Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  We left it at that for the time being. Was he thinking of having been done out of children by my condition? This often worried me. My barren condition was itself the result of my youthful search for a kind of wild mythical freedom that does not exist, mistaking at seventeen the idea of free sex for something far more substantial and elusive. Particularly, I knew, Arthur regretted not being able to have a son. I can’t say how I knew he was thinking of this at the time, I just knew it. And knowing it froze something in me. There was no obvious sign, and of course he didn’t say anything about it. If we had not concealed our true feelings from each other that evening, we might have had our big row and got it over and done with. Or is this too simple? I fear it may be. The big row, after all, was as dangerous for him as it was for me. We never had it. Its potential, like nuclear weapons, was useful as a deterrent. To have resorted to it would have left the survivor with little to celebrate. Was it our mistake to have secret lives? I know I should believe this, but I can’t make myself regret what we did. The open and the concealed. The concealed leaking dangerously into the open, like a levee bank beginning to give way and threatening to drown the entire town when the pressure of the flood outside becomes too great.

  Arthur drove the Ponty into Melbourne the following Friday. The people at Martin and King took him for a drive around Albert Park Lake. One mechanic (were they mechanics or something else?) stuck his head under the dashboard and the other drove at over a hundred miles an hour. When they were unable to detect the rattle, as Arthur was now calling it, they drove the car at various speeds and changed drivers and listened again. They said that whatever it was, it must have righted itself. Their joint conclusion (and it annoyed Arthur that they stuck together on this) was that something, a piece of wire or a twig, had probably lodged in the chassis during the drive home from Ocean Grove in all that rain and that it had been dislodged during the high-speed circuit of the lake.

  On Arthur’s way home it began again; ticker-ticker-ticker.

  He was sitting up in bed beside me (we only spent the one night sleeping apart) trying to read his Wilenski, which he was making rather a labour of. He said, evidently speaking out of a conversation he had been having with himself, ‘It’s quite clear.’ He was being comically earnest and I was glad I was able to shield my expression from him with my book. He turned to me. ‘Will you come for a drive with me in the morning and tell me what you make of it?’

  I said, ‘If it would help, darling, of course.’

  ‘I don’t think they believed me,’ he said miserably. He was like a little boy and was hating the difference that had arisen between himself and the craftsmen he so admired at Martin and King. I believe he had managed to convince himself that this was the principal cause of his unhappiness at that time. He was determined to resolve it. He respected them and wanted to know that they respected him in turn. Otherwise it wasn’t fair. And Arthur liked things to be fair. Despite his loathing of the daily practice of the law, justice in all things was Arthur’s guiding principle throughout his life. Justice and decency. Arthur was a good man.

  ‘Their explanation sounded reasonable to me,’ I said, as lightly as I was able. I would have much preferred to have read my book but was determined to be helpful. ‘Perhaps another stick has got caught up in the same place,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe you should take it in to the dealers and have them check the chassis and the motor?’ I was not so dumb as not to know the difference between bodywork and chassis and motor, was I? So there.

  The dealers were unable to find anything amiss and a week or two after they had looked at it Arthur declared that the ticker-ticker-ticker had deepened and become a much larger jagger-jagger-jagger. ‘It’s impossible to ignore.’ He was alienated now from the dealers and their mechanics as well as the craftsmen at Martin and King. The whole business with the car demoralised him. He had no way of stepping back from it and laughing at it and his own earnest obsession with it. It had caught him. That it was really something to do with his manhood was obvious to me. He was a man, after all. A surrogate problem, I thought it was. That it was not the real, the deeper, cause of his unhappiness only made it more impossible for him to deny its reality. He was stuck with it. And he couldn’t let go of it. Which is perhaps not surprising. Men cling to these obsessive illusions in the hope they will be saved. But they never are saved by them. The truth remains suspended beneath such surrogate problems like a gondola beneath a hot-air balloon. And sooner or later the whole thing must come down. Men probably know this and it is no doubt this knowledge that makes them cling the more strongly to the illusion that they are sailing aloft when in fact they are sinking into the depths. Pressed to a severe enough desperation, men kill (often their own loved ones) to keep their precious balloon aloft a little longer. All extremes are possible and all have been tried by them. Is there any truth, indeed, no matter how humane and sacred, that has stood in the end against a sufficiently persuasive rationalisation of men under pressure? I had no fear that Arthur would become a killer. But I did fear he might have some kind of breakdown if this thing went on indefinitely.

