Autumn Laing (40 page)

The art journals Arthur and I kept on the low table between the two sofas (it was a Chinese cherry wood table given to us by Louis) were now covered with numerous old volumes of the journals of the explorers. Pat kept all the old books out and had scraps of newspaper sticking out of them marking places he wanted to find his way back to. He would dart from one volume to another to check some fact, or to relive a scene that had appealed to him, or to make some comparison. On these occasions his lips moved while he leaned forward to read, an eagerness in him. When he was reading Charles Sturt’s two-volume journal of his South Australian expedition, he would look up and exclaim from time to time, ‘Not a patch on Leichhardt.’ He did not address this remark to Arthur or to me but to the vacant air around him. The absent tone of his voice made me want to look for the other person among us to whom he was addressing his remark. He read all the journals. Leichhardt remained his favourite, Major Mitchell his least favourite.

One weekday, when Arthur was at his office and Barnaby was with us for afternoon tea in the kitchen, Pat suddenly said, speaking his private preoccupation aloud and breaking into our conversation, ‘It would be such a great thing to do.’

‘What would be a great thing to do?’ Barnaby asked. He was interested in Pat, ‘Autumn and I were just filling in the tedious hours in the hope you would share your thoughts with us.’

Pat said, ‘To follow Leichhardt’s trail. To see that country. To go where he went.’

‘Is that all? It might be boring, Pat. There are a lot of flies and it is very hot.’

‘I’m serious,’ Pat said.

‘I can see that.’

‘It would all be changed,’ Pat said, disengaging from Barnaby. ‘It wouldn’t be the way it was in his day.’

Barnaby said, ‘On the contrary. Most of that country hasn’t changed at all since he went through. The Aborigines are gone, of course, pretty much, but little else has changed. You should come up home with me one of these days. I’ll show you that country. Nothing simpler. Leichhardt went through just to the east of us. The Expedition Range is named after him.’

Pat’s eyes, which were fully healed and recovered by then, filled with a look of boyish wonder—it was the look English public schoolboys once wore on the illustrated covers of stories about adventures among the savages of the South Seas. He said, ‘Would that really be possible, Barney? I mean seriously?’

Barnaby laughed at him. They had got on well together ever since the day Barnaby took his part against the others at lunch. Barnaby said airily, ‘Nothing simpler, old mate. You’d love it. You city boys are full of romantic notions about the bush.’ He turned and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Thanks for the leeks. I must be going.’

When Barnaby had gone Pat wanted to make love, so we went to his room. It was wonderful as usual and I was lost to
everything. Before I was really quite finished, Pat withdrew abruptly and said, ‘Was he just saying that, do you think?’

‘Who saying what?’ I said, my mind reeling as if I had run into a door.

‘Would it really be possible for me to go up there with Barney?’

‘You’re a bastard,’ I said. I rolled away from him and got off the bed and put my clothes on (I was still throbbing). A bright little flame of hatred was flaring inside me. I hoped I would be able to contain it.

‘What’s up? What have I said?’ Pat seemed genuinely perplexed. What could possibly have annoyed me? The flame of my anger burned brighter.

‘You might have waited a minute,’ I said.

‘Sorry.’

While I was in my delirium, imagining us to be at one, he had apparently been thinking about Barnaby and the bush.

‘Sorry,’ he said again. But he was quite cheerful about it and not the least bit contrite. He lay there with his arms behind his head and his nakedness presented to me. ‘Do you think he really would take me up there, though?’

I tottered, trying to put my sandals on, and had to sit on the edge of the bed. I didn’t want to be touched. Pat sat up and put his arm around me and kissed my cheek.

I said, ‘You never know what Barnaby will do and what he won’t do.’ I stood up and moved to the mirror and combed my hair out with my fingers.

Pat said, ‘So what’s the big hurry? What’s all this about? Don’t tell me you’re jealous of Barney? Jesus! What a thought.’
He laughed and reached for his trousers and felt around for his cigarettes.

