Autumn Laing (26 page)

When Freddy’s own real analyst, Wilhelm Stekel, committed suicide in 1940, Freddy told me that in a note Stekel asked his wife, with extraordinary grace, to kindly apologise to his patients for him. It was the sort of perverse sense of responsibility that greatly appealed to Freddy. He described for me the scene of Stekel’s wife turning up at her husband’s rooms on Monday morning and sitting in his customary place at his desk. Solemnly waiting until each patient in turn appeared for their usual appointment and made themselves comfortable on the couch, before asking them if they would please accept her husband’s apology for being absent. Not a cold in the head or the funeral of a favourite aunt but absence excuse Number One. He ate a bucket of aspirins on Friday night and has died. He says to tell you he is sorry. Freddy was subject to the same wrenching contradictions in himself as his analyst had been. When Freddy killed himself, however, he did not ask anyone to apologise to his patients for him but wrote me the note which ended with those terrible words,
I have a rat in the wainscot to dispose of
.

It frightens me when I realise that this, my memorial to our times—as it seems to have become, whatever it was when I began it or will become in the hands of others after I am gone—is all I have left to believe in. ‘Others’. I should say the robust Adeli Heartstone. What would Freddy have made of her? Despite her flab she has something of Pat’s steeliness, something of his hunger to eat up the whole cake for herself then run away with it, leaving only the smell of her departure in the air behind her—her little pressure pack of synthetic floral air cleanser with which to sweeten the stink of her leavings. If I were to kick her out Andrew would pack me off to the house of the dead immediately. I am as bound to the penguin as I was to Pat. And wasn’t she right when she flattered herself with a connection between the two of them? As contemptuous as I was in my dismissal of her suggestion that she and the naked Mr Creedy’s daughter were sisters of the idealised womanly form in Pat Donlon’s imagination. There is a cruel symmetry in this. My life the skipping rope swung by these two thieves at either end, keeping me dancing to their tune in the middle. If thievery is not too disheartening a term for their performances. The meaning sucked out of things. His drawings no longer a source of my dreaming but her dreaming now. How did she manage that? What biographical sleight of hand was it that enabled her to do it, as if she was bringing me something precious while stealing it from me? I need time to see when I’ve been tricked. I’m still too innocent. Can I say that at eighty-four? Or whatever I am. I look at her with new respect. She is no longer to be dismissed by me as the dullard bollard. Harmless and silly with her belly roll pushing
her twin set out of shape. Oh, no. There is far more to Adeli Heartstone than that.

How to avoid the gall of bitterness when ample cause for it has entered into our life? I would plead with Pat to try to understand the deeper causes of his misbehaviour and he would shout back at me, ‘Understand what, for Christ’s sake? I know what I feel.’ And he would plunge onward, trampling through the debris of broken things without a backward glance to see if I was still on my feet, then urging me to admire his latest picture, as if I had had no hand in its creation.

Freddy and Arthur were not great creative figures of my time as Pat was soon to become, but were of another, more contented and gracious world than his. Without them the disarray of life with Pat would have been impossible for me to endure for long. They not only admired but liked and understood each other. When Freddy talked with enthusiasm of the novelist Martin Boyd’s latest book—for Freddy, Boyd was our finest living novelist—Arthur understood it was Boyd’s troubling uncertainty about whether he was an Australian or a European with which Freddy was identifying, and not Boyd’s conservative politics or his loose meandering style—though I think in his contrary heart Freddy admired both these qualities in Boyd. Arthur also had the grace to understand that my flirting with Freddy was a quality of our friendship and had nothing to do with infidelity. Freddy was much better looking than Pat. But it was Pat, with his agitated view of our realities, who stirred in me the unease and restlessness that had disabled me during my travels in Europe with my mother when I was a young woman of nineteen. I feared and longed for that experience again and often despaired that I was never to know it. The
helplessness of it. The inability to bring it to an end or to contain it. The knowledge that I could do nothing to keep myself from it once it was ignited. And my pressing intuition that it would end badly for me. Sex.

