The Sitting
Ava had always thought etiquette should be pushed aside where hot scones are involved and John’s hum of appreciation suggested the same.
‘We made them for the sitting,’ she reminded him. She didn’t want to stop him enjoying the results of their combined labour.
‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll have a problem painting these from memory.’
Silence reigned as John ate another – his third – and Ava ran a finger over the faded burn on the table. Marjorie had pointed it out at her interview, no doubt as a subtle warning that future cooks should be more careful with hot baking trays. Scratches and stains over the ensuing decades had made the burn less obvious, and Ava could only imagine Marjorie’s indignation at the sad state of the once pristine and polished surface now speckled with paint.
‘When we were walking earlier, John, you said, “Welcome to my club.” What did you mean?’
As he reached for another scone Ava thought he was planning to ignore her. Then he rapped his knuckles on the side of his head. ‘The quacks tell me my forgetfulness will likely get worse as I age but to not worry about the future.’
‘Sound advice,’ she said. ‘No amount of worrying ever changed anything, in my experience.’
John pushed the plate with a half-eaten scone to the centre of the table. ‘I didn’t understand when the doctors explained I’d lost only some memory. My first words when I woke up in hospital were about not wanting to miss my exams. I was twenty-one, but in my head I was still at school.’
‘Did you receive therapy? Something to help you remember?’
‘Hypnosis and other strategies were talked about, but being sick is an expensive business, with no guarantees.’
‘So you didn’t try everything and nobody pushed to get you help?’
‘I didn’t feel like I needed it and Mum agreed. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t missing anything. How do you miss something you don’t know exists?’ Thank goodness his question was rhetorical or Ava might have lost it completely. ‘Mum said the best way to snap my brain awake was to be back with the one thing I loved more than anything – Ivy-May.’
Ava was unable to raise a smile. Thankfully, John’s more pensive mood didn’t call for one. ‘What do you remember about coming home?’
‘The property and the house. I knew my parents and Katie, of course, and the names of our dogs.’
‘You had a lot of dogs,’ Ava said vaguely. She was still recovering from the disappointment of Ivy-May being that special love.
‘We did. Dart, Dammit and Crikey, the Kelpie. I miss taking them for a run. We used to do it on horseback.’
Yes, John, we did, Ava wanted to say, every afternoon.
He was smiling, and she wished it was because he remembered the time he’d explained the difference between a Kelpie and a Border collie. ‘The Kelpie,’ he’d said, his expression deadpan, ‘is all excited and keen to do the job. They’re like, “Come on, come on, what are you waiting for? Let’s get out there, do it and get to the pub,” whereas the Border collie can be a bit like, “Slow down, let’s poke around, sniff a bit, bark a little.” Then, when it gets too hot, the Border collie will take to a shady tree and have a cuppa.’ Even today Ava could picture Crikey single-handedly turning the mob in the direction of home, while Dart and Dammit did a good job of pretending.
‘That’s a big smile, Ava. Want to let me in on the joke?’
Ava pressed four fingers to her mouth as if checking. ‘Cute names,’ she said. ‘What else did you remember, besides the dogs?’
John had kept his expression to no more than a faint smile, barely enough to turn one side up at the corner. ‘I probably could’ve told you about Pythagoras’s theorem. Not sure I can now, though. As for what happened the few years prior to my aneurysm, I never recovered those memories.’ He dragged his plate back in front of him. ‘Mmm, these scones are too good to leave.’
Ava pretended to nibble at the edges of her second.
‘One of my therapists suggested the words and the detail in my drawings were pointers to my past.’ His agitation seemed to be mounting. ‘All I knew was I’d woken up and slipped into another man’s life and nothing fitted. I didn’t fit.’ He shrugged, sighed. ‘Listen to me! I’m raving, sharing a theory I’m not sure I’ve ever said aloud before. Best ignore me and let me eat. I can’t talk with my mouth full.’
‘You’ve intrigued me,’ Ava said. ‘And I agree. Such attention to detail may very well stem from a lack of information. Do you think there were things your mother deliberately didn’t tell you about those years?’ The look he shot Ava made her regret asking. The question crossed about a thousand lines. Why should anything Marjorie Tate had or had not said back then matter now? Ava certainly didn’t want to hear the lies his mother had spun to keep her son none the wiser – largely because she didn’t trust herself not to blurt out the truth. That would only pit her against his mother’s memory. There was also no sense in telling him ‘But you loved me once.’ It wouldn’t make him love her again. No, Ava conceded, she had to pocket the temptation, then zip it, padlock it and throw away the key. ‘What I meant to say, John, is that as your memory keeper your mother was protecting you.’
