Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  Before I get to Pat and the day he and I first met I should tell you that I haven’t seen Edith again. I’ve watched for her. Adeli drove me down the street in her pale blue Toyota and waited, watching me through the windscreen while I sat outside Woolworths and watched for Edith. But like snakes, we never see people when we are alert for their presence. It’s only when we cease to look for them that they’re suddenly there in our path, their gaze on us, giving us a start—reminding us that we are helpless in the face of our fate. We will either meet a certain person or we will miss them by half an hour, or by minutes. Wasn’t that the fate of Burke and Wills, to miss their rescue party by half an hour after months of struggling towards a rendezvous with them? This is all I mean by fate: the critical moment. The kind of seemingly random event that determines life and death and which remains in the collective mind of the nation forever after. The plane one was late for which crashed, all passengers and crew killed. That kind of thing. The fate of Burke and Wills. We all know what that is. Their tragedy. Which would have been a triumph if they’d arrived at the rendezvous half an hour earlier.

  I should tell you, or you will never know it, this is all being handwritten by me at the kitchen table. The sun comes in here during the afternoons in autumn. It’s a lovely room. Homely. It’s where we all gathered and is much nicer than the dining room, which is gloomy and damp and smells of mice even more strongly than it smells of cabbages in here. Nothing good ever happened in the dining room. In the library, yes; lots of good things and lots of difficult things happened in the library. The library at Old Farm is a room of the sublime and the tragic. The library was for winter evenings and was the place where a few of us, three or four, sat and squatted around the open fire. I loved and feared library evenings. I seldom go in there these days. The library witnessed my hysterical outbursts more often even than our bedroom. The library, unlike the dining room, was a room in which we found our reality. There was no escape in the library.

  I’m writing in school exercise books that Stony brings me when he brings the wood for the Rayburn. They are secondhand, kids’ names and form numbers on them, most of the pages unused. He gets them from a school bin for recyclables. I write with a pen. A fine felt-tip. And no rewriting. You’re getting this just as it comes out, like toothpaste from the tube. I’m with Christina Stead on this. Rewriting is erasure. Like repainting. The thing gets muddy. Pat never repainted. He never refined a line. All Pat’s works are first drafts. Paintings, drawings (as you already know) and poems. Painting is simple, he said. The painter is simple. There was never any reconsideration with him. If it wasn’t right the first time it was never going to be right. He wasn’t striving like the rest of them to get to something fine and finished. He wasn’t striving at all. Striving was not what Pat did. It was what everyone else did, including Edith. Pat was heeding his imagination without questioning the direction it offered him, following the prompts. That was his god. His line untutored. He loved that. And when I say he dashed things off I am not disparaging what he was doing. That is how he worked: dashing things off, to catch the fierce and true while it shone for him. To hold it on the page or on the piece of cardboard, or the square of masonite (his preferred backing after Sofia Station). Pat Donlon wasn’t Alberto Giacometti, throttled by the need for the perfectly realised image. Constipated to the point of being unable to cross the road unless he could step on the same cracks he stepped on last time he crossed the road (or was it to avoid stepping on them?).

  I introduced Pat to the work of Christina Stead by telling him she too never reworked her stuff. He loved that. He read her three books. Reread them avidly (rereading was permitted) until he was familiar with them, like someone who listens to Bach’s Preludes and Fugues time and again because they hear in the music’s deceptive simplicities everything they need to hear. For a while Pat neglected his beloved Rimbaud for Stead. He was even thinking at one time of doing a series from The Man Who Loved Children, but he never did. That’s how Pat lived his life. If it shone for him he took it. And when it no longer shone for him he did not try to repair it or to develop it or to shine it up again but abandoned it and never looked back at it. Not till the very end. Then he made the mistake of looking back, just once. It was the same with his friendships and his lovers. When they ceased to shine for him they were discarded. Pat never nurtured anyone and he didn’t expect nurture from anyone. Sentiments that were formed into a harsh poetry in which sentiment had no place. He made great art and strewed suffering and disillusion in his wake. In this he was like his heroes of the sagas. Cruel. There were those who never recovered from their encounter with him. And those who never understood him. And perhaps my deepest and most hidden motive in writing this is not to deal with my guilt about the wrong I did to Edith but to discover if I am one of the ones who never recovered from him. The permanently damaged. Am I?

