by Alex Miller
Pat looked at the coloured illustration. A random scattering of bright shapes and lines on a hard blue background. It meant nothing to him. Did it mean anything to anybody? ‘Do you like him?’ he said. ‘Is he one of your favourites?’
‘We’re a generation behind Europe,’ Arthur said, telling a serious truth that troubled him. He refilled Pat’s glass and topped up his own then reached for the poker and gave the new log a hard jab in the ribs. It flinched from the blow and emitted a hiss. ‘I mentioned your enthusiasm for Rimbaud when I called Autumn earlier to tell her I was bringing you to dinner.’
Pat looked at the piece of wood in the fire and drank from his glass. The whisky burned its way down his throat and lay in the void of his stomach like a pool of mercury, an eye of unease. He suppressed a belch. ‘Your wife doesn’t like me,’ he said. ‘Maybe I won’t stay for tea after all. I can probably still make the last train to Geelong if I get going. There’s a bus to Ocean Grove.’ Edith wouldn’t chide him for neglecting her when he finally got home but would forgive him and fold him gratefully in her warm embrace. This wife of Arthur’s on the other hand, Mrs Autumn bloody Laing, or whatever her stupid name was, was set on giving the pair of them a hard time. Autumn? They should have called her Winter. Well, fuck her anyway, he thought. We’ll see who gives who the hard time if she starts anything. He sat staring into the fire, the warmth on his face. There was no way for him to make the Geelong train tonight. It would take an hour or more just to get back into Melbourne. His jacket had begun to steam. It was giving off a not-unpleasant smell rather like fresh horse shit. He wondered if Arthur could smell it. Arthur was poking at the fire again uselessly. It was beginning to look as if this man might turn out to be a fucking idiot after all.
He looked around the room. The house wasn’t exactly posh, not in the way Edith’s people’s houses were posh, but it was obviously the house of well-to-do people, people of taste and refinement. This impressive collection of books. He would have liked to be left alone in here with the books and the fire. He envied them their books. He would not deny that he knew the meaning of the word envy. The worn coverings on the couches, plain, expensive and well worn. The abundance of roses in the bowl in the bay window, as if they were always there and always freshly cut. The casual way the painting was leaned against the wall above the fireplace and had not been framed or hung properly. It was all a confident acceptance of their position. Their affluence. Comfortable and unquestioned. Nothing showy. They could do anything they wanted to do. No need to make a point of what they had. The bulk of it kept quietly out of sight. Land and property and shares in companies, all that and more than he could think of, for sure. Substance. Deep, enduring and inherited. He thought of his mother’s scruffy savings-bank book and the few pieces of china she kept dusted in the front room. He wouldn’t deny it, he envied these people the quality of their lives, the depth and richness of it. But he would not wish to be them. He did not envy them their being. Their ease with French, if nothing else, was surely to be envied. To read Rimbaud as he had read himself. Only a fool would not envy them that. He pressed his palm into the downy softness of the cushion beside him. You could sleep off a hangover on one of these couches. And plenty of people probably had done just that after a big night of talk about art and life and drinking themselves into a stupor. No one was going to feel they had to fluff up these cushions before they left the room. And how long was it since that fireplace had been cleaned out? The ashes were a foot thick. His mother cleaned out their fireplace every morning. It was the sound he’d woken to before getting up and getting himself ready for school. Her scraping about in the grate with her brush and pan and singing to herself. Something suddenly occurred to him. He said, ‘That painting’s not another Wyndham Lewis, is it?’ Arthur gave up blowing smoke rings. ‘No,’ he said and laughed. ‘No. If only it were we’d all be rich and I could stop work tomorrow. It’s by a friend of ours. He’s living in France these days. Splendid, isn’t it? I’m not sure that I understand it, but it has something to do with his theory of colour scales and their relation to musical scales. Synchronism, he calls it. Now don’t ask me what that means. If you want an explanation you’ll have to ask Autumn. Autumn’s the one for theory in this house. I’m afraid I’m not much chop at it. But it’s a strong painting, isn’t it?’ He stepped away until the backs of his knees were pressing against the edge of the low table, holding his head on one side then the other, as if he was trying to form a new judgment of the picture. He gave up and stepped to the fire again. ‘There’s a blindness about too much familiarity, isn’t there? We usually move our pictures around. This one’s probably been sitting here looking at us rather too long. There’s a dozen good pictures in the hallway with their faces to the wall for that reason. It’s our resting paddock.’ He looked down at Pat. ‘Roy’s our most important abstract artist. By a long way.’
