by Alex Miller
Autumn Laing
ALEX MILLER
For Stephanie
and for our son Ross and our daughter Kate
and for Erin
Epigraph
The most enchanting things in nature
and art are based on deception.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, The Gift
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART one
1 New Year’s Day 1991
2 Edith Black, 1938
3 Pat Donlon
4 March 1991
5 Edith’s announcement
6 July 1991
7 The big picture
8 Arthur
PART two
9 September 1991
10 Once, if I remember well …
11 November 1991
12 Picnic at Ocean Grove
13 November 1991
14 The flies
PART three
15 Retribution
16 5 December 1991
17 Paradise garden
18 28 December 1991
Acknowledgments
Editor’s note
HOW I CAME TO WRITE Autumn Laing
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise for Lovesong
Praise for Landscape of Farewell
Praise for Prochownik’s Dream
Praise for Journey to the Stone Country
Praise for Conditions of Faith
Praise for The Ancestor Game
Praise for The Sitters
Praise for The Tivington Nott
ALSO BY ALEX MILLER
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART
one
1
New Year’s Day 1991
THEY ARE ALL DEAD, AND I AM OLD AND SKELETON-GAUNT. THIS is where it began fifty-three years ago. Here, where I’m standing in the shadows of the old coach house, the boards sprung and gaping, this stifling January afternoon. I was thirty-two. I’ve retreated from the sun and smoke. The smell of smouldering paper has followed me. Blue smoke in the sunblades cutting the interior dark into shapes—in imitation of the work of a certain painter we once admired. There are things concealed and covered up here. The abode of the dead I should call it. In the shade, where I belong. Don’t laugh. It’s an old anxiety with me, this impulse to probe the rubbish with the toe of my sandal, disturbing the litter in the hope (or dread) of turning something up. I’m no longer a woman. Oh, you’ll understand all that soon enough. The buckle on my left sandal broke last night when I was dragging my mattress onto the veranda to catch the breeze. Instead of the breeze I caught my foot against the back step. I’ve no strength left in my legs. My legs! Back in my smooth skin days I seduced him with glimpses of the purity of my pearly thighs, watching him ache for my touch, my insides churning. There was no stopping us then.
I saw her on the street yesterday. And last night I was sleepless thinking about her. The air burning in my lungs at two this morning. I thought of going down to the river bank and lying on the grass under the silver wattles for a bit of relief. But I can’t manage it any more. I haven’t been to the river for it must be fifteen years. If I could reach the river bank I would lie there naked as I lay with him. My body white and still and cold in the moonlight now. On my back (ready for it, Pat would have said), my life and their lives seething in my brain. His and hers. I’m little more than a skeleton these days. No, it is funny. I won’t have it any other way. You can laugh all you like. I’ve never begrudged anyone a laugh. God knows, we get few enough of them.
Until I saw Edith yesterday I was ready to become that white corpse on the river bank. It’s true, I wanted it. I have the means for my end tucked away in the back of the drawer of my bedside table. But instead of dying last night I repaired my broken sandal with the length of purple silk ribbon which was around the box of cheap chocolates given me by that cheap woman who called here yesterday. If it was yesterday. And was it after I’d seen Edith or before I saw her? It doesn’t matter. She—the woman with the chocolates, I mean, not Edith—parked her car by the front door then walked around the side, coming through the rhododendrons to the back door as if she was one of our old group. She surprised me with my nightdress up around my middle at three in the afternoon, doing my corns. I should get a big dog. Or a gun. She stood with one foot on the raised course of bricks at the edge of the fish pond (no fish) and smiled up at me, her cheap offering held towards me. Wearing immaculate white linen she was. Her fat features glistening with the heat. Her fat body made for rolling down the hill into the river. That’s what I thought as I looked at her.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. I wish I could have menaced her but there was nothing to hand. I couldn’t stand up at once but I did pull my nightdress down over my ghastly shanks. Why are they always bruised? The bitch had given me no chance to conceal myself, to gather my dignity and hauteur. The truth of my decay was in her face. The ugliness of me. Her black eyes eating it all up. Writing my end. That was her cunning, to catch my lowest truth in the first moment without having to struggle for it. To arrive at Autumn Laing without preliminaries. She has the ruthlessness of a scavenger, and the luck. I know them, the scavengers. They feed off our flesh before we’re dead. What is privacy to them?
