by Alex Miller
I became aware of someone coming into the gallery from the back door. I half saw them sit down at the desk then get up again and start over towards me. I knew it was a woman by the tapping of her heels on the boards. She came up and stood alongside me and said, ‘Hello, Autumn.’
I turned to her. ‘Hello, Anne.’ She seemed to be at ease with me. I hated her. I had learned hate. It is horrible. It burns you. It is hell fire. Ask Dante.
She was looking very smart and youthful, her slim figure tucked neatly into a black dress. Her black hair, cut fashionably short and curled half across one eye, was rather fetching. On her left breast she had pinned a single red bud of Mr Lincoln, the rose that was my first planting in the rose bed in the centre of our drive at Old Farm. The perfume of this rose is exquisite. It is classically the smell of a rose. If you go blind you will know its presence. I could smell it as I stood beside her. I was trembling and wondered if I was going to be able to keep my legs under me. She must have seen the state I was in. She put her hand to my arm. ‘Come and sit down for a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea.’ When I would have resisted she was firm and made me go with her. I understood that she was being kind and the thought of her kindness made me want to weep with despair.
She sat me on the straight-backed chair by the desk and went out through the back door. I don’t know what made me do it, perhaps it was a panicky need to distract myself from his pictures, but I slid open the desk drawer to my left. There were probably other things in the drawer but all I saw was the hairy ball of pink twine. It was the twine we had found in the workshop at Sofia Station and had used to tie Pat’s paintings in bundles. My heart missed a beat. I grabbed the ball of twine and shoved it into my bag and closed the drawer just as the door opened behind me. My heart was beating fast and I felt my face flushing, as if I had stolen a precious jewel.
Anne leaned both hands on the glass desktop and looked into my face. ‘The kettle’s on. It won’t be a minute.’
I held her gaze, unable to disengage my eyes from hers.
She said softly, ‘So what did you take from the drawer, Autumn?’ She said it as if she was interested and not as if she was accusing me of stealing something.
‘Nothing,’ I said defensively. ‘What do you mean?’
She smiled and straightened. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’
We were both silent, she standing looking down the gallery towards the front door as if she was expecting someone. I could hear the kettle whistling in the back room.
She turned to me, amused by our situation, and she said, once again in an interested tone of voice, ‘Was it that ball of pink twine you took?’
I looked up at her. I remembered my mother asking me if I had stolen her perfume and I put my head in my hands and burst into tears of shame and confusion.
Anne held me against her tummy and rocked me gently back and forth. ‘Life is so terrible,’ she said.
I could not speak.
Hatred is as powerful a juice to the human system as love and makes us behave just as badly. I no longer hate (irritation I still know, but not hate). I have forgotten how to hate. I stopped hating Anne that day when she tried to comfort me. I have not forgotten how to love. I was never to see her again. She wrote many years later, in the eighties when his work was beginning to fetch very high prices, asking me to return Pat’s drawings of the naked daughter of the Ocean Grove butcher. I wrote back to say he had given the drawings to me. She did not insist and I heard no more.
I cried all the way home on the train from the gallery that day. There was a certainty in me now that I was never going to see him again. Arthur was there with the Ponty, parked at the station, watching for me at the exit. He had guessed and had been there for hours. I was in a dreadful state by that time. He drove me home without asking me where I’d been and I didn’t tell him. I never wore that grey suit again. Arthur didn’t say a word about any of it. He was a confirmed devotee of the least-said-soonest-mended school. A week later I burned the grey suit in the same incinerator in which I was to eventually burn my diaries. The incinerator was new then, grey cinder blocks still surrounding the iron drum. If Pat had walked into Visions while I was there and had asked me to go to bed with him I would not have been able to resist him. I would have gone with him, hating him and loving him. His ‘Fare well, dearest woman’ still haunts me. His small message as we stood by the boot of the Ponty has always confirmed in me the knowledge that he wished me well, as I have wished him well. But I did not fare well. But that is another story and there is no time left to me to tell it.
Adeli came in earlier this afternoon to take my tray. My lunch was still on it, untouched. She stood by the door looking at me, the tray held against her ample stomach.
I said irritably, ‘What is it? I wasn’t hungry. Give it to the chooks.’
She said, ‘There’s a visitor for you.’
‘I don’t want to see anybody,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anybody any more.’
Adeli stepped to one aside and Edith came into my bedroom.
Adeli went out and quietly closed the door.
I probably gaped at Edith open-mouthed, the way old people do gape (you will find out why soon enough). She was smartly dressed and still attractive in her early seventies. Few women manage that. I certainly didn’t. I was a scrawn by then and nearly as devastated as I am today. ‘It’s you,’ I said stupidly.
She was confident and calm and came over to my bed and took my hand in hers. She has soft hands. ‘Hello, Autumn.’ Her tone just a little condescending to the bedridden old lady. She smiled and leaned down and kissed my cheek. ‘Just look at us.’
