Autumn Laing (38 page)
Phillip said, ‘Jesus, Eu! We’ve fucking killed him.’ He got down on his knees and put his ear to Pat’s mouth. ‘He’s not breathing.’ He looked up at his brother. ‘We’ve killed the
fucker.’ He got up and stood with his brother. ‘What are we going to do?’
Pat coughed then sucked back on the air. He looked up at them. ‘Did you hit me with that spade?’
Euan said, ‘He’s going to live.’
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Phillip stepped to the door.
‘We should burn the place.’ Euan stood above Pat, looking down at him as if he was thinking of kicking him in the head with his boot. He spat on him and turned to the door. He wanted to do more damage, something final and satisfying, but his threat to burn the house had no strong intention in it. He followed his brother out to the truck. On his way across the garden he picked up Pat’s bag and tossed it onto the fire.
Pat wiped the spittle from his shoulder and raised himself on his elbow. He watched them back the truck then turn and head down the gravel track. He hadn’t felt a thing. He should have gone lower and caught that sod in the ankle with the spade then swung it up hard into the other’s groin as he came for him. Well, it was over for now. It was no good theorising about how he might have got the better of those two. He would probably have had to kill them to stop them. He lay back on the floor, his arm across his eyes. The pain was coming to a peak now. He would like to get another chance at them, one at a time. The younger one first. Catch him off his guard and knock his teeth out with an axe handle. He hadn’t got a punch in that he could remember. It was over before it had really got going. It was very disappointing to him that he had not marked one of them. Well, this was not the end of the story. He would go up to Bairnsdale and demand to see her. They couldn’t refuse to let a husband see his wife.
He lay there for some time, dealing with the pain and waiting for his thoughts to settle. Then he got up and went over to the sink and washed the blood off. His shirt was torn and there was blood on it and on his pants. He turned out his pockets. He had seven shillings. At least the buggers hadn’t robbed him. He went into the studio. Everything was smashed. There was nothing worth picking up. They must have taken her stuff out first. Had she been with them when they arrived? Driving down separately with her father to supervise the removal of her own belongings, then leaving them to get on with the act of retribution once she had made clear to them what they should take? Surely she could not have known they intended to destroy his stuff then beat the shit out of him? Surely she didn’t hate him? But perhaps she did. It occurred to him then for the first time that the pair of them might not be going to get through this. Maybe the damage he had done to her trust in him was too great for her and she wasn’t coming back. Too humiliating. She would
want
to go on loving him, he was sure of that, but would she be able to? Would she be able to overcome her repugnance after what he had done?
He went back to the kitchen and drank some water and stood at the sink, looking out at the fire burning in the garden, considering his life without Edith and their child. Dan Brennan’s book burning on the fire. He had destroyed everything good in his life. There was nothing left. He was a bad man and a fool. Could there be a less worthy combination? His mother would be ashamed of him. Had he injured Edith for life? Would she carry this with her for the rest of her days? She and the child? He leaned his elbows on the sink and put his head in his hands. He didn’t know what to think.
Arthur said, ‘Well, of course, Pat. It will have to be just for a few days, though. Autumn is not herself at the moment.’ He had thought it was over and had doubted they would see Pat Donlon again. He’d had only one appointment before lunch, with an old and very deaf client. He had been deeply lost in his book when Pat walked in. He could hardly have turned him away. Autumn would not have thanked him for that. Of course he did not have to tell her that Pat had come to see him. But the thought of deceiving Autumn was deeply repugnant to him. Deceiving Autumn would be deceiving himself. No, it was not an issue. He knew he was going to tell her.
Pat was seated in the clients’ chair across the desk from Arthur. He was smoking one of Arthur’s cigarettes. Sitting where he had sat that fateful evening when he turned up out of nowhere with his bundle of drawings. If Wilenski’s book had not arrived in the post that day and he, Arthur, had not stayed back late reading it, he would not have been in his office and Pat Donlon would have gone away and they would never have met and none of this would have happened.
‘You don’t have to,’ Pat said. ‘I’d go home to my mum and dad’s place, but they’d have a fit if they saw me looking like this. My dad would get a bunch of his mates together and go after those two. There’d be no end to the trouble. I’m not going to put her through that. It’s not her fault.’