‘I’m the one who’s writing your biography,’ she said. Cheerful as a bee. Breathless with self-esteem. Fat as a turd, Pat would have said.
‘You’re after something more than my story,’ I told her. I can be fierce. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. Get out of here.’
She came up the step and helped me to my feet, offering her cheap offering. I’m a foot taller than she is but I couldn’t shake her off. She clung. ‘You’re after one of his drawings if you can lay your eyes on a loose piece about the place.’ She had the confidence to laugh at this insult. She was as steady as a bollard. The peculiar smell of her. The chocolate box pressing into my ribs.
The mess of paper and rubbish here. There must be dozens of his drawings. Hundreds of them. I used to think I’d organise it all one day. Employ a young helper. Restore this house to something like a state of good order. When I was young I prided myself on being a good housekeeper. I imagined our papers boxed and numbered, ready to be carted off to the archives of the National Library. Then they could cart off my cadaver to the cemetery. I saw the end, my own, as neat and orderly. I always said I’d go when I was ready. But I’m less certain of that now. I have my pills but a gust of panic could knock me flat at any time and render me incapable. That’s the fear.
The scavenger bitch biographer stopped me in the hall, her hand to my arm. To draw my attention to the exquisite blue of the Sèvres tureen on the hallstand, she said, where the sunlight was catching it just at that moment. As if I wouldn’t have noticed. It was a ploy to convince me she has an eye, to let me know she is cultivated. But she is without respect. Without insight. I’ll bet she didn’t notice the crack in the tureen. It was Pat himself reeled against the stand, drunk or in despair. I should have given it to her. Here! Take it! A going away and staying away present.
They are all gone. Every one of them. Except Edith, his first. The laughter (I almost wrote slaughter) and passion are spent. Seeing Edith in the street shocked me. To know she still lives left me helpless. I had to sit on the bench outside the chemist’s shop. The chemist’s girl came out and asked me if I was all right. ‘I can give you a lift home, if you like, Mrs Laing.’ I told her I was all right. They only want to help. It’s not their fault they’re stupid.
Lying sleepless in the sleep-out last night (if it really was only last night and not weeks or months ago. Or was I on the veranda?) waiting for the dawn, Edith’s presence was before me like an
imperishable icon. I’m not sure why I write that. Except that it’s the truth. The way it felt. The persistence of her vision almost religious. An apparition fattened by my unshriven guilt. Let me shrive me clean, and die, Tennyson said. None of us willingly dies unclean. Religious or not, to seek confession and absolution is an essential moral imperative of the human conscience, isn’t it? To absolve means to set free, and that is what we yearn for, freedom. Young or old, it’s what we dream of and fight for. We never really know what we mean by it.
By the time the freeway (now there’s un-freedom for you) was waking up I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy an untroubled death after all. Problem-free, with a silly grin on my stiffened features when the bitch scavenger found me. Seeing Edith after all these years snatched the prospect of my own orderly death out of my hands. If Edith Black was not done with life then I was not done with it. The question that refused to let me sleep was whether I might yet recompense her with the truth. To embark on the confession that he and I resisted for so long. That he resisted. Most of all, the confession he resisted. It was his truth, after all, that he denied to us. And in denying it to us denied it to himself. I was humiliated and left with nothing. But the largest burden of our cruelty surely fell on Edith, abandoned and alone with her child. The form of Pat’s cruelty was always in his denial of things that made him uncomfortable. Even in that great expansive art of his, encompassing our entire continent, a truth was denied, was kept to one side of the picture, in the silence. And it was great. His art, I mean. There was none greater before him and there have been none greater since. Not in this country. My poor sad country. This vast pile of rubble, as someone has called it, that we think so very highly of (it is all we have to think highly of). My soul was in his vision before he ever knew his vision’s force. I gave it to him. I opened him to it. His country and my own. I and he together made this country visible. To make my claim on his art and compose the testament of our truth. A testament without which his pictures must remain forever incomplete. Forever mute. Deaf and dumb to the posterity they inhabit. The posterity of Edith and her child. Without my witness, Pat’s claim that his art represented an inner history of his country and his life is just another deceit in the veil of deceits with which he artfully concealed his truth. A sleight of hand he became so adept at he fooled himself with it in the end. Who can say under which cup Pat Donlon placed his truth?
