Autumn Laing (25 page)

What interested Freddy most deeply and most persistently throughout his life was understanding human motivation and the processes by which that understanding might be acquired. He was analysed in London by Wilhelm Stekel, a pupil of Freud’s who’d had a falling-out with the master. Freddy believed that one day science would acquire the means to prove that the basic theoretical assumptions of psychoanalysis were correct. The highest post he held during his career in Australia was Medical Superintendent of the Sandy Heights Mental Facility, at the time Melbourne’s largest mental hospital. On his appointment to the post he was charged by the state government with bringing about cultural change in the area of mental illness. Freddy quickly discovered that his masters,
being politicians with their eyes fixed on the next election, wanted results within months. He told them two generations and a great deal of money would be needed for the kind of cultural change they envisaged. It was a famous public row and dragged on unhappily for a number of years before Freddy tired of it and resigned. After Sandy Heights he worked as a private consultant. He was always living in hope of meeting interesting patients, but was usually disappointed.

And yet for all his frequent boasts that his was a professional and a scientific approach to the understanding of human behaviour, for Freddy, in a deeply private way, our lives remained poetic, the web of our motives a kind of shifting of clouds forming and re-forming, vague shadowy dawns and romantic sunsets, the tragedy of storms and the merciless in our souls. He was in awe of the wonder of it all and strove rigorously to make systematic sense of it. But he could never quite hold his faith in any system and always referred to himself as a failure. Indeed he was in thrall to a morbid fascination with failure and believed himself fated never to escape the traps set for him by this particular demon. Stekel, his analyst, set the pattern and committed suicide in 1940.

A contradiction to himself, Freddy was as much a poet as a scientist and I loved him for it and for the richly layered ambiguities of his infinitely complicated nature. He never wrote verse but the poetry of his understanding was in his soul. He spoke German fluently and not long after we first met, which was several years before Pat came into our lives, he recited Rilke’s ‘Herbsttag’ to me flawlessly. We had not been at Old Farm long and several of us were gathered in the library. It was late, the fire had burned down and there was a heavy and
contented silence between us. Suddenly, out of that silence, Freddy’s voice. After he had finished his recitation he turned to me and smiled. ‘That was for you,’ he said. I thanked him and told him that even though I had no German I had found it moving and very beautiful, as one might find a piece of music beautiful and affecting without being able to say why. He then recited the poem in English. ‘It is called “Autumn Day”,’ he said.

‘
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfilment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
’

Freddy was not religious himself but found the quality of Rilke’s religious faith deeply interesting. He once told me Rilke’s faith gave him a hope that he dared not hold for himself. I was not sure what he meant by this. Which was often the case with Freddy. That he spoke as if he was his own most enthralling mystery was part of his charm.

He was beset periodically by debilitating sieges of depression, during which he lacked the will to stir from his bed. He lived in a large apartment on the top floor of one of Melbourne’s oldest hotels in the centre of the city. His mother’s Imperial Bösendorfer had pride of place in his sitting room, which overlooked Collins Street a few doors down the hill from the building in which Arthur’s firm had their offices. Both the hotel and the building which housed Arthur’s offices were demolished in the eighties to make way for the towering headquarters of a bank. (Who will ever know the geographies of our town or the intimacies of our days if I do not memorialise them here?) While Freddy was enduring his depressions I was the only visitor he would admit to his flat. In company and in public he played the difficult piano works of Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók, composers whose music was rarely heard in Melbourne in those days. Privately he reserved his first love for the dreamy realms of Chopin’s nocturnes. That was Freddy. If there was such a creature as a romantic modernist it was Freddy Henning. His sense of duty and of what was right called him to the project of modernism, but his heart called him to the melancholy works of the romantics. He was ever divided against himself and was more jealous of my feelings for Pat than was Arthur. As I said, Freddy foresaw the danger of our affair long before I or anyone else saw it.

