by Alex Miller
Darling Uncle Mathew, he is still the saviour of my childhood. There was a touch of the poet in him and they despised him for it. He was the only one of them to die poor. They refused to help him. I have wondered if Mathew might have been the result of my grandmother taking a lover. Not the milkman, but some man cultivated, wayward and of a generous spirit. If she did have an affair, her manner gave no hint of it, unless in the very firmness of her implicit denial. Sequestered, she was. As tight as a dried fish in her corsets. The dowager Queen Adelaide. Her lips withdrawn into her mask. Severe in her reproach of all things joyful. The mistress of Elsinore to her last day. The laughter of children gave her migraines and she would not tolerate it in her house. My father’s mother. Grandma Ballard. Mother to the founder of our fortunes. And there were several fortunes. For a time the brothers Ballard (excepting Mathew) accounted for the largest fortune in Melbourne. I shall say no more. That lot will not be resurrected by me here. I will not be lured into an account of their hideousness. Truth does not require it of me.
I was eleven when Uncle Mathew kissed me within the canopy of the peppercorn tree in the garden at Elsinore. So gently did he put his lips to mine that a butterfly might have landed on me, the touch so exquisite my body bloomed for him with a pang I have not forgotten. That pale afternoon the beauty of consolation entered my life. For Mathew consoled me, as he consoled himself, not only with his kisses but with the secret that we are each born with a gift. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the strong rhythm of his heart. His voice was soft and unhurried, and when he spoke wide acres of time waited to be filled with imagination’s charmed possibilities. His was a landscape beyond reality.
‘Not everyone uses their gift,’ he told me that day, his hand on my side, his fingers warm through my dress. ‘Some,’ he said, ‘do not even realise they have received a gift. For them the gift remains mute, dormant until the end.’ I knew he spoke of his mother and his brothers. I said, ‘You mean until they die?’ I wished to hear him say it. His fingers pressed my ribs and he held me close in his embrace. ‘Yes, my darling, until they die.’ A hardness in his voice at this. And I wished then for the deaths of all of them. The smell of Mathew’s skin through his linen shirt was of herbs and blossoms and strange distant places. ‘Others,’ he said, ‘do not wish to acknowledge the gift. They see the burden of it and are frightened by what it demands from them, that it will challenge them to perform above themselves or else see them fail. They disown their gift in favour of the coarse reality of money. They loathe the creative life of others and strive to stifle it at any cost. They are best at cruelty.’ His mother’s fierceness stood over us and he lowered his voice and whispered, ‘In their most secret thoughts they believe in an untried quality within themselves that would prove equal in merit to the merits of the most gifted—if only they were to try it. That is their secret despair, not to have tried their worth.’
That is the way Mathew talked; lover, poet and philosopher. He was too kind and gentle for this world and failed to leave an impression on it. He spoke to me as if admitting me to secrets gathered from places I would never visit. I loved him and felt safe with him. And wasn’t he comforted by my innocence and my belief in him? None of the others spoke to me in his way. If they spoke to me at all, it was to correct me or to offer me advice or to mock me. They did not know how to speak of love or poetry. The imagination was a locked door for them and they feared it. I locked my lips and my ears to them too. It was the country of Mathew I was determined to inhabit when I grew up.
When I was seventeen and home from school for the Christmas holidays I saw Uncle Mathew for the last time. And perhaps he knew it was to be our last time. For we sat in the garden again on the seat in the shelter of the peppercorn and when I asked him, ‘What is my gift?’ he kept his silence for a long time, looking at me tenderly, before he said with an undeclared sorrow that puzzled me, ‘My darling Autumn, yours is the gift of recognition.’ It was his melancholy he would have me understand, not that the world is hard and sad but that life is beautiful and must end. I asked him how he could be sure this was my gift. ‘You are the only one among them,’ he said, and there were tears in his eyes as he said it, ‘who has not scorned me or accused me of failure, but has celebrated my struggle to make something of my poetry.’ I took his hands in mine. ‘But I love you, Uncle Mathew. Whatever you had done I would have loved you for it.’
