Autumn Laing (2 page)

If you knew Barnaby Green, the beloved poet laureate of our circle, you knew even in his decay a youthful man. There was nothing Barnaby could do to temper that out-of-time youthfulness of his. Whenever he ventured a patrician gesture he became laughable, poor man. Those who did not know him and love him as I knew him and loved him thought him a snob. I would not have predicted his suicide. He surprised me. Dismayed me. Angered me. His suicide made me feel as if I had never really known him. I felt cheated. Betrayed. Yes, I felt that in killing himself Barnaby betrayed me. Had he kept
himself from me after all? His inner self? Barnaby’s suicide, almost as much as seeing Edith in the street the other day (or whenever it was) shook my certainties about myself. That is what has happened. These things are not easy to understand. And you no longer expect it at my age. To have your certainties contradicted by experience, I mean.

I might have been prepared for some gesture of that heroic kind from the others. Their deaths were not surprising but confirmed the lives they had lived. Barnaby’s left me wondering. About myself. And then Edith appears. As if a last dream has waited its awful moment to come upon me and make its terrible demand.

Since seeing Edith my memory has become the cathedral of my torment. Well then, I shall consecrate its old stones to my truth. Am I being grandiose? Melodramatic? I am old-fashioned and am not going to try to be modern.
My
truth, did I say? It was his truth too. Not Barnaby’s, Pat’s. Did Barnaby even have a truth? A man of such powdery illusions, such primal gaiety? I doubt if the gravitas of truth ever stuck to Barnaby for long enough to become his own. Pat Donlon’s truth, I mean. His. Let me be clear. It is Pat, our greatest artist, if it is art that renews our vision of ourselves and our country, of whom I wish to speak here. And of myself. The torture that accompanies grand visions. That, and the beauty and the awful price of illicit love. The torture of seeing what others have yet to see. The torture of knowing what has been kept hidden, unseen, in the silence and the dark of wilful denial. All that. The suffering and the transcendent bliss. All right, yes, I
am
being grandiose. I like the sound of it!

I was christened Gabrielle Louise Ballard. From the beginning I hated my name. I refused to answer to Gabrielle and was teased to tears by my brothers with
Gabby
. When my darling Uncle Mathew came to visit and found me alone in the garden weeping, he took me on his knees and caressed my burning cheeks with his lips and called me his sweet golden Autumn. That is not a moment I shall forget. It goes with me into my grave—like the golden amulet of an Egyptian princess. Autumn is the name I have been known by all my life. No friend ever called me anything else. Freddy reduced me to Aught, of course. But I loved Freddy and forgave him. Gave him, indeed, the liberty of his dreams with me. But with Freddy it was always a game. Life. Nothing more.

It is the first of January, 1991. My first New Year’s Day alone. I was born in 1906. So I must be eighty-five. Is that right? Some people still have vigour at eighty-five. Barnaby had the facade of it. Close to, however, one saw the vacant sky behind his windows. But I have obeyed the biblical laws and become a disfigured crone. Still tall, I am stooped and cranky and thin as … Well, as thin as something. Think of something yourself. My scalp is dry, with reddened patches visible through the stray wisps of silver hair that remain attached. Colourless, really, rather than silver. This is my last chance to tell the truth. I must remember that. Which is why I wear a scarf. Because of my hair, I mean, not because it’s nearly impossible to stick to the truth. Not like the Queen’s scarves, but more a scarf of the kind once affected by America’s beat poets and the pirates. Tight to the skull. I have a long skull. Even with my stoop, once dressed and in public my appearance is tall and haughty. Today my headscarf is a fine Kashmiri pashmina. The deep
green of dreams. The sacred colour. It needs a wash but I don’t object to the faint warm odour of it. A peasant woman would never wash her scarf. I’ve become accustomed to strong animal smells here alone with Sherry.

