Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  He stood at his work table looking at his picture. ‘Horse’s blood,’ he said aloud, talking to himself without knowing it. He was gripping the edges of the table with his outspread hands, leaning forward and looking down onto his picture. He might have been a general examining a map of the terrain over which his forces were to engage with those of the enemy. Puzzling after a strategy that would give him the advantage. How to deploy his strengths so that their disposition would leave no opportunity for the enemy to mount a successful defence. Outrage, that would be their response when he showed this painting. Boot polish and cardboard. His materials alone would provoke them. They would conclude that his intention was to insult them and their standards. It would make them squeal and tremble like little pigs. They would not know which way to turn. They would see his work as an affront to the grand dignity of their sacred calling to teach their students how to draw after the manner of Leonardo. Not for art’s sake, of course, but for the coveted travelling scholarship. What else? A recommendation to Sir Malcolm for the annual travelling scholarship. A privilege bestowed upon the Gallery School’s anointed. A ticket to freedom from Australian provincialism for which every young artist and writer of Pat’s acquaintance would be happy to pawn his soul. For a year or two, at any rate. He was smiling. He would title his picture Homage à Rimbaud. Partly to rub it in, but also because that’s what this piece of work really was, a homage to the boy poet’s visionary response to life. That’s what everything was that he did these days. They would be affronted by the sight of it. His offensive against their conformity. The banality of their souls. His repudiation of them and their academy of ideas. They would snort and ask each other, Who the devil does he think he is, giving his bloody nonsense a French title? He lifted the painting from the table and set it with its face to the wall. An instinct in him revolted against submitting himself to their approval. He would find another way. His own way. And now he had a plan. To become one of their anointed, you had first to be on your knees to them. Well, he would never go to his knees for anyone. It would be they on their knees before he was done with them.

  He picked up the roll of butcher’s paper and undid the string. He laid the sheets flat on the table, their cheesy pallor and faint odour of raw meat reminding him of his mother’s kitchen when she unpacked the shopping and he looked to see what she’d got for their dinner. He stood smoothing the sheets with the palms of his hands, feeling the slight undulations of the table top through them, the way a blind man might know his own work table by the intimacy of touch. Imagining himself to be the blind seer. That’s what he was. Being the voyant of Rimbaud’s youthful intoxications. Alone. Accountable to no one. Inside the fortress of himself. Where he would not be called upon to make common sense of his work. He was remembering riding down the Hume Highway on his bicycle when he was nineteen. Alone with the wind and the hum of his tyres. Sleeping by the roadside at night. It seemed to him now that he had ridden his bicycle the thousand miles to Sydney and back in a dream. His eyes closed. Seeing some other world. A beautiful solitary journey, it had been. And wasn’t he that same man today? To be alone dreaming his dreams. He had forgotten Edith.

  He was drawing quickly on the sheets of butcher’s paper. Freely wielding the narrow brush. He loaded the brush from the bowl of rich black ink, carelessly flicking spots and drips of ink about the place. Flicking some of it on purpose. On himself. To join the spots of blood. Scattering his seed. A warrior. Perhaps it was naked figures he was drawing. Something like that. It was too early to know what he was doing. He didn’t want to know. Wild sweeping lines of disrupted ink that had begun to suggest the outlines of human forms. Limbs and torsos confusingly disproportionate and summary. Perhaps tussling and in some kind of movement against each other. He couldn’t draw for nuts. He worked quickly, without hesitation. He could feel it in his balls. The drawing. Tight and hard and thick with intention. An aggression in him. Without stepping back to consider what he did. Without correcting his line. On the battleground of his own choosing. Making it.

  As he covered each sheet he slid it off the table to the floor and started on the next, not bothering about smearing the wet image of the discarded sheet. Did he think he could force a result? Did he imagine he could coerce the ink and the paper into revealing true art to his eye without troubling himself to search for some sort of order in what he did? Without taking care? Without paying his dues to the craft, like everyone else had to? Yes, he did. He was convinced of it. Fuck them and their painstaking fucking everlasting fucking drawing classes. Once that was established in your eye you would never rid yourself of it. You would belong to them and to their tradition for the rest of your days. Like the copperplate trap, he wasn’t falling into this one either. Trying to be like Leonardo! Bloody fools.

  Edith gave an excited yelp and held up her mother’s letter. ‘Guess what? Hilary Trafford at the Argus has invited me to submit some of my illustrations to her.’ She was looking at Pat working at his table, his figure moving against the light from the north-facing window. A slim man, his shoulders almost as narrow as a woman’s, and not tall, but perfectly made, his aura illuminated contre jour. How well Mr Sickert would have rendered him. She stepped across to him and shook the letter at him. ‘Did you hear what I said, darling? Money!’ Her voice had taken on something of the command of her mother’s voice whenever her mother wished not only to be heard but to be listened to by the men of her household. ‘Ten shillings for every illustration she takes. We’ll have some money of our own.’

