by Alex Miller
Louis was annoyed. Drink didn’t suit him. His thoughtful formulation had gone unanswered and was drifting away into the emptiness of a conversation going nowhere. He leaned forward. ‘So, what’s your response, Patrick?’ He saw that Pat was not paying attention and looked about him distractedly for cigarettes.
Arthur reached forward, offering his blue packet with the dancing lady on it.
Louis said gratefully, ‘Thanks, Arthur. Thank you.’ He slid one of the cigarettes out of the packet. He didn’t see why he should give in. He wasn’t going to. He lit the cigarette with his Ronson and drew in a lungful of the fragrant smoke. That was better. He looked about for a drink. He couldn’t remember which was his glass. All the glasses were dirty.
Pat was watching him. Observing a specimen. Little Lord Fauntleroy, wasn’t it? Where did that come from? Lord Fauntleroy. He smiled at Anne Collins and when she didn’t smile back he lifted his glass to her. ‘Cheers, darling.’
Anne Collins did smile then. ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said, mildly amused by him.
‘True.’
‘And you’re drunk.’
‘And you’re sober.’
Freddy noticed that Pat had nice teeth. They were even and white. Had his parents taken him to the dentist regularly, which seemed unlikely, or was he just lucky?
Pat said, as if it was neither here nor there to him, ‘Making it new is Europe’s problem, Louis. That’s what they’re doing. It’s not our problem.’ He smiled at Anne again. ‘What do you reckon, Anne?’
‘So tell us,’ Louis said. ‘What is our problem, Patrick? We are all dying to know. Here we are, living in the dark ages without you. Please Patrick, do tell us what we are doing wrong, won’t you?’
Barnaby stood in the doorway to the passage. He looked around the kitchen, waiting for silence, then drawing breath, his arms out wide, his stick hanging from his right hand, he began to sing, ‘Ah! Godiamo, la tazza, la tazza e il cantico, le notte abbella e il riso; in questo paradiso ne scopra il nuovo di.’ He bowed and turned and walked down the passage, his fine tenor voice trailing away with great effect, ‘Quando non s’ami ancora.’ A moment later the library door slammed shut and the singing was silenced, as if the lid had been put on Barnaby’s tin. A faint murmur remained. If one listened keenly.
Pat smiled at Louis and took a drag on his cigarette. He refilled his glass and held it up, like a barman checking the head, or maybe he was just watching the bubbles rising, catching the light in a reflection of the doorway behind him.
‘Well?’ Louis said. ‘Your wisdom, Patrick. We are waiting to hear it.’ He chuckled. ‘You don’t have an answer, do you?’
Pat went on examining the beer.
Barnaby came back and stood quietly in the doorway. He was carrying a book he had promised to lend to Edith. It was not his book, but he assumed neither Autumn nor Arthur would object. Pat’s wife, after all, seemed a pretty safe bet.
‘Our problem is to make it Australian, Louis,’ Pat said, as if he was stating the obvious. He was preoccupied with the beer bubbles and might have been talking to himself.
‘And just how are we going to do that?’
Pat looked up at him. ‘You’re a persistent bugger, Louis. I’ll say that for you. If I knew the answer to that one I’d be doing it, wouldn’t I? Instead of sitting here listening to your shit.’
There was a silence.
Arthur sat up straight. His chair back creaked and Tom stepped out of the way. Autumn looked across at Arthur.
‘Beer bubbles,’ Pat said. He laughed uncertainly and raised his glass to Louis. ‘Here’s to you, mate. Long life and happiness, my dad always says.’ He looked around the room, possibly aware of having given offence. ‘Here’s to all of us.’
George said, ‘You rude bastard, Donlon!’ He made to get up but stumbled and had to put a hand to the table to stop himself toppling with his chair. ‘You scabrous little bastard!’
Pat laughed. ‘You’re pissed, George.’
‘Apologise!’ George shouted.
