by Alex Miller
‘Of course I’m not doing that.’ He spoke gently, sadness in his tone. How to convince Lena that she and he would always be…would always be what? There wasn’t a word for it. ‘There aren’t any words for this,’ he said. ‘We both know. We just know.’
There was a long silence.
He said, ‘I’ll write to Martin.’
‘It will make them both very sad.’
‘They’re grown-ups. They’ll understand. Martin understood perfectly when you went on your crazy jaunt to Italy. He knew exactly how to react.’
‘Do you think the four of us will ever be together again? The way we used to be?’
He said, ‘Do you think we will?’
‘There’s so much letting go in life, isn’t there? Of things we love.’
63
Three months later Robert stepped out onto the verandah for the last time. There was no one left to say goodbye to. The Rover was packed. Toby was with Lena in Melbourne, and Tip was on Jim Forbes’s farm, the horses running free and wild up the river, the way he’d found them, the cattle sold. For the first time in his life, Robert had money. Enough to buy him three or four years of writing if he was careful. Lena hadn’t made it up from Melbourne for a final visit, a last swim in the sacred waterhole. The place was deserted. It felt as if the place was waiting for him to leave now. Just the plovers crying out their warning in the horse paddock. Nothing would change when he left.
He stood in the doorway looking back into the kitchen. The log in the hearth creaking, sending up a curl of smoke, a bowl of bright oranges on the table. He might just as easily have stayed, put a rabbit stew on the stove for dinner, peeled a few spuds, had a glass of wine and a smoke and talked to himself. It was no longer his kitchen. The sadness of that was something he could not express. It was still his kitchen, no matter what. It would always be his kitchen. His thoughts refused the loss of it. The price of his freedom could only be managed in instalments. The farm and Lena giving him his freedom in the end. He closed the door and walked across to Ed’s old Land Rover. He rolled a smoke and lit it before starting the motor. The busted exhaust echoed around the hills as if Ray’s old black Standard Vanguard had woken to life again. ‘Ray.’ He said his dead friend’s name aloud. He drove out over the grid and onto the road and he didn’t look back.
64
He rested his forearms on the sill of the casement window and leaned out. The big soft snowflakes drifting down, brushing his bare arms like the wings of butterflies. He was wearing only a singlet but he wasn’t cold. He held his hands out to catch the snowflakes, remembering the way he had done this when he was a child. The concierge was crossing the yard below him. She looked up and signalled to him and he waved back. He had mail. He closed the window and put his shirt on and ran down the six flights of stairs. He carried the letter back up to his little flat and closed the door. It was from the English publisher whom the editor of the Melbourne journal had recommended to him. He sat at the painted table Ann had found for him at a local flea market and slit the letter open. They wanted to publish Hunted. Everyone here loves your beautiful story. They were offering him a modest advance.
Robert slipped the letter back into its envelope and placed it on the table beside his typewriter. He sat smoking a cigarette, looking out at the snow coming down. He was calm. The past six months in Paris had calmed him. The generosity of Ann’s affection had calmed him. They didn’t live together. That wasn’t it.
He felt no great surprise at the publisher’s letter and seemed to be looking on at himself, the young man sitting in that room overlooking the courtyard. It was as if he was not himself but this other person who took a close interest in the unfolding of this young man’s fate. His pleasure in knowing his Exmoor book was to be published was a gentle cool pleasure; it was quiet and it satisfied him. He would write and tell Martin. He was already halfway into his new Gulf book. That’s where his mind was now, back in the Gulf with Frankie. That book was no longer about anger and injustice but was about the beauty of a friendship between two young men, himself and Frankie—boys really, as they had been then, but men in their hearts. Ann had been right. From the distance of Paris he had seen the truth of the story he had to tell. All the other things were there, the adventure and the injustice, but for him they were not what the book was about. He got up and put his jacket and overcoat on and he put the letter in his pocket and went down the stairs.
Ann was sitting at their usual table towards the back of the cafe. She was reading. She looked up and set the book aside and he leaned down and they kissed. ‘You’re early,’ she said.
He sat down, took the letter out of his pocket and handed it to her. She read it quickly, ‘That’s wonderful! They love it.’ They stood up and embraced. ‘You must be over the moon.’
‘It’s odd,’ he said and sat down again. ‘It’s been so long coming I’m not really all that excited. I’m not taking it for granted, I don’t mean that. I just don’t feel madly excited—as I would have, I’m sure, if I’d got this letter while I was on the farm.’
She looked down at the letter in her hand and said, ‘It’s a very small advance.’
‘It’s money for my writing. It’s a start.’
She was reading the letter again. ‘They want you to come over from Paris to meet the team.’ She looked up. ‘And they’ll release it in Australia sometime in the New Year.’ She took his hand in hers. ‘I’ll take you to lunch. We’ll have champagne.’
The waiter set Robert’s coffee on the table beside him. He drank the black coffee and set the cup back in its saucer.
