by Alex Miller
So, has the biographer begun to compete with her subject for ownership of her subject’s story? Is she to read her own destiny in mine, displacing me little by little and inserting herself where I rightfully belong? I nearly lost my life searching for those drawings, but once they were found they held no interest for me. Adeli insisted on helping me to sit up so that I could look at them. She was right, those vast thighs and swirling buttocks were her own. I did not need to see her without her clothes to know this, any more than Pat had needed to see Mr Creedy’s daughter without her clothes to see in the eye of his imagination those trembling balloons of naked flesh.
I said, ‘I could do with some of that fat myself.’ But my irony was of no use to me. The fact is his drawings mean more to her than they do to me. The realisation drained me. I lay down and told her to take them away. ‘You’re interrupting me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I knew you’d want to see them.’
She waited but I said nothing. I felt as if it was all slipping away from me and I feared I might not have the power to hold it in place any longer. This, I mean. Everything. The hillside breaking from its ancient hold and easing down into the valley of its dissolution. Unstoppable. I felt the panic rising in my chest.
Adeli said, ‘I thought you were just resting.’
‘I am thinking,’ I cried out. ‘Do you know what that is?’
She collected the drawings and left, unabashed by my outburst. The last of those drawings, with the poem, the one that betrayed Pat to Sir Malcolm as neither quite artist nor quite poet, was not among them. I told her to close my door on her way out.
When she had gone I lay there for some time looking at Edith’s painting, seeing Pat down there in that little white cottage doing those drawings that evening, caught up in the energy of his big idea, putting together what he blithely called his folio to impress Sir Malcolm. His trek the following day culminating in the discouraging discovery of the Wyndham Lewis, painted well before he was even born, and finally his humiliating rejection by the critic Guy Cowper; ‘You are a charlatan.’ By the time he arrived at Arthur’s office Pat had run out of options, and his confidence in himself was shaken. He was, after all, a young man who had accomplished very little at that time. And even self-confidence as vaunting as his must have had its limits. When I met him later that evening I believe he was at his lowest point ever and was close to abandoning his hopes of becoming an artist. For the first time in his life, Pat knew himself to be without a way forward. He had set out that morning to take the citadel of the enemy by storm and by the end of the day had done little more than make a fool of himself. By the time I saw him he was demoralised, afraid that what lay ahead of him were the ties of fatherhood and a job at the tramway depot alongside his dad. It had been a long way down for him that day and I detected the fear and aggression in him when he walked into the library with Arthur.
In the first few minutes of meeting Pat I thought Arthur had made a dreadful mistake inviting such a person to our home. Old Farm was our haven. It was the temple of our beliefs and the base for our chosen group of like-minded artists and thinkers. Pat Donlon did not seem to me when I first saw him that evening to be the sort of person who would fit in with our friends or our aims, or who would even possess the grace to respect our hospitality. I was right about this, but not quite in the way I had imagined. My initial reaction was to be annoyed with Arthur. For when we are in doubt we blame our spouses. We all know that. It wasn’t until Pat vomited helplessly in the kitchen later that I saw how truly vulnerable he was and felt some sympathy for him, and even a desire to take care of him. Or at least to help him out for that moment. He was like a boy trying to be a man and I saw that he needed my help, not my disdain. And so my response, you will say, was to mother him. My unrewarded instinct. Which is probably all true.
Arthur had telephoned me twice that evening, the first time to tell me he had missed his train and the second to warn me he was bringing someone home for dinner. ‘I’ve met this interesting bloke. I think you might like him.’ Arthur’s brief description of ‘this interesting bloke’ had not prepared me for Pat. Expecting an interesting man to come home with Arthur I had gone to some trouble with dinner and had made one of my famous rabbit pies, with crème caramel to follow. In those days my pastry was the envy of every woman who ever had the good fortune to taste it, and those few of our men friends who were not in love with me were, without exception, in love with my pastry. Rabbit or apple pie, gooseberry tart or peach flan, they were my triumphs. We didn’t have the gas on up here in those days and I loved cooking on my wood stove and had become expert at it. Unlike modern stoves, which are clones of each other, wood stoves each had their own personality and could be moody if not treated with deference. My dependable Rayburn and I were a team.
