Autumn Laing (7 page)

Father Brennan had given him them. ‘The man who has not read the sagas remains uneducated in the literatures of his race.’ Which was the way Dan Brennan spoke. Grandly. As if ordinary life itself were a heroic epic, and there was something vast and nostalgic and lost to the world that would never be recovered. A kind of melancholy dream, it was, for Father Dan Brennan, that he might have shared with the poets themselves,
but never claimed to, out of modesty, a light of secret pleasure in his green eyes, some inner conviction of a greater humanity in it all than the inbred resolutions of the Vatican’s official bleating. The only priest Pat’s mother had ever had any time for. It’s something, she used to say, to thank religion for, an educated priest. Pat still had the volume. If only there were a way of instant reading, holding a book tightly in your hands and closing your eyes and thinking yourself into it. But enough of this! He had to get on. Right at this minute he could have downed a cold beer. He dried his face and hands on the tea towel and tossed it onto the bench and called, ‘Are you there, darling?’ He picked up the letter and the ten-shilling note and walked down the dark passage and out into the wonderful light of the back room.

‘I’ve got a plan,’ he announced. Edith was at her easel but she wasn’t working. Standing there troubling herself about something, pale and thoughtful in her white blouse and blue skirt, the light soft where she stood, half her lovely features cast in shadow. So neat and careful in her manner of work there was not a dab of paint anywhere to be seen on her clothes, not even on the wrists of her blouse. He felt himself smiling. His admiration for her was enormous, a rich pleasure and gratification in seeing her standing there that he could not talk about, not even to himself. He wasn’t a talker. Or measure. Well, it was bigger than anything he could think of. His gratitude, wasn’t it? His envy of himself almost. That this young woman should have chosen to love him. But she had. In another’s life, a life that could never have been his own whichever way you looked at it, he would have liked to share with her something of the quality of the love she’d shared with her dead grandfather,
the conservative old painter from Scotland. To have known something of that quiet richness between the two of them. He didn’t have it. A calmness in it that was not in himself. There was a need for quietness, too, wasn’t there? A paradox for him, this desire for quietness of the soul.

His existence was a torment of contradictions. A torrent of ambition and disgust. Tides in him that swirled and drove against each other. Powerful undertows that dragged him out into the deeps and sucked him down to solitary places where there was no bottom to his despair and his longing. The dance force in him was never still. Reeling and swaying to the speeding minutes of his days. It was all beautiful and terrible. He wanted to touch his lips to the soft bloom of her cheek and close his eyes and be gently with her. To still the agitation in his brain. He loved her. He supposed it was love. How are we to know? ‘Vows are nothing,’ he said to her the night of their marriage as they lay in each other’s arms. He had still been feeling irritated by having to mouth those stupid matrimonial promises. The glum sweating oaf in the registry office nodding his big ugly head as if he thought he was getting the better of the two of them. ‘It is how we feel, not what we vow,’ he said to Edith as they lay in bed naked together that warm summer night, their new home a single room above a tobacconist’s shop in Swanston Street.

She had turned to him and touched his cheek with her fingers. ‘Feelings change, my darling. It is our vows that are forever.’

In what Edith said there was a contradictory view to his own and his mother’s view, and it unsettled him to hear it from her. He was intending to keep quiet and let it pass. Then
suddenly he was saying, with more heat and impatience than he’d intended, ‘Vows are just an expression of the principles of the church and the state.’ His mother would not have wanted him to let such a view go unchallenged. ‘It’s them getting us to conform to their stupid bloody rules. It’s our feelings that are us. We’ll make our own rules.’ He lay beside her frowning into the silence until Edith leaned over and kissed him and put her hand on him and murmured in his ear, ‘I want you again.’

And when the high moment of their passion was reached she cried out with a kind of despair in her voice, the breath catching in her throat, ‘I love you, Pat! I love you!’ Why was love so painful?