‘No, of course not. I understand you perfectly.’ Arthur was aware that his manner must seem to Pat to be a little tight and that he was being less than wholeheartedly welcoming, and he was sorry for this, but was not able to do anything to relieve
this impression. He
was
tight. Pat made him feel tight. Having Pat sitting there asking for sanctuary (that was how Arthur thought of it) had put him horribly on edge. Pat had taken him completely by surprise. He had looked up from his book and been dismayed to see Pat standing there in the doorway, grinning at him like an apparition from a battlefield. Arthur was shocked. But he had no wish to be unkind and had done his best to make Pat feel at ease. Pat, he soon realised, was more at ease than he was himself. Arthur’s impulse was ever to be generous. And indeed what was to be gained by making things difficult for everyone? He sat looking at Pat unhappily, his book set aside, the calm of his day and his peace of mind shattered.
He looked across the desk at Pat. Pat’s eyes were swollen and richly discoloured, and his jaw bulged out on one side, the tight skin brightly inflamed. It made Arthur’s knees feel funny to look at it. Wounds had always made Arthur’s knees feel funny. Animal wounds on the farm as a boy in Tasmania no less than human ones. Autumn was able to deal with such things without blenching, but not he. He looked away from Pat’s jaw and wondered if Pat had eaten lunch, or would be able to.
Arthur examined something in his bookcase and said, ‘Did you lose any teeth? You would have been better off, you know, if you’d walked away from those fellows.’ He reached and took down a tome, the title of which he did not bother to notice. The book had been on the shelf unopened since before his own time in the office. He sneezed and put the book down and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.
Pat smiled. ‘Thanks for the advice, Arthur. You’re right. A sensible person would have turned around when he saw
those boys and walked back down the hill. But they were in my house burning my things. I don’t know what you would have done, but I found it hard to walk away from that.’
The picture in Arthur’s mind of these two enormous men, as Pat described them, burning his belongings then beating him insensible, was so without precedent in his private experience that he found it frightening to think of it. No such thing had ever happened to anyone he had ever known or to anyone his friends had known. George could be belligerent on occasion, and the others might get drunk and shout at each other, but burning and beating belonged to the world of criminal violence. That Pat did not seem particularly depressed or shocked by these events was a worry to him. Did this sort of thing happen often in Pat’s life? Was it an experience he was accustomed to dealing with? Was he inured, as Arthur could never be, to this kind of deranged criminal behaviour? The idea that Pat’s father would take it upon himself to gather a band of associates together and go in search of Edith’s brothers to exact his vengeance on them was utterly foreign to him. It made his mouth go dry to think that he himself, as a friend of Pat’s, might be called on to join such a party of vengeful miscreants. In inviting Pat back into their home now, might he not also be inviting this kind of extreme behaviour into their lives? The thought frightened him. Who was it who had invited the arsonists into his home out of pity, only to have his home burned down by them?
Pat said, ‘It’s all gone. Even my trousers and my only clean shirt. My toothbrush too.’ He laughed. But it was not a happy laugh. Privately he was grieving for the loss of Father Brennan’s book, and for his Rimbaud poems. He might be able to find another book of Rimbaud’s poems, but he would never again
have Dan Brennan’s book. With the loss of that book, one of the few precious and beautiful things in his life had gone for good. He was not grieving for the loss of his paintings and his drawings. He had already moved beyond them and the phase of life they represented. He was now located in a kind of void of art. An open nothingness. Indeed, he might have burned them himself if Edith’s brothers had not done the job for him. He had done nothing worth preserving. Nothing at all. He no longer saw himself as the young Rimbaud. That illusion of youthful genius was done with. He would always cherish the boy poet’s work but he would not mistake himself again for that kind of person. He did not have that dangerous wildness. It was not his. He did not regret the loss of the illusion. Its loss had brought him closer to who he really was. One day, soon or not so soon, when her wounds had had time to heal, surely he and Edith would get back together? If he were a poet he would write poems about all this. But he had no desire to write poems. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and looked up at Arthur. ‘I’ve got nothing to show for my twenty-two years, Arthur. Except those drawings I left up at your place.’
Arthur said it
was
very little, he could only agree. He picked up the telephone and dialled the Old Farm number.
Autumn picked up the phone and said a cautious hello.
