Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  When Pat and I got back to the house, Edith had returned to her bed and Arthur was drinking on his own in the kitchen. As we walked Pat’s bicycle up the gravel laneway to the gate I saw Arthur’s face at the rain-streaked window watching us.

  I have seen peasants in Spain walking through rain in the mountains without coat or head covering, a look of unconcern on their faces and in their unhurried manner. Something of that same unconcern was in Pat’s earlier observation to me when I objected that we would get wet if we went down to see the ocean, ‘And then we will get dry again.’ And it is true, there was something of the gipsy in Pat, and one day he would go looking for confirmation of this intuition in Ireland. Did he find it? Did he meet his brother-in-the-spirit? I don’t know. He was lost to me long before that.

  Arthur was very quiet on the way home that night. He drove as if he was not my beloved husband but my chauffeur, a responsible and rather grimly humourless man with a job to do and a surly determination to do it well, whatever the cost to his peace of mind. He was not the Arthur I knew and loved. It was dark and still raining heavily, water cascading across the road. I prayed we would not become marooned along the way, caught between rising streams, and forced to sit side by side in the cold silence of the hours. I was wearing one of Edith’s frocks and her cardigan. The frock was far too short for me. I was uncomfortable and chilled. My wet clothes were in the back. I had not thought to put in a rug when we set off from Old Farm that morning.

  Beside me Arthur drove within a bell of silence which inhibited conversation. I was feeling sorry for myself and feared I was coming down with something. I was longing to be in my own bed in my right and customary frame of mind. It was an emotion close to homesickness, this, a desire to reaffirm a deeply familiar reality. And a grief for something already lost perhaps. Fear of the reality which was to replace it. Arthur hadn’t told me why Edith’s painting was on the back seat with my wet clothes and I didn’t trust myself to ask him to explain its presence there. The resistance between us bewildered me and I knew I didn’t have the ability to deal with it peaceably. Perhaps I also lacked the nerve to make the attempt. There was, of course—of course there was—my strident ambivalence about the whole business. Of my life, I mean. My secret shamefaced guilt and elation.

  So the silence between us persisted. Edith’s star-spangled painting on the back seat waiting for a word to set off the explosion.

  We drove on for hour after hour, through the black rain, along deserted roads. And we seemed to make no progress. I could distinguish nothing familiar in the thick darkness outside the car. It was all the same. Just blackness. It was as if by some awful twist of ill fortune we had blundered into a foreign country where we were not known and were unwelcome. As if we had taken a wrong turning and might never find our way back to our own familiar world. I was sure nothing would ever again reassure me. About myself, I mean.

  As the drive went on it began to assume for me the trapped feeling of a nightmare; the darkness darker, the rain heavier, the roads more lonely, the terrain more threateningly unfamiliar. Before I would wake, surely I must arrive at some terrible end? I crouched miserably in my seat, hugging Edith’s inadequate cardigan around me, my gaze fixed on the trembling beams of our lights skidding over the glistening macadam. Now, as I write this, I seem to recall a fugitive music accompanied me that night. I know this sound of music is not a recollection of fact (how could it be?) but is the addition of fiction seeking to soften the moral contours of the unfolding events in which I felt myself to be trapped. The intractable forces, I mean, of character and destiny. Just as Edith’s painting waited on the back seat for a word from one of us, so this situation had waited its time, nestled sweetly in my unconscious. I knew myself to be helpless against it. I was still the crazy girl on the boat going to Europe with my mother.

  How was it, I asked myself that Arthur and I had set out from home that morning in a mood of optimism, Arthur delighted with the prospect of a long drive in his beloved car, I looking forward to an interesting encounter with Pat and his art, and now here we were returning like defeated people through an unknown landscape towards a destination that would not know us or make us welcome? The premonition that something precious had come to an end haunted me, in its various guises, throughout that terrible drive. And I was right. Although we survived—our marriage did, I mean—Arthur and I were never again quite as we had been before the excursion to Ocean Grove. The period of our untrammelled optimism together had lasted for twelve years. Now it had come to an end. And it was I who had brought it to an end. My long-forsworn capacity for a wildness of the spirit. This sleeping child of my past had been revived at the touch of Pat’s bloodied lips. It sounds very melodramatic, but it’s true.

