Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 5

by Alex Miller

  Pippa is a single mother these days (her husband, a medical specialist, has returned to his home in California to live). Pippa was born the year Marjorie and David met. Marjorie quite often thinks of the moment when she said to David, ‘I want to have your child.’ Even at the time there was a derisive part of her that saw this as a moment out of a soap opera, but it was the deeper maternal part of her that was moved to utter the words and they were spoken before she took time to consider them. And when he took her in his arms ever so gently and kissed her and said, ‘There’s nothing I want more than for us to have a child together,’ she wept. Pippa was conceived and born in love. When she fell pregnant, for just a little while afterwards her emotions were so stirred she willingly believed in the goodness of God. It was a weird sensation and she said nothing to David about it. She knew it would pass. To have his child was one way she could be sure of not being out-gunned by competition from the powerful past he had already lived; a past which garlanded his present life with the hard-won trophies of old campaigns that neither he nor his supporters and friends would ever be willing to forget. They were major chapters in his biography. And she was not in them. She knew, when she joined him, that she was taking on not only the man but his past. It was never going to be straightforward. The path she would travel was heavily mined and over the years she has set off a few and they both carry the scars of those explosions. But she was never to be cast as a victim. That has never been her style. And he loves her. She trusts this. She knows it. It saves her from despair.

  But that was it, just the one. He would never agree to more children after Pippa was born. Marjorie would have liked to have had a son. Now it’s too late. If she’d known the outcome back then she might have cheated to get her second child, her boy. Now they have their grandchild, little Mellie. Pippa often asks them to look after Melinda, who is in Grade One at the local primary school. Marjorie loves the child. So does David, but he doesn’t do very much to show his love. She tells him not to tease the little girl and to be gentle with her but he can’t seem to understand that children are small people whose feelings are even more sensitive than his own. Which is saying something. He calls her Melinda and she says, ‘I’m not Melinda, I’m Mellie.’ ‘Not to me you’re not,’ he says. Then chants, ‘Melinda! Melinda! Melinda!’ Until he is forced to shield his face while she beats at his arms and yells at him to shut up, the tears not far away. He laughs and pretends it’s all just a bit of fun. And when Marjorie comes in to see what the fuss is about, he says he’s just being a kid in the schoolyard with her. ‘But you’re not a kid and you’re not in the schoolyard,’ she says. ‘Come on Mellie, we’ll go and make a chocolate milkshake and leave grandpa to be grumpy on his own.’ He likes being left alone, so this is okay with him. ‘Goodbye Melinda,’ he says with mock sadness as they head for the door. ‘Why is everyone leaving me? Do I get a chocolate milkshake too?’ As she leaves the room with the rescued child Marjorie pauses at the door and says, ‘You’re horrible. Honestly, you really are.’ He laughs and says mildly, without contrition, ‘Yes, I know.’

  The door closes behind them and he is blessedly alone again. He is doing a series of woodcuts of the child. The distorted images that come into his head frighten him, but he does not resist them. They are prompts he treasures and fears. Messages from the source.

  Ellen pops the top back on her pen and looks up from her notes and says again, ‘Okay, this is it, David. I’m on my way.’ She smiles. ‘Sorry.’ She busies herself putting her smart new recorder back in her bag, closing her notebook and putting her pen and notebook in the bag with the recorder, all the while regretting letting that unconsidered sorry slip out, knowing it will have offered him an opportunity to pounce on this evidence of the weakness of her resolve. She is not sorry, and she should not be sorry, and she should not have said it.

  ‘So you’re leaving me too?’ David says and he gives her a hurt little smile, as much as to say, How can an intelligent young woman like you bear to leave such an interesting man as me? He is of course pretending to be joking. But it’s not a joke. He means it.

  She makes a face at him. ‘Me and who else?’ she says. ‘I’ve got three papers to finish before next Friday, David. And two meetings before lunch in the morning that I haven’t even looked at.’

