Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  Still standing by the gate with the letter in his hand, he looked at the defaced handwriting on the envelope. He noticed the dried horse blood on the brown skin on the back of his hand had formed a lovely crackly look over the prominence of veins. He examined the effect with interest. He was wondering what might be done with it. He picked flakes of the blood off with the nail of his thumb, experiencing the same pleasurably private guilt he experienced whenever he picked his nose. He tried a flake of the blood on his tongue. Something metallic. For sure, he might have been defensive about his own handwriting once upon a time, for it was childish and awkward-looking. When he wrote he stuck the tip of his tongue out the corner of his mouth. It was for steadiness. Having his tongue under control helped him concentrate on the point where the nib was moving across the paper, releasing its lovely mysterious snail trail of dark ink. A trail that could, and indeed would, take on meanings of all kinds for him. There was, if you thought about it at all (which he was surprised to find no one but himself ever did), no limit to what the ink trail could manage in the way of uncovering and portraying likenesses and even thoughts. The ink, he observed with astonishment, had states of mind in it.

  The day Miss Tasker issued the class with pens and nibs and inkwells Pat was smitten with the power that was handed to him and fell in love with the life of the ink trail. That day, his secret life of words and art began their mysterious dance, embraced so intimately the one with the other that he had never been able to decide since whether he was poet or painter. Copperplate, or whatever conformity of regularity it was Miss Tasker was required by the Victorian education department to impose on their hand, was the enemy. He refused it with a fierce intuition. Seeing the trap at once. To bring the ink trail under their control. That’s what they were up to. Old Miss Tasker, with her yellow ruler and the smell of offal on her breath, her long grey hairs falling onto your paper when she leaned over you, had no success curing him of his protruding tongue or his wayward pen and she exhausted herself finally in the futile effort of opposing him. ‘You are a gipsy!’ she shrieked at him, her cheeks flaming, as if him being a gipsy excused her failure. She made him stand with his face to the map of the world, pushing his face into it (Mercator’s projection), on which Australia was a big pregnant pink island. Now there was a shape for you! A bold outline to be laid down in his memory and never forgotten. His country. He was blessed with the entitlement of being native born. And she clouted him on the ear with the side of her ruler to bring home to him his failure. He mistook her fury for a most convincing act. ‘There is no hope for you, Patrick Donlon!’

  His mistake was understandable. Gipsy was the worst insult Miss Tasker knew. But for Pat, being called a gipsy did not carry the demeaning force of an insult, implying instead the exotic, a hidden promise of something uncommon that not everyone had. He took it as a distinction and from that day was confirmed in his sense of being different and superior. You might say that his teacher, this grey and harried old lady, had addressed not him, the boy wearing the dirty khaki shorts with the rent in the bum, but his demon, the invisible elemental presence within him. It was the first time anyone had spoken so personally to the genie of his imagination, and it made Pat realise something obvious he had always known but had never described to himself: he lived in two worlds, the private world of his imagination and the public world of breakfast and walking home from school with Gibbo and riding his bike and being clouted on the ear by Miss Tasker and longing to touch the back of Catherine Phillips’ knees. Miss Tasker’s fury was a revelation, and he came thereafter to think of her as his secret ally and to treat her with great respect and kindness, taking all her nastiness and her punishments and insults as part of a game between the two of them to keep the truth of their unusual alliance a secret from the rest of the class. He thought sometimes she overdid it a bit. His mother asked him why his right ear was always inflamed. He said it was nothing and wouldn’t let her look.

  His attachment to his teacher was a circumstance that bewildered the crabby old maid, and she remained convinced that it was Patrick Donlon’s singular aim in life to make fun of her in front of his mates. The more exaggerated he was in his politeness, the more she saw his behaviour as cruel and satirical. When they were all gone home and everything was quiet and she was alone in the smelly classroom, on more than one occasion she put her head in her hands and wept, wishing she was young again and had the energy to defeat the boy. That a boy with dirty feet and occasional head lice, who stuck his tongue out of his mouth while he struggled to copy the alphabet in large capitals from the board, should bow to her when he came into the classroom could be taken as nothing less than intentional insolence. And the class laughing their heads off and hissing with delight at the performance. So she used her ruler freely on him. But failed to rule him with it. Which eventually helped drive her to despair about herself and everything else. Her failure to turn up for work one day was never satisfactorily explained to the children. Her replacement was of no special interest to Pat. Miss Tasker had done her job well and would not be replaced in his special affections.

