Autumn Laing (20 page)

He was never able to share his innermost struggles with anyone, nor did he leave in his poetry any mention of the
demons that tormented him. I often thought him a man in search of a key with which to unlock access to his own inner world. I believe he did not have a choice to be other than this. It was not acquired habit with him to be so solitary, or a vain pretension, but was in him. His boyhood love for the Icelandic sagas, his dreams of one day meeting in a gipsy his own true brother of the spirit, or finding in Ireland something bathed in the strangeness of himself, these were all for him youthful expressions of the impulse of that inner solitariness, that sense of disconnect that he never mastered in himself.

He would have scoffed if you had called him a romantic. But it would have been the outer man doing the scoffing. Inside, deep inside, where Pat inhabited his creative life, he was like a great sad bird roosting in the fastness of some bleak mountain range, exposed relentlessly to the fierce elements of his own doubts and fancies. Pat was a man on his own. To me his solitariness was immediately attractive. I sensed it in him at once. On the outside he could be hard and unforgiving, but for a brief period with me he was without such defences. Our life together was to become a tangle beyond our unravelling and would cost us and others great suffering. But I would not forfeit it for something less. In my own solitary way (and I too have my solitariness, as do we all), it was the very point and meaning of my life. Love and art combined in Pat and me to make us each greater than either of us had ever been or would ever be again. And neither he nor I understood it. We lived it. Briefly it flamed in us then died. And we both grieved for it ever after. When Anne Collins telephoned from England to tell me he had died with my name on his lips I was moved and I wept, but I was not surprised. I understood.

Freddy was the first to detect the danger Pat’s arrival posed for our little group of intimates, the artists, poets and thinkers of our circle, the group that ever since our arrival at Old Farm had supported in Arthur and me a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives that went beyond the daily facts of living. It was late one wet and wintry Saturday afternoon. Arthur and I and Freddy and Barnaby, and one or two of the others, Anne Collins and Louis de Vries if I remember, were still at the kitchen table, drinking and arguing about art and life. We were reluctant to bring to an end the fellowship of the afternoon, which had begun with us meeting for lunch. That afternoon we had no doubt rearranged the priorities of the Australian art world. Pat was not with us. He returned late from an excursion into the city to visit his mother and to buy the paint he favoured. He had walked from the railway station and came up the back step onto the veranda and through the kitchen door, banging the flywire and bringing a blast of cold air and the bleakness of the day into the warm kitchen with him. His arrival among us seemed violent and sudden. His manner was aggressive, an impatience in him with our endless talk about art. He was fond of saying, ‘Artists paint, they don’t talk about it.’ He was a workman and wanted to clear them all out of the place so that he could lay his stuff out on the kitchen table and get on with his work.

When he came banging through the back door into the kitchen we fell silent and looked at him. It had been raining and his cap and the shoulders of his jacket were dark with the rain. He was lugging a bag and was red in the face with the effort of his walk up the hill. He dumped the bag on the end of the draining board. His clothes clung to him and you could sense
the heat and the impatience in him, something so physical and intense about him and his bag that none of us was willing to be the one to break the silence. It was Freddy who spoke.

There was the sound of Freddy striking a match to light his cigarette, then he said, in his soft and lightly teasing voice, glancing at me with a smile in his eyes, ‘Do you know what we’ve been arranging here this afternoon, Pat?’

Pat was at the draining board struggling to release two dead chooks from the bag. He didn’t turn around. ‘No, Freddy, I don’t.’ From his tone it was clear he meant, ‘and I don’t bloody care either’.

Freddy smiled and smoked his cigarette and let the silence go on a while, then he said, ‘We’ve decided to form a new group. We’re calling it the new art society.’ Freddy waited again but Pat went on gutting the first of the chooks. Freddy said, ‘We’d like you to join us.’

‘I don’t join groups,’ Pat said.

And so Freddy and the rest of us and our grand idea of a new art society were dismissed by Pat as of no consequence. I laughed and told them all it was time for them to go home.

