Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  Pat was in awe of the energy the series had released in him and feared the day his energy for them would wane and desert him. He did not wish to be done with the painting. He believed in himself with an excited fear that maybe it was all wrong after all and he would wake up and realise he had done nothing.

  ‘So what do you think?’ He must have asked for their reassurance a hundred times. He slept the night with Autumn and woke early each morning and went straight across to the machinery shed to reassure himself that his pictures were still alive for him, still needing his attention in their growing towards a maturity he had not foreseen, eager to see that maturity come into being, surprised by what he did, by what he saw, as if they were strange plants and were to present him with unknown fruits and blossoms. ‘This is my country,’ he said to Barnaby. ‘God, I feel it right here!’ And he poked his chest hard with his finger.

  Barnaby put an arm around his shoulder. ‘You’re doing it, old mate.’

  ‘You guys believed in me. I wouldn’t be doing it without you two. I’m too scared to think about it. I hate to think what I might see if I did think about it.’

  On the day before they were due to go home Autumn and Pat and Barnaby stood in the machinery shed looking at the collection before packing it up. Pat said, ‘So what are we going to call it?’

  Autumn said, ‘Well, we’ve been calling it The Citadel Range.’ He said nothing and she saw he was not content with such a title. ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘Hinterland,’ he said with certainty. ‘That’s what this is. Guy Cowper and his mates can make something of that. They’ll see it as a metaphor for all kinds of shit. My interior life as a swine for sure.’ He laughed. ‘What do you reckon?’

  And so the machinery-shed collection became Hinterland. Without the article. The last painting contained the only hint of narrative or sequence. A final addition of the brush, that was perhaps at first no more than an accident, and a corner of the homestead found its way onto the far right-hand edge of the picture. A narrow vertical of white-painted weatherboard topped by a triangle of green tin roof. A face at the only window. A woman looking out towards the citadel range. Pat turned to Autumn. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘You’re in here too. You and me both. Your eyes will always be in these pictures. They wouldn’t have come into being without you.’

  Barnaby found some hairy pink twine and they tied the paintings in four bundles of ten. When Barnaby had gone back to the house Pat and Autumn went down to the creek and swam naked in the cool clear water, ducking under to meet and embrace. That night they made love for the last time on her narrow iron bed in the so-called cottage (just a few feet away from the green frogs, which she was never to forget, the frogs and the supplicating arms of the drowning woman and the old boar under the lime trees).

  •

  And that (except for the details of saying goodbye to Bill and Peter and Margery and getting the shiny red aeroplane back to the coast and travelling for all of two days from Rockhampton by train to Melbourne) was more or less the end of their visit to Sofia Station in the Central Highlands of Queensland. Another country, that Autumn would come to think of as a country entirely foreign to her mind and way of thinking. Pat revisited Sofia and the country around the ranges whenever he returned to Australia from England during his long and fruitful career, but Autumn never did go back there. Pat found there his source and drew on it confidently for the material of his art until his last days, painting his strange pictures of those uncelebrated landscapes, those silent people, their broken dreams and unspoken hopes, the passions that flew around their heads like imprisoned ghosts. But always really painting himself, if you knew him. Snow or shine you could have found him there in his converted barn at the back of his fine old flint and greystone house in the West Midlands, painting the Expedition Range. He had his own copy of the first edition of Leichhardt’s Journal. Purchased from Quaritch in Golden Square for a goodly sum of English pounds.

  Autumn returned to the creek and the supplicating arms of the drowning woman and to the narrow iron bed many times in her dreams, in her thwarted passion, and in her helpless nightmares. And in the persistence of memory. The citadel range haunted Autumn throughout her long life. Right to the end. Green frogs and all, the musty smell of the striped ticking mattress, the pallid gecko on the ceiling with the black eyes (like an angel in disguise, knowing everything before it had come to pass), looking down on them making love for their last time together. And the eyes of the black boar that had seen into her soul.

  If there has to be a last time for everything (and how can there not be?), it is just as well we do not know it when it comes to us.

