by Alex Miller
‘You might have waited a minute,’ I said.
‘Sorry.’
While I was in my delirium, imagining us to be at one, he had apparently been thinking about Barnaby and the bush.
‘Sorry,’ he said again. But he was quite cheerful about it and not the least bit contrite. He lay there with his arms behind his head and his nakedness presented to me. ‘Do you think he really would take me up there, though?’
I tottered, trying to put my sandals on, and had to sit on the edge of the bed. I didn’t want to be touched. Pat sat up and put his arm around me and kissed my cheek.
I said, ‘You never know what Barnaby will do and what he won’t do.’ I stood up and moved to the mirror and combed my hair out with my fingers.
Pat said, ‘So what’s the big hurry? What’s all this about? Don’t tell me you’re jealous of Barney? Jesus! What a thought.’ He laughed and reached for his trousers and felt around for his cigarettes.
‘My hurry?’ I said icily. ‘I have to put in my orders for the week, Pat. If I don’t phone before lunch there will be nothing for your dinner tomorrow night. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
Was this our first disagreement? It is the first I recall. It left a distracting stain on the way things were between us. For a few minutes I had been capable of hating him. When we made love after that I was wondering if he was as deeply lost with me as I was with him, or if he was thinking about something else. It defeated things a bit. We both noticed it, but neither of us was able to be honest with the other one about it, so it stayed with us and I began to fear it each time we were together.
When Barnaby was in Melbourne he had a flat above a pub in Swanston Street, and when he was up the river near us he rented an old cottage overlooking a tight elbow of the Yarra. Barnaby was in and out and about the place all the time. You never knew when he was going to turn up, or with whom. He had nothing to say about me and Pat. It was all part of life in the theatre, as he called it, the daily dance and drama of things. Barnaby was not burdened with uncertainties or longings about family life. He loved his parents but adored his liberty and enjoyed it without a bad conscience.
It was not long after this that Barnaby started taking Pat into the city with him and introducing him to his friends in the wine bars. I hated this. When I asked Pat what they did and who they met on these excursions he said, Not much at all, just having a drink and a laugh with some of the fellers. He said I could go with them if I wanted to. But I knew he didn’t mean it, and anyway I loathed those places, the basements along Swanston Street and in back alleys (Barnaby said he remembered seeing Pat and Edith in the Swanston Family Hotel but Pat did not recall ever seeing him there). To me those so-called bohemian dives were sleazy and depressing places patronised by make-believe people who would never accomplish anything, rings of despair in their drunken laughter, the comfort of helplessness in each other’s company. Barnaby loved all that stuff. He was not its victim but liked to observe it. George was a regular at one of the bars and was more a victim of the cult of drink and noise and the seduction of young girls. George was oppressed by the white man’s Christian preoccupation with good and evil and couldn’t really enjoy the freedoms he required from life. His was a bitter struggle against the dark. He became very successful and his paintings are still greatly valued. It was the urban landscape, never the bush, that fascinated George’s eye. The glitter and fascination of decadence. He lived it deeply and knew first-hand what grossness was. His work carried the stamp of authenticity.
Pat and Barnaby were always very late getting back from these expeditions. Barnaby would drop Pat off here in the early hours of the morning. Most often Pat was drunk and noisy getting in. Arthur and I would lie awake listening to him bumping around before he finally fell into bed and settled. Our home was no longer the private haven of our dreams it had once been.
When Pat was in town with Barnaby, and Arthur and I were having our dinner alone, I was hardly able to speak a word or swallow a mouthful of food for the sickening anxiety and jealousy that engulfed me.
Arthur said to me cheerily (cheerily!) at the table one evening, ‘It’s like old times, darling. Just the two of us.’ It was impossible for me even to pretend to agree with this. Old times were gone and were never coming back. And this was not like them. He had never asked me outright if Pat and I were lovers. But I knew he knew. How could he not have known? Nothing was said. It was unsayable. To have said it would have destroyed us. Like the surprise of the Aborigines when they saw Charley coming through their country with a mob of horses. There are many ways in which life can be unspeakable. It can’t all be reduced to words. And the best of the poets have always known this. It is the legions of lesser poets who think otherwise. I was grateful to Arthur for his silence, but his silence was not enough.
The worst of it was, I had stopped being able to talk to Freddy. He was no longer my confessor. There was no one to whom I could tell my private joys and terrors. He did not approve and did not want to hear what I wanted to tell him. Whenever he came to see me, which was less and less often, he and I sat and drank and smoked and looked out the window or leafed through a magazine together, or we walked arm in arm down to the river as we used to. But it was as it used to be only in appearance. While we walked I was thinking of Pat, and Freddy was feeling me thinking of Pat. He did not like what we were doing and saw disaster in it for me and Arthur, his friends. He soon made some excuse and left. It was horrible. He kissed my cheek at the door and got into his car and saluted me sadly and drove away, and I went to my room and wept for the friendship that was no more. The day would come when Freddy and I would regain our trust, but by then we were different people and the source of our joy was soured and buckled out of its former shape and had become something else. We would never have the original thing again. By then he was suffering from his alcoholism and I had become a survivor who believed herself to have been betrayed. Though I did not know we were to regain our friendship, I was not mistaken to mourn what I had lost with Freddy.
