Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  I have never found it easy to go to sleep, and while Arthur snored and twitched beside me I would lie in the dark listening to the night noises beyond the house, away in my private fantasy world. It was my favourite moment of the day. The two oyster cats were hunters and I kept them confined at night to a cat run attached to the laundry. To be at peace with myself I needed to know they and the birds were safe in their nests for the night. The ginger tom (Sheridan’s spiritual ancestor) was only interested in other cats so I let him have his freedom. I’d hear them yowling dismally to each other across the river, the feral cats in those days in the old forest.

  Safe sex. That was our life. When Arthur and I were first married I was ambitious to become a fine housekeeper and to make Old Farm a haven for ourselves and our friends. I began work on transforming the surroundings of the house into a beautiful garden the first week we were here and with Stony’s help was soon growing our own vegetables. We bought a cow for the fresh milk and hens for their eggs. In those first months I saw myself at the centre of my own little kingdom. That is how it was for me then. I was fired by a fierce determination to build my own place and to shake off my family’s emotional parsimony and my mother’s barren legacy. Stony was happy to see the house occupied again and became my steady ally. While Arthur was at his office all day, Stony and I remade this place.

  In our second year Arthur and I began to publish a new art journal (it lasted for two years and ten issues, which we counted a success). With our journal and our support of young artists we imagined ourselves established at the centre of an influential third force in Melbourne’s narrowly partisan art world. We believed ourselves to be revolutionary, but in fact we subsisted in a state of self-congratulation, comfortably unaware of the narrowness of our own partisanship. We were young, we had money, and the world was ours to refashion as we chose. What else but to commit the great follies is youth for?

  My walk across the night paddock to the river the evening of Pat’s first visit to us calmed me. The ginger cat kept me company. Stony brought him to us in a shoe box as a kitten, saying, ‘He’s a tom.’ Arthur plucked the golden ball of fluff out of the box and cuddled him. ‘Welcome to your new home, Tom,’ he said. I reached for him. ‘Let me hold him.’ I remember the rush of desire that possessed me, to have the little kitten in my arms and for him to know it was me who was his first and only true friend. A misty rain was falling as Tom and I stood among the wattles and watched the glint of the water over the rocks and listened to the night sounds—he to his, I to mine. I was upset and I wept for the psychiatrist’s child, my poor discarded baby. No vixen barked.

  When I returned to the house and went into the kitchen and saw the nervous way both men stood and waited for me to speak, I could have laughed aloud. I had regained my ground and for the rest of the night I was in charge of the tone between us. Which was the way I liked things to be. I was aware of myself as the intellectual superior to most men of my acquaintance. Freddy, when he came into our lives, was the first man I was able to accept as my equal. My respect for his mind was the foundation of our elaborate friendship. In this he never disappointed me. Not even in the manner of his death.

  After Arthur had gone to bed to read his new book, Pat stayed on the couch beside me and we looked through his drawings for a second time. He smoked one after another of Arthur’s cigarettes and said very little. I felt more motherly than mistressly towards him that night. He was exhausted and I have a vivid recollection of him sleeping on the couch beside me, his upper body slipped sideways, his head pillowed on his arm. I was regretting my aggressive insistence that he could not be both poet and artist. Asleep he looked more like a boy than ever, his lips slightly parted, his pale hair falling across his face, his features unmarked and unremarkable. I fetched one of my Turkish shawls and spread it over him and I kissed him on his cheek again—as chaste a kiss as it is possible for a woman to give a man, I swear. His feet were crossed at the ankles, his battered sandshoes a pathetic token of his poverty. I did not know at the time that Pat’s habit was to dress as neatly as the tramway inspector he feared he was to become. I left him, looking back at him from the doorway before I turned off the light and went in to join Arthur.

  Arthur was sitting up in bed reading Wilenski.

  I said, ‘We should do something for Pat. You were right to bring him home.’ I wondered at myself for speaking as if I thought our home might become the home of this scruffy young stranger. Even then I discounted the existence of Edith and her inconvenient child.

