Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  Something of great importance to me happened two nights ago. Stony brings me the cabbages from the remnant of his market garden. He doesn’t park his Bedford at the front of the house as Adeli does but drives in by the double gates and parks next to the coach house, the old tradesman’s entrance. He carries the box of cabbages in through the side garden and sets it down inside the kitchen door. If I am still in bed when he calls I hear him talking to Sherry, and Sherry answering him. I leave his money on the table under a glass ashtray.

  It is all Stony grows these days, drumhead cabbages. Enormous things. Cannonballs. I can hardly lift one of them. He has grey horny hands with deep black cracks at the base of his thumbs ingrained with our river soil, like the feet of elephants. He is probably my age or even older and was market gardening with his father when Arthur and I first came here, at a time when this was the country, or the edge of the country. In those days Stony and his father sold us the varieties of vegetable we were not clever enough to grow for ourselves. Their neat little fields and glasshouses have gradually been squeezed into a tiny pocket surrounded by the new suburban mansions and their dogs and trampolines and tennis courts and swimming pools, the mansions all vaguely influenced by the holidays of their owners in Provence or Tuscany. This country influences no one any more. The old Australian Australia has gone. That remnant sense of the pioneer. It is all mock European now.

  Stony is still a strong man. After his father died he never married or had a companion, except his cats. I never met his mother but it is his mother’s genes that dominate his features. You have to know his father was Chinese before you see it in Stony. When he gets the mood on him Stony breaks his silence and talks to everything, whether there is anyone around to hear him or not. He talks to trees. To the earth. To his cabbages, especially to those that allow the grubs of cabbage whites to make colanders of their leaves. Boxes. Sherry. Furniture. Kettles that boil slowly or too fast. But he only sniffs at the comments of people.

  Two nights ago I dreamed the answer to where Pat’s nude drawings of Mr Creedy’s daughter were. I didn’t see the drawings in my dream but woke knowing where they were. I wasn’t in bed but was sleeping here at the kitchen table in my dressing-gown, my head on my arms. I’d had to get up earlier for a pee and was too lazy to go back to bed. I’ve no idea what time it was. The Rayburn was going and the kitchen was cosy. Suddenly I sat up, wide awake.

  I got up in a fever of excitement and went out to the coach house. (It was our poet laureate, Barnaby, who insisted we call it a coach house. Pat refused and always called it the shed. And of course he was right. It is an open-fronted shed with a loft from which hay bales were once tossed down to feed the horses.) The air was chill and fresh after the warm fug of the kitchen, and there was a great white moon standing high in the sky behind the branches of the red gum. The night reminded me of the time when Pat used to drop me notes. Look at the moon! It was our code for the lust that ruled our lives, our longing to be with each other. Arthur looking up from his book, his hurt gaze following me as I jumped up from the couch clutching Pat’s note and went out of the library through the French doors into the garden to stand in the night and gaze at the moon and wait for him to find me.

  Standing under the moon I threw my head back and moaned and ran my hands over my body. It was ridiculous and undignified, but we are animals and at such times know nothing of what is sensible or dignified. It was the full melodrama of youthful love. And I was over thirty then. Nowadays the only thing that gives my skin that feverish sensitivity is the prelude to a migraine or when I’m getting diarrhoea.

  Our ladder, the one and only ladder we ever had, was made by Arthur from dowels and poles that he cut and fashioned himself with great care and love from young casuarinas along the river bank. It took him weeks and was painful to watch. I found the ladder at last the other night, embedded under an accumulation of rubbish behind the Pontiac. It was lucky there was such a bright moon or I would not have found it. By the time I’d freed the ladder and dragged it out into the open I was shaking violently and had to sit on the running board of the Ponty hugging myself for half an hour before my body recovered. As I sat there I was remembering Arthur down at the river getting the poles, his shirt off, his skinny torso blazing white in the glare of the sun, wielding his axe so inexpertly I thought he must surely lop off one of his feet before he died of sunstroke. I went down to him and shouted at him angrily, ‘Leave it! Let Pat do it when he comes.’ But Arthur, poor man, was trying to compete with Pat.