Freddy was not a dandy, but he liked to dress well. That day he was wearing a lovely Donegal tweed suit which he’d had made for him when he was in Dublin the previous year. I loved Freddy. We entertained each other. There was never anything sexual between us but we teased each other and pretended to flirt. I don’t know how much he’d had to drink that afternoon, it was impossible to tell with Freddy, but quite a bit I’m sure. He got up and went over to the sink and he put his arm around Pat’s shoulders and kissed him firmly on the cheek. Freddy was not homosexual but knew Pat to be intensely
sensitive to any suggestion of homosexuality. Pat was caught off guard and reeled away from Freddy, wiping at his cheek with the back of his hand and looking so fierce I thought he was going to strike Freddy. Freddy stood his ground within striking distance and smiled and puffed on his cigarette, as if he were inviting Pat to strike him if he dared, or perhaps to return the kiss. But Pat just swore and laughed unhappily. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, Freddy.’

When Freddy left that afternoon it seemed to all of us that he had won a point over Pat. A physical, manly point. Something to do with good manners, not courage. And we all valued good manners more than we valued courage. I got up from the table and took Freddy’s arm and walked him to the front door. Neither of us mentioned Pat. As he was leaving, Freddy turned to me and said, ‘The first meeting of our new art society ended rather well, don’t you think?’ He got in his car and waved to me and drove off. The far-side rear wheel of his car rode up over the bricks with which Stony had edged the circle of roses in the centre of the drive. The bricks are still wonky there and I still feel a pang of sympathy for Freddy’s tortured loneliness when I think of that day. Freddy was not a solitary man, but he was a very lonely one. I stood at the door and watched him turn into the road, the rain falling steadily, the light fading rapidly. Our road was quiet in those days. Today it is often a drag-racing strip for the hoons in their yellow and red Holdens. In those days we had a few neighbours who still made the fortnightly trip into Melbourne along our road in their horse and buggy.

As I stood at the front door in the pleasant chill of the wet evening, the road empty, the sound of Freddy’s motor car a
distant murmur, I was troubled by the unrealistic demands Pat was starting to make on me. I knew myself to be at the beginning of something that was going to leave us all changed forever. Whichever way it went, for good or for ill.

I thought of myself standing at the rails of the
Cooee
at Port Melbourne with my mother when we were setting off to visit her relatives in England and to tour Europe together. It was 1925 and I was nineteen. On the boat to England I began a period of aggressive and exaggerated sexual behaviour that was to cost me dearly. My first lover was a steward not much older than myself. We made love in his cabin. I imagined I was a free woman. The thrill of concealing our dangerous liaison from my mother was delicious and terrifying. I thought myself launched on a new life. I believed our escapade was a perfect secret between my lover and myself, but it was probably known to the entire crew, and must have been at least guessed at by some of the passengers. Apart from my mother and me there were only twelve other passengers. My father’s pastoral company owned a controlling interest in the
Cooee
, which carried a regular cargo of wheat and wool to England. He had given the captain strict instructions to see that we were provided with the highest level of care and attention on the voyage.

In England, and during our tour of the continent, I had many other lovers. I was indiscriminate and wild and so emotionally distracted by the hectic frenzy of my imagination that my mother took me to a psychiatrist while we were in Rome. I fell pregnant to him on my second visit. He procured an abortion for me. I have never been sure if my mother knew of it or not. It was never mentioned between us. And she didn’t press me for an explanation of the mysterious ailment
which kept me in bed for a few days. She and I lived like enemies together in strange pensions and hotels, I seeking out new lovers everywhere we went, the pair of us tormented by the frantic hysteria of our extraordinary uncertainty. If we touched each other by accident one or other of us would flare into an outburst of violent anger and unfounded accusations. The slightest irritation was a cause for murderous eruptions of emotion. I accused her and my father of driving Uncle Mathew to his death. He had killed himself only a year earlier and my grief was still keen. Mathew had been the only one among my family ever to have shown me any understanding. I did not think of it at the time, but perhaps my sexual revolt was a response to my regret that I had denied Mathew that last time in the garden at Elsinore when I was seventeen (I nearly wrote, in the garden of Eden).

