Hare's Fur Page 7

  In the last eleven months he’d had to negotiate with her directly. She’d returned manyfold the sympathy and practical help she’d been given, taking turns with Hugh and Delys to shop for him when he was incapable of leaving the house, and persisting for weeks with soups and casseroles left at the back door until he finally found the pride to ask her to stop. He didn’t know her age, but thought about forty. He had always been sexually drawn to small slender women. Helen was neither, would never have been. But she combined fine olive skin with blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, and had the hands he admired in anyone, strong, and never still. The red caftan set off her skin and eyes. It hadn’t been selected for that, he knew, but because it was ‘arty’. She had put on a lot of weight when her husband left, then taken it off. Not to begin attracting men again, Adele had told him, but as a statement, the refusal to be a victim. She hadn’t while Adele was alive gone out with a man, because that news would have reached him, but he didn’t know if she had since. He didn’t invite confidences and she didn’t volunteer them. She had told him, though, that she was still refusing her husband the divorce his Thai ‘fiancée’ was insisting on. Not, she said, as payback for his not having paid a cent in maintenance, and not because of her Catholicism, but because he had never in the years he’d been gone even hinted that he missed the children. Only now was he making noises about ‘could they fly over, he would pay’, noises that had nothing to do with wanting to see them, and everything to do with her saying yes to the divorce.

  ‘You’re not drinking?’

  ‘What?’ He saw his hand on the table, fingers pressed to the glass as if in an arrested lift. He dropped his hand into his lap. ‘I am, definitely, but I’m happy to wait.’

  She’d taken from the oven a blue Le Creuset. She lifted the lid and steam ballooned into her face. ‘Okay, the wait’s over. Would you pop along to Lucy’s door and knock and just call to her that it’s dinner.’

  The white balls on his plate proved to be potato dumplings. He’d never had them before and said so. Helen laughed, said neither had she, and thank you Jane Grigson that they’d worked! The casserole was beef, strongly flavoured with red wine. Reminded, he raised his glass, said they’d saved him from toast and scrambled egg yet again, and Lucy too laughed.

  She no longer asked if it was too late in his day for coffee. They carried their mugs down to her studio, at the foot of the stairs walking into the smell of linseed oil, a smell he loved, and that took him back to his teaching days and passing the open door of the painting studio. He’d always slightly regretted that Adele had preferred watercolour. The room was rendered brick, in the day lit by two rectangular windows set lengthways high in one wall, and now by two reading lamps with strong white globes aimed at the ceiling. The room’s original purpose had been a games room. The table tennis table he’d seen leaning against the wall the first time he’d come here, with Adele, was still here, but now with canvases piled against it. The canvas she obviously wanted him to see, though, was on the easel. He stopped to take it in from gallery distance, heard her halt behind him. It was, as he’d expected, a landscape — but the cliffs and chasms were gone! This was a landscape such as Vincent might have painted, a field of vivid green under a high blue sky, a dirt road and a red tractor for perspective, a distant backdrop of gums. The green was a crop, not wheat, though, or young sunflowers. He was about to ask when she said quietly, ‘As you can see, my horizon finally allows for some sky.’ She made a soft chuckle in which he heard no humour. ‘Blue at that.’

  ‘You painted it on the spot?’

  ‘Here. From memory.’ She moved to stand beside him. ‘It’s near Mudgee.’

  ‘It’s … barley?’

  ‘Peas. I kept bumping up the green, but I’m still not sure it’s right. But they were so green!’

  ‘They are, Adele had them by the trellis-load. As you’d remember.’

  ‘Yes. And on that note — and I so very much wish it had happened sooner, for the obvious reason — I’ve been offered a show. Not the black ones, these.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrific! Where?’

  ‘Here — Katoomba. Lost Bear. In December. He thinks they’ll sell.’

  ‘So do I.’ He turned and put out his hand. They had never hugged. Not even her grief or his had brought them to that. ‘It deserves to, it’s a fine work.’

