The Passage of Love

by Alex Miller

  ‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly take it, Mr Crofts. It’s precious. It’s your book. You treasure it.’

  Robert knew she had no hope. The book was hers now, just as Frankie’s hat had become John’s in that terrible instant. Unlike that one, this gift was happening sweetly. His father was smiling. There was still something handsome in his looks. He touched Lena’s shoulder. ‘I’ve enjoyed it for many years. Now it’s yours.’ This was his delight, to give precious gifts to people he loved. And he had decided to love Lena. Robert saw it. Robert knew what love was in his father and what the refusal of it was.

  She looked at the book in her hands, then she leaned and kissed him on the cheek. The two of them engrossed in the delicate moment of it. Robert was proud of him. The sacredness of gifts for him, sealing friendships and speaking of love without ever needing the words for it. That was the way it had always been with his father. He was happy to see his beloved volume in her hands.

  ‘I’ll treasure it always,’ she said. She turned to Robert. ‘Look what your father’s given me!’

  Now that Robert saw him standing there being himself, the man and not his memory of the man, Robert knew that as far as his father was concerned his son had done what he had done ‘out there’ and that was his son’s own business and there the matter ended for him. There was to be no enquiry into his successes or failures. And despite his father’s love of literature, or maybe because of his excessive reverence for the authors of the past, the idea that his son hoped to become a writer would not greatly impress him. Sitting there at the old table where they had eaten their meals together when he was a child, watching Lena and his father going through the books, Robert relaxed. He knew it was all right. He would thank Lena for making him visit them.

  His mother came out from the kitchen. She was carrying the tea things on a black lacquered Chinese tray with pink and white peonies painted on it. There was a seed cake on a flowered oval plate. He said, ‘I remember that little plate, Mum.’ She set the tray on the table and touched the plate with her fingers. ‘You gave it to me.’ He had no memory of giving her the plate. ‘There’s not a chip on it,’ she said proudly and she looked at him and put her hand on his. ‘It’s lovely to have you home with us.’

  She pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Do you get parrots in Melbourne? I’d love to see parrots flying around in the trees. I always feel so sorry for them sitting in their cages at the zoo, their little shoulders all hunched up with the cold. I always think they are asking me to help them. Their eyes are so intelligent.’ She looked at him. ‘Do you get them?’

  ‘We do, Mum. Yes, lots of them. They fit in very well with us. Do you think your people might have originally come from an island somewhere with parrots in the trees?’ He was seeing how exotic she was. As a child, to his eyes she had just seemed normal, herself; now he was noticing her olive skin, her raven hair, still without a trace of grey, her dark eyes. She was small and light-boned and she was beautiful. He said, ‘You must have had romantic dreams of travel yourself when you were young. Didn’t you? Before you met Dad?’

  ‘I wanted to go to South America. One of the sisters in the convent in Chantilly was from Peru. She was beautiful and mysterious and we all loved her. I would have joined the order and gone with her to Peru if she’d asked me to. Did I tell you in one of my letters that I revisited the convent at Chantilly last year? Sister Clementina was still alive. She remembered me. I sat with her in her room and we held hands. She was ninety-four.’ She laughed with the pleasure of the memory. ‘My French came back to me. It was like being a girl again.’

  He said, ‘You look younger talking about it, Mum.’

  ‘Your father would stay at home if it weren’t for me.’ Her eyes were alight with a mischievous intelligence that he remembered from the days of the Blitz. He envied her the lightness of her touch with memory and experience. ‘I love travelling!’ she said. ‘You got your wanderlust from me, you know.’ She laughed again. ‘Do you mind my saying that?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s lovely to hear you say it. We always loved each other. All of us. Didn’t we?’

  ‘We did, darling. We did. It’s a pity your brother’s away on school camp. They say it’s a challenging winter hike with his schoolmates in the Yorkshire Dales. He’ll be sorry he missed you.’

