The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc. Read Free Book Online Page B

came off I felt naked. You hide behind them if you’re a shy child, which I was. But I was determined not to be what Mother wanted me to be.’
    â€˜What did she want you to be?’
    â€˜Oh, nice. Nice girls keep their clothes on. When I met Hugh, I thought: Eighteen – get rid of my cherry now. ’
    Her voice was light, but there was a seriousness in her gaze. Next thing I knew, her description was guiding me up uncarpeted steps into an artist’s studio in west Delhi. She conjured a little veranda. A dividing curtain of yellow shot silk. I looked over at Hugh.
    â€˜I loved the smell of gesso in the curtain. Just loved it.’
    He had done a few preliminary sketches, with pencil and crayon – and in different poses. ‘Some standing, some lying, some sitting in the middle of the room, on this chair, his bed, whatever he said. Do this or that … Oh, what did he call me?’ A worm of hot ash dropped to the grass when her hand tried to summon it.
    â€˜Names, names, they come back at three in the morning.’
    Her small blue eyes had ignited and widened. She was catching one after the other the images that her past was eager to toss at her. And one image she held fast to with a passionate ache. Of herself – propped up on her elbow on a ramshackle divan. The sketches were for a single voluptuous oil painting.
    â€˜Bhero had this ambition for it to be his “magnum opus” – the work by which everyone was bound to remember him. He struggled with it for over a year. This one painting! He kept telling me it was his chance to “break through”. I suppose all artists say the same.’
    Sylvia smiled, animated, before her seriousness returned. She needed an accomplice, to escort her, without stumbling, beneath that gesso-scented curtain, into the small back room where she had posed for him.
    â€˜I felt very special,’ she said moistly. ‘He wanted me to pose like that woman, you know, with her back to you, in London.’
    â€˜The Rokeby Venus?’ I nodded.
    She half smiled, but without a smidgen of humour. ‘Only, I was to lie facing the artist …’
    Two yards away, Hugh fidgeted in his sleep.
    She leaned further forward, her chin almost to her knees. ‘Like I said, we loved each other very much – well above a passion.’ Her voice was growing softer and softer. I moved my head closer. We were breathing the same air in front of her face. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with sex. Oh, it was in a way, but also not part of it at all. When you pose for people, you’re sharing with them. Bhero never talked while he worked, but afterwards he’d say: “When I’m painting you, I feel I’m touching you. I know what the texture of your skin is like. I know the texture of your hair in the way your husband does. I feel the bone under your forehead, I’m running my fingers over it …”’ Her hand mimicked the motion. ‘He taught me that turning someone into art is one of the most intimate things you can do.’
    â€˜How did it end?’
    â€˜Horribly.’ Her arm fell back slowly. ‘Hugh came home and it was only with great difficulty that I returned to him. But he had been in the war …’
    â€˜Did you see Bhero again?’
    She shook her head. Her face had taken on a painful, obscure look. She stared down at her gleaming shins, then at her husband – before hoisting her eyes up to me. ‘But I saw his painting.’
    *
    Some years after the war, the Billingtons had been guests at a military club in Delhi. After dinner, they went into the officers’ bar. ‘It’s totally Indian now; at the same time, more British than the British – wood panelling, regimental colours and the rest of it. Hugh was offered a whisky, I had one too. Conversation normal. The CO was pretending to speak to Hugh – the smallest of small talk – but I could see from