Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  So it was settled. I would get in touch with Pat and invite them both up for a weekend. ‘Them,’ Arthur had said. It was the only thing that marred the sweetness of my secret joy that afternoon. I had forgotten her, hadn’t I. An image of Edith sitting on the veranda observing us now came into my mind; not drinking or joining in with us but watching us, being smugly pregnant and womanly, not saying anything, a helpless smile occasionally passing across her lovely features. Yes, she was lovely. She was what some men call a real woman. That is, she was motherly and voluptuous at one and the same time. A suitable object for the male dreaming. I was building an image of her to be detested.

  I was wearing a wide straw hat that afternoon, which shaded my face. But even so I think Freddy noticed my colour was up. Drunk or sober, Freddy didn’t miss a lot.

  No sooner had the plan to invite Pat and Edith to Old Farm been decided than I began to feel sick with worry about it and to wonder if I was doing the right thing or was getting myself into a mess that I would never be able to get out of ever again. My worry took the form of an unpleasant combination of desire—fuelled by the phony liberties of the alcohol—considerable fear, confused expectation and utter self-loathing. I drank a great deal at that lunch and talked far more than I meant to.

  I was on my own in the kitchen later when Barnaby came stumping onto the veranda from the garden, whistling something piercing from one of his operas. I said, ‘Please, Barnaby! I’ve got a headache.’ The others were in the library getting some serious drinking done and no doubt flying with their imaginings of greatness. I told Barnaby I wasn’t feeling well enough to cook dinner. He said cheerfully, ‘I’ll cook it for you, my darling. Go and lie down.’

  I can’t remember what Barnaby cooked. He was a good cook. It would have been something tasty and not too complicated and probably a little surprising. Perhaps with an Asian flavour. He had spent some years in Thailand. He loved foraging in my vegetable garden, which was partly his garden too. He knew something was up with me and wanted to get the full story over the meal. I gave him the bare bones of it. He suspected more and came back in the morning and helped me break up the irises and plant them out. Barnaby wasn’t Freddy. Anything you told Barnaby in the morning was all over town by lunchtime. Anyway, what was there to tell? It was all just a confusion of the soul at that stage. I didn’t know whether to hope Pat Donlon would feel as confused as me when I contacted him, or would have forgotten me by now.

  •

  Adeli has just come out to the kitchen. I closed my notebook and set it aside with my pen on it. She looks as hot as I feel, her apple cheeks glowing. Maybe she’s been dancing again. She’s been doing something, that’s obvious. She asks me if I’d like a cold glass of lemon and orange. She calls it lolly water, a phrase she’s picked up. It sounds like lally wadder when she says it and I wonder for an instant what she is suggesting. I tell her that would be lovely and to please put some gin in it. She asks where the gin is and I tell her it’s in the refrigerator.

  I watch her making the drinks. She puts gin in mine but not in her own. I can see the perfect tone of her skin through the fine white linen dress she’s wearing. Open sandals on her small and rather shapely feet, and nicely tanned. I don’t know in which direction her tastes lie. There has never been any mention of a special friend either way. She brings my drink over and sets it down next to me on the table. When I see that she’s about to take her own drink back to the dining room I say, ‘Stay and have it here with me.’ She looks at me and I give her my nicest smile. She hesitates then pulls out a chair and sits. She takes a sip of her drink and looks at me again, not smiling, her look having more purpose in it now. She’s got something on her mind.

  She says, ‘I suppose you want to talk about my naked fandango?’

  ‘Is that what it was?’ I say pleasantly, trying not to smile.

  She sips her drink and looks into it and doesn’t say anything for a while. I let her think in the silence. That is what Freddy used to do. He allowed big silences in a conversation when the conversation was between two people. He invited confidences from his companion into the silence he offered them. Even though I knew what Freddy was doing I fell for it every time. When he was in a group he would take his share of the talking space and use it strongly. In this situation that I am in with Adeli he would sit saying nothing, not moving around or jiggling a foot or tapping a finger or giving out any sign of nervous waiting, like sipping his drink more than once in a while. I’m watching Adeli as if we both agree that it’s her turn to speak. To expand on the word fandango. The Americans, I’m assuming, call anything a fandango. For me she was not doing a Spanish dance on Arthur’s father’s dining table. But I let it be. Fandango will do for now if that is what she wants to call it.

