Autumn Laing (36 page)

‘You’re the first.’

‘Why don’t I believe you?’ She thought of him with another woman as he had been with her a moment ago and knew she would kill them both.

‘Because you’re a fool.’ He couldn’t see his singlet anywhere and wondered what he had done with it. He sat on the log and looked at her. He was astonished by the refinement of her beauty in the moonlight. He couldn’t believe he had just made love to her. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise.’ A twig snapped among the wattles behind him and he whirled around. The moon shone clear and white among the polished trunks of the spindly trees. A moth flew into the light, fluttering like a
white ghost across the open space, then suddenly disappeared into the darkness. He was afraid Arthur or Edith had heard Autumn crying out at the height of it. He had never heard a woman make such a racket. Was it anguish or pleasure she had been feeling?

‘You’re a scaredy-cat,’ she said. She lay there, languid, deeply relaxed, the warm night air on her skin. She caressed her flank. She was still drunk and too relaxed to care about anything. ‘I’m surprised you’re so fearful,’ she said. ‘I’d imagined you being fearless.’

‘Men being fearless is bullshit.’

‘I like to believe good men are fearless in defence of what they cherish.’

‘Yeah, that’s what they’d like you to believe. Only they’re not. Look around you. See what men do. Anyway, I’m not a good man. And you’re not a good woman.’ His brain was infested with small black figures leaping and running about in the eerie darkness, climbing over each other. An insane directionless panic of small black flies with grey markings on their backs. His head was thumping. The pump had started up. He supposed he would soon die and it would be over for him. Poor Edith, walking the streets of St Kilda with their little child. What would she tell the child about its father? … Sitting on the log looking at this goddess in the moonlight, he knew he would not be able to refuse her. The only way for him and Edith to survive this would be for them to go away without telling anyone where they were going. To England. And if they couldn’t raise the money for England, then to New Zealand. Somewhere deep in the South Island among the Maori. Out
of Autumn’s reach. Eventually he would forget her. She was watching him. He knew he would never forget her.

His admiration made her feel young and reckless. ‘I want you again,’ she said.

He stood up. ‘Jesus! I’m going up to the house.’

She sat up. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she pleaded.

‘I’m going.’

‘No!’ she shouted.

He turned on her. ‘Be quiet, for Christ’s sake!’ He was beginning to fear that she wanted them to be caught. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘You like to make a scene.’

‘Yes, like you.’

‘No, you’re dangerous. I’m going back.’

She jumped to her feet and caught him in a stride and held his arm, her nails digging into his flesh. ‘Wait, or I’ll scream and everyone will know.’

‘Yeah, I can believe you would do that.’ Even as he looked at her, knowing he would not be able to resist her, his stomach was churning with fear and remorse and the desire to be innocently with Edith again. ‘Okay,’ he said, his voice unsteady, missing a beat as if someone had jogged the gramophone needle. It was true, he was a scaredy-cat. ‘I’ll wait while you get dressed.’

‘No one,’ she said, holding his arm, ‘has ever made love to me like that.’ But she was thinking of the Roman psychiatrist. It was him she had thought of when Pat was making love to her just now. He had been forty and married and she was barely nineteen. Surely it had been like this with him? The fear and the excitement, the knowledge that they would make love no matter what the consequences, no matter what the cost to them. Life itself. She couldn’t remember his name. She remembered
his child. Her lost child. The child would have been sixteen this year. She longed suddenly to sit quietly by the river with Pat now and tell him everything that had ever meant anything to her, so that he would know her and understand her and no longer be a stranger to her.

‘This was a one-off,’ Pat said. His tone was harsh. ‘I shouldn’t have given in to you.’

‘You bastard! It was you who seduced me.’

‘You insisted on swimming naked in front of me. What was that supposed to be?’

She said helplessly, ‘Oh, I hate you.’ She kissed him on the mouth, pressing herself against him, thinking of him holding her to him in the river. He began to caress her and she pulled away from him and laughed. ‘You’ll have to wait.’ She went over to where her dress was lying on the grass and put on her pants and bra. She held up her stained and crumpled dress. She put it on over her head and dragged it down. ‘Arthur will know at once.’ She looked at Pat. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Can’t you say you fell in? Or you swam in your clothes?’

She said, ‘Look,’ and pointed through the tall gum trees on the far bank of the river behind him. ‘It’s starting to get light.’