‘Your Pat has the narrow morality of the working class,’ Freddy said to me the day after I introduced the pair of them. ‘It will mean disaster for the three of you.’ He advised me to send Pat back to his wife.

I told him it was too late for that and accused him of hypocrisy. ‘You say you are all for the people, Freddy, but most of the people are working class, just like Pat.’

‘I’m telling you what I see of the man,’ he said. ‘He isn’t capable of the kind of sophistication you’re asking of him with this three-hander of yours.’

‘Pat’s a quick learner.’

‘His morality is that of a literalist. He will require symmetry in his affair with you. For him you are either Arthur’s woman or you are his woman. That is the way he will see it. He has left his wife, or from what you’ve told me is going to leave her, or she has left him, and he will expect you to leave Arthur. Anything else will seem to him unjust and a betrayal.’

‘You know I’ll never leave Arthur,’ I said. I was shocked by the suggestion. Without Arthur I would be naked in the world and prey to my own instability.’

‘
I
know it, Aught. But does Pat know it?’

I didn’t want to hear Freddy’s warning and I dismissed it. ‘You’re jealous,’ I said. ‘And sometimes you can be a snob.’ This last was unfair. Freddy possessed too much empathy to be a snob. The other person’s situation always interested him. Pat interested him.

He shrugged. ‘Yes, that too, of course. Only a fool wouldn’t be jealous of sharing you with other men.’ He poured himself another glass of Arthur’s whisky and lit a cigarette. He went and stood at the bow window and looked out into the front garden, where Stony and I had not long since planted a new bed of roses. ‘You have your first bloom,’ Freddy said. He sounded a little sad.

I went and stood with him and took his arm in mine. The rose was the deep and richly scented red of Mr Lincoln. ‘Arthur’s not jealous of
you
,’ I said gently.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aught. I’m not jealous of Arthur either. This man will destroy you, and he will destroy Arthur with you. He will take everything from you and give you nothing in return.’

‘What nonsense,’ I said. ‘Now you’re being silly.’ I was annoyed.

‘I felt his enmity, Aught. You have a generous spirit. You believe that your inherited position and your education oblige you to help those less fortunate than yourself. You feel a need to give something back to the society that has given you so much. It’s not just the responsibility of your caste with you; your heart
feels
the debt. It’s in your sense of belonging as an Australian. You love this country in a way I never can. My attachments to Europe and my love for Australia are far too conflicted for me to ever have anything like your uncomplicated love of country. I envy you that. Something important about yourself that can never be settled for me is settled for you by that certainty. You are grounded by it.’

Freddy loved to talk in this way. To me the word
grounded
made it sound as if I had concrete boots. But I loved to listen to him. I didn’t believe everything he said, of course, and often thought him wrong in his estimation of people. But I wanted to believe he was right about this. I said nothing to it. It had pleased me to hear him say it. My hopes had always been with Australia. Unlike most of our friends in those days, I’d never considered the possibility of living anywhere else. My travels
with my mother had probably cured me of any uncertainty I might have had—if I ever had any. I don’t remember that I had.

‘In order to fulfil yourself, you have to give,’ Freddy said. ‘That’s the sort of person you are. You won’t defeat that in yourself. This man has no such needs.’

I squeezed his arm. ‘Please call him Pat, Freddy. It’s awful to hear you calling him
this man
. As if he is not our friend.’

‘He is hungry to take whatever he can get hold of,’ Freddy said. He was sounding a little surly, which was not like him. ‘And when he has taken all that he can carry away with him, then he will abandon you. And if you have given him everything, you will have nothing left. To see you making cow eyes at this man makes me weep, Aught.’

‘You’re being unfair.’ I was unhappy with our disagreement. ‘And you called him
this man
again.’ I was very cross with Freddy.

We were both silent after this, standing at the window arm in arm, looking out into the front garden at my single rose, neither of us sufficiently at ease with the other to be the first to break the silence. I was probably waiting for Freddy to apologise. Sooner or later it was usually Freddy who was the one to offer an apology and end our difficulties. This time he remained silent. It was not like him.