  She’d blushed to the colour of her caftan. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I think we need something a bit stronger than coffee. I’ve got a bottle of cognac over at the house that’s been waiting for the right occasion.’

  ‘I can save you the walk. Do you drink scotch?’

  ‘Just the once, a very long time ago. Not since.’

  ‘The day he rang I splurged on a bottle of Glenfiddich.’

  He woke with a dry mouth. He turned onto his back, wincing at a jab behind his left eye. There was sun in the room. He’d overslept. He worked his tongue to make saliva and swallowed, thinking he must be getting a cold. Then he realised what it was — he was hungover! For a moment he was more amazed than ill. How had he drunk enough — and kept it down? ‘It’s spirits,’ he whispered. But so’s brandy. He closed his eyes. He didn’t have an answer.

  He walked very slowly to the bathroom, trying not to jar his head, and stood under the shower with the water pouring into and overflowing his mouth. He was gentle with the towel on his hair, but the headache, too, seemed to be abating. He was still amazed that at no time had he felt nauseous — not in her kitchen, not on the walk home, and not when he lay down. He wanted to tell someone. The person who came, weirdly, was Jade. ‘For god’s sake,’ he said at the blur in the mirror.

  He thought he remembered you needed something fried. He halved a tomato and fried the halves with bacon and two eggs. Then he made a full plunger of coffee. By the time he’d washed up and stood the few things in the drainer he felt almost as he did on any morning.

  He threw the run of bowls the police had blocked. Just before four he heard a heavy motor and thought for a second they’d returned, then recognised the distinctive groan of its suspension as the wheels of the Hilux hit the sleepers bridging the roadside ditch and rolled onto the two-track that led to the splitting area and kiln shed. He didn’t stop, Hugh would see the smoke. He was thinning the lip of the bowl he was on when he heard boots on the step and the door open. ‘G’day,’ he said at his fingers.

  ‘And to you, good sir.’

  The feet of the stool left the floor and were set down beside the wheel. Russell lifted his fingers from the bowl and leaned and studied its profile, then straightened and let the wheel slow. Hugh held in each hand a parcel wrapped in newsprint.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘That new body.’

  He stood one package between his feet and began unwrapping the other. Russell dabbled his fingers in the slurry bowl, wiped them on the strip of towel lying across his thigh. Hugh handed to him a white bowl, its overall salting light, but up one side a flare strongly pink at the foot and dying palely at the rim. ‘They weren’t lying, the bugger flashes! And very sweetly! Take a look at this.’ He unwrapped and handed to Russell the second bowl, in his haste trapping the paper as well. He snatched it away, flicked it to the floor. The pink on the second bowl was even stronger, with an aureole of pearl grey. ‘What do you reckon? Nearly up there with the original, eh.’

  Russell moved his eyes back and forth between the bowls he held in the goblets he’d made of his fingers. Hugh couldn’t throw a bad bowl and these two were lovely. He didn’t say so, Hugh didn’t care about the throws.

  ‘Fired in the gas.’

  ‘Yep. With a crucible each. Just touching the feet.’

  Russell lowered his hands and grinned at him. ‘Looks like I’ll have to place an order after all.’

  Hugh was reaching to take back the first bowl. He halted his hand, frowned. ‘What order?’

  ‘
A dinner plate.’

  Hugh laughed. ‘Fuck, you’re a spender!’

  ‘Okay, a porridge bowl and a plate.’

  ‘In that case —’ he jabbed a finger — ‘you can have the one in your hand.’

  Russell shook his head, handed it back. ‘Wrong shape and too small. A hearty bowl.’ He became serious. ‘When are you ringing them?’

  ‘Soon’s I get home. Wanted to show you first.’

  ‘They twelve k blocks?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Add two, will you, and I’ll give you the dough. I’ll try it under the guan.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘You want a coffee?’ He glanced at the dusty clock. ‘Or have you reached your curfew?’