I asked Pat if he was staying out of Freddy’s way on purpose. He said he wasn’t, but I knew he was. ‘Freddy likes to talk to you on your own and I’m happy reading,’ he said. None of it seemed to trouble Pat. He sailed in clearer airs than I. And there were times when I hated him for this and was alienated from him because of it. Times when I could have torn the book out of his hands and ripped it apart and thrown the pieces in his face and screamed at him, Why must you read all the time! Don’t you ever notice other people’s pain? I think he would have laughed at me if I had done this. Laughed, then made love to me. And I would not have resisted him but would have wept with helpless fury.
I went to the library to look for him one morning, determined to distract him from his reading. The day was pure and light and still, cleansed of its sins after days of darkness and rain, the roar of the river was the welcome sound of a new beginning. I was going to suggest he join me in the garden and help me pick the peas for dinner. It was an innocent thought. Something simple and good that he and I might do together. Pat did not see the beauty of Old Farm as I saw it. I wanted him to know it at its best, in its clearest light, in its strongest mood. It was always the river that determined the strength of this place. When the river was in drought the bush became quiet and still and refused to grow and just waited. I longed to share with Pat my enthusiasm and love for my home. Which was foolish and wrong-headed. My home was Arthur’s and mine. It could never belong to Pat in the way it belonged to us. Pat did not want to see it as I saw it. But I ignored all that.
He was in the library day after day and night after night, breathing his own stale cigarette smoke, his nose buried in those old books of last century that had belonged to Arthur’s father. He did no drawing. He never painted. He never spoke about art or his ambition to make it. I knew it was still with him. Down there simmering quietly in the stones of his being, and that he was in there with it, the door firmly closed. He never once cam
e out into the garden and asked me what I was doing, or stood and looked in wonder at the day. He showed no interest in anything except Arthur’s father’s old books. He ate, he made love, he slept. And he read. And when Barnaby asked him if he would like to go into town he went with him, and drank and played up, I suppose.
I had begun to feel that I was being used. I resisted this feeling and hated it. But it persisted and there grew in me an unexpressed fury that I needed to do something about. I needed to find for myself a patch of the clear air in which Pat sailed. But I couldn’t. My life was not like his. My life would never be like his. I refused to see it. I would not accept these things. I mistook my defiance, my obstinacy, for intelligence and determination. Why must I be responsible for everything and he responsible for nothing? We never mentioned Edith.
When I went into the library Pat did not look up from his book to see who had come into the room but went on reading, his lips quivering, murmuring his approval. I thought of a dog following a scent through the bush, going this way then that, turning back on itself, then darting forward again, deaf to the whistles and shouts of its master. I stood watching him a while and was about to leave when I decided instead to sit on the sofa across from him and see how long it would be before he acknowledged my presence.
I sat down and folded my arms and watched him. I may as well have waited for the moon to speak to me. His silence and the way he had of turning the pages of his book began to infuriate me. As he drew near the end of a page his right hand slowly rose to his mouth, as if it were acting independently of his conscious mind, and touched the tips of forefinger and thumb to his tongue, which emerged pinkly from between his lips (the pronounced veins on the backs of his hands always reminded me of his penis). Then, with an equally mechanical deliberation, his tongue withdrew and his hand descended slowly to the book, where forefinger and thumb gripped the top corner of the new page and rubbed it between them. It was not necessary to do this. The pages of the explorers’ journals had been cut by Arthur’s father and the blunt paper knife had given their edges a deckled effect, which made it easy to know you were turning only one page at a time.
I wanted to scream at him to stop. I wanted to force him to look up and speak to me, to ask me to share my thoughts with him. I laughed aloud with haughty derision, but he still did not react. Why was he torturing me? Fuelling my fury, I imagined him to be telling me that I should be in the kitchen preparing his next meal, or in the garden growing the vegetables he loved to eat, or washing his filthy smelly clothes. In the end I could stand his silence and his cruelty no longer and I shouted at him the one question neither of us ever mentioned, but which lay like a cold stone in my heart every day: ‘Have you heard from Edith?’
The sound of my voice was very loud in the quiet room.
He started and looked up from his book and glared at me.
For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked down at his book and closed it on his finger. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have.’ He was very calm and might have been waiting for me to ask him just this question—and even been puzzled as to why I had not asked it of him long before this. His calm made me feel that I was in the wrong and had overreacted clumsily.
I waited until he looked at me again. ‘So did you get a letter? Did it come here?’
He regarded me with a peculiar expression, and might have been seeing me for the first time and wondering if I was worth bothering with. He said, ‘No. We met in the city.’
I was chilled by the tone of his voice, by his detachment, the immense distance that lay between us. Were we really lovers, this man and I? Did I know every part of his body in the most intimate ways possible? Had we given ourselves to each other and shared our most intimate delights freely and with joy? It seemed impossible that we had. My throat was dry and when I spoke there was a catch in my voice. ‘And what does she say?’ I said. I was furious with him for not telling me before this and was determined to force an apology from him. Why did I feel as if it was me who was in the wrong? ‘So, are you going back to her? Is she coming back to you? Are her brothers bringing her here to pick you up—or to thrash you again? What is it to be, Pat?’
