Autumn Laing (32 page)

I leaned closer to the dashboard. What was I hearing? There were bound to be other things than tappets that I had no knowledge of. I said I wasn’t sure. He very nearly drove off the mountain in his desperation to get me to identify his big jagger-jagger sound. Of course we both knew it was a lost cause, but we were prevented from telling each other this in a nice friendly mild way by the hidden lives we had begun to live, which depended for their conviction on being kept hidden. They could be managed no other way.

The tension between us was hideous. I could hardly stand it and was on the point of insisting he stop the car and let me out when a lorry drove up close behind us and began tooting repeatedly. Arthur pulled over to the side of the road and as the lorry went past the driver screamed a string of obscenities at us. Arthur sat leaning on the wheel with his head in his hands. I massaged his neck, which was hard as wood, and almost said to him, It’s all right, darling, you can relax now. I’m not in love with Pat Donlon.

But I didn’t say that, did I? We don’t, do we? Even if it were true, and I didn’t know if it were true or not, I couldn’t have said it. No one had said I
was
in love with Pat Donlon. So what would I have been doing denying it? No, for the double life there is always a double bind that requires our silence. Until the great break-out, that is, until the day the prisoners of silence have had enough and set fire to their prison. The night it all burns down and the next morning there is nothing left but smoking ashes. We’ve seen that. We know what that is. The conflagration of the secret life.

Some great man once said everything is either symbol or parable. Maybe it was Paul Claudel who said it. How good is my memory! I stroked Arthur’s hand and suggested he see Dr Hopman (it was before the days of Andrew) about getting some sleeping pills. He said he might. We lay down together and had a cuddle, my cotton nightgown and his fleecy pyjamas between us. And it was no more than a cuddle. Though I’m sure he would have been happy if I’d encouraged him a little further. He was asleep before me.

I dreamed something that night that impressed me for weeks. I even wrote it down somewhere, but I can’t remember
what it was now or where I wrote it. Adeli will find it on a slip of paper one of these days. Unless I wrote it in one of my burned diaries. Why is it I can remember something Paul Claudel said and I can’t remember my grand dreams of old? I shan’t be around much longer, thank God, to trouble myself with this kind of question.

It was a problem for me at the time that Arthur never mentioned the Ponty noise when any of the others was around. I confided in Freddy, but he said unless Arthur spoke to him directly he couldn’t very well bring up the subject. There was nothing much wrong with hearing noises, he said. ‘It’s when you’re hearing voices telling you to do things you would not normally want to do that it’s time to get concerned.’ He thought Arthur was looking well and said there was nothing seriously the matter with him. ‘My patients are really sick people. Arthur is just a bit confused. He’ll get over it.’

I was not so sure. I said to Freddy, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seriously thought I would lose Arthur, but I fear it more than anything. I know I wouldn’t be able to manage without him.’ Freddy listened. He was good at listening and playing the piano. ‘I called Edith’s painting muck,’ I said. ‘When we first arrived at their place in Ocean Grove, before I went in to sit with Edith. Arthur had started praising it extravagantly to Pat. Brown muck, I said, to be exact. The brown muck of the dead school of painters. Arthur was offended. Pat thought it was amusing.’ I was silent a minute, Freddy watching me and smiling a little. ‘I’m sure Arthur could find someone much nicer than me if he decided to look.’

Freddy agreed that it wouldn’t be a difficult thing for Arthur to do. We were sitting by the river. Not on the log, but
next to it on the couch grass under the wattles. On hot summer days it was ten degrees cooler there by the water than it was in the house. I swam naked with Freddy looking on. I loved the delicious feel of the sweet water over my skin and Freddy’s admiring gaze on my body. I’d heard nothing from Pat and I hadn’t tried to contact him. More than a month had gone by since our visit. But I thought of him at some point every day.

