Autumn Laing (3 page)
Arthur’s 1934 Pontiac. I’m standing here looking at it. We drove down to Ocean Grove in it to see Pat and Edith. It’s parked over there where he left it, God knows how many years ago. The key is still in the ignition. I suppose the battery is dead. My poor Arthur. A scavenger has stolen the Indian head from the bonnet. My beloved Arthur and I that summer afternoon in 1935, three years before we met Pat and Edith. Here, in this old coach house, is where it began for all of us. It stood as crookedly then as it stands now. Arrested in its fall. When Arthur and I saw this place we didn’t need to say anything. It matched our dream. Old Farm. It had been for sale for years. A piece of land beyond the suburbs. An old weatherboard house and this dilapidated shed with the open side. A sixteen-acre paddock and the river winding along the bottom boundary. Fragrant eucalypt forest on the far side of the river. Everything we had dreamed of. All wonderfully neglected and in need of the love we had to give. It is a big shed with a mezzanine, its boards sprung from its frame and grey with age. Now there is the roar of the freeway and the suburbs hem me in. It used to
be that if you stayed in one place long enough you eventually became a local. Now if you stay in one place long enough you become a stranger.
I’m a remnant from another time. I don’t eat properly. I can’t be bothered cooking. My breath is foul and I fart continuously. I’m accustomed to the smell. My stomach is a fermenting tip. I eat cabbages every day. I’m like a poor Chinese. There is a box of them—cabbages, not poor Chinese—behind the kitchen door. The house stinks of my farts and boiled cabbages. I don’t care. I
do
care! No, I
do
care, but I can’t summon the will to do anything about it. I was such a skilled housekeeper. Stony brings me cabbages. He’s the last of the market gardeners. He has hands like a stone breaker. When we came here it was cherry orchards and fields of strawberries around us. Now there’s just Stony’s cabbage patch and the suburban houses. All far grander than my dear old Old Farm. I might yet burn it to the ground. When this is done. There is no return from fire. We are not Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego. Are we? With no smell of fire on us. I can’t remember now why those three young men were put to the flames in the first place. To prove something, I suppose. Their heroic faith, was it? Or something purer? Another distraction from reality. The smell of fire is on me today. This dress will hold it. It is a smell that will see me out. The smell of fire and boiled cabbages. There are worse fates than destruction by fire. The ancients knew that. We have forgotten everything strong. It can’t have been today that I put my notebooks in the drum, can it? They must be still smouldering from last night. Oh, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Chronology’s not everything, is it?
Arthur and I came here that summer day in 1935 arm in arm, in each other’s arms. We knew at once we had found our haven from our terrible families. We were pure then. Yes, we were. Pure in our spirits and our intentions. And he was innocent. His family almost as wealthy and quite as mean and twisted as my own. He had given in to the love knots of his mother and become a city lawyer. But enough of that. There, just there by the back wall beside the Pontiac, is where we made love that first joyful afternoon. Where the hot eye of the sun is burning this very moment. Hay was piled loosely then. Loose hay for us. We were golden and young and in love (though not violently. Arthur was my refuge). I had to instruct him. I may as well tell you now, this story does not have a happy ending. I have never had a child. Not of my own. It wasn’t possible. There was a simple, unpleasant, gynaecological reason. If that is how you spell it. And speaking of spelling, have you noticed that prenatal needs only the displacement of one letter to become parental? It doesn’t take much. Ever. For one thing to become another. Usually its opposite. Love become hate. Heaven become hell. Good become evil. Laughter become slaughter. One letter. That is all it takes. You know the rest. Word and wound.
