So which of the sisters died and stayed in French soil? It was a question anyhow on which people expended some interest, but not a great amount. Out of politeness, they did not ask Mr. or Mrs. Durance.
But taking into account the membrane between alternate versions—of which Sally herself had become so convinced after the sinking of the Archimedes, believing that though she had survived, there was a parallel world of chance in which she had not—we can venture to say that at the end of the Australian summer of 1922 wealthy businessman, part-time painter, and printer of fine books Eddie Horowitz laid on a gallery for an exhibition by Charlie Condon.
When Charlie and Sally had first returned from Paris, the going had been hard for them. Sally worked at Sydney Hospital to give Charlie the breathing space homecoming always required. Paris had been in its way difficult too. But the excitement of beginning there—at the epicenter of art—had intoxicated them for a time. It was strange nonetheless that the British painters, the Americans, and the few Australians lived almost entirely in their own clique. They got together often to talk English or take holidays on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany—and thus to shy away from confronting the great alps of recent European achievement. The Americans were fascinated by Charlie’s missing arm—though rather than pin up his sleeve, he used a prosthesis and a glove over an artificial hand in an attempt to put paid to the issue. The British took missing limbs more for granted. So it was not out of false sympathy that Charlie had two paintings exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1921. This provided the modicum of validation needed for the artist to keep going and for his wife to continue in her original faith. He was also invited to exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. Though at that stage Sally had been offered a job nursing at the English Sanatorium in Paris, Charlie insisted that she should not waste her French experience on drudgery.
The parties they went to in Paris could become difficult. Spirits—particularly cheap spirits, which were all they could afford—made Charlie irascible. Then, when they got home to their one-room apartment, there were the sort of night sweats and dreams that all the women of the soldiers of the world endured at secondhand.
Painting French forests and seasides and pastures was an education rather than a career, Charlie began to assert. When it became apparent to him and Sally that the honest and essential thing was to go home, they knew it would not be an easy business. The English artists who went home had the certainty that they could swan back to Paris whenever they liked. The Australians had the greater certainty that their decision was a choice—very nearly—for life.
But within a few months of Charlie and Sally getting back to Sydney, Eddie Horowitz had given Charlie’s French work a cachet and was now trying to do his Australian coastal landscapes the same favor. Cachet in Sydney was not like cachet in Paris. But it would have to do. With the weight of the congealed Australian summer’s heat on them, they rented a flat by the sea in Bronte. As Charlie had predicted, the light in Bronte made Wimereaux and Boulogne look sick by comparison, but still there was a vacancy in the air above them. The imagination had not filled it to the same extent to which those atmospheres had been filled. But then the air of France was filled with the dream of war and mangling, as well as the dream of light.
When Eddie Horowitz first saw Charlie’s work, he introduced him to the Society of Artists in Sydney and the Australian Watercolor Institute. He also tried to get him a part-time job imparting sketching skills to the students of the Teachers’ College and he found him a studio in George Street to share with a number of other artists. The only thing Eddie could not do was cause his business partners—and the businesspeople he invited to the exhibition—to buy Charlie’s paintings and make Charlie’s name.
Charlie was sufficiently impressed by the seriousness of the night of the exhibition opening to have bought a new suit. He understood by now the impact drink had on his behavior and despite the stress of the occasion remained utterly sober that night. He had given instructions to Eddie that in no press—as little as there might be—were his war wounds to be mentioned. He did not want to be written up as a freak—the one-handed artist. I only started to paint properly after I lost the left arm, you stupid bastard, he had cried to an American artist at a party in Paris—and he’d had to be taken home.
So this event in a studio on the top floor of David Jones department store was the punishment and reward for painting. A number of men and women approached Charlie with their whiskies and gins in hand to congratulate him, in an amused but overcheery manner which told him they would not be spending anything tonight. Across the room Mrs. Sorley and Sally’s father were talking to some of Charlie’s friends from the studio.
Standing near them, a man in a good suit seemed engrossed by one of the paintings and he reminded Sally of Ian Kiernan. Her eyes had picked him out because this exhibition was frightening to her, and she looked for echoes of familiarity in it. The man did not look like an associate of Eddie Horowitz, there to please him for business reasons. Sally wished she could have said to Charlie, who was talking to friends, See that man there? Doesn’t he look like Ian Kiernan?
She had not written to Kiernan for at least six months and did not know if he was still in prison.
The man leaned to the painting, stood upright, turned, saw her, and smiled broadly. It was a smile of recognition, a smile from the Archimedes. He strode across the room towards her and Charlie.
Charlie saw him now. They wrung each other’s hand, and Ian kissed Sally’s cheek and stepped back and said, So much like your sister…
I thought, said Sally. I mean, I didn’t know if you were…
We were all amnestied in handfuls, said Kiernan. Thank God, our government didn’t have its heart in locking us away for good. I’m back working in the family business—it is still the family business even though the government tried to acquire it. Now I am totally respectable. All is forgiven.
Are you married? asked Sally, perhaps too quickly.
Oh no, he said.
She was strangely appeased.
He said, I must congratulate you, Charlie. The river over there.
He pointed to the painting he had been studying so keenly. It’s not the Somme, is it?
The Yser, said Charlie, with a smile. And look, I’ve got Australian rivers in the next alcove… the Clarence is there.
Painting the Yser isn’t an act of national dereliction, Ian Kiernan assured him. And if I were to acquire the Yser, I suppose you would think that it was out of friendship or regard for your wounds rather than for its inherent quality.
With a man who could speak Charlie’s fears so accurately, his buying a painting was no trouble, and they all knew it.
Three were sold that night. Eddie declared that was remarkable in this philistine age. Ian stayed till the end and walked out with them as Eddie Horowitz led the way. Eddie was taking them all to dinner at the Hotel Australia—Charlie, Sally, her father, and the new Mrs. Durance.
On the pavement, in the pleasant warmth of a summer’s night whose southerly breeze had arrived, Kiernan said in a lowered voice to Sally, I can never forget her. We were the perfect fellow pilgrims.
He squeezed her hand, shook hands with Charlie, and walked away up Elizabeth Street.
Charlie kissed her ear and said, Ducky.
Ducky had become his pet name for her.