by Alex Miller
He addressed the ladder in his usual dry, detached and ironic tone, as if he himself were not implicated in the childish follies of humanity but stood at a distinguished remove from the rest of us. ‘So what’s our Mrs Laing think she’s been doing with herself up there in the loft all night, then?’ His tone did not express interest in an answer to this question. And when the ladder did not answer him he raised it effortlessly and set it firmly against the lip of the loft and climbed up. As he climbed he counted the rungs aloud, and might have been counting out change in one-dollar coins to a customer.
I was so glad to see him it took me a moment or two to register the sharpness of his derision.
‘Eleven,’ he announced to his world when he reached the top of the ladder. He stepped onto the floor of the loft as if he did it every morning. He did not look at me but stood with his back to the vertiginous fall, his hands on his hips, surveying the dim interior. His reason for climbing the ladder had, it seemed, not been to rescue me. There was a job to be done and he would do it. In my state of weird exhaustion, dream and reality playing with my exhausted mind, the cockatoos bansheeing hysterically a few feet from us, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Stony had reached into the rubbish and pulled out Pat’s roll of drawings; ‘Out you come, you little buggers! They’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
We searched among the jumble of discarded things, disclosing the layers of the years. Most of it was junk—transistors, toasters, old blankets, yellowed pillows, a rat’s nest or two. I wondered which of us had thought to store bundles of newspapers tied neatly with butcher’s twine? His drawings were not there. I felt betrayed and was convinced someone had visited the loft and stolen them. Something else was there, however. Something I had never expected to see again. Stony handed me Edith’s modest oil of their white cottage and the embroidered field, as if he knew this was what I had really been looking for—had I only known it myself. I had long ago forgotten that Edith insisted Arthur take the picture with him the day of our abortive picnic.
Propped there on the floor of the loft with my back supported by the bundles of newspapers, my purple shanks stuck out in front of me, I held Edith’s picture across my legs and looked at it. I saw at once that for a young woman of twenty-one it represented an extraordinary level of skill. It is on the kitchen table in front of me now, a pile of books behind it, facing the veranda so that it catches the light. She solved her problem of the oxalis with simplicity and wit, the golden yellow of that wild weed an ironic reference to Monet’s cardinal fields of immemorial poppies. Everything I see in this good light confirms my first impression that Edith’s embroidered hill is a first-rate work. To have been guilty of stealing her husband and destroying her little family was crime enough, but it is clear to me now that I also destroyed her chance of establishing herself as one of the very few truly gifted Australian women artists of her time. And for this surely there can be no redemption. If her embroidered field is any guide, had she persisted with her art Edith Black may well have been the foremost among the women painters of her time.
I had never really looked at her painting before. Had I done so I would not have been capable of ‘seeing’ it. I was so one-eyed in my belief in the rightness—indeed, the righteousness—of modernism’s cause that any artist who worked in the conservative tradition as Edith did was automatically excluded from my serious attention. The least suggestion in those days that I might be mistaken in my attitude earned my disdain and derision. It was war. A moral war. And like all wars of belief, especially those between siblings, it was cruel and unjust. Edith’s painting had belonged for me in the camp of the enemy. Seeing her picture for the first time now I was reminded of the career of the great European, Georges Braque, his development during my own lifetime from a gifted young follower of Cézanne to a leader in the world of post-war art, and how all through that development Braque retained his deep attachment to and affection for the traditions of his craft. So why not Australia’s Edith Black?
Why was I so implacable in those days? If only I’d had enough wisdom to be Edith’s champion as well as Pat’s, how different this story might have been.
