Autumn Laing (17 page)

‘So you’re an admirer of Wyndham Lewis?’ Sir Malcolm said. ‘That makes you a rare bird in these parts.’ Sir Malcolm crossed his legs. He glanced down at his crossed legs, as if the manoeuvre had taken him by surprise, his legs having assumed the initiative without consulting him. Although his observation to Pat had been delivered in the tone of a question, Sir Malcolm went on speaking. ‘He’s the best of the British modernists. If it was up to me and Guy, Wyndham Lewis and his mates would be hanging in that bloody great mausoleum up the road they call the National Gallery, instead of that brown muck those bloody tonalists call art.’ He regarded Pat with narrowed eyes. Something had stirred his emotions. ‘The place is being run by fools. Do you and your fellow students know that, Mr Donlon?’ He shut his mouth firmly on this question and waited to hear from Pat.

‘Many of us do,’ Pat said. ‘Yes.’ This was not a lie. Didn’t he despise the values taught at the Gallery School? And hadn’t he rejected them, just as his hero, Rimbaud, would have done?
It was sad to think of it all now. That episode of empty bravado. But it was all he had to draw on. Instead of telling Sir Malcolm this he said, ‘We have to do our own art. We can’t just follow the British and the Europeans.’

‘And is that what you’re doing? Your own art?’ The question was bluntly put, Sir Malcolm’s cold rebuff waiting in the wings for its cue. ‘Can you artists ignore the great art of Europe and Britain without paying the price of provincialism and condemning yourselves to obscurity? Hmm? Eh?’ He drew in a rapid gasp of air. ‘So where have you seen Wyndham Lewis before today?’

‘In reproductions only, sir,’ Pat said. He gestured at the journals on the table. ‘In magazines. I didn’t recognise him. You don’t see the hand of the artist in those glossy little pictures. You get no idea of the grandeur of their work. There was definitely something familiar about it. It stopped me dead when I came through the front door. But I couldn’t have told you who the artist was. Not an Australian, for sure. I could see that.’

‘Why not an Australian, Mr Donlon? Why so sure not an Australian? Miss Barquist told me you recognised it as Lewis’s work at once. Aren’t we as good as them? Can’t Australians do it, Mr Donlon? Is that your opinion?’

‘She was mistaken, sir. It’s not her fault. I was impressed with it. I didn’t recognise it. More impressed than I can tell you, but I didn’t know who’d painted it. There aren’t any Australians doing work as confident as that.’

‘You do know he gave up painting abstract pictures twenty years ago? He’s been doing very fine figurative work since then. That’s one of his early ones. A pre-war work. I was lucky to get it. It wasn’t for sale. Guy Cowper winkled it out of a private
collection in London and we made them an offer. It’s only been hanging here a month. Guy’s a wonderful man. A great man. There’s no one else like him in Australia. You and your mates would have to know his critical writings in my paper?’

‘Yes, of course, everyone reads Guy Cowper’s reviews.’ Pat laughed. ‘The teachers at the Gallery School are scared of him.’

‘Do you think so? That’s not my impression. What a bunch of blundering idiots. You think he’s got them scared? Are they bright enough to know when they should be scared? And you and your fellows, do you agree with what Guy has to say? He’s the only man for that job. He’s lived in Paris and London. He knows everyone over there. If a picture comes into the market he knows exactly where it’s from and who owned it last and if it’s any good or a dud. He speaks three European languages. All fluently. If it were up to Guy and me, we’d have Georges Braque and Picasso and Lewis and his mates all over the walls up there at that tomb. I’ve been elected to the board, did you know that? We’re going to make a few changes up there.’

‘I heard something, I think, along those lines, sir.’ Pat wished he had kept in touch with things and hadn’t despised the idea of involvement.

‘You’re not familiar with the politics of art, Mr Donlon, I can see that.’

‘I just try to do my work, sir.’

‘If your business is going to be art, Mr Donlon, then my advice to you is to get involved in the politics of your business. And the sooner you do that the better for you. It’s in boardrooms, not in studios, where decisions about the reputations of fellows like yourself are made. You’re going to need a few mates on the right committees if your work is to be brought
to the notice of the right people. Ignore the politics of your business, and the politics of your business will ignore you.’ He motioned briskly to the untidy bundle on the floor by Pat’s chair. ‘Is that your work?’

