Free Night Street by Kristel Thornell

beforehand, the process efficient, exact. ‘It’s Ada Anderson,’ he said questioningly.
    â€˜Thank you,’ she said, taking it and turning her back on him.
    â€˜I’m calling to commiserate. Are you alright?’ Ada’s voice was cheerfully melancholy. She had not been mentioned in the review.
    â€˜Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m alright.’
    â€˜It’s just bitterness. Bitterness against Meldrum. He’s the target. They won’t forgive him for spurning the Gallery School. For having pluck and going his own way. You’re his best student, so they’re taking it out on you. They haven’t even looked at what you’ve done. They don’t want to see it. You can’t take this to heart.’
    â€˜Everyone got a hard time of it,’ Clarice said. The hurt mixing with fury now, and she could be angry for Meldrum, for all of them. ‘The only serious art is big bright sentimental potboilers. Apparently. You can’t show the smaller view, the real colours of the Australian landscape. That’s unacceptable. Not heroic enough, I suppose.’ She was nearly pleased to have provoked them, and sorry that Ada had been left out of it. ‘How are you, Ada?’ She should invite Ada over for tea one of these days.
    The girl rushed by the question, embarrassed or unaccustomed to having others consider her feelings. ‘Your art is important, Clarice. But it’s easier for them to discount you as a woman. Mrs Hamlin is right—it confuses them. You’ll have to get used to it.’ Could she? Clarice asked herself. Would they always have such a view of her? ‘You don’t paint as a Lady Painter should.’
    Father passed the doorway, checking his watch. Still angry but also increasingly pleased with herself, she said, ‘No, I don’t.’

11
    The week after the opening, on an excessively luminous, unseasonably hot day, Mrs Hamlin threw them a party in the garden of her stately home in South Yarra. Arthur, thoroughly one of them by then, did the honours and took a photograph of the artists uproariously arrayed on the lawn. Under the sun, a tablecloth, a handkerchief, a woman’s high-collared shirt, a rather incongruous goat were all celestial; Clarice was dazzled by so many white forms, containers of light. She felt the dizzying suspension that precedes an Event and it cost her a considerable effort to control her trembling. She gritted her teeth.
    The picture taken, wine was drunk amid growing amusement. She toasted with the others, to art for art’s sake, to life, to everyone’s health, to goats, to the entire animal kingdom. She was not used to drinking; one of the few outward signs of Father’s Low Anglicanism was his scathing view of alcohol; equating it with swift and total moral decline, he did not allow it in the house. The music was persuasive, divine coils of Debussy unspooling from a gramophone through an open window. This was followed by other music that was new to her—faintly but persistently troubling, liquid; it released something in her. The crimson wine, too, spawned obscure impulses and left dark perfect rings on the tablecloth. She drank two or maybe three whole glasses to soften the idea of Mum at home: she had appeared a little glum as Clarice prepared to leave; her stomach was not quite back to normal and perhaps she would have preferred her daughter at home, for company. Those glasses of wine must have induced the migraine, though the beating of her head took some time to distinguish itself from merriment. It was a marvellously bohemian afternoon, pain holding her skull like a large, insistent hand.
    Meldrum, dapper as usual in a dinner suit, held court on the lawn. The company seemed by turns a circus troupe under the direction of their ringmaster and the devotees of a sage. He was indulgent, that day, a benevolent patriarch. It made her consider the rumours of his playful side, a