by Alex Miller
There was the sound of Freddy striking a match to light his cigarette, then he said, in his soft and lightly teasing voice, glancing at me with a smile in his eyes, ‘Do you know what we’ve been arranging here this afternoon, Pat?’
Pat was at the draining board struggling to release two dead chooks from the bag. He didn’t turn around. ‘No, Freddy, I don’t.’ From his tone it was clear he meant, ‘and I don’t bloody care either’.
Freddy smiled and smoked his cigarette and let the silence go on a while, then he said, ‘We’ve decided to form a new group. We’re calling it the new art society.’ Freddy waited again but Pat went on gutting the first of the chooks. Freddy said, ‘We’d like you to join us.’
‘I don’t join groups,’ Pat said.
And so Freddy and the rest of us and our grand idea of a new art society were dismissed by Pat as of no consequence. I laughed and told them all it was time for them to go home.
Freddy was not a dandy, but he liked to dress well. That day he was wearing a lovely Donegal tweed suit which he’d had made for him when he was in Dublin the previous year. I loved Freddy. We entertained each other. There was never anything sexual between us but we teased each other and pretended to flirt. I don’t know how much he’d had to drink that afternoon, it was impossible to tell with Freddy, but quite a bit I’m sure. He got up and went over to the sink and he put his arm around Pat’s shoulders and kissed him firmly on the cheek. Freddy was not homosexual but knew Pat to be intensely sensitive to any suggestion of homosexuality. Pat was caught off guard and reeled away from Freddy, wiping at his cheek with the back of his hand and looking so fierce I thought he was going to strike Freddy. Freddy stood his ground within striking distance and smiled and puffed on his cigarette, as if he were inviting Pat to strike him if he dared, or perhaps to return the kiss. But Pat just swore and laughed unhappily. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, Freddy.’
When Freddy left that afternoon it seemed to all of us that he had won a point over Pat. A physical, manly point. Something to do with good manners, not courage. And we all valued good manners more than we valued courage. I got up from the table and took Freddy’s arm and walked him to the front door. Neither of us mentioned Pat. As he was leaving, Freddy turned to me and said, ‘The first meeting of our new art society ended rather well, don’t you think?’ He got in his car and waved to me and drove off. The far-side rear wheel of his car rode up over the bricks with which Stony had edged the circle of roses in the centre of the drive. The bricks are still wonky there and I still feel a pang of sympathy for Freddy’s tortured loneliness when I think of that day. Freddy was not a solitary man, but he was a very lonely one. I stood at the door and watched him turn into the road, the rain falling steadily, the light fading rapidly. Our road was quiet in those days. Today it is often a drag-racing strip for the hoons in their yellow and red Holdens. In those days we had a few neighbours who still made the fortnightly trip into Melbourne along our road in their horse and buggy.
As I stood at the front door in the pleasant chill of the wet evening, the road empty, the sound of Freddy’s motor car a distant murmur, I was troubled by the unrealistic demands Pat was starting to make on me. I knew myself to be at the beginning of something that was going to leave us all changed forever. Whichever way it went, for good or for ill.
I thought of myself standing at the rails of the Cooee at Port Melbourne with my mother when we were setting off to visit her relatives in England and to tour Europe together. It was 1925 and I was nineteen. On the boat to England I began a period of aggressive and exaggerated sexual behaviour that was to cost me dearly. My first lover was a steward not much older than myself. We made love in his cabin. I imagined I was a free woman. The thrill of concealing our dangerous liaison from my mother was delicious and terrifying. I thought myself launched on a new life. I believed our escapade was a perfect secret between my lover and myself, but it was probably known to the entire crew, and must have been at least guessed at by some of the passengers. Apart from my mother and me there were only twelve other passengers. My father’s pastoral company owned a controlling interest in the Cooee, which carried a regular cargo of wheat and wool to England. He had given the captain strict instructions to see that we were provided with the highest level of care and attention on the voyage.