Suicide is for strong people. Suicide is not for the likes of Barnaby. Barnaby has spoiled suicide for me. It is so annoying. I tremble and have no strength. The tea tray jiggles in my hands as if it will leap out of my grasp and run away laughing into the garden, like one of my tormenting brothers risen from his grave to mock me again. Each of the seven lidless teapots on the shelf above the Rayburn represents a period and a particular friendship. I realised this the other day when I broke the lid of this one. Don’t worry, I shan’t bore you with a catalogue of all that. My two brothers shouting
Gabby
into my face until I wept with fury and pursued them helplessly around the garden at Elsinore. Elsinore! You see how I was schooled in grandiosity. They became grey-suited chairmen of their own great companies. Members of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. Terrified of publicity. Terrified of taxation. Both dead. Their wives dead. Elsinore given to the state. The garden cut up to make room for the developer’s blocks of yellow-brick flats. That vast cold house a rehabilitation centre for the hopeless of this new age that is not my age. Elsinore, my childhood home that was never homely. It should have been bulldozed instead of classified. I turned my back on it and on them when I met Arthur. When my father met Arthur he said to me, ‘There’s only one thing wrong with your Arthur, my dear.’ I asked him what that might be. ‘Arthur doesn’t think enough of money,’ my father said. I answered, ‘And your trouble, Father, is that you think of nothing else.’ He did not forgive
me. We were not friends. Were we ever? I loathed them all. I was afraid of them. I still am. They damaged me. My fear of them made me hysterical. I felt trapped with them and the only thing I could do was to scream and break things and refuse to eat. Even though they are dead the trap they set for me then is still in me now. I still scream and break things and refuse to eat. Not as often, but I do it. I dread what their cold world of money worship might yet do to me in the vivid nightmares that have begun to haunt my feeble years. You would not believe the awful conviction in the nightmares of the aged. They are a fearful assault. There is no resisting them.

Darling Uncle Mathew, he is still the saviour of my childhood. There was a touch of the poet in him and they despised him for it. He was the only one of them to die poor. They refused to help him. I have wondered if Mathew might have been the result of my grandmother taking a lover. Not the milkman, but some man cultivated, wayward and of a generous spirit. If she did have an affair, her manner gave no hint of it, unless in the very firmness of her implicit denial. Sequestered, she was. As tight as a dried fish in her corsets. The dowager Queen Adelaide. Her lips withdrawn into her mask. Severe in her reproach of all things joyful. The mistress of Elsinore to her last day. The laughter of children gave her migraines and she would not tolerate it in her house. My father’s mother. Grandma Ballard. Mother to the founder of our fortunes. And there were several fortunes. For a time the brothers Ballard (excepting Mathew) accounted for the largest fortune in Melbourne. I shall say no more. That lot will not be resurrected by me here. I will not be lured into an account of their hideousness. Truth does not require it of me.

I was eleven when Uncle Mathew kissed me within the canopy of the peppercorn tree in the garden at Elsinore. So gently did he put his lips to mine that a butterfly might have landed on me, the touch so exquisite my body bloomed for him with a pang I have not forgotten. That pale afternoon the beauty of consolation entered my life. For Mathew consoled me, as he consoled himself, not only with his kisses but with the secret that we are each born with a gift. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the strong rhythm of his heart. His voice was soft and unhurried, and when he spoke wide acres of time waited to be filled with imagination’s charmed possibilities. His was a landscape beyond reality.

‘Not everyone uses their gift,’ he told me that day, his hand on my side, his fingers warm through my dress. ‘Some,’ he said, ‘do not even realise they have received a gift. For them the gift remains mute, dormant until the end.’ I knew he spoke of his mother and his brothers. I said, ‘You mean until they die?’ I wished to hear him say it. His fingers pressed my ribs and he held me close in his embrace. ‘Yes, my darling, until they die.’ A hardness in his voice at this. And I wished then for the deaths of all of them. The smell of Mathew’s skin through his linen shirt was of herbs and blossoms and strange distant places. ‘Others,’ he said, ‘do not wish to acknowledge the gift. They see the burden of it and are frightened by what it demands from them, that it will challenge them to perform above themselves or else see them fail. They disown their gift in favour of the coarse reality of money. They loathe the creative life of others and strive to stifle it at any cost. They are best at cruelty.’ His mother’s fierceness stood over us and he lowered his voice and whispered, ‘In their most secret thoughts they believe in an
untried quality within themselves that would prove equal in merit to the merits of the most gifted—
if only they were to try it
. That is their secret despair, not to have tried their worth.’

That is the way Mathew talked; lover, poet and philosopher. He was too kind and gentle for this world and failed to leave an impression on it. He spoke to me as if admitting me to secrets gathered from places I would never visit. I loved him and felt safe with him. And wasn’t he comforted by my innocence and my belief in him? None of the others spoke to me in his way. If they spoke to me at all, it was to correct me or to offer me advice or to mock me. They did not know how to speak of love or poetry. The imagination was a locked door for them and they feared it. I locked my lips and my ears to them too. It was the country of Mathew I was determined to inhabit when I grew up.