John leaned back and slapped floury hands together over the plate. ‘All I knew was that my desire to do anything was overridden by the need to sit inside the house and empty the words in my head onto paper. Angry ones in the beginning. I was mad at the world and looking for someone to blame. My parents didn’t understand where their son had gone and I’d disappointed them, but possibly not as much as I disappointed my wife.’
‘Why would Katie not have understood?’
He gave the wry smile Ava had loved. ‘You told me you never married, Ava. Have I remembered that correctly?’
‘You have,’ she said, curious.
‘Then let me tell you something about being a husband with a bad memory.’ He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest and grinned. ‘A husband gets away with forgetting the occasional wedding anniversary by making up for it the next day. The difference between most other men and me is that, after missing one such occasion, the smart husband will make a point of remembering next year by adding chocolates to the flowers. But to have no recollection whatsoever of the night you proposed to your wife and she knows it…’ his laugh startled Ava ‘… there’s no bouquet or box of chocolates big enough to apologise.’
Ava’s chuckle melded with John’s. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see that could be hazardous.’
‘Every anniversary Katie would remind me about the weekend we spent in Brisbane.’
‘You went to Brisbane?’ Ava dared.
‘Apparently I took her to a fancy hotel that cost a bomb. Not that I stopped there, the story goes. Ensuring I made the night unforgettable for my wife-to-be, I went all out by giving her the fright of her life when she found me.’
Unconscious.
‘I was lying on the bathroom floor.’
Blood everywhere.
‘The paramedics came pretty quick, thank goodness.’
Not quickly enough.
‘They stabilised me and got me to hospital. I was fine.’
Your heart stopped twice, John.
‘My parents were there when I woke up. They told me what happened.’
They lied to you, John. They all lied.
‘At least I got one thing right.’
‘Oh?’ Ava had been staring at her lap, too afraid he’d notice her mushrooming emotions. Her hands were twisted so tightly together that her fingers had turned white. ‘And what was that one thing?’
‘Blair.’ John’s voice had shifted to the gentle one that Ava was learning he saved for his son. ‘Katie fell pregnant that weekend.’
Ava’s head snapped up to face him. ‘That weekend?’
‘Imagine me finding out I was going to be a dad and not remembering ever doing the deed.’
Ava pushed her voice a notch higher in a pathetic attempt to match John’s joke. ‘Imagine that!’
‘No woman, especially one like Katie, wants to hear she’s not memorable.’ John pushed his chair back from the table. ‘What did you put in those scones, Ava? Why I’m telling you all this I don’t know. I need to stop talking.’ He picked up a sketchpad, flipping the cover to find a fresh sheet. ‘And start drawing.’
No longer in the mood to sit, with every instinct telling her to put an end to the torture of having to settle for John’s life of lies, Ava prepared an excuse to leave. If thirty years hadn’t unlocked his memories, what made her think she might by turning up on his doorstep and baking scones?
‘Are you okay, Ava?’ John’s pencil was poised over the sketchpad on his knee.
‘You’re starting already?’
‘I’d better. It’s been a long time since I painted someone, other than the occasional self-portrait. Keep enjoying your tea, but if I could ask you to shift your chair to face me. Unless you’re having a change of heart.’
Here’s your chance, Ava, she told herself. Go home to your children, to your life. Your place is not here. It never was.
‘No, John,’ she said. ‘We’re doing this.’ Knowing his mother would have had a fit over scratched floorboards, Ava scraped the chair into a new position. Damn Marjorie Tate for the lies, and Katie for deceiving the man she had vowed to love, honour and obey. ‘Is this position better, John?’
‘Perfect. Stay as you are and as still as possible until I say so.’
Ava breathed deep to clear her head of Marjorie but not before wishing she’d been stronger that last day. If only she’d defied John’s mother and stayed. Instead she’d let Marjorie send her away and agreed that going quietly was the best thing for John. But a different choice that day would have meant not having her adorable twins, and Ava couldn’t imagine her life without Tony and Nina.
