Autumn Laing (41 page)

The sound of my voice was very loud in the quiet room.

He started and looked up from his book and glared at me.

For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked down at his book and closed it on his finger. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have.’ He was very calm and might have been waiting for me to ask him just this question—and even been puzzled as to why I had not asked it of him long before this. His calm made me feel that I was in the wrong and had overreacted clumsily.

I waited until he looked at me again. ‘So did you get a letter? Did it come here?’

He regarded me with a peculiar expression, and might have been seeing me for the first time and wondering if I was worth bothering with. He said, ‘No. We met in the city.’

I was chilled by the tone of his voice, by his detachment, the immense distance that lay between us. Were we really lovers, this man and I? Did I know every part of his body in the most intimate ways possible? Had we given ourselves to each other and shared our most intimate delights freely and with joy? It seemed impossible that we had. My throat was dry and when I spoke there was a catch in my voice. ‘And what does she say?’ I said. I was furious with him for not telling me before this and was determined to force an apology from him. Why did I feel as if it was me who was in the wrong? ‘So, are you going back to her? Is she coming back to you? Are her
brothers bringing her here to pick you up—or to thrash you again? What is it to be, Pat?’

He said quietly, ‘Fuck you, Autumn.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And fuck you too.’ I was not in perfect control of my emotions as he was. I hated him. I wanted him to make love to me. To lose himself in a wild torment of passion for me. I was afraid he had decided that I was too old for him.

His expression did not change. ‘I had a meeting with her in town. It was in a cafe in one of the arcades. I forget which one. Her dad was with her. Her brother Phillip waited outside the cafe and watched us.’ He laughed softly to himself. ‘What did they think I was going to do to her? They wanted to offer me something. They were afraid I was going to have them charged with assault. I told them not to worry about it. Her father wouldn’t let me see her on my own. I could see how painful it was for her to be sitting there and not be able to say anything real to me.’ He was silent a while, still looking at me in that odd way. ‘She’s not coming back,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost her.’

‘When was this meeting?’ I asked. I needed to know how long he had been keeping it to himself.

‘Last week.’ He looked down at the closed book and rubbed its binding with his free hand. Then he looked up at me.

I saw there were tears in his eyes and I suddenly realised how much he was suffering. How greatly he missed her. It occurred to me only then that burying himself in the books had been his way of smothering his pain. His way of keeping from his thoughts the fact that he and Edith were done for. That their lives together were finished. Was he regretting becoming my lover? I watched him sitting there like a lost boy, rubbing the
back of the book. He looked very alone. I longed to take him in my arms and comfort him.

After a silence that felt as if it was never going to end, he looked up and said, ‘She’s going to divorce me.’

I was unable to say anything, but a little flame of joy leapt in my heart.

‘I’ll admit I’m the guilty one,’ he said. ‘I won’t give them any problems. They don’t trust me. They don’t believe I’m going to make it easy on them. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t trust me either if I were them.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘You and me, eh!’

‘What about us?’ My voice was small and afraid.

‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it? You and Arthur. Me and Edith. Then you and me. We’re a pair.’

‘A pair?’

He set the book aside on the sofa and got up and came over to sit beside me.

I did not know what to expect from him.

He looked into my face, his gaze going over me, giving me a thorough looking over, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘You know that? I don’t know who you are.’ His gaze focused on my eyes and he gripped my chin so that I flinched. ‘Meeting you has changed my life. Completely. I knew Edith.’

I reached out and held his wrist. He was squeezing my chin painfully.