  Arthur said absently, ‘Yes, of course we will, darling,’ and went on reading contentedly, travelling the familiar path of our comfortable bedroom silence.

  How self-satisfied we were. How right we thought ourselves. I lay beside Arthur that night and thought of Pat curled up asleep on the couch in the library. It seemed to me he was under our care, almost as a son might have been to us, a slightly wayward son who had returned home discouraged and in need of our support. Australia’s most influential art critic had told Pat he was a charlatan and had thrown him and his drawings out of his office. Pat’s confidence in himself as an aspiring artist had been badly undermined by his experiences that day, and by the time he came to us he was almost ready to abandon his dreams. The critic’s job is to deepen our understanding, and no critic has a right to be as severe as Cowper was with Pat. I tried to cheer Pat up by reminding him of the German poet Rilke’s answer to the young poet who asked for his opinion of his verses; There is nothing, Rilke wrote back, that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. But I don’t think Pat was listening to me by then. He was too tired and too drunk on Arthur’s whisky. I was confident I had the means to help him get over Guy Cowper’s bullying dismissal of him and his work. I loathed that man. I’d often watched him displaying his erudition, as if he were the only man in the room ever to have read a book or looked at a picture. In conversation Guy Cowper did not address himself to his companion but to an imaginary absent equal—the greatly admired shadow of himself, no doubt. In public he was in performance. Needless to say he was contemptuous of women and their opinions, unless they were a wealthy patron of the arts.

  Pat had strayed into the den of his natural enemy, announcing himself a mendicant, and been mauled. Until I fell asleep that night I let my fancies play with my plans for providing sustenance to Pat’s depleted confidence in himself as an artist. I was, had I been aware of it, already beginning a private project in which the advancement of Pat Donlon’s career was to be the principal theme of the story. My motives, however, were complicated. Arthur and I and our group were opposed to the influence of Sir Malcolm and Guy Cowper. And I was probably setting out not only to promote Pat but to show these powerful men how mistaken they were to have dismissed him. Who now remembers either of them? It is the name of Patrick Donlon that today still has the power to excite a crowd in the fine-art auction rooms of Europe, America and Australia (but mainly Australia, I have to admit).

  At breakfast the next morning, before Arthur and he went off to catch the train to the city, I told Pat we would motor down in the Pontiac and visit him at Ocean Grove one weekend soon.

  Arthur loved an excuse for a long drive and was keen on the idea. ‘We’ll bring a picnic,’ he said.

  Pat said, ‘We should have it on the beach if it’s a fine day.’

  Perhaps it was for my sake that neither of them mentioned Edith.

  I walked around to the coach house with them and stood and waved as Arthur drove out onto the road. The morning was cold and it was raining. I was happy. After they had gone I stood in the grey drift of rain, looking down the slope of our paddock towards the river, excited to know in myself that I had so much to give, and moved by the beauty of our home and its glorious setting. My own rather grand self-regard had the better of me that morning. I felt Pat had been given into my care to form and to shape into the great artist he dreamed of becoming.