My Rayburn has been the heart of this home since the day it was delivered from Scotland in its wooden crate and installed by Stony. It is keeping the kitchen cosy with Stony’s reliable wood this afternoon as I sit out here on the veranda writing this. Adeli has no idea how to deal with wood stoves. She needs an on/off switch for things or she is lost. I’ll go in soon and draw a chair up to the firebox and rattle the stove into life. I’ll select one or two pieces of red gum from the wood box and will not close the door of the firebox at once after I’ve put the wood in but will sit looking into the orange glow of the embers, the new wood catching with blue and yellow flames, and I shall enjoy the heat on my face and the smell of the wood smoke. I will allow a curl or two of the fragrant smoke to escape into the kitchen—I wish it would penetrate as far as the bathroom and defeat the chemical stench of Adeli’s pressure pack. And, if I have enough energy left, as I sit there looking into the firebox I shall daydream of being young again. If Adeli is not about I’ll smoke a cigarette and probably have a little cry. I don’t like her to see me shedding tears. My sense of the situation with Adeli is that she is not really a support but undermines me. I must remain strong with her or she will not be satisfied with having established herself in her end of the house but will invade me utterly and take over. She is a fat cat—and remember, I have known cats all my life. Confined at first to a basket in the wash house and forbidden to enter the house, they are not satisfied until they are sleeping on the pillow next to one’s head. True, Sherry never made it that far with me, which is just as well. Adeli will have everything if she can get it. But she will never be mistress of my Rayburn. My comforter. All those years ago—how many is it?—when Pat first came to see us, the Rayburn was my pride and joy. I was never content to be merely a bluestocking but had worked hard to become expert in all the branches of the art of housekeeping. I was proud of being unlike my mother. She scarcely knew how to flick a duster, let alone prepare a fine dinner on a wood stove.
I was ready for Arthur and his interesting bloke that evening, my rabbit pie in the oven and the crème caramels cooling on the stone shelf in the pantry. I’d had time to have a bath and change, and had put on just the lightest touch of lipstick and a feathery pass or two of powder to my perfect cheeks—perfect they were, but even then, at thirty-two, I searched the mirror for the first signs of wrinkles, the dread that I would find my beauty flawed by the beginning of ageing, the anxious question ever in my thoughts, When is my decay to begin?
Waiting for them by the fire in the library that evening I was the cool one. I took down our copy of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, the only work of his we possessed, and sat in my favourite place on the couch to the right of the fireplace. Arthur had told me the man he was bringing to dinner was a Rimbaud enthusiast. I imagined a sophisticated European, perhaps a few years older than Arthur and me. I’d been careful to ration myself to one gin while I was preparing the dinner and was enjoying a pleasant sense of intrigue and expectation at the prospect of the evening ahead. The fire was drawing well and the room was warm. I don’t remember what I thought of Rimbaud’s poem. The words were no doubt just sliding past my eyes. It was years since I’d read him and
I wasn’t really in the mood for his youthful extremes of emotion. I was probably rather enjoying just being me; that comfortable self-satisfied state of being which Arthur and I both slid into without effort in those days, before Pat Donlon entered our lives.
10
Once, if I remember well …
ARTHUR CLOSED THE FRONT DOOR AND WAVED PAT FORWARD, indicating the first door on the right-hand side of the passage. Pat set his bundle of drawings down against the wall and opened the door. As he stepped through, Arthur was so close behind him that the hard toe of Arthur’s brogue caught the soft heel of Pat’s dilapidated plimsoll and as Pat went to step forward the sandshoe was yanked off his foot. Pat stopped abruptly and put his hand to the doorjamb to steady himself while he reached down and retrieved his plimsoll and pulled it back onto his foot. When he straightened he saw that he had entered a long high room. The walls were lined with well-filled bookshelves. The only break in the impressive ranks of books, apart from the fireplace at the far end of the room, was a deep bow window behind him, a table in front of it with a great bowl filled with pale roses.
