by Alex Miller
His hair was without a curl, fine and pale and sitting flat to his skull. Whenever he had let it get a bit long it looked lank and wispy, framing his features with an unflattering weakness, especially around his eyes, which he was inclined to squint. He was squinting now thinking about it. His were not the glorious locks of a wild bohemian. He knew that. Edith was right, he looked more like an accountant. His mother had slicked a wayward forelock with her spit for him, ‘There!’, before sending him off to school with a quick peck on his cheek, which he had begun to close his eyes to and flinch from when he was seven or eight years of age. ‘Oh, you big man, you. Now get on with you!’ The minute he was out of her sight he wiped the kiss from his cheek with the back of his hand, not because he didn’t treasure his mother’s affections, but because he was afraid his friends would detect the cool imprint of his mother’s lips on his cheek if he didn’t wipe away the feel of it—it had a lovely private smell to it, sniffing the back of his hand, like nothing else, faint and delicate and suggesting her love for him, like the elusive scent of a wildflower on the breeze one spring day. The smell of his mother’s kiss was the smell of home and of love.
He carried the roll of drawings into the bedroom. Edith was sitting up reading her book, her green velour dressing-gown draped around the soft curve of her shoulders and her breasts, the green uplands of his beloved landscape. He smiled to see her. She was in her own quiet world of reading. He envied her the ability to be so content. He set the drawings down on the bed. ‘Is your tea not right?’
She put her finger on her place and leaned and looked into her cup. ‘I forgot it,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. Thank you, darling.’ She picked up the cup and took a sip of the tea. ‘I like it cold.’
He put on the old pair of paint-spattered trousers with the hole in the left knee and the frayed turn-ups. They smelled damply of the back of the cupboard. He was reminded of his early death. The trousers of a dead man. He had woken up with a headache and it hadn’t quite left him. It wasn’t much of a headache, but he worried about it. Surely it signified the onset of the disease that would carry him off before his next birthday? Rimbaud had quit writing his poetry when he was, what? Nineteen or twenty, wasn’t it? The deep malady of the body that will defeat a young man. The first sign, this throbbing of a piston in an unvisited chamber of his being, driving the engine of his demise. His premature death … It worried Pat a great deal. The notion that he was sure to die young. He often thought about it but was too superstitious ever to write about it or to speak of it to Edith. To express his fear (he feared) would be to give it encouragement, proffering to the dread of it a foothold in his reality, from where it would flourish, the roots of its being drawing sustenance from the roots of his own strength and sapping him. Hollowing a great space beneath him. Undermining him.
There were times when he was so besieged, so alone and vulnerable with the thought of this great echoing vault of nothingness beneath his life’s enterprise, that he completely seized up. In this state he could neither think nor do anything. A seizure of silent panic, it was. Gripping him. If he were ever to speak of these episodes to Edith he feared she would plead with him to submit to the discipline of the great tradition and be like all the others. Be like herself, following her beloved grandfather. She would ask him to retreat from his solitary enterprise and play it safe with the support of companions and fellow students. Everyone in the same boat. The comfort of it. But he would never do that. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know why this was so. Secretly he was proud that it was so and knew that his isolation was necessary to him. Knew he would either succeed on his own or would fail on his own. But he would not withdraw from his isolation and join the others. It was how he was. He couldn’t change and it was no good trying.
Often he was in such a hurry to get work done that the least interruption enraged him. He excused his rages. He understood the reason for them. There was so much he had to do. And there were days when his fear of premature death drained him. If he had a few bob he found someone to drink with. Something his father had warned him against. For there had been a run of the drink among the uncles of Wicklow, his father’s five brothers. It was not his rages but his drinking that shamed Pat.
He buttoned the fly of the smelly trousers and tied them at the waist with a length of Gerner’s pink baling twine then sat on the side of the bed and put his bare feet into the ancient pair of plimsolls. Their rubbery soles were colder than his feet and he gave a shiver. Both his little toes poked from holes in the sides of the plimsolls, the frayed edges of the material like lashes, his toes the eyes of crustaceans peeking nervously from their shells, knowing they were in for it any minute.