‘I brought along a few drawings.’

‘The mackintosh is a novel idea,’ Sir Malcolm said drily. ‘Miss Barquist said you were carrying a folio.’ He sighed heavily and stood up. Was he getting bored? ‘Put them on the desk. Let’s have a look at them.’ He stood back, watching Pat struggling to release his drawings from the clinging embrace of Edith’s damp old mac. Pat didn’t mind the smell of it. He was reminded of rainy days at home in St Kilda.

Pat said, ‘I didn’t intend to be so blunt just now, sir. About the money, I mean. The bursary. But I need to get to Europe.’ He thought he’d have more chance of success if he mentioned the word Europe. The small black fly settled on the back of his hand then flew off towards the window, deciding it had had enough of the place. Pat freed one arm from his struggle with the mackintosh and waved at the pictures around the walls. ‘I need to see these first-hand. I need to find out what the rest of the world is doing before I can know what it is I have to do myself. To know where the gaps are, if you see what I mean.’

‘The gaps?’ Sir Malcolm said sharply, as if he questioned himself about cracks in the wall that needed attending to, or suspected a criticism of his collection. ‘What gaps are we talking about?’

The drawings did not want to roll out flat but curled back on themselves—terrified of being exposed to the gaze of this great man with the eyebrows and the money. Pat was sorry he had mentioned the word
money
again. And
gaps
had been a
mistake. Mentioning money a second time had doubled the clumsiness of mentioning it the first time. But how else, if he didn’t speak about it, was he supposed to get Sir Malcolm to speak about it?

Sir Malcolm stepped up to the desk and held down two corners of the curling paper with the tips of his fingers. Big hands. Pat noticed his fingernails were pink and carefully manicured. They seemed too delicate to belong to his hairy fingers.

‘Thank you,’ Pat said. He held down the other two corners of the sheets himself, his shoulder touching Sir Malcolm’s shoulder then easing away. The two of them restraining a weakened patient on the operating table, ready to begin their dissection. A modern
Anatomy Lesson
. ‘The things that no one else is doing, I mean,’ Pat said, trying to explain his use of the word
gaps
. They stood looking down at the flowing bosom and oddly displaced swirl of hips of Mr Creedy’s buxom daughter. Pat could smell her sweet clear skin, intriguingly tainted with the sawdust and blood of the shop. He looked up at Sir Malcolm.

But Sir Malcolm was not thinking of art. ‘I think you’ll generally find, Mr Donlon,’ he said, adopting the magisterial tone of an elder of the tribe, ‘that the things other people are not doing are things that are not worth doing. And that is why they are not doing them. Contrary to what you say, we must do the things that other people
are
doing. And we must take careful note of
how
they are doing them. Then we must strive to do them better.’ He drew breath and paused to scan each drawing before folding back the sheet and delivering it into Pat’s care, his head first on this side then on the other, repeating a small sound in his throat, keeping his lips closed and giving a bit of a nod of his head. The sound in his throat
underwent a number of minor variations with each drawing, as if he were trying out a new flute, a slight modulation of tone or decrease of intensity, tuning his reactions. Pat paid close attention to these sounds, but if they implied an expression of interest, that expression did not reach a level where it might have been taken by him for enthusiasm. When Sir Malcolm had got to the last drawing, the one of Mr Creedy’s daughter’s buttocks, he paused a little longer, reading the poem. ‘So you’re a poet too, Mr Donlon,’ he said. And only then did he look directly at Pat. ‘Are you sure art’s your vocation?’

‘I’m either an artist or I’m nothing,’ Pat said. He realised how hopeless about it all he had sounded. And wasn’t there also a note of impatience and anger in there too? If serious men such as Sir Malcolm were to have any confidence in him he would have to find a way of concealing the rawness of his emotions and tempering his private truths. He was not very good at playing this game. He was aware, suddenly, that the interview was over. He had failed Sir Malcolm McFarlane’s inquisition. For that was what it had been. A final mistake had been to include his poem, which had only provided Sir Malcolm with a distraction from art on which to close their meeting.

‘Well, young man,’ Sir Malcolm said, freeing his hands from the butcher’s paper and stepping away from the desk, leaving control of the drawings to Pat and lightly dusting off his fingers. ‘You’d better stop by Guy Cowper’s office on your way out and show these to him. I leave judgments about bursaries in his capable hands. He’s the finest this country has.’ He summoned a cold smile to his eyes and held out his hand. ‘Miss Barquist will show you where Mr Cowper has his office.’ Sir Malcolm moved to the door and held it open for him.