She looked like a girl standing there in the faint dawnlight, her hair in wet braids, her feet bare, her dress like the dress of a gipsy or a peasant.

‘You look innocent,’ he said. ‘Like a girl.’

Edith opened her eyes. Moonlight, she supposed it to be, was showing in a strip around the curtains. She thought she was
at home in their bed in Ocean Grove. Then she remembered. Something had woken her. Had someone called to her? Then she heard it again. A man’s laughter followed by talking. She realised Pat was not beside her. She switched on the bedside light and looked at her watch. It was a quarter past four. She got up and put on her dressing-gown and slippers and went out along the passage to the library. She stood outside the door. A man’s voice. It was Arthur. She opened the door and went in. Arthur was standing with his back to her in front of the fireplace and seemed to be addressing the large abstract painting that was leaning against the wall on the mantelpiece. His jacket was off and his braces hung over his trousers. ‘Well, dear boy, that’s how things stand here.’

Edith coughed.

Arthur fell silent and turned around.

She said, ‘Where’s Pat?’

‘Well, dear girl,’ he said, ‘I thought you would have been well and truly in the land of nod by now. Would you like a drink?’

‘Where’s Pat?’

He looked around the room, as if he thought he might see Pat and cry out, Ah, there he is! ‘Won’t you come in properly and sit down?’ he said. ‘I can make us a cup of tea if you’d prefer.’

‘I think I’ll go and look for them,’ Edith said.

‘Oh, they’ll be all right. I shouldn’t worry.’

‘But the moon must have gone down ages ago.’

‘The moon?’ he said slowly, as if this were a piece of a puzzle he had been looking for and it had just been handed to him. Now to fit it into its proper place. One problem solved, another confronts us. ‘Look, Edith. Talking. You know.’ He
was talking with his hands. ‘I dare say. About life and art. That’s it, isn’t it?’ He grinned at her, but she did not respond. ‘Life and art. You must know what it’s like yourself. Time gets away when we’re talking. We have all our lives. What about that cup of tea? I’ll come with you, if you like, and we’ll look for them together when we’ve had a cup of tea. What do you say to that? Do we have a bargain? I don’t think Autumn will be wildly pleased to find us skulking about in the dark spying on her, but if it will put your mind at rest. Well, no doubt it will be worth it. Aren’t you tired? I am frankly exhausted. No work tomorrow, thank God. God, I hate that place.’ He stood looking at her as if he had only just realised who she was. ‘I have all the courage in the world in theory. In theory I tell my mother I am through with the law and I resign from the firm. It’s simple. Then I visit my mother and she asks me about one of her dear friends who has business with our firm and she wants me to do something to hurry things along. I can do very little. Nothing really. Believe me, it is not humanly possible to hurry the law. This woman, or man, and sometimes it has been a man since my father passed away, is unknown to me except by name. Their affairs are a mystery so far as I am concerned. And, what’s more important, they are not my client but the client of one of the senior partners. So I promise Mother I’ll see what I can do, because I know she has told her friend that her son, the prince—you know what I mean?—has influence at court, if you’ll allow the pun, and is able to fix these things. So it is my mother’s standing with her friend that is at stake. It is this she places in my care. Her standing with her friends. So what can I do if I am not to seem to betray her, but eat my cake and drink my tea and kiss her cheek and
give her my worthless word and sneak off like a hyena who has just pinched someone’s lunch? If that makes sense. I’m sure you know what I mean. I am a hypocrite. What would you do?’

Edith said, ‘You look very tired, Arthur.’

‘Yes. Yes. It’s kind of you to notice. My car has been misbehaving. But look here. I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear any of this. My troubles are nothing, are they? When you compare them to the troubles of some people. The thing is, I don’t have the pleasure of driving any more. It was one of my very few private pleasures. I don’t think Autumn quite realises. But I mustn’t criticise Autumn. It is Autumn who has made sense of my pointless life for me.’ He knew he was rabbiting on in case, if he permitted a silence, Edith asked him about her picture. Why couldn’t he just tell her about her picture? Why not sit her down and explain the whole thing to this intelligent young woman? Like a physician explaining the disease you have contracted through no fault of your own. A good bedside manner required for that. And if the patient weeps, you comfort them. Simple really. Surely she would understand? You see, my dear, it’s like this: Autumn and I had a nasty row. Autumn can be terrible when she is aroused. She hit me several times. Or would have hit me if I hadn’t held her wrists and prevented her from hitting me. Don’t ask me what the row was about. I can’t remember what it was about. Everything and nothing, I suppose. The usual thing. It was the night we drove home from our picnic with you at Ocean Grove. Not that it was much of a picnic, was it? It was that same night that my car began to rattle. Troubles never come singly, do they? Troubles band together, my father used to say. I had the purest trust in my car till then. Now it is not possible for
me to have confidence in it. It is like a dear cherished friend who has betrayed me. I dread getting behind the wheel and driving out the gate. I know the rattle will begin as soon as we are on the road. It is so unfair.