  I soon ceased to laugh, even secretly, at his silliness. I felt sorry for him. I had been persuaded by then that it was serious. ‘Take it in to them again,’ I said, and I stroked his hand. ‘Before something falls off.’ I hardly dared to think what it might be that could fall off. It was his car’s bodywork, its perfection, after all, not his own that was in danger of falling apart. Wasn’t it? I had been unable to hear the first ticker-ticker sound but had not had the nerve to tell him so. There might just possibly have been something, I didn’t know engine sounds well enough to be certain, so I said yes, I heard it, but that it sounded rather too slight to worry about. Now I was being told it was not slight but major. Would I listen again? I did so, reluctantly, but heard nothing to alarm me. When I said I heard something like a ticking and attempted to mimic it he responded scornfully, ‘That’s the bloody tappets, for Christ’s sake!’

  Arthur, unlike the rest of us, didn’t usually swear. Not even mildly. I had never heard, or heard of, tappets before this so far as I knew, but now that I was listening seriously I was able to hear all sorts of things, and after an hour of driving around I became quite confused by the medley of peculiar noises coming from the car. I might have pointed to any one of them. Apparently expert mechanics can ‘see’ inside the engine of a car by listening to the sounds it makes when it is running. The engine of the Ponty, indeed the entire organism of the car, spoke a language of its own. Cars like whales in the ocean depths, clicking and whining and howling to each other across the vastness. I’ve never been very convincing in my attempts at anthropomorphism. It is all just meaningless noise, I think.

  But was I hearing his sound or not, Arthur wanted to know. His tone by now was edged with anger and frustration. Was I deaf, or daft, or what? Why couldn’t I say something useful? Bloody women! Indeed.

  I leaned closer to the dashboard. What was I hearing? There were bound to be other things than tappets that I had no knowledge of. I said I wasn’t sure. He very nearly drove off the mountain in his desperation to get me to identify his big jagger-jagger sound. Of course we both knew it was a lost cause, but we were prevented from telling each other this in a nice friendly mild way by the hidden lives we had begun to live, which depended for their conviction on being kept hidden. They could be managed no other way.

  The tension between us was hideous. I could hardly stand it and was on the point of insisting he stop the car and let me out when a lorry drove up close behind us and began tooting repeatedly. Arthur pulled over to the side of the road and as the lorry went past the driver screamed a string of obscenities at us. Arthur sat leaning on the wheel with his head in his hands. I massaged his neck, which was hard as wood, and almost said to him, It’s all right, darling, you can relax now. I’m not in love with Pat Donlon.

  But I didn’t say that, did I? We don’t, do we? Even if it were true, and I didn’t know if it were true or not, I could
n’t have said it. No one had said I was in love with Pat Donlon. So what would I have been doing denying it? No, for the double life there is always a double bind that requires our silence. Until the great break-out, that is, until the day the prisoners of silence have had enough and set fire to their prison. The night it all burns down and the next morning there is nothing left but smoking ashes. We’ve seen that. We know what that is. The conflagration of the secret life.

  Some great man once said everything is either symbol or parable. Maybe it was Paul Claudel who said it. How good is my memory! I stroked Arthur’s hand and suggested he see Dr Hopman (it was before the days of Andrew) about getting some sleeping pills. He said he might. We lay down together and had a cuddle, my cotton nightgown and his fleecy pyjamas between us. And it was no more than a cuddle. Though I’m sure he would have been happy if I’d encouraged him a little further. He was asleep before me.