  ‘A weak one.’

  ‘Not here, the kitchen. I’m ready to knock off.’

  He cut the bowl from the wheel-head and stood it on the crowded board, then drew a sheet of plastic over the remaining balls, tucked it.

  At the house Hugh said his ritual words, ‘Just go and say hello,’ and headed in his socks to the bedroom, to the tea bowl. It had come to Russell from a man dead now twenty years, James Sedgwick, a collector of antique Chinese ceramics, and, enthusiastically, of Russell’s modern interpretations. He had bought from every show. Both avoided openings, and it was some time before Russell finally met him, an arranged introduction at the gallery followed by an invitation to his house when Russell mentioned that he had seen Songs behind glass but had never held one. ‘That can be mended,’ the man had said. The house was a potters’ Aladdin’s cave. In its inner sanctum Russell was handed, one after another, seven tea bowls in oil spot or hare’s fur, each nine hundred years old and each looking freshly lifted from the kiln. He’d almost dropped the last, certainly swiftly handed it back, when told casually the insured value of what he was holding.

  He’d learned too late of the man’s death to attend the funeral, but would have gone, deeply grateful for what he’d been granted that day. The day was returned to him four months after the funeral when a cubic-foot plywood box was delivered by special courier. Professionally wrapped and padded was the second of the hare’s fur tea bowls he’d held, tucked down beside it an envelope of heavy cream paper. The handwritten note and accompanying certificate of provenance lay in the top drawer of his desk. He still took it out, not to read the words, which he had by heart, but simply to look at the signature in remembrance of the man.

  To Russell

  In honour of a true spiritual inheritor of the Song tradition, and with gratitude for the many hours of pleasure your pots have given me, this small token.

  (And this necessary postscript, each of us, from opposite directions, being acutely cognisant of the fact that a pot is more than its aesthetic value. Should this one ever need to be sold on, its last valuation was $27,500.)

  With my deepest regards

  James Sedgwick

  The bowl sat quietly on the bedroom dresser. No thief entering the house would have dreamed that it was, by far, the most valuable object there. Not wanting to scare himself, he’d never gone online for even a glimpse of its current value. Hugh, though, had, he was sure — could have told him in a flash if ever he wondered aloud. Russell called to him that coffee was up. He answered, but didn’t immediately appear. A last fondling, Russell guessed. One of the pears piled in the fruit bowl had yellowed since morning. He took it to the cutting board and peeled and quartered it and carried the quarters back to the table and arranged them around the dates and almonds on the plate. Hugh appeared soundlessly in the doorway.

  ‘It was a bit dusty, old son. I gave it a clean.’

  ‘So do I.’

  Hugh halted and lifted a hand, hey, I was helping.

  Russell nodded down at the table, ‘That one’s weaker.’

  Next evening he was standing at the open fridge trying to decide what to cook when he heard what sounded like a knock at the front door. No one who knew him came to the front. Someone lost, maybe. But he hadn’t heard a car. He cocked his head and waited. The knock came again.

  In the dim light of the forty they used in the hallway he thought for a second the girl was Jade.

  ‘Hi. Russell?’

  She managed simultaneously to hold his gaze and look past him. He knew who she was.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Jade’s sister.’

  ‘I thought you might be.’

  She had the same narrow, slightly feral face. Her blonde hair looked hacked with a knife. In the left nostril where Jade had a ring she had a small clear stone. He assumed glass, but, so small, it might equally have been a diamond. A black studded jacket hid her build, but her throat was as sinewy as her sister’s, and the bulky sleeves probably hid the same thin arms.

  ‘I’m Kayla.’

  His eye was caught by a movement. A young man, also in black, was standing in the gap where he could observe both the house and the road.

  ‘Okay if I come in?’

  ‘Ah, certainly, yes.’ He flattened himself against the door. She moved past him in a creak of leather and halted at the lounge room doorway and glanced in, then stood side-on and waited, her gaze flicking between him and the lit kitchen.