  Arthur was not a practical man. He was not one of those men who can pick up a bag of tools and go off whistling and build a house for his family with his own hands. Arthur loved books and artists and poets and musicians. He liked to sit and drink whisky and smoke his French cigarettes on the veranda with a friend or in the library and talk all day and all night if he were allowed, or lose himself for hours in a book, preferably a history of art or the life of an artist. There was no envy of the gifted in Arthur, except at that time his envy of Pat’s easygoing ability to do anything practical. Arthur felt his manliness to be at risk and could not forgo the challenge. Freddy stood with me by the pond and we looked down the hill to where Arthur was working. Freddy lifted his glass and said, ‘Behold the Christ fashioning his own cross.’ We laughed and drank our wine, then linked our arms and turned and went inside and left Arthur to it. If he was fool enough to do it, then it was his own fault and no one else’s if he got sunburned and cut his toes off. We would care for him while he recuperated.

  If old age inclines us to a withering of the spirit of generosity, youth is surely more cruel. Had I the chance now I would go down the hill and help Arthur save his manhood. But perhaps he would not wish me to.

  The ladder was a one-off for Arthur. Having done it successfully he believed he had proved something that would not need proving ever again. ‘If I have to, I can do it. So there!’ That was the moral of Arthur’s ladder. When he finished making it he was absurdly proud of it, and was even rather smug. Which was not like him. Barnaby called it The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Freddy of course said it was the ladder of divine assent. If Arthur was present when it was being used, those who were using it had to admire it extravagantly. But it was often used when Arthur was not present. For the loft of the coach house was an ideal hidey-hole for lovers, hence Freddy’s little pun. Lovers climbed up to the loft and pulled the ladder up behind them and were safe as the monks of Glendalough hiding from the Vikings in their stone towers.

  Things were sometimes deposited in the loft, and as the years passed they were forgotten. Or the one who put them there eventually died or went overseas and never returned to retrieve them. The loft was a place where you might stash something you loved but to which painful memories were attached. A thing you wanted to keep, but to keep out of sight. Barnaby christened it the mezzanine, but no one else would come at that and it remained the loft for the rest of us. I had no memory of putting Pat’s drawings up there, but when I woke from my dream I knew that’s where they were. Had I put them up there myself? Or had someone else put them there? My memory was a blank on the matter, but I trusted the message of my dream: Look at the moon!

  The dream, indeed, was of another landscape. A moonless darkening country, kin to Alice’s Wonderland or a time lord’s Tardus, defying perspectives and deepening into mysteriously luminous vistas that my unease cautioned me were filled with threats to my existence. When I woke I knew at once the sinister landscape of my dream had referred to the loft of the coach house. Then I realised the obvious. Why had I never thought of it before? Some things wait their moment, held in the anteroom of our consciousness, like messengers from a far kingdom, until they are called into our presence. Servants of our destiny, Freddy once called them, then laughed tragically and tossed back another generous tumbler of Arthur’s favourite single malt, The Famous Grouse. Before his system’s tolerance for alcohol collapsed Freddy could finish a bottle of whisky on his own in the library before lunch then emerge
and drink a bottle of good shiraz with lunch and you would not have known from his manner that he had drunk anything at all. Freddy was in a kind of heaven with alcohol for years. We envied him and thought him blessed. The end came suddenly. It was a shock to all of us, for we had foolishly believed him to be immune. He was waiting for a tram in Swanston Street after lunching with a friend at the Athenaeum Club when his bowels let go.