  When Pat asked his mother if there was gipsy in him, she said he was born with a shock of black hair and that you could never tell what was in you if you were Irish, there having been in Ireland every kind of person and strange being you could ever imagine, including leprechauns and Spaniards and heaven knows what else in the way of witches and fairies and goblins and that kind of thing, and it all went back too far to ever know what bits of this or that might have got into you along the way. ‘You could be a moon boy for all I know.’ No one, she said, bending over the washtub and scrubbing the last of his father’s shirt collars against the ripples of the board, breathing hard through her open mouth, no one knew who they really were if you went deeply enough into it. ‘So have I got gipsy in me or not?’ he wanted to know. ‘You might have a bit of gipsy in you and you might not.’ She would not commit herself beyond that. ‘It’s even money then?’ he said, using a phrase he had often heard his dad use when talking with his mates about the gee-gees. ‘I suppose so,’ she conceded. It was good enough odds for him and he took the offer of it. ‘And have you and Dad been to Ireland then?’ he asked her. ‘You should be at school,’ she told him. ‘Have you?’ he persisted. ‘No, we haven’t.’

  He thought about this for a while, watching the rinsing and bending and breathing going on fiercely beside him. But he wasn’t quite done yet. He wanted one further point of fact cleared up. ‘If you and Dad have never been to Ireland, why do we call ourselves Irish?’ She straightened and eased her back, the palm of her hand pressed to her kidneys. ‘What else are we going to call ourselves, you ninny?’ She flicked suds at him and bent and picked up the basket loaded with rinsed shirts and collars and pushed him out of the wash house, holding out the dripping basket ahead of her and threatening to wet him. ‘If we’re not Irish, what are we?’ She laughed as she went out into the sunlight of the backyard, a shapely young woman still in those days and filled with wonder herself at the curiosity of her eldest. She ached with anxiety to think of him going into the world on his own one day and would have liked to keep him at the age of holding hands and looking up with belief in his innocent eyes asking her his lovely silly questions. Did he suppose they could call themselves English? As she pegged her husband’s dripping shirts on the line, Edna Donlon said to the blackbird that was watching her from the overhang of the neighbour’s plum tree, ‘And isn’t he going to be breaking hearts with those sky-blue eyes of his one day?’

  He got his bike from the shed and rode down the street to Gibbo’s place. There were two things that day he swore to do when he grew up: make the acquaintance of a fair-dinkum full-blood gipsy and see Ireland for himself. Had he been hoping to encounter ancestral affinities with this wish list, even then? Wondering if meeting a gipsy would be like meeting a long-lost brother? And if being on the soil of Ireland would give him a queer feeling he didn’t get from being in the country of his birth? Some expectat
ion of this kind, of encountering a world more real than the one he was in? Beginning to ask, in other words, the grown-up question: who am I really? Where do I belong? The same question wearing different clothes. And what did he think of all that now that he was a grown man of twenty-two? Did it still matter to him?

  He ran up the path and took both veranda steps in a stride and snatched open the flywire door. In the kitchen he nipped a corner of Gerner’s ten-shilling note with thumb and forefinger and withdrew it from his trouser pocket. He put the precious note on the draining board beside the letter. Blood money. While he was butchering the horse for Oscar Gerner’s dogs, his axe aloft, a big idea had come steaming into his mind, like a train arriving at the station, and he the only man alive waiting there for its arrival, a solitary figure on the platform knowing it was his destiny to step on board and take the journey. His train. In that poised instant, before burying the bright steel blade in the poor beast’s groin, the flesh still quivering, Pat conceived his bold plan of escape. Audacious it was, and not one of their mates they’d left behind at the Gallery School would have been game to try it on.

  The thought of it was making him hot with impatience. He would do it. There was nothing to stop him. He would carry it out. He turned on the tap over the sink and washed the blood off his hands. There was blood on his khaki shirt, too. His mother would have had the shirt off his back and soaking in cold water in the laundry tub by now. He cupped his hands and leaned and drank, the water chill in his throat. A poet warrior of the old Icelandic days, he was, Egil Skallagrimsson, his axe beside him, taking his feud to the king himself, bending to drink from a sacred spring that had been pouring out of its magical crevice since before the gods retreated from the face of the earth, knowing themselves cursed by the death of poetry among men. Would he learn the ancient Greek and read their great literature in the original? Was it possible? And French. To hear Rimbaud as Rimbaud had heard himself. He envied Edith the fluency of her French. In his mouth the words were tortured out of shape, chipped, hard and separate, insisting on being Australian. She made the flow of them all running together sound as natural as thought. A song she had learned in her infancy. How could he ever get to that? There was so much to read. So much to learn. So much catching up to be done. Surely he had started too late and would never be convincing on their terms. Hadn’t he always known that he would have to do something else? His own thing. Something they were not already expert at. Something they and their teachers had never thought of. There was already one thing he had done the others had not, and which stood him in advance of their reading. For while they were poring over the novels of D.H. Lawrence, he had been reading the Icelandic sagas.

  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.