Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  Edith said, ‘You look very tired, Arthur.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. It’s kind of you to notice. My car has been misbehaving. But look here. I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear any of this. My troubles are nothing, are they? When you compare them to the troubles of some people. The thing is, I don’t have the pleasure of driving any more. It was one of my very few private pleasures. I don’t think Autumn quite realises. But I mustn’t criticise Autumn. It is Autumn who has made sense of my pointless life for me.’ He knew he was rabbiting on in case, if he permitted a silence, Edith asked him about her picture. Why couldn’t he just tell her about her picture? Why not sit her down and explain the whole thing to this intelligent young woman? Like a physician explaining the disease you have contracted through no fault of your own. A good bedside manner required for that. And if the patient weeps, you comfort them. Simple really. Surely she would understand? You see, my dear, it’s like this: Autumn and I had a nasty row. Autumn can be terrible when she is aroused. She hit me several times. Or would have hit me if I hadn’t held her wrists and prevented her from hitting me. Don’t ask me what the row was about. I can’t remember what it was about. Everything and nothing, I suppose. The usual thing. It was the night we drove home from our picnic with you at Ocean Grove. Not that it was much of a picnic, was it? It was that same night that my car began to rattle. Troubles never come singly, do they? Troubles band together, my father used to say. I had the purest trust in my car till then. Now it is not possible for me to have confidence in it. It is like a dear cherished friend who has betrayed me. I dread getting behind the wheel and driving out the gate. I know the rattle will begin as soon as we are on the road. It is so unfair.

  But no, he could not revert to memories of that night drive or their so-called picnic. That could not be done. Why are our lives, he wondered with a sense of futility, these forts in the wilderness, each palisaded with spikes to defend its silly little secrets and repel the larger truth of the wilderness? Why can’t we be open? He decided to get rid of the ‘forts in the wilderness’ idea. Why can’t we just tell each other the truth, in other words, and be done with it? And if the truth upsets us then we can have a cuddle afterwards and confess our stupidities? He might write something about this dilemma; the general dilemma, that is, of truth and its difficulty. Not the specific one of why he couldn’t tell Edith the truth about how her picture came to be up in the loft of the coach house …

  Edith said, ‘I think I can hear them coming. Or someone.’ She couldn’t hear them or anyone else coming but she said she could because the sound of Arthur’s voice was like someone sawing her head in half.

  They went out to the kitchen and he rattled the Rayburn and put some sticks in the firebox, not noticing there was no fire, and he set a full kettle of water on the cold hotplate. He was surprised by how heavy the kettle was. His admiration for Autumn knew no limits. She was astonishing. She ran the house like a machine. No, like a friend. A dear close good friend whom she loved and who loved her in turn. The things she did! He did not know the half of them. He went over and stood beside Edith. He hoped his presence was a comfort to her. Poor girl.

  Edith was standing at the back door looking down the slope of the garden. A thin band of grey and yellow light peered back at her through the forest beyond the river—the evil squint of a yellow-eyed cat.

  ‘There, that’s done,’ Arthur said. ‘She’ll be boiling in no time and we can sit down and have a nice cup of tea.’ He wanted another whisky but felt the moment was not quite right for it. He had noticed that Edith did not drink and he didn’t want to risk disappointing her. She would have no confidence in him if she got the idea he was a drunk. Any more sudden rattles starting up in his life might be the last straw. He took a deep breath and blew it out. Everything was going to be all right. Wasn’t it? Of course it was. Things always work out. Surprises, that’s all. Life with Autumn was full of surprises. He put his arm across Edith’s shoulders and gave her a small squeeze. He felt her stiffen and realised he had given her the wrong impression. She had large breasts. Well shaped and firm. Generous breasts. European. Was that it? Lovely. Autumn’s chest was like the country beyond the Grampians, flat as a tack. But she had very good nipples. He went, ‘Hmm,’ and removed his arm from across Edith’s shoulders.

  Edith eased away a little. She didn’t mind his arm but his breath was sour. The garden was so still and so silent in the grey dawnlight. It was eerie and it repelled her, as if there was no one out there and had never been anyone out there. And why were there no birds at this time of the morning? She had liked Barnaby, but this place seemed evil to her. Yes, evil. As if a spell had been cast over it, and the people who gathered here were trapped in an invisible web of disdain for the rest of humankind, bewitched by their own way of talking and their vain egotism. Unaware of the trap that held them. Their supercilious contempt for artists like her grandfather had embarrassed her, but she had said nothing. What was the point of arguing with such people? They held their own narrow hateful view of art and life and excluded everything else from their field of vision. How would her arguments change them or make them reconsider their views? They were like the flies with their legs caught in the sticky paper that Mrs Kemp hung from the light flex above the big table in the kitchen at the farm. They were stuck and that was that. No fly had ever escaped Mrs Kemp’s sticky paper. Just as these people had no hope of escaping the evil spell of their prejudices. Wasn’t the aim of art to be free of prejudice? Such had been her grandfather’s view. The cosmopolitan man and woman, he said, are liberated from prejudice. In reality the opposite was true. But he had made the world of art seem large and generous and warm, embracing all the strong and good feelings of what it is to be human. These people engendered an atmosphere of a kind of yellow sickness. When George’s drunken gaze had settled on her breasts a shiver had passed through her. It was as if he had touched her insides. His eyes frightened her.

