Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  She rinses her mother’s floral cup and saucer and dries both pieces, then she sets them beside the other pair on the shelf by the icebox and returns to the studio. She cannot imagine where he has gone or what he is doing. Should she paint into her picture some notation of the yellow oxalis flowers? It is an oil study of the house and the field, sketched initially from the rear, where the great broken cypresses are. Or are they pines, planted there by the founding Scots a hundred years ago? Great black pine trees wherever the Scots have been, like the dooming drone of their pipes and the clenched averted silence of their religion. She closes her eyes and sees her painting before her, perfectly conceived. She is in despair. Her mother wrenching up handfuls of oxalis from her perennial borders. And each spring the oxalis returning more luxuriant than the previous year. As if decimation inspires the weed. Does her mother believe a spring will eventually come when the oxalis will at last be vanquished by her Presbyterian endurance? Edith’s grandfather called oxalis by the gentler name of wood sorrel, and calmly painted fields of it. ‘See! It closes its bells when the sun goes behind a cloud.’ Another hour has gone and she is hungry. She cannot bear to look at her picture. The thought of it disgusts her.

  She lifts her hands and sweeps her hair back from her face. Gripping her hair in a tight hank behind her head and closing her eyes, she reties the green silk ribbon, securing the bow with a final tug. Her hair has lost its lustre since they came down here. The trouble is the chip heater is rusted and not working properly. So there is no hot water, except what she can heat in a saucepan on the wood stove. He has said he will fix the chip heater. But can he fix rust? She is beautiful and young and she is in love. She knows she should not be unhappy. The light is poor at her end of the room. Pat stomped into the house ahead of her and took the sunny end of the room the first day and said nothing about it. Like an infantry captain leading his platoon up a hill, he secured the advantage.

  She is not prepared to fight for it. She can’t compete. His vigour is as relentless as the oxalis. It’s not a fair contest. Before they had even looked at the house properly, he was lugging the kitchen table into the back room and setting it by the window, where it faced the light of the northern sky. ‘Stay there!’ he ordered the table, and went out to fetch his baggage of paints and brushes. And within minutes he had started painting on the back of his first square of cardboard, flat on the table, saying nothing, working with a rapid unhesitating energy, as he always does. As if he is afraid to lose the image. As fugitive as the memory of a dream on waking, is it for him? Afraid that if he pauses to reflect, the certainty will escape him?

  Getting it down onto the cardboard, that’s what he does. So that it’s out there and is what it is. A thing. A reality. You can’t argue with that. It’s there. And there is nothing for you to compare it to. You might hate it, but you can’t argue with its existence or the claim he makes for it. Art. You might resent it. Fear it even. Or fear his certainty about it. You might even say it is not art. And then he will laugh with delight to have provoked you to enter the trap. For there is no doubt that its existence and his certainty of its existence deny the worth of everything you do yourself, your care, your skill, the devoted craft of your earnest calling. You may think all this, but you can’t ignore the reality of the thing he makes. The thing he has made confronts you. It has been produced with the speed and assurance of a child sitting on the floor in a kindergarten. He invites the scorn of the trained artist. But he is not a child. He is a man. She sees the empire of his ambition in his eyes. It is this that attracts her and makes her afraid of him. This seriousness. It is this that is authentic: his determination to find a way. ‘Anyone can have talent,’ he says, dismissing the talented, not pausing in the swoops and dabs of his big brush. Listening to him she is made to doubt the worth of everything she does and believes.

