Free Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones Page A

places. She said she looked like she was made of mattresses
or armchair stuffing and that bits of twine had been pulled tight in all the wrong
places. Two weeks after Alma finished and presented her with her portrait he was around
there on another rat job when he noticed she had taken down the painting above the
hearth. Its absence was puzzling. They had spent a pleasant hour deciding where to
hang it and Victoria had been excited at the time. Now the blank space on the wall
made him question the accuracy of his memory. They skirted the subject, but after
a while their eyes kept returning to the emptiness above the hearth and finally Victoria
told him, ‘Alma, I had to. You gave me no choice after I saw what poor company I
make…that downturned mouth, those grumpy eyes.’
    And as was their habit in those days the conversation stopped there. Then they both
heard it—a scratchy sound behind the skirting. Alma told her, ‘Victoria, let this
one be on me.’
    As far as the rest of the women in the district were concerned, to be looked at
or observed was as rare as sugar or chocolate. They could have looked in the mirror,
of course. But there is nothing like another’s eyes to set us alight, to make our
nerves stand on end, to tell us, in effect, who we are.
    A long period of fine weather put further distance between their lives and the war
in Europe. When you walked outside you saw dragonflies. You saw waxeyes in their upside-down
efforts to get the nectar of the flax flowers. You saw the great unhurried parade of
clouds. You breathed in and forgot the war until you picked up that day’s newspaper
off the lawn, or a letter arrived, and then the local imagination crept into areas
of the map previously unknown. When a name such as Tobruk arrived in a letter a face
would go slack, like sailcloth.
    With the men away some things continued as they had before. The sound of tennis balls
smacking against the wooden volley-board, balls kissing the net, only it was women
playing women. Like at the dance at New Year’s Eve, the hall decorated as it had
always been with streamers, flowers, trestles sagging under sponges, music, the same
old dances, but no men.
    In 1942 the last of the married men were called up and with these men gone the altered
world was more or less complete. Every second or third day Alice found something
to ask Alma’s help with. The beehives. Thistle to dig out of the paddock. Those drainage
canals that had been bugging her. For a farmer’s daughter she didn’t have much of
a stomach for blood so Alma did the butchering, and when he grabbed a chook and smacked
it down on the saw horse, its neck stretched, she made sure her head was turned or
better that she was inside so she wouldn’t hear the light splatter of chicken blood.
Once when a neighbour’s bull tore a boundary fence down Alma helped fix that. There
were also the rats, of course.
    By now she was so used to his being around they dropped certain formalities. When
he turned up at the door she no longer headed for the sitting room to perch on the
edge of the stuffed armchairs. While the hot weather lasted the door was open day
and night, and to the extent that Alma was part of the outside world there was no
attempt to hold him at bay.
    In those days there stood a hill about a hundred metres from the farmhouse. When
Alice’s parents had lived there her mother complained endlessly about the hill blocking
the sea view. Various sheep tracks wound to the top. Every morning Alice would walk
up the hill until she could see the rooftops of town and the blue ocean. When she
was very small, before she could talk or walk, her father used to pop her in his
fishing net and drop her over the gunwale then drag her back and forth through the
top layer of warm ocean, curled up like a trout in her father’s net, her gummy mouth
wide with laughter, or so it is told in family lore.
    From her father she inherited this love of the sea. And on those days she decided
a swim