by Alex Miller
She looked up quickly. ‘Is he really? Poor little Toby.’
‘That’s right. Poor little Toby.’
‘Bring him down here with you next time you come. I’d love to have him here with me. Haven’t you got Ray’s dog now?’
‘Yes, I’ve got Tip. Toby was always your dog.’ He reached for the loaf and the knife and cut a thick slice of the black bread and buttered it and took a bite. He chewed a few times then reached for his tea and drank half the mug off, washing down the masticated bread. He said, ‘Look, I’m not sorry I said all that stuff. There’s a lot of stuff you and I have never dealt with.’
She said quietly, ‘You sound bitter.’
‘Sometimes I’m bitter. It depends on the day and the mood and how the book’s going and the rest of it. Sex in the silence alone. I suppose it’s okay. It’s not illegal. A bit humiliating, but okay. Bitter? Not generally. But, yes, sometimes. Eaten up with hatred and bitterness for an hour or two. Who knows but me?’ He laughed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He said, ‘There’s no need for contrition. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault either. It’s just us. It’s who we are. You and I. There’s always been a price. Show me what you’ve been doing. I want to see it.’
She stood up. ‘You might not like it.’
He followed her out of the kitchen and down the short flight of stairs to the half-landing then up the three steps. The far room was small and oblong and filled with the brightness of the late-afternoon sun that was shining down the long passage. Out the window in the backyard below a woman was hanging out grey-looking underwear on a clothes hoist. Lena said, ‘That’s Angela, my boarder.’
The floor was covered with paper. Dozens of pen-and-wash drawings of dolls stuck around the walls, overlapping each other, joined here and there by scrawls and lines and bits of masking tape—thoughts added after the drawings were put up. The whole room a work in progress. Several old dolls lying propped against the walls, a sad-looking trio on a threadbare couch, huddled together for comfort, or dead drunk, or just dead. On an easel was a half-finished nude study of a woman.
He said, ‘So who’s this? She’s got a body like you used to have when we first met.’
Lena stood beside him looking at the unfinished drawing. ‘It’s Margaret. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘Voluptuous,’ he said. ‘So you two pose naked for each other?’
‘Of course.’
‘Will you finish it? Most of these look unfinished.’
‘They are unfinished. I like unfinished things. Art is like time. I mean, there’s no point at which it’s complete and finished. Your fighting man wasn’t finished. You stopped doing it when it reached that point. You didn’t complete it. It just came to a stop for you. You knew you’d done enough. Drawing is like that. It’s one reason I love it. That’s what makes your drawing still intriguing to look at today. You asked a question with it. A question without an answer. Finished work has answered something. It’s come to a stop. Grand oil paintings are still and dead and finished.’
He said, ‘You should write that.’
She laughed. ‘I have written it. The art school published my essay in their journal.’
‘Can I have a copy?’
‘I’ll give you something else,’ she said.
The doll drawings were mostly rendered in pen-and-wash, while the nudes were a combination of heavily scored and finely detailed charcoal. In her naked studies of herself Lena’s ravaged body was portrayed unflinchingly, a fiendish delight in deciphering crevices and details that another woman would have been horrified to see.
‘They’re powerful,’ he said. ‘Why do you exaggerate your decrepitude? You still have a lovely face, you know.’
She laughed. ‘You don’t need to say that. I draw what I see in the mirror.’
‘The truth? Your truth? Is that it? You really have become an artist.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m happy. And I want you to be happy too. I can’t be fully happy if I know you’re unhappy.’ She slipped her arm through his and leaned against him. ‘We’re still us. When you get depressed on your own you must always call me. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night it is. Just call me. You’re not alone.’
They were standing in front of one of the more fearsome of the naked self-portraits. He said, ‘There’s something tragic about it. It’s as if you’ve externalised the anxiety that used to torment you. You’re calm now. The agitation’s in your pictures.’
She was delighted. She kissed him on the cheek and waited until he turned from the drawing and met her gaze before she said with feeling, ‘I’m free. Just like you were when I met you. Do you remember how completely free you were then? You didn’t have anything, but you were free. How I envied you in those days! I looked out of my cage and I thought, my God, just look at that man standing there as if he owns himself. It made me weak at the knees to see you.’
‘You’re even living in a dilapidated house like the one I lived in back then.’
She considered him. ‘We both have our sense of purpose. Our belief. We don’t take it for granted.’
‘My sense of purpose is fleeting. It’s unstable. It doesn’t hold. It disappears and I’m wondering what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing hidden away on that patch of hillbilly country.’
‘But you do have your times of belief and purpose.’
‘Anxiety and ambition, they’re the only things that really hold steady. It’s hard to know which is which sometimes.’
She went to her bedroom and came back with the ledger. ‘I want to give you this,’ she said. ‘The dead toreador.’ She opened the ledger at the drawing and handed it to him. ‘This is a precious document for me, just as your fighting man is a precious document for you. I want you to have it.’