  She abandons her own work now and goes to his bright end of the room and stands looking down at the last painting he did yesterday. It is lying on his table by the window—the table that became his table when he carried it in here. The smell of the boot polish reminds her of her grandfather lining up her and her brothers and sister on Saturday evening (to be ready for church in the morning), newspaper covering the kitchen table, the five of them polishing like mad, singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ and marching round the table, a shoe on one hand, a brush in the other, polishing like mad, Grandfather in the lead, stomping their feet in time and shouting, ‘Eggs! Eggs! Walking about on legs, in the store, in the store. There were eggs, eggs, walking about on legs in the quartermaster’s store.’ Someone once told her boot polish was made of animals’ blood. She had watched Pat working yesterday, his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth. His anxiety to get on with it. She has not possessed the courage or the will to dispute his possession of the sunny end of the room, or even to remark on it. Her own art is not to be favoured. Ever. Obedient to the rules, her art has already been dismissed. She knows it herself. She hates the fact that she works at her painting as if someone in authority is watching over her shoulder. She hates the feeling that she has to get it right. For whom? It’s not for herself, it’s for them. Her teachers. Her grandfather. The traditions. The craft. How to shed the habit of obedience? What to do if she does shed it? Where to look? There is to be no nurturing from him. He has not inherited the habit of obedience. He owes no one obedience. He is alone. His sudden departure without explanation at high speed on the bicycle this morning. He is able to do such things without a need to explain or to justify himself.

  For her, work is a subtle, delicate, mysterious coming together of the right mood and the right moment. Work is the difficult making of art. Striving, that is the word that characterises what she does. She has had to settle in to this house before she could begin, to feel herself to be in place. But not him. He was off. He had made five of his pictures by midnight the first night on his pieces of cardboard. She went to bed. After he had finished painting he sat in the kitchen reading and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, and writing poetry in his notebook. He does everything at once. Writing, painting, drinking and smoking. He does not know if he is a writer or a painter. He does what he pleases. She was asleep by the time he came to bed and wanted to make love.

  She looks at the work he has left on his table. It is a square of cardboard, two feet by two feet. It is the reverse of a bulk Rinso carton he asked the young woman at the corner shop to save for him. The young woman, who is already the mother of three children, looks at him with devotion. She will do anything he asks of her. Astonished by the confidence of his eye. Lying in bed beside her husband at night that girl will think of Pat. Edith knows it. He prepared the cardboard with dark tan Kiwi shoe polish, leaning over the table and burnishing it, his elbow going as if he was a devoted charlady polishing a family heirloom. In the centre of the cardboard is an abstract design. There is nothing to delight the eye, just a thick layer of light grey on top of a layer of dark reddish brown, the nameless thing roughly ovoid in form. Between the layers, separating them, a thin wavy line, the only note of uncertainty. She thinks of a chocolate layer cake her mother once dropped. Her mother called them into the kitchen to look and they all had hysterics.

  Edith’s suspicion is that Pat’s work is not authentic but is an expression of his contempt for the strivings of his contemporaries. A week after she first met him at the Gallery School (before his contempt got the upper hand and they threw that over), the first time they made love in his room in town, the minute he had finished he reached for his makings and rolled a cigarette. When he had taken a drag on the cigarette he said—as if he had been thinking about this while he was making love to her and it was a matter of pride with him and he wanted her to know it about him at once—he said, ‘I can’t draw.’ And he looked down at her and grinned, making something superior of this claim to the lack of the basic skill required of all artists. Making himself seem different. But he already seemed different to her without this claim. He made her puzzle about herself. Being w
ith him was as exciting as being in a foreign country. He offered her the cigarette and watched her take a drag from it. ‘You’re a much better draftsman than I am,’ he said, his hand caressing her belly, and he reached for the cigarette. ‘You’ve absorbed their training. You’re one of their best students.’ He leaned over her then and thrust his index finger close to her eye, so that she flinched. ‘It’s in there now. You’ll never be free of it. You’ll never get it out. I’m not going to pollute my eye with their rubbish. We get one chance to make our own way.’ Then he made that stupid boast. It was an unintelligent boast that made her doubt her belief in him. ‘Mine is a higher calling,’ he said. There was something almost sinister in his laughter at that moment of absurd boastfulness. She had objected, ‘It’s not intelligent to speak of a higher calling. It’s the achievement that must be higher. La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Remember? It was you who pointed it out to me. You said your dad being a tram conductor was just as important as my father being a farmer. But you didn’t call Dad a farmer, which he would have been happy with. You called him a pastoralist. And Rimbaud’s your god, not mine.’ But it didn’t suit him to remember having said any of this. She heard in his laughter that night how solitary he believed himself to be with his art. How completely alone with it he was. And she realised there was something ruthless in him that would never include her. She might suspect his work of being inauthentic, a showy gesture against conformity, but she does not doubt that his ambition and his need for art and for poetry and literature are real. He is greedy for it all. He knows he has been deprived and longs to catch up and overtake everyone who received it as a birthright. There are moments when his greed and his hunger make him ugly to her.