Edith leaned over the side of the bed and looked. ‘Your feet will get wet in those things. Hadn’t you better wear your boots? You’ll catch a chill.’
Her concern for him was like his mother’s concern for him. But it would not be a chill that would carry him off. He stood up for her inspection. ‘So what do you think? Am I shabby enough for him?’
‘You’re putting on a shirt, aren’t you?’
‘I will. Do I look that daft in these?’ He looked down at himself unhappily. To be dressed like this threatened to demoralise him. Disguising himself as a bohemian was surely as good as pretending to be one of them, wasn’t it? Being poor might be a man’s fate, but poverty was not to be mimicked, the disgrace not in poverty itself but in flaunting it in public, in becoming a whining beggar at the table of a rich man. ‘What choice do I have?’ he said, miserable suddenly with the prospect of the day ahead of him. ‘Can you think of something else I can do? I’d drop this in a bloody flash. You know that.’
‘Only what the others do,’ she said. She laid her book face down on the bed cover and held out her arms to him. ‘Come here! You’re not going to do that.’
‘Is it what you want me to do? Give in to them?’
‘No, darling, it’s not. I know you can’t do that. You are my untutored genius. It’s for that I love you most of all.’
He went to her and she took his hands and he leaned down and kissed her.
‘Do you remember the first day we met at the Gallery School?’ she said, looking up, her dark eyes shining with the memory. ‘We’d all caught the tram down to the Swanston Family after the class. You were standing next to me in the doorway looking out at the crowd in the laneway? Do you remember?’
He did remember. He had promised himself at the school that day, If she goes to the pub with the others then I’ll go too. And if she stays behind, I’ll stay behind. Their eyes had already met, but not their bodies. Never with other girls, but suddenly with this girl he had been too shy to speak. And then at the pub she came and stood beside him in the doorway to the lane. It was a narrow doorway and her shoulder touched his. Without a word she took his hand in hers. Just like that. As if she trusted her decision. It was a while after that they kissed. In the park he asked for her name. And she told him, I’m Edith Black. And he knew it should mean something to him.
She reminded him now, ‘You said, when we were in the park afterwards, it was a kind of warning to me and I knew it was a warning, I mean if I was thinking of going with you for good, as I was, you wanted to warn me not to expect anything. You said, and you were being very formal and there was a kind of anger in your tone as you said it. I was a little bit afraid of you. You said, You should know I’m never going to get a proper job and I’m never going to do the kind of art they teach at the Gallery School.’
‘You remember that?’ He was pleased.
‘Whenever I go past the park in the tram I think of you saying it. It thrilled me. I knew you were different to the others. I knew I’d go with you. Wherever you wanted me to go.’
‘It wasn’t my good looks you fell for, then?’ He laughed. He had forgotten to think about his headache and his fear of death. He sat on the side of the bed and took her hands in his lap. Her hands were soft and warm against the chill of his own hands, her fingers long and tapering.
Her book lying face down on the blanket, the author’s name on the cover in small black letters, Guy de Maupassant. The title in the same tone of red that reapers and binders were painted, Une vie. A life. A woman’s life, he supposed it was. Perhaps it was a premonition of the storm gathering in his head, but after they had made love two nights ago he had felt terribly alone suddenly and was unable to sleep. He asked her to read to him. He did not ask her to translate, but lay with his head against her bare shoulder, smelling her skin and listening to her reading the French the way he listened to music, his thoughts released from anxiety and free to wander. And after a while the agitation in his mind was soothed and he began to feel sleepy.
He turned to her now and bent to kiss her gently on her lovely lips. He smiled into her eyes. She was tearing up as he expected her to. ‘I didn’t think I had a hope with you. Then you took my hand. I’m not likely to forget it.’
He loved her gentle refinement, her calm, the feeling of abundant time she carried with her, the quiet certainty of her spirit. ‘We are opposites,’ he said. ‘You and I.’
‘That is what I fear sometimes.’
‘I wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t believe in me.’
