by Alex Miller
He went into his study and sat down at his desk. He would have loved to tell Ann about Martin’s story, but he didn’t want to tell Phil. He rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and began to write out what he thought was going to be a synopsis of this two-part story—his life as a labourer on Exmoor followed by life in the outback on the other side of the world. It was a story as familiar to him as his own body.
51
He came back from doing the mail run and put the meat and bread bags on the table and he went over and called down the passage, ‘There’s a letter here for you.’ The return address on the envelope was the Prahran College of Art. He put the letter on the table. Lena came in and picked it up. She slit open the envelope and unfolded the letter and stood reading it. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What do they want?’
She looked at him. ‘It’s from Margaret Hall.’ She looked so excited he thought she might be going to press the letter to her breast.
‘So, who’s Margaret Hall?’
She sat down at the table and read through the letter again.
She had colour in her cheeks and her eyes were alive with excitement.
She said, ‘I suppose I should have told you before.’
‘Tell me now.’ He sat across the table from her.
‘When I went to Melbourne to see Birte we talked about our lives. I showed her my drawings and she said I had to take myself seriously and that I should go and speak with the people at the Prahran College of Art who were teaching a full-time three-year drawing course. I took my drawings and met Margaret Hall. She’s an artist and one of the lecturers. We got on really well at once. She took me up to the studio and showed me drawings by students and staff and asked me if I thought I would fit in with their ideas. There were some unsigned charcoal and pencil drawings on top of a desk and I said, “These are the kinds of things I do.” They were astonishingly like my drawings. More elaborate and more highly finished and larger but the feeling of them was like my own things. Margaret said the drawings I’d picked out were by Pam Hallandal, who runs the course.’
Lena stopped talking and sat looking at Robert, her lips compressed as if she was holding back the flood of things she wanted to say, her eyes shining. ‘Margaret said she’d speak to Pam about me and would write after they’d had their meeting. I probably should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was frightened, I suppose. I didn’t trust it. It just seemed too much to expect that they’d really make me welcome.’ She picked up the letter. ‘She suggests I come in to the college and meet them and bring in everything I’ve done so far.’
Robert said, ‘This is wonderful for you. You must go. Of course you must.’
She said, ‘We’re both finding ourselves at the same time.’
‘It’s Martin and Birte,’ he said. ‘It’s making sense. It’s them. I don’t think I can ever go back to being quite so helpless and confused ever again as I was before Martin read that dreadful bloody book of mine.’
‘I just want to draw,’ she said. ‘I hope they don’t ask me to explain why. I love doing it. While I’m drawing I feel calm and hopeful. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. I don’t really care about being an artist. That’s got nothing to do with it. When I was talking with Margaret and looking at those drawings I felt as if I was among people like me.’
‘There isn’t anyone like you. You’re a one-off.’
‘Would you mind if I enrolled in the course, if they’ll have me? It’s three years full-time.’
‘You have to do it. I’ll miss you. It will be lonely here without you. But I’ll be over the moon if you really have found what you’ve been looking for.’
‘How good did you feel when the editor said he’d decided to publish your story? You looked like you’d been let out of gaol. Well, that’s how I feel. This really is what I want to do. It feels right. I was terrified I was just kidding myself. I’ve been feeling my way in the dark for so long. I’ve made some terrible mistakes.’
‘You’ve no idea how glad I am for you. You already look better. You’re an intense bugger.’
‘And look who’s talking!’
They both laughed.
He got up and went around the table and sat on the bench beside her. ‘This is going to work for you,’ he said.
‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘Your drawings are amazing. And the poetry. Those powerful images of yourself. I was blown away by them. It was powerful. Disturbing.’
She looked at him. ‘You never said.’
‘Leaving the ledger open while you were out walking seemed like an invitation. I should have said something. I’ve never been capable of that level of honesty. I knew I was looking at the real thing. It was all so raw, so open and painfully real. Those people at the college don’t see that kind of stuff every day.’ He took her hand in his. ‘It hasn’t happened yet but it’s going to happen for you.’
She said, ‘I should have been more ready to share them with you.’
‘You shared them in your own way. Our way. Nothing’s direct, is it? Between us. It’s impossible to keep anything secret in this house.’
She said, ‘Come and help me select some of the drawings for them to look at. I need a folio for their final decision. I’d love to see which ones you choose. Then, when I’m down there showing them to the women, when they pick up the ones you liked, I’ll think of us and the way all this has gradually come to us.’
They went down the hall to the back verandah. It was a warm sunny day. She arranged some of her loose drawings against the back wall under the louvres. She opened the ledger to the page of the contorted dolls and the strange series of notes she’d made. They both stood back and looked at the display. She said, ‘What do you think? I don’t think I can decide.’