At the far end of the room, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, a large brightly coloured abstract painting in its unframed stretcher leaned against the wall. A woman was sitting on the couch to the right of the fireplace. She was smoking a cigarette and holding a book aside in her left hand, which rested on the couch, and was watching him with interest. His stumbling entrance had evidently surprised her.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and lifted a hand to her in the sign of peace. ‘My sandshoe came off.’ He moved to one side and Arthur came up and stood beside him.
Arthur said, ‘This is Pat Donlon, darling.’ He turned to Pat. ‘My wife, Autumn.’
Autumn did not get up. She said coldly, ‘It’s good of you to call on us, Mr Donlon.’
‘It’s nice of you to have me.’ Pat bent and adjusted his left sandshoe, which having tasted freedom once seemed intent on leaving him again. After the chill of the Pontiac’s cabin on the way up from the railway station the library was cosy. The house smelled of wood smoke and cooking and had a welcoming, homey feel to it. Pat’s stomach growled. He was dizzy with hunger. He had had nothing to eat since Sir Malcolm’s guardian angel Miss Agatha Barquist’s cup of tea and two Dundee shortbreads. His eyes met Autumn’s. ‘What a great collection of books,’ he said.
Autumn did not respond to his remark but turned and set her book on the arm of the couch then stood up. ‘I’ll go and see to the vegetables, shall I, darling? I’ve set places for us in the dining room. Perhaps you could look in and see how the fire’s going in there.’ She came across the room and as she drew level with him Arthur stepped forward and leaned to kiss her. She closed her eyes and presented her cheek, her head turned away from him.
As she stepped past him to go out the door Pat said, ‘It smells great, Autumn.’
Beside the tall figure of Arthur Laing, the stoop of his shoulders lending a patrician humility to his appearance, his expensive silvery suit and his long hair, Pat knew he looked more like the man who had come to collect the rubbish than the man who had come to dinner. He would like to have explained his odd getup to Autumn but she gave him no opportunity to do so. She left the room without pausing, closing the door so firmly behind her he wondered if she had meant it to seem to him that she had slammed it in his face. The whiff of violence he caught from her impressed him and he looked at Arthur.
‘We’ll have a drink, Pat,’ Arthur said. He was looking thoughtful. ‘Why don’t you sit by the fire and get some warmth into you.’ He handed Pat his packet of cigarettes. ‘You look half frozen. I can let you have a cardigan. That jacket of yours is wet.’
‘It’s all right,’ Pat said. ‘I’m okay.’ He lit one of Arthur’s cigarettes and handed the packet back to him, then he went to the far end of the room and stood in front of the fire and looked at the painting. He did not recognise the artist and there was no signature. He turned from examining the painting and picked up Autumn’s book from the arm of the couch and read the title. Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, in the original French. Surely it was a message to him? He sat on the couch in the dent in the cushion where she had been sitting. The cushion was warm through the thin material of his trousers. Arthur handed him a glass of whisky. Pat took the drink and thanked him.
Arthur said, ‘Cheers,’ and drank from his glass, then placed his glass and the bottle on the low table that stood between the two couches at either side of the fire. He took a black iron poker from its stand and jabbed at the fire with it, as if he were thrusting a sword at his enemy. At his first jab a panic of sparks raced up the chimney. He saw in the shower of sparks a flight of children and mothers crying out in dismay, a whole town of innocents raped and murdered. He put another piece of wood on the fire and stood with the poker in his hand, a troubled expression on his long intelligent face. In the deeply private place where he kept his feelings, at that moment Arthur Laing might have been entertaining the idea of a gentlemanly melancholy.
Pat began to read Rimbaud’s poem aloud, the book held out in front of him. ‘Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.’
Arthur turned from the fire and reached for his drink. ‘Don’t stop. I’m so glad you read French, Pat. Please go on. You read well.’ He stood looking down at Pat wonderingly. ‘Go on. Please.’ His entreaty was gentle and persuasive, his mood evidently affected by the poetry.
