by Alex Miller
A contradiction to himself, Freddy was as much a poet as a scientist and I loved him for it and for the richly layered ambiguities of his infinitely complicated nature. He never wrote verse but the poetry of his understanding was in his soul. He spoke German fluently and not long after we first met, which was several years before Pat came into our lives, he recited Rilke’s ‘Herbsttag’ to me flawlessly. We had not been at Old Farm long and several of us were gathered in the library. It was late, the fire had burned down and there was a heavy and contented silence between us. Suddenly, out of that silence, Freddy’s voice. After he had finished his recitation he turned to me and smiled. ‘That was for you,’ he said. I thanked him and told him that even though I had no German I had found it moving and very beautiful, as one might find a piece of music beautiful and affecting without being able to say why. He then recited the poem in English. ‘It is called “Autumn Day”,’ he said.
‘Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfilment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.’
Freddy was not religious himself but found the quality of Rilke’s religious faith deeply interesting. He once told me Rilke’s faith gave him a hope that he dared not hold for himself. I was not sure what he meant by this. Which was often the case with Freddy. That he spoke as if he was his own most enthralling mystery was part of his charm.
He was beset periodically by debilitating sieges of depression, during which he lacked the will to stir from his bed. He lived in a large apartment on the top floor of one of Melbourne’s oldest hotels in the centre of the city. His mother’s Imperial Bösendorfer had pride of place in his sitting room, which overlooked Collins Street a few doors down the hill from the building in which Arthur’s firm had their offices. Both the hotel and the building which housed Arthur’s offices were demolished in the eighties to make way for the towering headquarters of a bank. (Who will ever know the geographies of our town or the intimacies of our days if I do not memorialise them here?) While Freddy was enduring his depressions I was the only visitor he would admit to his flat. In company and in public he played the difficult piano works of Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók, composers whose music was rarely heard in Melbourne in those days. Privately he reserved his first love for the dreamy realms of Chopin’s nocturnes. That was Freddy. If there was such a creature as a romantic modernist it was Freddy Henning. His sense of duty and of what was right called him to the project of modernism, but his heart called him to the melancholy works of the romantics. He was ever divided against himself and was more jealous of my feelings for Pat than was Arthur. As I said, Freddy foresaw the danger of our affair long before I or anyone else saw it.
‘Your Pat has the narrow morality of the working class,’ Freddy said to me the day after I introduced the pair of them. ‘It will mean disaster for the three of you.’ He advised me to send Pat back to his wife.
I told him it was too late for that and accused him of hypocrisy. ‘You say you are all for the people, Freddy, but most of the people are working class, just like Pat.’
‘I’m telling you what I see of the man,’ he said. ‘He isn’t capable of the kind of sophistication you’re asking of him with this three-hander of yours.’
‘Pat’s a quick learner.’
‘His morality is that of a literalist. He will require symmetry in his affair with you. For him you are either Arthur’s woman or you are his woman. That is the way he will see it. He has left his wife, or from what you’ve told me is going to leave her, or she has left him, and he will expect you to leave Arthur. Anything else will seem to him unjust and a betrayal.’
‘You know I’ll never leave Arthur,’ I said. I was shocked by the suggestion. Without Arthur I would be naked in the world and prey to my own instability.’
‘I know it, Aught. But does Pat know it?’
I didn’t want to hear Freddy’s warning and I dismissed it. ‘You’re jealous,’ I said. ‘And sometimes you can be a snob.’ This last was unfair. Freddy possessed too much empathy to be a snob. The other person’s situation always interested him. Pat interested him.
He shrugged. ‘Yes, that too, of course. Only a fool wouldn’t be jealous of sharing you with other men.’ He poured himself another glass of Arthur’s whisky and lit a cigarette. He went and stood at the bow window and looked out into the front garden, where Stony and I had not long since planted a new bed of roses. ‘You have your first bloom,’ Freddy said. He sounded a little sad.