He stood in front of her now holding out the blood-smeared envelope. ‘A letter from your mother,’ he said. ‘Old Gerner gave me ten shillings for doing the horse.’ He waved the note at her then folded it and tucked it into the back pocket of his trousers. There was a button on that pocket, which he fastened. Edith reached and took the letter from him. He would have kissed her but she drew back from him. ‘You’ve got something on your forehead,’ she said, making a face.

He put his hand up to his forehead. ‘It’s only blood,’ he said, scratching at the dried scab of it. ‘I thought I’d got it all.’ He stood looking at her picture, his head on one side. ‘It’s very good. Do you know that?’ He put this to her with a certain seriousness, and not in his usual bantering way. ‘Your grandpa would have been proud of you.’

She thanked him. His approval was a joy she had not been expecting at this moment, and she saw her picture with a sudden new confidence, as he might be seeing it, through the window of his eyes. And for that brief glimpse her doubts were
banished and she too thought her work accomplished. She was grateful. ‘Maybe I’m getting somewhere at last. Thank you,’ she said again. ‘It’s nothing like anything you’d do.’

He shrugged and turned away, and walked over to his work table.

She wished she had let him kiss her, but she was not yet sure that she had forgiven him for the horse. Seeing that axe rising and falling she had felt a loss within herself, something more intimate than the loss of a farm animal. A portent. It was him, wasn’t it? She did not know what it was, and was not able to attend to it. But it wasn’t just the brutal death of the old brood mare. There was always brutality in the butchering of the animals. Something deeper had been signified, something had been touched for which she had no name. Wounded, she might have said. She knew Pat’s generous mood was partly due to the ten shillings; but it was lovely all the same, whatever its cause, when he was feeling like this,
meaning
his compliments instead of giving them an edge of derision. And was he shocked himself by the killing of the old beast? Or had he dismissed it from his thoughts already? She didn’t know him well enough to be sure. She thought of asking him but decided not to. He was standing there looking down at his work, the sun falling across his features, across his work table. She knew not everyone thought him as beautiful as she did.

She took the two one-pound notes from her mother’s letter and put them in the pocket of her skirt. She turned so that the light from the window fell on the letter—the felled horse before her, falling … One day she would know what it was.
My very Dearest Girl, Our great news here is that the Reverend Golder Burns (how auspiciously named he is for your father!) has accepted
a call to Scots. At last Melbourne is to have its own minister again after these years of uncertainty …
Her mother’s austerely beautiful hand, every word inscribed as if the perfection of the script would endow it with lasting significance, the familiar broad and narrow strokes, the newness of the nib she had fitted to the holder before beginning. Keeping unused in its box on her desk the expensive fountain pen her husband had presented her with. The stately ritual it was for her mother, the writing of letters to loved ones, the attention, the care, the pleasure, the skill and the thought that went into it. She wrote letters to the members of her family the way her own grandmother had written them, responsible to her highest sense of the task, to her finest sense of her relations with the person she was writing to. Living at home Edith had taken such refinements for granted and had not appreciated how precious they were until she saw that in the life of Pat’s home there had never been anything of that sort. Her mother’s hand was as familiar to Edith as her own embroidered eiderdown on her childhood bed in the Brighton house, a warm and loving home. Reading her mother’s letter, Edith could smell her old home. She could smell her mother.

He stood at his work table looking at his picture. ‘Horse’s blood,’ he said aloud, talking to himself without knowing it. He was gripping the edges of the table with his outspread hands, leaning forward and looking down onto his picture. He might have been a general examining a map of the terrain over which his forces were to engage with those of the enemy. Puzzling after a strategy that would give him the advantage. How to deploy his strengths so that their disposition would leave no opportunity for the enemy to mount a successful defence.
Outrage, that would be their response when he showed this painting. Boot polish and cardboard. His materials alone would provoke them. They would conclude that his intention was to insult them and their standards. It would make them squeal and tremble like little pigs. They would not know which way to turn. They would see his work as an affront to the grand dignity of their sacred calling to teach their students how to draw after the manner of Leonardo. Not for art’s sake, of course, but for the coveted travelling scholarship. What else? A recommendation to Sir Malcolm for the annual travelling scholarship. A privilege bestowed upon the Gallery School’s anointed. A ticket to freedom from Australian provincialism for which every young artist and writer of Pat’s acquaintance would be happy to pawn his soul. For a year or two, at any rate. He was smiling. He would title his picture
Homage à Rimbaud
. Partly to rub it in, but also because that’s what this piece of work really was, a homage to the boy poet’s visionary response to life. That’s what everything was that he did these days. They would be affronted by the sight of it. His offensive against their conformity. The banality of their souls. His repudiation of them and their academy of ideas. They would snort and ask each other, Who the devil does he think he is, giving his bloody nonsense a French title? He lifted the painting from the table and set it with its face to the wall. An instinct in him revolted against submitting himself to their approval. He would find another way. His own way. And now he had a plan. To become one of their anointed, you had first to be on your knees to them. Well, he would never go to his knees for anyone. It would be they on their knees before he was done with them.