Pat looked up at the picture. He had no feelings for it. Or perhaps he hated it. It was obviously competent and professional. Clever even. Was he being measly-minded thinking like this? Wouldn’t he have wanted to have painted it himself? Not to be that painter, but to be his own self with that much confidence. Australia’s most important abstract artist. Wouldn’t he want them saying that about him? The stretcher and the oil paint would have cost the bloke a heap. ‘Yes, it’s strong,’ he said. The word had no meaning for him. Everything was strong, wasn’t it? Water. Fire. Hate. Envy. All of it. Love. The smell of shit. He knew he was being boring but he didn’t have the energy to think of anything worth saying. What was there to say, anyway? He was going to be a tram conductor like his dad. He stared into the fire. The split piece of wood had joined in now and was going for it, rejoicing in a wild release of fiery energy, crackling and spitting and popping. He wondered if the day would ever come when he would murder someone. The thought came into his head unbidden like a silent dream, closing the door softly behind it. Standing looking at him. It sent a shiver through him. It could happen, couldn’t it? An impulse to murder someone sweeping through you, beyond your will to control it. You would be taken by it and thrown against a life. Edith’s face staring at him, as white as the full moon over the Great Southern Ocean, howling her despair over her lost hopes for him and for herself. He would leave her nothing. Emptiness. He hugged himself. His head was going places on him. He stood up, then abruptly sat down again. I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. Rimbaud’s poem was on the loose in him.
Arthur said, ‘Are you all right?’
Pat waved a reassuring hand at Arthur. It was those terrible cigarettes and the whisky on his empty stomach. And the warmth of this bloody great wood fire, which had blazed up and was beginning to cook him since the madman had left off poking at it. He struggled out of his jacket and tossed it on the couch beside him. If he had a heart attack now it would be days before Edith heard the news of his death. He felt deeply lonely and sad suddenly. At the bottom of a hole on his own with his misery. The pump in his head had started up a while ago. He reached for his glass and drank some more whisky to steady himself. ‘Synchronism,’ he said, perhaps a little too loudly, and wasn’t sure why he said it, except to demonstrate to himself that despite the whisky and the heat and the impending fatal heart attack he could pronounce the word clearly. Arthur was looking at him.
Pat gazed around the walls. ‘It would take a lifetime to read all these books,’ he said. ‘Have you read them all, Arthur? Has your wife read them?’ He belched explosively. ‘Sorry. I think I might be going to be sick.’
Arthur was frowning at the fire again, as if he was considering a fresh assault on it. ‘There won’t be any need for you to catch trains tonight. Women, you know? We always have to have done something wrong to start off with. It’s the way they go about these things. I never expect to get in from the office of an evening innocent of all wrongdoing.’ He looked down at Pat and smiled. He had a genuinely warm and friendly smile. He was a man who seemed untouched by bitterness or thwarted ambition. ‘You’ve
not been married a year yet, isn’t that right? It’s too early for these games.’
Pat looked at his hands. ‘We’re going to have a baby,’ he said. Was it true? Of course it was true. Someone was soon going to be calling him daddy. Maybe it would be a boy. The real future artist. His dad a tram conductor too. His glass was empty again. He watched Arthur refill it.
‘How wonderful. We must drink to it.’ Arthur lifted his glass. ‘Congratulations, Pat. It’s great news.’
‘Thanks,’ Pat said gloomily.
‘Are you not pleased?’