  In that moment of euphoria I could not have imagined that I wa
s not to be the one in charge, but that in Pat Donlon I had encountered not a boy but a man who would prove more than my match at controlling the tone of our relations. The strange flatness of his style, his plainness quite beyond my experience of artists, his unaffected attitude to the work of the painter, and his astonishing rejection of the conventional training, which he feared would limit his ability to see with a fresh eye, had all impressed me. The idea that he might become a tramway inspector and devote himself to the narrow life of supporting a growing family of children in some dreary hovel in a St Kilda back street appalled me. I was determined not to let that become his fate. I would save him from it. And Arthur would help me save him.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Barnaby all about it. I went back into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil on the Rayburn. When Barnaby arrived he was so full of the news that his friend, Harry Croft, a Central Queensland policeman, was coming down to stay with him for six weeks during Christmas and the New Year that I could scarcely get a word in. Barnaby’s limp, which he made the most of, was from a riding accident when he was a boy mustering cattle on his father’s station. Scrub bashing, he called it, and made it sound both thrilling and hazardous to man and horse. He posed for me in the kitchen doorway that morning, leaning on his shillelagh and smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the garden and the paddock beyond as if he viewed the broad landscape of his childhood adventures, telling me the story of his days as a boy in the wild outback of Queensland’s hinterland and how he met there the son of the local sergeant of police. His first lover, and still, twenty years on, his most deeply cherished friendship. When he was drunk and it was late at night, with just a few trusted friends, Barnaby often said, ‘Harry is my darling wife.’ And if he was asked if he was married he would always answer with an emphatic, ‘Yes, I am very married.’ Harry died the year before Barnaby committed suicide. He returned to Sofia Station at least twice a year for a month or two to see his friend and, as he put it, ‘To refresh my poetic soul.’

  In the end I didn’t tell Barnaby the story of Pat Donlon that day. He was in one of his large self-absorbed moods and I let him have his head. My story was too good to waste. Barnaby could have it when the rest of them got it. He had missed his chance at an exclusive. It annoyed him greatly whenever I reminded him of this later.

  Pat was different to the others. That much I had seen. But despite my confident assumptions about him I had not seen just how very different he was any more than had Sir Malcolm or Guy Cowper. Pat was not to be easily understood. He kept his truths to himself and eluded us all. But at that time I believed implicitly in the gift Uncle Mathew had told me was mine when I was seventeen. And I still think Uncle Mathew was right. But he was only partly right. And a partial truth that is held sacred by us can be more corrupting of our behaviour than a lie. When I took on Pat Donlon I saw myself as a kind of Mother Courage, feeding and caring for the spirits and aspirations of my little tribe of artists. Pat was to be the principal among them. But I misjudged him. And I misjudged our situation. There is a perversity in us, however, that knows no limit. And thinking of our day at Ocean Grove as I write this my heart even now beats a little faster and I would change none of it.

  But I must stop this and go in and see to the Rayburn. The air is suddenly cold out here. I put my weight on Barnaby’s stick and rest my free hand on the table top but I can’t rise. I sit back and rest and try again. I don’t want to go on about old age. It bores me to do so. But the plain fact is that after sitting still for some time I have scarcely enough strength in my legs to get myself upright. As if she senses my call, Adeli comes out onto the veranda and says in her best coaxing Californian, ‘It’s time we went in, Mrs Laing. We can’t have you catching your death out here.’

  We? My death.

  How bitterly I resent my dependence on her. How I would love to swing Barnaby’s great lump of a stick at her big soft gut and watch her go bouncing down the slope of my abandoned garden. Is there a magic word that will summon my youth back to me?

  12

  Picnic at Ocean Grove

  A LARGE OLD-FASHIONED MIXING BOWL STOOD ON A WOODEN crate beside Edith’s bed. A lamp without a shade, a book and a tin cup half filled with water beside the bowl. The green cloth cover of the book damp-stained in the shape of Italy, the title in gold, Une vie, partly obscured by the toe of the boot. The bowl was made of yellow glazed stoneware with a raised pattern of acanthus leaves around its belly. Autumn could not resist peeking into its sallow interior. An inch of opalescent bile, green, translucent and still—a lens drawn up from a mysterious ocean deep. The air in the room was sour and smelled of stale bed warmth. A solitary fly dragged its heavy body slowly up the grimy windowpane towards a spider web already damaged and hung about with the embalmed corpses of various luckless insects.