*
John had been tempted to ask Ava if something was wrong. The gutsy woman from the day before seemed different: quiet, preoccupied… breakable. Just as she seemed to loosen up, something would cause her to withdraw.
So much for small-talk relaxing the subject!
Her questions had encouraged him to talk, though, hadn’t they? Or was John inexplicably drawn to tell her his story? In future he’d stick to the more humorous anecdotes because he’d learned that people rarely wanted to know the whole truth. At least he’d stopped short of confessing he’d fallen into such dark periods of depression that he’d thought about his options. On each occasion Blair had unwittingly pulled him through to the other side.
‘How are you doing, Ava?’
‘The silence is a little unnerving. You can talk and draw at the same time, can’t you?’
‘I can, although I believe I may have chatted enough for one day. You, on the other hand, cannot speak, and no moving means no smiling, especially once I start on your mouth.’
‘You’re doing my mouth?’
‘What I’m doing now is a preliminary study of all your features. I start with the big shapes first, followed by some detail.’
‘The big shapes?’
‘Please, Ava, keep still.’ John smiled, crossed his legs, and plucked a fresh pencil from the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘I did warn you that sitting isn’t easy. It might be a good idea for me not to talk about the process.’
‘No, do carry on. Understanding is all part of the portrait experience I’m wanting to achieve. I promise not to distract you and I’ll shut up if I can say one more thing.’
John rested the pad and pencil on the table, taking the opportunity to slip out of the shirt that was constricting his arm movements. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m sorry for being more work than a young model with translucent skin and perfect features.’
‘And as a result, Ava, you will be ultimately more intriguing.’ As he freed the white T-shirt he wore so it hung over his jeans, he asked, ‘You don’t mind, do you? I find tight clothes restrictive.’
‘Ah, um, of course not.’
With that he unbuckled the belt and dragged it free of his waist. ‘That’s better.’ The pad was back on his crossed knee, the pencil skimming the sheet of paper. ‘I start a face by drawing a sequence of landmarks. A series of shapes will map the position and help get the angles right. The eyes, for example, start out as circles – simple placeholders.’ His gaze constantly shifted between Ava and the pad resting on his lap. ‘Later comes the detail – pupils, irises, lashes. That’s when I look closer.’
‘Closer, John?’
‘Absolutely. Last year’s Archibald winner used a garden backdrop filled with memories so that the seventy-six-year-old subject’s history would be reflected in her eyes. I agree they tell our story,’ John said. ‘And the longer our life, the more layers to a person. What starts out sharp and taut becomes rounded and softer over time. A mature person has depth of character and it’s those layers built from life’s lessons that interest me most. That shift in a person when wisdom replaces curiosity, and experience replaces youthful exuberance.’
*
Who was the man studying her, wanting to look closer at her? What might he see inside Ava right now? Fear, hope… love? Ava wasn’t seeing the grazier who’d once talked of nothing but cooking, cattle breeding and land management. This John Tate wasn’t the man she’d known, but that didn’t stop her wanting to fall in love with him all over again. A man with such passion who could articulate it was sexy. And getting sexier by the second.
‘No two people are the same,’ he was telling her. ‘And eyes are never just round shapes. In a relaxed state the lids will cover a good third of the iris, and noses are long or short, wide or thin, bumpy, crooked or—’
‘Okay, okay, I get the picture. You’re dissecting my face.’
‘Starting with a straight line from here.’ John leaned closer and pressed the tip of his index finger to her forehead.
Ava’s mind traced the same line as John’s finger: down her nose to the small ski lift at the end, over the Cupid’s bow that outlined her top lip, and across her mouth. She prayed there was memory in his touch. There had to be, she told herself. She could see it in his face. That memory… The one of them together, sun shining, their mounts, Paddy and Clancy, grazing on the long grass where John and Ava lay hidden from the world, family and, for a few hours, farm responsibilities.
‘And finally to here.’ John’s finger had stopped on her chin, but his gaze travelled back along the same path, lingering on her eyes. ‘Ava?’
She hoped he was remembering that day, that kiss, that unforgettable moment among the spiky Rhodes grass where Ava lay on her back, John studying the landscape of her face, his words never forgotten: ‘Your face, it’s a…’
A dream? Your face is a dream? Go on, say it. That’s what you told me that day, John. Please say it again. Say it now. Remember me. Remember us.