  ‘You sound like your mother,’ he said, not pausing in the work. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ Sheet after sheet. Nothing to stop him. Travelling his wild ink trail. On the train. It was, he often observed to himself with a pleasurable detachment, as if some weirdo inside him believed the application of a consuming impatience to create would force paper and ink to yield their astonishing perfections to him. A weirdo. Yes. Himself. His other self. He wasn’t going to ask him to stop or to slow up. Without the liberty of untutored energy that weirdo’s life would not be worth living. Without his liberty, Pat knew he would drown in the sorrows of self-loathing. He had not been offered a choice. It had been born in him. To lay it down would be to lay himself down. Life was good only so long as the genie had his freedom. He had no idea what he could expect from his genie. And that was the way he wanted it to be. In the dark with the fear till the new light struck him. No guarantees. No commercial opportunities sidelining him.

  Edith was shouting at him that he was being unbending and too filled with pride for his own good. ‘There’s a limit!’ she shouted again, her voice rising, leaning to look into his face. ‘We need the money!’

  No doubt she was right and there was a limit. And wasn’t he intent on finding that limit? And then going beyond it? Wasn’t he already beyond it? Wasn’t that just what he was doing? Liberating himself from her limits. Not just being unbending. Unbending wasn’t it at all. Wasn’t he repudiating the confines of a dead tradition by the shortest cut? He had not reasoned his way out of it. He chanted Rimbaud loudly over the sound of her angry voice. ‘Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! The others advance. Tools, weapons … time! … Fire! Fire on me! Here! Or I surrender.—Cowards!—I’ll kill myself! I’ll throw myself …’ He couldn’t remember the next line. But if Rimbaud could do it, then so could he. They were both men. Both human beings. Both young. So why not? Who was to stop him? He had the energy.

  At the edge of his vision he was aware of Edith leaving the studio. The gentle loving part of him wanting to catch up with her and give her a cuddle and be nice to her and make things fine and glorious between them. But the weirdo wasn’t having any of that. The berserker Egil Skallagrimsson swept his brush across the large sheet of paper in which meat was supposed to have been wrapped by Mr Creedy, or by his assistant, his big dark-complexioned daughter with the eyes of black glass. Jet, wasn’t it, that he was thinking of? The black jewel of women’s mourning. So was it her figure he was after here? The round
ing of her ample thighs and arms, her weighty breasts? And here she was, found for a line, then lost again. A figure in the torment of lust. Elusive and not to be invoked by artifice or technique. She had smiled a smile of womanly welcome at him with those jet-black eyes of hers when he went into the shop. He had asked if she could please let him have some of her paper. Without a word, as if she had been expecting his request for years, as if it was her destiny to know his need, she turned her back and rolled up this generous bundle, her eyes catching at his in the mirror with the arch conspiracy of it, dimples in her elbows as well as in her cheeks, lifting her bare arm and tying the roll of paper with the twine her father used to tie the rolled roasts with, snapping it with an expert jerk of her chubby wrist, then turning back from the mirror and presenting him with the paper, her understanding of what she did swimming in the generous Gulf Stream of her gaze, her offering to the artist for the work he was to undertake. And would there be something else the artist might be wanting from her? Body and soul would it be that he wanted from her? Is that all then? He had tied the paper on the back of his bike and ridden home with his booty. And as he rode he daydreamed that big motherly girl waiting in her father’s shop all her life to render this service to him when he came by, knowing through some primitive instinct in the welcoming warmth of her bowels that he, the warrior artist and poet, would surely be coming one day, her destiny to become his accomplice. It was a nice little daydream that he played with as he pedalled hard up the hill, the chain creaking, the tyres spitting stones. He had no idea then what he would do with the daydream, but here it was. She was a fitting mistress for a warrior poet … Black ink staining the paper now instead of the carmine blood of the slaughtered sheep and cattle and the screaming pigs. She was his satanic apprentice. He didn’t know her name. He would not ask it of her next time he went into the shop. He might have called her his muse for this enterprise, but muse was a notion he had rejected along with all the other old nonsense from the Gallery School masters. Satanic apprentice had more energy in it. More possibility. More concealment and uncertainty. More brutality. What, after all, did he mean by it? He knew, and he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He was not after understanding. He just wanted to enjoy the feel of it on him. In his sweat. In his balls. That was the way he liked it. Fuck their understandings. Perhaps over time the richness of its meanings would unfold to him: his satanic mistress. He liked the sound of it, carrying her generous body with it. That was enough. The glow of possibility in her black eyes. It was a story. A poem. Her plump fingers gripping his cock. That would do. Who gave a fuck what it meant? It was private. It didn’t have to have a meaning. It was just for himself. It was a story that hadn’t been told yet. They wouldn’t be hearing about it. His own private truth in it. They wouldn’t be getting the chance to tell him it wasn’t any good and would have to be improved. He was done with them. They’d hear from him when he was ready for them to hear from him.