My voice shook when I said, ‘Your picture’s up there, Edith.’ I pointed to her embroidered field of golden oxalis, where it hangs beside the French doors.
She continued to hold my hand as she turned to look. ‘So that’s where Arthur put it. I always wondered what he had done with it. I thought I was foolish to have given it to him.’
I said, ‘It has always hung there. He treasured it.’ It was only partly a lie. Arthur did always treasure her picture. He just had the good sense not to insist on retrieving it from the loft before its due time.
Edith went over and looked at her picture. ‘I was sorry my friendship with Arthur never matured,’ she said. ‘I liked him a lot.’
I felt free to elaborate the half-lie. After all, at the lie’s centre I knew there to be concealed a precious truth that I might now pass on to her. ‘He often spoke of you. He was very fond of you.’ The shock of seeing her gave her an unreal glow in my presence, and for a brief flash of uncertainty I wondered if I was hallucinating her, my old mind at last collapsing into a dreamscape around its rotten core.
She came back and sat on the edge of my bed, which creaked with her weight. ‘Your friend found me,’ she said. ‘I visit my daughter and her family once a year. They live nearby. On the other side of the hill. Her husband works in the medical practice with Andrew Temple.’ She looked at me a moment. ‘I’ve always known you still lived here. I wondered if I might run into you on one of my visits. We live in England. We’ve lived there since the war.’
‘You look happy,’ I said. I could see she was a happy woman. And content. Fulfilled, I suppose the word is.
‘I’ve been lucky,’ she said. ‘I met a wonderful man in London. We married and had three lovely boys.’ She was smiling as she said this. ‘I have three beautiful grandchildren.’
‘Did you continue to paint?’ I said. When she was young, Edith wore her dark hair in a fringe and had a ready smile. She still wore her tinted hair in a fringe and smiled in just the same easy way, as if nothing had ever seriously troubled her and to smile was effortless. She was aged of course, but strangely unchanged. It was this that had enabled me to recognise her the day I saw her, or thought I saw her, outside the chemist’s shop. The day, wasn’t it, if I remember, that I was inspired (if that is the word) to write this?
‘No. Oh no,’ she said, an
d laughed. ‘I haven’t painted for decades. A daughter, then three boys and my husband, and now three grandchildren, have filled my life. I painted scenes for the grandchildren when they were small. There was never any room for real painting.’ She looked at me. ‘You never had children?’
‘One,’ I said, and my throat closed tightly around the word and I was not able to say more.
I am aware that I am leaving nothing behind but this memoir. Or confession. Or whatever it is. My private search for my own truth, I suppose? Is it? Does it matter what I call it?
I said, ‘You were very talented.’
‘There were lots like me at the Gallery School in those days,’ she said. ‘Hardly any of them went on to become real artists. We were skilled, I think, but not driven like he was.’
We were both silent.
She said, ‘Is it all right to speak of him?’
I laughed. ‘At our age everything is forgiven. Isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it a wonderful freedom?’ For an instant she looked young. ‘I don’t really think I’ve had all that much to forgive, you know.’
‘Surely you had?’
‘No more than others. Life has been very good to me.’
‘Did you ever see him? In England, I mean?’
‘No. But I followed his career. Albert and I always went to his exhibitions when we were in London.’ She was silent a while. ‘I never really liked his paintings.’ She frowned and looked at me. ‘Is that an awful thing to say?’
‘A lot of people still don’t like them.’
‘They seem made up to me. They don’t seem to be reporting on anything real. But I’m obviously wrong.’
We talked for an hour. She said she would come and see me again. I said I would look forward to seeing her. But after she had gone and I was lying here on my own again looking at her picture, I knew, in a very quiet and calm way, that it was over for me now that I had seen her. Coming in like that she had put the full stop at the end of what I have been doing, this writing that has been keeping me alive for a year. I had not expected to see her. Ever. She has been a character in my story and no longer a real person. Have they all been that? I wonder. Would I really wish to see Barnaby walk into my bedroom here now? The real Barnaby with his stick? Arthur? Would I want to see him? Pat himself? No. No. They no longer inhabit my reality but inhabit my private fiction, a fiction that to me represents the truth of things for myself only, and only for today. My truth is for no one else. How can our truth belong to others? Edith’s visit from the real world settled whatever last bits and pieces in my story had remained floating about looking for a home—like those permanently disconnected body parts and teapots and other things in his pictures that never quite attached themselves to the country.
As I lay here listening to Adeli talking loudly on the phone in her Californian I knew it was time for me to die.