‘Or what?’ Pat said quietly. He turned to Louis and said lightly, ‘My sincere apologies, Louis.’ He looked at George. ‘And to you too, George.’
George scowled at him. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
Pat said, ‘Other things offend me, George. This bloke’s sarcasm’s one of those things.’ He drank some beer. He appeared, suddenly, to be downcast and sat looking into his beer, an expression of sadness on his face.
Barnaby waved his stick dangerously close above George’s head, the book clasped in his other hand, an evangelist on a street corner. He shouted, ‘Bravo! Let us all stand and drink to Pat’s singular truth.’ He tucked the book under his shillelagh arm and reached over George’s shoulder for George’s glass of beer. He raised the glass. ‘Come on, boys and girls, a toast to Pat Donlon!’
But something had come to an end. The energy had gone out of the room.
‘For God’s sake!’ Barnaby cried. ‘We don’t have to admire his bloody singlet, but we’d do well to have the modesty to acknowledge the truth of what this savage little bugger has just said to us.’ He took a sip from George’s beer, grimaced and set the glass down again. He laid a hand heavily on George’s shoulder. ‘I don’t know how you can drink that muck.’ He looked around the room. But he saw it was no good, they weren’t to be driven.
Freddy said, ‘I’ll give you a lift home, George.’
Barnaby turned away. ‘Damn you all!’ Then he turned back. ‘You’re all hoping to be in Paris or at the Slade by this time next year. And when you’re there, you will not forget what you’ve just heard here at Autumn and Arthur’s lunch table. The truth of it will eat into your confidence that there is any good reason for you to be in Europe and not here at home making it Australian.’ He raised his stick in Pat’s direction. ‘Good on you, Patrick.’
‘And I suppose your poetry’s not going to be referring to European precedents any more, Barney,’ Louis said, ‘now that you’ve converted to Saint Patrick’s philosophy? Is that what we are to expect from you?’
‘Louis, I’m like you. I’m doing it the old way. The provincial way. I want to get to Europe as badly as you do. Europe is the home of the life of my mind, just as it is yours. I am as Australian as you are, old mate, but making my art Australian, whatever that may mean, is not something I can take on. The only training any of us have ever had has been in the European tradition. We know nothing else. So I’m not pretending to take on something I know nothing about. Modernism’s already an old-fashioned idea. It’s dead. We know that. They’ve dealt with that one. We’re a generation behind them. All we can do now is to follow them and hope for the best.’
Boris roused himself and gave a bit of a shake of his shoulders. He was like a big golden house dog, moon-faced and moon-bodied. He tucked his little square sketchbook into the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket. When he was silent people often forgot he was among them. But when he spoke they listened. He carried the authority of the old world with him. They looked at him before he spoke, expecting to hear from him. He said, ‘There is no Australian art. It is like Canadian art. Or South African art. Or white Kenyan art. What are they like? Have any of you enquired? You Australians have no musical or artistic or literary traditions of your own. And what is worse, you have no folk art with which to sustain and renew yourselves. So unless you interbreed with the Aboriginal people and adopt their cultural forms of expression, you will have to either continue to be Europeans in Australia or improvise something entirely new of your own. That is your opportunity. But will you grasp it? Improvisation is a great freedom. We are all scattered about the world now. The African was enslaved and scattered and he came up with jazz. It was the greatest stroke of genius, and everyone has been influenced by it.’ He surveyed the room like a schoolmaster checking to see that his poor little ones were paying attention. ‘Your feast days, your cuisine, the songs you sing on such occasions. Your surroundings engender melancholy and regret that you are not
at home where those things are at home. The great opportunity for you is not to follow Europe but to improvise as the Africans did in America. Perhaps you can do something like that? Do you think you might? What can it be? Any ideas, any of you?’ He dragged himself to his feet. ‘Is someone going to give me a lift to the station, or am I going to have to walk?’