  Standing there looking at his brownish squashed cake, Edith suddenly realises its tones belong to her grandfather’s range of tones. She laughs. Not even Pat can escape from tones and colours. Pat’s cowpat, however, is without that concealed source of illumination that gave her grandfather’s pictures the mysterious suggestion that a story was lurking in them, if only its beginning could be grasped by the onlooker. In Pat’s thing—it could not be called a picture of anything—there was neither a source of illumination nor any hint of story. It was a full stop. A refusal to be looked at with imagination. The onlooker was required to be silent and puzzled. To ask, ‘What is this? What is meant by it?’ And perhaps to feel inadequate for not being able to guess. For having no idea. To be struck dumb. To feel dumb. She has watched Pat enjoying the difficulty educated people have in finding something to say about his work. Gleeful at the effect he has on them. Knowing they fear to dismiss him. Knowing they fear him. She fears he will stop at nothing.

  She hears a noise outside. It is a man’s shout, or a laugh. She listens, then goes through into the kitchen and looks out the window. On the horizon of the green field their landlord, Mr Gerner, is sitting in his wheelchair. He is silhouetted against the white sky, two of his many dogs leashed at his side, as if he is a hunting god in his chariot. Pat stands to his right, also in silhouette against the sky, a rifle held to his shoulder. The horse is facing Pat from a few feet away. Everything is still. The mare collapses and rolls onto her side, her hind legs kicking out. Edith hears the crack of the twenty-two, like someone stepping on a twig in the forest. The old man urges himself forward in his chair, his great dogs rearing at their leashes. Pat leans and sets the rifle down on the grass and picks up an axe. He steps in close and stands over the horse, swinging the axe high above his head. Pat is a man who knows how to use an axe. The thump of the blade striking through flesh and bone. The old man leaning from his wheelchair, holding the leashes of his eager dogs. They are howling and rearing at their straps … She is out of the house, running up the hill, choking on the thick air. She has witnessed her father’s manager butchering sheep on the farm and is not new to bloodshed and butchery, but the sight of this destruction tears at something in her.

  On the summit of the hill she stands looking at the bloodied grass, the blue and green swath of steaming guts, the reek of it, the two great dogs snarling at her as if she has come to take their meat from them. The neighbour is shouting something at her, throwing down a bundle of hessian sacks at her feet. The sudden hot stench of the disembowelled horse in her throat … Now she is the small figure of a young woman clutching her stomach, stumbling down the embroidered hill towards the white cottage, the faintest wisp of blue smoke issuing from its red-brick chimney, paint peeling around its window frames, like crusts of scale around the eyes of a half-blind beast. The dark patch of turned earth, the spade abandoned upright in the soil, the hen run along the back fence by the shed overhung by the darkness of the broken pine trees. The heels of her black court shoes catch in the oxalis, her blue skirt flies up … She is a fugitive figure in her own composition.

  3

  Pat Donlon

  HE SNATCHED THE LETTER OUT OF THE BOX ON HIS WAY THROUGH the gate. The gate was permanently sagged open, clutched at its base by tight fists of kikuyu grass. He had stamped the creamy envelope with a thumbprint of jellied blood. He looked at it. The letter now bore his seal. He wiped it against his trousers, the blood patch becoming a livid slash, defacing her mother’s elegant handwriting. He stood looking at the smear across the perfectly ladylike hand of an educated woman, the expensive stationery with its printed address on the back, Mrs Maud Black, Craigellachie, Bairnsdale, Victoria. On the front, Mrs E. Donlon, John’s Cottage, North Track, Ocean Grove. His wife. Mrs E. Donlon. It still made him smile to see it. Mrs E. Donlon was his mother.