  I was trying to raise Arthur’s ladder and lean it against the open front framing of the loft floor. But each time I got it halfway up my strength failed and the ladder began to slide away from me. It was all I could do to stop it crashing onto the Pontiac. The Ponty was Arthur’s one great extravagance. He paid more for it than we paid for this place. Its paintwork had never received so much as a scratch. In 1934, when he bought the car, it was imported into Melbourne from the General Motors plant in Detroit as a bare chassis and engine. In those days customers went to their local coach builder and had the bodies of their cars custom made. Old Mr King, the founder of the famous Melbourne firm of coach builders Martin and King, was a client of one of Arthur’s senior partners and offered Arthur the services of his firm. The Ponty was not just any car, it was a unique motor tailored by Australia’s finest coach builders to fulfil Arthur’s dream. And it did. I could not bear the thought of being the one finally to damage its beautiful coachwork.

  Many sacred and quite a few less-than-sacred moments of our years together were lodged in the smell of the Ponty’s wood and leather. The weekend after Pat Donlon arrived in our lives, Arthur suggested we motor down to Ocean Grove and pay the pair of them a surprise visit. Arthur referred to them, rather insouciantly when you consider what was warming on the hob between Pat and myself, as the young people—as if our lives and theirs were to be innocence and gaiety in summer woodland glades. We packed the Ponty’s boot with a heap of goodies: wine and beer and fresh bread and tins of this and that, and a whole ham. And several bottles of very good French champagne from Arthur’s cellar.

  Arthur drove up the gravelled lane to their little white cottage blaring his claxon and halloing, and I hung out the side window waving a bottle of champagne. But the joyous picnic we had anticipated failed. Edith was suffering from nausea and was in bed, and Pat was in a grim intractable mood. He resented what he called our charity, until the champagne loosened his wildness and he dinked me down to the sea on the crossbar of his bike. I took everything that day to be a sign from the gods that my fearful enterprise was blessed. When we arrived at the cottage I went into their bedroom and sat with Edith and took her hand in mine. My other hand lay on the sheet beside her, where I knew he must have lain, naked as the palm of my own hand, I assumed. I could not then imagine Pat wearing pyjamas. Even Edith’s sickness, which conveniently removed her from our company, seemed to me to be a blessing. I had no sympathy for her but made the most of my opportunity to advance my cause with her husband. That is the truth of it. It might seem an odd way of putting it, to advance my cause. But that is what it was, a cause. It was never for me to be merely a George and Alice situation, in which seduction was to have been the end. That was not my aim at all. With Pat Donlon, seduction for me was always to be a beginning to something much larger and more encompassing. I knew it from the moment he walked into the house with Arthur. It would be more truthful of me to say—and it is truth to which I am committed—that I did not know it, but felt it stir within me, a demon aroused by Pat’s glance from a long slumber.

  After the fourth try to get the ladder up I was exhausted and decided to call it quits and wait for Stony to come in the morning and do it for me. I loathed my feebleness, however, and was consumed with anger and frustration at the thought of having to ask for help. I have always hated asking for help. I stood looking up at the loft knowing Pat’s drawings were there, almost within my reach. A surge of defiance against my feebleness fired me with new resolve. It was that interior voice, which remains forever young and vigorous, berating me scornfully: So Autumn Laing has become a quitter.

  We would see about that. I got a fresh grip on the ladder with my claws, and grunting and cursing and staggering about, I managed at last to touch the very top of it to the front beam of the loft floor. I stepped back, my chest heaving, waiting to see if it was going to move. It stayed. I took hold of the side poles with both hands and set myself to begin the perilous ascent. My heart was beating so hard I had difficulty getting my breath. My left foot raised, I placed it on the first rung. There! My bare foot was set on the rung and would not slip off. Cautiously my right foot bucked up the courage and joined its sister. There they stood, side by side, sedate and innocent, the pair of them. I straightened my legs. We had risen from the ground!

  I stood gazing around from the eminence of my one-rung elevation. It was surprising the difference this small achievement made to my view, I mean of the world and of my life altogether: I was on my way up. It gave me a lift to know it. Encouraged, I placed my left foot on the second rung and stood poised like a trapezist teasing her audience, withholding the climactic moment, my legs trembling and wobbling, gripping Arthur’s old casuarina side poles with all the puny strength in my claws.

