I never answered, just panted ‘leave me alone’ and ‘Hitler of the backyard.’ One day I trumped her with this: ‘Why don’t you take your top off and come running with me?’ I said it with a snigger.
‘All right then, I will.’ She unlatched her overalls, unbuttoned her shirt down to her navel.
For a moment I was sure she was going to do it. I glanced for any sign of parted curtains. I said, ‘Jesus, Tilda, do your buttons up. Jesus.’
That gave her a victory. She had out-bluffed me. She raised her chin and smiled her satisfaction.
I trumped, ‘Take your top off then. Go on, give the town an eyeful.’ I headed for the hose for a champagning.
Tilda yelled that I was cruel. How else could she describe a husband who told her to go naked in public?
I didn’t see her unbutton everything. I was snorting water from my face and moaning like a lowing cow. When I peeped through the spray her top was off, her overalls were already at her ankles. She wore black knickers and asked if she should take them off as well.
I leapt out of the water and covered her with a bear hug. I picked her up and marched into the kitchen. She laughed all the way, kicked her legs like paddling. When I let her down she put her fists on her hips to signal another victory, another out-bluffing. She said it felt so wonderful to at last go, ‘Here I am, world. This is me, one tit and all.’
‘I have a responsible job in this town. You want people saying I have a missus who runs around starkers?’
‘Oh, Mr Responsible. Grains writer for the Wimmera Wheatman hardly makes you Prime Minister.’ She gave a slow, mocking shake of her head.
Then, whether by accident or instinct, I produced the ultimate trumping. ‘Fuck it, I’m leaving. No more of this shit. I’m having no more.’ I put my hands out in front of me and waved: ‘No more. I’m leaving.’ I strode up the hall, gripped the balustrade knob and swung onto the stairs, bounding up three at a time.
In the bedroom I stomped when I walked, cursed: ‘I’m off. I’ve had a gutful.’ I opened and closed drawers with as much bang and crash as I could. I emptied my sock and underwear drawer onto the bed, same for my wardrobe shirts and trousers from the ironing pile. Razor and toothbrush from the bathroom cabinet. I was leaving. Or at least that’s what I wanted to show. I had instinct enough to know this trumping needed an aggressive display of packing; not just saying ‘I’ve had a gutful’ but actually shoving possessions in a backpack.
Tilda arrived at the bedroom still topless but with one arm across herself for modesty. I snapped at her, ‘Where’s my blue polo neck?’
‘In the futon room on the clothes horse. What are you doing packing?’ There was no mocking from her now. There was shallow breathing, quick little gasps: ‘What do you mean, leaving? Please, sweetheart. No. Don’t leave. No. Don’t go.’
I kept packing but slowed down my jamming the backpack full. If I finished too soon and had to fasten the straps shut there wouldn’t be time for Tilda to plead more.
‘Baby, please, where would you go? Sweetheart, don’t.’
‘I’ll get a hotel room until I find my own place.’
‘Darling, no. I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry. Don’t leave, please. Please.’ She held my arm to prevent me hoisting the backpack to my shoulder. She embraced my neck, pressed her face into it. Her voice smelt sweetly and sourly of tea and a tooth on the turn needing drilling.
Chapter 61
If I had my life over again I would not have my life over again. Not from this point on in the story, anyway. I would have thought more decent thoughts. Thoughts have consequences though they never leave your brain. They do damage if the bad ones get too prominent. Thinking darkly rots your decency. Among us small people—people in small towns with pipedreams over—the staleness of disappointment makes you mean. Add in dark thinking and you’re history.
Two months after my trumping win Tilda was admitted to hospital. There was blackish blood on her toilet paper. A tumour in her woman’s parts was her amateur diagnosis. Her cancer must be on the march.
It turned out to be a benign ovarian cyst easily dealt with, scalpelled out and forgotten.
‘Get plenty of rest,’ Roff advised.
‘Rest is the best medicine,’ Philpott agreed.
Rest, I scoffed in my thoughts to their faces. Rest is her main occupation these days. Art is too hard for her so she has a long lie down. If you spend your life resting what are you resting towards?
She had stopped her complaints about my parading without a shirt—I’d trumped those out of her. In their place, however, came rest and the silent treatment. That’s what I called her new polite distance. Silence, I was convinced of it, was her latest trumping strategy. It never occurred to me she might be acting in good faith, trying to help me love her by letting me breathe a little. I was too busy letting my thoughts run away: I felt let down by the black blood not being cancer. I expected it would be. I expected Tilda would die soon. I would nurse her. I would grieve. I would get sympathy. I would live in this big home a widower. I was still a young man: one day I’d remarry. Till then I would play the field—one-night stands in Melbourne; a week in Surfers or Byron. I would buy a David Jones suit and act a man of means. I would wait a year or so, a respectable period, then clean out Tilda’s clothes, her studio. This building would go on the market and I would exit Scintilla, make a beginning from an end.
Then Tilda broke her silence with this declaration: she wanted to embrace life with fresh resolve. She blessed the cyst as a reprieve, a reminder that life is temporary and we must make our mark before perishing—any mark, something to say we were born into this world and have lived a life that’s worthwhile. She wanted me to be proud of her again, not think of her as a patient or a nuisance. She wanted me to relish her presence and not feel trapped by petty put-a-shirt-on demands. Jealousy drives the person you love away, she realised that now: ‘It’s a very unattractive quality. It’s like you don’t trust the very person who has vowed themselves to you.’
At night I faked sleeping, my back turned against her.
‘Please, sweetheart, don’t fall asleep yet. Talk to me. Talk to me.’
I kept my eyes closed tight.
Chapter 62
It was her idea to ring the Wilkins household. It was her decision to attempt the Archibald Prize, nothing to do with me. I supplied the phone number, yes, but at her request. I didn’t think anything would come of it.
She was almost too late: Cameron’s cancer was back and in the process of killing him. He could barely sit upright; his bones were eaten out and could not take his weight. Tilda apologised for even fetching him to the phone, let alone suggesting he might pose for her. ‘Art is so trivial alongside illness,’ she said, tucking the phone under her chin, pressing her palm against her forehead. Her face had lost its pink cheeks and pink lips; they were sick-bed pale from embarrassment and cancer memories. ‘Just forget I rang,’ she apologised.
Cameron insisted she not apologise more. He was accepting of his fate. So was his wife. Dying needs its distractions too: a portrait might be the perfect tonic. There were plenty of photographs of him around, family ones, a few formal shots for book covers—his daughter, Ruth, eighteen months old, would have those images to say, ‘This was my father.’ But a painted portrait was another matter, he said. It’s an artist’s impression in oils of what’s inside us, of who we are. It’s an artefact.