Nelly gathered up the photographs and replaced them in their folder. Then she sat at the table. Said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘They frightened you.’
Tom refi lled his glass. ‘What went on with you and Felix?’ he asked.
‘I got married so young.’ She held her glass between fi nger and thumb, rocking it on the table, and repeated, ‘I was so young.’
Tom waited. She spoke patiently, as to a fooclass="underline" ‘That was it.’ For a moment she was frightening again, jaw hard, eyes slitty. ‘That was what he liked,’ said Nelly.
It was Posner who introduced her to Atwood, said Nelly. The two men had been at school together. When she realised she was pregnant, ‘Felix was the one who wanted to get married. He was so happy. Well, we both were.’
She said, ‘It began when I started to show. I didn’t for ages, not until about six months. Then I disgusted him.’
Tom understood long before she had finished. The old Polaroid pinned up in the Preserve: he remembered thinking how much younger than her age she had looked.
Scraps of what she was saying lodged in his brain. Atwood had liked to buy her clothes. At first it excited Nelly. Her husband dressing her up the better to undress her. But she quickly grew bored with his taste; with pintucked frocks of English lawn. ‘I mean, all the artists I hung out with were in torn black.’ She began refusing to wear the garments Atwood bought; or wore them incongruously, a baby-doll nightie pulled over a long-sleeved flannel vest, a Peter Pan collar half-hidden under a polyester shift or a safety-pinned T-shirt.
He liked her in pigtails, so she had her hair cropped and gelled into spikes. She dropped a clutch of white cotton knickers into a vat of magenta dye.
Her resistance infuriated Atwood. What began as a mild squabble expanded into one of those sour conflicts that leaves both sides drained yet resolved not to yield. Nelly’s clothes- her appearance, her image-became the site each struggled to control. It was ludicrous and deadly. Sometimes, in the early stages, an argument collapsed because they would catch each other’s eye and begin to laugh. She didn’t speak of the lovemaking that followed, but Tom guessed its edgy mixture, the desire to punish leaving its tang in the syrup.
Nelly’s elastic young flesh sprang back within weeks of giving birth. But her milk-gorged breasts repelled Atwood.‘He wanted me to bottle feed. He’d leave the room as soon as I undid the fi rst button.’
It had phases. In one of them he bought concoctions of silk, or lace, or gossamer French chiffons, an armful of extravagant, feminine wisps one or two sizes larger than Nelly required. Slipping from her shoulder, a dress emphasised the slightness of her frame. There was also the dress-up aspect: lipsticked, hung with flashing paste jewels, she was a child essaying a sexual disguise.
Each mustered their weapons. Nelly’s income was minimal. Rory left her exhausted, with neither the time nor the stamina needed for painting; in any case, in those days only Posner collected her work. Atwood settled the household bills and did so unstintingly, but no longer paid a fortnightly sum into Nelly’s account.
He withheld treats: a line of cocaine, a trip to Venice. In bed he aroused her until she whimpered; at last, pinned beneath him, she would consent to his scheme. Arrayed in whatever elfin costume he required, she acted out his wishes.
She shaved off her hair. ‘It looked terrible. My skull’s that lumpy kind. I’d get around in these old Doc boots I bought at Camberwell, looking like the love child of Johnny Rotten and a Buddhist nun.’ She searched op shops for matronly castoffs and paraded them at formal dinners. ‘Those corporate occasions where all the men wear their wives.’ Atwood told his colleagues she was suffering from post-natal depression. ‘Anything I did from then on was down to being hormonal.’
She thought Posner guessed. ‘Sort of. He was friends with us both. But he’d known Felix for years. And been in love with him from the start. It was really important to him that things worked out between us.’ She said, ‘In a way, it was like I was his proxy.’
The manoeuvres husband and wife practised on each other were misleading. They lent the thing the aspect of a game. That was one reason Nelly stayed. Besides, there were stretches of calm. There was the delight the child brought into the world. They might be drinking cold wine on daisied grass while he crawled over a rug between them, and she would relish the ordinariness of these pleasures.
There was the eroticism that still reeled her in to Atwood. She said, ‘He had perfect ears.’
Nelly had no aptitude for narrative. But that night it poured from her. Tom was of no account in the spate. There was something unnerving in her indifference to his reception of her tale.
She spoke with scarcely a pause. She grew repetitive, elaborating on avowals, coiling back over explanations. She told a pointless story about a mothers’ group she had attended with Rory. She was prolix. A draught set the candles fl ickering and carried the smell of wax around the room. The tiny kitchen filled up with words.
At some point, quite early on, she must have grasped the significance of Atwood’s preferences. What she failed to imagine was that they might encompass other beings. Nelly was accustomed to the cluster of fantasies that she drew from men. With the egotism that is a symptom of innocence, she believed it was her singularity that triggered Atwood’s response.
In this way, her knowledge of what her husband desired was tempered. It was seeing and not-seeing: the perfect mechanism for controlling dread. Nevertheless, what made its way into her paintings was fear.
Atwood began spending longer at work. He was often away. There were meetings in Sydney, in Hong Kong, in Singapore. When he had a free weekend, he would drive to the house in the bush. Usually he went alone. Their skirmishes might have turned wholly vicious but grew routine instead.
At the time, the dwindling of his attention brought Nelly relief. It was only long afterwards that she began to imagine what it might have meant. At once the void left by his lack of interest in her filled with childish forms she had never seen. She pictured flesh so immaculate it measured each caress in damages.
In the last months she spent with Atwood, Nelly’s headaches were more frequent and more brutal. Between bouts of illness, she shut herself into her studio and worked. Rory had started kindergarten, in addition to which she hired babysitters for him while she painted; borrowing their wages, as she borrowed money for materials, from Posner. In five months she completed her Nightingale series, a lunatic fl ow.
‘The selection in the show, Carson said those seven were no worse than gruesome. I was totally pissed off with him for refusing to show them all, but then…’ She shrugged. ‘I was walking around the gallery after the installation and I stood in front of those paintings and it hit me for the fi rst time. Felix had been gone months and it was only then that I realised what’d been really going on.’
Tom asked, ‘Why carry the photos around?’
But the answer took shape even as he formulated the question. When understanding fails, the consequence is always a haunting.
In the last year of their marriage, Atwood began pressing her to have a second child. The idea, once speculative, took on definition: a print emerging into clarity through the chemistry of talk. Nelly temporised; not while she was working towards a show. In that rationalisation of reluctance, she was entirely sincere.
Atwood accepted it without argument. There was an increasingly disengaged quality to his scenarios. ‘I guess things were hotting up at work.’ It was a period when more than ever before Nelly was struck by the abstract nature of money, its almost hallucinatory disembodiment. She was hard put to lay her hands on twenty cents for the bag of mixed lollies her son begged for at the milk bar, but luxuries multiplied around her as in a dream. She swigged vintage Krug in her bath and lay every night in a clean linen envelope.