But no, he could not revert to memories of that night drive or their so-called picnic. That could not be done. Why are our lives, he wondered with a sense of futility, these forts in the wilderness, each palisaded with spikes to defend its silly little secrets and repel the larger truth of the wilderness? Why can’t we be open? He decided to get rid of the ‘forts in the wilderness’ idea. Why can’t we just tell each other the truth, in other words, and be done with it? And if the truth upsets us then we can have a cuddle afterwards and confess our stupidities? He might write something about this dilemma; the general dilemma, that is, of truth and its difficulty. Not the specific one of why he couldn’t tell Edith the truth about how her picture came to be up in the loft of the coach house …

Edith said, ‘I think I can hear them coming. Or someone.’ She couldn’t hear them or anyone else coming but she said she could because the sound of Arthur’s voice was like someone sawing her head in half.

They went out to the kitchen and he rattled the Rayburn and put some sticks in the firebox, not noticing there was no fire, and he set a full kettle of water on the cold hotplate. He was surprised by how heavy the kettle was. His admiration for Autumn knew no limits. She was astonishing. She ran the house like a machine. No, like a friend. A dear close good friend whom she loved and who loved her in turn. The things she did! He did not know the half of them. He went over and
stood beside Edith. He hoped his presence was a comfort to her. Poor girl.

Edith was standing at the back door looking down the slope of the garden. A thin band of grey and yellow light peered back at her through the forest beyond the river—the evil squint of a yellow-eyed cat.

‘There, that’s done,’ Arthur said. ‘She’ll be boiling in no time and we can sit down and have a nice cup of tea.’ He wanted another whisky but felt the moment was not quite right for it. He had noticed that Edith did not drink and he didn’t want to risk disappointing her. She would have no confidence in him if she got the idea he was a drunk. Any more sudden rattles starting up in his life might be the last straw. He took a deep breath and blew it out. Everything was going to be all right. Wasn’t it? Of course it was. Things always work out. Surprises, that’s all. Life with Autumn was full of surprises. He put his arm across Edith’s shoulders and gave her a small squeeze. He felt her stiffen and realised he had given her the wrong impression. She had large breasts. Well shaped and firm. Generous breasts. European. Was that it? Lovely. Autumn’s chest was like the country beyond the Grampians, flat as a tack. But she had very good nipples. He went, ‘Hmm,’ and removed his arm from across Edith’s shoulders.

Edith eased away a little. She didn’t mind his arm but his breath was sour. The garden was so still and so silent in the grey dawnlight. It was eerie and it repelled her, as if there was no one out there and had never been anyone out there. And why were there no birds at this time of the morning? She had liked Barnaby, but this place seemed evil to her. Yes, evil. As if a spell had been cast over it, and the people who
gathered here were trapped in an invisible web of disdain for the rest of humankind, bewitched by their own way of talking and their vain egotism. Unaware of the trap that held them. Their supercilious contempt for artists like her grandfather had embarrassed her, but she had said nothing. What was the point of arguing with such people? They held their own narrow hateful view of art and life and excluded everything else from their field of vision. How would her arguments change them or make them reconsider their views? They were like the flies with their legs caught in the sticky paper that Mrs Kemp hung from the light flex above the big table in the kitchen at the farm. They were stuck and that was that. No fly had ever escaped Mrs Kemp’s sticky paper. Just as these people had no hope of escaping the evil spell of their prejudices. Wasn’t the aim of art to be free of prejudice? Such had been her grandfather’s view. The cosmopolitan man and woman, he said, are liberated from prejudice. In reality the opposite was true. But he had made the world of art seem large and generous and warm, embracing all the strong and good feelings of what it is to be human. These people engendered an atmosphere of a kind of yellow sickness. When George’s drunken gaze had settled on her breasts a shiver had passed through her. It was as if he had touched her insides. His eyes frightened her.