I found his visits unsettling and distracting and was glad when he left again and the house was mine once more. It made me feel guilty to see my grandchildren and my beautiful daughter-in-law and my successful son.

My father taught me to draw. If it were summer when he was home on a twenty-four-hour leave during the war, he would take us on a Greenline bus out into the country. We’d get off the bus in some out-of-the-way village in Kent and we’d look for a sheltered spot in a field, under an old elm tree or close against a piece of woodland, where we would be alone and out of the sight of passers-by. And in this secluded corner my mother and sister and my father and I would establish our camp, as if we’d decided to become gypsies, and we’d settle down there with our bits and pieces until nightfall. Going home at the end of the day, rushing along the dark lanes with the overhanging branches of the trees snatching at the windows of the bus, we’d sit close, carrying the solitude of the country back with us into the housing estate and thinking our thoughts in silence together.

The way I saw it, on these occasions I was the one to carry the old walnut box he kept his paints and brushes and pencils in. Although he’d bought the box from a street stall I decided it had been in his possession forever. It smelt as he smelt, of aromatic wood and paints and sharpened pencils and tobacco, and I couldn’t see that box without seeing his nicotine-stained fingers jiggling a brush in the little pot of cloudy water, and hearing his hushed voice describing to me the intricate problems of the scene before us — as if we were hunters concealed in the covert and planning our strategy, being careful not to startle our shy quarry. His grandfather had been a gamekeeper in Scotland, so maybe something of that style was bred in him; and in me too if I’m forced to concede it, the covert and the hidden, the desire to conceal myself, to steal up on things without being seen, to catch my models in the privacy of their thoughts.

And when he’d gone back to the war, transformed once again into a soldier in his khaki uniform, carrying his heavy rifle and his pack, after I’d watched him from the window of our flat until the very last second, until he’d turned the corner at the top of the street and had looked back and saluted me gravely for the last time, then I hid under the table and pressed my nose against the precious painting box and breathed its rich sad smell and I cried for a long time. I could cry for him easily then.

With our brushes and our saucers of water and colour, we’d draw our intricate scenes of coppices and fields and church spires in the distance, and we’d take care to render our clouds fluffy and light and to set them delicately in a china-blue sky. And while we painted he’d tell me his dreams, for me and for himself and for our life after the war. And that’s what I’d begun to live for, these strange, beautiful and romantic fancies, this future that was never going to be part of our real lives, but which belonged to a more socially elaborate style than anything we would ever know.

The truth is — and it’s not an easy matter for me to stick to the truth when I’m talking about my father — we went only once into the country on an excursion like that, and even then it was not quite like that anyway. But let’s say at least that the experience of that one real imperfect day in the green field in Kent left an impression in me of perfection nevertheless. Happiness. That’s what it was, summer and the closeness of my family and the possibility of dreams. A delusive little memory, kneaded and pummelled and stretched out endlessly by my longings and by my imagination, until it eventually filled a whole period of my childhood and I had transformed it into an endowment worth living for. And perhaps I made that day into such a large imaginary life so that it would reduce the space left in my real history for the brutal period that followed it, when the war was over and he was at home for good, so damaged and charged with bitterness that he never dreamed for us again.

It was always portraits with me. Portraits of other people. For forty years my work was images of strangers. Then it changed. She brought about the change. I don’t know how it happened. It’s a story, not an explanation.

I like plain things. I like to bring all that chaos and noise back to an image that has a certain amount of silence in it. My furniture is plain. When she saw my place Jessica said, ‘You’ve got what you need.’ She knew what she meant. Plain things have their own excellence. In sumptuous surroundings I feel lonely. In grand houses I’ve always felt abandoned. My house in Canberra was an ex-Government house where a middle-level public servant had lived. The previous owner had built a verandah onto the back. That was all. When my wife and son left I had the verandah closed in with big windows and I opened the wall of the back bedroom so that the bedroom and the verandah formed a large L-shaped space. That was my studio, the place where I worked and where I stored my stuff. It was where I spent all my time. People were often taken aback by this. They were disappointed when they came to see me for the first time and saw how simply I lived. They felt cheated that there was nothing exotic, that there was nothing in my style of life to fascinate them. Jessica wasn’t disappointed.

My father wanted me to be a writer. He called it being an author. Later, when he and I were no longer friends, he couldn’t have cared less what I did. But at the beginning, when we were close, his eyes used to light up and he’d grab me and say it would be a grand life for me to become an author and that is what I should set my heart on. He was dreaming he was me. He used to take hold of me and say it and then laugh and give me a hug, as if he really believed it would happen. As if believing would make it happen. He had no idea what he was talking about. He was a hall porter in a club somewhere in London’s west end, in Pall Mall or St James, one of those places. He was a lackey. Yes sir, Good morning sir, that sort of thing. His days and nights were filled with that stuff. He had to keep quiet about himself. That was as high as he ever reached, the outer hall. And it wasn’t a matter of pride with him, but he just wasn’t interested in the things the other hall porters were interested in. He didn’t have a bet and he didn’t follow the football. He was an eccentric, and in a hall porter that’s sad. His own father had been lost in the North Sea, in a story that never made sense to me, a story that my father changed with his changing moods.

The idea of his son becoming an author was something to keep his spirits up. When he was old and had given up painting he started picking up secondhand books in the markets and spending his evenings at the dining table repairing their bindings. I never saw him read any of these books. These broken old books stood for something he’d never had. They stood for education. Intellectual freedom. Autonomy. That kind of thing. Refinement. The permission to lead another life. A better life. A secret life that had to be repaired and attended to. Himself in other words. The books stood for a quiet, disciplined, organised, productive life that he’d long ago despaired of. How could he put something like that together? In the end his despair came to fit exactly the volume of these old books. He’d had a terrible beginning in Glasgow. He died surrounded by hundreds of old books. My mother threw them out. She knew they weren’t any good.

‘Where are his books?’ I asked her when I visited her after his death.

‘I threw them out,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand the smell. It was like having him still here.’

She’d repainted the place...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• BEGIN READING
• ALSO FROM ALLEN & UNWIN