Sitting there in the bleak morning light of the loft, the sharp edge of her picture’s stretcher biting into my shrivelled thighs, I felt old and weak. The true enormity of the damage I had done to that woman was at last clear to me. How she must hate me still. How for her I must be the cruellest of enemies and the most unjust of women. Autumn Laing, the ogre shadowing her life. To this day, to hear my name spoken in her presence must be to feel a chill in her soul. So why did she not fight me for him? Why did she not fight me for herself? Why did she give in so easily? If only she had not accepted defeat so meekly but had fought for what was rightfully hers, I might yet find some justification for my own implacable attitude then. But her modest submission denies me even this. In this story I am cast as the dragon and Edith is the helpless maiden chained to the rock. So where was her Saint George? Might her champion yet appear on the stage, lance at the ready to dispose of the evil dragon?
Arthur was never fierce. Not in anything he ever did or said. He was never scornful of the work of others. All work for him was worthy trial. Arthur was much wiser then than I, and gentler. Nor was he afraid to recognise in Edith’s painting of the embroidered field a splendidly soulful example of her own period and tradition. I remember now laughing at him and calling him a sook for his timidity. He smiled and did not resent my stupidity, or even point it out to me. I had quickly dismissed Edith and her picture from my mind and forgotten the exchange with Arthur. I never gave any of it another thought until this moment in the loft.
Stony stood over me, waiting, I supposed, for me to begin the perilous descent. I looked up at him. ‘I believe it is in negotiating the descent from the summit,’ I said, ‘that most deaths occur among those who climb mountains.’ I didn’t expect a response from him and wasn’t disappointed when I received none.
Edith didn’t fight me because she had neither Pat’s brutal confidence nor my arrogant certainties. She was overwhelmed by us. Edith didn’t have the capacity to push herself forward and persist in her ways without the support of her loved ones. She was a modest young woman. But clearly she was also a young woman of great talent. Edith’s sensitive spirit was broken by what Pat and I did to her. She loved Pat and believed in him. When he praised her painting that day after slaughtering the horse she was encouraged because she knew he had given her his honest opinion. But to go on believing in herself day after day she needed his belief to be reliably there for her all the time.
Pat needed no such support. He thrived on the most savage criticism of his work and was energised by mockery. The more his peers laughed at him the more certain he was that he was doing the right thing.
I see it’s not raining. If Adeli turns up later I’ll get her to drive me down the street. I’ll sit on the bench outside Woolies and keep a lookout. My dread is I’ll be keeping an appointment with a ghost. Is it in my fate ever to meet Edith again? It is the question that is in my mind when I wake at two in the morning and lie in my bed and stare at the bedroom ceiling until I can stand it no longer and I get up, light a cigarette and go out onto the back veranda to sit with the sounds of the past and watch the white mist rising along the dark line of the river, and wait for the vixen’s bark. But no one wants to go to their death despising themselves, do they? And so I leave the veranda and come into the kitchen and rattle the Rayburn into life and I take up my pen and go on with the story. Without Him in whom I do not believe, to write our story is the only hope of redemption left to me.
7
The big picture
IT WAS STILL RAINING HEAVILY WHEN PAT TURNED OFF THE FOOT-path and ducked in under the shelter of the awning. He had been travelling for hours since leaving Ocean Grove that morning, Edith sitting up in their warm bed with her cold cup of tea and her book beside her. She blew him a last kiss as he turned at the door, dressed in his raggedy get-up. And just as the scre
en door banged behind him he thought he heard her call to him, ‘I love you, darling.’ It sent a lonely pang through him thinking of it now. He hadn’t called back to her.
He was a man masquerading as someone he wasn’t for purely mercenary reasons and the lie of it was digging a hole in his confidence. He stood under the shelter of the canopy and looked up. A high green copper dome, it was, like a parachute frozen in its graceful descent to earth, rainwater jetting from its corners in imitation of a fountain. On occasions such as this one, momentous occasions, when he was determined to challenge his fate, Pat knew himself to be obedient to an impulse that had its source in a deeper and more obdurate place than mere common sense. It was a kind of precious intuition, this irrational compulsion to act in a certain way no matter what, and had been there since he was a lad dreaming of going to Ireland one day and meeting a true gipsy. It was himself, that’s how he thought of it. So despite feeling a bit of a fool for being dressed up the way he was, he wouldn’t be turning back now.
