A Perfect Square

Chapter 1-3

Ecstatic, she went home to her rooms in a two-storey house in Fitzroy—Number Seven Moor Street and she rented upstairs. The larger room she used as her studio: high ceilinged with a balcony that faced south. The room was bland. The rudiments of a kitchen lined the back wall. A box room at the back served as her bedroom. The bathroom, shared with the downstairs tenants, was down the hall. In the studio-room she had laid drop sheets on the carpet in the corner by the window and positioned her easel towards the natural light. She would spend many hours of each day standing by the window, pondering her latest work and at last she could do it with a modicum of financial security.

She leaned back against the window frame, for once at ease with her surroundings, despite the incongruities of domestic and personal style. She had adopted a ladybird look, although she liked to think of it as colourist meets noir: Curly hair, black as jet, held back from her face by a red silk scarf, her smock, black, protecting her turtleneck sweater of red cashmere, dog-tooth check mini-skirt and red tights. While many of her peers were pairing off or marrying, or moving away for promising careers and big mortgages, she clung fast to her bohemianism. Melbourne frustrated her. She yearned for Berlin, Paris, New York, cities where art thrived, where she felt sure she would find scores of her own kind. Yet here in downtown Fitzroy, thanks to her friend Phoebe, she was exhibiting, selling and receiving commissions and she had to be grateful for that.

Phoebe had a natural instinct for the niche market and a sharp eye for trends. Abstract, expressionist, symbolist—modernist art had been having a renaissance. All of their old student friends had a poster on their walls of a Matisse or a Munch or a Klimt. Being ostensibly naïve, Harriet priced her works accordingly and well below her competition. It was at once their subversion of the male-dominated neo-expressionist art scene and the all-pervasive Australian cultural cringe. Aussie art produced by a woman, selling like Rolexes from a suitcase in London’s Petticoat Lane: Phoebe and Harriet were rapt.

So it was with much confidence that she applied a touch of raw umber to the work on her easel. She was working in gouache for the matte finish. The piece was to be her homage to Kandinsky, part of her homages series that had been keeping her busy for months. Upon selling her first Homage to Matisse before the paint was dry and receiving a commission for a second, she had wondered if the title held the appeal, a title that framed and contextualised each painting, as if the buyer thought they were in some way taking home a real Matisse or Munch or Klimt.

Kandinsky was not so popular: Buyers, it seemed, had a preference for the French, presumably inspired by the arty popularity of Edith Piaf, exemplifier of melancholia, passion, the suffering of the disenfranchised artist fallen on hard times, and chic. Or perhaps it was merely the presence of some sort of representational form: a chair, however distorted, still recognisably a chair. Pure abstraction was too difficult, nay meaningless for the plebeians of Melbourne, who therefore deemed it pretentious. Alas the work on her easel was her indulgence, for it was really quite good and when finished would hang on her wall.

She stood back from the work, moving aside to let what light there was of a dull day shine directly on the canvas. The work depicted her faithful application of Kandinsky’s rules of colour and form, a series of interconnecting geometric shapes splayed along two intersecting planes that vanished at separate points. Shapes in muted tones, negative space earthy, and the three contrasting yellow circles tense before a blue rhombus. Then there was the dominating black moon that took up the top left corner. It was possible to see in the work representations of buildings, roads, pyramids and references to time, another viewing and a building became a city, the road a river and the pyramids pyres until there were no more mundane associations and the shapes became what they were, forms in themselves, and their interactions spoke then of something else, something ineffable, perhaps cosmological, even divine.

The piece had indeed achieved transcendence, and she knew she had fulfilled Kandinsky’s spiritual aims for abstract art. With quiet triumph she jiggled her brush in a jar of water, removed it and wiped it dry, setting it down on the table where all her other brushes were lined up in order of size; flat with flat, round with round, sable with sable, hog bristle with hog bristle.

She removed her smock, folded it in half and draped it on the back of a chair. Then she leaned against the window and looked up and down the street. To the east, the terraced houses with their lacework verandas receded in two straight lines into the grey of the day. Directly opposite, three bikes were chained to the railings. She was about to pull away when, cornering Nicholson Street, a figure approached in a steel-grey trench coat and matching fedora, and she recognised as well Phoebe’s purposeful stride.

She turned back to the room. On the draining board, saucepans and crockery were stacked about ten high. The bin stuffed full. On the floor before a low cabinet her records, in and out of their sleeves, arced like a fan. The lid of the record player was open, with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the turntable. She took it all in with the domestic indifference she had contrived to suit her persona, and walked from the scene and out to the landing, ready to call down to Phoebe that the front door was on the latch.

‘Great,’ Phoebe said as she entered the hall without an upward glance. She climbed the stairs in twos, wheezing at the last tread. Harriet looked on, thinking ones would have better suited her condition.