  ‘Papers, meetings,’ he says. ‘With you it’s nothing but papers and meetings these days. That’s not a life.’ He’s not smiling now. Now he’s impatient with her, jealous of the duties that distract her from the serious work of recording his story—that is what he thinks of the art of biography, the recording of a story. ‘It’s this book that will make you famous, not your meetings and papers.’ It is as if he says bits and pieces of rubbish. He grabs the thick arms of the chair with his hands and tenses his shoulders. ‘You’ve let yourself be seduced by the prestige of that job of yours. Professor!’ He enunciates this last word with contemptuous emphasis. ‘There’s a price to pay. The only good work comes from our vulnerability.’ This he seems to be saying to himself. Reminding himself. ‘When we met, you were your own person. What happened to that?’ He’s afraid his story will fail her, that it will prove to be too much for her to deal with, that she will falter before she achieves the full weight of it. That’s not what he wants: failed energies, failed enthusiasm, a failed biography. To be memorialised by a failed biography! Who wants that? That’s not why he’s supported her all this time. His hands gripping the arms of the chair are broad and heavily veined, the strong hands of a man who in his youth built with them in stone and timber hewed from nature. He heaves himself from the deep embrace of Gotto’s chair, pauses on the lip of the cushion to gather himself (hands gripping the arms, legs bent and shoulders hunched, like a fugitive in a movie about to jump from a speeding train) then launches himself into a standing position.

  She has also stood up.

  They are the same height.

  They stand face to face looking at each other. She sways and rebalances herself. He puts his hand on her arm, not possessively, not belligerently, but with the touch of a caring friend. Then he drops his hand. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’ He goes over to the sideboard and pours a glass of whisky. ‘I want you to have a drink with me before you go, Ellen.’ He makes it sound serious, as if he is about to disclose to her an intimacy he would disclose to no other person. Something that can be done only late at night while his wife is not in the house.

  She thinks, After all these years how many secrets can there be that he hasn’t already shared with her? Some several times. She decides to be firm with him. ‘I really can’t stay, David. Honestly. I’m terribly behind with things.’

  Boys, young men, are calling to each other along the street outside, going to the Espy for a night out, hoping to meet the right girl, deepening their voices to make themselves sound manly. There is a faint rumble of thunder out in the night behind all the other noises. The night is warm and the windows are open. Out over the Bay lightning flickers continuously along a dark band of cloud. It is the end of summer.

  David pours whisky into a second tumbler and carries both drinks back. He thrusts one at her. ‘Take it! Take it!’ She is forced to take the glass in her hand or see it fall to the floor and the moment descend into melodrama. He swings away from her, uncaring about the fate of the glass. He sets his own whisky on the broad arm of the chair and sits. He settles himself (safe in his mother’s womb, safe in the loving embrace of his great dead friend, Gotto) then reaches and takes a sip of the whisky, looking up at Ellen over the rim of the glass. ‘I’ve never told you this.’

  It is his form of blackmail. One of his forms. To play with her purposes, to manipulate her motives. She abandons her resolve to be firm and sips the neat whisky. It burns its way down her throat. It is just what she needs. Once upon a very long time ago she would have been out there with the boys going to the Espy, laughing with them at their silliness, dancing alone on the crowded floor, the music burning in her breast like David’s whisky. I
n the days when time meant nothing to her. Were there ever such days?

  ‘Sit down, Ellen, for God’s sake. Looming over me like a bloody...’ But he can’t think of the word he wants and waves his hand at her. ‘Just sit down, please.’

  She sits in the upright chair and places her drink on the table beside her.

  ‘Like a coffin,’ he says, the unexpected image coming to him and displacing colossus, which offered itself but hadn’t convinced him. ‘My coffin, standing at the ready.’ He laughs, pleased with the image of his biographer as his coffin, the vessel that will contain his remains (when he is dead and they all have the run of this place). He takes another drink, his irritation gone as quickly as it had been aroused. It is for him as if the occult has intruded between him and his standing biographer, replacing her with a reminder of his death; an event which the project of her biography foreshadows. He likes it, this intruding image. It is the kind of thing that cheers him up. He’s not interested in the connection between images and the nature of the imagination. He just wishes to be the recipient of these out-of-time messages, to wear their mystery, to work with them, to receive them the way the earth receives rain and seed. If dinner guests to his house ever begin to discuss such things as the meaning or understanding of imagination and imagery he either gets up and leaves the room or violently forces a change in the direction of the conversation. He is vividly superstitious. Although he is said to be (by various reliable sources) a very intelligent man, understanding does not interest him. He doesn’t seek understanding. As an artist, understanding is of no use to him. The standing coffin of his metaphor cheers him. It is not he who has thought of it, but the image that has thought of him. This is the way he likes it to be. It delights him to have been taken off his guard by the appearance of this sudden and unexpected image of Ellen as his coffin. He doesn’t reject it but embraces it and cherishes it. It is a gift. He has no plans for it, but sooner or later it will appear in one of his canvasses. It will never be explained. Others will find their own explanations for it. So let them. The polished wood of the coffin, the gleam of its bronze handles, upright in the shadows. It is his now and will be painted with love and conviction. The form it finally assumes will be prefigured in conte drawings and small studies in gouache and then in oil and perhaps a series of etchings. And at last it will be realised on a large canvas, in its place, belonging. He will not know why it belongs, but only that it does belong. And that will satisfy him. The thought of it satisfies him now.