  When Arthur spoke I jumped at the sound of his voice.

  ‘What’s that ticking?’ he demanded.

  ‘What ticking?’

  ‘Listen!’

  His tone was so stern and so angry I thought he might have gone mad. ‘I can hear nothing,’ I said carefully. ‘It is just the sound of the road.’

  ‘There! Listen!’

  We ran on behind the beams of the headlights, the rain lashing the windscreens. I could hear nothing that sounded anything like ticking. Did he think there was a bomb in the car? I looked at him. The brim of his hat shaded his eyes, the lower part of his features faintly lit by the back glow of the headlights, his mouth set in a hard line. I sat hugging myself, waiting for whatever was going to happen. But Arthur lapsed once again into deep silence and I did not have the courage to break it with the sound of my own voice.

  We were grinding our way slowly up into the hills in first gear and I had at last begun to recognise the landscape when Arthur said, in that same tight angry voice he had used when speaking of the ticking in the car, ‘If you take on Pat Donlon you’ll be taking on responsibility for a family. You’ve considered that, I suppose?’

  I stared at him. I was scarcely able to believe what I had heard, or the accusing tone of his voice. So he was accusing me! I felt myself assaulted by a powerful surge of self-righteous fury. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I think you heard me.’

  He was busy negotiating the final tight bends in the road that led to the entrance to Old Farm.

  ‘Repeat what you just said!’ I shouted at him. I was so angry I lost control and without considering what I was doing I grabbed his arm. The car dived to the left. Arthur had very good reflexes and stamped on the brake before the car went off the road. To have gone off at that point would have meant a plunge down the hill for us and almost certain death or serious injury.

  We both sat very still. Then Arthur engaged reverse and eased us back onto the middle of the road. I was trembling as we turned into our gate and drove down into the coach house. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  Sitting with his hands on the steering wheel, still in the driving position, the engine silenced, staring ahead at the back wall of the coach house and no doubt still watching the road unfold before his eyes, Arthur said in that tight and very deliberate voice that he had found for the occasion (I had never heard it before), ‘I said, if you take on Pat you’ll be taking on the care of a family.’ He turned to me, his eyes looking into mine as if he were the judge and knew the whole case and had made his judgment. ‘Have you thought of that?’

  It is not possible to recount exactly what happened then, but I can still hear my voice screaming accusations at him, utterly incoherent and unreasonable, something to do with him having always denied me the important things in life. He fought off my blows, gripping my wrists and restraining me without too much difficulty, for he was quicker, more controlled and far stronger than I. When he released me and stepped out of the car I stumbled out on my side hardly able to see where I was going. It was blind impulse then that made me reach into the back and pull out the square canvas of Edith’s painting. With a howl of fury I threw it with all my force. If I’d been aiming for the loft I would probably have missed. Whe
n it didn’t come down again I was mystified as to where it could have gone. As we know, it remained in the loft for more than fifty years, like a forgotten bale of hay. Tossed.

  Once I would have said Edith’s painting was forgotten by us. Now I would say we had no wish to remember it. The mind is capable of deep silences on subjects we have no desire to deal with. The loft swallowed it and the problem of Edith’s painting conveniently disappeared from our sight for half a century. We didn’t ask any questions. It was enough that it was gone, like the rainbow’s lovely form evanishing amid the storm. And so on.

  We didn’t sleep together that night. Arthur and I had had rows before this. He was usually controlled and severe at such times (being his mother) but I’d had several richly florid outbursts in our early days when the influence of my own mother and my family was still a raw wound with me. But this was the first time Arthur and I had not made up and gone to bed together, friends again. He slept in the guest room, if he slept at all. And I slept in our bed. I locked the door. I could not have faced his gentle fumbling attempt at a reconciliation that night.

