Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  She is pleased to see that the horse is still there. The green hill, where the horse stands, sweeps upward from the foot of the garden to form the soft curve of her near horizon, like the warm belly of the earth. She half closes her eyes, permitting this thought a little space. High above the paddock immature white clouds silently approach from the troubled sea across the cold blue of the sky, which, she notices suddenly, is exactly the white-blue of his eyes. Yes, white-blue. Like the eyes of his hero, the poet Rimbaud, whose verse he never tires of reciting. She hears it now, her own voice translating for him, I had caught a glimpse of conversion to good and to happiness. She gives a small, nervous laugh at the thought of him, at the thought of where he might have gone this morning. Some sense with him always of the terrible disasters that await us in life, his urgency, his mad desire to be bodily engaged with the future.

  The upward sweep of the green paddock is decorated with yellow oxalis flowers. It is a counterpane sewn with morning stars. Her mother’s handwork, for example. Finely embroidered silk thread. The Latin names of the flowers done in sylvan green around the border, so fine a magnifying glass is needed to see the individual stitches, and even then … There is nothing cruel or cynical in her mother’s life. All painful memories have been put down, like old family dogs. Quiet, calm, sensible. That is how it is at home, in Brighton and on the farm. Wherever her mother presides, there everything is as it should be. No daisies in the lawn. The past unpicked and restitched. The work goes on. Their saving routine. Church on Sundays, with Dr Aiken presiding at Flood Street, his thin nose and sad intelligent eyes. A good man in the claim of his grateful parishioners. His apologetic frown a perpetual reminder that there is some terrible problem to be resolved before we can all move confidently to a full enjoyment of our lives. Saint Paul advised the Philippians to Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice. But Dr Aiken hasn’t rejoiced. He has puzzled in the Lord. What he has missed is something vital, the key to happiness eluding him. His life has been without a companion. He has not seemed to wish for a woman by him. The manse a cold redbrick darkened by moaning cypresses, the shelves of his study closely inhabited by puzzling tracts to do with something he does yearn for, the Ultimate Truth and the Christian God—staples of his divine preoccupations. No touches of the floral, either in teacups or counterpanes, to lighten his days. And such a handsome man, his manner gracious, his hands fine and well shaped, noticeable when he bows his violin, and other features of nature’s approval gracing his gentle person. A match. But all for nothing, so it seems. His solitariness a puzzle to her mother. For the Presbyterian assembly does not bar its ministers from the sacrament of marriage. Even so …

  No, the floral counterpane is surely more exotic than that, Edith decides firmly and sets her cup in its saucer in the dulled stone of the sink, the sink’s crazed glaze the perfect hue of old bones, the fine lines possibly an antique script. Clink, the cup says sharply to its saucer and Edith looks down and steadies it, breathing a murmured apology. Once again she has been dragged back into memory and her old home and her mother. Her mother. The decorated hill is not a floral counterpane at all but is something Persian and is not of her mother’s world. A Persian embroidery. The work of silent hours and days when a woman in her solitude dreams of distant events that never were but might have been, and bends her head to her needle in the soft lamplight and smiles at the tiny golden flowers. Pretending that her dreams are memories.

  Standing at the window, her fingers still touching her mother’s lilac-patterned teacup, the smell of the wood stove in the air, something of hot iron and smokiness, Edith thinks: How peaceful it is here. How lovely. How at home I might so easily know myself to be in this little house with him, if only … The horse is a mare. It is an old brood mare, the points of its hips prominent, gut-hung, its spine bowed with the bearing of many foals, its brown coat dry and wintry. Equus caballus. Edith has known the companionship of horses since her childhood on her father’s farm. The old brown mare stands side on to the hill, her hollow flank towards Edith. She, the mare, looks as if she is expecting someone to come over the horizon; her ears pointed forward, the imagination of oats in her distended nostrils. Edith wonders where she has come from and what has prompted their frugal neighbour to offer her the generous pasturage of his paddock. The horse was there this morning, large and brown, turning its great head towards the house when Edith came out the back door to feed the hens and collect the eggs, a newcomer like themselves, curious, alert and a little apprehensive. After feeding the hens—there were no eggs—Edith fetched a thick slice of bread from the house. Gently coaxed, the mare approached the fence and lipped the offering from her hand. The calm innocence of the mare’s eye. It is a fact well known among horse people that the horse has the largest eyes of any land mammal. ‘Will you be lonely in Mr Gerner’s paddock with only the milker for company?’ At the touch of her voice the mare lowered her long lashes and bent her head. The horse is highly sensitive around the areas of its nose, its eyes and its ears. Edith stroked its silky nose. ‘Stallions once trembled before your beauty.’