A year later he found his death, alone and destitute, in the backyard of a pub in a dismal village in County Kilkenny, Ireland, where he had foolishly strayed in search of the roots of his poetic gift. I wish I had been there to comfort him. I denied him my lips that last time in the garden at Elsinore. I was too awkward with myself at seventeen to permit it. And afterwards I regretted denying him. I still do. I could have let him have everything and it might have given him hope.
But he was right. I was gifted to recognise the strengths of others, often before they saw their strengths themselves. I was the one who gathered them together and brought them into their own light and into the confidence of the admiration of their peers, without which many of them would have faltered and fallen by the wayside, like poor solitary Uncle Mathew himself. He had taught me that the country of the gifted is a dangerous place to be alone in. I vowed that I would always keep myself at the centre of a group of writers, artists and thinkers. And that is what I did, with Arthur at my side. Until it was all torn apart by envy, betrayal and despair.
When I saw Edith on the street it shocked me. It was her walk that was familiar. That same balanced containment which, when I first met her, made me think her prissy and lacking in seriousness. That soft young woman’s walk in an old woman. A demon voice whispering in my ear, Edith Black! See? There! That’s her in the green hat walking away from you. The only woman on the street wearing a hat. I felt as if I’d been shot. She stopped and turned around and looked straight at me. My hand went to my face. When she started back towards me I thought she had recognised me. I was unable to move. But she walked past me and went into the chemist’s, where I’d just been to get my prescription filled for the life-saving drugs I take every day by the handful. As I watched Edith go into the chemist’s I realised she could have been my oldest friend in the world today instead of my oldest enemy. Instead of taking her man from her I might have put my arm around her and given her a kiss. She was without guile. My throat thickened and I wept. Why did I weep? I don’t know. I wept, that is all I know. And something changed for me. I have always been indifferent to the why of things. It is what happens to us that matters, not why it happens to us.
I kept diaries all my life. Notebooks. What the Germans call Tagebücher. Notes on my days. The incidents that filled them, or the voids that made them echo with my cries of anguish. That smell of burning in the summer air today is them. This blue smoke in the sunbeams here within the coach house. I must go and stir the ashes. Books burn badly. My despair. My hopes. My girlhood dreams. All that stuff. It goes stale quicker than cabbages. When I got home after seeing Edith I went out to the back veranda and poured a large whisky and drank it off in one go. Half a bottle of whisky later I was in the study collecting my notebooks from the shelves above my desk. They went back to the days before Mathew kissed me under the peppercorn. The earliest of them had pressed violets between its pages from the garden at Elsinore. I must have been seven. What started me keeping a diary when I was seven? There was another with the impression of my girlish lips from my first lipstick (stolen from my mother’s clutchbag). Later notebooks with boys’ love letters pasted into them. I gathered them all from the shelves and stuffed them into an empty wine carton. This afternoon I dragged the carton along the passage and out the side door to the forty-four-gallon drum that Stony incinerates our rose clippings in. I reached into the drum with the iron poker from the library and stirred them around, pieces flying up and making me squint. I watched the pages curl and catch, my antique past in the flickering sparks crawling along the edges of the old paper. So w
hat? It was time to burn them. An added delight in watching them burn (knowing there is no return from fire) was that Biographers love nothing more than notebooks.
Arthur’s 1934 Pontiac. I’m standing here looking at it. We drove down to Ocean Grove in it to see Pat and Edith. It’s parked over there where he left it, God knows how many years ago. The key is still in the ignition. I suppose the battery is dead. My poor Arthur. A scavenger has stolen the Indian head from the bonnet. My beloved Arthur and I that summer afternoon in 1935, three years before we met Pat and Edith. Here, in this old coach house, is where it began for all of us. It stood as crookedly then as it stands now. Arrested in its fall. When Arthur and I saw this place we didn’t need to say anything. It matched our dream. Old Farm. It had been for sale for years. A piece of land beyond the suburbs. An old weatherboard house and this dilapidated shed with the open side. A sixteen-acre paddock and the river winding along the bottom boundary. Fragrant eucalypt forest on the far side of the river. Everything we had dreamed of. All wonderfully neglected and in need of the love we had to give. It is a big shed with a mezzanine, its boards sprung from its frame and grey with age. Now there is the roar of the freeway and the suburbs hem me in. It used to be that if you stayed in one place long enough you eventually became a local. Now if you stay in one place long enough you become a stranger.