Without the sustaining presence of my father’s authority or the familiarity of home, neither my mother nor I was emotionally mature enough or sufficiently sophisticated to impose order on our wandering lives. We were in a state of nervous panic most of the time and too aimless and too ignorant and uncaring of Europe’s treasures to recognise their interest for us. The tour was a disaster. There were times when we might have died on the streets of some strange city and never been heard of again. Whenever my mother tried to talk to me I sought escape from her in hysterical outbursts. In Venice I threatened to throw myself from the window of our apartment into the green waters of the canal beneath our windows. I was serious. I longed to enter the green tide below our windows and find oblivion there. If my mother had not wrestled me to the floor, the pair of us shrieking and struggling, I might have ended my
life that day. My mother was frightened of me. I was frightened of myself. We were both bewildered and slightly insane. On the boat home I became depressed and refused to leave my cabin. I was bewildered and confused. I had become a stranger to my mother and to myself.

It was less than a year after we got home to Melbourne that I met Arthur. I recognised in him at once a safe place in which to shelter from myself. My mother was relieved beyond words to be rid of the burden of me and agreed to the marriage at once. I was unwell after our marriage and eventually a specialist in Collins Street discovered I had undiagnosed gonorrhoea. Arthur, a virgin when we met, was shaken by this, but he was heroic and didn’t falter in his support of me. I had to have a hysterectomy. Facing up to the fact that we would never be able to have a family of our own was a terrible blow to us both, but it also drew us closer together. We shared a sense of refuge with each other from our detested families and our misfortunes. I’m sure that being unable to have children was partly the reason why, soon after my operation, we began to rely for a sense of structure in our lives on a salon of creative friends.

With these friends I was at last beginning to use the ability Uncle Mathew had recognised in me; an ability to acknowledge the gifts of others. More important than my cherished ‘gift’, I was a good cook and Arthur a generous judge of wine. So our little band of friends could always be confident of a good feed and something decent to drink whenever they came to see us, or stayed with us when they were short of funds. When I left home I vowed never to have a cook or a maid in our house but to do it all myself. I even went to cooking classes. My mother’s total ineptitude around the house and especially in the
kitchen appalled me. I learned nothing useful from her and was determined not to be like her. Arthur and I cared for our inner circle of creative friends as we would have cared for our family. Our chosen few had only to swear to a passion for defining modernism and upholding its principles for us to make them welcome and feed them. Arthur and I wished to be a source of influence among young artists and to counter the forces of an unsympathetic conservatism which was represented for us not only by the art of the establishment but by the values of the families we had each rejected, I with a greater vehemence than Arthur.

I had not forgotten the child of the Italian psychiatrist. If that child had lived—and it lives still in my imagination—it would be sixty-five. It remains my only child. What sort of a mother would I have been to it? What sort of a mother
was
I to it? The price I paid for my wild sexual liberty as a young woman was the heaviest a woman can pay. Motherhood. I swore when I married Arthur I would never be unfaithful to him. And until Pat I had kept my word.

After Freddy left that day, I stood at the front door for a long time, watching the rain falling and listening to the sounds of our familiar silence. I was terrified by my feelings for Pat Donlon. Arthur and I had been married almost twelve years by then. That I might be unfaithful to him was inconceivable to me. And yet I feared it would be inevitable with Pat. I had believed I was safe from myself with Arthur. Safe forever. Why had I become obsessed with this narrow-shouldered Irish workman? There were frightening moments when it made no sense to me and seemed to threaten me with a return to the madness of my European tour with my mother. I felt threatened that day
as I stood at the front door after Freddy had gone. I stepped out into the rain and lifted my face to the heavy grey clouds and closed my eyes and let the lovely chill drops run down my hot cheeks. And I prayed to Him in whom I most devoutly do not believe to help me find my way through the chaos of emotions that were destroying my peace of mind.