I went and stood with him and took his arm in mine. The rose was the deep and richly scented red of Mr Lincoln. ‘Arthur’s not jealous of you,’ I said gently.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aught. I’m not jealous of Arthur either. This man will destroy you, and he will destroy Arthur with you. He will take everything from you and give you nothing in return.’
‘What nonsense,’ I said. ‘Now you’re being silly.’ I was annoyed.
‘I felt his enmity, Aught. You have a generous spirit. You believe that your inherited position and your education oblige you to help those less fortunate than yourself. You feel a need to give something back to the society that has given you so much. It’s not just the responsibility of your caste with you; your heart feels the debt. It’s in your sense of belonging as an Australian. You love this country in a way I never can. My attachments to Europe and my love for Australia are far too conflicted for me to ever have anything like your uncomplicated love of country. I envy you that. Something important about yourself that can never be settled for me is settled for you by that certainty. You are grounded by it.’
Freddy loved to talk in this way. To me the word grounded made it sound as if I had concrete boots. But I loved to listen to him. I didn’t believe everything he said, of course, and often thought him wrong in his estimation of people. But I wanted to believe he was right about this. I said nothing to it. It had pleased me to hear him say it. My hopes had always been with Australia. Unlike most of our friends in those days, I’d never considered the possibility of living anywhere else. My travels with my mother had probably cured me of any uncertainty I might have had—if I ever had any. I don’t remember that I had.
‘In order to fulfil yourself, you have to give,’ Freddy said. ‘That’s the sort of person you are. You won’t defeat that in yourself. This man has no such needs.’
I squeezed his arm. ‘Please call him Pat, Freddy. It’s awful to hear you calling him this man. As if he is not our friend.’
‘He is hungry to take whatever he can get hold of,’ Freddy said. He was sounding a little surly, which was not like him. ‘And when he has taken all that he can carry away with him, then he will abandon you. And if you have given him everything, you will have nothing left. To see you making cow eyes at this man makes me weep, Aught.’
‘You’re being unfair.’ I was unhappy with our disagreement. ‘And you called him this man again.’ I was very cross with Freddy.
We were both silent after this, standing at the window arm in arm, looking out into the front garden at my single rose, neither of us sufficiently at ease with the other to be the first to break the silence. I was probably waiting for Freddy to apologise. Sooner or later it was usually Freddy who was the one to offer an apology and end our difficulties. This time he remained silent. It was not like him.
I can’t remember how that day ended for us, but for some time after there was an uncertainty between Freddy and me that I found painful. Ar
thur asked me the cause of it but I denied it and told him he was imagining things. Arthur never pressed me when I was evasive with him but took my evasion as his answer. For a while I was frightened I had lost my precious freedom to confess my secrets to Freddy. I could not disclose to either Pat or Arthur the full gory truth about myself the way I could with Freddy. Without Freddy’s trust I was alone with myself and I didn’t like it. It frightened me. But Freddy was not a man who could sulk for long or hold in himself a sense of having been wronged, and it was no more than one very long month before we had regained our old trust and had securely reinstated the wonderful intimacy of our friendship. I never had such a friendship with a woman. Freddy could see into the hearts of women with as much clarity as he saw into the hearts of men. His perfect empathy with the conditions of others was his gift and his burden. He disliked Pat but was fascinated by him.
I didn’t wish to hear Freddy’s analysis of Pat and dismissed it. We don’t want to have our futures disclosed to us. We don’t wish to know that our hopes are to come to nothing and our passions are to wane and turn to disgust. I have never understood why people are eager to listen to fortune-tellers, or why our newspapers are full of expert opinions about the disasters that lie ahead of us. But there has been an eager market for prognostications since antique times, and probably before then if we only had a record of the caveman’s sense of doubt about himself, and I suppose there will be no stopping those who like to fossick among the entrails of slaughtered beasts, even though what they purport to see there is generally mistaken. We forget nothing more readily than an incorrect forecast. It is the next forecast we are listening out for. And there is always someone ready to give it to us with confidence. As a species we have no wish to accept that the future, where our death lies in wait, is closed to us aside from that one grim fact.