I’m a remnant from another time. I don’t eat properly. I can’t be bothered cooking. My breath is foul and I fart continuously. I’m accustomed to the smell. My stomach is a fermenting tip. I eat cabbages every day. I’m like a poor Chinese. There is a box of them—cabbages, not poor Chinese—behind the kitchen door. The house stinks of my farts and boiled cabbages. I don’t care. I do care! No, I do care, but I can’t summon the will to do anything about it. I was such a skilled housekeeper. Stony brings me cabbages. He’s the last of the market gardeners. He has hands like a stone breaker. When we came here it was cherry orchards and fields of strawberries around us. Now there’s just Stony’s cabbage patch and the suburban houses. All far grander than my dear old Old Farm. I might yet burn it to the ground. When this is done. There is no return from fire. We are not Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego. Are we? With no smell of fire on us. I can’t remember now why those three young men were put to the flames in the first place. To prove something, I suppose. Their heroic faith, was it? Or something purer? Another distraction from reality. The smell of fire is on me today. This dress will hold it. It is a smell that will see me out. The smell of fire and boiled cabbages. There are worse fates than destruction by fire. The ancients knew that. We have forgotten everything strong. It can’t have been today that I put my notebooks in the drum, can it? They must be still smouldering from last night. Oh, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Chronology’s not everything, is it?
Arthur and I came here that summer day in 1935 arm in arm, in each other’s arms. We knew at once we had found our haven from our terrible families. We were pure then. Yes, we were. Pure in our spirits and our intentions. And he was innocent. His family almost as wealthy and quite as mean and twisted as my own. He had given in to the love knots of his mother and become a city lawyer. But enough of that. There, just there by the back wall beside the Pontiac, is where we made love that first joyful afternoon. Where the hot eye of the sun is burning this very moment. Hay was piled loosely then. Loose hay for us. We were golden and young and in love (though not violently. Arthur was my refuge). I had to instruct him. I may as well tell you now, this story does not have a happy ending. I have never had a child. Not of my own. It wasn’t possible. There was a simple, unpleasant, gynaecological reason. If that is how you spell it. And speaking of spelling, have you noticed that prenatal needs only the displacement of one letter to become parental? It doesn’t take much. Ever. For one thing to become another. Usually its opposite. Love become hate. Heaven become hell. Good become evil. Laughter become slaughter. One letter. That is all it takes. You know the rest. Word and wound.
He—Pat I mean, not my dear gentle Arthur—was my great est work of acknowledgment. He was the one on whom I spent my gift without holding anything back. I knew him the moment I saw him—well, not quite the moment, but within the hour. He squinted in the fierce light of his ambition. He was not like Picasso. He did not have those famous hungry eyes. Pat had a deep eye. That is what I saw. No one else saw it. Pat Donlon, with his white-blue eye that he tried to conceal from us by squinting. Concealing from us the terrifying nakedness of his ambition. Even he was unsure of it. Until I opened him to it, he was unsure. So there! He was married to Edith when Arthur and I first met him. She was a beautiful girl, lovely and sad. A little afraid of him and what she had done. Afraid of his intensity. Afraid of what she had done in tying herself to this man’s course. But she loved him. And she had courage. We both saw that. Oh yes, how she loved him. If God, who made us all (I suppose) and gave us our passions were to give me my life to live over I would be kind to Edith. I would put my arms around her and take care of her and make her feel safe and loved. What did I do? I took her man from her. I took Pat. It was easy. He was offered to me by fate, so I took him. I never considered Edith. My gift of recognition was called on by Pat in a way it would never be called on by anyone ever again. It was my fate to take him from her. So I took him. Arthur trembled with it, but withstood it. My poor dear lovely Arthur. Like heartless Nebuchadnezzar with his three young men, I put Arthur to the fiery test. He survived but he didn’t come out unscathed. Burned to the bone, he was. White as ash. A great innocent gentle part of him destroyed. Not to be recovered. My Arthur. What I made him endure. How I still love him.