‘I believe in you.’
‘What is it?’ He squeezed her hands. ‘Is something up? There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be home tonight and we can have a laugh about all this.’
In a voice of quiet tenderness, which was very nearly an admission of her greater fears for them, Edith told him her news. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’
6
July 1991
THERE WAS SNOW ON MOUNT DANDENONG TODAY. SUMMER IS JUST a memory. I hear my mother sigh and say, ‘How the years do fly away!’ I’ve begun to doubt it was Edith I saw. Is she alive or is she dead? It is a terrible anxiety out of which nightmares have begun to fashion themselves. Oh yes, the dire effects of imagination, our curse and our saving grace. There were half a dozen of us sitting round this kitchen table drinking wine and beer and smoking cigarettes and talking about art and life and flirting with each other one lovely summer afternoon, when someone—George Lane it was, the darkest and fiercest of the artists among us—said, ‘We would be better off without imagination.’ Poor George was drunk and had failed the previous evening to seduce beautiful teasing Alice Meadows, so he would most certainly have been better off without imagination that day.
Although Freddy was already drinking far too heavily at the time and was probably drunker than George, he was still a practising psychoanalyst and felt compelled to say at once, ‘Our imagination is the way to ourselves, George.’ Easy for him, you might say, not being a tormented artist like George. I saw the look George gave Freddy, the flicker of detestation in his black eyes. Freddy probably saw it too but he persisted. ‘All mental illness, all human cruelty, is a failure to heed the prompts of the imagination, George.’ I hear Freddy’s voice now ringing out in this kitchen, and the sound of his laughter. Already the seeds of despair were in him, bathed by a constant stream of alcohol. Freddy loved vast generalisations of this kind, but on that occasion he was also turning the blade in George’s sensitive liver. Freddy’s pronouncements were often dismissed by more temperate people than himself as merely an excessive bravura of style. But I thought there was nearly always a kernel of wisdom embedded in these baroque gestures of his. Tragically, for he had a good mind, Freddy acquired no insight into the maladies of his own soul and became a hopeless alcoholic, impotent and unable to control the functioning of his bowels. He shot himself when he was forty-three. I kept his note for years. He had been off the grog for a year at the time of his suicide. I live without my first love. Her name is Wine. It is no longer possible, darling Aught, to persist with this torment. By the time you receive this I shall be dead. I have borrowed Ray’s little .22 and a bullet. The dear man believes I have a rat in the wainscot to dispose of.
Could it have been her daughter I saw? Edith gave birth in 1939 and her daughter would be fifty-two today. Some people age quickly. Alice was such a one, our beautiful Alice, a rapid ager. She, poor girl, developed anorexia and looked sixty before she was forty. Perhaps she would not have become ill with that dreadful self-denying disease if she had encouraged George that day and had lain down for him with her dress up and abandoned herself to the pleasures and torments of sex. I sometimes wonder if we weren’t a sick generation, the whole lot of us. Denying this and denying that, for no better reason than our own narrow prejudices about life and art—our beliefs, as we called them. Prejudices, in fact, which we mistook for passions and vision. Our view of life and art required a narrowing of everything to the single dimension of our own orthodoxies. No one got a look in with us if they weren’t strictly of our persuasion. Now they’re all dead does it matter to anyone what we believed?
I’ll wait on the bench outside Woolies next time I get my drugs. If Edith went to my chemist once, she will go again. They give us discount membership cards these days to make sure we’re loyal to them.