  The Southern Ocean lies beyond the horizon that is formed by the swelling rise of Mr Gerner’s green paddock. The Great Southern Ocean, her grandfather, the painter Thomas Anderson, called it. Encircling the world. Its boundaries indeterminate. Taking her hand in his large knobbly one and leading her forefinger on a journey across the old atlas, Alexander Keith Johnston, F.R.G.S., 1857, on Mercator’s Projection. A great book all the way from the family home on the bank of the Nith between the lofty hills and fertile holms of Dumfries, the largest private house in the county. The book. Yes. Shelved there once upon a time in his own grandfather’s library, another Thomas Anderson in a line of them from the Border country, the book’s elephant folio sheets giving off a smell of the other world on the other side when he laid it open on his broad oak desk, as she stood close beside him in his studio in the house where her own mother had been born, a dwelling elegant and Victorian, on the fashionable foreshore of Brighton.

  To speak of the other side is to refer to death by another name. Even then she knew it. Her grandfather’s jacket smelling of Erinmore tobacco. The grip of his hand making the first joint of her finger bend like a hockey stick on the heavy paper as they made their imaginary journey together, crossing the ocean (whose breathing and sighing is with her in the kitchen at this moment), so firmly guided by him then; ‘We sail past the stormy tip of South America, then touch South Africa. A big tack between Crozet and Kerguelen islands. And here we are already!’ Leaning together, his moustache tickling her cheek now, ‘The bottom of Australia. I—think—I—can—just—see—us. Can you see us? Yes! There we are! See, the pair of us?’ His free arm around her, cuddling, just the two of them in the quiet of their own story, among the smell of old books and turpentine. She misses him. It is already four years since his housekeeper, Mrs Dress, found him lying on his back beside the long kitchen table, his feet together, a familiar old man clad in pyjamas and slippers, his glasses and his pipe and tobacco pouch neatly arranged beside him, his striped cottons freshly laundered. But, oddly, without his plaid dressing-gown. Perhaps he thought the ancient garment unfit for the occasion? ‘So there you are,’ Mrs Dress said, stepping around him, and made herself a cup of tea before telephoning his daughter. He had evidently felt the approach of the moment. A wavering light at the periphery of his vision, was it? A mild anxiety and tightening across his chest? We shall never know. And had prepared himself so as to cause the least shock and trouble to those whom he cared for and whom he was about to leave on this side.

  Edith wonders if she will always miss him. He had no time to say goodbye but was gone, suddenly, without a word. She had found her mother by the telephone, sitting on the big camphor wood chest in the hall, weeping. Will she always carry her loss as she goes on through her life, Edith wonders, becoming old herself one day, a grandmother, her grandfather a noble resident of her childhood memory, loved and missed? Will it always be li
ke that? Or do our dead eventually leave us? He is her inspiration for this life that she has chosen, and she needs his approval for her work. Art. Her mother’s father. But Edith does not call herself an artist. She is far too uncertain of herself for that; too deeply conditioned to the habit of womanly modesty to openly admit the secret ambition of her heart. He, her grandfather on her mother’s side—whenever sides were taken—had been either happily ignorant of or indifferent to the innovative schools and styles of his time. The great artistic debates and feuds had left him untouched. His palette throughout his life a range of golden browns with their own inner light, achieved with a knowledge of the classic craft. He had seen no reason to snub the tradition that had given him his splendid livelihood. He was not a visionary. He did not see it as his business to challenge the authority of his masters. His subjects were leisurely pastoral scenes, farm buildings, crops and roads leading somewhere or other, a girl sometimes with a straw hat and ribbon going somewhere or other, a workman in a field with a horse, the sound of birdsong and maybe a butterfly or two. His was the reassurance of a kindly nature for the drawing rooms of the well-to-do city folk and great country families who were his patrons. He might have been making sturdy chairs for the ease of their minds and their backs. A reliable craftsman, they were pleased to revere him and to acclaim his genius in the works he made for them. Occasional portraits, too, of children or their fathers (when honours were bestowed), commissioned by the wives, were competently produced when required. He was a Melbourne man. Solid, reliable, of good Scottish stock. Sydney did not know him. Although almost never hung these days, a work or two of his can still be found in the inventory of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