  I am a woman of considerable courage and have proof of it, but I panic. I know this too. It is a distressing fact. There have been two or three occasions in my life when panic (not hysteria, but panic), swift and unaccountable, has defeated my courage and flung me sideways howling. I knew, as I stood there ready to ascend, that when panic strikes, true panic, not the flutter of fear in the belly, we cannot answer it either with our will or our determination. I knew that in a state of panic the body’s physiology conspires with the mind to defeat the will. I prayed silently that I would not be overcome by this enemy.

  I shan’t give you a rung-by-rung account. Imagine me ascending, if you will, slowly by this means, my billowing dressing-gown lending me the sombre appearance of a monk in the moonlight, my wisps of silvery hair gliding about above my long skull, my bruised legs trembling, the soles of my feet tortured by Arthur’s narrow dowels, stopping at each rung to gain breath, and closing my eyes to pray to Him in whom I do not believe. Imagine Mrs Autumn Laing at eighty-five climbing The Ladder of Divine Ascent in the moonlight of her last days, seeking absolution. Was that it? What I was after? Relief from my guilt? If it was, then I was to be disappointed.

  My eyes at last topped the lip of the loft and I gazed, fascinated, into the sinister depths of its recesses, vertigo induced by the emptiness of moonlit space below me, reflux souring my gullet. Was I going to faint and fall to my death?

  A vixen barked twice down at the river, and I steadied.

  But how was I to get from the ladder onto the floor of the loft? I didn’t have enough strength in my legs to get me back down the ladder. I was stuck where I was. Like the duke, neither up nor down. I couldn’t stand there all night, or even for much longer. The last of my strength would soon drain from my shuddering legs and arms. I saw my white corpse spreadeagled in its flaring dressing-gown on the roof of Arthur’s motor car, my ghastly thighs parted. I gazed fearfully into the luminous shadows of the loft before me—the darkening landscape of my dream indeed. The top of the ladder reached only one rung above the level of the floor. Hugging the ladder against my chest and mouthing Pat’s sweet curses, I sneaked up two more rungs until I stood with my waist on a level with the loft floor. There was nothing more for me to hold onto. I was teetering dangerously. I could go no higher and could not balance for long where I was.

  I thought it was blood running down my legs, then realised with relief that I had only peed myself. There was only one thing for it. A desperate thing it was. But I saw at once that I must do it without delay or fall to my death. I let out a Comanche howl and flung my top half forward onto the floor of the loft and dug my fingers into a crack between the boards at the full stretch of my arms.

  My flailing feet sent the ladder screeching sideways. It fell with the drumbeat of doom onto the roof of the Pontiac. One way or another I suppose
it was the night when the Ponty was going to be pounded. I lay stretched out on the boards of the loft, my head reeling, my heart crashing about wildly, the lower part of my legs and my feet sticking out above the moonlit emptiness. Indeed I may as well have landed on the moon for all the hope I had of ever getting myself down to the ground again. I thought of screaming for help but was afraid the lycra-clad woman would hear me—I would rather die than live owing my life to such a creature. Imagine, after doing me such a favour, if she were to ask me to babysit that awful child of hers?

  I lay there shaking and trembling with the shock of it. Eventually I drew in my legs and curled myself into the classic foetal position of regression and self-pity. The poor little orphan girl missing her mummy. Or could it have been the consoling arms of my darling Uncle Mathew? These days dear Mathew would be condemned and hounded to his death not for being a poet but for interfering with his little niece. He was, and remains for me to this day, my beloved Uncle Mathew. Do we ever lose our faith in our first love?

  I woke to the shrieking of cockatoos in the red gum that bowers the coach house. Stony was loudly berating the ladder for beating up the bodywork of the Pontiac. It was the pink grey light of early morning, a few minutes before sunrise. I was deeply chilled, my limbs stiff and bruised. I heard myself groan as I crawled to the edge of the loft and peered over. Stony’s upturned gaze measured me, as if I were a plank of wood he might have a use for.