  I dreamed something that night that impressed me for weeks. I even wrote it down somewhere, but I can’t remember what it was now or where I wrote it. Adeli will find it on a slip of paper one of these days. Unless I wrote it in one of my burned diaries. Why is it I can remember something Paul Claudel said and I can’t remember my grand dreams of old? I shan’t be around much longer, thank God, to trouble myself with this kind of question.

  It was a problem for me at the time that Arthur never mentioned the Ponty noise when any of the others was around. I confided in Freddy, but he said unless Arthur spoke to him directly he couldn’t very well bring up the subject. There was nothing much wrong with hearing noises, he said. ‘It’s when you’re hearing voices telling you to do things you would not normally want to do that it’s time to get concerned.’ He thought Arthur was looking well and said there was nothing seriously the matter with him. ‘My patients are really sick people. Arthur is just a bit confused. He’ll get over it.’

  I was not so sure. I said to Freddy, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seriously thought I would lose Arthur, but I fear it more than anything. I know I wouldn’t be able to manage without him.’ Freddy listened. He was good at listening and playing the piano. ‘I called Edith’s painting muck,’ I said. ‘When we first arrived at their place in Ocean Grove, before I went in to sit with Edith. Arthur had started praising it extravagantly to Pat. Brown muck, I said, to be exact. The brown muck of the dead school of painters. Arthur was offended. Pat thought it was amusing.’ I was silent a minute, Freddy watching me and smiling a little. ‘I’m sure Arthur could find someone much nicer than me if he decided to look.’

  Freddy agreed that it wouldn’t be a difficult thing for Arthur to do. We were sitting by the river. Not on the log, but next to it on the couch grass under the wattles. On hot summer days it was ten degrees cooler there by the water than it was in the house. I swam naked with Freddy looking on. I loved the delicious feel of the sweet water over my skin and Freddy’s admiring gaze on my body. I’d heard nothing from Pat and I hadn’t tried to contact him. More than a month had gone by since our visit. But I thought of him at some point every day.

  Nothing had come of our plans to buy the gallery space in Flinders Lane. None of Arthur’s business contacts thought the idea interesting enough to back it. But I wanted to give Arthur something to occupy his energies that would hopefully displace his obsession with the Pontiac, and I convinced him we should sponsor an exhibition of the works of a wide circle of Melbourne modernists in another gallery space that was to let in Collins Street. We would not need to buy this place but could rent it for a season. It was a more manageable plan and the others were keen on it. When I suggested I might contribute some of my early watercolours I was met with the usual resistance from the men. They were happy for me to do the organising and for Arthur and I to meet the expense of the whole thing, but they feared they would invoke the taint of amateurism if they were to show their work alongside that of a woman. I knew they were thinking something along the lines of, Why can’t Autumn be satisfied just to manage the show and leave the art to us? They wanted to be the creative stars, and for me to be their impresario. It was an attitude that was eventually to wear me down and leave me feeling ungenerous towards them. Most of them eventually made their way to Paris or to the Slade in London or found their vocations in something other than art.

  Anne Collins was exempt from the charge of amateurism. She was such a brilliant draftswoman it placed her works beyond conventional criticism. She was also well connected socially, and her pen-and-wash drawings of notable people and places were universally admired, in Sydney as well as Melbourne. She was the only one of us to remain untouched by the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, whereby if your work was acclaimed in Sydney, then Melbourne scorned to comment on it, and vice versa. Anne’s work was highly skilled and clever but her drawings did not interest me. They challenged nothing of our ideas of what art might become for us but reaffirmed, with uncanny accuracy, what it already was. They did not make us uncomfortable or puzzle us, but simply made us all feel good about ourselves. She put me in mind of an obedient and gifted senior student who has set out to delight and gratify her awed professors. Anne always had an agenda to be served in whatever she did. Nothing with her was ever intuitive. She wasn’t beautiful but men were attracted to her. They were drawn to her. They listened to her with respect. I saw her a number of times in her one-piece black swimsuit (Italian, I suppose, then), her white legs bony and unlovely, her back pimpled. I could not understand the fascination she held for serious and intelligent men. Arthur thought she was the real thing. She and I were never close. I wonder why?