He crouched down and looked closely at the row of drawings against the wall and the strangely disturbing contorted dolls in the ledger. He was thinking of the two men carrying the bundle of blood-soaked towels from the house in Chislehurst. Two men he had not seen, but whom he remembered. He said, ‘They all affect me. I look at them and I see a part of you that you’ve never been able to share with me. For me your drawings have a lot to do with all the things that you and I have never been able to talk about.’ He turned and looked up at her.
She said, ‘Don’t start analysing it, please. Just tell me which ones affect you most strongly. Which ones would you take?’
He stood up. ‘They belong together. They’re a suite. The Doll Suite. I think the women need to see them all if they’re going to understand what you’ve done.’
‘I suppose I could take them all,’ she said doubtfully. She bent down and turned the page of the journal. A drawing of a doll with a broken skull, dark empty eyes.
In the morning it was raining. Lena stayed in bed until Robert took her in a mug of tea. She sat up and took the mug in her hands and thanked him. He sat on the edge of the bed and sipped his own tea. The fire in the kitchen was sending out little explosions. He said, ‘Some of that last lot of wood we got was green.’
‘It couldn’t have been green,’ she said. ‘It’s been dead since last century.’
‘Maybe it’s just damp.’
They sipped their tea and listened to the rain drumming on the tin.
She said, ‘Do you think it would have made any difference if we’d had a child?’
Her question shocked him. Surely it came from that most deeply guarded part of herself, that fragile place to which she had never been able to admit him. He thought a thousand thoughts all at once and didn’t know which of them to speak aloud. She had said a child, not children, or the child. He heard her question as an announcement of change, an announcement of the prospect of being on her own forever, for the rest of time, her life. In the deepest sense, of course, she had always been on her own. He knew that. He had seen that from the start. He said, ‘It must have made some difference, mustn’t it? I mean, there would have been three of us.’
‘I�
��ve often thought of a little boy who looked just like you.’
How moved he would have been if she’d been able to tell him this when that imaginary little boy had still been a possibility for her.
She said, ‘Promise me you really don’t mind if I do the Prahran course.’
‘It seems almost too much to dare think you might have found something at last that’s going to make sense of your life for you. I not only won’t mind, I’ll bloody well rejoice.’ They looked at each other, the years of her struggle between them. ‘It will be the end of this little dream,’ he said.
‘No it won’t!’ she objected at once. ‘Araluen has been my way of getting to it. This place will always be important to me. It’s given me my sanity. My year of gardening changed something for me. It’s been important for both of us. Some things are sacred. This place will always be with me, no matter what happens and no matter where I am.’
Robert said, ‘I know that but you’ll be in Melbourne. I’ll be here on my own with Toby.’
‘Why should my going to Melbourne be the end of this? I can come up here between semesters and over the long Christmas vacation and you can come down to Melbourne from time to time for a break. We can go to movies and the theatre together, and see Martin and Birte, and you can buy books. You’ll be writing your novels and we can enrich our life here by connecting it to the city. We can live in two places. People do it. People even live in two countries. It can be another way of sharing our lives—not an end to what we have but an addition. I’d hate to lose the farm. I’d hate to think of being cut off from the creek and the hills.’
He was unsettled by what she’d said about the little boy. He was annoyed with her for saying it. It seemed to hark back to a time when she’d been attempting to manipulate his emotions, and he didn’t trust her motive for saying it. He couldn’t see where it fitted.
She said, ‘Your father was showing me his pictures and you were talking to your mum when he said to me, “You know, Lena, I feel safe while I’m doing this.” I thought he meant safe from his memories of the war. The horrors they lived through. All that. Now I think he meant more than that. He said that while he was drawing and painting, the door to his nightmares was closed. That’s how I feel. When I’m drawing I feel whole. Not safe, but whole. Strong enough to take the risks. If someone asked me why I’m drawing the broken doll I’d say because I feel as if I’m stealing time with her, and there’s no other way for me to do that.’ She looked at him and frowned and laughed at the same time. ‘Can that possibly make sense to you? I didn’t plan it, honestly. I started drawing her without thinking about why I was doing it. I was playing the piano one day and she seemed to be waiting for me to notice her. I rescued her. Now she’s rescued me. That’s how I see it. Is that too fanciful?’
‘Nothing’s too fanciful in this business,’ he said. He was moved to think of his father sharing such a moment with her. Robert’s father had never spoken of those things to him. ‘Thanks for telling me about you and Dad,’ he said. He was looking at her and was thinking of the past of Lena Soren, the plump girl in her tight jodhpurs before he knew her, riding her pony with her dad alongside—the dad who turned out to be a disappointment because he never took the leap she knew he was dreaming of.
52
Driving up to Canberra the pastures were looking green and fresh, the sheep and cattle shiny and content. He waited with her in the boarding lounge. When they called for passengers to board they stood up and embraced—the bones of her back under Robert’s fingers, her frame under his hands, fragile and intensely familiar.
He said, ‘Good luck. Be careful, won’t you?’
She laughed. ‘I’m only going to Melbourne, not Florence.’