Safe sex had quite another meaning for me and Arthur than the meaning it has today for young people (anyone under sixty). It wasn’t a question of condoms with Arthur and me. We never used those things. With Arthur beside me in bed I felt safe. From myself more than from external dangers. What was there for me to fear in the external world, after all? I had always been intrigued by the dark, and the attentions of strange men delighted me. Arthur and I enjoyed each other’s bodies, but never frenziedly. He always wore his pyjamas to bed and I wore my nightgown (cotton). Even in the early days of our marriage, after my operation, most nights we read ourselves to sleep.

It was a relief for me to be with Arthur after being the tormented lost girl of my family. With him I knew myself cherished. The only unsettling moment before sleep was if one of us interrupted the other’s reading to insist on reading out something amusing. ‘Goodnight, darling,’ was our regular refrain. There was not a lot of moaning or ecstatic howling in our nights. None at all in fact. A fond kiss before lights out usually settled any doubts we had about how the night was to develop between us. Or, once we were lying there in the dark, he felt for my hand and we made love, simply and in silence, almost as if we made love to ourselves. Afterwards we lay side by side and he held my hand a while, as if he thought I needed comforting, which I didn’t, but I was glad of his hand in mine all the same. When I wanted an orgasm I gave one to myself.
Here, Autumn, one for you! A series of gasps, a moan or two, but no howls to give pause to the neighbours or alarm their dogs. Wasn’t that what every mature woman did? Dreamed of her demon lover? In my case the Roman psychiatrist looked into my eyes and I was nineteen again.

I have never found it easy to go to sleep, and while Arthur snored and twitched beside me I would lie in the dark listening to the night noises beyond the house, away in my private fantasy world. It was my favourite moment of the day. The two oyster cats were hunters and I kept them confined at night to a cat run attached to the laundry. To be at peace with myself I needed to know they and the birds were safe in their nests for the night. The ginger tom (Sheridan’s spiritual ancestor) was only interested in other cats so I let him have his freedom. I’d hear them yowling dismally to each other across the river, the feral cats in those days in the old forest.

Safe sex. That was our life. When Arthur and I were first married I was ambitious to become a fine housekeeper and to make Old Farm a haven for ourselves and our friends. I began work on transforming the surroundings of the house into a beautiful garden the first week we were here and with Stony’s help was soon growing our own vegetables. We bought a cow for the fresh milk and hens for their eggs. In those first months I saw myself at the centre of my own little kingdom. That is how it was for me then. I was fired by a fierce determination to build my own place and to shake off my family’s emotional parsimony and my mother’s barren legacy. Stony was happy to see the house occupied again and became my steady ally. While Arthur was at his office all day, Stony and I remade this place.

In our second year Arthur and I began to publish a new art journal (it lasted for two years and ten issues, which we counted a success). With our journal and our support of young artists we imagined ourselves established at the centre of an influential third force in Melbourne’s narrowly partisan art world. We believed ourselves to be revolutionary, but in fact we subsisted in a state of self-congratulation, comfortably unaware of the narrowness of our own partisanship. We were young, we had money, and the world was ours to refashion as we chose. What else but to commit the great follies is youth for?

My walk across the night paddock to the river the evening of Pat’s first visit to us calmed me. The ginger cat kept me company. Stony brought him to us in a shoe box as a kitten, saying, ‘He’s a tom.’ Arthur plucked the golden ball of fluff out of the box and cuddled him. ‘Welcome to your new home, Tom,’ he said. I reached for him. ‘Let me hold him.’ I remember the rush of desire that possessed me, to have the little kitten in my arms and for him to know it was me who was his first and only true friend. A misty rain was falling as Tom and I stood among the wattles and watched the glint of the water over the rocks and listened to the night sounds—he to his, I to mine. I was upset and I wept for the psychiatrist’s child, my poor discarded baby. No vixen barked.

When I returned to the house and went into the kitchen and saw the nervous way both men stood and waited for me to speak, I could have laughed aloud. I had regained my ground and for the rest of the night I was in charge of the tone
between us. Which was the way I liked things to be. I was aware of myself as the intellectual superior to most men of my acquaintance. Freddy, when he came into our lives, was the first man I was able to accept as my equal. My respect for his mind was the foundation of our elaborate friendship. In this he never disappointed me. Not even in the manner of his death.