‘
My
hurry?’ I said icily. ‘I have to put in my orders for the week, Pat. If I don’t phone before lunch there will be nothing for your dinner tomorrow night. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

Was this our first disagreement? It is the first I recall. It left a distracting stain on the way things were between us. For a few minutes I had been capable of hating him. When we made love after that I was wondering if he was as deeply lost with me as I was with him, or if he was thinking about something else. It defeated things a bit. We both noticed it, but neither of us was able to be honest with the other one about it, so it stayed with us and I began to fear it each time we were together.

When Barnaby was in Melbourne he had a flat above a pub in Swanston Street, and when he was up the river near us he rented an old cottage overlooking a tight elbow of the Yarra. Barnaby was in and out and about the place all the time. You never knew when he was going to turn up, or with whom. He had nothing to say about me and Pat. It was all part of life in the theatre, as he called it, the daily dance and drama of things. Barnaby was not burdened with uncertainties or longings about family life. He loved his parents but adored his liberty and enjoyed it without a bad conscience.

It was not long after this that Barnaby started taking Pat into the city with him and introducing him to his friends in the wine bars. I hated this. When I asked Pat what they did and who they
met on these excursions he said, Not much at all, just having a drink and a laugh with some of the fellers. He said I could go with them if I wanted to. But I knew he didn’t mean it, and anyway I loathed those places, the basements along Swanston Street and in back alleys (Barnaby said he remembered seeing Pat and Edith in the Swanston Family Hotel but Pat did not recall ever seeing him there). To me those so-called bohemian dives were sleazy and depressing places patronised by make-believe people who would never accomplish anything, rings of despair in their drunken laughter, the comfort of helplessness in each other’s company. Barnaby loved all that stuff. He was not its victim but liked to observe it. George was a regular at one of the bars and was more a victim of the cult of drink and noise and the seduction of young girls. George was oppressed by the white man’s Christian preoccupation with good and evil and couldn’t really enjoy the freedoms he required from life. His was a bitter struggle against the dark. He became very successful and his paintings are still greatly valued. It was the urban landscape, never the bush, that fascinated George’s eye. The glitter and fascination of decadence. He lived it deeply and knew first-hand what grossness was. His work carried the stamp of authenticity.

Pat and Barnaby were always very late getting back from these expeditions. Barnaby would drop Pat off here in the early hours of the morning. Most often Pat was drunk and noisy getting in. Arthur and I would lie awake listening to him bumping around before he finally fell into bed and settled. Our home was no longer the private haven of our dreams it had once been.

When Pat was in town with Barnaby, and Arthur and I were having our dinner alone, I was hardly able to speak a word or swallow a mouthful of food for the sickening anxiety and jealousy that engulfed me.

Arthur said to me cheerily (cheerily!) at the table one evening, ‘It’s like old times, darling. Just the two of us.’ It was impossible for me even to pretend to agree with this. Old times were gone and were never coming back. And this was not like them. He had never asked me outright if Pat and I were lovers. But I knew he knew. How could he not have known? Nothing was said. It was unsayable. To have said it would have destroyed us. Like the surprise of the Aborigines when they saw Charley coming through their country with a mob of horses. There are many ways in which life can be unspeakable. It can’t all be reduced to words. And the best of the poets have always known this. It is the legions of lesser poets who think otherwise. I was grateful to Arthur for his silence, but his silence was not enough.

The worst of it was, I had stopped being able to talk to Freddy. He was no longer my confessor. There was no one to whom I could tell my private joys and terrors. He did not approve and did not want to hear what I wanted to tell him. Whenever he came to see me, which was less and less often, he and I sat and drank and smoked and looked out the window or leafed through a magazine together, or we walked arm in arm down to the river as we used to. But it was as it used to be only in appearance. While we walked I was thinking of Pat, and Freddy was feeling me thinking of Pat. He did not like what we were doing and saw disaster in it for me and Arthur, his friends. He soon made some excuse and left. It was horrible. He kissed my cheek at the door and got into his
car and saluted me sadly and drove away, and I went to my room and wept for the friendship that was no more. The day would come when Freddy and I would regain our trust, but by then we were different people and the source of our joy was soured and buckled out of its former shape and had become something else. We would never have the original thing again. By then he was suffering from his alcoholism and I had become a survivor who believed herself to have been betrayed. Though I did not know we were to regain our friendship, I was not mistaken to mourn what I had lost with Freddy.