‘Hello, darling. Pat’s here with me.’ He was looking across his desk at Pat, wondering how best to describe his facial injuries without alarming her. ‘He’s had a bit of a fight, I suppose you’d call it, with Edith’s brothers.’
Pat could hear the squeaks and squawks of Autumn’s excited voice but was not able to make out anything of what she was
saying. He feared she might be telling Arthur she never wanted to see him again.
Arthur said, ‘No. Not seriously.’ He listened. ‘I thought you might say that.’ He hung up. ‘Autumn said I should bring you home until you’re recovered. I have to tell you, Pat, I was glad I did not have to make that suggestion to her myself.’
Pat said, ‘It’s very kind of you both. I’ll make sure I’m no trouble to you.’
The phrase rang in Arthur’s head:
I’ll make sure I’m no trouble to you
. He shied away from thoughts of Autumn’s night of the moon and the river with this young man. He trusted her. Of course he did. Their trust was inviolable. It was sacred to them both. In new company she took his arm and held him close to her side and repeated their private formula—their truth, they called it: ‘We made sense of each other’s life.’ It would be their epitaph, carved in gilded letters on their joint tombstone.
We made sense of each other’s life
. To doubt her would be a betrayal in itself. And anyway, she had assured him that nothing improper had taken place between herself and Pat that night. Arthur’s rational mind could accept Autumn’s assurance; unfortunately his viscera could not.
He said to Pat, ‘Would you like to get something to eat before we go? Can you eat with that jaw of yours? It looks very tender. We have time before the train. There’s a buffet at the station. It’s licensed.’
Pat said he would like that very much.
Arthur said, ‘Give me a minute and I’ll close the shop.’
WHOEVER HAS NO HOUSE NOW, WILL NEVER HAVE ONE. WHOEVER is alone will stay alone.
These lines from Rilke’s portentous ‘Autumn Day’, once recited to me by my confessor, Freddy, had been repeating themselves in my head all morning. It is my birthday. But it wasn’t until after lunch that I realised it
is
Autumn’s Day, and that my unconscious was singing me a birthday message. Freddy, I should say, strongly disapproved of my affair with Pat.
I didn’t see Edith again until I thought I saw her in the street outside the chemist’s shop late last year. And what a shock that was. Flinging open the offending archive of my memory and bad conscience. I’ve sided with her, haven’t I? I mean, that’s what this is. I’ve dived back into things and resurrected her and I’ve taken her side. She’s the one I’ve made us feel sorry for. I have made myself seem hateful. In this story I’m the evil fairy and she is the good fairy. Isn’t it the ever-solitary good fairy who wins out in the end after enduring injustices
heaped upon her by the evil fairy? I don’t see how that can come about. I seem to have agreed, in principle at least, that Edith was right about life and art and we were wrong. My friends who suicided; my darling Uncle Mathew, then Freddy, my confessor, and finally dear old Barnaby, the last of my true friends. Surely no further proof is needed than these deaths that empty choices were made by us? Choices that did not result in happy lives.
She
didn’t kill herself, did she? She had her child to live for. Was it all really as simple as that? A happy life? Surely that is not the point of this, is it? To live a happy life. Contentment, happiness, satisfaction? I’m afraid I am not to be convinced. Surely we engaged with the struggle, risked everything in the cause of a creative life? Wasn’t that it? Didn’t we, in our youthful fervour, put the idea of happy families a poor last on our list of choices? Didn’t we seek some higher and more noble end than mere personal happiness?
I’m not at the kitchen table writing this. I’m sitting up in my bed looking at her picture of the embroidered field, her clever solution with the yellow oxalis. Pat wondered if oxalis had a season of flowering. Of course it does. Everything has its season of flowering. And this late flowering may be mine. And speaking of flowering, I’m seeing her painting for what it was then, not what it is now. Now it is a period piece, a fine tonal study in the conservative manner (if I am permitted a pun) of the long-forgotten Max Manner and his followers. Then it was that young woman’s modest hopes spread out on this piece of linen canvas. I’m weeping for her. Not sobbing, but weeping silently, inside. Perhaps for myself too. For all of us. I did not weep for her then. Pat wept for her then, and for himself. Now that it is too late to make amends I seek to make
amends and I weep. Isn’t that life, after all? The inescapable irony of survival. That it is always too late to make amends.