  She looks directly at me, just a touch of aggression in her big amber eyes, holding her glass tightly so that the skin under her nails has gone pale, and she says, keeping her mouth tight and holding her shoulders in, ‘I suppose you think I’m trying to take him over?’

  I let a couple of seconds pass, then I say carefully, still being Freddy, ‘Do you want to take him over?’ I’m not sure that I know what she means by take him over. Pat’s been dead some while now and taking him over may not be an option for anyone, let alone this big girl. When I first saw her that day, coming around the back and surprising me on the veranda with my nightdress up around my waist, I thought she had nasty eyes. Today the amber of her eyes has a strange clarity, as if some fine perfection of thought or feeling has drawn all calculation from her soul and left her intentions pure. I can, it seems to me for an instant of insanity, see into her depths. And I am fascinated. The gin has not yet kicked in.

  She says seriously, her Californian accent suddenly more pronounced, ‘I’ve formed a deep spiritual connection with his work.’

  So much for the pure intentions of her soul. I’m still enough of an idiot to beguile myself into thinking such things. And there’s no time left now for me to learn better. Once again I give her a long silence. A flock of white cockatoos is going over, reclaiming country with their banshee screeching. I find it hard work not to mock this stuff she’s coming out with. ‘That’s good,’ I say. What else can be said to such nonsense?

  She looks at me; an innocent little-girl look that I haven’t seen before, her shoulders relaxed and her fingers releasing the glass. I wonder if she has been to acting school and all this body language is a studied effect to impress me with the veracity (not simply the truth) of what she’s getting at.

  She says, ‘You don’t mind, Mrs Laing?’

  ‘Does it matter if I mind?’

  ‘But do you?’ she persists.

  ‘Do you care if I mind?’ I’m determined to keep her offering up what’s in her mind while keeping my own thoughts to myself.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  A big silence now. I could have taken a nap if I’d known how long it was going to go on for. As it is I have to suppress a yawn. She notices.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m tiring you.’

  ‘I was already tired,’ I say. ‘At eighty-four or-five or whatever I am there isn’t a lot of energy left by four in the afternoon. Please go on.’ I have a feeling I’ve spooked her with my interest and she won’t pick up the thread of this thing again. I resist prompting her and am half expecting her to get up and leave.

  She says with solemnity, her hands coming together, the one clasping the other, like two plump pink crabs joined in the ecstasy of mating, ‘I have found my spiritual guide in Patrick Donlon.’

  I can’t deal with this and decide there is nothing to be hoped for from her. And who ever called him Patrick? I forget to be Freddy and tell her, ‘Well, you’d better watch where he takes you.’ I’d rather have Arthur’s Ponty rattle than this shit. Poor old Arthur. God save his soul. I can say that if I like. Whatever it means. We stayed together till the end. I nursed him for his last two years here in this house. His last night I was with him holding his hand in the Aust
in Hospital. He was looking into my eyes, trying to stay focused on me, when he went. I saw him leave. It was three in the morning. Then he was gone and I was suddenly alone. I had no idea what the word grief meant till the moment he left me. An iron band tightening around my body and my mind and crushing me … I see Adeli is looking at me as if she feels sorry for me. I realise she’s seeing some poor lame old biddy not long for the bonfire. I am surprised and a little proud to hear myself say firmly, ‘I think it’s time for you to pack your bags and go, Adeli. You can take one of his drawings with you. But that’s it. I’ve had enough.’

  She says calmly, ‘You’ve been working too hard at your writing today.’ She fingers a corner of my exercise book—what was the child’s name?

  I snatch the book away. ‘Haven’t you got enough of me in the dining room? You’ll have to wait for this for a day or two yet.’

  ‘I’ll make you some scrambled eggs and toast,’ she says. It is no effort for her to remain composed. ‘Would you like a fried tomato with that?’

  ‘I need a pee,’ I say bitterly, and I grab the table and try to stand.

