Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  ‘So you like our Wyndham Lewis?’ she said. ‘Sir Malcolm will be delighted to hear your opinion of it. Most of his friends hate it and don’t make any bones about telling him so. I don’t like it much myself.’

  Wyndham Lewis. So that’s who it is. But it didn’t matter now. He was no longer pointing in that direction. Was he pointing in any direction? The painting in the foyer was the blank wall where the dead end of his mistaken journey into abstraction had come to a halt.

  Miss Barquist’s features settled into a thoughtful alertness suddenly, as if a sombre thought had stalked across her view of things. The look in her eyes revealed to Pat a corner of the depths of fortitude that must enable Sir Malcolm to rely on this woman in all kinds of stressful weather. ‘We’ll go in when you’ve finished your tea,’ she said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  But there was. He felt it in her now. An impatience to get on with it. He was hoping his nerves weren’t going to get the better of him. Why couldn’t Sir Malcolm be this woman? My God, life would be so much easier if they were all homely women with big tits instead of old men with heavy eyebrows and thick moustaches. ‘So he will see me then?’ he said. He knew he sounded like a boy. If only he were more measured and steady, more a man of the world in his style, a man certain of his direction. To be sure of his own worth, like the portraits in the foyer. How was it done? It was going to be hard to make any sort of real substance out of his claims for himself in this place. He could see that.

  ‘Of course he’ll see you, dear. Sir Malcolm loves meeting young artists.’

  He set the cup and saucer on the edge of her desk and stood. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was just what I needed.’

  She struggled to her feet, lifting the load she carried with her everywhere. Fancy having those great things on your chest all day.

  He had the sudden childhood feeling of being called in from the waiting room to see the dentist, gripping his mother’s hand as if the demons were going to rip her from his grasp before they got stuck into him with their instruments of torment.

  Without knocking or any other to-do, Miss Barquist opened the panelled door behind her desk and stepped half into the room beyond. Holding the door open and standing to one side, she announced into the room, ‘Here’s the artist, Sir Malcolm.’ She put her hand to Pat’s shoulder and urged him forward. ‘Go on in, Mr Donlon. Sir Malcolm doesn’t bite at this time of day.’

  Pat stepped into the room. The door closed behind him with a snick of the latch. It wasn’t a weasel who came forward to meet him but another big Scot, like Edith’s brothers, over six feet tall with a great round head like a bullock set squarely on broad shoulders above the solid carriage of a deep chest. Pat was the weasel himself. Sir Malcolm’s hair was dark with grey at the edges and parted flat down the left side, slicked neatly into place with a dab of cream just the way Pat usually wore his own hair, just a light sheen to it. His eyes were dark brown and sharply focused, as if he were aiming a weapon, or was looking for something he wasn’t sure of, something he hoped or expected to see but feared he might not recognise when he saw it. He was not exactly frowning, but was straining after this something, an interrogation in his carriage and his features. A big question in the whole set of the man. He was not handsome but was a physically strong-looking man, upright and sound, a year or two beyond his fiftieth birthday. He was dressed in a dark three-piece suit and a striped tie—no tie pin. As he extended his hand the white cuff of his shirt came out of his jacket sleeve a good four inches or more, to permit the sparkle of a gold cufflink. The back of his hand and the backs of his fingers were covered with a pelt of bristly black hairs. And if it was a smile he wore on his face it could also have been an expression less welcoming, needing only a fine adjustment to sail out into cold evasion, or even a direct rebuff. Pat could see his likeness done by Longstaff, fitting and appropriately stern-faced, framed in gilt and hanging in the reception area alongside his brothers in the money and the power of things. The chairman of the board. Someone to be taken seriously. There was no doubt about it.

  Pat took his hand. ‘How do you do, sir.’ The hand was large and cool and dry, the grip firm and encompassing, and those dark brown eyes looking out from under the shrubbery of his heavy brows, probing for that something he was afraid might elude him, the little extra thing that would slip past him if he didn’t remain alert. The telephone rang. Sir Malcolm withdrew his hand and excused himself. He stepped to his desk and picked up the telephone. His manner to his caller was calm and courteous but it was clear he was not pleased.