‘She’ll be sitting at home on her own worrying.’ Was it really only this morning he had left Edith? It felt like a lifetime ago. Another world. Sitting up in their warm bed with her cold cup of tea and her book. The cold tea seemed particularly melancholy to him now. Une vie, a woman’s life. He couldn’t remember the author. What sort of a woman’s life was it? He could hear Edith’s lovely soft voice reading the French to him, his head on her shoulder, breathing the smell of her skin. She blew him that last kiss as he turned at the door dressed in this stupid disguise. What a waste he had made of the day. A waste of all of it. His life. And just as the screen door banged behind him he heard her call to him, ‘I love you, darling.’ Was that the last time she was to see him alive? The last image she was to retain of him? He regretted not calling his love back to her. He put his hand to his heart. He could feel nothing. He placed two fingers on the side of his neck. He had no pulse. The pump had fallen silent. Here it comes then! ‘My mum and dad will be pleased,’ he said, surprised by the naturalness of his tone. The last words of a dying man. The thickness gathering in his diaphragm, beginning to stifle him. He would drop his drink and slip sideways on the hot couch, his face red, his eyes popping from his skull.
‘Your mother and father don’t know yet?’
‘She only told me this morning herself.’
Arthur was silent a while. ‘Autumn would have loved to have a child.’ His voice was dense with feeling.
‘So why don’t you have one?’
Arthur took a sip of whisky from his glass, then another, pressing the rim of the glass firmly against his lower lip and looking down into the flames. ‘Couldn’t have them, I’m afraid,’ he said tightly. ‘Not possible.’ He brightened and turned to look at Pat. ‘We’re content. We have friends. Very good friends. Hardly any of our friends have children. It’s odd that, isn’t it? But it’s true. I suppose it seems unnatural to you?’
Pat shrugged. ‘I feel a bit sick.’
‘Perhaps you should get some fresh air.’
Pat closed his eyes then quickly opened them again. He stood up.
Arthur took his arm. ‘Come on, we’ll stand you out on the back veranda in the fresh air. That fire’s getting to you. I shouldn’t have stoked it up so much.’
Pat did not resist. He thought of shouting, Fuck the rich! But held onto the impulse. It wouldn’t do any good. Why hadn’t he gone straight to the railway station after leaving this bloke’s office and caught the train to Geelong? The bus would have had him in Ocean Grove an hour ago.
They were going through the kitchen, Arthur guiding him by the arm, Autumn at the Rayburn taking a pot from the hotplate, a cloth protecting her hand, a blue and white cross-stitched apron over her dress making her look domestic and feminine. She paused and turned from her task to watch them, when Pat suddenly vomited.
Autumn set the pot back on the hotplate and stepped across to them. She pushed Arthur aside. ‘You idiot!’ She laughed. ‘You’ve filled him up with your whisky. Go and get the things from the dining room. We’ll have it in here.’ She supported Pat, holding him firmly under the arm, and helped him out through the door onto the veranda. She was laughing softly to herself. She stood and watched him bent over, one hand to the veranda post, leaning out into the night. He retched twice emptily and groaned. In a stricken voice he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Autumn took her cigarettes out of her apron pocket and lit one. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke into the fresh night air. She stood with one arm tucked under the other looking at him, the cigarette smoking between her fingers. ‘You’re not the first one to vomit in my kitchen.’ She went back inside and brought him a glass of water. ‘Rinse your mouth.’
He did as he was told.
‘Gargle it,’ she said. She was enjoying herself now, finding the situation amusing. She handed him a tea towel. ‘Here, wipe yourself.’ She had liked the feeling of holding him under the arm. Touch was always crossing a bridge to the other side of something with people. A one-way bridge. You could never not have touched them afterwards. There was always that to be drawn on, like a small preliminary deposit in a private account. She noticed the white blue of his eyes, the strangeness of them, the way he squinted at her as if he wanted to hide his feelings from her. She was interested now and wanted to see his drawings. He was a peculiar boy in need of something strong and definite.
He wiped the drops of water from his lips. ‘I’ll clean it up,’ he said.
‘Arthur’s done it. Come in when you’re ready,’ she said. ‘We’ll eat in the kitchen.’ But she didn’t leave, just stood there smoking her cigarette.