  She comes around the table and helps me get onto my feet. She steadies me and hands me Barnaby’s stick. I snatch it out of her hand and slam its bronze tip down on the floor. She takes my free arm and comes with me to the bathroom door. ‘Will you be all right?’ I shut the bathroom door violently on her and feel my way around the wall to the pan. I pee then let out a satisfying fart. I sit for a minute, then yell, ‘Give me a hand in here!’ I know she’s still out there. I have no strength. I can do nothing without her.

  14

  The flies

  LUNCH WAS DONE WITH LONG AGO. IT WAS NOW LATE IN THE afternoon. A lovely autumn afternoon it was, the sky clear, the air warm, bees among the flowers, birds in the trees, other birds flying over in small flocks, going home to roost or maybe to their favourite watering places, crying to each other for passion and comfort as they went. The human company had scattered a bit since lunch. Two friends down the hill in the garden, concealed from the house by the coppice of elders, planted by Arthur on a fancy for homemade wine of the old country. The young man lying on his back in the rich smell of the grass, she reading Yeats to him, searching in the little book for poems to fit their moment, so that he will laugh and reach up and hold her to his chest and kiss her lips. ‘Never give all the heart,’ she read, ‘for love will hardly seem worth thinking of to passionate women if it seems certain …’ Her young voice in the autumn afternoon, full of hope and charm and dreams. He watching her lips forming the words. They were nice lips but the wine and the food was making him wish for sleep more than for love. Voices and laughter drifting to him from the river, where some of the party had gone to swim. He closed his eyes, imagining the swimmers’ golden bodies glistening in the lantern sun of late afternoon, hearing Yeats’s words in the young woman’s voice. He was not in love with her enough to have anxiety about it, his situation pleasant rather than passionate. What was his name? Who was he? She was Alice Meadows and had once been a model in the life class at the Gallery School (Pat called it the lifeless class). She had become a painter herself and was one of our group of young artists at the time.

  After the lunch was done with, a core of guests had not moved but had stayed to drink and talk earnestly about art and other matters. In the kitchen Pat was sitting at the table with his back to the screen door and the veranda. With his right hand he was holding onto a glass of beer, as if he thought it might wander away from him if he did not restrain it, and in his left hand he was touching a cigarette to his lips, his eyes narrowed, squinting at Louis de Vries through the smoke.

  Louis de Vries was sitting across from Pat and was waiting for a response to some proposition he had taken care to compose, directing his words to Pat but talking for the sake of the company, confident his friends were favouring his arguments over the arguments of this barbarian of Autumn’s, if the barbarian had any arguments of his own. He was yet to hear anything half sensible from the man. A couplet of Eliot’s was in his mind to deliver to Autumn later: The heathen are come into thine inheritance, And thy temple have they defiled.

  A bottle of beer was on the table in front of Pat, several empties and numerous wine bottles down the length of the table, glinting nervously at each other among the disarray of dirty crockery and the scatter of leftovers.

  Pat took a long drag on his cigarette, his gaze not leaving Louis’s face. He might have been considering a purchase. Unusually, for he preferred to dress neatly, Pat was wearing a stained singlet that had once been white (when his mother was caring for his laundry) and a pair of old khaki shorts. His feet bare, crossed under the table, the toes of his left foot anxiously gripping the toes of his right foot. His narrow shoulders were bony and freckled with sunburn, his arms firm and strong enough to wield an axe all day, his chest without a sign of hair. His hands, too, despite the work he undertook for Mr Gerner, were fine. They were strong sensitive hands, you could see that, and had a suggestion of intelligence about them. What an ungenerous soul might have called native cunning. Nothing, at any rate, in Louis’s opinion, that could have been attributed to refinements due either to upbringing or education.

  A woman’s sudden shout of laughter came from the garden.

  Pat said, ‘Someone’s having fun.’ He skolled the beer and reached for the bottle. Turning his glass on its edge, he watched it fill, bringing it upright as the beer approached the top, then setting the glass and the bottle down on the table in front of him. Delicate bubbles of condensation, the bottle sweating.