  Pat placed his bundle and his hat on the floor beside a chair and looked around the room. It was panelled in the same manner as the reception area. Through the window behind Sir Malcolm’s vast desk, over beyond the railway yards, the white tower of Government House thrust up through the green canopy of elms in the park on the other side of the river, the Governor’s imperial yellow ensign stretching out in the breeze—look at me! Look at me!

  Pat turned back to the room. Not one of the half-dozen paintings on the walls was as large or as imposing as the one in the foyer downstairs, but like that painting these too were examples of the work of British and European modernists. There was something familiar about each of them, but Pat could not have named the artists with any confidence. He hoped he was not going to be tested. The great European modernists and the less than great. It made his stomach ache to see them. A geometric group of shapes occupying multiple overlapping perspectives at the centre of one canvas might have been a Braque. He could take a punt on that one, but his judgment had no certainty in it and the painting could as easily have been the work of a follower—someone like himself, trying to catch up. He had seen the work of none of these painters in real life and had acquired no eye for what might be authentic among them. In their presence he was aware of his provincialism and the vastness of his ignorance.

  On a low coffee table by the chair, where he had put down his bundle and hat, recent copies of Apollo and the Burlington Magazine and one or two other expensive art journals whose titles were not familiar to him were neatly displayed. No doubt artfully arranged by the hands of Miss Agatha Barquist. A woman you might easily underestimate.

  He was in a place where an interest in art was supported by a great deal of money. He made a new decision. It was a simple enough decision, and not so different from the audacity of the original one made on an impulse as he rode his bicycle to Mr Creedy’s butcher’s shop yesterday morning (was it only yesterday morning?). It was a decision that had a less audacious feel to it now that he stood in the heart of the citadel. Sir Malcolm, after all, talking on the telephone a few feet from him and looking out calmly towards the river and the tower with the flag waving from its pole, was just like any other man, and at worst could decline a modest call on his bounty from an aspiring young Australian artist. Sorry, son, there’s nothing I can do for you. Followed by a smile and handshake of farewell. There was nothing to be lost here.

  Sir Malcolm was off the phone. He waved at the chairs that stood on either side of the coffee table and came around his desk. They sat facing each other across Apollo and the Burlington Magazine, the newspaper tycoon in his suit and the would-be artist in his mock rags. Neither spoke. Pat looked at the picture of a pale Chinese celadon vase on the cover of Apollo. He raised his eyes and met Sir Malcolm’s steady scrutiny. Pat cleared his throat. Was Sir Malcolm waiting for him to get to the point? No doubt the chairman was used to men who knew their own minds and spoke their minds freely.

  Pat said, ‘I came to see you, sir, to ask you to grant me one of your bursaries.’ There, it was done. Not so difficult. Simple really. Just out with it. What was the problem with that? Would anyone else have had the cheek to do it? The unimaginable hurdle cleared at a single bound. Pat smiled. Sir Malcolm’s expression did not change. There was no inner response to Pat’s smile. A little flutter arose in Pat’s stomach and he would have liked to light a cigarette. He noticed that a fly had got into the office and
was buzzing around the back of Sir Malcolm’s head. He watched it settle on the shiny nap of Sir Malcolm’s hair. Sir Malcolm moved his head and the fly took off, then landed on the shoulder of his suit and began cleaning its legs.

  Oblivious to the fly busying itself on his shoulder, Sir Malcolm regarded Pat steadily from under the dense hedgerow of his eyebrows, like a sniper gazing out from the concealment of his hide. He had only to pull the trigger and this irritating young man would be blown away. Pat began to doubt the wisdom of having come so abruptly to the point. Might not this hurry to talk about money have seemed to the great man to be a display of bad manners? Wasn’t he accustomed to evasion and delicacy and even to charm, flattery and diplomacy from the numerous mendicants who came to call on him? Maybe Sir Malcolm even felt that his dignity and intelligence were belittled by this crude frontal attack, reducing a meeting whose potential pleasures might have involved a discussion of the higher values of art to the question of a small amount of cash. Pat was wishing he had waited, had left the issue of a bursary to find its own way into the conversation.