Pat considered the book. He said gloomily, ‘I don’t read French. I know the English translation of this pretty much off by heart.’ He drank the whisky as if it was beer and made a grimace. ‘Jesus!’ he said. He held the empty glass at arm’s length and looked at it as if it had contained acid. He had never tasted whisky before. He set the empty glass on the table and looked at the book in his hand. ‘Rimbaud had the sense to give up writing before he was my age.’ He seemed about to go on with his reading, but turned instead and put the book on the arm of the couch face down, where Autumn had left it. ‘He changed his life and never wrote another word of poetry. It can be done.’ He looked up at Arthur, who was standing above him in front of the fire, as if he hoped the older man was going to contradict him. The flames were reflected redly in the silvery sheen of Arthur’s trousers, as if muscles rippled beneath the material. Arthur said nothing but sipped his drink and looked into the fire.
‘We think we’re going in one direction,’ Pat said. ‘Then we go in another.’ He took a drag on the cigarette and picked up one of the magazines from the table and riffled through its pages. ‘We’re not really in charge. We only think we are.’
Arthur said, ‘You sound just a little dispirited about things, Pat. You’ve no cause to be. Your drawings are interesting. I told Autumn I’ve not seen anything quite so fresh for a long time. She’ll want to see them later.’
Fresh fish, Pat thought. The magazine in his hand was the October edition of Cahiers d’art from the previous year. He put it back on the table and picked up a copy of Siecle.
‘So where do you get these?’ He waved his hand over the crowded table. He was thinking of Edith at the cottage on her own and wishing he was with her. They were going to be a family. He would have to bring them both back to the city, his wife and child. She would be afraid of the dark down there on her own. The unfamiliar night noises in the cottage. The rats playing polo in the ceiling wouldn’t be funny without him beside her to laugh with. He was able to make the strangeness of it all seem like fun to her, but on her own she would hate it and wouldn’t be able to sleep. He could see her sitting up at the kitchen window with a blanket round her shoulders right now, watching for a sign of his bike lamp coming up the track. It would be black as hell down there tonight. He was a criminal for coming to this place instead of going home. He could have been almost there with her by now, the two of them cosying up in their bed. With him beside her she wouldn’t give a rat�
��s arse for the rats. When he’d settled them in Melbourne he’d take himself down to the tram depot and apply for a conductor’s job. His dad would see him right with the supervisor. His dad would be over the bloody moon. I’ve never said anything, son, but I can say it now while your mother’s not with us to hear me. I’m glad you’ve got that art business out of your system at last. The Donlons have never been artists. Your mother’s people neither. The Egans were rhubarb growers in Kilkenny. That was her lot. Honest working people all of us. You wait, once you’re on at the depot the super will be promoting you to inspector before me. His dad would get excited and start exaggerating things. Making stuff up to clothe his son’s disaster in a story of success. He’d take him down to the Albion and shout him a beer with his mates. They’d all be yelling and carrying on at him and giving him a hard time. But privately they’d be celebrating that Jimmy Donlon’s son was no different to their own boys after all. It would be a confirmation for them. We’re all one here, Pat. A tribe. And you’re one of us, lad. His mother, alone of all of them, would know the depth of his misery but she would say nothing. She would offer him and Edith his old bedroom until he had some money coming in for rent and the two of them could find a place of their own. He would never accept charity from Edith’s people. For some reason he saw himself and Edith walking along Acland Street in search of a wardrobe. Why a wardrobe? Why Acland Street, for Christ’s sake? A wardrobe was going to be the least of their worries. The stupid things we think of. Edith’s brothers would have a good laugh. Australia’s greatest artist! They’d never let up on him. Ting-ting! How about a ticket, Mr Conductor? It would be on with those two bastards. They’d be fucking merciless.
‘My life was a feast,’ Arthur said, quoting from the poem. He gave a small satisfied laugh with the warmth of the whisky and the fire in it. ‘I like that. Where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. It’s years since we’ve read him. It gets rather gloomy after that lovely opening if I remember.’ He looked down at the book on the arm of the couch. ‘Indeed, if I remember well. Yes, we’ve a number of subscriptions to international art journals. These are just a few of them. There are plenty more. You’re very welcome to borrow whatever you like.’ He leaned down and picked up the copy of Cahiers d’art that Pat had discarded. He opened the magazine and handed it to Pat. ‘Miró. Do you know his work?’