It was a grand and imposing building. Where the money was, you could see that. He took off his hat and knocked the water from it against his leg. He’d had nothing to eat since the slice of toast for breakfast and his stomach was letting him know it. He was facing a pair of heavy bronze and glass doors. In the eight bevelled glass panels eight identical shabby men were reflected back at him, each of them clutching a bundle under his arm, the shoulders of his jacket dark with rain. It was the anonymous figure of an unfortunate stranger. A beggar off the street. One of the hopeless tribe he had passed a few minutes ago slouching against the wall in the undercroft of the railway station.
Supposing his dad’s tram was passing at the moment he had been waiting to cross Swanston Street just now? The idea that his dad might have seen him looking like this sent a chill into Pat’s empty stomach.
The bell on the town hall clock was striking the hour. He listened for the next stroke. He wasn’t in a hurry to confront them. He was regretting not having had the courage to come as himself. It was two o’clock. Would the old bugger be back from his lunch yet? To have his appeal turned down by these people as his honest self would have been no disgrace at all, but to be refused by them unshaved and got up in this ridiculous outfit was going to be a humiliation. If his dad had seen him waiting to cross the street, his dad would tell his mother but would never mention it to him. And he would never be able to ask his dad if he had seen him or not. He wasn’t worried about what his mother would think. She would dismiss the idea of it. ‘Pat’s in Ocean Grove with Edith, you ninny.’ But his dad would brood on it, figuring from it something strange and troubling to himself. The brief sighting of his son from the driver’s cabin of his tram an apparition, was it? The thing he most dreaded to see? His boy a derelict waiting at the kerb to cross the road? Had he made it up to frighten himself? It would be a deep puzzle for his dad to unknot in the solitude of his sleepless nights. No, his dad would not forget it, but would tease it this way and that until he was hopelessly ravelled up in the tangle of his own fears for his boy.
A man came out of the doors, shattering the reflections, and Pat stepped to one side to let him pass. His feet were cold and wet in the sodden plimsolls. These people were not going to believe him. If only Edith had been firmer with him. Why hadn’t she made a serious attempt to talk him out of it? She gave in to him too easily. She wasn’t timid exactly, that wasn’t it, but she never insisted on having her own way. She never forced an issue in her own favour. He wished she would be more determined sometimes, instead of always letting him win. Was he too hard on her?
He took hold of the handle of the door and pulled it open. The pointed tip of the handle—an intricately cast bronze representation of the armhold of an ancient warrior’s shield—snagged the buckle on the belt of Edith’s old mackintosh, in which he had wrapped his drawings, and he was hauled back on his heels. He unhooked the buckle and stepped through the doorway.
He was in a vast echoing area of shiny marble surfaces under the soaring vault of a high-domed ceiling. An enormous painting in a black metallic frame was hanging on the back wall in the magnificent importance of its own specially mounted spotlights. The painting was at least fifteen feet high by ten feet wide. A young woman was sitting at a desk underneath it. She was watching him. But it was the painting, not the young woman, that had Pat’s attention. It was obvious what it was. A grand masterwork by one of the great European moderns. But which great European modern? Pat’s heart contracted. A confident arrangement of sweeping geometric forms in tones of carbon blue and sea grey. What seemed to be represented were gigantic human forms, naked and leaping about in some energetic activity, dancing or fucking or fighting. Or all three. The painting was brazenly self-assured. It had no doubt about itself. Pat had seen nothing like it before outside the pages of glossy art magazines. He felt it like a slap in the face from a man. Not from a woman. A slap from a woman would have thrilled him. This humiliated him. It embarrassed him. He had imagined himself to be daring to dream of something not yet dreamed by other artists. But even in his grandest dreams for his work there was nothing as forceful in its authority as this picture. It was a thing that believed in itself and in nothing else. It did not ask to be understood but proclaimed its own reality, standing in a place of its own, beyond the understanding of the onlooker, indeed contemptuous of the onlooker. It was a work of art. He understood that. That is what it was. The first grand work of art he had ever seen in real life.