‘Is this love that we have? You and me? Or what is it?’ He laughed again, an unpleasant laugh. ‘That’s not a question.’ He took his hand away and lay back on the sofa beside me, his hip pressing into mine. ‘I don’t know what we are, you and me. But we’re two of a kind. We’re the destroyers, aren’t we? But
are we also the creators?’ he was silent for a little while. Then he said ‘I miss her. I miss the life Edith and I had together. The life we promised each other. The life we are not going to have now. Our struggle. Our plan for the future. Just the two of us against the world. I miss all of that. And I miss her. She understood me. And I hate not being able to talk about her. I’ve wept for it and for her lost trust. For that more than for anything. Edith trusted me. And for the sound of her voice when she read to me in French. And I’ve wept for my lost child. I’ve wept for what I have done to her. The pain I have given her, which she did nothing to deserve.’ He sat up abruptly, as if he had remembered something, and searched in his pocket for his cigarettes. He offered me one then lit both cigarettes from the same match. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame you.’

There was a dread in me that he was working his way around to telling me he and I were finished. That it was over. That he would be leaving Old Farm. Tomorrow, or the next day. Or maybe today. I imagined him asking if he could take Leichhardt with him. I was too afraid to say anything.

He rested back against the cushions beside me, smoking in silence for a long time, gazing at the bookshelves on the wall opposite. He gently took my cigarette from me and he kissed me on the mouth. His kiss was not bruising and searching as our kisses often were, but was gentle, almost an apology.

We had never made love in this way before. It was as if we approached intimacy as children might have, or strangers, feeling our way with caution, interested, caring, finding each other a little at a time, curious, looking for something in the other we had not yet found. Exploring our mysterious suffering even more than our passion. He did not cover my mouth at
the high moment but joined his voice with mine, a terrible drawn-out sob from his throat that made my heart contract. I had not known how great his suffering was, his remorse for what he had done to Edith. He had expressed his pain in me. He had expressed it inside me. I felt the strange responsibility of it and I held him to me as a mother would hold a forsaken son to her breast. He was right. He and I were of a kind. No one would pity us or have any sympathy or understanding for what we had done. I knew, suddenly, that I could not see the end of us and that I did not know what that end would be or who would be caught up in the tragedy of our love before it was over. I held him tightly to me and he lay in my arms and wept.

The sound of the Pontiac coming down the drive and the slam of its door in the coach house entered my dream and woke me.

When I made to get up and gather my clothes Pat held me to him. I struggled to my feet. He said, ‘We’ve got to tell him. Or we’ll have nowhere to go with this.’

I wrenched myself away from him and collected my scattered things. ‘For God’s sake, pull your trousers up, Pat. He’ll be in for his whisky in two seconds.’ I pulled my dress down over my head and ran my fingers through my hair. Pat’s cheek was red where I had been lying against him. I grabbed his arm and dragged him off the sofa. ‘Get up! Get up!’ My heart was pounding.

He got to his feet and buttoned his fly. ‘We should live together,’ he said. ‘You can get a divorce too. We’ll find somewhere of our own. We can’t just keep going as we are here.’

I was terrified Arthur was about to walk in on us and heard myself say, ‘That will never be possible! Never! Do you hear me? I shall never leave Arthur. This is my home. Please, tuck your shirt in!’ I was suddenly fully ten years older than him and I was not going to put up with any of his nonsense. I might have been his headmistress at that moment.

Arthur came in. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘All huddled in here on a magical day like this?’

He came straight up to me and kissed me. ‘I’ve got some good news. And no rattle in the Ponty.’ He went over to the cabinet and poured himself a whisky. ‘She’s decided to behave herself. Touch wood.’ He turned and looked at us. ‘You won’t have one?’

Neither Pat nor I drank whisky.

I was in agony waiting for Pat to tell Arthur everything. I almost heard him saying the words. Pat lit a cigarette as Arthur came over and sat on the sofa across from him.

‘What’s your news then?’ Pat said. ‘Apart from the no rattle.’

Arthur made space among the books on the table for his glass.

I was incapable of sitting down. I stood to one side, my body trembling, waiting for my life at Old Farm with Arthur to fall apart.

Arthur looked at me and smiled. ‘You okay? They’ve agreed to let us have the gallery for six weeks. How’s that?’

I said in a hollow voice, ‘That’s wonderful.’