Nothing had come of our plans to buy the gallery space in Flinders Lane. None of Arthur’s business contacts thought the idea interesting enough to back it. But I wanted to give Arthur something to occupy his energies that would hopefully displace his obsession with the Pontiac, and I convinced him we should sponsor an exhibition of the works of a wide circle of Melbourne modernists in another gallery space that was to let in Collins Street. We would not need to buy this place but could rent it for a season. It was a more manageable plan and the others were keen on it. When I suggested I might contribute some of my early watercolours I was met with the usual resistance from the men. They were happy for me to do the organising and for Arthur and I to meet the expense of the whole thing, but they feared they would invoke the taint of amateurism if they were to show their work alongside that of a woman. I knew they were thinking something along the lines of, Why can’t Autumn be satisfied just to manage the show and leave the art to us? They wanted to be the creative stars, and for me to be their impresario. It was an attitude that was eventually to wear me down and leave me feeling ungenerous towards them. Most
of them eventually made their way to Paris or to the Slade in London or found their vocations in something other than art.

Anne Collins was exempt from the charge of amateurism. She was such a brilliant draftswoman it placed her works beyond conventional criticism. She was also well connected socially, and her pen-and-wash drawings of notable people and places were universally admired, in Sydney as well as Melbourne. She was the only one of us to remain untouched by the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, whereby if your work was acclaimed in Sydney, then Melbourne scorned to comment on it, and vice versa. Anne’s work was highly skilled and clever but her drawings did not interest me. They challenged nothing of our ideas of what art might become for us but reaffirmed, with uncanny accuracy, what it already was. They did not make us uncomfortable or puzzle us, but simply made us all feel good about ourselves. She put me in mind of an obedient and gifted senior student who has set out to delight and gratify her awed professors. Anne always had an agenda to be served in whatever she did. Nothing with her was ever intuitive. She wasn’t beautiful but men were attracted to her. They were drawn to her. They listened to her with respect. I saw her a number of times in her one-piece black swimsuit (Italian, I suppose, then), her white legs bony and unlovely, her back pimpled. I could not understand the fascination she held for serious and intelligent men. Arthur thought she was the real thing. She and I were never close. I wonder why?

Distracting Arthur from his Ponty obsession wasn’t my only motive for wanting to mount a show in town. It was a little more complicated than that for me. Anne Collins, Louis de Vries, Arthur and I, with Barnaby roaming around in the garden
whistling opera, Freddy as our silent witness (happily suckling at the breast of his first love, his doom, his death, a melancholy smile in his beautiful eyes) and our captive Central European, Boris Karabashliev, were lunching in the garden to discuss our strategy for the show. The members of our immediate group of friends each had his or her own circle of artist friends and hangers-on and collaborators, and they in turn had their own circles beyond that. My intention was for us to draw on the widest possible array of such people, people who would have an interest in our venture and be inclined to support it. Most of them would be brought together for the first time by our show. It was a grand plan.

There was a feeling of excitement between us at the lunch table that afternoon. Louis in particular seemed to believe himself present at the birth of a new movement, of which he was to be a member of the founding nucleus. I was excited for other reasons and had no such alarmingly grandiose dreams. And of course nothing of that sort ever happened. Louis was eventually to lose himself somewhere in South America, searching for fresh inspiration—or perhaps it was drugs he was after? I can’t remember. Perhaps I never knew. At the time of our lunch his work had recently enjoyed some early favourable notice and as a result he had felt encouraged to believe there would be no limit to the eventual exercise of his refined genius. Although it was a warm day, he was wearing his usual black velvet outfit with a wide-brimmed floppy hat and deep purple bow tie against his black silk shirt. Louis was fond of affirming, If you’re going to be a great artist (such as himself), then you may as well dress the part. His motto was, Why be modest? What is the point of pretending to be someone you are not?

There is a photograph of us. I suppose Barnaby took it, as he is not in it. We were at our most self-congratulatory. Each of us looking anxiously at the camera, projecting our sense of the importance for posterity of the occasion, posturing. All of us now forgotten. I was sure of not meeting with any resistance when I said, as if the idea had occurred to me only that minute, ‘You know, we should let Pat Donlon in on this show. His work startles and puzzles everyone who sees it.’ My throat thickened when I said Pat’s name and I feared I had betrayed myself. Freddy allowed himself a private smile.

Arthur said mildly, ‘If we’re going to do that, then Pat must meet everyone first. What do you say?’ Louis and Anne both said they were eager to meet Pat. Freddy remained silent. As did Boris. Boris was a butterball of a man. His nickname was Mr Sheen. He rarely spoke unless he had something to say, then he was inclined to deliver a lecture to us poor benighted antipodeans. He was sure we understood nothing of the international life of art, and he was probably right.