  Autumn was sitting on the side of the bed. She was holding Edith’s hand in hers. Edith’s eyes were closed, her hand cool and slightly damp resting slackly in Autumn’s. The two women had fallen silent, the sound of the men’s voices from the kitchen and the steady drip of rainwater striking the galvanised top of the tank below the window. Autumn watched the fly climbing the window glass towards its doom. Edith’s hair was spread around her skull on the pillow, her forehead pallid and gleaming with an unhealthy perspiration. The top two buttons of her nightdress were undone, her chest rising and falling unevenly. Her lips, which were dry and cracked, were apart and after every few breaths she gave a little gasp, or a sigh.

  The fly encountered the web and panicked, becoming at once hopelessly entangled. Autumn watched but no spider appeared to embrace its captive prey. It seemed to her the web was so old and dusty and so in need of repair the spider must have died or gone elsewhere long ago, leaving its deadly trap behind—like a sin committed in the past. She would have liked to have got hold of a broom and swept the whole thing away and given the window a good wash and the room a thorough airing. The fly was frenzied, its legs and wings more securely entangled in the sticky skeins every second. The sound of its frenzy was of a remote aeroplane high up somewhere in a clear summer sky.

  Autumn saw that Edith’s eyes were open. She realised, with an uncomfortable feeling of having exposed her private thoughts to the other woman, that Edith had been watching her.

  Edith said, ‘Please go in and join them, Autumn. He’s been talking about nothing else ever since he met you both. He can’t wait to spend some time with you. I’m feeling much better. Honestly. I might sleep for a while.’

  Autumn bent and touched her lips to Edith’s sweating forehead. She closed her eyes and held her lips against the cool skin for a long moment, then slowly straightened, a faint taste of salt and something of animal decay on her mouth.

  The two women held each other’s gaze. Neither spoke.

  A faint imprint of Autumn’s lipstick on Edith’s forehead reminded Autumn of the pinkish export stamp on New Zealand legs of lamb. She said, ‘Well,’ with the sense that everything between them was inconclusive. She took her hand from Edith’s and pressed her freed palm on the sheet where the bed had been roughly turned back at Edith’s side. She looked at her hand pressing into the used and rumpled bedding, and she thought of Pat’s boyish body lying there naked. ‘I’ll come in and see you again a bit later,’ she said, and patted the bed and stood up. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ The drone of the trapped fly ceased suddenly, as if it listened, expecting imminent rescue or death.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind closing the door when you go out,’ Edith said.

  Autumn gave Edith’s hand a little pat then she turned and went out of the bedroom and closed the door. She stood with her back to the closed door and gathered her thoughts. She could not help feeling pleased that Edith was too unwell to join them. She wiped her lips with her handkerchief and walked down the passage to the studio, the drone of the fly’s death struggle in her head, the dark of the sickroom behind her, the sourness of Edith’s skin persisting on her mouth. Her throat was dry. She needed a drink.
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  In the studio the two men were leaning together over Pat’s work table. There was no sun but the room was bright and filled with signs of life and work, paintings and drawings piled against the far wall and pinned to the plaster. Both men looked at her as she came into the studio. A bottle of champagne and an empty glass stood on the work table. Arthur poured champagne into the empty glass and handed it to Autumn. ‘How’s Edith?’

  Autumn looked at Pat. ‘She’s going to sleep for a while.’ She drank the champagne.

  Arthur refilled Pat’s glass then his own. Pat drained his glass in one go and set it down on the table. He watched Autumn examining his painting.

  She put down her glass beside his and picked up the square of cardboard and held it to the light from the window. It was Pat’s boot polish and house paint abstract of what might have been a squashed chocolate layer cake, or perhaps a mood of despair.

  Pat said, ‘It’s no good.’ He laughed. ‘It’s nothing.’ There was something of nervousness and aggression in him.

  ‘I can’t say whether it’s good or not,’ Autumn said coolly. ‘But everything you do is disconcerting.’ She looked at him. He shrugged and looked away. She put the painting down on the table. She didn’t like it. ‘I’ve no idea what to think of it. Except that it’s utterly different from anything else I’ve seen.’ She turned to Arthur. ‘We should put it in the show and see what the public have to say about it.’