He stood looking at the fallen doll and brief inscription. ‘Thank you. I knew at once when I saw this that you’d found something authentic.’
They were both silent for some time, she looking out the window at her boarder hanging out the washing on the clothes hoist. He was looking again at her half-finished drawing of her naked self. No doubt the decrepitude she saw in the mirror was a reflection of her inner truth, the terrible days of her degradation in Italy and the abortion in London. The stuff her truth was made of.
‘Margaret wants me to have a show,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to. I love the mystery of unfinished things. It’s what keeps me going. A poet, I forget which one, called it the miracle of incompleteness. There’s no point having a show. People aren’t interested in the incomplete. There’s no market for it.’
‘I bet you there is.’
‘The senior students and staff have shows and get caught up in the whole rigmarole of it, wondering if someone is going to buy one of their pictures. They walk back into the trap they spent years freeing themselves from so they could become artists. They begin working towards the idea of a show and it changes them, changes what’s in their heads. They can’t help it. We all want to be liked. I’m not going to do that. I’m outside and I’m going to stay outside. I just want to draw.’ She laughed. ‘Come on! Let’s go and sit on the front balcony and watch the sunset.’
There were more dolls in her bedroom, the room at the front of the house next to the balcony. All naked. All harmed or broken in some way, picked up at opportunity shops, she said. Mostly. Others discarded on the street with the hard rubbish. Robert imagined her fossicking through piles of waste put out for collection on the roadside by home owners. A thin woman with a shopping trolley into which she crams the things she fancies. Rescuing dolls. Not a bag lady, but the doll woman of South Melbourne, her ageing body browned by the summer sun, her fierce spirit private, driving her.
There were two wicker chairs and a small round table on the balcony. She set a bottle of wine and two glasses on the table and brought an ashtray. They sat opposite each other and she poured the golden wine into the sparkling glasses, her mother’s b
est, the glasses that had been kept in the sideboard for special occasions—Waterford, something like that.
She handed him a glass of wine and picked up the other one and held it out to him. ‘To our lasting love, my dearest Robert!’ Tears sprang to her eyes, making her at once older and more vulnerable and wonderfully beautiful in a way he knew only he would ever see; the private, the secret Lena he had come to know.
‘To you, my Lena.’ He was moved.
They smiled and touched their glasses and looked into each other’s teary eyes and drank the luscious wine.
‘God!’ he said. ‘We’re not going to cry, are we?’
They both laughed.
He turned to the window when a train rushed by, and she said, ‘The evening skies here are very different from the valley. That tower block against the more fiery evenings always makes me think it must have been built by visiting aliens. I never see anyone on the balconies.’
They looked out at the tower, crimson in the last of the sun—the burning tower.
‘Do you think you’ll come to the farm during your semester break?’
‘Margaret and I are running a life drawing class in July. I’ll come in the summer. We’ll have Christmas together.’
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
‘Melbourne feels a bit empty with Martin and Birte away,’ she said. ‘When they’re home again we can all get together in their lovely front room. Just the four of us. The way it was.’
He didn’t say anything. He knew things would never again be as they once had been. The crimson tower was turning grey. They sat in the silence until it was dark. There was no more to be said. He didn’t want to stay any longer.
They went downstairs together. At the front door they embraced. She stood at the door watching him leave, silhouetted against the light. He put the ledger in the back of the Rover and started the motor, rousing the neighbourhood with the roar of Ed’s beaten-up old Rover. He stuck it into gear and drove off, his arm waving out the open side, the brass buckles of the loose tarp already starting up their tap-tap-tap. Before he’d cleared the suburbs and hit the open road he was back in the world of the Exmoor hunt. Everything now depended on the book. He drove on through the night, the wind swirling around him, the smell of the country and exhaust fumes in his nostrils, his thoughts already far ahead.
57
The sun was coming up over the hills, the western summits of the forests splashed with gold. Aunt Molly was around the back of the pub feeding her chooks. She called to him, ‘There’s a dozen eggs on the bar for you, Robert.’ He unchained the dogs and went around to the bar and picked up his bread and meat and the eggs. Tip and Toby jumped into the back of the Rover. He drove through the morning to the lower valley. He wasn’t tired from the long night drive but was exhilarated. He lit the stove and cooked eggs and sausages and cut three slices of the fresh white bread and he made a pot of tea and sat at the table and satisfied his hunger. When he’d finished his meal he lit a smoke and poured a fresh mug of tea then went into the study and sat at his desk. He read the half-page he’d left sitting in the typewriter and began writing at once. The hounds moan and bay and howl their mournful howls, but they don’t turn aside until Perry’s desperate shouts threaten them with hanging, and then they draw off, reluctant, complaining, growling and giving out that deep peculiar baying that is sinister and needs no explanation…
He wrote steadily all morning, the sun coming through his window and warming the small room. The visit to Melbourne and Lena had woken him and given him a great burst of energy and belief. He wrote the last sentence of the story at ten minutes after midday. The great stag was dead, the story was done, the body of the deer broken and distributed to those who had been in at its death. He typed the last thought of the nameless boy narrator: I wonder what it is that I am making my own way towards. It was done. At no point had the story resisted him; it had unfolded before him as if it possessed a secret need to be told. He sat back and looked at the final sentence and read it over several times, then he took the last sheet of paper from the typewriter and set it on the pile. One hundred and seventy-five pages. Hunted. It was his first real novel.