Arthur looked at me and said easily, ‘Why don’t we invite them both up for a weekend, darling, and get everyone together over here on the Saturday afternoon?’

I was soon to discover that while I was a competent manager, I did not possess the instincts of a social tactician; those skills (if skills is what they are) of forming alliances and driving wedges between rivals, and so on. I lacked the ruthless calculation for it. It wasn’t the way I saw things. I don’t see them that way now. I had not counted on having to deal with the circling menace of sensitive male egos, last-minute withdrawals, betrayals, counter-cliques and vicious gossip. It was all part of the deal I was taking on but I didn’t know it. That afternoon in the
garden, drinking and talking, I wasn’t thinking about tactics. I thought I had been very clever in clothing my deeper motive in such a plausible disguise. I was even momentarily able to convince myself that the show was the main idea behind all this.

So it was settled. I would get in touch with Pat and invite them both up for a weekend. ‘Them,’ Arthur had said. It was the only thing that marred the sweetness of my secret joy that afternoon. I had forgotten her, hadn’t I. An image of Edith sitting on the veranda observing us now came into my mind; not drinking or joining in with us but watching us, being smugly pregnant and womanly, not saying anything, a helpless smile occasionally passing across her lovely features. Yes, she was lovely. She was what some men call a
real
woman. That is, she was motherly and voluptuous at one and the same time. A suitable object for the male dreaming. I was building an image of her to be detested.

I was wearing a wide straw hat that afternoon, which shaded my face. But even so I think Freddy noticed my colour was up. Drunk or sober, Freddy didn’t miss a lot.

No sooner had the plan to invite Pat and Edith to Old Farm been decided than I began to feel sick with worry about it and to wonder if I was doing the right thing or was getting myself into a mess that I would never be able to get out of ever again. My worry took the form of an unpleasant combination of desire—fuelled by the phony liberties of the alcohol—considerable fear, confused expectation and utter self-loathing. I drank a great deal at that lunch and talked far more than I meant to.

I was on my own in the kitchen later when Barnaby came stumping onto the veranda from the garden, whistling something piercing from one of his operas. I said, ‘Please, Barnaby!
I’ve got a headache.’ The others were in the library getting some serious drinking done and no doubt flying with their imaginings of greatness. I told Barnaby I wasn’t feeling well enough to cook dinner. He said cheerfully, ‘I’ll cook it for you, my darling. Go and lie down.’

I can’t remember what Barnaby cooked. He was a good cook. It would have been something tasty and not too complicated and probably a little surprising. Perhaps with an Asian flavour. He had spent some years in Thailand. He loved foraging in my vegetable garden, which was partly his garden too. He knew something was up with me and wanted to get the full story over the meal. I gave him the bare bones of it. He suspected more and came back in the morning and helped me break up the irises and plant them out. Barnaby wasn’t Freddy. Anything you told Barnaby in the morning was all over town by lunchtime. Anyway, what was there to tell? It was all just a confusion of the soul at that stage. I didn’t know whether to hope Pat Donlon would feel as confused as me when I contacted him, or would have forgotten me by now.

•

Adeli has just come out to the kitchen. I closed my notebook and set it aside with my pen on it. She looks as hot as I feel, her apple cheeks glowing. Maybe she’s been dancing again. She’s been doing something, that’s obvious. She asks me if I’d like a cold glass of lemon and orange. She calls it lolly water, a phrase she’s picked up. It sounds like
lally wadder
when she says it and I wonder for an instant what she is suggesting. I tell
her that would be lovely and to please put some gin in it. She asks where the gin is and I tell her it’s in the refrigerator.

I watch her making the drinks. She puts gin in mine but not in her own. I can see the perfect tone of her skin through the fine white linen dress she’s wearing. Open sandals on her small and rather shapely feet, and nicely tanned. I don’t know in which direction her tastes lie. There has never been any mention of a special friend either way. She brings my drink over and sets it down next to me on the table. When I see that she’s about to take her own drink back to the dining room I say, ‘Stay and have it here with me.’ She looks at me and I give her my nicest smile. She hesitates then pulls out a chair and sits. She takes a sip of her drink and looks at me again, not smiling, her look having more purpose in it now. She’s got something on her mind.