  I undressed and climbed into bed and lay down. My emotions were in turmoil. But I must have been exhausted because I fell asleep at once. I woke, suddenly, into the night; the metallic taste of Pat’s blood when I slid my tongue over my teeth after he kissed me was vivid and compelling in my mouth. I slid my tongue over my teeth again there in my bed, my eyes closed, testing the recollection of his blood. I was appalled. By all of it. The thunder of the waves. Lying there in the dark, strangely awake in the warm intimacy of my bed, it seemed to me that I had danced with Pat Donlon in the eye of life and death; as one might dance in the eye of a storm for an instant before being tossed helplessly to one’s death. A totentanz of the liberated spirit. I knew I could not give it up. It? Yes, it. The edge. Freedom. The thing between us that compelled me. I had no name for it then and have none for it now. It is no good calling it love. I loved Arthur, my life’s companion.

  I had feared it would come out sooner or later. My emotions were fragile and exaggerated. I felt superstitious, and as if I carried a taint of evil. The wonder was, it seemed to me that night, that Arthur and I had managed to enjoy so many years of peace and contentment together. The thought that I would risk it now, that I would risk losing him, terrified me. In our early twenties we had been each other’s saviour. Nothing could replace that bond between us. Ever. We had saved each other. We had made sense of each other’s life. That could not be undone. I knew this then and I know it now. Its truth was never a question for either of us. We belonged. That is love. That deep belonging.

  Words. Language is useful for a few restricted realities. But for the rest, for the life of the gods, language has nothing to say. One can only know such things as experience in the heat of one’s blood, not as descriptive possibilities. Even Milton and Dante, with their headlock on language, couldn’t do it. Our blood, not our words, carries the message that compels us to submit, just as an invading army of superior force compels the submission into barbarism of gentle civilisations. Is that too much? Well, we shall see.

  Arthur and I never spoke to each other of Edith’s embroidered field. And on the single occasion Edith stayed with us at Old Farm she did not mention it. Her picture (and soon she) dropped out of our lives into a well of silence from which they have only now finally re-emerged. It is surely as if they have had to find their way to me along that same haunted route on which Arthur and I travelled together that night; to live with each other thereafter at the still centre of our own private labyrinth, where calm was never more than a temporary illusion and the menace of the ocean deeps was ever with us. Ah well. From that day on we knew our love to be fragile, tested, beleaguered, damaged, marked indelibly, and often so sad it made us weep, but somehow, yes, enduring.

  At the time it seemed to us both that to attempt to deal with the charged enigma of Edith’s painting would be to risk touching off an explosion of unreason that would finish us. Eventually distance and time, the loss of friends, ill health, and finally a kind of forgetting eroded our interest, until at last we were alone again with each other, she and her picture no longer a feature of our horizon. A buried city of the plain whose ramparts I have begun to unearth.

  The morning after our return from Ocean Grove I woke to the sun streaming through the French doors and the sound of Arthur singing in the kitchen. I lay listening, disbelieving, seeing the pale green leaves of the Algerian oak he had planted out in the middle of the lawn. A blackbird stood on the oak’s topmost branch challenging all comers. Tom was flattened in the grass, staring up at him with evil in his eyes. Arthur didn’t bring me a cup of tea. Perhaps he had tried my door in the night and knew it to be locked. I got up and looked at myself in my dressing-table mirror. My eyes were red and had little lines in their corners. I put on my dressing-gown and went into the kitchen.

  He was at the Rayburn. There was the comforting smell of toast and coffee and the kitchen was bright with the lovely day. He turned to me and smiled and said good morning, not as if nothing had happened, but as if he was determined to demonstrate to me that we could proceed as if nothing had happened. So in a way nothing had happened. But all was changed. I had become a liar and a hypocrite.

  ‘I can do you a couple of boiled eggs?’

  He was not over-cheerful. In fact he did it very well. Almost as if he were a practised hypocrite himself. I thanked him and lit a cigarette and stood in the doorway looking out at my garden. Stony was among the tomatoes, pruning and tying them up. There were birds busy everywhere, going for it after the rain. I suppose the leaves and weeds were alive with insects. The sun was already warm. Arthur came to my elbow and handed me a cup of coffee and kissed my neck. I turned and kissed him on the cheek. He fetched his coffee and stood beside me. I prayed to my godless god that he would not mention last night. The smell of the country was in the morning. It was why we had come here, this smell of our reality, this peace, this beauty.

