Autumn Laing (19 page)
‘I don’t know yet what sort of artist I am.’
‘My wife says an artist doesn’t need to know what he wants to paint until the inspiration to paint comes to them. At which point necessity takes over. Or should do. What do you think? Is she right? Is that the way you do it?’
The strong cigarette was making Pat dizzy. He hadn’t eaten anything substantial since breakfast. He belched softly, tasting Sir Malcolm’s Dundee shortbreads. He watched Arthur Laing get up and come around the desk and begin fumbling with the belt buckle of Edith’s mac. He was reminded of their old sportsmaster at school, smelling of pee and nervously fumbling at the buttons of a boy’s shorts before letting loose with the strap. ‘Let me do that,’ he said. He took the belt from Arthur Laing’s hands, their fingers touching as he did so. Arthur Laing looked down at him, his lips forming into a delicate smile, as if the touch of their hands confirmed for him a sensitive perception about his visitor; the beginning, perhaps, of a guarded respect for Pat’s guileless request for help.
Arthur Laing, with his hair and his yellow tie and his silver suit, leafing through Mr Creedy’s daughter. Pat’s fictions of the girl, that is, of the naked young woman, whom Pat had never seen without her clothes. Laing, his head on one side then the other, murmuring, ‘Yes! Interesting,’ or even, ‘Very interesting.’ And once, ‘Unusual, Mr Donlon.’ Striving to make sense of what he was seeing. Eager to respond. In fact responding. Delighted to have been distracted from Wilenski. His lips moved as he read the poem under the last drawing. When he
had finished reading the poem, Arthur Laing returned to his seat and, with great care, lit a fresh cigarette.
He did not blow smoke rings this time, but formed a small circular opening with his soft pink lips and exhaled the smoke in a narrow thread, as if he wished to imitate the exhaust of an idling motor car on a frosty morning. He sat without speaking for a while, gently making his smoke trail and evidently absorbed in his thoughts, or perhaps listening to the clang of tram bells outside and the sound of footsteps—was it a man or a woman?—hurrying down the stairs. Then someone passed along the corridor whistling. It was a perfectly keyed version of ‘Dance a Cachucha’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Gondoliers
.
Arthur Laing said, ‘He can do an interesting realisation of a Chopin nocturne for you if you ask him to. Perhaps it’s this that keeps him happy. He’s a lawyer too, but received from his gods not only the charming ability to whistle sublimely, but also the even rarer gift of a reposeful soul. He is a man blessed with the wisdom of contentment.’ He looked at Pat, feigning astonishment. ‘I envy him.’ He sat gazing at Pat for a long half-minute, the receding whistler eventually silenced by the closing of a distant door. ‘I shan’t pay you fifty pounds for your drawings, Mr Donlon. But how about coming to dinner with us this evening? What do you say? There are extravagant aspects to my wife’s character, but her cooking is renowned. And reliable.’
EIGHT MONTHS OF THIS YEAR HAVE GONE ALREADY. I’M LUCKY TO still be here. After my night in the loft I came down with a chill which developed into bronchitis. It wouldn’t shift off my chest for weeks and I was losing weight that I could not afford to lose. Andrew diagnosed mild pneumonia and ordered me to stay in bed and rest. ‘Or you won’t see the year out.’ I’ve never known him in such a bossy mood. He told me to never, never smoke ever again and to give up writing my memoirs. ‘This whole business has unsettled you.’ Unsettled?
Between wheezing and coughing my lungs up I managed to tell him, ‘You’re trying to bully me, Andrew, and it won’t work.’ But I was too exhausted to put up a serious fight. He stood beside my bed glowering at me, Adeli at his side wringing her chubby hands over her paunch as if she was an old-fashioned lady’s maid—some Americans, and I’ve noticed this before, are oddly unsuited to our century. No doubt she was afraid she was about to lose her subject. What then, Adeli? Without
me, who is my biographer? Andrew didn’t shout at me. Like Arthur, Andrew is far too well mannered ever to shout. But he was seriously alarmed by my midnight visit to the coach house. ‘If you’re going to persist with writing this thing of yours and smoking cigarettes, there’s nothing I can do for you. You won’t last till the spring.’ Well, Andrew, it’s the first day of spring and I’m still here.