In England, and during our tour of the continent, I had many other lovers. I was indiscriminate and wild and so emotionally distracted by the hectic frenzy of my imagination that my mother took me to a psychiatrist while we were in Rome. I fell pregnant to him on my second visit. He procured an abortion for me. I have never been sure if my mother knew of it or not. It was never mentioned between us. And she didn’t press me for an explanation of the mysterious ailment which kept me in bed for a few days. She and I lived like enemies together in strange pensions and hotels, I seeking out new lovers everywhere we went, the pair of us tormented by the frantic hysteria of our extraordinary uncertainty. If we touched each other by accident one or other of us would flare into an outburst of violent anger and unfounded accusations. The slightest irritation was a cause for murderous eruptions of emotion. I accused her and my father of driving Uncle Mathew to his death. He had killed himself only a year earlier and my grief was still keen. Mathew had been the only one among my family ever to have shown me any understanding. I did not think of it at the time, but perhaps my sexual revolt was a response to my regret that I had denied Mathew that last time in the garden at Elsinore when I was seventeen (I nearly wrote, in the garden of Eden).
Without the sustaining presence of my father’s authority or the familiarity of home, neither my mother nor I was emotionally mature enough or sufficiently sophisticated to impose order on our wandering lives. We were in a state of nervous panic most of the time and too aimless and too ignorant and uncaring of Europe’s treasures to recognise their interest for us. The tour was a disaster. There were times when we might have died on the streets of some strange city and never been heard of again. Whenever my mother tried to talk to me I sought escape from her in hysterical outbursts. In Venice I threatened to throw myself from the window of our apartment into the green waters of the canal beneath our windows. I was serious. I longed to enter the green tide below our windows and find oblivion there. If my mother had not wrestled me to the floor, the pair of us shrieking and struggling, I might have ended my life that day. My mother was frightened of me. I was frightened of myself. We were both bewildered and slightly insane. On the boat home I became depressed and refused to leave my cabin. I was bewildered and confused. I had become a stranger to my mother and to myself.
It was less than a year after we got home to Melbourne that I met Arthur. I recognised in him at once a safe place in which to shelter from myself. My mother was relieved beyond words to be rid of the burden of me and agreed to the marriage at once. I was unwell after our marriage and eventually a specialist in Collins Street discovered I had undiagnosed gonorrhoea. Arthur, a virgin when we met, was shaken by this, but he was heroic and didn’t falter in his support of me. I had to have a hysterectomy. Facing up to the fact that we would never be able to have a family of our own was a terrible blow to us both, but it also drew us closer together. We shared a sense of refuge with each other from our detested families and our misfortunes. I’m sure that being unable to have children was partly the reason why, soon after my operation, we began to rely for a sense of structure in our lives on a salon of creative friends.
With these friends I was at last beginning to use the ability Uncle Mathew had recognised in me; an ability to acknowledge the gifts of others. More important than my cherished ‘gift’, I was a good cook and Arthur a generous judge of wine. So our little band of friends could always be confident of a good feed and something decent to drink whenever they came to see us, or stayed with us when they were short of funds. When I left home I vowed never to have a cook or a maid in our house but to do it all myself. I even went to cooking classes. My mother’s total ineptitude around the house a
nd especially in the kitchen appalled me. I learned nothing useful from her and was determined not to be like her. Arthur and I cared for our inner circle of creative friends as we would have cared for our family. Our chosen few had only to swear to a passion for defining modernism and upholding its principles for us to make them welcome and feed them. Arthur and I wished to be a source of influence among young artists and to counter the forces of an unsympathetic conservatism which was represented for us not only by the art of the establishment but by the values of the families we had each rejected, I with a greater vehemence than Arthur.
I had not forgotten the child of the Italian psychiatrist. If that child had lived—and it lives still in my imagination—it would be sixty-five. It remains my only child. What sort of a mother would I have been to it? What sort of a mother was I to it? The price I paid for my wild sexual liberty as a young woman was the heaviest a woman can pay. Motherhood. I swore when I married Arthur I would never be unfaithful to him. And until Pat I had kept my word.