  It was a Sunday so he was home for the day. After breakfast we walked down to the river together and sat on our log and watched the water. Owing to the heavy rain the night before the river was up and had a lovely strong energy to it. Arthur pointed. ‘There!’ he whispered. A tawny water rat slipped along the bank into the churning water. Arthur took my hand in his.

  When he came home from the office on Monday he looked tired and worried. I had cooked a beef pie, which was his favourite meal, and had opened one of his better clarets. We sat at the table in the kitchen eating our dinner. I just wanted life to go on. He looked up at me in a way that made me realise he was about to say something important. His fork was halfway to his mouth. I waited, cold creeping into my stomach.

  ‘Something seems to be coming apart in the Ponty,’ he said. He kept looking at me as if he was expecting a strong response from me, possibly an explanation, even a convincing reassurance from me that all was well with his precious car.

  I said, ‘You mean that noise you think you heard?’ I hated having to speak of anything to do with Saturday night. But he was forcing me to it. I wondered where the conversation would lead and was terrified he would bring it around to Pat and to Edith’s painting and, well, to the whole sordid mess of my exhausted emotions. I did not think the ticking he had complained of was something that could be worth talking about on its own.

  ‘Thought I heard?’ he said.

  ‘That you heard, then,’ I said with care.

  He forked the paused food into his mouth and chewed. ‘It was there again on the way to the station this morning and when I drove home this evening.’ He reached for his glass and took a good swig of claret.

  Did he murmur, Thought I heard? Or did I only imagine it?

  I waited, but he said no more. The evening was charged with nasty possibilities. I had lost my appetite and pushed my plate away and lit a cigarette. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. ‘Smoking already? Not hungry, darling? Are you feeling okay?’

  ‘I had
a late lunch with Barnaby,’ I said.

  ‘The pie’s terrific. How’s Barnaby?’

  I knew we were not done with the ticking in the car, but the initiative was not mine and there was nothing I could do to hurry things to a conclusion. I drank some claret and smoked my cigarette. ‘He’s going up to Sofia Station on Wednesday. Harry can’t come down. He wanted me to go with him. He complains that he knows our home and our lives in every detail and we only know most of his life thinly and from hearsay.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it. Would you mind?’ I was certain I wasn’t going to Sofia Station with Barnaby, then or ever. Eventually, but not on this occasion, I was to change my mind. The results of my change of mind could not have been foreseen and were momentous. The biggest thing, in fact, to happen to me and to Australian art during my lifetime.

  Arthur ate more pie and drank more claret and frowned and sniffed a couple of times. ‘I would a bit,’ he said. He looked up at me, obviously unsure of what he was letting himself in for. It hadn’t been easy for him to say this. ‘But if you’d really like to go …’ He didn’t finish what he was about to say but voiced a new idea. ‘Perhaps I should take a couple of weeks off and we could both go?’

  I knew he didn’t mean it any more than I had meant that I might go with Barnaby. ‘There’s too much to do here,’ I said. Would Pat arrive at the door one day and demand to become part of our lives? Or demand that I run away with him? In this last fear (or was it a hope?) I wasn’t so far off predicting what eventually happened. I said, ‘Will you take the car into Martin and King and have them look at it?’ I knew that for Arthur the suggestion there might be something amiss with the bodywork of the Ponty was about as acceptable to him as sacrilege to a nun—there was a moral dimension to his faith in that car.

  His frown deepened. ‘Oh, I doubt if it’s in the body,’ he said, dismissing the idea as a form of idiocy. How dare I suggest such a thing? What did I know of the bodywork of the masters? If it came down to it, what did women know of anything much? For his time Arthur wasn’t particularly sexist, but I knew he could reach for the popular male view of women whenever he was feeling insecure about himself. Arthur’s sexism was, as it usually is, a form of self-defence against a sense of his own inadequacy to meet a particular challenge. His implied belittling of my opinion on this occasion was a useful means for diverting his anger away from himself and its real cause. I don’t know that he ever understood things in this way, but it is how I understood them.