  Pat always said that the stuff we erase with our rewriting and repainting is more revealing of our truth than the stuff we overlay it with, our second and third thoughts. Our unconscious motive in rewriting and repainting, he claimed, is always to conceal ourselves. The unbidden truth that stares at us, ugly and blemished. So we erase and rework in the name of art, in the name of refinement and perfection. And we do this not to reveal the reality of the thing, but to distract ourselves from the problems of depicting its reality. Art is the expert lie, he said. It was one of Pat’s favourite provocations at the table. He wasn’t much of a talker but whenever the conversation began to bore him he would come out with something like that. Art distracts us from reality. That’s what he said. People thought he was being provocative, but he meant it. He believed it.

  From the moment I opened the first of these exercise books, here at the kitchen table, and put my fine black pen to paper and wrote This is where it began fifty-three years ago, I promised myself I would write those very things I felt most strongly prompted to leave out. Erase nothing, I said to myself. Dear God in Heaven, let Edith live! Let me see her once again and look into her eyes and know she lives. Let me keep the illusion of my purpose. This is not my prayer. It is the prayer my mother would have said had she been in my position. Dear God in Heaven; this invocation so often prefacing her statements is on my lips now.

  Pat made his way to my darling Arthur by a roundabout route the day after the horse slaughtering. It was only by chance that Arthur was still in his office and had not already set off for the station by the time Pat called on him. Usually he was out of there as soon as he could decently manage it. So their meeting, the meeting that changed all our lives, was the opposite of Burke and Wills missing their rendezvous with the support party. The amazing chance of it all. So I shall attempt to follow Pat’s tracks that day from the cottage at Ocean Grove to Arthur’s office in Collins Street. Only one thing, one small decision, one trivial incident, need have been a little different during those hours and we would not have met. Whither then our fates?

  The meeting between the two men in my life to whom my soul will remain in thrall to my last breath—there can be no more important moment for me. I dread to approach it. But I need to approach it more than I need do anything else in this remnant of living that is left to me.

  Sometimes I pray despite myself. Pray even though I don’t believe in Him. To whom, then, do I address my prayers?

  Your Honour, I ask no more than to find the courage to tell his story and mine truthfully and in my own words. For this, imagination will be required. It is not fiction and truth that oppose each other. Fiction is the landscape beyond reality and has its own truth, the truth of our intimate lives. The place of empathy.

  5

  Edith’s announcement

  PAT WAS STANDING AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW FOR THE LIGHT. HE was holding up Edith’s silver-mounted hand mirror, tilting his chin to examine himself. The glitter of his unshaved jaw in the chilly morning. His pale eyes looking down his nose at himself, a touch of dismay in his expression. It’s true, he was thinking, I’m not a serious-looking person
. That other man inside him was rehearsing those insecurities of his that never left him free of doubt about the outcome of any project he set himself, hearing the doom of his dreams always in the voices of the bosses, hating himself for hating them for being born to what they were. The thought of appealing to one of Edith’s mob for help was oppressing him. The anxiety he had of them since his childhood, and from which he never liberated himself as a grown man. But who frees himself from childhood’s pains and dilemmas?

  Regarding himself that morning in Edith’s lovely little hand mirror, Pat was theatricalising the scene, Sir Malcolm’s reception of him later that day, an imaginary conversation that went something along the following lines:

  SECRETARY: There’s a little Irish larrikin out here insisting on seeing you, sir.

  SIR MALCOLM: Is that how you would describe him?

  SECRETARY: He says he’s an artist.

  SIR MALCOLM: A bullshit artist, is it?

  SECRETARY: More than likely, sir. He says he’s been recommended to you by the director of the Gallery School.

  SIR MALCOLM: Bernie Threshold? I’ll be damned.