Barnaby said, ‘I’ll be content in beautiful Paris or lovely London, Boris. Don’t you worry. Dreaming of being a true cosmopolitan while I worship at the feet of the great ones and lament the sad history of my own country in their words. Pound’s and Eliot’s and Yeats’s, and the rest of them. To be a provincial at the courts of the kings, that’s my fate. Fortunately I’m content to embrace it. Go to London, Barnaby, my mother always urges me. Go to Paris. You will hear what the great world has to say to you. My mother is too sensible to say, And the great world will hear what you have to say to it. She knows the great world cares no more for me than I care for some poet in the wilds of British Columbia. When it comes to her son’s gifts my mother is a realist, not a dreamer.’
Pat scraped his chair back and stood up. They watched him leave. He went out past Autumn onto the veranda, gave a wild yell and jumped into the garden, clearing the fish pond and its sharp bricks at a bound.
No one said anything. The atmosphere in the kitchen was suddenly flat without him. There was to be no further contest.
Arthur said into the silence, ‘Never mind about Paris and the Slade. We’ll be at war with Hitler this time next year.’ He looked around the table at them all, as if they had already vanished. ‘Khaki,’ he said. ‘That’s going to be our colour.’
Autumn stood at the front door waving Freddy off. George was slumped beside him in the passenger seat. When Freddy had gone she did not return through the house to the others but walked round the southern side of the garden through the rhododendrons. She eventually found Pat sitting on Stony’s rustic bench behind the deep holly hedge that sheltered the vegetable garden from the north wind. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, apparently contemplating the grey-green spikes of the artichokes. He looked up as she came through the rose arch—Félicité et Perpetué, a delicate white-pink climber, faintly perfuming the air.
Pat pointed. ‘Look.’
She leaned down to see. A praying mantis swayed on an artichoke leaf, its colour perfectly matching the green of the leaf. ‘Stony will spray it with something,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘You really don’t know?’
He shrugged. ‘Am I supposed to know?’
‘It’s a praying mantis,’ she said. ‘Of course you’re not supposed to know. I didn’t mean that.’
‘Yes you did. You thought, What an ignorant bastard this bloke really is.’
‘All right, I did think that.’ She sat on the bench beside him. ‘I thought everyone knew what a praying mantis was.’
‘I’m kidding you,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew what it was.’
‘I don’t know whether to believe you or not.’
He laughed. ‘Neither do I.’
She sat puzzling at him. ‘You mustn’t be too hard on them.’ She reached and took his hand and laid it in her lap and examined it. She was drunk.
He watched her looking at his hand, as if his hand no longer belonged to him. ‘You just do that?’ he said. His hand resting against her thigh, the astonishing warmth of her skin through the thin material of her dress. His throat thickened. ‘You turn things on their head. You know that?’ His voice was a little husky.
She said nothing to this but smiled.
‘The first time we met, you told me I’d had a privileged upbringing. Now you say I’m being hard on your friends. It all seems the other way around to me.’
‘They say the soul is in the eyes.’ She considered his hand, holding it in both her own in her lap, then looked up at him. ‘Your soul is in your hands, Pat.’ She passed her fingers gently over the ripple of veins on the back of his hand.
He drew his hand away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No, it’s fine. It tickles.’ He rubbed his hand.
‘Have you got another cigarette?’
He handed her the cigarette he was smoking.
She took the half-smoked cigarette from him and put it between her lips. She closed her eyes and rested against the bench and drew the fragrant smoke into her lungs.