I shall call Adeli in and ask her to look in the little drawer to the left of the mirror on my dressing-table. There she will find a ball of hairy pink twine that has been there for fifty years. And I shall get her to bring me all my nineteen exercise books (including this one), and will make a bundle of them with the twine. Give this to Edith, I shall tell her. It is for her and for myself. And I will thank Adeli for all that she has done for me. It is a great deal. She has been kind and uncomplaining and not an aged-care specialist but always vulnerable to my bullying and intemperance. I will make a present to her of his Ocean Grove drawings. I will sign something to say that I have given them to her so that her ownership of them will not be challenged. She will probably cry and protest, but I will be firm. These drawings are yours to dance to, I shall say.
And when that is done, I shall ask her to leave me for the night and I will reach into the back of the drawer in my bedside table and take out the envelope with the four little yellow tablets in it that a very kind doctor (who I shall not name) gave me for just this purpose. I will swallow those little yellow tablets with a mouthful of water. And then I shall lie back against my pillows and look out the French doors at the moonlight through the branches of Arthur’s Algerian oak and I shall quietly leave, this place, this earth, this life. Adeli and Sherry will find me in the morning. Fancy Edith’s daughter being married to one of the doctors in Andrew’s practice. There is nothing we can do or say that is an adequate response to such coincidences. They lie like dormant desert plants for decades until some slight shift of conditions releases their sudden bright jolt of colour into our lives. Why do my emotions threaten me with weeping now? It is not for myself I would weep. My year of grace is done. Adieu. L’automne déjà.
Autumn Laing, Old Farm, 28 December 1991
Editor’s note
MY BIOGRAPHY, AUTUMN: THE NEW ARTISTS’ GROUP AND THE CIRCLE of Autumn Laing, was published by the University of California Press to wide critical acclaim in 1998. In 2003 the biography was at last published in Australia. When my American publishers began to build a list in Australia last year they asked me to edit Autumn’s memoir for publication. Its release this year is the culmination of a long-cherished dream of mine. I am not sure if Autumn would have blessed me for it.
After the important article on Patrick Donlon and his work appeared in Apollo, the pictures that comprised Hinterland were sold to a private collector and disappeared from public view for more than forty years. In the early eighties the collection was given to the Australian National Gallery in Canberra with the condition that it be kept on permanent display there. The Sofia Station pictures of the Hinterland series are presently housed in the Canberra gallery in their own dedicated space and are considered to be one of the great iconic series in Australian art. The importance of Patrick Donlon’s contribution to Australian art is still a matter of some dispute among Australian scholars of art history. His work, however, is rarely mentioned today outside Australia and is no longer considered controversial.
After Autumn’s death I followed her instructions and presented the nineteen exercise books in which the text of this memoir was written to Edith Taling. Edith did not even untie the knot in the twine but handed the collection back to me at once. She said it was enough for her that Autumn had wanted her to have the books, but that she had no interest in reading them or in reliving that past which, she said, had little to do with her or with the life she had led since her divorce from Pat. Edith Taling insisted I take the collection of exercise books, believing that it would be an invaluable resource to me in the writing of my biography, as indeed it proved to be.
Dr Andrew Temple signed Autumn’s death certificate. He recorded the cause of death as heart failure. In her brief obituary in the Age, it was said Autumn died of natural causes at the age of eighty-six. Her principal claim to notability was given as her brief relationship with the artist Patrick Donlon and the circle of Old Farm.
Autumn’s need to turn me into a fictional character and to distort my identity to serve her own purposes amused rather than offended me. I understood her intention as an honourable one. I do in fact have a sense of humour and I am large and robust but I am not fat. Much of what Autumn wrote was fiction, but it was fiction written in an honest search for her own truth. It was Oscar Wilde who said, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ Autumn’s fiction was the mask she wore in order to locate her truth. Her last words—Adieu. L’automne déjà—are taken from the final section of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer.
Autumn gives the impression in her memoir that she did not cooperate with me during my researches. The truth, however, is that we spent many long hours together going through the immense collection of Laing papers in the dining room at Old Farm. I could not have had a more cooperative subject than Autumn. The burning of her diaries and day books, which she recounts at the beginning of her memoir, is also a fiction. She did not wish to consult them in the writing of the memoir, so for the sake of the memoir they had ceased to exist. It was not her past views or her daily record of her lif
e she wished to uncover but the present truth of her reality as an old woman. I had use of all those ‘burned’ diaries and journals. They are held in the National Library of Australia, where they may be consulted.
Autumn had no living relatives. Stony and I accompanied her to the crematorium and scattered her ashes in the wattle grove by the river one sunny afternoon two weeks after her cremation. Old Farm is now managed by a trust. Exhibitions and events are held there regularly. Entrance is free to the public and visits may be made during normal business hours from Wednesday through Sunday. A brass plaque set into the front wall to the left of the entrance commemorates Autumn and Arthur Laing’s long residence there.
Professor F. Adeli Heartstone
Chair of Pacific Cultural Studies