  •

  It was dark and raining steadily when Barnaby turned into the driveway at Old Farm and reefed on the handbrake. The brake made a loud ratcheting sound. The sharp noise and the lurching stop woke Autumn. She had been sleeping against Pat’s shoulder on the back seat, his left arm around her, his right hand resting in her lap, his fingers lightly gripping her upper thigh through the thin fabric of her cotton dress. He had not been asleep. They sat up and disentangled themselves. He kissed her warm cheek gently and said, ‘We’re here.’ (Which, of course, is where we always are.)

  The porch light went on and Arthur came to the door and looked out at them, shading his eyes with his raised hand. Was he not the intrepid explorer Leichhardt himself, gazing into new country? And, no doubt, just as the real Leichhardt before him, wondering what to expect?

  They all climbed out of the car and Arthur came across the gravel to meet them. They greeted each other, handshakes for Barnaby and Pat and a kiss on the cheek for Autumn. The rain was fairly coming down. Pat and Autumn stood close beside each other at the open boot, shoulders hunched against the cold rain, sheltering under Barnaby’s umbrella, and watched Barnaby lift out Autumn’s bag. Arthur said, ‘I’ll take that,’ and Barnaby relinquished it to him. Arthur hurried across to the porch with the bag. Barnaby left Autumn and Pat standing on their own by the boot, the pictures stacked at the sides and on the bottom. Pat closed the boot on them.

  Barnaby got into the driver’s seat and lit a cigarette and started the engine.

  He had left a small space of privacy to Autumn and Pat. It was a very small space as it turned out. Arthur deposited Autumn’s bag on the porch and returned at once to where they stood. Pat had time only to kiss her cheek and murmur, ‘Fare well, my dearest woman.’

  Arthur came up and took Autumn’s hand and Pat turned and walked around to the passenger side, leaving Barnaby’s umbrella with the two of them, and he got into the car and closed the door. Barnaby leaned from his window and called to them, ‘I’ll come up and see you soon.’ And with that he waved and drove around the rose bed and out the gate. Pat did not look round or wave or look back when the car turned at the gate.

  The shock of Pat’s sudden unexpected departure was so great Autumn did not properly begin to register it until the sound of the car was fading down the hill. Until he closed the boot on the paintings she had been expecting him to come into the house and go to his old room and for everything to pick up and continue, plans for the showing of Hinterland racing in her head alongside her passion for this man.

  Standing on the gravel with Arthur’s jacket over her and listening to the fading of the car’s engine, Autumn began to see what Pat had done. And to see that he had planned to do it.

  Two weeks later she received a letter from him. There was no salutation. Barnaby had told her Pat was living with Anne Collins in Anne’s flat in East Melbourne. Anne was arranging a one-man show of Hinterland at a gallery in Malvern.

  You and I can’t build our happiness on Arthur’s misery. Your husband’s grief can never be a foundation for our joy. That is not possible and you know it is not possible. With you and Arthur holding together there is no place at Old Farm for me to be myself. Barnaby told me you were thinking of killing yourself. I don’t believe you will go through with something like that, you are far too fond of lif
e and of yourself. But please don’t go about talking as if you mean to do it, it upsets everyone and they are all beginning to hate me. I don’t want to be the destroyer of another life. I don’t mean yours. I mean Arthur’s. By the way, you can keep those drawings I left with you.

  The note was not signed. She burned it and went back to bed and cried for a long time and cursed him bitterly. Arthur took care of her until she was more settled and regained some of her former sense of life’s possibilities. Freddy came to see her and sat on the side of her bed and held her hand and said very little but listened with his old trust and depth of sympathy. He was not looking well himself and she apologised to him for being so selfish. He laughed and said he was fine. She said, ‘I don’t know how I would have got through this without you.’ But it was Arthur, not Freddy, who had made available to her the safe ground she had needed. She told Freddy the story of Barnaby taking them up to the escarpment and showing them the intricate labyrinth of laneways between the rocks. ‘We came around a corner and there were red hand prints under an overhang and a piece of ochre sitting in a cleft. Barnaby said, It’s been sitting there since the old blackfellow left it there. And he reached for it. Pat grabbed his hand and said, Leave it, Barney! If you touch it now it will only have been lying there since you put your hand on it.’ And she looked up at Freddy and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Whenever she spoke of Pat she was overwhelmed with the feeling of having been abandoned and humiliated by him. She thought there could never again be anything good in her life. ‘I don’t know why I told you that,’ she said, sniffing and blowing her nose on her hankie. ‘None of it makes any difference now.’

  Freddy was silent a while, holding her hand in his. Then he said, ‘Let’s face it, Aught. We hardly knew him.’

  •

  There was something missing in all this. Something flat and not alive in her response to it. Long after she was up and about and back in the garden spreading piles of last year’s mulch with Stony, she was still bothered by the troubling conviction that she had missed something important. She had been in shock. But that was no excuse. She was not in shock now. She stopped digging, the fork held upright in the earth, and stared off towards the wattle flat and the river. She left the fork standing in the ground and walked up to the house and dropped her gloves on the steps.

  She had not written in her journal since their return. She took up the book and sat at the kitchen table and read over her Sofia entries and she saw at once what it was that had been nagging at her. It was obvious. She wrote:

  I learned that for the people who live there the outback is elsewhere. Further out, that is where they say the outback is. But it is this very outback sense that weighs on them with its encompassing silence and renders them mute. When I brought up the subject while Margery and I were having a cup of tea she said, ‘Oh, this is nothing, Autumn. Here is not the outback.’ That is what they say. And say very little else. They deny the reality of their lives, and it is this denial that silences them. ‘You should go right out,’ they say. ‘Then you would see the real outback.’ I asked her, ‘And have you been yourself?’ She laughed. ‘No! No, Bill and I have not been.’ They know they are speaking of a place that has no location. No reality of its own. Their governing illusion is that they themselves are not the inhabitants of the outback they speak of. To go in search of the true outback would shatter this illusion and leave them defenceless before the truth. The truth that they are without imagination for their own country, silenced by their denial. They have divorced themselves from it with this lie of the land. So they speak of the outback as of something sacred, but they may not go in search of it. They know that if they were to go, their goal would be elsewhere. The outback is a mirage of itself and moves away from us as we approach it. Pat painted the truth of this in his floating animals and people, in the trees that had lost touch with the ground and melted in the haze of heat, and in the death and the daisies, the fragments of dismembered things that established no connections with the country.

  I was mistaken to write that the outback is the Australian land of myths and heroes. It is this that is the governing illusion by which we deceive ourselves. The lie by which we live. I wrote it when I first arrived at Sofia and knew no better. And there is no escape for us, no exemption by writing of them and of us—their illusion, our enlightened state. For in truth the outback is not a place but is the Australian imagination itself. It is always elsewhere. A steady thunder of silence is imposed on the inhabitants of this island by the impossible weight of isolation in space and history. The truth is not admissible, so we deny it. Pat saw the truth, grasped it intuitively, and painted it during those few extraordinary days in the machinery shed at Sofia Station.

  She screwed the cap back on her pen and blotted the page of her notebook and closed it. She got up from the table and retrieved her gloves from the back steps and went down into the garden and resumed spreading the compost from last year’s bins. While she worked she knew the satisfaction of having understood something. She would talk to Barnaby and Freddy about it. Arthur would hum and agree with her and change the subject and ask what was for his dinner.

  Stony staggered towards her across the dug ground pushing another barrow loaded high with the black and reeking compost. He tipped it at her feet and she dug into it with her fork, exposing dozens of tiny pink worms. Next week she and Stony would plant out the seedlings in neat rows.

  18

  28 December 1991

  SENSING MY END, THE SCAVENGERS ARE GATHERING. ONE OF THEM threatened to do something to me she called a Lomi Lomi full-body massage. When she pulled back the bedclothes and would have lifted my nightie I shrieked at her, ‘Get your hands off me, you bitch, or I’ll have you charged with assault.’ She was young and fled from me in tears. I was thrilled with this little surge of power. Andrew accused me of being cruel and told me he had apologised to the girl on my behalf. He brought the aged-care specialist and a nurse with him. The three of them have ganged up on me, watched over by a sad-eyed Adeli, who serves them tea and cake at my kitchen table, while they admire through the open door the spreading arches of Arthur’s Algerian oak, as if my garden is no longer mine but is just there. I have served my purpose (whatever they think that might have been) and they are eager for me to be out of the way.

  The aged-care specialist told me I needed to be in an aged-care facility.

  ‘A correctional facility, you mean,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you people ever say what you mean?’

  Death is what she means. They are careful not to use the word, but it is they who are afraid of death, not I. Well, I’m not quite done yet. ‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ I told the aged-care facilitator. (Facilitator! I almost gagged.) ‘Get out of here and leave me to the privacy of my pain. You’ll get yours soon enough.’

  She smiled. They have been trained to smile. To counterfeit kindliness and to bear with the irritation and helplessness of the aged without impatience. They give credence to nothing I say. They are conditioned to be unmoved by my pleas and dismiss them as the deluded ramblings of an old woman in her last days. I am to be pitied, to be sure, but la pietà is not a professional position, so they conceal compassion—if they ever feel it. With them nothing in our relations is permitted to be real. Andrew, however, is vulnerable to my reality. I have long had the measure of him and know his family and the private conditions of his life.

  ‘This is my home,’ I said to the aged-care bitch. (Unlike the Lomi Lomi girl, this one is large and matured in oak and is not to be trifled with.) ‘I told you to get out. So would you please go?’ No, she would not go. She bared her perfect teeth and stayed and measured me and weighed me and humiliated me with her instructions to lift this arm and flex that leg. I can’t defend myself against her. How can I resist her? She is far stronger than me. She enters my privacy as if I deserve none and leaves the door wide open for the others to follow. I am a public thing. The respect of intimacy means nothing to them. When she leaned over me I thought of
biting her elbow, but was afraid I might crack a tooth on her pointy bones.

  When she had gone Andrew reasoned with me, ‘You know, Autumn, there are many residents [inmates] in the aged-care facility who are a lot worse off than you are.’ It was the same old story from childhood: Think of the starving millions and eat your greens. It never made greens (cabbage?) taste better to be told there were people who did not have to eat it.

  While he was cutting the plaster off my arm he gave me one of his pep talks. ‘Living there could give your life a new sense of purpose,’ he said brightly, as if he might take his family and go and live there himself. ‘You would have a community.’

  ‘I already have a sense of purpose, Andrew, thank you. You’re pinching me! And I don’t want a community. I’ve had one of those.’

  ‘Many of these people suffer from advanced macular degeneration and are no longer able to read. You could read to them.’

  ‘They have talking books for that,’ I told him. ‘Are you going to cut that thing off my arm or not?’

  They torment me in the name of their new invention, professional ethics. Once upon a time it was enough for us to behave decently to each other if we could manage it. Now they are trained by experts in ethical behaviours.

  ‘Adeli can’t look after you on her own any longer. It’s too much to expect her to do her work and look after you at the same time.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘You’ve become a full-time job, Autumn. We have to face the facts.’

  ‘Face your own facts, Andrew. Your wife’s having an affair with the postman. What are you going to do about that?’

  He threatened to take my writing materials away from me. Am I to be interred in the great Australian gulag of aged care to wait for my end? I have my four little pills and will take my life in my own time and depart when I am ready. These people are bullies and tyrants acting in the name of professionalism and their precious new ethics. I can scream at them but who will defend me against their cruelties? Where are Freddy and Barnaby? Where is my dear Uncle Mathew? My friends. My champions. My men. And poor Arthur, where is he? They have all gone on ahead of me. That other one has gone too. He would not defend me. Would he even defend his own child if it distracted him from his work? His mother? Perhaps he would have defended his mother. Barnaby used to say, ‘The poets are my consolation,’ and would recite a long passage to me from the Inferno in the original medieval Italian and grin and say, ‘It can’t be translated.’ I hear him now walking up and down the back veranda, swinging his shillelagh and declaiming in the language of true poetry, Al tornar della mente, che si chiuse dinanzi alla pietà de’ due cognati … But at the end even the poets could not console him. I have begun to understand his state of mind during his last days. My dear friend Barnaby, the closer I get to my own great day, the more fondly I recall you. Friendship is my consolation.