  SECRETARY: So he says.

  SIR MALCOLM: Well, you’d better send him in then. We can’t go upsetting one of Bernie’s little angels, can we?

  Pat fingered his bristles and turned to look out the window, something catching his eye. It was the first of the sun lighting the highest point of Gerner’s hill, an emerald gold where he’d spilled the guts of that poor old nag yesterday. There was every reason to be anxious. Getting to where the money was had always been the hardest thing for the Donlons. The most unnatural thing, he might more truly say. He and his mum and dad and the uncles and aunts. So far he’d stayed honest, and what good had it done him? The best-paying job he’d ever had was serving pies and sausage rolls to the late-night drunks at Bill Tetley’s stall in Swanston Street. Keeping himself in tucker and saving the best hours of his days for painting and writing. He had seen men get so confused by the need for money they had robbed their mates. And in David O’Grady’s case, his own mother. Poor bastard. There had been no need to step under a train because of the shame of that. A terrible mistake. David O’Grady. He had not been a bad man in himself. Not in his heart. Dreadful scenes of destitution and violent events along the way of keeping yourself sane and on some kind of track that would get you somewhere. He had gone to school with Dave. It had not been easy avoiding the traps. And then not bending your knee to the bastards.

  ‘You don’t get money,’ his dad tearfully told his solemnly assembled family that Saturday afternoon after he’d done his wages on a certainty at the Caulfield track. ‘You have to already have it.’ And he was right. The way of the world, they called it. It was the kind of family gathering that stuck in your memory, that one. But his mother wasn’t crying. Your thoughts take you back to those memories every time you’re faced with a crisis to do with not having any money. And wasn’t there a kind of fatalism in what his dad said that had an irresistible throb of the truth in it for them? Hadn’t the Donlons always repelled money? Wasn’t that the plain fact of what his dad meant? Wasn’t it something in the family make-up? An ancestral lack of merit, or something like that? If there is ancestral nobility and merit then there is surely a lack of it too. His own lot. There hadn’t been a single accomplished man or woman among them. Not one for all those six generations of trying their luck in Australia, the land of opportunity. A bunch of no-hopers. The Donlons and the Egans too, on his mother’s side; the little Egans of Ballyragget. As far back as anyone could go. The ten bob from Oscar Gerner was a miserable little miracle and Pat was ashamed to think he had waved it triumphantly in Edith’s face yesterday afternoon. His confidence fled now at the thought of himself doing that. Could he seriously hope to be the exception in his family? After umpteen generations of nothing much, could he really expect to shine among the gifted men of privilege of his own generation? Wasn’t he just another good-for-nothing Donlon? For God’s sake, waving a miserable ten-shilling note in his wife’s face!

  He looked at the mirror in his hand and turned it over, not wanting to catch sight of the self-loathing in his eyes. Her initials were engraved on the back, ERB, the capitals elegantly entwined within an oval cartouche of grapevines. The middle letter was the initial of her grandmother’s maiden name—the Ritchies of Melrose—as if Edith were the daughter of a noble Scottish household and this was their coat of arms. A solemn assurance of her legitimate accession to worthiness, this mirror. He was in his underpants and singlet. He curled his toes, the lino chilly against his bare feet. Rain was coming down now and the light was gone, a shower invading from the ocean. A drift of low cloud wrapping the hill like a skull and killing the light. The rain a sudden engine on the tin roof. He had hoped it was going to be fine. Living here at the bottom edge of the continent was almost like being out in the Great Southern Ocean itself, squalls coming up from the emptiness out there, then gone again just as suddenly, leaving you wet and surprised in a tranquil field of sunlight if you were lucky. The mood of the weather here was not to be predicted. It was one of the delights of the place, the unpredictability of moods. As if you weren’t expected to be settled and complacent if you lived at the bottom of the world, looking out at the vast ocean on which no man had ever made his dwelling place or left his mark. Oscar Gerner would be over there in his hovel with his dogs, grinning out his kitchen window like something out of Dickens, watching his grass grow. For Gerner, the landowner and man of substance, and none of it earned but every bit of it inherited from his immigrant grandfather, it was raining money. His dad was right. You either had it or you didn’t have it. Gerner’s pile under his mattress, no doubt, if a man could coax a way past those dogs. The old bugger had only to sit there in his wheelchair to be making pounds and shillings by the hour with this lovely rain on his clover.