After Arthur had gone to bed to read his new book, Pat stayed on the couch beside me and we looked through his drawings for a second time. He smoked one after another of Arthur’s cigarettes and said very little. I felt more motherly than mistressly towards him that night. He was exhausted and I have a vivid recollection of him sleeping on the couch beside me, his upper body slipped sideways, his head pillowed on his arm. I was regretting my aggressive insistence that he could not be both poet and artist. Asleep he looked more like a boy than ever, his lips slightly parted, his pale hair falling across his face, his features unmarked and unremarkable. I fetched one of my Turkish shawls and spread it over him and I kissed him on his cheek again—as chaste a kiss as it is possible for a woman to give a man, I swear. His feet were crossed at the ankles, his battered sandshoes a pathetic token of his poverty. I did not know at the time that Pat’s habit was to dress as neatly as the tramway inspector he feared he was to become. I left him, looking back at him from the doorway before I turned off the light and went in to join Arthur.

Arthur was sitting up in bed reading Wilenski.

I said, ‘We should do something for Pat. You were right to bring him home.’ I wondered at myself for speaking as if I thought our home might become the home of this scruffy
young stranger. Even then I discounted the existence of Edith and her inconvenient child.

Arthur said absently, ‘Yes, of course we will, darling,’ and went on reading contentedly, travelling the familiar path of our comfortable bedroom silence.

How self-satisfied we were. How right we thought ourselves. I lay beside Arthur that night and thought of Pat curled up asleep on the couch in the library. It seemed to me he was under our care, almost as a son might have been to us, a slightly wayward son who had returned home discouraged and in need of our support. Australia’s most influential art critic had told Pat he was a charlatan and had thrown him and his drawings out of his office. Pat’s confidence in himself as an aspiring artist had been badly undermined by his experiences that day, and by the time he came to us he was almost ready to abandon his dreams. The critic’s job is to deepen our understanding, and no critic has a right to be as severe as Cowper was with Pat. I tried to cheer Pat up by reminding him of the German poet Rilke’s answer to the young poet who asked for his opinion of his verses;
There is nothing
, Rilke wrote back,
that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words
. But I don’t think Pat was listening to me by then. He was too tired and too drunk on Arthur’s whisky. I was confident I had the means to help him get over Guy Cowper’s bullying dismissal of him and his work. I loathed that man. I’d often watched him displaying his erudition, as if he were the only man in the room ever to have read a book or looked at a picture. In conversation Guy Cowper did not address himself to his companion but to an imaginary absent equal—the greatly admired shadow of himself, no doubt. In public he was in performance. Needless to say he
was contemptuous of women and their opinions, unless they were a wealthy patron of the arts.

Pat had strayed into the den of his natural enemy, announcing himself a mendicant, and been mauled. Until I fell asleep that night I let my fancies play with my plans for providing sustenance to Pat’s depleted confidence in himself as an artist. I was, had I been aware of it, already beginning a private project in which the advancement of Pat Donlon’s career was to be the principal theme of the story. My motives, however, were complicated. Arthur and I and our group were opposed to the influence of Sir Malcolm and Guy Cowper. And I was probably setting out not only to promote Pat but to show these powerful men how mistaken they were to have dismissed him. Who now remembers either of them? It is the name of Patrick Donlon that today still has the power to excite a crowd in the fine-art auction rooms of Europe, America and Australia (but mainly Australia, I have to admit).

At breakfast the next morning, before Arthur and he went off to catch the train to the city, I told Pat we would motor down in the Pontiac and visit him at Ocean Grove one weekend soon.

Arthur loved an excuse for a long drive and was keen on the idea. ‘We’ll bring a picnic,’ he said.

Pat said, ‘We should have it on the beach if it’s a fine day.’

Perhaps it was for my sake that neither of them mentioned Edith.

I walked around to the coach house with them and stood and waved as Arthur drove out onto the road. The morning was cold and it was raining. I was happy. After they had gone I stood in the grey drift of rain, looking down the slope of our paddock towards the river, excited to know in myself that
I had so much to give, and moved by the beauty of our home and its glorious setting. My own rather grand self-regard had the better of me that morning. I felt Pat had been given into my care to form and to shape into the great artist he dreamed of becoming.