Autumn Laing (42 page)

I looked for Stony but had forgotten it wasn’t one of Stony’s days. And for the first time I knew myself to be alone and vulnerable and helpless here, and I asked myself if I really had found my true home at Old Farm or had I been beguiled by a false turn in life and arrived at the wrong place? Had I really been waiting all these years for Pat? When was the moment of my error? Or was my error to believe in Pat? Was that it? Was it for the exercise of my gift I was being punished? And I did believe in him. I still believed Pat would make great art one day. My belief was a stubborn unreasoned thing that sat in me blind and dumb and refused to negotiate its position, a toad that buries itself in the clay and waits for rain, and when the first drops of rain strike the dry ground it shifts and opens its eyes and gives voice; at last emerging into the air and standing proudly for everyone to admire, the beautiful manly prince. All foolishness was mine that day.

I sat in the kitchen looking out at the garden for hours, unable to find the conviction to set my mind or my hands to any of the tasks that waited for me. I did no washing, but left it sitting in its smelly pile in the laundry basket; I ordered nothing from the butcher or the baker or the grocer; I did not bother to brush my hair or put on my makeup or cut fresh flowers for the library and the kitchen. It was as if the hitherto benign spirit of my home had withdrawn from me. I knew, as we know in dreams, that I would never find my way back to my innocent days here with Arthur. The silence sang in my ears and nothing moved. The sun stood still in the sky and no wind touched the leaves or set the ripening summer grasses
to weaving their familiar patterns. I talked to myself and went again and again into Pat’s room and stood in the doorway and looked helplessly at his rumpled bed, his clothes lying about on the floor, the books he had borrowed open face down, their pages turned under, carelessly discarded, cigarette butts stuffed into a tumbler, and I searched in my heart for the true reason for my despair. I could smell him. I was sure I was never going to see him again. I longed to be making love with him. Just the two of us lost to the world and our passion. And I was sure that would never happen again.

How long had he been with us? Six months, was it? Eight months? Forever? The day dragged on, empty, lonely, waiting helplessly, minute on minute, hour on hour. When I looked at the clock in the kitchen again I saw it was only five to ten in the morning. It felt like three in the afternoon.

Pat did not come back that night either. There was no dinner ready for Arthur when he got home from the office. I was sitting at the kitchen table smoking the last of a packet of cigarettes and halfway through my second bottle of claret. He came in and stood looking at me. I was exhausted and drunk and had decided to tell him everything. To throw myself on his mercy, was how I thought of it.

Without any sign of anxiety in his voice, he said, indeed with an edge of sarcasm, ‘You’re looking a bit peaky. Is everything all right?’

I was stung and I laughed and my resolve to confess my sins vanished. It was not I who was the sinner.

I said, ‘God, I wish Freddy would come and see me.’

‘Why don’t you call him, darling?’

I could not accuse Arthur of cruelty. I could do nothing. I put my head on the table and howled. He did not come near me or touch me or seek to comfort me but left me to suffer on my own. I was sure my good world had ended and only the bad world would now have me.

At around eleven the following morning I was still in my nightgown, lying on my bed, when I heard the screen door out the back bang shut and the sound of footsteps crossing the boards of the kitchen. I jumped up and went to the door of my room as Pat came along the passage.

He said, ‘So how’s it going here, then?’ He glanced into the bedroom and brushed past me and went on to his own room. I followed him.

I said, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

He dragged his bag out from under the bed and opened it and began putting his things in it.

‘So you’re leaving me?’ I said.

He stopped and turned to look at me. ‘No, Autumn. I am not leaving you. You are staying here with Arthur. Remember? Because this is your home and you will never leave it or your husband to start a new life with me.’

I went up to him and took his arm. ‘Can’t we talk? Please, Pat?’

‘Have you told him?’ he waited. ‘No. I thought not. Okay. I’m going up to Sofia Station with Barnaby. I might come back here afterwards and I might not. It’s up to you. If you want to change your mind, we can front Arthur tonight and get it over with. We can do it together. It’s the only honest thing to do. This must be killing him. The choice is yours.’ He looked me up and down, as if he was wondering how much more trouble
I was worth. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t suit you. You were already skinny enough.’