He picked up the roll of butcher’s paper and undid the string. He laid the sheets flat on the table, their cheesy pallor and faint odour of raw meat reminding him of his mother’s kitchen when she unpacked the shopping and he looked to see what she’d got for their dinner. He stood smoothing the sheets with the palms of his hands, feeling the slight undulations of the table top through them, the way a blind man might know his own work table by the intimacy of touch. Imagining himself to be the blind seer. That’s what he was. Being the
voyant
of Rimbaud’s youthful intoxications. Alone. Accountable to no one. Inside the fortress of himself. Where he would not be called upon to make common sense of his work. He was remembering riding down the Hume Highway on his bicycle when he was nineteen. Alone with the wind and the hum of his tyres. Sleeping by the roadside at night. It seemed to him now that he had ridden his bicycle the thousand miles to Sydney and back in a dream. His eyes closed. Seeing some other world. A beautiful solitary journey, it had been. And wasn’t he that same man today? To be alone dreaming his dreams. He had forgotten Edith.

He was drawing quickly on the sheets of butcher’s paper. Freely wielding the narrow brush. He loaded the brush from the bowl of rich black ink, carelessly flicking spots and drips of ink about the place. Flicking some of it on purpose. On himself. To join the spots of blood. Scattering his seed. A warrior. Perhaps it was naked figures he was drawing. Something like that. It was too early to know what he was doing. He didn’t want to know. Wild sweeping lines of disrupted ink that had begun to suggest the outlines of human forms. Limbs and torsos confusingly disproportionate and summary. Perhaps tussling and in some kind of movement against each other. He
couldn’t draw for nuts. He worked quickly, without hesitation. He could feel it in his balls. The drawing. Tight and hard and thick with intention. An aggression in him. Without stepping back to consider what he did. Without correcting his line. On the battleground of his own choosing. Making it.

As he covered each sheet he slid it off the table to the floor and started on the next, not bothering about smearing the wet image of the discarded sheet. Did he think he could force a result? Did he imagine he could coerce the ink and the paper into revealing true art to his eye without troubling himself to search for some sort of order in what he did? Without taking care? Without paying his dues to the craft, like everyone else had to? Yes, he did. He was convinced of it. Fuck them and their painstaking fucking everlasting fucking drawing classes. Once that was established in your eye you would never rid yourself of it. You would belong to them and to their tradition for the rest of your days. Like the copperplate trap, he wasn’t falling into this one either. Trying to be like Leonardo! Bloody fools.

Edith gave an excited yelp and held up her mother’s letter. ‘Guess what? Hilary Trafford at the
Argus
has invited me to submit some of my illustrations to her.’ She was looking at Pat working at his table, his figure moving against the light from the north-facing window. A slim man, his shoulders almost as narrow as a woman’s, and not tall, but perfectly made, his aura illuminated
contre jour
. How well Mr Sickert would have rendered him. She stepped across to him and shook the letter at him. ‘Did you hear what I said, darling? Money!’ Her voice had taken on something of the command of her mother’s voice whenever her mother wished not only to be heard but to be
listened to by the men of her household. ‘Ten shillings for every illustration she takes. We’ll have some money of our own.’