  The blood stain might have been the confident final flick of a Chinese master’s brush as he lifted it from the paper. A smile of private triumph from the old poet painter. Was her mother’s handwriting what they called copperplate? He didn’t know and would not ask. It was another gap in his knowledge of them that could stay a gap. Some gaps didn’t need filling. Whatever kind of handwriting they called it, he could see it revealed nothing personal but perfectly concealed his mother-in-law’s character behind the blind regularity of its elegant curves. Better to have a gap you could see through than fill it in with knowing something useless. Maud Black had made it plain to him that she thought her daughter marrying out of her caste, and to a Catholic, would bring nothing but heartache and trouble on all of them.

  The Blacks were tall people, the men broad with it. Big fellows. Thighs like bullocks. Country boys. Highland or Borderers in their origins, they had the weight and presence of farmers or fighters, a tight violence of ownership in them. Perhaps it was a remnant of the Viking. Just the men for throwing hammers and tossing cabers. Pat himself was of a slight build, like his mother, and might have been a dancer or nearly a jockey. He felt like an elf standing with Edith’s father and brothers. A shifty little Irishman from the back streets of St Kilda, one of the Black boys was heard to say of him. A Pat, they said, dismissing him. Indeed he was, and did not wish to apologise for it. Wasn’t marrying that Irish scallywag the very worst thing possible our Edith could have done? Why ever did the girl have to go and fall in love with that scrawny little bugger?

  He knew Edith defended him. ‘Pat is going to be Australia’s greatest artist one day.’ Her mother nearly choked on her apple crumble to hear this from her daughter. ‘Oh, not the world’s greatest then?’ she said, and was intending to develop a sharper sarcasm but a piece of the crumble went down the wrong way and prevented her from speaking. She took a gulp of water, everyone at the table watching her sideways, and cleared her airways before she was able to go on, getting just a little beetrooty in the cheeks with the effort of fighting the crumble. ‘Even Max Manner never made such an arrogant claim as that.’ A thick wheeze still in her delivery. Dabbing at her lips with her napkin. ‘It’s all right! I’m all right! Don’t look at me!’ There was still something throttling her speech, as if a persistent crumb in the airways might yet get the better of her. ‘And the good Lord alone knows,’ she went on valiantly, ‘Manners is a man with a very high and mighty opin
ion of himself.’ She needed to breathe, however, and had to pause and blow her nose again. They waited in respectful silence for her. ‘Your grandfather would have been ashamed to hear such a thing from you. The greatest, indeed!’ They ate in silence for a while, subdued and sombre, looking down at their bowls of apple crumble, knowing it was the disaster of Edith’s man that was choking the wife and mother of them and was not the fault of the crumble at all. Edith ought to have been ashamed of herself. But that girl was too stubborn for shame. What would Grandpa Anderson have said if he’d been alive? His favourite little peach hooking herself up with a Mick? And Edith’s brothers ever after greeting him with, ‘And how’s Australia’s greatest artist today?’ Slapping their thighs and looming about the place laughing.

  Maud Black, Edith’s mother and the author of the blood-smeared letter in his hand, was not, in Pat’s opinion, a generous woman herself and was unlikely to ever come around to his way of seeing the world. When he told her he was a sixth-generation Australian on both sides of his family (the only family distinction he could think of that might amend her displeasure), she closed her eyes and drew herself up and murmured something about the first Catholic priests to arrive in Australia being convicts. He told her he and his family didn’t give a tap for religion. But like the crumble this seemed to go down the wrong way too. So he went silent and withdrew into himself and thought about something interesting that had nothing to do with his in-laws. Fuck them.