  She had been terrified all day, in fact, that Arthur was going to bring out her painting and show it to them, or that he was going to announce to them that she too was an artist. She was grateful to him that he’d had the grace to do neither of these things, and also had not hung her picture somewhere in a prominent position where they would have all seen it and felt compelled to rubbish it in their sophisticated way, while making it sound as if they were praising it. If he had shown her painting to them she didn’t know how she would have managed the situation without telling them the truth of what she thought of them. She knew she would have had the courage for that if she had been pressed. But Arthur was not quite as they were. He wanted to be more human and more relaxed and was not out to make a big impression on everyone. He was like one of the flies she had watched in horrified fascination as a child, he was still struggling a bit. His weak struggling made his life seem futile to her, and he seemed to know this futility in himself and to acknowledge it with her in a silent way that they both knew they would not be able to talk about openly—mainly because to have done so would have been to betray Autumn. Edith had sensed this already at Ocean Grove when they had had their talk while Autumn and Pat were at the beach. Arthur was trapped too, but he was still trying to attract the sympathies of outsiders like herself, as if he thought there might be a chance of being rescued. She knew she was right about this. For the others, art and life were the conditions of a kind of war that preoccupied them to the exclusion of everything else (including the real war that would soon be upon them). This meeting in the house was not really a gathering of friends, with all the strangeness and surprise that friendships have, but was a meeting of a clan with its own secret signs and codes. She was glad she had not been present in the kitchen when Pat had his disagreement with them. She enacted in her mind now how she would have stood behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders and looked her defiance at them boldly. Pat was worth more than all of them put together.

  She wished they had never come here. And she could not wait to be gone. The moment
they were alone she would take his hands in hers and tell him, We must never come back here, ever again. It will change you if you go on knowing these people. You will become like them. Their influence will hold you. Would she use the metaphor of Mrs Kemp’s fly paper in the service of her argument? Perhaps not. We can do this on our own, would be a better thing to say. Thankfully Pat had recovered from his obsession with the solitary ideals of Rimbaud, but he still liked to think they could do things on their own and without the charity of others. She felt suddenly dizzy and reached for the doorjamb to steady herself.

  Arthur said with concern, ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ His hand tentatively extended towards her shoulder, but he did not quite touch her. He felt she had asked him not to touch her. She had rebuked him. He liked her and felt sad for her and for himself and he did not know why he should feel this sadness. Perhaps he was just exhausted. The long night had drained his spirits.

  ‘I’ll have to go and lie down,’ she said. She thought she was going to be sick. She turned and walked away from the door and the night and the garden of death. Once she was in the bedroom she could no longer hold back her tears. She climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up close around her and closed her eyes. When she stopped crying she said a prayer to the old god of her childhood, murmuring it aloud as she had done then, ‘Please God, make everything be all right.’ Just as if she was a little girl again in her bed at home on the farm or at her mother’s house in Brighton when something was going wrong, when there had been no rain and the grazing had failed, or when her mother and father had an argument. And she thought of her dear grandfather and saw herself pressed against his coat in the library at Brighton, his smell of Erinmore tobacco, his hand guiding her hand safely across the Great Southern Ocean to the shores of Australia. There we are, the two of us. See us? I can. ‘Dear God, please make everything all right.’

  She must have gone to sleep. She opened her eyes. The door was opening slowly. She watched through slitted lids. Pat crept in and turned and closed the door, holding the knob with one hand and easing the door to with the other. He wasn’t wearing his singlet. The room was filled with a grey light and she could see his features contorted with the effort to be silent. When he turned towards her she closed her eyes. She heard him taking off his shorts, the soft hush of material against his flesh. The next minute he was easing himself into the bed beside her. Now she smelled the sour river water on him and knew it must be her she smelled.

  He lay still beside her. She waited, hardly daring to breathe. If he went to sleep she would wake him and ask him. She could not hear his breathing and thought he must be breathing with his mouth open. She could smell his fear. The sourness of his body. She waited. Slowly the room grew lighter. She heard a shout and something being banged or struck a number of times in another part of the house. Then silence. She was sweating. She waited. She felt Pat ease his limbs.

  She said, ‘Did you make love to her?’

  His silence screamed in her head like her brothers at the bench-saw, cutting wood for the winter fires. She waited, her heart pounding. She felt her baby stir. She waited for Pat to deny it. It was light now. Pat said nothing.

  She pushed the bedclothes off her and felt for her slippers. She stood up and went over to the door.