Pat was never deep. He was intuitive, but he was not deep. It was I who was deep. I who was left on my own to struggle with the fearful knots and tangles of our vicious web, while he sailed on in clean air, free of self-doubt, painting his pictures as if they were his alone to paint. So instead of eating my three little yellow pills I shall write this. Then I shall eat them.
Did I say I was on my own these days? I still have Sheridan, of course (my sweet Sherry). He will be eighteen this year and in the life of cats is even older than I am in the life of humans. Barnaby was the last of our company of human friends. Poor silly old Barnaby in the end. His blackthorn shillelagh is leaning in the corner by the door where he left it. Now there is no one for me to bully. He gave in at the beginning of summer to his persisting irritation with life. How I resent that! It was so selfish of him. How could he? Didn’t he think of me carrying my pot of tea out to the back veranda and having no one to gossip with but Sheridan? When there are no other humans, a cat, even loved as I love my darling Sherry, is not sufficient company. Barnaby taking his own life, as if (and I enjoy the repetition) it were his alone to take. The handful of it that remained to both of us. Going off in that sad little way with his head in a plastic bag, like something from the supermarket. An old man should have acquired more dignity. But what am I saying, Barnaby was never old. Nor dignified. His motto surely was, You have the dignity, I’ll have the fun. Until his parents died and the station was sold he left us each year for a month or two to revisit his birthplace and his friend in the Central Highlands of Queensland. His home was a cattle station with the lovely name of Sofia, deep in the mountains they call the home of the rivers. ‘I go to refresh my source,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll write.’ And he did. He was always urging us to visit him there. When I at last went there with him and Pat, the visit changed all our lives. But you will hear more of that later.
If you knew Barnaby Green, the beloved poet laureate of our circle, you knew even in his decay a youthful man. There was nothing Barnaby could do to temper that out-of-time youthfulness of his. Whenever he ventured a patrician gesture he became laughable, poor man. Those who did not know him and love him as I knew him and loved him thought him a snob. I would not have predicted his suicide. He surprised me. Dismayed me. Angered me. His suicide made me feel as if I had never really known him. I felt cheated. Betrayed. Yes, I felt that in killing himself Barnaby betrayed me. Had he kept himself from me after all? His inner self? Barnaby’s suicide, almost as much as seeing Edith in the street the other day (or whenever it was) shook my certainties about myself. That is what has happened. These things are not easy to understand. And you no longer expect it at my age. To have your certainties contradicted by experience, I mean.
I might have been prepared for some gesture of that heroic kind from the others. Their deaths were not surprising but confirmed the lives they had lived. Barnaby’s left me wondering. About myself. And then Edith appears. As if a last dream has waited its awful moment to come upon me and make its terrible demand.
Since seeing Edith my memory has become the cathedral of my torment. Well then, I shall consecrate its old stones to my truth. Am I being grandiose? Melodramatic? I am old-fashioned and am not going to try to be modern. My truth, did I say? It was his truth too. Not Barnaby’s, Pat’s. Did Barnaby even have a truth? A man of such powdery illusions, such primal gaiety? I doubt if the gravitas of truth ever stuck to Barnaby for long enough to become his own. Pat Donlon’s truth, I mean. His. Let me be clear. It is Pat, our greatest artist, if it is art that renews our vision of ourselves and our country, of whom I wish to speak here. And of myself. The torture that accompanies grand visions. That, and the beauty and the awful price of illicit love. The torture of seeing what others have yet to see. The torture of knowing what has been kept hidden, unseen, in the silence and the dark of wilful denial. All that. The suffering and the transcendent bliss. All right, yes, I am being grandiose. I like the sound of it!