  ‘So you’re an admirer of Wyndham Lewis?’ Sir Malcolm said. ‘That makes you a rare bird in these parts.’ Sir Malcolm crossed his legs. He glanced down at his crossed legs, as if the manoeuvre had taken him by surprise, his legs having assumed the initiative without consulting him. Although his observation to Pat had been delivered in the tone of a question, Sir Malcolm went on speaking. ‘He’s the best of the British modernists. If it was up to me and Guy, Wyndham Lewis and his mates would be hanging in that bloody great mausoleum up the road they call the National Gallery, instead of that brown muck those bloody tonalists call art.’ He regarded Pat with narrowed eyes. Something had stirred his emotions. ‘The place is being run by fools. Do you and your fellow students know that, Mr Donlon?’ He shut his mouth firmly on this question and waited to hear from Pat.

  ‘Many of us do,’ Pat said. ‘Yes.’ This was not a lie. Didn’t he despise the values taught at the Gallery School? And hadn’t he rejected them, just as his hero, Rimbaud, would have done? It was sad to think of it all now. That episode of empty bravado. But it was all he had to draw on. Instead of telling Sir Malcolm this he said, ‘We have to do our own art. We can’t just follow the British and the Europeans.’

  ‘And is that what you’re doing? Your own art?’ The question was bluntly put, Sir Malcolm’s cold rebuff waiting in the wings for its cue. ‘Can you artists ignore the great art of Europe and Britain without paying the price of provincialism and condemning yourselves to obscurity? Hmm? Eh?’ He drew in a rapid gasp of air. ‘So where have you seen Wyndham Lewis before today?’

  ‘In reproductions only, sir,’ Pat said. He gestured at the journals on the table. ‘In magazines. I didn’t recognise him. You don’t see the hand of the artist in those glossy little pictures. You get no idea of the grandeur of their work. There was definitely something familiar about it. It stopped me dead when I came through the front door. But I couldn’t have told you who the artist was. Not an Australian, for sure. I could see that.’

  ‘Why not an Australian, Mr Donlon? Why so sure not an Australian? Miss Barquist told me you recognised it as Lewis’s work at once. Aren’t we as good as them? Can’t Australians do it, Mr Donlon? Is that your opinion?’

  ‘She was mistaken, sir. It’s not her fault. I was impressed with it. I didn’t recognise it. More impressed than I can tell you, but I didn’t know who’d painted it. There aren’t any Australians doing work as confident as that.’

  ‘You do know he gave up painting abstract pictures twenty years ago? He’s been doing very fine figurative work since then. That’s one of his early ones. A pre-war work. I was lucky to get it. It wasn’t for sale. Guy Cowper winkled it out of a private collection in London and we made them an offer. It’s only been hanging here a month. Guy’s a wonderful man. A great man. There’s no one else like him in Australia. You and your mates would have to know his critical writings in my paper?’

  ‘Yes, of course, everyone reads Guy Cowper’s reviews.’ Pat laughed. ‘The teachers at the Gallery School are scared of him.’

  ‘Do you think so? That’s not my impression. What a bunch of blundering idiots. You think he’s got them scared? Are they bright enough to know when they should be scared? And you and your fellows, do you agree with what Guy has to say? He’s the only man for that job. He’s lived in Paris and London. He knows everyone over there. If a picture comes into the market he knows exactly where it’s from and who owned it last and if it’s any good or a dud. He speaks three European languages. All fluently. If it were up to Guy and me, we’d have Georges Braque and Picasso and Lewis and his mates all over the walls up there at that tomb. I’ve been elected to the board, did you know that? We’re going to make a few changes up there.’

  ‘I heard something, I think, along those lines, sir.’ Pat wished he had kept in touch with things and hadn’t despised the idea of involvement.

  ‘You’re not familiar with the politics of art, Mr Donlon, I can see that.’

  ‘I just try to do my work, sir.’

  ‘If your business is going to be art, Mr Donlon, then my advice to you is to get involved in the politics of your business. And the sooner you do that the better for you. It’s in boardrooms, not in studios, where decisions about the reputations of fellows like yourself are made. You’re going to need a few mates on the right committees if your work is to be brought to the notice of the right people. Ignore the politics of your business, and the politics of your business will ignore you.’ He motioned briskly to the untidy bundle on the floor by Pat’s chair. ‘Is that your work?’