  He said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To call Dad.’ She went out and closed the door. In the passage she picked up the telephone and dialled their Brighton number. Her brother Phillip answered immediately. ‘Dad’s up at the farm,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and pick you up, Sis. Did he hit you?’

  She said she would get a lift to the railway station and he should meet her there. She put the phone down and turned and saw Arthur silhouetted against the morning sky at the far end of the passage. She asked him to take her to the station. ‘I’ll wait there for my brother.’

  She went back into the bedroom and put her clothes on and packed her few things in her bag. Pat lay watching her. He did not ask her to forgive him. She knew he had been weeping. She did not say goodbye when she went out the door with her bag and she did not look around.

  At the station she sat on a bench under the awning and waited for Phillip’s green and red International to come around the corner at the top of the incline. When they were reading Grote’s History of Greece in her senior years at school she had begun to address her letters to him as Phillip of Macedon. ‘You are my hero,’ she wrote, ‘oh noble son of Amyntas.’ And such like. It was a game. But it was a true game. She knew Phillip would come and rescue her if she was ever in trouble. He was ten years older than her. There was a photograph in the sitting room at the Brighton house of him holding her in his arms when she was newly born, a look of pride and exquisite delight on his face, his joy and responsibility to have a little sister to champion.

  Arthur had tried to insist on waiting with her until Phillip arrived, but she told him to leave. ‘It will be better if my brother doesn’t meet you.’ She was sorry to see that Arthur seemed to take this as a personal rebuff, which it was not. She felt sorry for him. He seemed like a very sad man to her. She could not think of what had happened. She knew she was crushed. Something was holding her together. People would call it courage.

  She waited, watching the people coming and going across the station forecourt. Frowning mothers with prams, their older children at their heels or holding the pram handle. Fathers striding ahead, gripping a boy or girl’s hand, and calling to their families to hurry up or they would miss the train. Old people who could hardly move faster than a snail, their legs caught in the sticky paper of life’s end. She watched them and she didn’t watch them. She saw them and she did not see them. She had been buried alive beneath the cold earth. Her womb was still. Her baby dared not move for fear it would bring about the end. She did not weep. She no longer prayed. She waited. She had lost him. It was the end.

  PART

  three

  15

  Retribution

  PAT WALKED UP THE LAST PINCH OF THE GRAVEL TRACK CARRYING his bag. Gerner was on the hill above him with his dogs. The old man was calling and waving, his hands going about wildly in the air, the dogs howling and straining at their leashes. Stuck up there in his wheelchair, Pat thought. He raised his hand in a greeting to the old man and kept going. Lonely old bugger, he was always wanting something. The yellow oxalis was flowering again. Wasn’t it flowering all the time? Or did it have a season? He had taken no notice. If Helen Carlyon had not given him Arthur’s card that day and he had not gone to Arthur’s office as a last resort but had caught the train to Geelong, none of this would have happened. If he’d spent the rest of his ten bob at the pub that day he would have been better off. You made the right choice and finished up in the shit. You made the wrong choice and came out smelling sweet. You could never tell which way it was going to go. Planning was not enough to determine destiny.

  He saw them before they saw him and stopped on the track. He said, ‘Shit!’ He knew who they were. There was a pile of stuff burning in the front garden, the spade still sticking in the ground beside the fire, more or less where he’d left it last spring. Their truck was parked on the sidling to the right of the gate. A flat top. One of them was tying something onto the tray body of the truck, throwing the rope over and going around to tie it off at the cleats on the other side. Pat watched him. It was the younger one, Euan. A weird name for a weird bloke. The nasty sod. Pat’s stomach knotted with fear. The other one, Phillip—the older one, Edith’s favourite—would be in the house for sure. He realised Gerner had been trying to warn him. He could turn around now and walk back down the track and no one would be any the wiser. He would not even need to make a run for it. Just walk away. He wondered how bad it was going to be. It’s my house, he thought, resenting them. The bastards are in my house. He knew she wasn’t there. She would be at the farm in Bairnsdale with her mother by now. He could feel her up there in that big cool house with the veranda looking out over the valley, the river glinting here and ther
e in the distance through the trees, that range of hills, cattle all facing in the same direction in the paddocks, heads down, feeding forward as if they had been trained to it. He could see Edith sitting on the veranda with her mother, having a cup of tea and telling the story of being betrayed by the little Irish bastard they had all warned her against.

  He went on towards the gate. His legs were weak and shivery. He drew in a couple of breaths. The brother at the truck was out of sight now. Pat went on through the gate. It was a pity he couldn’t close the gate properly and tie it shut. It would have given him that extra bit of time. Phillip was the one he might be able to talk some sense into. This other one was not a talker. He went over to the fire and looked at what they were burning. His pictures and books and some bedding and clothes. His best trousers. He could smell the kerosene they’d doused it with. Father Brennan’s book of the sagas was face up, burning. He thought of Njál’s house burning around him, his wife refusing at the last minute to plait him a new string for his bow. He felt sick to see the book go. There was no use trying to rake it out with the spade.