After Freddy left that day, I stood at the front door for a long time, watching the rain falling and listening to the sounds of our familiar silence. I was terrified by my feelings for Pat Donlon. Arthur and I had been married almost twelve years by then. That I might be unfaithful to him was inconceivable to me. And yet I feared it would be inevitable with Pat. I had believed I was safe from myself with Arthur. Safe forever. Why had I become obsessed with this narrow-shouldered Irish workman? There were frightening moments when it made no sense to me and seemed to threaten me with a return to the madness of my European tour with my mother. I felt threatened that day as I stood at the front door after Freddy had gone. I stepped out into the rain and lifted my face to the heavy grey clouds and closed my eyes and let the lovely chill drops run down my hot cheeks. And I prayed to Him in whom I most devoutly do not believe to help me find my way through the chaos of emotions that were destroying my peace of mind.
My prayers of unbelief amused Freddy and, I think, interested him also. He said to me once, ‘You live as if there is a God, though you know there is none.’ I called him my Hebraic sage. He was my closest confidant and best friend for many years. I could and did tell him everything. Things I could not comfortably tell Arthur I freely confided to Freddy. There was no sense of betrayal in these confidences. They were the exchanges of friendship, Arthur understood the quality of that friendship and was never jealous of Freddy. Freddy loved gossip, but I knew my confidences were kept by him in sacred trust. My poor dear Freddy. How wonderful it would be if only he were here with me now; how we would make light of all this together. Or would the burdens of old age have soured his humour? Men fail at old age more readily than we do. His suicide was quite unlike Barnaby’s. Freddy’s suicide was a deeply self-conscious act of courage in the face of his total physical breakdown. Barnaby, the silly man, had no such reason to kill himself. Suicide with Barnaby was selfish and unnecessary. He just couldn’t be bothered with the tedium of going on living and getting older. His death made suicide something ordinary, like shopping for the necessities. A few bobs’ worth of nothing remarkable from the supermarket. Since the age of eighteen I had thought of Uncle Mathew killing himself in that village in Ireland, alone and lost, and his death had seemed to me something deeply sad and romantic. Barnaby made suicide banal. But perhaps Mathew’s death, too, had been merely sordid. At eighty-five (or whatever I am), human behaviour is no longer a source of romantic illusions.
Adeli encourages me to write this memoir, if memoir it is. Which is hardly surprising. After all, she’s not exactly a disinterested observer of the outcome of my defiance of Andrew. I haven’t let her see any of it. But I dare say she is confident of having the opportunity to study every word of it after I am gone. Providing the trustees accept her bona fides, she will be in charge of my record when I am dead. I’ve no doubt she’ll shove most of this into her book, and much of it without acknowledgment or editing. There is something ruthless about her kindly caring, slightly soppy manner that I find intriguing and a little repulsive. She is not simply the eager fat sook from California I took her for when she first came here. She is still from California, of course, and she is still fat, but these facts no longer carry quite the same imperative for me to bully her they once carried. I’ve not asked to read anything she has written about me, and she has not offered to show it to me. I don’t want to see it. I have no wish to authorise her project with my approval. Historians know the official biography is worthless. Let her struggle for her own truths. I won’t influence her with mine. Our truths are written in our hearts and are not a currency of exchange.
She has set herself up very comfortably in the guest bedroom, which is conveniently next door to the dining room, where the elaborate sources for her scholarship are piled on the big dining table, and under the table and on the long sideboard. And even on the mantelpiece. And there are cartons stuffed full of papers in the corners of the room. If she lives to be ninety she will never get through our archive. Sooner or later she will need research assistants. I’ve not been into the dining room to check on her progress in case she mistakes it for interest. And anyway, there was always something discouraging about that room and there is no reason why that discouragement should not still be there. Perhaps it is that the furniture reminds me of my mother’s dining room. The furniture came, in fact, from Arthur’s father’s gloomy old mansion in Tasmania (that land of melancholy and despair, haunted by the ghosts of human suffering and cruelty. I visited it once and never returned. I shivered all the while I was there).