  ‘I brought along a few drawings.’

  ‘The mackintosh is a novel idea,’ Sir Malcolm said drily. ‘Miss Barquist said you were carrying a folio.’ He sighed heavily and stood up. Was he getting bored? ‘Put them on the desk. Let’s have a look at them.’ He stood back, watching Pat struggling to release his drawings from the clinging embrace of Edith’s damp old mac. Pat didn’t mind the smell of it. He was reminded of rainy days at home in St Kilda.

  Pat said, ‘I didn’t intend to be so blunt just now, sir. About the money, I mean. The bursary. But I need to get to Europe.’ He thought he’d have more chance of success if he mentioned the word Europe. The small black fly settled on the back of his hand then flew off towards the window, deciding it had had enough of the place. Pat freed one arm from his struggle with the mackintosh and waved at the pictures around the walls. ‘I need to see these first-hand. I need to find out what the rest of the world is doing before I can know what it is I have to do myself. To know where the gaps are, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘The gaps?’ Sir Malcolm said sharply, as if he questioned himself about cracks in the wall that needed attending to, or suspected a criticism of his collection. ‘What gaps are we talking about?’

  The drawings did not want to roll out flat but curled back on themselves—terrified of being exposed to the gaze of this great man with the eyebrows and the money. Pat was sorry he had mentioned the word money again. And gaps had been a mistake. Mentioning money a second time had doubled the clumsiness of mentioning it the first time. But how else, if he didn’t speak about it, was he supposed to get Sir Malcolm to speak about it?

  Sir Malcolm stepped up to the desk and held down two corners of the curling paper with the tips of his fingers. Big hands. Pat noticed his fingernails were pink and carefully manicured. They seemed too delicate to belong to his hairy fingers.

  ‘Thank you,’ Pat said. He held down the other two corners of the sheets himself, his shoulder touching Sir Malcolm’s shoulder then easing away. The two of them restraining a weakened patient on the operating table, ready to begin their dissection. A modern Anatomy Lesson. ‘The things that no one else is doing, I mean,’ Pat said, trying to explain his use of the word gaps. They stood looking down at the flowing bosom and oddly displaced swirl of hips of Mr Creedy’s buxom daughter. Pat could smell her sweet clear skin, intriguing
ly tainted with the sawdust and blood of the shop. He looked up at Sir Malcolm.

  But Sir Malcolm was not thinking of art. ‘I think you’ll generally find, Mr Donlon,’ he said, adopting the magisterial tone of an elder of the tribe, ‘that the things other people are not doing are things that are not worth doing. And that is why they are not doing them. Contrary to what you say, we must do the things that other people are doing. And we must take careful note of how they are doing them. Then we must strive to do them better.’ He drew breath and paused to scan each drawing before folding back the sheet and delivering it into Pat’s care, his head first on this side then on the other, repeating a small sound in his throat, keeping his lips closed and giving a bit of a nod of his head. The sound in his throat underwent a number of minor variations with each drawing, as if he were trying out a new flute, a slight modulation of tone or decrease of intensity, tuning his reactions. Pat paid close attention to these sounds, but if they implied an expression of interest, that expression did not reach a level where it might have been taken by him for enthusiasm. When Sir Malcolm had got to the last drawing, the one of Mr Creedy’s daughter’s buttocks, he paused a little longer, reading the poem. ‘So you’re a poet too, Mr Donlon,’ he said. And only then did he look directly at Pat. ‘Are you sure art’s your vocation?’

  ‘I’m either an artist or I’m nothing,’ Pat said. He realised how hopeless about it all he had sounded. And wasn’t there also a note of impatience and anger in there too? If serious men such as Sir Malcolm were to have any confidence in him he would have to find a way of concealing the rawness of his emotions and tempering his private truths. He was not very good at playing this game. He was aware, suddenly, that the interview was over. He had failed Sir Malcolm McFarlane’s inquisition. For that was what it had been. A final mistake had been to include his poem, which had only provided Sir Malcolm with a distraction from art on which to close their meeting.