  He had forgotten for a minute or two why he was doing this. His idea for getting away overseas. That was it. A folio of drawings of the butcher’s daughter, then, to impress the great man. It was a liberating discovery to know whose body it was he was drawing. A confirmation to know who the subject of all this was. The particularity of it giving the enterprise a new force of its own, as if it was coming from outside himself. From some authentic and mysterious source. The weirdo in touch with the ocean of the unconscious. Was that it? He had been sure he was drawing someone or other and was very glad to discover it was her. The big girl in the butcher’s shop. The need for such generous volumes of flesh was beginning to make sense to him. He would never have thought of it himself. She couldn’t have been much more than seventeen and already had a young child of her own. Her maternally noble manner, that she was surely not aware of. Just as statues are not aware of the thoughts they kindle in poets who stand and gaze at them in the moonlight. A young woman conceived by the generous hands of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and not simply the splendid daughter of Mr Creedy, the Ocean Grove butcher. A treasure waiting here for him. And him not knowing it till he had the idea of going in and asking for some paper. Our triumph must be our own secret. Triumph belongs to the interior life of the artist, not out in the street. Such things wither when exposed to the sceptical gaze of social realities. So it was for himself. All this, it was just for himself.

  Later, after he had sobered up a bit and he and Edith had made up, he told her his plan. When they had eaten their sardines on toast and Edith had gone to sleep, murmuring an apology to him for a last fishy burp (she had complained during their lovemaking about the distraction of the rats in the ceiling cantering back and forth above their heads. He told her the rats were having a polo match up there and made her laugh), he got up and went out to the studio and sat at his work table, the Tilley lamp humming to itself beside him, casting its trembling light against the walls. He bent and picked up the last sheet of butcher’s paper from the strewn collection of drawings on the floor, and underneath the generous buttocks of the butcher’s daughter he wrote the poem of his day:

  The Chinese masters of the brush

  Wrote their poems with the blood of horses.

  To dwell secretly in the solitude

  Of my convictions,

  What a state! What an achievement!

  To know there the triumph

  Of the old Wen-jen masters

  In the final flourish of my brush,

  My triumph secret, my brush loaded

  With the blood of horses.

  He didn’t read his poem but pushed it to one side and sat looking at nothing, dreaming of his audacious plan for the next day, the first day of the battle, the day his forces would engage in a frontal assault on the headquarters of the enemy. They would not be prepared for him. He was sure of that. He was wondrously tired and elated, a surge of oxygen in his blood and his brain—it was a state of meditative lust that required no immediate action from him. If he’d had a cigarette and a bottle of beer now he would have been in everyman’s heaven.

  4

  March 1991

  THAT’S WHERE I LEFT HIM, SITTING THERE SURROUNDED BY HIS drawings of the butcher’s voluptuous daughter. It was Arthur’s generosity that brought Pat Donlon into our lives the following day. Arthur’s innocent announcement to me over the telephone from his office that evening that he was bringing someone home for a meal. ‘I think he might interest you.’

  I’ve been ill. I collapsed. I shan’t bore you with it. It’s more than two months since I’ve had the energy or the courage to come near this. Writing their portraits exhausted me. I had no idea it would be such an ordeal, all that recollecting and imagining. He exhausted me. He drew me into himself again. I developed a terrible headache writing him. I was nearly blinded by the time I put the last word to him: heaven. Writing him brought him back. I sat here night after night at the kitchen table, writing him and cursing him and weeping for him and for myself. He was in me again. It was the heaven and hell of us all over. He and I. I hadn’t expected it, this terrible reanimation of memory. He drained me and I wonder if I’m going to have the strength to finish it. Writing her was so without conflict for me that I was off my guard when I began to work on him. But I soon discovered that dealing with my regrets had been a breeze compared to the exquisite agony of recalling the love and torment of my tortured life. While I wrote him Pat was with me day and night. I could get no rest from him. The truth, terrifying when you consider it, is that nothing is so forgotten it cannot be brought back to haunt us. In the deeps of memory it seems our past is never put to rest but lives on, preserved and catalogued according to a system unknown to us, every detail retrievable at an unbidden signal, ready to remind us that the comfortable autonomy of our consciousness is nothing but an ignorant illusion.

  The night after I began writing Pat’s portrait I was sitting on the toilet when I found myself suddenly remembering Anne Collins’ telephone call. There she was with her coolly dignified tones—a delay in thos
e days all the way from England, how many years ago is it?—telling me he had died the previous night with my name on his lips. He and I had been estranged for years at the time of his death. I was transported at once from the toilet seat and returned to that moment when I had stood in the bedroom here at Old Farm with the telephone in my hand, my gardening gloves held in my other hand, the French doors open to the lovely spring day and to my beloved garden, the smell of lemon blossom in the air, Anne Collins’ voice in my ear. A bee had come in with me and while I listened to Anne I watched it probe in turn each of the blue and citron blooms of an arrangement of fragrant Cupani sweet pea that I had placed on my dressing-table earlier in the day. It was all there, perfectly preserved for this moment, each bloom of that flower arrangement, the individual items on my dressing-table, the lemon-scented air. In the retrieved memory each detail was charged with meaning. I sat on the toilet, my knickers round my ankles, transported, sobbing to see once again that honeybee at its eternal labour. I had not known there was so much memory and so much weeping left in me. What have I done to open this door? Will I yet regret the day I dared look into the black doorway of my past? Pass through that door and re-enter those times.