He said, ‘This is the second time you’ve left me.’ And was immediately sorry for saying it.
She said, ‘That’s not fair.’
When she looked back at him from the gate he saw there were tears in her eyes. He watched her plane rise into the golden evening sky, glint once, and then again, a golden flickering in the sunlight, then disappear.
53
He drove the two and a half hours home to the narrow lower reaches of the Araluen Valley, the hemmed-in poor part of the valley, with its few old people still hanging on. As he passed the light of Betty and John’s place, he thought, They’ll all be dead in ten years and their shacks will be rotting into the ground the way the old shacks on John’s and all the other flats are rotting into the ground, scavenged for materials. His headlights picking out the familiar road ahead, the tunnel of trees and the sudden drop-off to the creek. He had never felt so strongly before the sense of the lost history of the lower valley, the shadowed melancholy of the place. He wondered if a day would come when he would try to write about it, attempt to bring it back out of the silence for love of the place, the way he was attempting to bring back from the silence of his own past those magical days on Exmoor, wanting to set them beside Frankie and his mob on the plains of the Gulf.
He parked beside the barn and stepped out of the Rover and stood looking up at the sky. The night was cold and still, the sky clear, the Southern Cross sparkling, the creek roaring. Toby came over and greeted him. Robert said, ‘Well, here we are, old mate. Lena’s gone.’ Toby gave a low woof and charged the ginger cat, who was watching them from the top of the strainer post at the corner of the garden, her silhouette against the sky like a Chinese lion. She looked down at the dog prancing around the base of the post, inviting her to come down and play—the idiocy of dogs and the regal disdain of the solitary cat. Robert went into the kitchen and lit the stove. He poured a glass of wine from the flagon and drank it off, then refilled the glass and sat down with it in front of the stove.
The crackling of the kindling pushed back the emptiness of the house. He sat close to the open fire door of the stove, his glass of wine clasped in both hands. He looked into the swirling flames, the heat on his face.
In the morning he was lying in bed working his way through a lavishly erotic fantasy with Ann when he heard the roar of Ray’s old Vanguard coming up the road. He said, ‘Shit!’ and got out of bed and dragged on his pants and shirt and went out into the kitchen and stuffed a page of the local newspaper and some kindling into the stove and threw in a match. Ray’s car door slammed and he came up onto the verandah, called a hello to Toby and stepped through the door. He entered the kitchen and tossed his hat on the table and sat in his chair.
Ray took out his tobacco and rolled a smoke. Robert set out two mugs and the sugar bowl on the table and cut two slices of bread. He said, ‘So what’s doing? You’re early.’
Ray lit his cigarette. ‘My nephew phoned last night. He wants me to see his doctor. I said I’d go just to quieten him down. It’s his wife nagging at him about me. Sonja’s a lovely woman. He’s a lucky boy. If I’d met someone like Sonja when I was young I would be a different man now.’ He laughed and coughed. ‘I don’t mind pleasing her at all.’
‘Are you ill?’ Robert said.
‘It’s nothing. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s her worrying about me being down here on my own. I tell her I’ve been here on my own since I was eighteen and old Nancy and David Andrews passed on and left me the place. She wants me to eat more vegetables and fruit. But I never did eat vegetables or fruit.’ He gestured towards the stove. ‘That kettle’s boiling.’
They drank tea and ate the bread with jam.
Ray said, ‘Lena get away okay, then?’
‘Lena’s gone, Ray. I don’t think she’ll be coming back on any kind of a permanent basis. Maybe for a visit.’
Ray turned and studied him for a long moment.
Robert said, ‘Well, that’s it. I’m on my own just like you are. I reckon Lena’s not a Sonja kind of woman.’
Ray said, ‘I am very sorry to hear this. I had you two paired for life.’
‘We are, in a way. We are the best of friends and I don’t admire any woman more than I admire Lena. She has great courage.’
‘Oh, I admire her too,’ Ray was quick to come back with. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
Robert said nothing.
Ray said, ‘It’s not my business, but I don’t think the single life will suit you.’
‘You’ve done it.’
‘Not from choice. I would have married Tess up there at the pub with Aunty Molly, but that Pommy bloke got in ahead of me.’
‘You never had any other choices?’
‘Well, I probably didn’t look too hard. I always thought there was one woman and one man who was meant for each other and when they found each other that was that. Tess was that woman for me.’ He looked into his mug. ‘Any tea left in that pot?’
Robert leaned over and filled Ray’s mug with the dark brown tea. ‘She’s a bit stewed.’
‘I don’t mind it stewed.’ Ray drank. ‘How’s that bull of yours doing?’
‘He’s done his job. Every one of those heifers had a calf again this year.’
‘He’s a good type, that old feller.’ Ray sat a while, looking into the dead fire. ‘I’ll go up to Sydney and see that doctor.’
Robert knew he was talking to himself, the way he did down there at his place on his own. Keeping a bit of conversation going. Robert was doing it himself. Talking to Toby more.