Arthur looked into his glass and picked a hair or a scrap of something from the top of his whisky then took a sip. ‘The
terms are very reasonable. The only catch is we’ll need to have the show in before March, which gives us less than six weeks at the outside to get everything organised. It’s going to be pretty tight. Most of the pieces will need framing, and there’s the lead times on advertising. Do you think you’ll manage it? Anne will help you and I’ll do what I can.’ He looked across at Pat. ‘Of course you can put in whatever you like, Pat. We’d love you to have something in the show.’

Pat examined the end of his cigarette. ‘I might have a glass of that after all, if you don’t mind.’

Arthur said, ‘Please, Pat. Do help yourself.’

Pat got up off the sofa and went over to the cabinet and half filled a glass with whisky. He turned around. ‘I won’t be putting anything in your group show, Arthur.’ He stood looking across at Arthur. He raised his glass to me and drained the whisky then turned and set the glass back on the cabinet and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I noticed he had missed a button on his fly. It gaped slightly with the shocked expression of a fish’s mouth. ‘Good luck with it,’ he said. He did not look at me again but walked out of the library and closed the door.

Pat didn’t join us for dinner. I went to his room but he was not there. Arthur was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. He said, ‘If you’re looking for Pat, he said he was going to walk to the station and catch a train into the city.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

Arthur turned his paper inside out and reached for his glass. ‘What’s for dinner?’

I wondered for a brief moment of complete insanity if Arthur was really worth it. Was I making a terrible mistake by clinging to him and the security he offered me? Was I forfeiting my last chance for a life of real engagement with a passionate man who loved me and with whom I would know the dangers and follies of the creative life? Was I merely hanging on to safety and comfort here with Arthur, unable to let go of the commonplace illusion of security, like any other suburban housewife? Were Arthur and I—I asked myself as I stood there looking at him reading his newspaper and drinking his whisky, waiting for me to serve him his dinner—were we cowering with each other in the shelter of our own timidity and weakness? I walked out of the kitchen and went down to the river, leaving Arthur to serve himself his dinner. I didn’t return until late.

He had done the washing-up and was in bed reading. He greeted me as if nothing out of the ordinary had passed between us. I understood why intimates sometimes murder each other.

I said, ‘Did he come home yet?’

‘Hmm?’ Arthur was not to be distracted. ‘Who, darling?’

How much did he know? How little did he care? How sure was he I would stick with him? There was no way for me to discover the answers to any of my questions without confessing everything to him. Should I do that? Should I just tell him and be done with it? I hated him for so smugly seeming to have achieved the upper hand without doing anything, while all my lies and scheming and clever stratagems had left me alone and vulnerable and angry and without the certainty of anything.

I didn’t sleep at all that night but lay awake waiting for the sound of Pat returning. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt as if Pat had left me with an ultimatum. Was it even too late to decide to leave Arthur? Arthur slept beside me without once stirring. When I went to Pat’s room in the morning after Arthur had gone to work Pat wasn’t there. I knew he hadn’t come home, but I looked in every room of the house all the same, pretending to a hope that I was mistaken and he had somehow returned without me noticing. I went back and looked in the library several times. I could
see
him in there reading, turning the pages of Arthur’s father’s books with that infuriating mannerism of his. But no matter how often I went in and no matter how hard I stared, the library remained empty. I felt taunted by his absence, the untidy scatter of books on the table where he had left them, the derisive tongues of torn newspaper sticking out from between the pages where he had marked them.

I walked down to the river and stood by the log and called his name. The sound of my voice made the river a desolate place.

As I was returning up the hill, the house and the garden had the air of an abandoned place. Abandoned long ago. When the plague came. Or when the war took everyone. When the unnameable disaster passed over the house with its biblical finality. The stillness was eerie. There were to be no explanations. God does not explain the horrors he casts on us. There are no reasons for our misery. There are no excuses. To complain is pointless. To ask for help is futile. To confess is to confess to the silence. I walked up the hill through the damp green grass and saw my home in flames. Rilke’s words ringing in my
head,
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone.