by Alex Miller
Lying there helplessly in a crumpled heap in the hot sun beside the fish pond, half on the bricks and half on the grass, was no fun. I was in pain and unable to get up. It was humiliating. Being in pain is nothing new, it is being unable to help oneself that is humiliating. I have learned to endure pain by submitting to it and taking painkillers. If one doesn’t work, the other usually does. I called for Adeli but she didn’t come to my aid. When I want that woman she is not available to me. Stony came. Good, solid, ever-reliable Stony of the hands stained with the earth. I have not done him justice here. Yet it is a kind of justice to him if I keep him in the shadows. For that is where Stony prefers to be. He does not hanker after his own spotlight. He did not ask me how I came to be lying there but picked me up without a word—I might have been a broken bird—and carried me into the house. He laid me gently on my bed then fetched Adeli from the dining room. I didn’t ask him if she had been dancing naked before the mirror and he didn’t say. He came back a minute or two later with Barnaby’s shillelagh and set it against the bed end. Stony is older than I am. He too is a survivor. I wonder what ironies inhabit his dreams? Or is he innocent of irony? I do not know him deeply enough to guess his inner life with any assurance. Andrew has given me painkillers, but they don’t seem to be working so I shall have to practise submission. Luckily it was my right wrist. I am left-handed and can still scribble this.
Andrew carried on with his usual patter. Attempting to reassure me, while he was strapping up my ankle and plastering my arm, that I’d soon be up and about again. I told him, ‘Everyone knows at my age, Andrew, that a fall is the Fall. So do please stop talking nonsense. I might be old but I am not stupid. My next stop,’ I said to him, ‘on this little journey of ours is the crematorium. We all know that. It’s where you will be going too one of these days.’ He snorted at this and asked me to keep my arm still. ‘Time’s bitter flood will rise, Andrew,’ I quoted at him. ‘Your beauty perish and be lost.’ He asked me where this was from. I told him I had forgotten. What is the good of telling people such things who will never read poetry but will only ever look at the television? The one serious possession remaining to me is my mind, the great container of my memory. When it goes, I shall go with it. There are tablets at the back of the drawer in my bedside table. I hope I shall have enough judgment to know when the time has come for me to swallow them. What I didn’t tell him (he would have had me in for scans and tests) was that something deeper than knee ligaments and wrist bones seems to have been jolted out of position by the fall. I don’t feel right standing up. And I don’t mean perching on one leg like the stork I am. But being upright at all. My body does not like it. Something has ended. I am not panic-stricken. Let it end when it will.
•
The first night with Pat and Arthur sitting up at the table across from each other eating their rabbit pie was easier than I’d thought it was going to be. I’d patched him up earlier. I enjoyed doing it. Being a mother to my boy. So there had been closeness and touch between us, and his breath on my face when I bent to stick the bandaid above the worst eye, the left one. That and catching the look in his eyes, of course, that too. And I’d seen it was all still there with us. And Arthur sitting at the table nursing his whisky and watching. We might have been a little family after all, the three of us. I had put Pat’s clothes in the wash for the morning and he was wearing one of Arthur’s old dressing-gowns. A grey one I’d always liked. Silk. He had very nice feet. I told him he could have been a dancer. He pointed a foot and looked at it, as if he had never thought to look at his feet before this.
I had noticed he did not greatly prize his natural gifts, but was inclined to dwell on his poor education and his family’s lack of money, believing himself deprived of life’s good things. I saw him differently, seeing in him a man endowed with certain beauties and a cast of mind and temperament that would assure him of some achievement one day. He seemed to me far more naturally an artist than the rest of our friends. His confident rejection of the training they had embraced, and on which they relied for their confidence, convinced me of this. Pat possessed a rare sense of personal belief that referred to nothing outside itself, no community or school or circle of like-minded friends. It stood alone. Where did it come from? Not, apparently, from his family. Not from some inheritance of a sense of worth. It came from within himself. That he might misplace it from time to time was nothing. We all know absence and despair, and know not why we know these things, or why it is we wake the next morning, our confidence restored to us. I saw the good things that had come to him at his birth, and which he did not see. And I pointed them out to him. There was the beauty of his hands. To look at Pat Donlon’s hands you knew he was not a man who was meant to do nothing with his life. He was always surprised to hear these things from me. I think no one had ever said them to him before. Not even Edith. It is impossible for me not to notice a man’s hands. Stony’s I could draw exactly as a study from my memory. And Arthur’s. All of them. They were all known to me by their hands. And by much else besides. A man’s hands tell a whole story, whereas a woman’s hands conceal more than they reveal. We are misled if we read a woman’s soul in her hands.
I was already, even that first night, dreading the day Pat would leave us (the day he would leave me). The day Edith would come and reclaim him. Or the day he would return to her. Surely that day would be when their child was born. I knew how precious this little eye of the storm was to us, the three of us quietly tucked away together up here at Old Farm, the world roaring outside. My men with me. There was surely something of fate in this, if there was ever fate in anything. I wanted to believe it, but have always struggled to quite put my belief in fate. Pat could turn a key and I would be young again. This I did know. Touch my hand, my cheek, the instep of my foot and I was a schoolgirl ready to faint. A feeling more dear to me almost than my life, for the life it signified (if that makes sense). That I was more alive with him than with anyone. More dangerously stirred to acts of folly and excess. Pat restored my youth to me.
But that first night there was no urgency in it for us. No anxiety. We were three, not two and one, that night. We all felt it. Arthur and Pat had enjoyed a drink together at the station buffet before they caught the train and it seemed they had talked all the way home. Apparently Arthur had told Pat the story of his life and had laughed (of all things) when he told him the story of his mother moving to Melbourne to be close to him after his father passed away and the farm went to his brother. His brother, Don, pulling down the old family home and building a new yellow-brick one on the high bank overlooking the river, giving his father’s collection of books and the dining room furniture to Arthur. Ridding himself of his parents. I had never heard Arthur laugh at this story. It was always a gloomy old Tasmanian relic, damp and green and heavy, whenever he brought it out for my sympathy. So it appeared Pat and Arthur had become mates on the train journey. It’s wonderful what a glass or two of beer with a mate does for a man at the end of a long day at the office. Ah well.
Arthur went to work in the morning in great spirits. There had been no sign of Pat at breakfast, so once I had seen Arthur off I took Pat in a cup of tea. He was sitting up in bed reading.
‘I found this,’ he said, and held up a book for me to see. ‘Is it all right if I borrow it?’ He was like a bruised schoolboy. It was Ludwig Leichhardt’s Journal. I had never read it. I scarcely knew we had it. I don’t think Arthur had read it either. It had belonged to his father. A heavy old tome with a cracked spine.
I set his tea on the bedside table and stood looking down at him. His face resembled the backside of a mandrill. Purple, blue, yellow and red, his lips, eyes and jaw swollen, twisting his features out of shape. He might have been a Francis Bacon portrait of one of that peculiar artist’s friends, but of course we didn’t have Bacon’s skewed view of ourselves until the 40s. His face was the right colours but was too distorted for a Van Gogh.
‘Of course you can borrow it,’ I told him. ‘They�
��re all there in the library, the journals of the explorers. Arthur’s father collected them. Arthur will be delighted if you read them.’ They were books that no one else had ever given any thought to since Don pushed them Arthur’s way. Books from the past, they had occupied a dead area in the library and in our thoughts. Was it just chance, and his eager curiosity for things, that had led Pat to them? His hunger for knowledge was great. He felt he had missed out. I think he would have read the entire library if he had had the time to do it.
I should have left his room as soon as I put his tea down and exchanged these harmless pleasantries about the explorers’ journals with him. But instead of leaving I continued to stand there looking at him. He looking up at me. I became aware of the silence of the house, the sound of the train in the distance. My blood surged through me, delicious and intoxicating. Stony was in the garden waiting for me to come out to help stake the tomato plants. Pat set the book aside and drew back the covers. He was naked. I took off my clothes and got into bed with him and we made love. He put his hand over my mouth when I howled. I opened my eyes and saw that he was laughing. I was afraid Stony had heard me. We muffled our laughter, like children playing a forbidden game in terror of being overheard by alert parents in the next room. If to be old or to be young is but a state of mind, then I had been old all my years with Arthur and now was young again.
Pat came out onto the veranda later and watched me and Stony working in the garden. He did not return my wave and didn’t offer to help but stood smoking one of Arthur’s cigarettes as if he was alone in his thoughts and it was his own house. When I looked up again he was gone. That we could be so intimate one moment and in different worlds the next confused me. It made his presence elusive and I dreaded to lose him at any moment without explanation or reason. This feeling kept me in a state of nervous suspense. When I had set our lunch in the kitchen later I went in search of him. I found him in the library reading.
He did not greet me but held up his hand and said, ‘Listen to this.’ He beckoned me to his side. He was sitting on the couch reading Leichhardt’s Journal. ‘It’s poetry,’ he said, his voice filled with enthusiasm. He was in the dream of his reading. I went up and stood beside him and he took my hand in his (his hands were soft) and he read to me from the book in a voice of rapt interior attention, ‘Charley also, whilst bringing in the horses on the morning of the 22nd, passed a numerous camp, who quietly rose and gazed at him, but did not utter a single word.’ He looked up at me, his bruised eyes alight with the wonder of it. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you feel it? Out there a thousand miles from another white man and these people seeing Charley coming along. Never having seen anything like him before. Standing up and gazing at him. Can’t you just feel the silence of that moment? The whole of Australia is in that silence.’ He looked down at the book in his lap. ‘What a great thing that is. That silence. It calls to you, doesn’t it?’
But I had never heard the call of the silence as he had heard it. I loved him for being sensitive to such feelings, and I envied him, and I feared for myself.
He looked at me. ‘I’ll read to you whenever you like.’
‘That would be lovely,’ I said. He was still holding my hand. He had not mentioned Edith, but she stood in my mind day and night. Surely she must come to reclaim him soon? Melancholy is to know the beauty of life, and to know it must end.
He read to me often. And we made love all over the house and down by the river. Wherever we made love, those places became my sacred sites, each one of them a daily signal to me as I passed it. But never in the bedroom where Arthur and I slept. Pat made making love seem natural and nothing to be feared. And while we were together I felt as he did and was free of guilt and uncertainty. But as soon as I was no longer with him my fear that I was to lose Arthur because of what I had discovered with Pat returned to torment me. Arthur and I still made love every once in a while in the old silent way. It was a torture for me. I gritted my teeth and prayed for it to be over each time. That last gasp and sigh as Arthur finished and withdrew. Even as I write this I believe that no one should have to speak of such things as these. But it is the place to which I have led myself in this search for my truth, and from here there can be no turning back to more innocent themes if I am to persist in that search.
Pat spent his days in the library. I could always find him there. And when the three of us sat in there together after dinner in the evening he did not join our conversation but read and smoked, lost in the world of the Australian explorers and oblivious to our presence. I soon came to understand that Pat possessed no sense of social obligation. He felt no need to make a contribution. To anything. To the budget of our household or to the conversation (the two chooks he brought home that time Freddy kissed him he told us he had won in a pub raffle, and hadn’t known what to do with them so had brought them home). He never washed the dishes or made his bed or offered to help in the garden. Not once. And he didn’t even suggest that he might find a job and pay his own way. He seemed not to notice these things. They were not important to him. They yielded nothing. He lived with us as a child might, unaware of his dependence on us for his every need. I envied him his freedom and knew I should never be able to fake such a detachment from any situation. For me, as for Arthur and our caste, all situations possessed their social dimension. Obligation attached to everything in our lives. There was no place where we felt ourselves to be free from the need to contribute. It had been bred in us. Pat was the first person I had known intimately who was without this sense of obligation. I wondered if it was just him, or if it was common to all people of his class. But Stony was a working man and he was rich in a sense of responsibility to his fellow human beings. So it wasn’t just a working-class thing. But of course Stony was not strictly an Australian either. Though he was uneducated, Stony was like Boris, essentially an outsider who would always be an outsider. The deeper connections of the native born would never be forged for them. They were not there and could not be brought into being. Neither Stony nor Boris, as much as we loved them, would ever be mistaken for an Australian. They carried something with them that we lacked; the marker of their cultures and their histories. The old world of Central Europe was in them. We knew nothing of them first-hand, as it were. To think of Stony did not help me to understand Pat. I saw it was a dead end and abandoned that line of thought. Pat could not have been mistaken for anything but an Australian.
The art journals Arthur and I kept on the low table between the two sofas (it was a Chinese cherry wood table given to us by Louis) were now covered with numerous old volumes of the journals of the explorers. Pat kept all the old books out and had scraps of newspaper sticking out of them marking places he wanted to find his way back to. He would dart from one volume to another to check some fact, or to relive a scene that had appealed to him, or to make some comparison. On these occasions his lips moved while he leaned forward to read, an eagerness in him. When he was reading Charles Sturt’s two-volume journal of his South Australian expedition, he would look up and exclaim from time to time, ‘Not a patch on Leichhardt.’ He did not address this remark to Arthur or to me but to the vacant air around him. The absent tone of his voice made me want to look for the other person among us to whom he was addressing his remark. He read all the journals. Leichhardt remained his favourite, Major Mitchell his least favourite.
One weekday, when Arthur was at his office and Barnaby was with us for afternoon tea in the kitchen, Pat suddenly said, speaking his private preoccupation aloud and breaking into our conversation, ‘It would be such a great thing to do.’
‘What would be a great thing to do?’ Barnaby asked. He was interested in Pat, ‘Autumn and I were just filling in the tedious hours in the hope you would share your thoughts with us.’
Pat said, ‘To follow Leichhardt’s trail. To see that country. To go where he went.’
‘Is that all? It might be boring, Pat. There are a lot of flies and it is very hot.’
‘I’m serious,�
� Pat said.
‘I can see that.’
‘It would all be changed,’ Pat said, disengaging from Barnaby. ‘It wouldn’t be the way it was in his day.’
Barnaby said, ‘On the contrary. Most of that country hasn’t changed at all since he went through. The Aborigines are gone, of course, pretty much, but little else has changed. You should come up home with me one of these days. I’ll show you that country. Nothing simpler. Leichhardt went through just to the east of us. The Expedition Range is named after him.’
Pat’s eyes, which were fully healed and recovered by then, filled with a look of boyish wonder—it was the look English public schoolboys once wore on the illustrated covers of stories about adventures among the savages of the South Seas. He said, ‘Would that really be possible, Barney? I mean seriously?’
Barnaby laughed at him. They had got on well together ever since the day Barnaby took his part against the others at lunch. Barnaby said airily, ‘Nothing simpler, old mate. You’d love it. You city boys are full of romantic notions about the bush.’ He turned and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Thanks for the leeks. I must be going.’
When Barnaby had gone Pat wanted to make love, so we went to his room. It was wonderful as usual and I was lost to everything. Before I was really quite finished, Pat withdrew abruptly and said, ‘Was he just saying that, do you think?’
‘Who saying what?’ I said, my mind reeling as if I had run into a door.
‘Would it really be possible for me to go up there with Barney?’
‘You’re a bastard,’ I said. I rolled away from him and got off the bed and put my clothes on (I was still throbbing). A bright little flame of hatred was flaring inside me. I hoped I would be able to contain it.
‘What’s up? What have I said?’ Pat seemed genuinely perplexed. What could possibly have annoyed me? The flame of my anger burned brighter.