  Distracting Arthur from his Ponty obsession wasn’t my only motive for wanting to mount a show in town. It was a little more complicated than that for me. Anne Collins, Louis de Vries, Arthur and I, with Barnaby roaming around in the garden whistling opera, Freddy as our silent witness (happily suckling at the breast of his first love, his doom, his death, a melancholy smile in his beautiful eyes) and our captive Central European, Boris Karabashliev, were lunching in the garden to discuss our strategy for the show. The members of our immediate group of friends each had his or her own circle of artist friends and hangers-on and collaborators, and they in turn had their own circles beyond that. My intention was for us to draw on the widest possible array of such people, people who would have an interest in our venture and be inclined to support it. Most of them would be brought together for the first time by our show. It was a grand plan.

  There was a feeling of excitement between us at the lunch table that afternoon. Louis in particular seemed to believe himself present at the birth of a new movement, of which he was to be a member of the founding nucleus. I was excited for other reasons and had no such alarmingly grandiose dreams. And of course nothing of that sort ever happened. Louis was eventually to lose himself somewhere in South America, searching for fresh inspiration—or perhaps it was drugs he was after? I can’t remember. Perhaps I never knew. At the time of our lunch his work had recently enjoyed some early favourable notice and as a result he had felt encouraged to believe there would be no limit to the eventual exercise of his refined genius. Although it was a warm day, he was wearing his usual black velvet outfit with a wide-brimmed floppy hat and deep purple bow tie against his black silk shirt. Louis was fond of affirming, If you’re going to be a great artist (such as himself), then you may as well dress the part. His motto was, Why be modest? What is the point of pretending to be someone you are not?

  There is a photograph of us. I suppose Barnaby took it, as he is not in it. We were at our most self-congratulatory. Each of us looking anxiously at the camera, projecting our sense of the importance for posterity of the occasion, posturing. All of us now forgotten. I was sure of not meeting with any resistance when I said, as if the idea had occurred to me only that minute, ‘You know, we should let Pat Donlon in on this show. His work startles and puzzles everyone who sees it.’ My throat thickened when I said Pat’s name and I feared I had betrayed myself. Freddy allowed himself a private smile.


  Arthur said mildly, ‘If we’re going to do that, then Pat must meet everyone first. What do you say?’ Louis and Anne both said they were eager to meet Pat. Freddy remained silent. As did Boris. Boris was a butterball of a man. His nickname was Mr Sheen. He rarely spoke unless he had something to say, then he was inclined to deliver a lecture to us poor benighted antipodeans. He was sure we understood nothing of the international life of art, and he was probably right.

  Arthur looked at me and said easily, ‘Why don’t we invite them both up for a weekend, darling, and get everyone together over here on the Saturday afternoon?’

  I was soon to discover that while I was a competent manager, I did not possess the instincts of a social tactician; those skills (if skills is what they are) of forming alliances and driving wedges between rivals, and so on. I lacked the ruthless calculation for it. It wasn’t the way I saw things. I don’t see them that way now. I had not counted on having to deal with the circling menace of sensitive male egos, last-minute withdrawals, betrayals, counter-cliques and vicious gossip. It was all part of the deal I was taking on but I didn’t know it. That afternoon in the garden, drinking and talking, I wasn’t thinking about tactics. I thought I had been very clever in clothing my deeper motive in such a plausible disguise. I was even momentarily able to convince myself that the show was the main idea behind all this.