Not smoking doesn’t suit the idea of myself I’ve been conjuring with this year—the indestructible old harridan, lone survivor from a bygone era of greatness, the standard-bearer of truth from her own time.
That
woman smokes and writes and possesses a furious energy for it all. But my night in the loft nearly did for me and I’ve been forced to temper my belief in my powers of resistance. The truth is, I have been humbled. Even as I write this I am trembling. The tremor has never quite left me since it started in the loft—like the precursor of a truly grand earthquake that will shatter the familiar landscape of my being for good. The night in the loft cost me more than my strength. Is it a penitent I am to become? Repenting my life? Not all of it, surely? I don’t know that true repentance is possible for the intelligent unbeliever, is it?
During those long sleepless nights these past weeks, struggling to get my breath, the last of my flesh melting from my bones, I might have given up and let the angels take me. But I persisted with the struggle. I want to get this job done before I am done for myself. It was my sighting of Edith in the street that day that gave me the impulse to begin this, but it is my own stubbornness that compels me to go on with it. I will not willingly go over to the other side until I have given an account of myself on this side.
So I obeyed Andrew and laid off writing and cigarettes until this morning. Andrew thought I might also have had a mild stroke but I refused to go to hospital for the scans. ‘You know very well,’ I told him, ‘if I go into hospital at my age I’m never coming out again.’ I think he did know. He didn’t argue. But he refused to let me stay on my own in the house. So I find that I am no longer the independent woman I once was, but am returned to the dependencies of childhood. If I do not agree to his terms and conditions my doctor has the power to send me to await my death in purgatory with the other creepy inmates with their dead-fish eyes and walking frames. I am powerless to oppose his will. Was he even threatening me with a return of the multiple orgasmer? This possibility inspired me to say, ‘Adeli will look after me.’ She smiled and leaned over to take my hand in both her own, her plump cheeks trembling. ‘Of course I shall look after you, Mrs Laing. It will be an honour.’ Yes, it will be an honour, I thought, but it will be an honour on my terms, young lady. As it has turned out, the terms are not quite my own. She has been feeding me my antibiotics twice a day with the quiet determination of a French farmer force-feeding his geese for the season of foie gras.
Today is the first day she has let me out of my bed. I would have defied her and been up before this but I haven’t had the conviction in my legs or my head to manage it on my own. Yesterday was the last official day of winter. It was one of those days of fine purity and promise, when the world seems graced by a primal innocence and the most abject among us rejoice to be alive. Even the freeway was subdued, as if in homage to what is left to us of nature’s wonder. Adeli opened the French doors for me so that I could hear the magpies and smell the
wattle blossom. After she’d fed me my pills I said, ‘You’ve got to let me up for the first day of spring, darling, or I promise you I shall die in my bed. You won’t have the free run of this place when I’m gone, I can tell you that. Your dining-room hoard will be closed to you. The trustees will have you out of here like a shot.’ As you can imagine, the
darling
was bestowed on her by me in a tone of gritty irony. I asked her to bring me Barnaby’s stout blackthorn shillelagh. She brought it and helped me up. I held her arm and wielded Barnaby’s stick in my other hand, the knob fitting perfectly to my palm. We’re not in love exactly, but I am confident we understand the terms of our arrangement. If I am prepared to deal in the currency of small compromise, then I doubt if Adeli will give me any serious trouble.
She has refused to give me my cigarettes. She burst into tears when I shouted at her that she was a selfish bitch. I was overwrought and regressed for a moment to my old hysterical ways. I think I frightened her. But she did not yield. Through her trembling little sobs, her size fifties shuddering alarmingly, she said, ‘I’d rather see you die than be the one to give you those terrible things.’ It was very affecting. I calmed her with an apology and a fond pat to her enormous thigh and told her we had smoked day and night when I was young. But she is a woman of her time and was not to be convinced. I shall find a way to get cigarettes when I need them badly enough. It will be more fun to trick her than to threaten her. After all, I need her as much as she needs me. I can’t afford to lose her. Without her I would soon be drifting about in a home for the waiting dead. Imagine the smell! And no smoking there, you can be sure of that. No fun for anyone. I can always get Stony
to smuggle in cigarettes among the cabbages—all prisoners find the means for evading the rules of their jailers, and I am now a prisoner of my old age. My once-silky legs may be withered and frail, the sensual curves of my thighs reduced to wasted sacks of wrinkled skin, but my mind remains as sharp and clear as winter moonlight in the desert—and I have been loved in the desert and seen the silver of the moon laid across the trembling stalks of young wheat, and I have cried out to my lover with the breath of my passion. I am not a stranger to the desert.