‘Give me a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right in a minute.’ He was uncomfortable with her standing there silently staring at him. He looked at her and she met his eyes. She’s not for me, he thought. Too tall and skinny. He could see how people, women as well as men, would think she was beautiful. She was impressive, to be sure, he would say that, but not beautiful. Not sexy. Edith was sexy. Edith had lovely voluptuous curves. He could see this woman’s hip bones poking through her apron. Edith was not as voluptuous as the butcher’s daughter. He wondered what it would be like to fuck the butcher’s daughter.
He was not himself tonight. Or maybe he was really himself. These people had upset him.
Autumn said, ‘You’ve lost a sandshoe.’
The flywire screeched and Arthur came out and handed the sandshoe to Pat.
Pat thanked him and squatted and put it on.
Autumn flicked her cigarette out into the night and gave Arthur a look, then she turned and went back into the kitchen.
The three of them were sitting at the kitchen table among the uncleared remains of their meal. A symmetry of three cats, a long-haired ginger and two sleek oyster-coloured aristocrats from Asia, were delicately eating scraps of baked rabbit on the floor by Autumn’s chair. Autumn drank from her wine glass then drew deeply on her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs, and reached and tapped the ash onto the edge of her dinner plate. ‘You might not do anything at all,’ she said, lifting her chin to billow the held smoke towards the light. She looked at Pat. ‘We don’t know, do we? What you will do. You may have a spoiled youth and a treacherous old age.’ She laughed. ‘There is never a shortage of that sort. We can know nothing of what you will accomplish. But one thing we do know, if you give up now you will be deciding to be a failure. And that is no way to live.’ She squinted at him through the smoke, as if she were thinking of sketching his likeness. ‘Give up now and it will torture you for the rest of your days.’ She paused, then said with sudden vehemence, as if she wished to be believed, ‘I forbid you to give up. Not now, not ever.’
Pat would have objected but she held up her hand for silence.
‘Weaklings give up. Serious people persist.’ She sat there loosely in her dress, as if his fate was to be decided by her at this table tonight.
‘Why should you care?’ he said, incredulous and impressed at the same time that she should speak to him in this way.
‘You’re being churlish now.’
He shrugged.
‘I am a trained artist myself,’ she said. ‘But to care for artists is more my vocation than to make art.’
‘I’m not an artist.’
‘It’s too late for that nonsense,’ she said with impatience. ‘You sensed your gift and you made your choice. There is no way back from that. Choosing failure is n
ot an option. If you give up now, your need to be an artist will torture you until it destroys you and everyone close to you. Art will become a serpent in your breast instead of your salvation.’
He regarded her in silence and she returned his gaze, saying nothing but observing the effect of her words on him. He was tempted to hope that what she had said was a kind of wisdom and wasn’t just the boldness of the wine, but he was not sure that he could trust her. And perhaps he feared to trust her.
‘What have you done that makes you think you know all this?’ he said.
She stubbed out her cigarette on the lip of her plate. ‘You’ve hardly begun the struggle,’ she said calmly. ‘And at the first sign of difficulty you’re already thinking of giving it up.’
Arthur said, ‘That’s hardly fair, darling.’
Pat looked at her. He said steadily, ‘Fuck you. What do you know about me?’
She smiled. ‘I know about myself. Why don’t you go and fetch your drawings. Then I’ll know something about you. You said yourself, the friends you grew up with went off to work in factories after they left school or got jobs at the tram depot where your father works. They didn’t do folios of drawings, did they? They didn’t go to the Gallery School, then decide they were too good for it. Arthur doesn’t do folios of drawings, does he? Arthur reads books. That’s enough for Arthur, to see art and to read and talk about it. Arthur and your old school friends are not troubled by the business of making art. For them there is no struggle. They are not artists and they don’t think they are artists.’ She reached for her wine glass, but she did not pick it up and drink from it. ‘You’ve had a privileged beginning, Pat. You don’t seem to know your luck. The struggle has only just begun for you. Go and fetch your drawings, we’ll clear this off and have a look at them.’