  The feeling of this creative process awakened in him by the image of the coffin makes him smile and he feels suddenly indulgent and generous towards Ellen, this fine intelligent young woman who has taken on his life as her purpose. And the whisky of course. The fifteen-year single malt going smoothly down into his stomach. ‘Professor!’ he says it now without venom, gently mocking her youthful folly in being impressed with herself and her position—harnessed to the prestige of her demanding job. He thinks she has fallen into the age-old trap of seeking success in the eyes of her peers instead of seeking success on her own terms, a state wherein she might have remained free. But perhaps she will break free one day and become herself again, queen of her own estate and no longer merely the subject of another’s. Puzzled critics have called him a romantic modernist. Which makes him smile. His thoughts are kindly now, less centred with anxiety on himself and the posthumous fate her book will confer on his stature among the creative voices of his time.

  She sips the whisky and smiles back at him, forgiving him, her liking for him refreshed, her spirits refreshed, waiting for him to produce his precious disclosure. Here is where she always sits. Years ago, when she first met him, when she was writing her PhD, a study of the life and work of his first wife, the graphic artist Kathleen Anderson, rehabilitating the woman from the obscurity of critical indifference that had accompanied her throughout her life, passionately trying to convince the great David Davoser that his first wife had been as important an artist as he was himself (futile), this is where she sat then. He had seemed so much younger in those days. And she, a passionate feminist of thirty-something, recently returned from Harvard triumphantly waving her masters, unstoppable on the express track to academic eminence, a trajectory begun at school that had not faltered since, great things expected of her by her teachers and her peers. On this upright chair by this table, this is where she sat then (another person), in the house of David Davoser for the first time. She is still here. This woman. It amuses her to think of it. Her own biography.

  It was winter that first afternoon. He lit the fire and kept getting up to fiddle with it, poking it and rearranging it with the tongs and putting more wood on and asking her if she was warm enough. He had seemed nervous. She had expected him to make a pass at her, but he didn’t, not even the smallest nod of that kind her way. Despite her high feminist principles this disappointed Ellen. Hadn’t he noticed? He was a man, after all. He was still in love with Marjorie then (which of course didn’t mean he wouldn’t try it on with other women, just to see, just to feel himself flattered). He and Marjorie still slept in the same room in those days, in the same enormous red ironbark bed built for David and Kathleen years earlier by Gotto. Marjorie and David were still having sex regularly then. He hadn’t opened up to her (ever) about these intimate details of his life, but Ellen had guessed. Marjorie had a way of inviting her to guess, signs (Danger! Radiation!) warned her not to get too close to him. Ellen had wondered then, long before she began to write his life, if it would be possible to write the life of a man one had never seen naked, never seen weeping alone, never seen making love to his wife or to his mistress, never seen in his moments of private despair, never seen picking his nose or emptying his bowels. Did this man even have a mistress? There was no tension in the house in those days. But not long after Marjorie and David moved into separate bedrooms they began having sex less often. It soon became evident there was to be no return to their earlier form. Something had changed. These days they had stopped having sex altogether (the warning signs were left in place but the radiation was gone and lettering had faded). Ellen wondered if they had known it was to be the last time when they had sex for the last time. Or had they just left the gate to that paddock open, the path gradually becoming overgrown and new fences quietly erected? Erected. She did not wish to imagine him erected. She shied away from the proffered image. Perhaps she should be a biographer after all? (Ellen had grown up on a Gippsland dairy farm and her imagination’s first call was invariably to images of country life—she was careful to keep these out of her scholarly writings). Despite the drought (another rural image—she just couldn’t help it) and his evident vigour, however, David had still not made a pass at her. Had he remained faithful to Marjorie even in abstinence? This was something odd. It didn’t fit and had got her attention. If it was in fact the case that he had remained celibate then she wanted to account for it. He gave her no indication of being on the lookout for sex. Not a sign. Sex was a dimension of his life that remained private and closed to her. She would like to have pried it open and taken a peek inside, but had never made the effort to do so for fear of unforeseen consequences. But she didn’t want to leave sex out of her book of his life altogether. A contemporary of David’s had spoken of him with considerable venom. A failed artist who had resorted to reviewing the shows of his peers. An odious man suffering from stomach pains, his thoughts soured with the black bile of envy, he had become a scavenger in the trade. In his youthful works people had once seen promise but his creative drive had been washed out of his system before he was forty with alcohol and resentment. Anyway, even ordinary sober people with no axe to grind were inclined to gossip about the private lives of well-known artists, assuming that all the men were bastards and all the women neglected geniuses. It was not the kind of reductive feminism that had ever interested her. Feminist she was, in every fibre of her being, but people remained for her complex and full of contradiction and intricacy. Writing the biography of a famous living man w
as not as straightforward, she had discovered, as writing about an unknown dead woman had been. What would Marjorie and Pippa think if she were to tell the story of the separate rooms and the faded warning signs about the house? Marjorie, who has been so slow to release his letters, like a postmistress in a Kafka story. The feelings of the living had to be considered, to be sure, but how to consider them and avoid having the book’s scope reduced by them?

