[16] That silence companions them both

In the afternoon I look for a way to fit an armchair into the studio. In the end, I dismantle it into three, carry the pieces up the stairs, and screw it back together. Then I carry up the five canvased stretchers I’ve brought down from the cottage. Then I attach railings to the staircases so that Emma won’t have to fall. Then I try to move a crib up there, but for that one, no means.

In the afternoon, she’s joined me in the studio, under a sunbeam in the chair I’ve moved, watching the sky with Johnny in her lap while I empty the circus trunk and line it with canvas and a multicoloured quilt. Before Johnny, she would come up twice a day to call me for something and to inspect the way she does. Now she’s looking around herself as if she’ll be here a lot. She’s wearing a dress I haven’t seen in a year, a winter frock with a cashmere shawl. Her hair today is two loose braids down her shoulders.

She doesn’t look at me just then. Actually, she does, but only when my back is turned. Women have their pride, and you have to let them keep it. You think because they don’t lead with it as much, they have less. Wrong – they’re saving it up to aim at people they know, while men are out wasting theirs on strangers. (She told me this, which is how I can tell you.) When her pride is wounded, I don’t look at her or say anything. I know what I want to ask: ‘Are you going to tell me what frightened you yesterday?’ She knows I want to ask it. So while I’m preparing the studio, we’re doing this dance we know, where I’m not here to her, or she to me, and we look at Johnny together but not at each other. A moment will come when we blink at the same time.

I’ve swept the floor and washed the windows and walls. I’ve touched up the plaster with a pot of plain white. I’ve stacked some of my papers on the desk for her to file downstairs when she’s looked at them, and mopped the oak floor until it shines, and placed four easels around the room just so. The useful things on my desktop are lined up, which of them I’ve kept. I’ve cleaned off the surfaces of things and polished them with an oiled chamois. When I start tomorrow, I’ll make a terrible mess again. But I don’t want any of it on my mind when I start, so I always give two hours to this. Now the last thing …

‘Where will Johnny’s trunk go?’ I ask her.

‘There.’ From her chair that I’ve assembled, she aims a hyperextended finger at a spot a metre from the corner under the morning sunbeam. So I unfold my ladder and with a tack hammer and heavy thread hang the temple frog where Johnny will be able to watch him.

‘Mister Frog,’ she tells Johnny. We watch them bob their noses and tilt their arms hello. There. The moment has come for us to look at each other again.

‘Are you going to tell me about it one day?,’ I ask.

‘Yes.’ But it’s her wavering yes that means not sure.

I want to tell her: You feel bad. Then you feel bad about feeling bad. Then you feel worse about feeling worse. Then you explode, and when the smoke clears you’re back together again. Emma, you’re not the mystery you think you are, never completely. But I’m not going to tell her that, and I wonder how much her fractured body will have changed her. I don’t know, she doesn’t know, how much strength she’s going to get back, or when her face will fill out again, or her stride lengthen and her breath come deeper, so let’s talk about what we can today, Emma.

‘Take him,’ she says, and I lift Johnny from her arms and watch her raise herself from her chair and totter to the supply cabinet, where she checks tubes and boxes, row on row.

‘Ochres,’ she tells me. ‘Cerulean blue.’

‘Chinese red.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Thinner.’ She stares some more. ‘Scrap cloths for your brushes. There’s plenty downstairs.’ With her toe, she taps on the bottom shelf, where I keep the sulphuric. ‘Paul, if you’re not going to do any etching, if the sulphuric’s still there … really. Get rid of it, please, or lock it up.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Do you want me to order the rest?’

‘I can buy it all this afternoon.’

‘You’re going out again?’

‘I want it all here tomorrow. I don’t want to start out knowing it isn’t here.’

‘To Langeweische’s shop,’ she says. She doesn’t add, you’ll be passing the Rosemeyrs’. ‘I’ll write a list for you, then.’

[[ chapter 17 on March 28 ]]