I was christened Gabrielle Louise Ballard. From the beginning I hated my name. I refused to answer to Gabrielle and was teased to tears by my brothers with Gabby. When my darling Uncle Mathew came to visit and found me alone in the garden weeping, he took me on his knees and caressed my burning cheeks with his lips and called me his sweet golden Autumn. That is not a moment I shall forget. It goes with me into my grave—like the golden amulet of an Egyptian princess. Autumn is the name I have been known by all my life. No friend ever called me anything else. Freddy reduced me to Aught, of course. But I loved Freddy and forgave him. Gave him, indeed, the liberty of his dreams with me. But with Freddy it was always a game. Life. Nothing more.
It is the first of January, 1991. My first New Year’s Day alone. I was born in 1906. So I must be eighty-five. Is that right? Some people still have vigour at eighty-five. Barnaby had the facade of it. Close to, however, one saw the vacant sky behind his windows. But I have obeyed the biblical laws and become a disfigured crone. Still tall, I am stooped and cranky and thin as … Well, as thin as something. Think of something yourself. My scalp is dry, with reddened patches visible through the stray wisps of silver hair that remain attached. Colourless, really, rather than silver. This is my last chance to tell the truth. I must remember that. Which is why I wear a scarf. Because of my hair, I mean, not because it’s nearly impossible to stick to the truth. Not like the Queen’s scarves, but more a scarf of the kind once affected by America’s beat poets and the pirates. Tight to the skull. I have a long skull. Even with my stoop, once dressed and in public my appearance is tall and haughty. Today my headscarf is a fine Kashmiri pashmina. The
deep green of dreams. The sacred colour. It needs a wash but I don’t object to the faint warm odour of it. A peasant woman would never wash her scarf. I’ve become accustomed to strong animal smells here alone with Sherry.
Suicide is for strong people. Suicide is not for the likes of Barnaby. Barnaby has spoiled suicide for me. It is so annoying. I tremble and have no strength. The tea tray jiggles in my hands as if it will leap out of my grasp and run away laughing into the garden, like one of my tormenting brothers risen from his grave to mock me again. Each of the seven lidless teapots on the shelf above the Rayburn represents a period and a particular friendship. I realised this the other day when I broke the lid of this one. Don’t worry, I shan’t bore you with a catalogue of all that. My two brothers shouting Gabby into my face until I wept with fury and pursued them helplessly around the garden at Elsinore. Elsinore! You see how I was schooled in grandiosity. They became grey-suited chairmen of their own great companies. Members of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. Terrified of publicity. Terrified of taxation. Both dead. Their wives dead. Elsinore given to the state. The garden cut up to make room for the developer’s blocks of yellow-brick flats. That vast cold house a rehabilitation centre for the hopeless of this new age that is not my age. Elsinore, my childhood home that was never homely. It should have been bulldozed instead of classified. I turned my back on it and on them when I met Arthur. When my father met Arthur he said to me, ‘There’s only one thing wrong with your Arthur, my dear.’ I asked him what that might be. ‘Arthur doesn’t think enough of money,’ my father said. I answered, ‘And your trouble, Father, is that you think of nothing else.’ He did not forgive me. We were not friends. Were we ever? I loathed them all. I was afraid of them. I still am. They damaged me. My fear of them made me hysterical. I felt trapped with them and the only thing I could do was to scream and break things and refuse to eat. Even though they are dead the trap they set for me then is still in me now. I still scream and break things and refuse to eat. Not as often, but I do it. I dread what their cold world of money worship might yet do to me in the vivid nightmares that have begun to haunt my feeble years. You would not believe the awful conviction in the nightmares of the aged. They are a fearful assault. There is no resisting them.