  ‘Mary Mother of God,’ Pat said. (It was the only blasphemy his mother ever permitted herself.) ‘There’s nothing I hate so much as having to leave the work to make money.’ Every day was a day for painting with him and any day lost to painting was a day lost to himself. The thought of losing a day was putting him in a bad mood.

  If it had not been for their dire need of some cash, nothing would have convinced him to set out on this desperate caper this morning. He’d be down there in the village buying tobacco and papers and a bottle of beer at the pub with the ten bob instead of wasting the best part of it getting himself into Melbourne and back. It was just the weather today for stoking the wood stove and staying indoors, and giving himself up to painting and reading, and maybe writing another poem—if one happened to come his way, and he had the feeling it might have, if only he’d had a moment to himself. He loved days like this, grey and cold and isolating. He and Edith snugged away down here cosily in this little cottage at the bottom of the world, getting on with their work in the quiet of their own time. He was going to have to wrap the roll of drawings in something or the absorbent paper would disintegrate in the wet. He’d better get on with it, or the day would slip away and his resolve with it.

  He held up her mirror and smirked at himself. There! It wasn’t such a bad picture, was it? He could see the fine hairs up the fellow’s nostrils. They flickered palely as he breathed in and out. Little golden hairs, they were, and surely rather nice for nose hairs. He had always kept a neat appearance and until today had almost never missed having a shave in the mornings. When he’d told her his plan last night over their sardines on toast and a cup of tea, Edith said, ‘If you’re going to stand in front of a man like Sir Malcolm and have any chance of convincing him you’re worth his money then you’re going to have to do something about your appearance.’ She laughed at him. ‘You look more like an accountant than a bohemian. Appearances are everything with these people. I know them. They’re my people. If you look as if you’re starving for your art you might have a show of convincing them you’re the real thing.’

  She didn’t see how it was going to work, this ab
surd charade he was proposing, and she told him so. And mightn’t it even be illegal? ‘They don’t part with their cash that easily. That’s why they’ve got so much of it.’

  He set her mirror down on the sink (where it became an oval of grey sky) and went out to the studio and collected the drawings from the floor. He shuffled them together into a neat pile on the table, standing a moment considering whether to put the drawing with the poem on top, where it would be the first to be seen. He put it under the others, where it belonged—under Mr Creedy’s daughter’s great swaggering bottom. If he’d been at all interested in depicting the realities of the girl’s anatomy he might have asked her to pose naked for him. But it was something in himself he was after, not another picture of a girl’s bare bum.

  He felt uncomfortable with the idea of making himself up to look like your typical art student, unshaved and his clothes unpressed. It wasn’t him. ‘We might be poor,’ his mother said to him time and again, slapping at the back of his jacket with the flat of her hand before he went out, ‘but we’ll keep that to ourselves.’ The only times he ever saw his father unshaved was on Sunday mornings. His dad sat in the front room reading the newspaper by the light from the window, in his braces, his collar off and his boots not shined. But he never went into the street looking like that. Not even just to go next door for a yarn with Don Foley. Pat had always worn his hair short and neatly parted on the left side. Looking in the bathroom mirror over the sink at home, his head at an angle to concentrate, his tongue between his teeth, drawing the comb over his scalp from back to front to get the white line of demarcation clean and straight, like his dad’s. When he thought about it, it seemed a funny thing to be doing, but he did it all the same, like everything else he did. Wanting to be the man his dad expected him to be. Even when he was little they didn’t hold hands, he and his dad, but walked down the street side by side, going for a swim on Saturday at the sea baths with the other men from the tram depot. None of the others taking their boys with them. They had always been mates, he and his dad, from the beginning.