  At the laugh from the garden Autumn turned from where she was standing at the sink. She could see Edith’s head and shoulders above the tall staked dahlia blooms. Edith on Barnaby’s arm, Barnaby waving his stick over his head, acting out a story for her of his youth in the wild outback. Edith leaning back against his arm and laughing. She was without a hat and her dark hair was catching lights from the low sun. Autumn turned back into the room. She had been following the conversation between Louis and Pat and was interested to hear where it would go.

  George Lane was gloomily watching Louis and Pat from the far end of the table, his head lowered, his eyes dark and brooding. Lovely Alice Meadows had gone off with a friend, going at a run to hide in the garden with him, to read love poems to him. And George was getting drunk. His intention was to get a lot drunker before the day was done. It was quite likely he would want to fight someone. Just at this moment he had a tight smile in his eyes, visualising a series of Alice in gipsy dresses with bloodstained fangs, her thighs gaping, revealing some kind of dark evisceration. The gross images of delicate Alice swam satisfyingly in his mind against a deep green and black background, in which were shifting lights. Fairy lights, were they? Was it a fairground in hell? He would like to know. He would find out. It would come to him, he was sure of that. He might get up and go looking for those two. Yes, he might. He glowered down the table at Pat and Louis, as if he couldn’t make out whether they were human or animal. Isn’t it all the same? He laughed. A black laugh with no sun in it.

  Arthur looked at him and smiled, ready to hear something from him, as if his laugh had been a preparation for speech.

  But George had gone back to contemplating his hellish images. They came to him. He didn’t invent anything. It was all there waiting to be painted. Tormenting and delighting him. And when it wasn’t there he despaired of it ever returning and drank. Blankness for ever. He would kill himself (he never did, but was one among them who proposed it more than once. He became successful instead). He shifted on his chair and reached for his beer glass, missed it, steadied himself, and grasped it firmly in his fist. He emptied the contents down his throat, belched, and reached for the bottle.

  Louis was wearing his black velvet suit with black silk shirt and deep purple bow tie as usual. His hat was on the floor beside his chair, his hair a springy mop of darkly bouncing curls. He applied a wash to lend it raven highlights. Strangers at parties remarked
on his remarkable hair. Anne Collins was sitting to his right. She was sober and was watching Pat with close interest.

  Watching Anne watching Pat, Autumn asked herself, Is she measuring him for a suit of clothes? Freddy was sitting at the end of the table on Pat’s side and Arthur at the end opposite the Rayburn. Boris was drawing in the square pad he always carried with him. Arthur was lolling back in his chair, his right hand reaching down beside him, his fingers playing with Tom’s ears. The two oyster aristocrats from Asia had eaten well at the table and were asleep in one another’s arms in Tom’s basket. Tom purred loudly.

  Louis said, ‘You’ve rejected the conventional training of the artist not from some high disciplined principle, as you seem to claim …’

  Pat muttered, ‘I don’t have principles.’

  Louis continued, ‘… but from the commonplace need of youth to effect some kind of revolt against the elders. What you are doing is utterly traditional. That is what it is. That is all your wonderful revolt is, Patrick. It’s commonplace. You know? Ordinary. You have nothing with which to replace what you’ve rejected. If you had, then what you say might be interesting. Either you’ll soon see the error of your ways and re-enrol at the Gallery School, or you’ll stop doing art altogether.’ Louis straightened his shoulders and brushed at something on his shirt front. ‘Full stop! Your ideas, if I may say so, amount to very little. It takes enormous skill and heroic persistence to make something new in art. Either we follow Europe in this, or we Australians will fall by the wayside and remain a pointless backwater forever.’

  Freddy said composedly, ‘Forever. That is a very long time, Louis.’

  Louis frowned.

  Barnaby came into the kitchen. He was without Edith. He waved his wonderful black stick. ‘She’s gone for a walk down to the river.’ He gave the timber wall a loud whack with the ferrule and made everyone jump. ‘Your wife, Pat, is a lovely woman. You are a very lucky boy. You don’t deserve her.’ He reached and poked Pat playfully in the small of the back with his stick. ‘Do you hear me? That girl’s too good for you.’