When I was seventeen and home from school for the Christmas holidays I saw Uncle Mathew for the last time. And perhaps he knew it was to be our last time. For we sat in the garden again on the seat in the shelter of the peppercorn and when I asked him, ‘What is my gift?’ he kept his silence for a long time, looking at me tenderly, before he said with an undeclared sorrow that puzzled me, ‘My darling Autumn, yours is the gift of recognition.’ It was his melancholy he would have me understand, not that the world is hard and sad but that life is beautiful and must end. I asked him how he could be sure this was my gift. ‘You are the only one among them,’ he said, and there were tears in his eyes as he said it, ‘who has not scorned me or accused me of failure, but has celebrated my struggle to make something of my poetry.’ I took his hands in
mine. ‘But I love you, Uncle Mathew. Whatever you had done I would have loved you for it.’

A year later he found his death, alone and destitute, in the backyard of a pub in a dismal village in County Kilkenny, Ireland, where he had foolishly strayed in search of the roots of his poetic gift. I wish I had been there to comfort him. I denied him my lips that last time in the garden at Elsinore. I was too awkward with myself at seventeen to permit it. And afterwards I regretted denying him. I still do. I could have let him have everything and it might have given him hope.

But he was right. I was gifted to recognise the strengths of others, often before they saw their strengths themselves. I was the one who gathered them together and brought them into their own light and into the confidence of the admiration of their peers, without which many of them would have faltered and fallen by the wayside, like poor solitary Uncle Mathew himself. He had taught me that the country of the gifted is a dangerous place to be alone in. I vowed that I would always keep myself at the centre of a group of writers, artists and thinkers. And that is what I did, with Arthur at my side. Until it was all torn apart by envy, betrayal and despair.

When I saw Edith on the street it shocked me. It was her walk that was familiar. That same balanced containment which, when I first met her, made me think her prissy and lacking in seriousness. That soft young woman’s walk in an old woman. A demon voice whispering in my ear,
Edith Black! See? There! That’s her in the green hat walking away from you.
The only woman on the street wearing a hat. I felt as if I’d been shot. She stopped and turned around and looked straight at me. My hand went to my face. When she started back towards me I thought
she had recognised me. I was unable to move. But she walked past me and went into the chemist’s, where I’d just been to get my prescription filled for the life-saving drugs I take every day by the handful. As I watched Edith go into the chemist’s I realised she could have been my oldest friend in the world today instead of my oldest enemy. Instead of taking her man from her I might have put my arm around her and given her a kiss. She was without guile. My throat thickened and I wept. Why did I weep? I don’t know. I wept, that is all I know. And something changed for me. I have always been indifferent to the why of things. It is what happens to us that matters, not why it happens to us.

I kept diaries all my life. Notebooks. What the Germans call
Tagebücher
. Notes on my days. The incidents that filled them, or the voids that made them echo with my cries of anguish. That smell of burning in the summer air today is them. This blue smoke in the sunbeams here within the coach house. I must go and stir the ashes. Books burn badly. My despair. My hopes. My girlhood dreams. All that stuff. It goes stale quicker than cabbages. When I got home after seeing Edith I went out to the back veranda and poured a large whisky and drank it off in one go. Half a bottle of whisky later I was in the study collecting my notebooks from the shelves above my desk. They went back to the days before Mathew kissed me under the peppercorn. The earliest of them had pressed violets between its pages from the garden at Elsinore. I must have been seven. What started me keeping a diary when I was seven? There was another with the impression of my girlish lips from my first lipstick (stolen from my mother’s clutchbag). Later notebooks with boys’ love letters pasted into them. I gathered
them all from the shelves and stuffed them into an empty wine carton. This afternoon I dragged the carton along the passage and out the side door to the forty-four-gallon drum that Stony incinerates our rose clippings in. I reached into the drum with the iron poker from the library and stirred them around, pieces flying up and making me squint. I watched the pages curl and catch, my antique past in the flickering sparks crawling along the edges of the old paper. So what? It was time to burn them. An added delight in watching them burn (knowing there is no return from fire) was that Biographers love nothing more than notebooks.