‘I haven’t slept,’ I said. I began to cry. He went on putting his things into his bag and took no notice of me.

I never did put that weight back on.

After Pat had gone I telephoned Barnaby and told him I was coming to Sofia Station with them. He did not sound surprised. ‘You’ve always said I should.’

He laughed. ‘True, Autumn. Does Arthur know yet?’

Arthur came home from the office later than usual. The lemon chicken I had prepared was spoiled. I was wondering what he would do for his meals while I was away and had been trying to think of someone who could come and cook for him. It occurred to me that if he told his mother he was alone she would come here or he would go to her. The thought of either solution disgusted me. I served the dried-out chicken and we sat across from each other as usual in the kitchen. I said, ‘I’m going to Sofia Station with Barnaby for a visit. He’s always wanted me to.’

Arthur stopped eating. ‘What about the show? Who’s going to manage that?’

‘Get Anne Collins to curate it,’ I said. ‘Curating is what she’s good at.’ I looked up at him. He looked into my eyes and I felt sick with guilt. I was astonished at my ability to dissemble at such a depth. ‘You know Anne. She’ll be delighted to be put in charge.’

Arthur didn’t say, What about the others? They are relying on us. And he didn’t say, What about me? Who’s going to look after me while you’re gadding about in Queensland with Barnaby and Pat Donlon? He let it pass. He refused to go
the way of the grand domestic row. Would it have made any difference to us if he had not avoided a confrontation? Arthur had always laboured quietly at maintaining the status quo with friends and with his family, no matter what. If Arthur had been a sheriff in the wild west he would never have drawn his gun. Did Arthur even
have
a gun to draw? Was that why he was so perfect at keeping the peace? Was he afraid he would not be able to stand up to a fight? Had he ever had a fight in his entire life? He was silent until we had finished our meal and were standing at the sink doing the washing-up together, me washing and he drying, our usual arrangement. This had often been the best moment in our day, the moment when we shared unconsidered thoughts, when we looked out the window together and admired how well his oak tree was growing, or shared our enthusiasm for our plans, or gossiped about our ideas and the friends we kept close to us. It was the moment in our day when he and I came together and were best friends and companions, undistracted by the presence of other people or by the pressures of our affairs.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

I was startled. It was a gesture of peace. I understood that. I stopped scrubbing the pan in which I had sautéed the chicken breasts. But I did not turn to him and acknowledge his request for a reconciliation. I stood there looking steadfastly out the window at my own reflection in the dark garden, and I waited for him to speak.

He said, ‘Please don’t go to Queensland with them.’

I resumed scrubbing at the base of the pan.

His hand lingered on my shoulder a moment, then he took it away.

‘Why not?’ I asked, bent vigorously to my task, my shoulder turned against him.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

‘Why not?’ I asked again.

‘Isn’t it enough that I don’t want you to go, but want you here with me?’

I stopped scrubbing and straightened. I pushed my hair back off my face with my forearm and turned to him. ‘You have always denied me the important things in life. And your reason has always been a selfish reason. You think only of yourself. What you want and what you don’t want are all that matter to you.’ I went back to the pan, which was by now very shiny. ‘I’m going. You can’t stop me.’

I had first accused him of denying me the important things in life on that terrible night when we returned from Ocean Grove. It was a claim I felt in my heart to be just, but I knew I would have great difficulty demonstrating the justice of it to a fair-minded jury of twelve honest citizens.

But Arthur did not ask me to justify my claim. He said quietly, ‘No, I can’t stop you. You had better let me have that pan before you wear it through.’