He—
Pat I mean, not my dear gentle Arthur—was my great est work of acknowledgment. He was the one on whom I spent my gift without holding anything back. I knew him the moment I saw him—well, not quite the moment, but within the hour. He squinted in the fierce light of his ambition. He was not like Picasso. He did not have those famous
hungry
eyes. Pat had a deep eye. That is what I saw. No one else saw it. Pat Donlon, with his white-blue eye that he tried to conceal from
us by squinting. Concealing from us the terrifying nakedness of his ambition. Even he was unsure of it. Until I opened him to it, he was unsure. So there! He was married to Edith when Arthur and I first met him. She was a beautiful girl, lovely and sad. A little afraid of him and what she had done. Afraid of his intensity. Afraid of what she had done in tying herself to this man’s course. But she loved him. And she had courage. We both saw that. Oh yes, how she loved him. If God, who made us all (I suppose) and gave us our passions were to give me my life to live over I would be kind to Edith. I would put my arms around her and take care of her and make her feel safe and loved. What did I do? I took her man from her. I took Pat. It was easy. He was offered to me by fate, so I took him. I never considered Edith. My gift of recognition was called on by Pat in a way it would never be called on by anyone ever again. It was my fate to take him from her. So I took him. Arthur trembled with it, but withstood it. My poor dear lovely Arthur. Like heartless Nebuchadnezzar with his three young men, I put Arthur to the fiery test. He survived but he didn’t come out unscathed. Burned to the bone, he was. White as ash. A great innocent gentle part of him destroyed. Not to be recovered. My Arthur. What I made him endure. How I still love him.
Edith was forgotten by us. So I will give her portrait the first place in this testament. Pat will have to come second to her for once. The portrait of a young woman, at the time of life when we need our portrait painted: when we are young and beautiful. Not when we smell of cabbages and smoke and our own farts. I shall do Edith the honour of remembering her youth. You may not like
him
(Pat) and I can’t expect you to like me. But you cannot dislike Edith. She was the first to
be sacrificed to the violence and the hunger of his ambition. An ambition of such rapture its severity frightened even him. As if it were an affliction that came at him when the weather changed or the moon was full. She and their child, Edith and the little baby. The first to be fed to the strange dark blessing, the furnace of his art. If that is what it was. Or am I getting too melodramatic again? That speechless art of his that hangs today in its silence on our gallery walls. His art become a kind of silence itself. A shroud. Something awful about it that I still cannot confront. Why did we do it? Who has it served? Edith is forgotten. She was like a child when Arthur and I first met her, still obedient to the hopes and sacred values of her parents and her lovely grandfather. A girl incapable of revolt or betrayal against those who had nurtured and tutored her. She was shocked by such things. Embarrassed by them. Confused by them. I can see the blush rise to her lovely cheeks now when I spoke in her presence of my hatred for my family. That was something she could not understand. My revolt against them shocked her sense of what was right.
I was his acolyte. What is that? Acolyte? These days one needs to explain such words.
An altar attendant of minor rank
, my dictionary says. Not just his accomplice, but something sacred in the ministry of it. That was me. I drew him out and encouraged him and shared the mad illusions that made an artist of him. And I paid a terrible price for it. He was creative in the conventional understanding of that notion. An artist. But you will have to ask, as I have had to ask, whether what we destroyed in the service of his creations was of greater value than what he and I produced. Was he, was I, just as cold, just as ruthless in the struggle to deliver his art, as my father and
uncles (saving Mathew) were in their struggle to amass a great fortune? At any price. Always at any price to others. Never to themselves. They sacrificed nothing. It was always others who were made to pay. Was there not as great a coldness in the way Pat and I exercised our ambition as the coldness I so despised and feared in my family? The coldness I fled from? My heart aches with this question: was I not my father’s daughter after all? Inescapably branded from the cradle with his will? There may be no answer to questions such as these. Or the answers may be obvious. Something to do with the simplest moral principles of our humanity. We will all have a different answer, I dare say, those of us who love art and find in it our consolation, and those of us who live contentedly without it. But in asking the question we would do well not to forget Edith Black and her child. To forget them, as they have been forgotten, written out of our record, written out of Pat’s history, is to lie to ourselves about the nature of our culture. To forget Edith and her child is to lie to ourselves about the nature of our art and what it is we worship in it.
Here she is then, Edith Black. The best I can do for you. A realist portrait. Realism, that most difficult of styles, filled as it is with intricacy and contradiction.
IT WAS A FINE DAY. THE SUN WAS SHINING JUST FOR HER. THE SEA running a heavy swell after the previous night’s storm. The sound of the sea in the room with her now. He had raced down the track to the main road on his bicycle earlier without telling her where he was going or when he would be back. She stood at this window then, where she is standing now, watching him go.
It is already midday. The postman has been and there is a letter sticking out of the box by the gate, a white triangle catching the sun, as if a white bird has alighted there. The letter will be from her mother. She will walk down and fetch it later. She has come out of the studio and rattled the stove into life and made a cup of tea, a drop of bluish milk from the neighbour’s blue roan cow, and a half teaspoon of their precious sugar stirred into it. She stands at the window sipping her tea and looking out at the green hill, the cup held by its slim handle in her right hand, the saucer in her left. The cup and its saucer are delicate pieces of English bone china decorated
with a crowded pattern of lilac blooms. One set of a pair on temporary loan from her mother. ‘Lilac Time’. Like everything in this house, and the house itself, temporary and borrowed. And not her mother’s best, but her second best, or perhaps even her third best. Expensive nevertheless. A measure of her mother’s trust. ‘Until you two can get a few nice things of your own together.’
She is pleased to see that the horse is still there. The green hill, where the horse stands, sweeps upward from the foot of the garden to form the soft curve of her near horizon, like the warm belly of the earth. She half closes her eyes, permitting this thought a little space. High above the paddock immature white clouds silently approach from the troubled sea across the cold blue of the sky, which, she notices suddenly, is exactly the white-blue of his eyes. Yes, white-blue. Like the eyes of his hero, the poet Rimbaud, whose verse he never tires of reciting. She hears it now, her own voice translating for him,
I had caught a glimpse of conversion to good and to happiness.
She gives a small, nervous laugh at the thought of him, at the thought of where he might have gone this morning. Some sense with him always of the terrible disasters that await us in life, his urgency, his mad desire to be bodily engaged with the future.
The upward sweep of the green paddock is decorated with yellow oxalis flowers. It is a counterpane sewn with morning stars. Her mother’s handwork, for example. Finely embroidered silk thread. The Latin names of the flowers done in sylvan green around the border, so fine a magnifying glass is needed to see the individual stitches, and even then … There is nothing cruel or cynical in her mother’s life. All painful memories have been put down, like old family dogs. Quiet, calm, sensible. That is
how it is at home, in Brighton and on the farm. Wherever her mother presides, there everything is as it should be. No daisies in the lawn. The past unpicked and restitched. The work goes on. Their saving routine. Church on Sundays, with Dr Aiken presiding at Flood Street, his thin nose and sad intelligent eyes. A good man in the claim of his grateful parishioners. His apologetic frown a perpetual reminder that there is some terrible problem to be resolved before we can all move confidently to a full enjoyment of our lives. Saint Paul advised the Philippians to
Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.
But Dr Aiken hasn’t rejoiced. He has puzzled in the Lord. What he has missed is something vital, the key to happiness eluding him. His life has been without a companion. He has not seemed to wish for a woman by him. The manse a cold redbrick darkened by moaning cypresses, the shelves of his study closely inhabited by puzzling tracts to do with something he does yearn for, the Ultimate Truth and the Christian God—staples of his divine preoccupations. No touches of the floral, either in teacups or counterpanes, to lighten his days. And such a handsome man, his manner gracious, his hands fine and well shaped, noticeable when he bows his violin, and other features of nature’s approval gracing his gentle person. A match. But all for nothing, so it seems. His solitariness a puzzle to her mother. For the Presbyterian assembly does not bar its ministers from the sacrament of marriage. Even so …
No, the floral counterpane is surely more exotic than that, Edith decides firmly and sets her cup in its saucer in the dulled stone of the sink, the sink’s crazed glaze the perfect hue of old bones, the fine lines possibly an antique script. Clink, the cup says sharply to its saucer and Edith looks down and steadies
it, breathing a murmured apology. Once again she has been dragged back into memory and her old home and her mother. Her mother. The decorated hill is not a floral counterpane at all but is something Persian and is not of her mother’s world. A Persian embroidery. The work of silent hours and days when a woman in her solitude dreams of distant events that never were but might have been, and bends her head to her needle in the soft lamplight and smiles at the tiny golden flowers. Pretending that her dreams are memories.