Edith was forgotten by us. So I will give her portrait the first place in this testament. Pat will have to come second to her for once. The portrait of a young woman, at the time of life when we need our portrait painted: when we are young and beautiful. Not when we smell of cabbages and smoke and our own farts. I shall do Edith the honour of remembering her youth. You may not like him (Pat) and I can’t expect you to like me. But you cannot dislike Edith. She was the first to be sacrificed to the violence and the hunger of his ambition. An ambition of such rapture its severity frightened even him. As if it were an affliction that came at him when the weather changed or the moon was full. She and their child, Edith and the little baby. The first to be fed to the strange dark blessing, the furnace of his art. If that is what it was. Or am I getting too melodramatic again? That speechless art of his that hangs today in its silence on our gallery walls. His art become a kind of silence itself. A shroud. Something awful about it that I still cannot confront. Why did we do it? Who has it served? Edith is forgotten. She was like a child when Arthur and I first met her, still obedient to the hopes and sacred values of her parents and her lovely grandfather. A girl incapable of revolt or betrayal against those who had nurtured and tutored her. She was shocked by such things. Embarrassed by them. Confused by them. I can see the blush rise to her lovely cheeks now when I spoke in her presence of my hatred for my family. That was something she could not understand. My revolt against them shocked her sense of what was right.
I was his acolyte. What is that? Acolyte? These days one needs to explain such words. An altar attendant of minor rank, my dictionary says. Not just his accomplice, but something sacred in the ministry of it. That was me. I drew him out and encouraged him and shared the mad illusions that made an artist of him. And I paid a terrible price for it. He was creative in the conventional understanding of that notion. An artist. But you will have to ask, as I have had to ask, whether what we destroyed in the service of his creations was of greater value than what he and I produced. Was he, was I, just as cold, just as ruthless in the struggle to deliver his art, as my father and uncles (saving Mathew) were in their struggle to amass a great fortune? At any price. Always at any price to others. Never to themselves. They sacrificed nothing. It was always others who were made to pay. Was there not as great a coldness in the way Pat and I exercised our ambition as the coldness I so despised and feared in my fam
ily? The coldness I fled from? My heart aches with this question: was I not my father’s daughter after all? Inescapably branded from the cradle with his will? There may be no answer to questions such as these. Or the answers may be obvious. Something to do with the simplest moral principles of our humanity. We will all have a different answer, I dare say, those of us who love art and find in it our consolation, and those of us who live contentedly without it. But in asking the question we would do well not to forget Edith Black and her child. To forget them, as they have been forgotten, written out of our record, written out of Pat’s history, is to lie to ourselves about the nature of our culture. To forget Edith and her child is to lie to ourselves about the nature of our art and what it is we worship in it.
Here she is then, Edith Black. The best I can do for you. A realist portrait. Realism, that most difficult of styles, filled as it is with intricacy and contradiction.
2
Edith Black, 1938
IT WAS A FINE DAY. THE SUN WAS SHINING JUST FOR HER. THE SEA running a heavy swell after the previous night’s storm. The sound of the sea in the room with her now. He had raced down the track to the main road on his bicycle earlier without telling her where he was going or when he would be back. She stood at this window then, where she is standing now, watching him go.
It is already midday. The postman has been and there is a letter sticking out of the box by the gate, a white triangle catching the sun, as if a white bird has alighted there. The letter will be from her mother. She will walk down and fetch it later. She has come out of the studio and rattled the stove into life and made a cup of tea, a drop of bluish milk from the neighbour’s blue roan cow, and a half teaspoon of their precious sugar stirred into it. She stands at the window sipping her tea and looking out at the green hill, the cup held by its slim handle in her right hand, the saucer in her left. The cup and its saucer are delicate pieces of English bone china decorated with a crowded pattern of lilac blooms. One set of a pair on temporary loan from her mother. ‘Lilac Time’. Like everything in this house, and the house itself, temporary and borrowed. And not her mother’s best, but her second best, or perhaps even her third best. Expensive nevertheless. A measure of her mother’s trust. ‘Until you two can get a few nice things of your own together.’