The east side of the house has become Adeli’s end (why did I nearly write Edith’s end?). Unfortunately she and I have to share the only bathroom. She always seems to be in there, the door bolted, just when I need to pee. I stand outside and bang on the door with Barnaby’s shillelagh and yell at her, but she does not reply. Silence. An hour later I will be sitting at the table in the kitchen, my bladder on fire, when I hear the cistern flush. By the time I’ve hobbled along the passage to the bathroom she is back in the dining room. She sprays the air in the bathroom with some kind of chemical deodorant that makes me sneeze. I tell her I would rather smell her animal stink than this stuff, but she goes on spraying it freely. I might as well tell Sherry not to spray. I like to sit on the pan and smoke a quiet cigarette. Beside the sink there is a little old four-paned window with a view of Idaho, Arthur’s favourite species rose. It has climbed into the topmost branches of the red gum, where it flowers, its face turned to the sun. Such blooms among the gum leaves.
Adeli looks after me without complaint. But then looking after me is taking care of her own welfare, isn’t it? She is a good cook and the three of us eat well and the house no longer stinks of cabbages and my farts. I have insisted, however, that we maintain our order for cabbages with Stony. ‘It was Stony,’ I reminded Adeli when she objected to keeping our order in, ‘who saved my life. You should be grateful to him.’ Adeli does something with the cabbages but I have not enquired what it is. They arrive then disappear. So long as Stony gets paid for them I don’t care what the fate of the cabbages is.
A week ago Adeli found Pat’s drawings among her treasured rubbish in the dining room. She carried them in to me triumphantly. I was in bed, lying on my back gazing at Edith’s painting, daydreaming about the two of them down there in that isolated cottage at Ocean Grove with hardly enough money to get by on. But happy, young, in love and full of hopes—just before he stepped into our picture and brought their brief happiness to an end.
Adeli came into the bedroom carrying the bundle, her round cheeks glowing with a sheen of sweat (as usual). ‘I’ve found them!’ she announced, as if she had found the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre. They were no longer in a roll. She set them down on my bed covers and leaned over to spread them, her great melons diving about like bloated water bombs. Sherry came into my room behind Adeli and sat on the Anatolian kilim Arthur gave me for my fiftieth birthday. He watched Adeli adoringly. When I was first confined to
bed after the loft escapade Adeli cancelled my regular monthly order with Stony for the hundredweight bag of cat biscuits and began buying fine cuts of meat from the local butcher. Sherry was now eating from a blue and white Spode bowl such exotic combinations as devilled calf’s liver with chopped smoked bacon, or smoked salmon and sardines. I stared hard at Sherry over the side of the bed, but he would not meet my eyes.
‘Unfaithful swine!’ I said. He drew himself up disdainfully and closed his beautiful green eyes. He was looking five years younger, his long fur glossy, his tail curled regally around him like an ermine cape. His colouring was perfectly set off by the rose madder and fig green of the rug. He was no longer my friend. The one betrayed is always hurt. Age is no defence against the pain of betrayal.
I looked up at Adeli. ‘Well done,’ I said, hoping she heard the sarcasm in my tone. ‘They had to be somewhere.’ She stood looking down at me, a hard gleam in her eyes. I realised with a little shock that she believed she had bested me in some way.
‘They are drawings of my anatomy, Mrs Laing,’ she said, scarcely emphasising the my. But it was there.
Perhaps I was feeling oversensitive after Sherry’s betrayal, but it seemed to me that what Adeli really said was, ‘They are not drawings of your anatomy, you skinny wraith.’ As if she had seen in these hurried early sketches of his the expression of Pat’s ideal of the feminine form. Indeed her own form. Did she believe she had discovered a shared bond with him that he and I had not shared? The possibility affronted and angered me. What nonsense. Pat had no ideal of the feminine form. She has understood nothing.