  ‘I would have liked to see him,’ Robert said. ‘How’s he getting on at school?’ A school camp was an unheard-of idea when he was a boy. His brother was obviously not the hoodlum of the streets that Robert and his mates had been, but inhabited a world far richer in possibilities than the world they had known.

  ‘Do you have to go back to Australia so soon? Lena said in her letter you’d be leaving on Tuesday.’

  Lena and his father came over and sat down. Robert’s mother poured the tea and handed the cake around. He didn’t answer her question and she didn’t ask it again. She and his father wouldn’t probe.

  Lena was enjoying talking to his father about his drawings. Robert watched her crumbling her piece of cake and pushing the pieces around on her plate, trying to make it look as if she’d eaten some of it. He had hoped she would eat normally in the company of his parents. She caught him looking at her and frowned. He looked away.

  His mother still had lovely skin, her arms smooth and unblemished, just as he remembered her when he was a boy. The post-war gloom and poverty that he had left behind in Downham had vanished, however. There was no trace of it. This was a different world. He’d had no part in the making of it, but had been imagining all these years that everything had remained as it had been the day he left England.

  Watching his wife and his father become friends, he was glad it had happened this way. He was grateful to Lena for persisting. He had not dreamed his parents’ love for him. Writing was the real leap for him now. The leap from which in the end the quality of his own reality must be shaped. Now he must give substance to that dream.

  When they were leaving the flat, Robert’s father held him tight against his body and said with emotion, ‘I love you, son.’

  Robert was too moved to reply. He and Lena went down the stairs. On the top step of the last flight Robert paused. Lena turned to him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

  She said with astonishment, ‘You’re crying!’

  33

  My dear old cat Gus died last night. I got up to take a pee and he was a dark shadow lying inert on the mat inside the back door. I spoke to him. He didn’t move. I bent down and touched him, speaking his name. ‘Hey, Gus, old boy!’

  Later this morning I wrapped him in my best towel and carried him out to the apple tree and dug a hole for him there. I wept helplessly as I placed him in the hole, his little head sticking out of the folds of the towel, his once-beautiful eyes sunken back into his skull and clouded over. He was eighteen. When I stood up abruptly after shovelling the earth in on him, I felt dizzy and rested my back against the scabby bark of the old apple tree with my eyes closed, waiting for the dizziness to pass. I was seeing the bloodied towel in the hands of the men who had visited Lena all those decades ago; two men and a bloodstained towel, something I had not seen with my own eyes but which had been reported to me by our landlord, Donald Tree, vividly before me now, an image from memory and imagination, the past touching my emotions with its savage presence, as it will. It was the only child Lena ever had. She was never again to fall pregnant.

  I stood there with my back to the tree, thinking back to that time. I had scarcely known her. We had scarcely known each other. What kept us together? It isn’t enough to say love. We clung to each other. There was never any suggestion from either of us that we would not go on together. We must have still believed in a future life together. We never talked about her abortion. She refused to. Not having been with her that afternoon when it happened, I was haunted by my imaginings of how it must have been for her. I always felt slightly sick whenever I tried to imagine the actual event there in that bed in the
house in Chislehurst, her terrible vulnerability, her thin body being violated by those two anonymous men with their instruments and bloodied towels. She told me nothing. She hid it deep inside herself. She kept it so strictly to herself that I sometimes wondered if it had really happened. I said to her once, ‘Do you sometimes think the abortion never really happened?’ She gave me a peculiar look, an expression of pain in her eyes that rebuked me and made me uncomfortable.

  I ask myself now, did I wrap Gus in my best towel as some kind of unconscious attempt to pacify my guilt about that time? My guilt, not for the commission of a crime, but for my lack of empathy for Lena’s situation. I am certain that the abortion of her only child was a life sentence for Lena. I am sure now that she not only never forgot it, but spent much of her subsequent life dealing with it in a richly creative way that projected the experience outwards and made of it something physical and real, something that satisfied her deep need for the private expression of an aesthetic value to her existence.