Freddy told me that day, though in a rather more elaborate and mannered style of delivery, what Uncle Mathew had told me simply the last time I had seen him when I was seventeen and had asked him, What is my gift? To give, they might both have said. But of course they never met. Both suicides. Both dearly beloved men in my life. Both grieved for and cherished in my heart to this day. I was never sure what Freddy made of my confession to him of my childhood sexual carryings-on with Uncle Mathew under the peppercorn tree in the garden of Elsinore. I think I wanted Freddy to reassure me that the experience had been normal. Or perhaps I’d hoped that, despite my view of myself as a modern liberated woman, he would put it into some kind of bourgeois place of conventional feminine safety for me. At eleven years of age Mathew’s kiss had touched in me something of the fierce uncaring wildness of sex, that source of our helpless moaning, the pulse we would all willingly ride to our deaths, and I think I had always feared a little that he had shaken loose in me at that tender age some force that was not quite normal or healthy—whatever we are to mean by such contented terms as these in our bewildered world of fearsome insanities.
The first time I kissed Pat under the silver wattle trees in the moonlight on the river bank, when my lips met his I was aware of how much older than him I was, and it was the gentle touch of Mathew’s lips on mine when I was a girl that came into my memory. That touch such that a butterfly might have landed on my skin, so thrilling my body bloomed for him with a pang I have not forgotten. For the first time since then it was there again with Pat. Who but the coldest among us can resist that song of the blood? Gone now, all that. I am reduced and am no longer a woman, but I have memory—and the knobbly shank of Barnaby’s shillelagh to press into the lines of my palm. Arthur and I were lovers, but of another, calmer, more sequestered order altogether than were Pat and I. With Arthur I never risked my story of Uncle Mathew under the peppercorn. I did not wish him to know it. I did not wish it to be misunderstood by him. It was sacred to me then and has remained sacred to me. My golden amulet when I lie in my tomb—so to speak. I shall, of course, be ashes, and will have no tomb. Scattered here at Old Farm by Adeli the penguin. Or not, as she sees fit.
When Freddy’s own real analyst, Wilhelm Stekel, committed suicide in 1940, Freddy told me that in a note Stekel asked his wife, with extraordinary grace, to kindly apologise to his patients for him. It was the sort of perverse sense of responsibility that greatly appealed to Freddy. He described for me the scene of Stekel’s wife turning up at her husband’s rooms on Monday morning and sitting in his customary place at his desk. Solemnly waiting until each patient in turn appeared for their usual appointment and made themselves comfortable on the couch, before asking them if they would please accept her husband’s apology for being absent. Not a cold in the head or the funeral of a favourite aunt but absence excuse Number One. He ate a bucket of aspirins on Friday night and has died. He says to tell you he is sorry. Freddy was subject to the same wrenching contradictions in himself as his analyst had been. When Freddy killed himself, however, he did not ask anyone to apologise to his patients for him but wrote me the note which ended with those terrible words, I have a rat in the wainscot to dispose of.