He got up and went out onto the front verandah and stood looking out onto the sunlit hillside, the red cattle grazing peacefully on the abundant feed. He knew he had done something good. Something true and real. He rolled a smoke and lit it. He was about to go back inside and make a pot of tea when it occurred to him that something more final and complete than the story of Morris and farmer Warren and the great hunt had been laid open. Surely a different question had been asked by the book than the question he had thought he was asking? Writing it had laid open to him an understanding of the power of the stranger to disrupt a settled community; the stranger, himself in the story, the nameless boy narrator, like a pathogen unknown to the locals, against which they had prepared no defences. Their necessary adjustment to find a place for the one who had no place in their tradition. He had seen none of this before he wrote the story. He saw now that what he had written was a meditation on his own place in that closed society.
Standing there on the verandah looking up the green hill at the trees and the cows, Robert knew that the act of writing might also be a revelation of the self. He hurried back inside and stood at his desk and began to read the manuscript from the beginning. What had he really done? He read the opening lines: The doctor told Morris yesterday that he shouldn’t eat so much raw pig fat. It would probably kill him before he was forty…Suddenly it seemed to Robert that the act of writing was to deal in the mystery of the self, the story merely a cover for this inner need. The key had been given him by Martin: Why don’t you write about something you love? Only now he had discovered that to write of what he loved involved him in far more than he could ever possibly understand. A richness of future possibility seemed to lie in wait for him. All he had to do was to write of those things and those people he loved in order to lay open to his understanding the hidden sources of his own emotions and motives.
He sat at his desk and read the manuscript through from the beginning. He was reading something else, a story not of the visceral rush of excitement and fear of riding hell for leather down the steep combes and boggy hollows of the moor, but the hidden story, something he had not been aware of writing. Would readers of the novel hear this subterranean story, or was he the only one who would ever know of its existence?
He stood up and went into his bedroom and lay on the bed and closed his eyes. His head was buzzing. Something in himself had been completed by the story of Morris and the farmer and the great hunt. He drifted into sleep with the sound of the magpies warbling in the garden, the distant rushing of the creek over the rocks, the hum of millions of insects out in the sunlight, the stillness of the house inviting a rat to gnaw the shelves in the pantry.
When he woke he couldn’t think what day of the week it was. He looked at his watch and saw he had slept for twelve hours with his boots and clothes on. He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. He remembered lying down on the bed the evening before feeling utterly spent. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He saw the day was fine and warm. He took a towel and his toothbrush and called the dogs and went down to the creek and stripped off. He plunged into the bathing hole. The little brown fish shoaling in the disturbed water, finding minute specks to feed on. The sun glinting and flashing in a restless pattern on the stones. Robert felt as if he was being lifted and carried forward on a wave of happiness. He surfaced and blew out water and shook his hair. He swam to the end of the deep pool and back then dived deep, clinging to a bulge of casuarina root, holding himself down there in the flickering waves of light among the little fish, the dogs pawing the water above him. He surfaced and climbed out onto the grass and dried himself off. He was hungry again, but first he had something he had to do.
He went over to the house and parcelled up the manuscript then drove up to the pub and left it with Molly to be posted on with the ot
her mail. He was confident that whoever read the story would know at once it was authentic. He had addressed the parcel to a Melbourne publisher and included a brief letter: Dear Sir or Madam, I am sending you this book in the hope that you will like it enough to publish it. Yours sincerely, Robert Crofts. All he had to do now was to wait for their enthusiastic response. When he got home he gave the handle on the phone a good twirl and waited for John to pick it up. He asked John to put him through to the main switch in Braidwood. He called Lena’s number and waited.
Lena’s voice in his ear. ‘Hi! Is everything all right?’
‘Everything’s very all right. I finished the book.’ He paused. ‘It’s gone. I needed to tell you.’
‘That’s wonderful! And you feel really good about it?’
‘I know it’s good.’
‘That’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you. How long do you think it will be before you hear from them?’
‘Well, the editor rang me about “Comrade Pawel” only three days after I posted it to him. So maybe a week? Ten days? What do you think?’
‘And do you think Hunted is as good as “Comrade Pawel”?’
‘Probably better. I feel very sure of it.’
‘You sound wonderful. I mean, you sound really strong and happy and motivated.’
‘There are things I’d like to talk with you about sometime.’
‘What things?’
‘I can’t really say over the phone. They’re the kind of things you can only say in person.’
‘I’m intrigued.’
They both fell silent.