  The abortion was to become a determining experience for Lena. Unlike me, she could never have imagined it hadn’t happened. She needed it. In a way that I could not then have understood, she kept the abortion of her child as a secret treasure within herself—almost as though she kept the child within her, a permanent state of gestation, her control of her thin body and her child a weapon of defence against the world. The experience made her the woman she eventually became, and of course in a way it also unmade her. The loss of her only child was to become the central contradiction at the heart of Lena’s art. She never attempted to share with me this central truth. She didn’t want to share it. It was her own private reality. She understood something essential through the pain of it. So it stayed with me as a thing that was incomplete, unfinished and puzzling, a thing I had to deal with in my own way if I were ever to quiet the ghost of it within myself. And of course my way is to write of such things.

  I gave Gus’s fresh grave a last look then walked across the lawn and put the spade back in the shed. It had begun to rain, a soft rain from a grey sky, no wind, a cool stillness over the garden. The grass would soon grow over him. I went into the house and made my morning coffee, the sound of the steady rain on the roof. A good day to be inside. I carried my coffee into the warm study and sat down here at my desk and began to write. It is what I have always done, either to avoid the pain of these memories or to better understand them. I’m not sure which it is. Or is it simply to hide? To distract myself? To secure my inner peace against the torrent of memory? For there is something ruthless about old age. Old age unseals the buried memories of our past and refuses to allow us to forget. In old age those things we refused to think about in our youth because they were too uncomfortable come out of the grave and stand before us and demand their right to a place in the story of our lives. They are not polite, as they were when we were young and strong, and are no longer obedient to our refusal. In old age, with death closing in upon us, we lose our power over these troubling memories and they command us. The tables are turned. Deal with me now, or go to your grave unshriven! That is the choice we’re given.

  I sipped my coffee and considered the moment when Lena and I returned to Australia from England. She had succeeded in reducing herself to a figure resembling one of Giacometti’s fleshless standing nudes. Ironically, her strong jawbone was more prominent than it had been when she’d first begun to worry about it at Red Bluff, telling me that night in a panicked voice of her fear that her face was getting fat—the first sign of the transformation that was to take place in her, had we only known it then. I was a young man, and when I saw her naked I felt the shock of loss, a keen nostalgia for the beautiful sexy young woman I’d first met and married. And a terrible regret at being cheated of the sexual pleasures that I was certain were my due. That she had become pregnant to some unknown man on that cargo boat played tricks with my mind. And yet—and it is important for me to find a way of saying this—there was even then in the extreme refinement of her physical being a fascination that she had not possessed before. A fascination that was only partly sexual; a perverse intensity that both denied and invited sexual thoughts. I believe my father was entranced by this, the absent, ethereal quality of her smile, and would have liked to paint her portrait. This quality seemed to be a compensation for her loss of flesh, and she appeared to enjoy an obstinate sense of advantage in starving herself. It was a source of power for her. When she thought herself unobserved she often wore a private knowing smile. It was impenetrable. If I spoke of it she denied it. What she had or wanted was an advantage over reality. That is how it seemed to me then. Not just control over herself: an advantage over her embodied self. Just as I was to find an advantage over reality in the world of my writing, where memory and imagination became indistinguishable from one another. And it is also true that I was never able to share this with her. In some ways she and I were a matched pair, and perhaps it was our recognition of this that kept the bond between us so strong.

  I see these things now with the wisdom of hindsight, but at the time my response to Lena’s condition was entirely conventional. I repeatedly tried to convince her to see a doctor. She refused: ‘I’m not ill.’ She was so confident about this that I began to think perhaps she really wasn’t ill but was attempting something I simply didn’t understand, and which she herself was either unable or unwilling to speak to me about, and most probably also didn’t fully understand, her fasting a response to an inner compulsion that she felt was right and necessary for her. The peculiar appropriateness of my father’s gift to her of Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, in which the heroine starves herself—goes supperless to bed—in order to raise her sensitivity to a higher imaginative state. It all became part of Lena’s claim on freedom—the hard road of it. I thought for a time it might kill her. And of course it might have killed her. She was testing the limits. And there was a period when I don’t think she would have cared if it had killed her, and might even have felt some kind of satisfaction about it.