  The unexpected popularity among general readers and critics alike of her first book (ThePregnant Artist, the graphic life of Kathleen Anderson) that came out of Ellen’s doctoral thesis brought her a kind of fame that lasted for a couple of years. Fame in Australia, not world fame (fame on the dark side of the moon, she called it), local notoriety, and even a certain celebrity that she was intensely ambivalent about, seeing herself as a serious scholar and above celebrity, hating that side of her success while at the time feeding it with her responses and feeling neglected and unfairly forgotten when its moment had passed. Her parents (still on the farm in Gippsland milking their cows twice a day) were overjoyed to see her on the television and in the papers and felt it was their brilliant daughter’s due. For them celebrity equated perfectly with success. But the slightly frenzied attention unsettled Ellen for quite a while. At the height of it she became so wobbly she very nearly accepted an invitation to host an arts show on ABC television (she has very attractive teeth). But she steadied and is over all that silliness now. Now she holds the prestigious Robert Hughes Chair of Fine Arts at one of Australia’s leading universities. Now she’s a harried professor with more demands on her time than she can possibly cope with. Now she wakes each morning like a bishop of the twelfth century with the feeling there’s a crowd of suppliants gathered outside her window baying for her attention. Since she got the job no one has thanked her for anything. Not once. Ever. And she has made enemies. She never had enemies before and spends far too much time trying to turn them back into friends. The harder she works the more numerous the demands on her become. For the first time in her life she is falling further behind each day and is unable to fulfill the expectations people have of her. She tells herself she should be doing better. But her view of people has undergone a dispiriting change and the bitterness of disillusion threatens her. She understands this and fights the debilitating drain of it. But to fight it requires energy and she is exhausted half the time, running to keep up with the travel and the papers and the endless meetings and funding debates, dealing several times each day with a bullying dean and a disengaged and confrontingly sexist vice chancellor (when they were briefly alone together in his office, he fixed his watery gaze on her breasts and said, ‘You fill a nice sweater, Ellen.’) She’s not yet forty five. She is a young woman. She is one of the youngest professors in Melbourne. To chuck it all at this stage is not an option and she knows it. At her lowest ebb she has begun to feel that the great promise of her years has led her into a trap. She’s disappointed in herself for being so beleaguered. She should sit down and work out a management plan for work and life and bring them into some kind of coherent balance. There is a term for it; work-life balance. She hears it almost every day. Such slogans mock her. How will she find the time to make such a plan? Time for reflection is a thing of the past. She mourns the loss of it. She hardly ever listens to music anymore and can’t remember the last time she read a book simply for the pleasure of it. And when did she last see a movie? But what can she do? Her phone never stops ringing and her diary is always full (she doesn’t bring her phone to David’s. He is fiercely opposed to such demonic inventions and always asks her when he comes to the door, ‘You didn’t bring that infernal device with you, did you?’) And she hasn’t had sex for longer than she cares to remember. She too is celibate. Young and celibate. It isn’t fair. She feels like a victim. But there is no one among her colleagues she can bear to think of. More like a bishop of the middle ages than ever.