Phoebe followed her into the studio-room, tossed her fedora on the sofa and ran both hands through her slick-backed hair. Phoebe was petite, flat chested, and plain of face. Yet there was a slight hood to the eyes, a firm set to the mouth and a definite uprightness of gait. Altogether her presence was formidable, as if she had spent her whole life fighting for the spotlight, forever passed over by the tall and the beautiful. Condemned to the wings, she had learned to make the most of the obscurity, adopted the part of the hustler and, with ruthless resolve and an astounding efficiency, made herself indispensable in the local arts scene, undoubtedly in a similar fashion to her cor-blimey forebears. Phoebe hailed from rough and ready parentage from London’s East End and had been adopted for health reasons by an aunt on her mother’s side, growing up in Melbourne. The aunt managed to divest her of the accent but not the asthma or the attitude. Harriet, herself no mouse, might have cowered inwardly in her presence had she not been her closest friend.

Phoebe was in Harriet’s class at high school. They studied the same subjects, and became school-based best friends, neither Harriet’s parents nor Phoebe’s aunt enamoured with the bond. The only time Harriet did invite Phoebe home, Claudia Brassington-Smythe called Harriet aside and asked her why she was associating with a commoner. Harriet overheard Phoebe’s aunt say much the same when she visited her house, only in reverse. ‘She’s up herself, that one. You’d do better mixing with your own kind.’ Instead, their bond grew stronger. Flying in the face of their respective family’s wishes, each secured a place in art history at the University of Melbourne and their lives had intertwined ever since.

Phoebe stood in the centre of the room, one foot only an inch from The Firstborn is Dead. Harriet was about to rescue the record from her friend’s absent-minded foot when Phoebe said without preface, ‘Have you finished the Klee?’

‘Tea?’ Harriet said, wishing Phoebe would sit down.

‘The Klee, sweetheart.’

Realising she was not in a sociable mood, Harriet reached behind the sofa and pulled out a canvas.

‘Ah superb,’ Phoebe said, giving the work a brief but appraising glance before adding, ‘Can you knock out a Matisse by Thursday week?’

‘Sure, but…’

‘No buts. The buyer is a nonce. Couldn’t tell a Cezanne from a Mondrian.’

She went to the painting on the easel then took a step back, tilting her head to the side. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself with this one,’ she said and stared a while longer. ‘Have you thought more about the Klimt?’

‘Too fussy.’

‘Thought so. I’ll negotiate a Hirschfeld-Mack. Something gold though.’ She looked back at the easel. ‘That one won’t sell. Needs a human face, lovey.’

Harriet paused then laughed. ‘Or a chair.’

And so it went. Phoebe took thirty per cent of sales. They did good business and neither felt compromised. Naïve her work may have been yet Harriet was no dilettante. Not only had she attended art classes throughout her university years, during her Masters she had secured private tuition from a cash-strapped doctoral student in fine art. She would whip round to his flat in Carlton after her Wednesday tutorial, and spend an hour or two, sometimes more, acquiring the methods of the craft. His name was Fritz.

The night they had met was fated, of that she was sure. For it had been with much trepidation that she took the number ninety-six tram to St Kilda. Bauhaus were playing at the Crystal Ballroom, not her sort of venue but she was curious to hear the band live, having found their music conducive to the production of Kandinsky and Klee-inspired works. It was a muggy October evening and she was feeling peeved that Phoebe had chosen a night in. Hadn’t wanted to brave the air, she said, in case it set off her asthma, but Harriet suspected otherwise, a suspicion confirmed when she alighted the tram in Fitzroy Street and stepped into St Kilda in the rain and had to skirt two semi-conscious drunks propped against the façade of the Seaview Hotel before confronting a melee of Goths under the portico. Phoebe’s bugbears; the former would have brought to mind her father, the latter her derision. Goths, for Phoebe, were a pretentious perversion of good taste.

Harriet sympathised with Phoebe’s prejudices. The Siouxsie Sioux hair, the leather, the black, the theatricality of the garb, altogether the look might have carried vaudeville appeal if only the wearers wouldn’t take themselves so seriously. She filed in behind and headed upstairs, acutely aware of her own apparel: an over-sized vee-neck sweater of black, a red satin mini skirt, un-laddered black stockings, and fur-trimmed pixie boots. The kohl about her eyes, the pale make-up, the vermillion lipstick, the silky black locks of her hair, and the uninitiated might suppose her a conservative version of those hustling ahead of her. But she knew and the Goths knew as well, that they didn’t belong at the same gig.

The fug of the Crystal Ballroom hit her as she walked in. Despite its size and high ceiling, the stench of sweat, dirty damp coats and cigarette smoke seemed to have nowhere to go. The huge chandelier that gave the venue its name was lost in the haze, its crystal indistinct and bereft of glimmer.

While the support act was playing she queued in the crush at the bar. Then she found a spot far from the Goths and downed her can of beer in long steady draughts. She preferred to drink wine but didn’t trust the labels behind the bar. The beer was bitter and gassy but left her feeling more courageous. She put the can on a window ledge and, even though it meant mingling with the diehards, she squeezed into the crowd until she was some way towards the front and equidistant from the speaker stacks. She wasn’t a diehard, here for the worship like the Goths. She could never lose herself to a pack. Yet Bauhaus were compelling. At twenty-one she was all attuned senses to the uncomplicated music, the insistent pulse, the melancholia. She shared with the crowd an impatient expectancy. When Bauhaus took the stage, and Pete Murphy the microphone, she felt deep inside her the jagged guitars and the rich baritone vocals.