  He wore a dove-grey fedora with a wide black silk band and a grey three-piece suit with a plain bow tie. His moustache was large and brown and prickly. He looked like a painting of himself. A tonal head and shoulders of him, the brim of his fedora shading his eyes, hung in the parlour of the Brighton house, done by the controversial Max Manner—who did call himself an artist—and tendered in lieu of rent when Mr Manner brought his family home from France, stony broke and with nowhere to live, bolstered nevertheless by the assurance of his own genius. All that before the steady years of Manner’s prosperity and influence. Comfort and opulence in the grand house in Kew, where his two daughters, lissom Elise and chubby Simone, lived on in genteel poverty long after the great man himself had gone over to the other side. As the years went on without him the house grew seedy, green around the brows from leaking guttering and failed damp courses, the garden splendidly overgrown, the two devoted spinsters insisting on the grandeur of their father’s achievement to their last days together on this wonderful earth. Simone, the younger of them, played the role of maid to the elder’s haughty chatelaine; Elise receiving her visitors seated in the parlour, veiled in layers of pink and apricot chiffon, her lips bright red (a little askew), her purpled eyes challenging her visitor to exercise the fine manners and graces of an earlier time. Their father’s early poverty was never referred to.

  Each of the three large mirrors in the parlour was mounted on castors, concealed with tasselled strands like the feathered feet of Chinese hens, the mirrors’ shoulders draped suggestively with red or green brocades, their great wide eyes angled to reflect depths and elaborations of space and light. Manner’s works on the walls, or resting back on easels, were set amid the hues and tones of their own origins by his daughters. The great man’s reflected pictures, Edith recalled, had seemed to exist beyond her reach in a space of pure imagining, a world in which reversed reality held up for contemplation a mysterious order. As one entered the room, to glimpse in a mirror as if through a doorway, the mothlike figure of Elise fingering one of John Field’s elemental nocturnes at the keyboard of the great piano, the enormous black lid like the wing of Satan cloaked above her, was not to be in the presence of something real but something imaginary. It was to have no presence oneself, but to be the witness of another’s dream. As a child Edith had been struck with wonder by the achievement of this visual elaboration at the house in Kew; the endless play, not on words but on light and shade, scenes within scenes, corners and suggestions, tonal variations receding forever deeper, the centre and substance elusive, the eye drawn on in search of a point of rest. Dizzying. She had believed then that the Manner sisters were in possession of an arcane truth about the world and art that she would never come to possess herself. And in a way she still believed it. And in an even deeper way it was probably true.

  The authority of her childhood years remained with Edith, the lives of her grandfather, his friends and her parents and their friends binding her to a respect for their values which she could not easily desert in her own art. She was convinced she had been born into a worthy tradition. And like her family she believed, often against her youthful inclination to rebel, that she owed a debt to that inheritance and was honour bound to repay it. Society, Edith understood, would require from her something of worth in return for the advantages of her birth. Indeed, that something was owed she accepted as a founding principle of her caste.