  34

  Their plane landed in Sydney in the middle of a hot and steamy summer day. The blast of damp heat struck them as they stepped from the plane and they knew at once they were in another country. Sydney was unknown to both of them and made them feel vulnerable and disoriented. They didn’t know where to go. They knew no one and had nowhere to stay. They rented the first flat they looked at. It was on the top floor of a three-storey block of new yellow brick flats in the inner west suburb of Leichhardt. The block was so new the stairwell still smelled of fresh cement. None of the other flats in the block were let. They dragged themselves and their suitcases up the stairs after the agent. Behind them the heavy street door to the lobby slammed with a crash that made them both jump, their nerves tingling with fatigue and anxiety, a booming reverberation going through the empty building and making it shudder.

  The door to the flat the agent showed them opened directly from the upper landing onto a room that was to be their living and dining and kitchen area all in one. The door to the bedroom and the tiny bathroom were off to the right of the living space. That was it.

  Robert walked over to the far side of the room and looked out the only window. Below him was a car park, the roof of the agent’s iridescent blue saloon shining in the fierce sun. Across the way an identical block of flats was being built, a yellow crane swinging a cement bucket through the air.

  Lena said, ‘We’ll take it.’

  Robert turned around from the window. She took her cheque book out of her bag. The agent gave her his pen and she leaned on the bench and wrote out a cheque for the bond and a month’s rent in advance then signed the lease without reading it. She handed the cheque and the pen to the agent. He put a copy of the lease on the bench and placed the other copy, together with Lena’s cheque, inside his black satchel. He thanked her and shook her hand and she thanked him and went to the door with him and shut it after him. She stood with her back against the door, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes and walked over t
o where they had set down their cases against the wall and arranged herself on the bare floor, as if this was going to be her camping spot. The floor was made of a pale false wood laid over a concrete base. It was hard and unyielding.

  Robert said, ‘You’d better unpack your coat and some clothes and put them under you.’

  She didn’t reply.

  He stood looking down at her, this strange woman with whom he had chosen to spend his life. She was curled into herself, lying there on the floor beside their cases, her back to him. She sometimes frightened him. He didn’t know what it was that kept them together, but he knew he would be hopelessly lonely without her. ‘We’ve come this far together,’ he said. He would write to Martin.

  The thunder of a jet going over gaining altitude at full throttle made the door and the window rattle. He went out and down the stairs and staggered into the desperate glare of the roaring street. Crowds of people rushing along the footpath in both directions, the sun’s glare blinding. He stood still, stunned by the heat and the white pulsing sky above him. He had meant to buy supplies and furniture and the things they would need: cups and knives and forks, towels and blankets…He could see the second-hand furniture store. It was a little way along the road. He had seen it from the taxi. A green awning casting the front of the store in black shade, edges and legs of pieces of furniture piled onto the footpath. He couldn’t move towards it. His throat was thick with the pulse of his blood. The sky and the sun and the noise a scream in his head.

  He was standing outside the second-hand shop. He couldn’t remember walking there. A pale blue Olivetti portable typewriter sat in the centre of a wooden table in front of him. Someone had put a sheet of paper into the roller. Robert stepped into the deep shade of the shop’s dense interior and stood in the dark, unable to make out any detail.

  The man understood his needs perfectly. A table and chairs, a double bed, the table with the typewriter and the typewriter itself, a box of assorted cutlery, two thick mugs and a teapot, a mattress and plates and so on. It all went into the back of the ute and the man’s son brought the things to the flat and he and Robert carried them up the stairs. Then Robert went out and bought food. He couldn’t remember afterwards whether Lena went with him or if he went alone.