He watched her, the sun on her face, her long hair in disarray, the high dome of her pale forehead. The strands of her hair were fine and light, her scalp visible where the fall of the hair parted. It was the opposite of Edith’s hair, which was strong and dark and thick. Impossible to see Edith’s scalp. Even in bright sunlight. He was tempted to lean forward and sniff Autumn’s scalp, just to see. But he didn’t. He could not be as free with her as she was with him. She was different from every woman he had ever known. He was not sure what it was that made this difference an issue for him. He did not feel at home with her, but felt rather as if he was in a foreign place, another country than his own. Not his Australia. Her language was not his language. He did not know what to expect from her, or what it was she expected from him. He was unsure of the signals here between these people, what this or that sign or this or that look or word might mean. He caught only the surface texture of their conversation. He struggled to find his sense of humour with them and resorted to the coarse in place of the comic. He was aware of all this. Something in him was dampened down by them. Were they aware of it? Or only of his coarseness? Was this woman aware of it? That he was only half here, the subtle, the eloquent, the emotional half of him held in abeyance? Edith was one of their caste but she was immediate and present to him. Edith was his familiar. He knew what Edith meant. He knew himself to be understood by Edith in the way he understood himself. And yet Edith was at ease with these people. He decided it could not be their caste that estranged him, but something else.
She opened her eyes and handed the cigarette back to him. ‘Thanks. I needed that. You don’t think much of them, do you?’
‘They’re okay,’ he said. He examined what was left of the cigarette. ‘They’re just people. I can only take so much of that crap. Art’s what you make, not what you talk about.’
‘It’s both,’ she said. ‘Art is many things. You mustn’t try to say what art is or you’ll be required to say what it’s not. And that will be impossible for you.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Wilde said it’s more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.’
‘Well, Wilde, whoever he was, was wrong.’
‘He was a praying mantis,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure you know him. He was a satirist who meant everything he ever said. And I quite liked what you had to say in there just now. Only I don’t think it’s that simple. Louis is a very fine artist. It would be a mistake for you to dismiss Louis. He paints wonderful semi-abstracts. Like all good artists he renders the familiar strange to us. He has done a brilliant series of Luna Park. Luna Park is your own backyard. It is the Luna Park we know and yet it is somewhere else, somewhere we wonder if we might have been in another life, a richer and more poetic life than this one. And a more tragic life. Louis is good. Make no mistake. He will be a success in London, I’m sure of it. His manner is too showy for you but he’s disciplined with his work. You would admire it if you knew it. He’s got an exhibition on at the Basement. It’s been getting good reviews. I’ll take you.’
There was shouting and laughter from the outer garden. The swimmers were returning.
Pat slapped her cheek suddenly, not hard but with a quick dart of his hand.
She flinched and put a hand to her face.
‘Mozzie,’ he said. He held out his hand for her to see the squashed insect in his palm. ‘One little bloodsucker less.’
The offence of the mild blow to her cheek had shocked her. She said with feeling, ‘I hate being struck.’
He saw that she was upset. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll let the buggers eat yo
u next time.’ She did not respond. ‘I keep having to apologise here, don’t I?’ he said. ‘I made a mess of it in there. Why did you invite us?’
‘Oh, you didn’t make a mess of it at all. Don’t be silly.’ She was impatient with this.
‘George and Louis thought I did.’
‘And Barnaby loves you. So what? We argue and fight endlessly here. No one ever agrees with anyone else. Ever. That was mild. I invited you because I believe in you. They’ll be your friends next time you see them. They are all people of courage and integrity.’
‘And are you and I friends?’ he asked.
She drew back, the better to see him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Friends? Is that our word? Say it often enough and we empty it of meaning. I don’t know if you and I are friends or not, Pat. But I know we are something.’
He took her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips.
‘Don’t!’ She pulled away. ‘Please don’t do that.’ But she had permitted the kiss for a moment before she recoiled, just as she had permitted it at the edge of the ocean.
‘A kiss between friends,’ he said. He was not sure if he had reached for the coarse response once again. Or had it been something more than that? The repeat of this impulse to kiss her lips? It angered him that he was not able to know himself with her.
She stood up and flattened her skirt with her hands. She looked down at him. ‘I don’t know what I am to make of you.’
‘Make of me whatever you like, then.’
‘Let’s go in to the others and have a drink,’ she said. ‘Freddy and George have gone. I need to be among people.’
‘You’re afraid of me,’ he said.
‘That’s stupid. No. Of course I’m not afraid of you. If I’m afraid of anyone, Pat, it’s myself.’