Pat shook his hand and thanked him for his kindness in seeing him, then he tucked his untidy bundle of drawings under his arm, gripped the brim of his hat between two fingers and went out the door, which closed behind him with that curt little click he had noticed before, the brass lock evidently well aligned, his father would have been pleased to know, and sweetly oiled, thanks to a man doing the rounds with his long-nosed oilcan and a wad of cotton waste whipped from the back pocket of his green dungarees, making his periodic appearances in the executive suite after the boss and his bosomy pal had gone home. The invisible maintenance of things so dear to his dad’s heart. Was it where he was always going to belong himself? Pat wondered. Although he loved and respected his mother and father, and wished to retain their love and respect for himself and his way of life, he had a cold horror of becoming trapped in their class. Of being like them. As he left Sir Malcolm McFarlane’s office that day the piston in Pat’s head was thumping and he was longing for a smoke.

When Pat stopped talking the only sound penetrating through the thick glass and stone of the building into the foyer was the squeal of a tram going past along Flinders Street.

‘What do you do with yourself all day here?’ He was looking over Helen Carlyon’s head at the agitated blue and grey field of the great Wyndham Lewis on the wall behind her. The painting now seemed to him forlorn and stripped of its power, displaced and not belonging here, pillaged from its rightful home on the other side of the world by Sir Malcolm’s foraging
critic, the much-feared Guy Cowper. It came to Pat then that a work of art can only retain its full power in its own place. Looking at the picture he knew in himself a kinship of exile with it, a sense that each of them had been subjected to the same wilful coercion, the same peculiar cultural violence, of the men in command of things. Those who could command the pillaging. Displayed here in this silent foyer, Wyndham Lewis’s masterpiece had become a trophy merely of wealth and power, a rare and expensive object, like the Chinese celadon vase on the cover of
Apollo
, with which to augment the prestige of its owner, the great chairman of the board. Pat’s voice broke across the empty spaces of the foyer. ‘I’d go bloody starkers sitting here all day with that looking over my shoulder.’

‘I thought you liked it,’ Helen said gently. ‘And there’s no need to swear, Pat. You’re upset. Go on with what you were telling me. I’ve got plenty to do. Don’t you worry. The foyer is my kingdom.’ She giggled at this. ‘Go on! Tell me what the great Mr Guy Cowper said to you.’

Pat looked down at her upturned face, her red lips parted just sufficiently to reveal her two front teeth, like a tiny new pair of glistening ballet shoes presented to him for his inspection. He could lean down and kiss them. He was confident he was the most interesting event in Helen Carlyon’s day, possibly in her entire week.

‘He was sitting at that big fancy French desk writing something,’ he said. ‘An article for Sir Malcolm’s newspaper, I suppose. Thinking up how he was going to rubbish some poor bugger’s paintings. He didn’t even look up when your mate Agatha showed me into his office. He just sat there with his head down and went on writing as if nothing had happened.
I waited half a minute for him to say something. I was thinking what a rude bugger he was. I should have turned around and walked out of there, but I was still hoping he might like my drawings. So I said, Sir Malcolm said I was to see you, Mr Cowper. Well, he sort of paused and frowned at this, as if the sound of my voice irritated a sensitive nerve in his head. He laid down his pen, carefully lining it up with the edge of his blotter. You would have thought it was costing him a pound to do it. Then he took his time blotting the page, pressing it down evenly all over. When he’d done fussing around with this performance he stood up and came around his desk. He was still not acknowledging my presence in any way at all, no hello or how do you do or even a little smile of welcome. Not a thing. My drawings might have arrived on his desk by magic. Hello! I should have said. I’m here too, you know! He flicked through my drawings with a sneer on his face, a dreadfully distasteful chore for him, obviously, to be interrupted in the middle of his important work with this—his lips were twisting around as if he had his nose in a stinkpipe.’

‘His lips are too wide for his mouth,’ Helen said. ‘They’re all over the place. And did you notice how still his eyes are? They’re uncanny. The way he looks through you gives me the creeps. I feel like turning around to see if I’m standing behind myself.’