They walked arm in arm along the street. The snow had stopped falling. The street was bathed in pale yellow sunlight. They walked along the narrow footpath together, enclosed in their happiness. The cafe she took him to was noisy with laughter and talk. The proprietor came out from behind his counter and greeted Ann as if they were old friends. He shook Robert’s hand and led them to a corner table at the back. They took off their coats and a tall Tunisian waiter took the coats from them and spoke to Ann in French. She ordered champagne. They toasted each other and she said, ‘To your book!’
He said, ‘And to your phone call from Canberra inviting me to dinner.’
They sipped the champagne and held hands across the narrow space of the table, looking into each other’s eyes.
‘I was so nervous I nearly didn’t call you,’ she said. ‘How different our lives would have been if I hadn’t phoned.’
He tightened his grip on her hand. ‘And here we are together in Paris!’
‘And now you really are a writer.’
When they left the cafe they walked along the quai to a bridge. Leaning on the rampart they looked at the river and the famous skyline, then they turned to each other and kissed, a long, lingering kiss. And when they at last drew apart she said, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to be as happy as this.’
They held each other close and looked with wonderment into each other’s eyes. He said, ‘Life can never be better for us than it is now, right at this very moment. I want to keep this moment on the bridge forever. Will you stay the night tonight?’
She squeezed his hand. ‘Of course I will.’
They turned and walked across the bridge and on to the square before the great facade of the cathedral. They stood gazing at the elaborate Gothic architecture of the front. She said, ‘Will you go back to Australia for the release of the book there?’ It had begun to snow again. Being home in Melbourne when his book came out had been the first thing he had thought of.
‘I don’t know. What do you think? Should I go back for it?’
She said seriously, ‘Of course you should. But I don’t want you to.’
‘Well, I might not. Let’s not talk about it now. You’re going to show me Voltaire’s manuscripts in the library. I love this quiet snow.’
‘Snow is always quiet.’
He reached and took her hand. ‘Don’t look so sad.’
‘I’m not sad.’
; ‘Yes you are. You are especially beautiful when you’re sad.’
‘If you go back for the release of your book,’ she said, and she turned to look at him, ‘will you come back to Paris?’
‘Of course I will. Come on, take me to Voltaire! We’re doing good things today.’
They stood, arm in arm, watching the birds circling the cathedral towers, crying their strange heartfelt cries of knowing.
PART THREE
65
When I opened my email yesterday morning I got a shock. My past hurled itself into my face as I sat here at my desk. My French translator, Françoise, had forwarded to me an email she’d received from Ann. It is the first communication I’ve had from Ann since I left Paris and returned to Australia for the release of my first novel forty-three years ago. A painful guilt that has lain corrosively on my conscience unattended for more than forty years was revived. That time in Paris with Ann, a time long before my wife and I had our children and watched them grow to adulthood and become successful in their chosen fields and have children of their own. That remote time, a lifetime ago. So long ago you might think its details must surely have been forgotten by me and overlaid with such an entangled depth of subsequent experience as to be difficult, or even impossible, for me to access. Despite this remoteness in time, the instant I realised the email was from Ann, I saw an image of myself standing at the open casement window of my sixth-floor apartment in rue St Dominique that day, leaning out and watching the snowflakes falling softly into the courtyard below. And I pictured Ann, not as an old lady in her seventies, as she must be now, but as the lovely young woman I knew then.
I sat here at my desk for a long time, reading and rereading her email, which she had written to Françoise in French. I was trying to imagine the person she had become. But my memory resisted this brutal transformation and insisted on presenting Ann to me as the shining young woman who had walked away from me naked in the sunlight across the sandbar at the junction of the Araluen Creek and the Deua River that day, the shadows of the blue gum dancing across her skin. That is the woman who stood in my memory’s eye as I translated her letter. An image as clear and as present to me as if I had seen her only yesterday. Her letter greatly disturbed me.
We didn’t live together for that year in Paris. Neither of us wished to re-enter with each other the labyrinth of marriage. I kept to my flat in rue St Dominique and she kept to her rooms at the university. She visited me most days and we often spent our nights together and cooked our meals in my little flat. When I returned to Australia I knew her address and could have written to her. She didn’t have an address for me in Melbourne and must have waited in a torment of suspense for some word from me, her hopes of hearing something gradually fading. Had that experience left her with a scar that still burned in her mind whenever something happened to remind her of our days and nights of love in Paris? There was cruelty in my failure to write to her. I returned to Australia after a little over a year in Paris to be present for the release of Hunted and to look for a publisher for my book on Frankie and the Gulf. I was by then missing the Australian way of life and the bush. I promised Ann I would return. She came to Charles de Gaulle to see me off. ‘You won’t come back,’ she said. I never saw her again.
Within a week of arriving back in Melbourne I met the woman who became the enduring love of my life and who bore our children. The woman with whom I have grown into my old age. The companion of my years. We began living together two days after we met. From the first there was no doubt in either of our minds that we would spend the rest of our lives together.
There is also no doubt in my mind now, and never has been any doubt, that I should have written to Ann at once and told her what had happened. Leaving the valley and joining her in Paris saved my life and ended my long period of isolation and failure. And, of course, I still loved her, my memory of her, our youth and the intensity of our hopes and emotions then, the wondrous liberation of our meeting. The way she and Paris calmed me. None of this was forgotten, but it was cruelly neglected by me. At first I simply put off writing to tell her I’d fallen in love. Then, gradually, I began to realise I wasn’t going to tell her. Now I shan’t remain silent. I don’t want to remain silent. My reply can’t be the letter I didn’t write then, and I’m not sure what it can be. She hints at sickness in her email and says that she has just read Françoise’s translation of my latest novel. She then quotes from an interview of mine she found on the internet: C’est moi, le ‘woman friend’ à qui Robert fait référence en parlant de son roman Lovesong sur son site: ‘I sold my farm in the Araluen Valley and went to live in Paris, invited to go by a woman friend who, when she visited me at Araluen, had seen how jaded I was by my solitary life on the farm, and how unlikely I was to ever become a successful novelist if I were to remain there.’
Reading in the interview my reference to those days, Ann must surely have known herself included in the world of my writing, and been made aware for the first time in more than forty years that I hadn’t forgotten her. What I said in the interview might even have seemed to be a secret message to her. She was right when she said that I loved the farm and the lower valley: I did. I still love them. Until she provided me with a way out, I also hated and feared the farm and knew myself to be trapped there. Until Ann’s invitation to dinner in Canberra I’d been deprived of my liberty.
I thought all day about what I would say in my letter to her. I wrote and rewrote that letter in my mind a hundred times. But I didn’t write it in the email. I woke at two and couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay in my bed till four, then I gave up the struggle and got out of bed and went out to the kitchen. The garden was in cold moonlight. Still and beautiful and silent. I made a cup of tea and took it into the sitting room. I put on the light and stood in front of the fireplace looking at Lena’s painting of the open door—an open door through which another open door can be seen, the sense that someone has just left the room, the air still disturbed by their passing, the sense of loss. The picture is unfinished, as all her pictures were. She didn’t like finished things. They silenced her, she said. There is no more to be said when something is finished. That was her claim. She hadn’t given the picture a title but had left the enigma of it with me. Why must our memories always be touched by melancholy?
I sat on the couch, Lena’s painting above the fireplace, a vertical image, a welcome distraction for me from my torment over the letter to Ann that I knew I must write. I sipped my tea and looked at Lena’s picture. I was seeing her slip around the corner of the far room, leaving the house of her dreams. She was always sparing with colour, until the end. This painting came close to the end. Something was always held back and concealed from view. That knowing smile of hers. Her secret life.
I’ve been invited to speak to the women’s book club in the prison again. I asked if the note-taking woman would be there. They told me she’d been released. I would have liked to meet her again. But I suppose something was settled at our first meeting. I always want more. I wanted more from Lena. Her withholding of herself was surely partly what kept us together. I only now seem to be fitting the pieces together at last. I shan’t locate all the pieces, of course. How could I? Some things are not recoverable. Those missing pieces are the negative shapes in our stories. It is they that define for us what is really there. The inescapable truth of Lukács’s horizon line. The sentence at the beginning of ‘Comrade Pawel’, my very first published story: To our front, towards the west, stretched a plain without a single feature to interrupt the distant skyline. Written half a century before I had thought of any of this, the resolute connections, the tyranny of narrative. Martin’s voice in my ear transformed into my own truth.
I’ve always seen this late painting of Lena’s as a depiction of the presence of absence, just as the note-taking woman in the prison read in my work a preoccupation with absent mothers. Perhaps there was something that Lena and I had both forgotten. Something we’d overlooked. Something left unresolved along the
way—like the manuscript of my first attempt at Frankie. In my memory it still lies on the table in that Leichhardt flat.
She died suddenly. There was no warning. Abruptly, from one day to the next, Lena ceased to exist. Her death shocked me and left me with a terrible emptiness. She is one of my present dead. There are a number of them. Martin and Birte among them. They inhabit my soul.
The friendship that blossomed between us after we separated was far freer and more generous than our relationship as a married couple had ever been. Once we no longer lived together, once we’d got rid of the impediment of our vows, we were able to share the important things with each other. Separation cleared the decks for us to have the friendship I’d told her mother we should have had from the beginning. I haven’t forgotten her terrible struggle, a far more painful struggle than mine ever was, the heroic way in which she made of her obsession with thinness a positive project, a form of self-protection, a way of becoming who she was physically as well as with her art. Her project was her body. The abandoned doll. I spoke to Lena on the Friday and wished her well for her trip to America. Then, at three in the morning, I received a call from the woman who shared the house with her. There was no traffic at that hour but all the same it was an hour and a half from here to the hospital in Melbourne. A nurse showed me into a small private room on the seventh floor.
There was a single bed in the room. Lena was lying on her side, her left arm out of the covers, dangling slackly over the edge of the bed. The nurse had not bothered to tuck her in properly. The room was cold. Strands of her thin hair were slicked across her face. She wasn’t attached to any machinery. There were no wall connections in the room to fix machinery to. It was clear that no drips or other life-supporting apparatus were ever used in this little room. The room was dimly lit, the shade drawn half down over the window, partly obscuring a view across the city to the bay. The greenish glow of the first signs of a summer dawn.