  ‘And … your friend? What does he want to do?’

  ‘He’s good.’

  He watched the figure as he closed the door. He didn’t move. She was waiting. He motioned her along the hallway, but she shook her head, ‘You go.’ When she stepped into the kitchen her eyes went instantly to the other doorway. If you were a wallaby, he thought, your ears would be up and your nose twitching. Jade’s words came to him, they do weekenders.

  ‘I live on my own.’

  She half-turned. ‘She said you’re married.’

  ‘Was. My wife died eleven months ago.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The word conveyed no sympathy, was simply the logging of a fact.

  ‘And she says you’re a potter, yeah.’

  He heard she’d never till now had need to speak the word. ‘That’s right. Not many of us about, no. Now, would you like a hot drink? I can do tea or coffee.’

  ‘Nah.’ She turned and faced him properly. ‘If you’re wonderin, we found you from the phone book. She give us your name.’

  ‘Well, my description was a bit vague, so I figured something like that.’

  ‘Um, you got juice?’

  ‘No. Sorry. I can offer you a beer, though, if you’d like. Or wine.’

  She shook her head. ‘Tea, then.’

  He thought as he turned towards the jug, you’re as short on the pleasantries as your sister. But how many ‘pleasantries’ would they have heard growing up? He carried the jug to the sink, spoke with his hand on the tap. ‘What about your friend? It must be a bit chilly standing out there.’

  ‘He’s good.’

  He ran in water for one. He motioned to the table. ‘Would you like to sit?’

  ‘I’m good.’ She folded her arms across her breasts, the jacket softly creaking. ‘I better say why I come, ay.’

  Another trip. Would she offer money? he wondered. He shrugged, ‘There’s no hurry. I don’t get many visitors.’ He switched on the jug and took the milk from the fridge, then went to the shelves to choose her a mug. He chose the better of his two early crawled shinos as a surface she would never before have encountered.

  ‘She said you brung em stuff.’

  ‘Well, I guessed food might be hard to get. She told you, I suppose — how I saw the kids.’

  ‘Yeah. So I come to ask you somethin.’

  ‘Please.’

  She frowned. ‘What?’

  He was himself confused, then realised hers was again a profound unfamiliarity with pleasantries.

  ‘I mean go ahead, ask.’

  ‘Well … we was wonderin, me and her — like, could they come here, jus
t for a bit, not long. Be safer. You know? You found em, so some other ba— … someone else’s gonna.’

  ‘Here? Aah … My goodness.’ He dropped the bag into the mug and, for thinking time, looped its string around the handle. The jug had switched off. He spoke as he poured, glad that for a few seconds he didn’t have to meet her gaze. ‘I would think she told you also that I didn’t just stumble on them. I go up that creek to get rock.’

  ‘Yeah. But you seen the cave — Toddy and Em are too little, ay … for there. Me and him —’ she hooked her head towards the road — ‘we stayed there, but summer. And we was her age, Jade’s.’

  He placed the mug on the table, and a teaspoon, lifted the lid from the sugar bowl. She ignored the milk, spooned in two sugars, and retreated again to stand near the fridge, the mug in both hands. It, too, she’d ignored, it was just a mug. She took a quick sip, lowered her hands, her eyes not leaving his.

  ‘Jade said you’re old but not, yeah. You might be cool with it. Can’t take em places we know, DoCS know em, too. Soon’s me and him seen where your place is I thought yeah, go for it.’ She took a longer sip, then, lowering the mug, lifted it again slightly and touched the rim. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome. So … when you say “not long” … can you give me any clearer idea?’ He heard now how she might interpret what he’d intended simply as a clarification. ‘I mean when would you need an answer?’

  They’re children. Why are you hesitating? The girl was speaking. ‘Pardon — what?’

  ‘We was hopin tonight. Three, four days tops, yeah — for how long.’

  ‘And where will they go after that?’