There are certain moments in our lives when chance and mischance conspire either to elevate us to a new state of being, or beat us down and leave us without hope of achieving our heart’s desire. Such unplanned and arbitrary moments come upon us with the force of revelation and seem to us to be the unfolding and disclosure of our destiny. We look back on them
for the remainder of our days and say, That is when it happened. Such moments mark the boundary, the point of departure, the demarcation of our before and after. The bend in the river. Such was our visit to Sofia Station with Barnaby. I have often asked myself whether, if I could have foreseen the outcome of that visit, I would have persisted in my determination to go with them. Or would I have attempted to thwart the unfolding of my fate and looked for some other way forward? I never know which of my two answers to this question is the right one.

The pain in my arm woke me half an hour ago. I was lying on my cast, pushing it into my upper arm. It is almost dark. The sky beyond the garden is white and green against the larger evening, the trees in perfect silhouette. I suppose I have been snoring and am dry in the throat, but there is no water left in my jug. My exercise book has fallen to the floor. My pen is caught in the folds of the blanket but I can’t be bothered getting at it.

I call out to Adeli. My voice is hoarse and weak. The house is still and quiet and my call is absorbed and silenced. I had another nightmare. I do not wish to write about my pain and my nightmares and the thousand other afflictions of old age. I endure them. There is more dignity in endurance than in complaint. The demoralising effect of the nightmare will wear off. It will fade. I touch my face with my fingers. My glasses are still on my nose. Some things don’t change while we sleep. There is a capriciousness in it. I call to Adeli again and hear her cough as she comes along the passage in her stocking feet.
She has been outside in the garden. Does she meet someone there? Does she have a friend? Do they make love among the rhododendrons? Or on the lawn, naked together in the moon shadows of Arthur’s oak tree?

I am low tonight. Mean-spirited. Drained by remembering. Empty. At this moment I can’t believe my energies will ever revive sufficiently for me to write the account of our visit to Sofia Station. My mind speaks to me. It says, Let it end when it will. I reply defiantly, I will end it when I am ready. But where is my conviction? I listen to the voice of my mind and I long to give in to the slide into perfect torpor; the offer of death my mother called to share with me, it surfaces and whispers to me, Let go, Autumn.

I shout Adeli’s name and she bursts into the room and switches on the light.

‘Where have you been?’ I scream at her. ‘You’re never here when I want you. You’ll get nothing from me! My jug’s empty.’ I reach out and knock the glass jug from my bedside table to the floor. ‘I could die of thirst for all you care. Give me my exercise book!’

Adeli makes no comment but picks up the jug and helps me to sit up. Her hands are warm and her touch is tender as she holds me forward while she (the plump one) plumps the pillows at my back. When she has gone to fetch my water I open the exercise book at a new page and adjust my glasses on my hard white nose and I begin to fight my way forward into memory, making myself believe the energy will come for the struggle so long as I do not give in … If I remember well, it is Dante’s great insight that illuminates my endeavour. After his return from paradise he says,
I saw things which he
that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it
. But he follows it. He presses forward and does not give up. Dante knows that to succeed in his noble endeavour to recapture his vision of paradise he must first survive failure, and that the key to surviving failure is persistence enlivened by inspiration. Of course, Dante begins his journey at the portals of hell, and through long endeavour climbs slowly upward until he at last reaches the portals of paradise, but not without help. Despite my great regard for Dante as a poet of his time, it seems to me (lying here in pain, helpless and dependent upon a woman I do not love) that he got it back to front, and that the rest of us make the journey in the other direction, descending from the gates of paradise in our childhood years to the gates of hell in our final days.

But poets are an inspiration to us (for Barnaby they were his consolation), and isn’t inspiration the source of our energy? Suddenly we are energised, where before was boredom and lassitude. So while I disagree with the direction of his poetic journey, Dante’s solution to his problem will be mine all the same and I shall persist as he persisted. Everything is shared. The world is one. And it is my birthday. Sofia Station took me from the gates of paradise to the gates of hell in less than two short weeks. But what is time except the measure of experience? There are those in whom experience settles in the heart as a layer of dust, and those in whom it takes fire. Dante appealed to Apollo to fire his imagination for his last labour (his
ultimo lavoro
). In what is surely the most perfect invocation to inspiration in the poetic world, Dante quietly pleads, ‘Come into my breast and breathe there.’