Autumn Laing (12 page)
THERE WAS SNOW ON MOUNT DANDENONG TODAY. SUMMER IS JUST a memory. I hear my mother sigh and say, ‘How the years do fly away!’ I’ve begun to doubt it was Edith I saw. Is she alive or is she dead? It is a terrible anxiety out of which nightmares have begun to fashion themselves. Oh yes, the dire effects of imagination, our curse and our saving grace. There were half a dozen of us sitting round this kitchen table drinking wine and beer and smoking cigarettes and talking about art and life and flirting with each other one lovely summer afternoon, when someone—George Lane it was, the darkest and fiercest of the artists among us—said, ‘We would be better off without imagination.’ Poor George was drunk and had failed the previous evening to seduce beautiful teasing Alice Meadows, so he would most certainly have been better off without imagination that day.
Although Freddy was already drinking far too heavily at the time and was probably drunker than George, he was still a
practising psychoanalyst and felt compelled to say at once, ‘Our imagination is the way to ourselves, George.’ Easy for him, you might say, not being a tormented artist like George. I saw the look George gave Freddy, the flicker of detestation in his black eyes. Freddy probably saw it too but he persisted. ‘All mental illness, all human cruelty, is a failure to heed the prompts of the imagination, George.’ I hear Freddy’s voice now ringing out in this kitchen, and the sound of his laughter. Already the seeds of despair were in him, bathed by a constant stream of alcohol. Freddy loved vast generalisations of this kind, but on that occasion he was also turning the blade in George’s sensitive liver. Freddy’s pronouncements were often dismissed by more temperate people than himself as merely an excessive bravura of style. But I thought there was nearly always a kernel of wisdom embedded in these baroque gestures of his. Tragically, for he had a good mind, Freddy acquired no insight into the maladies of his own soul and became a hopeless alcoholic, impotent and unable to control the functioning of his bowels. He shot himself when he was forty-three. I kept his note for years. He had been off the grog for a year at the time of his suicide.
I live without my first love. Her name is Wine. It is no longer possible, darling Aught, to persist with this torment. By the time you receive this I shall be dead. I have borrowed Ray
’s
little .22 and a bullet. The dear man believes I have a rat in the wainscot to dispose of.
Could it have been her daughter I saw? Edith gave birth in 1939 and her daughter would be fifty-two today. Some people age quickly. Alice was such a one, our beautiful Alice, a rapid ager. She, poor girl, developed anorexia and looked sixty before she was forty. Perhaps she would not have become ill with that
dreadful self-denying disease if she had encouraged George that day and had lain down for him with her dress up and abandoned herself to the pleasures and torments of sex. I sometimes wonder if we weren’t a sick generation, the whole lot of us. Denying this and denying that, for no better reason than our own narrow prejudices about life and art—our beliefs, as we called them. Prejudices, in fact, which we mistook for passions and vision. Our view of life and art required a narrowing of everything to the single dimension of our own orthodoxies. No one got a look in with us if they weren’t strictly of our persuasion. Now they’re all dead does it matter to anyone what we believed?
I’ll wait on the bench outside Woolies next time I get my drugs. If Edith went to my chemist once, she will go again. They give us discount membership cards these days to make sure we’re loyal to them.
Adeli brings the smell of California with her and is at the forefront of all the latest fads. I put non-organic honey in her herbal tea the other day and watched her to see if she would notice. But she sipped and smiled and babbled on, heedless of what was going down her pristine throat. Her virginal, unsullied throat, I’ll bet. She is not the frequently orgasming nurse. It was Adeli who brought the herbal tea. Not I. I drink Bushells tea for preference. Strong, black and without sweeteners. When she first told me her name, I said, ‘Adelie penguin.’ I suppose everyone thinks of the penguin when she tells them her name and would
like
to say so. It was bullying of me to actually say it. She offered to stay overnight. To keep me company, she said. She doesn’t seem to notice the stench of this place or that I dislike people. I asked her the other day to go and fetch me a packet of cigarettes from the corner shop that is clinging to its final
threads of subsistence half a mile from here. The Vietnamese woman who runs the shop looks eighty but is really only fifty. There’s rapid ageing for you. It can be done, it seems, if the circumstances are favourable to it. She has five daughters. Her husband died last year. She keeps her shop open all night in competition with the 7-Eleven. She and her daughters gaze out of a darkness of deep fatigue. ‘Get me some cigarettes,’ I said to Adeli. ‘I don’t care what sort they are.’ She went very still and silent and examined her podgy hands in her lap. Then, in a small voice—I might have asked her to fetch the shotgun and a box of shells—she said, ‘Cigarettes, Mrs Laing?’
I said, ‘You should take them up. You might lose some of that fat. She persists in addressing me as Mrs Laing and I find I’ve grown to rather like it. She is not an Australian, after all, so does it matter?
Don’t say I didn’t warn you that you probably wouldn’t like me. I don’t like myself much.
‘The spelling is different,’ she said, and sipped her herbal tea. ‘It is Adeli without an e.’
She bounds in through the flywire on to the veranda, bringing something or other that I’m supposed to like but which really it is she who likes. It was those cheap chocolates the first time (the purple ribbon is still holding my sandal together) then the South American hot chocolate. Now it is herbal tea or exotic Asian fruit from the Prahran Market. It was bright orange dragon fruits last week. I threw the ridiculous things onto the back lawn. The white cockatoos tore them into vivid shreds. When the cockatoos had done and had flown away screeching, it looked as if small animals had been dismembered on the lawn.
Adeli’s summer linen has been exchanged long ago for cashmere twin sets, rose pink and apple blossom. They make her bust look a size fifty. She smiles and pulls out a chair and arranges herself at the table, undoes her buttons and puts her notebook and her pen (a woodgrain-finished fountain pen, for God’s sake) on the table in front of her and crosses her fat thighs and folds her hands in her fat lap. Ready! I tell her nothing. She continues to disapprove of my cigarettes, closing her eyes and wrinkling up her nose whenever I light one. What am I supposed to do? Australia has become a nation of wowsers. I said to her, ‘Tell me there is something better for me at my age than the pleasure of smoking.’ Bullying fat Adeli entertains me. I can’t help it. I almost like her but
I
don’t have to be liked in return. I don’t
need
to be liked, it is she who needs to be liked (as all Americans do). Anyway, she’s an American. Naturalised naturally. But still American. Still twanging her California up her nose. She’ll never get past that here. It isn’t possible for an American to become an Australian, no matter how long they stay. We believe it to be our birthright as Australians to bully solitary Americans who venture into our midst. That big bright red overcoat and those red patent-leather shoes. Who does she think she’s kidding? And purple stockings the other day. I’ve lived too long. But Adeli is not the only aesthetic scourge in my life. The woman next door jogs in her lycra while pushing their ugly baby in a three-wheeled thing and leading that vicious dog on a lead. She almost knocked me down the other afternoon. I was bending to fasten the front gate when she brushed past me as if I wasn’t there. Loathing rises in my gorge at the sight of her silver and black body-hugging suit flashing along our road. I do not wish to admit that such creatures as
she have come into existence in my country. My own species is endangered by them.
I have handed over the dining room to Adeli. She is in her seventh heaven. She’s in there now, sorting things. I asked her to keep the door closed, then rattled the key after she’d gone in. The door flew open. ‘Please don’t lock me in, Mrs Laing!’ I smiled and left her to it. I’m like a child sometimes. I was tempted to tiptoe back and turn the key in the lock. Fierce little visions sweep into my mind like evil fairies. The mummified corpse of Adeli among the Laing papers when the dining room is opened forty years from now. Absurd, but stinging me with a guilty delight I do nothing to resist. Time is nothing. The silent vengeance of the aged. If only I could be a winged goddess!
Something of great importance to me happened two nights ago. Stony brings me the cabbages from the remnant of his market garden. He doesn’t park his Bedford at the front of the house as Adeli does but drives in by the double gates and parks next to the coach house, the old tradesman’s entrance. He carries the box of cabbages in through the side garden and sets it down inside the kitchen door. If I am still in bed when he calls I hear him talking to Sherry, and Sherry answering him. I leave his money on the table under a glass ashtray.
It is all Stony grows these days, drumhead cabbages. Enormous things. Cannonballs. I can hardly lift one of them. He has grey horny hands with deep black cracks at the base of his thumbs ingrained with our river soil, like the feet of elephants. He is probably my age or even older and was market
gardening with his father when Arthur and I first came here, at a time when this was the country, or the edge of the country. In those days Stony and his father sold us the varieties of vegetable we were not clever enough to grow for ourselves. Their neat little fields and glasshouses have gradually been squeezed into a tiny pocket surrounded by the new suburban mansions and their dogs and trampolines and tennis courts and swimming pools, the mansions all vaguely influenced by the holidays of their owners in Provence or Tuscany. This country influences no one any more. The old Australian Australia has gone. That remnant sense of the pioneer. It is all mock European now.
Stony is still a strong man. After his father died he never married or had a companion, except his cats. I never met his mother but it is his mother’s genes that dominate his features. You have to know his father was Chinese before you see it in Stony. When he gets the mood on him Stony breaks his silence and talks to everything, whether there is anyone around to hear him or not. He talks to trees. To the earth. To his cabbages, especially to those that allow the grubs of cabbage whites to make colanders of their leaves. Boxes. Sherry. Furniture. Kettles that boil slowly or too fast. But he only sniffs at the comments of people.
Two nights ago I dreamed the answer to where Pat’s nude drawings of Mr Creedy’s daughter were. I didn’t see the drawings in my dream but woke
knowing
where they were. I wasn’t in bed but was sleeping here at the kitchen table in my dressing-gown, my head on my arms. I’d had to get up earlier for a pee and was too lazy to go back to bed. I’ve no idea what time it was. The Rayburn was going and the kitchen was cosy. Suddenly I sat up, wide awake.
I got up in a fever of excitement and went out to the coach house. (It was our poet laureate, Barnaby, who insisted we call it a coach house. Pat refused and always called it the shed. And of course he was right. It is an open-fronted shed with a loft from which hay bales were once tossed down to feed the horses.) The air was chill and fresh after the warm fug of the kitchen, and there was a great white moon standing high in the sky behind the branches of the red gum. The night reminded me of the time when Pat used to drop me notes.
Look at the moon!
It was our code for the lust that ruled our lives, our longing to be with each other. Arthur looking up from his book, his hurt gaze following me as I jumped up from the couch clutching Pat’s note and went out of the library through the French doors into the garden to stand in the night and gaze at the moon and wait for him to find me.
Standing under the moon I threw my head back and moaned and ran my hands over my body. It was ridiculous and undignified, but we are animals and at such times know nothing of what is sensible or dignified. It was the full melodrama of youthful love. And I was over thirty then. Nowadays the only thing that gives my skin that feverish sensitivity is the prelude to a migraine or when I’m getting diarrhoea.
Our ladder, the one and only ladder we ever had, was made by Arthur from dowels and poles that he cut and fashioned himself with great care and love from young casuarinas along the river bank. It took him weeks and was painful to watch. I found the ladder at last the other night, embedded under an accumulation of rubbish behind the Pontiac. It was lucky there was such a bright moon or I would not have found it. By the time I’d freed the ladder and dragged it out into the open
I was shaking violently and had to sit on the running board of the Ponty hugging myself for half an hour before my body recovered. As I sat there I was remembering Arthur down at the river getting the poles, his shirt off, his skinny torso blazing white in the glare of the sun, wielding his axe so inexpertly I thought he must surely lop off one of his feet before he died of sunstroke. I went down to him and shouted at him angrily, ‘Leave it! Let Pat do it when he comes.’ But Arthur, poor man, was trying to compete with Pat.
Arthur was not a practical man. He was not one of those men who can pick up a bag of tools and go off whistling and build a house for his family with his own hands. Arthur loved books and artists and poets and musicians. He liked to sit and drink whisky and smoke his French cigarettes on the veranda with a friend or in the library and talk all day and all night if he were allowed, or lose himself for hours in a book, preferably a history of art or the life of an artist. There was no envy of the gifted in Arthur, except at that time his envy of Pat’s easygoing ability to do anything practical. Arthur felt his manliness to be at risk and could not forgo the challenge. Freddy stood with me by the pond and we looked down the hill to where Arthur was working. Freddy lifted his glass and said, ‘Behold the Christ fashioning his own cross.’ We laughed and drank our wine, then linked our arms and turned and went inside and left Arthur to it. If he was fool enough to do it, then it was his own fault and no one else’s if he got sunburned and cut his toes off. We would care for him while he recuperated.