John snapped his hand back to his lap so abruptly that the pencil resting on his sketchpad flew into the air. It completed a couple of somersaults before spearing the floor.
‘I’m sorry, Ava, this isn’t working for me. It’s all wrong.’ He stood and the pad slipped from his lap. ‘It’s confusing. The light… There’s too much.’
‘Too much light?’ Ava enquired, hoping he wasn’t about to pull the plug on the portrait altogether. ‘What if we were to close the curtains?’
‘I know I said consistent lighting is important for setting, Ava, but it’s the right mix of shadow and light that plays on a face that turns something ordinary into a thing of beauty. A good artist uses contrast to their advantage and this room is suddenly too bright.’ He rammed the pencil into the glass holder on the table. ‘I think that’s all for today. Tomorrow I’ll have paints. We’ll start early and get straight into the portrait.’
‘I understand. That sounds great. But first… ’ Ava was also feeling a little overwrought. While she was far from ready to leave, standing got her blood circulating. A walk to the kitchen stretched out the kinks and the dishes provided a suitable stalling tactic. ‘A good cook tidies her own mess.’
‘I’ll do them later,’ John said. ‘By the way, those scones were the best. Better than Blair’s, but don’t tell him I said so.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ she said. ‘Come on, four hands will get them done twice as fast. Wash or wipe?’ she asked, tossing him the dishcloth because she already knew his answer.
‘I’ll wash.’
*
Ava struggled to open the jammed odds-’n’-sods drawer.
‘It’ll be a gadget caught in the lip.’ John yanked at it until whatever had been caught was freed. Unfortunately the final tug pulled the entire drawer off its rails and it landed with a thud, spilling its contents across the kitchen floor: spatulas, serving spoons, oddments and baking paraphernalia.
The pair were temporarily speechless, then burst out laughing as the last item, a cookie cutter, came to rest against the cupboard kickboard.
‘Good heavens! Look what we’ve unearthed.’ John picked up a set of rusty measuring spoons. ‘I do believe I used these at school in home sciences.’
‘They look well used.’
‘A long time ago. These days I burn more than I eat, usually because I draw well into the night without realising the time.’ He stood and straightened his frame, then went to the far end of the kitchen and dropped the measuring spoons into the pedal-bin.
‘There certainly isn’t a lot of reward in cooking for one,’ Ava said. ‘That’s all I have unless my daughter is at a loose end, which is rare these days. Maybe this is better in the bin, too.’ She pinched the perished piping bag between her thumb and index finger, handing it to John from where she was scooping the strewn cutlery into piles.
John kicked something on his way back to the bin and both of them reached for it.
‘I’ve got it,’ they said in unison, and while Ava let go, John felt a powerful urge to hold on to it as if his life depended on the heart-shaped cookie cutter.
Ava remained on her haunches, looking up at him as he turned it in his hand. ‘Do you recognise that, John?’
What did she mean? He wondered. It’s an old cookie cutter, but… The frisson of expectation took him by surprise and the small heart fell from his fingers, back into the drawer on the floor beside her. ‘Excuse me, Ava, I need to… Sorry, I won’t be a minute.’
*
Ava’s legs gave out and she dropped onto her bottom to stare at the cookie cutter she and John had fought over in the little corner shop in a Brisbane backstreet. When the man had refused their money, they’d believed the cookie cutter held the key to their happy-ever-after. John had insisted.
‘It’s a sign,’ she said now.
‘What is, Ava?’ John had come back, startling her.
‘Oh, um, never mind.’ She looked up at him, squinting through the shaft of late sunlight now streaming through the kitchen window and hoped humour would negate the need for explanation. ‘But now you’re back, would you mind helping me up?’
John grabbed the hand she held out and gently hauled her upright, allowing her to get her balance before he let go. ‘Sorry I left you there. Sometimes this head of mine plays tricks on me. I needed to step outside.’
‘At least you came back. I might’ve been stuck on the floor for ever.’ She stepped back to lean against the counter.
‘You were talking to this cookie cutter. Something about a sign.’
‘Was I?’
‘If you want it, it’s yours,’ he said.
She picked up one of his hands, turned it palm up and placed the cutter firmly on it. ‘Maybe you should keep this. Try cooking something one day.’