I asked Pat if he was staying out of Freddy’s way on purpose. He said he wasn’t, but I knew he was. ‘Freddy likes to talk to you on your own and I’m happy reading,’ he said. None of it seemed to trouble Pat. He sailed in clearer airs than I. And there were times when I hated him for this and was alienated from him because of it. Times when I could have torn the book out of his hands and ripped it apart and thrown the pieces in his face and screamed at him, Why must you read all the time! Don’t you ever notice other people’s pain? I think he would have laughed at me if I had done this. Laughed, then made love to me. And I would not have resisted him but would have wept with helpless fury.

I went to the library to look for him one morning, determined to distract him from his reading. The day was pure and light and still, cleansed of its sins after days of darkness and rain, the roar of the river was the welcome sound of a new beginning. I was going to suggest he join me in the garden and help me pick the peas for dinner. It was an innocent thought. Something simple and good that he and I might do together. Pat did not see the beauty of Old Farm as I saw it. I wanted
him to know it at its best, in its clearest light, in its strongest mood. It was always the river that determined the strength of this place. When the river was in drought the bush became quiet and still and refused to grow and just waited. I longed to share with Pat my enthusiasm and love for my home. Which was foolish and wrong-headed. My home was Arthur’s and mine. It could never belong to Pat in the way it belonged to us. Pat did not want to see it as I saw it. But I ignored all that.

He was in the library day after day and night after night, breathing his own stale cigarette smoke, his nose buried in those old books of last century that had belonged to Arthur’s father. He did no drawing. He never painted. He never spoke about art or his ambition to make it. I knew it was still with him. Down there simmering quietly in the stones of his being, and that he was in there with it, the door firmly closed. He never once came out into the garden and asked me what I was doing, or stood and looked in wonder at the day. He showed no interest in anything except Arthur’s father’s old books. He ate, he made love, he slept. And he read. And when Barnaby asked him if he would like to go into town he went with him, and drank and played up, I suppose.

I had begun to feel that I was being used. I resisted this feeling and hated it. But it persisted and there grew in me an unexpressed fury that I needed to do something about. I needed to find for myself a patch of the clear air in which Pat sailed. But I couldn’t. My life was not like his. My life would never be like his. I refused to see it. I would not accept these things. I mistook my defiance, my obstinacy, for intelligence and determination. Why must I be responsible for everything and he responsible for nothing? We never mentioned Edith.

When I went into the library Pat did not look up from his book to see who had come into the room but went on reading, his lips quivering, murmuring his approval. I thought of a dog following a scent through the bush, going this way then that, turning back on itself, then darting forward again, deaf to the whistles and shouts of its master. I stood watching him a while and was about to leave when I decided instead to sit on the sofa across from him and see how long it would be before he acknowledged my presence.

I sat down and folded my arms and watched him. I may as well have waited for the moon to speak to me. His silence and the way he had of turning the pages of his book began to infuriate me. As he drew near the end of a page his right hand slowly rose to his mouth, as if it were acting independently of his conscious mind, and touched the tips of forefinger and thumb to his tongue, which emerged pinkly from between his lips (the pronounced veins on the backs of his hands always reminded me of his penis). Then, with an equally mechanical deliberation, his tongue withdrew and his hand descended slowly to the book, where forefinger and thumb gripped the top corner of the new page and rubbed it between them. It was not necessary to do this. The pages of the explorers’ journals had been cut by Arthur’s father and the blunt paper knife had given their edges a deckled effect, which made it easy to know you were turning only one page at a time.

I wanted to scream at him to stop. I wanted to force him to look up and speak to me, to ask me to share my thoughts with him. I laughed aloud with haughty derision, but he still did not react. Why was he torturing me? Fuelling my fury, I imagined him to be telling me that I should be in the kitchen preparing
his next meal, or in the garden growing the vegetables he loved to eat, or washing his filthy smelly clothes. In the end I could stand his silence and his cruelty no longer and I shouted at him the one question neither of us ever mentioned, but which lay like a cold stone in my heart every day: ‘Have you heard from Edith?’