  All that splendid illusion lying in the future for those two Manner girls when they were twelve and nine and Edith’s grandfather offered their father a place to camp while he got his finances together after their return from France. Hence the head and shoulders study, dutifully hung in the parlour of the Anderson family’s Melbourne home in Brighton, in case the great Mr Max Manner or his daughters ever returned for a visit. But they never did. ‘He obscured my eyes with that dark shadow of my hat brim,’ Edith’s grandfather complained. But Edith had always thought the picture the very likeness of him, imagining within the luminous shadow of his fedora’s brim the familiar light of innocent pleasure in his eyes. She had never known her grandfather sombre or preoccupied but on one occasion. She found him one summer evening in the garden at Brighton, sitting alone on the bench within the bower of the old apple tree. He was weeping. She did not ask him why he wept, but leaned her child’s weight against him and took his large hand in both her own, and waited there with him in the shared silence of his grief—which, she remembers with sudden acute clarity now, was chipped away at by an angry blackbird in the laurels. She never learned the cause of her grandfather’s grief that day.

  As a young man her grandfather had studied in London at the Slade school, learning the tedious perfection of anatomical drawing from Henry Tonks. Then later, in Paris, he won a greatly coveted place in the Atelier of Fernand Cormon, where he met the Australian artist John Peter Russell. The young Thomas Anderson and the young John Russell were both skilled boxers and soon became firm friends. Thomas had no enthusiasm, however, for the revolt against Fernand Cormon’s formal academism mounted by his fiery fellow students—among them the dangerously unstable Van Gogh, who liked to make threats of violence and to nervously finger a black revolver that he kept in his overcoat pocket. Crusaders for the revolution of modernism. Well, there did seem to be some kind of ultimate truth in it at the time that might even have been worth dying for (though none did) but was certainly worth living for.

  It was not modernism that excited Thomas’s imagination. John Russell’s stories of his home inspired in Thomas an enticing vision of an exotic Australia on the far side of the world. John was happy to give his friend Melbourne introductions. When Thomas arrived at Port Melbourne it was a blustery winter day of bright sunshine and harried clouds rushing across the bay from the Southern Ocean, as if something out there had panicked them into making a dash for the safety of land. Ten minutes after stepping out of the customs shed and nearly having his hat blown off the end of Station Pier, Thomas met the beautiful young Gwendoline Pocock. Miss Pocock was at the port with her mother and father seeing her eldest brother off to England, where he was to study something useful at Cambridge. Thomas gallantly held the train carriage door open for Gwendoline and her parents. Encouraged by the blush on her cheek and her murmured, ‘Thank you,’ he stepped into the carriage after th
em and sat himself down opposite her. And he smiled. And she smiled back. It was the old story. He always said it was a telepathic call from Gwen that brought him to Australia. And who can say it wasn’t? They were married after a decent spell of being engaged, all with the blessing of Dr and Mrs Pocock, and were soon settled in the Brighton house where, apart from visits to his folk in Dumfries and to relatives of hers in Derbyshire (or wherever they were), they remained for the rest of their lives. Gwendoline bore two healthy children, a son then a daughter. The son, Ian Augustine, was killed on the Somme, and the daughter was Maud, Edith’s own mother. Thomas, so it turned out, had been just the man for the brown tones of the Melbourne world of art. His brothers in art from Cormon’s carried on staging their revolution without him.

  Edith steps away from the sink and draws in her breath sharply, her hand going to her chest. It is as if something binds her. It is always as if something is binding her. The whisper of the breakers coming ashore from the Great Southern Ocean, the concussion of them, a tremor transferred from the ground into the timber floor, a tremor within her womb. Four years after his death her grandfather’s pictures have been forgotten. They appear from time to time among the effects of deceased estates and fetch very little. The tremor in her belly, where the child whose existence Pat does not yet know of lies … Perhaps the old mare is not expecting someone to come over the hill, but is from the hinterland and is in a state of passionate wonder at the exalted voice of the sea? Edith is comforted by the presence of the horse. It is like having a new friend. The binding in her chest is a kind of desperation. About all of it. Everything. Unlike him, she is not at liberty but is responsible. She must get back to her work.