I’m sitting at the small table on the veranda with a blanket around my shoulders and, as you can see, I am writing. Yes, I have re-entered my little world. What a joy it is. Andrew will not be pleased. In this final year of my life—surely there cannot be another?—I have discovered the joy of dwelling in a world of my own uncontested memory. Adeli has had Edith’s picture cleaned and framed for me. It is hanging on the wall in my bedroom beside the French doors. From my bed when I wake in the morning I now have a view of their white cottage and the embroidered field at Ocean Grove, where Pat slaughtered Gerner’s horse for dog meat more than half a century ago and received ten shillings in payment, with which he paid his fare to Melbourne and changed our lives forever.
Edith’s picture no longer represents the despised work of the enemy for me, but is a window to my memory. If Arthur saw it here he would be pleased. Arthur adored me, poor man, and was terrified of losing me. I saved him from his mother and from his own uncertainties. He kept alive a hope that one day
I would find within myself the grace of a gentleness akin to his own. I’m afraid I never did. But even so, was there a need for me to be quite so fierce with her?
To be fair—and I wish to be fair to myself—I was no less intolerant with Pat. Once he was with us—once, so to speak, I had snared him in my net of love and ambition—I insisted he make up his mind whether he was to be a writer or a painter. ‘You can’t be both,’ I told him. As if I knew. Which of course I did not. But he was no use to me as a poet. The thought of him dithering about with his verses angered me. My rejection of his poetry was selfish. I was impatient for him and me to get on with the business of deciding what sort of painter he was to be. It was not only his adoration but the collaboration in art I wanted from him. Not long after we met it was this that came to represent my sense of my own way forward. To be with him in art,
our
art. I let him know he could not have me if he was going to be a poet. I feared at first that I had overplayed my hand and he would choose poetry (no doubt a true poet would have done just that). He claimed to feel more at home with writers than with artists. ‘And Freddy here,’ I said, ‘feels more at home with women than with men, but that doesn’t make Freddy a woman.’ It was easy to get a laugh at Pat’s expense in those early days, especially if we’d all had a few drinks. He looked on at us and said nothing, as if he was not of our time. He unsettled our certainties (as Andrew would no doubt have said).
And he was right. He was ever a loner and was never at home even with his own kind. He was a refugee from his parents’ modest home and their restricted life in St Kilda. He was, though he scarcely knew it himself at that time, in search
of a home for his imagination. A grand, strange, far-off place it would have to be if it were to satisfy his needs, unfamiliar and subject to legends and dreams. In his thirties he found such a place in the soft English countryside and never did return to live in the hard land of his birth. A reverse migrant, Pat became. A bird of passage visiting us whenever the season of his soul required it of him. Many of our friends decided he was a faithless deserter for abandoning Australia, but I understood him and knew it was not desertion or abandon ment that drew him away. Pat took Australia with him. To find kinship among strangers was a quest he’d had in him since his boyhood. His only home had ever been in his own head. In that strange shifting landscape of his imagination, a place he never shared with anyone.
And this may explain why despite the volumes of critical attention his paintings have received, there remains even today an untouched silence in them. Something essential about them that evaded the critics, and perhaps evaded him. Something at the centre of his art that remained undisclosed. And was it not wilful, this keeping of a sacred enclosure beyond our reach, beyond his own reach. It was the entire creative endeavour of Pat’s life, to reach into that heart of his imagination and expose it. But he found in the end that it eluded him. As perhaps it always must. For the silence at the heart of art is surely art’s singular precondition. The estranging silence and absence we feel when contemplating his pictures are precisely what draws us back to them. Always in us after we leave them a sense of unresolved anxiety about their meaning.