It frightens me when I realise that this, my memorial to our times—as it seems to have become, whatever it was when I began it or will become in the hands of others after I am gone—is all I have left to believe in. ‘Others’. I should say the robust Adeli Heartstone. What would Freddy have made of her? Despite her flab she has something of Pat’s steeliness, something of his hunger to eat up the whole cake for herself then run away with it, leaving only the smell of her departure in the air behind her—her little pressure pack of synthetic floral air cleanser with which to sweeten the stink of her leavings. If I were to kick her out Andrew would pack me off to the house of the dead immediately. I am as bound to the penguin as I was to Pat. And wasn’t she right when she flattered herself with a connection between the two of them? As contemptuous as I was in my dismissal of her suggestion that she and the naked Mr Creedy’s daughter were sisters of the idealised womanly form in Pat Donlon’s imagination. There is a cruel symmetry in this. My life the skipping rope swung by these two thieves at either end, keeping me dancing to their tune in the middle. If thievery is not too disheartening a term for their performances. The meaning sucked out of things. His drawings no longer a source of my dreaming but her dreaming now. How did she manage that? What biographical sleight of hand was it that enabled her to do it, as if she was bringing me something precious while stealing it from me? I need time to see when I’ve been tricked. I’m still too innocent. Can I say that at eighty-four? Or whatever I am. I look at her with new respect. She is no longer to be dismissed by me as the dullard bollard. Harmless and silly with her belly roll pushing her twin set out of shape. Oh, no. There is far more to Adeli Heartstone than that.
How to avoid the gall of bitterness when ample cause for it has entered into our life? I would plead with Pat to try to understand the deeper causes of his misbehaviour and he would shout back at me, ‘Understand what, for Christ’s sake? I know what I feel.’ And he would plunge onward, trampling through the debris of broken things without a backward glance to see if I was still on my feet, then urging me to admire his latest picture, as if I had had no hand in its creation.
Freddy and Arthur were not great creative figures of my time as Pat was soon to become, but were of another, more contented and gracious world than his. Without them the disarray of life with Pat would have been impossible for me to endure for long. They not only admired but liked and understood each other. When Freddy talked with enthusiasm of the novelist Martin Boyd’s latest book—for Freddy, Boyd was our finest living novelist—Arthur understood it was Boyd’s troubling uncertainty about whether he was an Australian or a European with which Freddy was identifying, and not Boyd’s conservative politics or his loose meandering style—though I think in his contrary heart Freddy admired both these qualities in Boyd. Arthur also had the grace to understand that my flirting with Freddy was a quality of our friendship and had nothing to do with infidelity. Freddy was much better looking than Pat. But it was Pat, with his
agitated view of our realities, who stirred in me the unease and restlessness that had disabled me during my travels in Europe with my mother when I was a young woman of nineteen. I feared and longed for that experience again and often despaired that I was never to know it. The helplessness of it. The inability to bring it to an end or to contain it. The knowledge that I could do nothing to keep myself from it once it was ignited. And my pressing intuition that it would end badly for me. Sex.
Safe sex had quite another meaning for me and Arthur than the meaning it has today for young people (anyone under sixty). It wasn’t a question of condoms with Arthur and me. We never used those things. With Arthur beside me in bed I felt safe. From myself more than from external dangers. What was there for me to fear in the external world, after all? I had always been intrigued by the dark, and the attentions of strange men delighted me. Arthur and I enjoyed each other’s bodies, but never frenziedly. He always wore his pyjamas to bed and I wore my nightgown (cotton). Even in the early days of our marriage, after my operation, most nights we read ourselves to sleep.
It was a relief for me to be with Arthur after being the tormented lost girl of my family. With him I knew myself cherished. The only unsettling moment before sleep was if one of us interrupted the other’s reading to insist on reading out something amusing. ‘Goodnight, darling,’ was our regular refrain. There was not a lot of moaning or ecstatic howling in our nights. None at all in fact. A fond kiss before lights out usually settled any doubts we had about how the night was to develop between us. Or, once we were lying there in the dark, he felt for my hand and we made love, simply and in silence, almost as if we made love to ourselves. Afterwards we lay side by side and he held my hand a while, as if he thought I needed comforting, which I didn’t, but I was glad of his hand in mine all the same. When I wanted an orgasm I gave one to myself. Here, Autumn, one for you! A series of gasps, a moan or two, but no howls to give pause to the neighbours or alarm their dogs. Wasn’t that what every mature woman did? Dreamed of her demon lover? In my case the Roman psychiatrist looked into my eyes and I was nineteen again.