Adeli brings the smell of California with her and is at the forefront of all the latest fads. I put non-organic honey in her herbal tea the other day and watched her to see if she would notice. But she sipped and smiled and babbled on, heedless of what was going down her pristine throat. Her virginal, unsullied throat, I’ll bet. She is not the frequently orgasming nurse. It was Adeli who brought the herbal tea. Not I. I drink Bushells tea for preference. Strong, black and without sweeteners. When she first told me her name, I said, ‘Adelie penguin.’ I suppose everyone thinks of the penguin when she tells them her name and would like to say so. It was bullying of me to actually say it. She offered to stay overnight. To keep me company, she said. She doesn’t seem to notice the stench of this place or that I dislike people. I asked her the other day to go and fetch me a packet of cigarettes from the corner shop that is clinging to its final threads of subsistence half a mile from here. The Vietnamese woman who runs the shop looks eighty but is really only fifty. There’s rapid ageing for you. It can be done, it seems, if the circumstances are favourable to it. She has five daughters. Her husband died last year. She keeps her shop open all night in competition with the 7-Eleven. She and her daughters gaze out of a darkness of deep fatigue. ‘Get me some cigarettes,’ I said to Adeli. ‘I don’t care what sort they are.’ She went very still and silent and examined her podgy hands in her lap. Then, in a small voice—I might have asked her to fetch the shotgun and a box of shells—she said, ‘Cigarettes, Mrs Laing?’
I said, ‘You should take them up. You might lose some of that fat. She persists in addressing me as Mrs Laing and I find I’ve grown to rather like it. She is not an Australian, after all, so does it matter?
Don’t say I didn’t warn you that you probably wouldn’t like me. I don’t like myself much.
‘The spelling is different,’ she said, and sipped her herbal tea. ‘It is Adeli without an e.’
She bounds in through the flywire on to the veranda, bringing something or other that I’m supposed to like but which really it is she who likes. It was those cheap chocolates the first time (the purple ribbon is still holding my sandal together) then the South American hot chocolate. Now it is herbal tea or exotic Asian fruit from the Prahran Market. It was bright orange dragon fruits last week. I threw the ridiculous things onto the back lawn. The white cockatoos tore them into vivid shreds. When the cockatoos had done and had flown away screeching, it looked as if small animals had been dismembered on the lawn.
Adeli’s summer linen has been exchanged long ago for cashmere twin sets, rose pink and apple blossom. They make her bust look a size fifty. She smiles and pulls out a chair and arranges herself at the table, undoes her buttons and puts her notebook and her pen (a woodgrain-finished fountain pen, for God’s sake) on the table in front of her and crosses her fat thighs and folds her hands in her fat lap. Ready! I tell her nothing. She continues to disapprove of my cigarettes, closing her eyes and wrinkling up her nose whenever I light one. What am I supposed t
o do? Australia has become a nation of wowsers. I said to her, ‘Tell me there is something better for me at my age than the pleasure of smoking.’ Bullying fat Adeli entertains me. I can’t help it. I almost like her but I don’t have to be liked in return. I don’t need to be liked, it is she who needs to be liked (as all Americans do). Anyway, she’s an American. Naturalised naturally. But still American. Still twanging her California up her nose. She’ll never get past that here. It isn’t possible for an American to become an Australian, no matter how long they stay. We believe it to be our birthright as Australians to bully solitary Americans who venture into our midst. That big bright red overcoat and those red patent-leather shoes. Who does she think she’s kidding? And purple stockings the other day. I’ve lived too long. But Adeli is not the only aesthetic scourge in my life. The woman next door jogs in her lycra while pushing their ugly baby in a three-wheeled thing and leading that vicious dog on a lead. She almost knocked me down the other afternoon. I was bending to fasten the front gate when she brushed past me as if I wasn’t there. Loathing rises in my gorge at the sight of her silver and black body-hugging suit flashing along our road. I do not wish to admit that such creatures as she have come into existence in my country. My own species is endangered by them.
I have handed over the dining room to Adeli. She is in her seventh heaven. She’s in there now, sorting things. I asked her to keep the door closed, then rattled the key after she’d gone in. The door flew open. ‘Please don’t lock me in, Mrs Laing!’ I smiled and left her to it. I’m like a child sometimes. I was tempted to tiptoe back and turn the key in the lock. Fierce little visions sweep into my mind like evil fairies. The mummified corpse of Adeli among the Laing papers when the dining room is opened forty years from now. Absurd, but stinging me with a guilty delight I do nothing to resist. Time is nothing. The silent vengeance of the aged. If only I could be a winged goddess!