He said quietly, ‘Fuck you, Autumn.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And fuck you too.’ I was not in perfect control of my emotions as he was. I hated him. I wanted him to make love to me. To lose himself in a wild torment of passion for me. I was afraid he had decided that I was too old for him.
His expression did not change. ‘I had a meeting with her in town. It was in a cafe in one of the arcades. I forget which one. Her dad was with her. Her brother Phillip waited outside the cafe and watched us.’ He laughed softly to himself. ‘What did they think I was going to do to her? They wanted to offer me something. They were afraid I was going to have them charged with assault. I told them not to worry about it. Her father wouldn’t let me see her on my own. I could see how painful it was for her to be sitting there and not be able to say anything real to me.’ He was silent a while, still looking at me in that odd way. ‘She’s not coming back,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost her.’
‘When was this meeting?’ I asked. I needed to know how long he had been keeping it to himself.
‘Last week.’ He looked down at the closed book and rubbed its binding with his free hand. Then he looked up at me.
I saw there were tears in his eyes and I suddenly realised how much he was suffering. How greatly he missed her. It occurred to me only then that burying himself in the books had been his way of smothering his pain. His way of keeping from his thoughts the fact that he and Edith were done for. That their lives together were finished. Was he regretting becoming my lover? I watched him sitting there like a lost boy, rubbing the back of the book. He looked very alone. I longed to take him in my arms and comfort him.
After a silence that felt as if it was never going to end, he looked up and said, ‘She’s going to divorce me.’
I was unable to say anything, but a little flame of joy leapt in my heart.
‘I’ll admit I’m the guilty one,’ he said. ‘I won’t give them any problems. They don’t trust me. They don’t believe I’m going to make it easy on them. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t trust me either if I were them.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘You and me, eh!’
‘What about us?’ My voice was small and afraid.
‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it? You and Arthur. Me and Edith. Then you and me. We’re a pair.’
‘A pair?’
He set the book aside on the sofa and got up and came over to sit beside me.
I did not know what to expect from him.
He looked into my face, his gaze going over me, giving me a thorough looking over, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘You know that? I don’t know who you are.’ His gaze focused on my eyes and he gripped my chin so that I flinched. ‘Meeting you has changed my life. Completely. I knew Edith.’
I reached out and held his wrist. He was squeezing my chin painfully.
‘Is this love that we have? You and me? Or what is it?’ He laughed again, an unpleasant laugh. ‘That’s not a question.’ He took his hand away and lay back on the sofa beside me, his hip pressing into mine. ‘I don’t know what we are, you and me. But we’re two of a kind. We’re the destroyers, aren’t we? But are we also the creators?’ he was silent for a little while. Then he said ‘I miss her. I miss the life Edith and I had together. The life we promised each other. The life we are not going to have now. Our struggle. Our plan for the future. Just the two of us against the world. I miss all of that. And I miss her. She understood me. And I hate not being able to talk about her. I’ve wept for it and for her lost trust. For that more than for anything. Edith trusted me. And for the sound of her voice when she read to me in French. And I’ve wept for my lost child. I’ve wept for what I have done to her. The pain I have given her, which she did nothing to deserve.’ He sat up abruptly, as if he had remembered something, and searc
hed in his pocket for his cigarettes. He offered me one then lit both cigarettes from the same match. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame you.’
There was a dread in me that he was working his way around to telling me he and I were finished. That it was over. That he would be leaving Old Farm. Tomorrow, or the next day. Or maybe today. I imagined him asking if he could take Leichhardt with him. I was too afraid to say anything.
He rested back against the cushions beside me, smoking in silence for a long time, gazing at the bookshelves on the wall opposite. He gently took my cigarette from me and he kissed me on the mouth. His kiss was not bruising and searching as our kisses often were, but was gentle, almost an apology.
We had never made love in this way before. It was as if we approached intimacy as children might have, or strangers, feeling our way with caution, interested, caring, finding each other a little at a time, curious, looking for something in the other we had not yet found. Exploring our mysterious suffering even more than our passion. He did not cover my mouth at the high moment but joined his voice with mine, a terrible drawn-out sob from his throat that made my heart contract. I had not known how great his suffering was, his remorse for what he had done to Edith. He had expressed his pain in me. He had expressed it inside me. I felt the strange responsibility of it and I held him to me as a mother would hold a forsaken son to her breast. He was right. He and I were of a kind. No one would pity us or have any sympathy or understanding for what we had done. I knew, suddenly, that I could not see the end of us and that I did not know what that end would be or who would be caught up in the tragedy of our love before it was over. I held him tightly to me and he lay in my arms and wept.
The sound of the Pontiac coming down the drive and the slam of its door in the coach house entered my dream and woke me.
When I made to get up and gather my clothes Pat held me to him. I struggled to my feet. He said, ‘We’ve got to tell him. Or we’ll have nowhere to go with this.’