For the first time in his grown-up life Pat was afraid of art. He was afraid of his lack of the extremes of energy and imagination that would be required from him if he were ever to conceive something as bold and successful as this picture. It made everything he had dreamed of doing seem trivial and of no consequence, and forced on him the admission that what he had hoped to achieve one day had already been far surpassed by the artist who had painted this picture. Beside this his own works were nothing more than the casual and inconsequential gestures of a feeble intention.
People were coming through the doors behind him and stepping around him. One of them brushed against him. He was embarrassed by the mediocrity of his own ambition. He would never be able to compete with this kind of thing. There was a deep panic rising in him; he would have to make a new beginning. He would have to abandon the abstract and find something else. But what? He couldn’t join Edith in her gentle pursuit of the old traditions. He would rather do nothing than do that. He would rather die now and be done with it than do that. Was he an artist at all? he asked himself. Or was he a small man playing at being an artist? A charlatan? In fact, wasn’t he that very worst thing, that most feared and despised thing of all, a self-important dilettante?
He reached into the side pocket of his jacket and took out the slim green packet of five cigarettes he had bought from the machine at the station. The thin paper of the packet was crumpled, the damp cylinders of the cigarettes on the point of disintegrating. He smoothed a cigarette and put it between his lips. His hand trembled as he held the unsteady flame of the match to the tip of the cigarette. He closed his eyes and drew the smoke into his lungs, trying to stem the panic.
He stood in the silence of the suddenly empty foyer dragging on his cigarette and asking himself with disbelief how he could have mistaken his puny ambition for something grand. The drawings under his arm shamed him. And that pathetic boot polish and cardboard thing he had left against the wall of the studio. The truth was, he had done nothing worth a second look. It had all been empty bravado and arrogance with him, pretending to be the young Rimbaud. The thought of creeping back shamefaced and defeated to the crowd at the Gallery School made him feel sick. After his contempt for the meekly obedient students, what a perfect destruction it would be for him if he were to turn up at their life classes now—lifeless classes, he had called them. The most arrogant and least able drawing student among them. Leonardo’s arsehole, that’s who he’d be. His mimicry of Rimbaud’s youthful revolt was a joke. Before he was twenty-one Rim
baud had abandoned poetry and had never touched it again as long as he lived. So was that what he must do now? Abandon art? Get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life like his dad? Was that the truth of it? Was the dream over? Was he finished?
He walked across the foyer towards the back wall. He felt weak in the stomach. He was going to be a father in seven months’ time. He would have to earn a living for the two of them. And there would be more kids to follow this one. Without greeting the young woman he went behind her desk and looked for a signature on the painting. He turned to her. ‘It’s not signed!’ The sheer effrontery of the absent signature. The intolerable confirmation of the artist’s disdain for his own fame and the onlooker’s opinion. It was exactly the standard he had dreamed for himself, to be above critical opinion, to stand alone in a place beyond concern with public approbation. Just to be great. To be himself. Alone and out of their reach.
‘Isn’t it?’ the young woman said.
He looked at her. ‘So who’s the artist?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Why are you calling me sir?’ He suspected her of derision.
She said coolly, ‘I’m instructed to call everyone sir who comes in … sir.’
‘Women too?’
‘Are you an artist yourself, sir?’
‘Do I look like an artist?’
‘I’ve learned in this job you can’t tell what people are by the way they look. Except lawyers.’ She laughed, showing her teeth. ‘Lawyers always look just like lawyers.’
He noticed the way her two front teeth overlapped, like small white pincers. He had an urge to reach into her mouth and prise her teeth apart with his fingers.
‘But you’re not a lawyer,’ she said.