I can’t remember how that day ended for us, but for some time after there was an uncertainty between Freddy and me that I found painful. Arthur asked me the cause of it but I denied it and told him he was imagining things. Arthur never pressed me when I was evasive with him but took my evasion as his answer. For a while I was frightened I had lost my precious freedom to confess my secrets to Freddy. I could not disclose
to either Pat or Arthur the full gory truth about myself the way I could with Freddy. Without Freddy’s trust I was alone with myself and I didn’t like it. It frightened me. But Freddy was not a man who could sulk for long or hold in himself a sense of having been wronged, and it was no more than one very long month before we had regained our old trust and had securely reinstated the wonderful intimacy of our friendship. I never had such a friendship with a woman. Freddy could see into the hearts of women with as much clarity as he saw into the hearts of men. His perfect empathy with the conditions of others was his gift and his burden. He disliked Pat but was fascinated by him.

I didn’t wish to hear Freddy’s analysis of Pat and dismissed it. We don’t want to have our futures disclosed to us. We don’t wish to know that our hopes are to come to nothing and our passions are to wane and turn to disgust. I have never understood why people are eager to listen to fortune-tellers, or why our newspapers are full of expert opinions about the disasters that lie ahead of us. But there has been an eager market for prognostications since antique times, and probably before then if we only had a record of the caveman’s sense of doubt about himself, and I suppose there will be no stopping those who like to fossick among the entrails of slaughtered beasts, even though what they purport to see there is generally mistaken. We forget nothing more readily than an incorrect forecast. It is the next forecast we are listening out for. And there is always someone ready to give it to us with confidence. As a species we have no wish to accept that the future, where our death lies in wait, is closed to us aside from that one grim fact.

Freddy told me that day, though in a rather more elaborate and mannered style of delivery, what Uncle Mathew had told me simply the last time I had seen him when I was seventeen and had asked him, What is my gift? To give, they might both have said. But of course they never met. Both suicides. Both dearly beloved men in my life. Both grieved for and cherished in my heart to this day. I was never sure what Freddy made of my confession to him of my childhood sexual carryings-on with Uncle Mathew under the peppercorn tree in the garden of Elsinore. I think I wanted Freddy to reassure me that the experience had been normal. Or perhaps I’d hoped that, despite my view of myself as a modern liberated woman, he would put it into some kind of bourgeois place of conventional feminine safety for me. At eleven years of age Mathew’s kiss had touched in me something of the fierce uncaring wildness of sex, that source of our helpless moaning, the pulse we would all willingly ride to our deaths, and I think I had always feared a little that he had shaken loose in me at that tender age some force that was not quite normal or healthy—whatever we are to mean by such contented terms as these in our bewildered world of fearsome insanities.

The first time I kissed Pat under the silver wattle trees in the moonlight on the river bank, when my lips met his I was aware of how much older than him I was, and it was the gentle touch of Mathew’s lips on mine when I was a girl that came into my memory. That touch such that a butterfly might have landed on my skin, so thrilling my body bloomed for him with a pang I have not forgotten. For the first time since then it was there again with Pat. Who but the coldest among us can resist that song of the blood? Gone now, all that. I am reduced
and am no longer a woman, but I have memory—and the knobbly shank of Barnaby’s shillelagh to press into the lines of my palm. Arthur and I were lovers, but of another, calmer, more sequestered order altogether than were Pat and I. With Arthur I never risked my story of Uncle Mathew under the peppercorn. I did not wish him to know it. I did not wish it to be misunderstood by him. It was sacred to me then and has remained sacred to me. My golden amulet when I lie in my tomb—so to speak. I shall, of course, be ashes, and will have no tomb. Scattered here at Old Farm by Adeli the penguin. Or not, as she sees fit.