Autumn Laing (21 page)

My prayers of unbelief amused Freddy and, I think, interested him also. He said to me once, ‘You live as if there is a God, though you know there is none.’ I called him my Hebraic sage. He was my closest confidant and best friend for many years. I could and did tell him everything. Things I could not comfortably tell Arthur I freely confided to Freddy. There was no sense of betrayal in these confidences. They were the exchanges of friendship, Arthur understood the quality of that friendship and was never jealous of Freddy. Freddy loved gossip, but I knew my confidences were kept by him in sacred trust. My poor dear Freddy. How wonderful it would be if only he were here with me now; how we would make light of all this together. Or would the burdens of old age have soured his humour? Men fail at old age more readily than we do. His suicide was quite unlike Barnaby’s. Freddy’s suicide was a deeply self-conscious act of courage in the face of his total physical breakdown. Barnaby, the silly man, had no such reason to kill himself. Suicide with Barnaby was selfish and unnecessary. He just couldn’t be bothered with the tedium of going on living and getting older. His death made suicide something ordinary, like shopping for the necessities. A few bobs’ worth of nothing remarkable from the supermarket. Since the age of eighteen I had thought of Uncle Mathew killing himself in that village in Ireland, alone and lost, and his death had seemed to me
something deeply sad and romantic. Barnaby made suicide banal. But perhaps Mathew’s death, too, had been merely sordid. At eighty-five (or whatever I am), human behaviour is no longer a source of romantic illusions.

Adeli encourages me to write this memoir, if memoir it is. Which is hardly surprising. After all, she’s not exactly a disinterested observer of the outcome of my defiance of Andrew. I haven’t let her see any of it. But I dare say she is confident of having the opportunity to study every word of it after I am gone. Providing the trustees accept her bona fides, she will be in charge of my record when I am dead. I’ve no doubt she’ll shove most of this into her book, and much of it without acknowledgment or editing. There is something ruthless about her kindly caring, slightly soppy manner that I find intriguing and a little repulsive. She is not simply the eager fat sook from California I took her for when she first came here. She is still from California, of course, and she is still fat, but these facts no longer carry quite the same imperative for me to bully her they once carried. I’ve not asked to read anything she has written about me, and she has not offered to show it to me. I don’t want to see it. I have no wish to authorise her project with my approval. Historians know the official biography is worthless. Let her struggle for her own truths. I won’t influence her with mine. Our truths are written in our hearts and are not a currency of exchange.

She has set herself up very comfortably in the guest bedroom, which is conveniently next door to the dining room, where
the elaborate sources for her scholarship are piled on the big dining table, and under the table and on the long sideboard. And even on the mantelpiece. And there are cartons stuffed full of papers in the corners of the room. If she lives to be ninety she will never get through our archive. Sooner or later she will need research assistants. I’ve not been into the dining room to check on her progress in case she mistakes it for interest. And anyway, there was always something discouraging about that room and there is no reason why that discouragement should not still be there. Perhaps it is that the furniture reminds me of my mother’s dining room. The furniture came, in fact, from Arthur’s father’s gloomy old mansion in Tasmania (that land of melancholy and despair, haunted by the ghosts of human suffering and cruelty. I visited it once and never returned. I shivered all the while I was there).

The east side of the house has become Adeli’s end (why did I nearly write Edith’s end?). Unfortunately she and I have to share the only bathroom. She always seems to be in there, the door bolted, just when I need to pee. I stand outside and bang on the door with Barnaby’s shillelagh and yell at her, but she does not reply. Silence. An hour later I will be sitting at the table in the kitchen, my bladder on fire, when I hear the cistern flush. By the time I’ve hobbled along the passage to the bathroom she is back in the dining room. She sprays the air in the bathroom with some kind of chemical deodorant that makes me sneeze. I tell her I would rather smell her animal stink than this stuff, but she goes on spraying it freely. I might as well tell Sherry not to spray. I like to sit on the pan and smoke a quiet cigarette. Beside the sink there is a little old four-paned window with a view of Idaho, Arthur’s favourite species rose. It has climbed
into the topmost branches of the red gum, where it flowers, its face turned to the sun. Such blooms among the gum leaves.

Adeli looks after me without complaint. But then looking after me is taking care of her own welfare, isn’t it? She is a good cook and the three of us eat well and the house no longer stinks of cabbages and my farts. I have insisted, however, that we maintain our order for cabbages with Stony. ‘It was Stony,’ I reminded Adeli when she objected to keeping our order in, ‘who saved my life. You should be grateful to him.’ Adeli does something with the cabbages but I have not enquired what it is. They arrive then disappear. So long as Stony gets paid for them I don’t care what the fate of the cabbages is.

A week ago Adeli found Pat’s drawings among her treasured rubbish in the dining room. She carried them in to me triumphantly. I was in bed, lying on my back gazing at Edith’s painting, daydreaming about the two of them down there in that isolated cottage at Ocean Grove with hardly enough money to get by on. But happy, young, in love and full of hopes—just before he stepped into our picture and brought their brief happiness to an end.

Adeli came into the bedroom carrying the bundle, her round cheeks glowing with a sheen of sweat (as usual). ‘I’ve found them!’ she announced, as if she had found the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre. They were no longer in a roll. She set them down on my bed covers and leaned over to spread them, her great melons diving about like bloated water bombs. Sherry came into my room behind Adeli and sat on the Anatolian kilim Arthur gave me for my fiftieth birthday. He watched Adeli adoringly. When I was first confined to bed after the loft escapade Adeli cancelled my regular monthly order with Stony
for the hundredweight bag of cat biscuits and began buying fine cuts of meat from the local butcher. Sherry was now eating from a blue and white Spode bowl such exotic combinations as devilled calf’s liver with chopped smoked bacon, or smoked salmon and sardines. I stared hard at Sherry over the side of the bed, but he would not meet my eyes.

‘Unfaithful swine!’ I said. He drew himself up disdainfully and closed his beautiful green eyes. He was looking five years younger, his long fur glossy, his tail curled regally around him like an ermine cape. His colouring was perfectly set off by the rose madder and fig green of the rug. He was no longer my friend. The one betrayed is always hurt. Age is no defence against the pain of betrayal.

I looked up at Adeli. ‘Well done,’ I said, hoping she heard the sarcasm in my tone. ‘They had to be somewhere.’ She stood looking down at me, a hard gleam in her eyes. I realised with a little shock that she believed she had bested me in some way.

‘They are drawings of my anatomy, Mrs Laing,’ she said, scarcely emphasising the
my
. But it was there.

Perhaps I was feeling oversensitive after Sherry’s betrayal, but it seemed to me that what Adeli really said was, ‘They are not drawings of
your
anatomy, you skinny wraith.’ As if she had seen in these hurried early sketches of his the expression of Pat’s ideal of the feminine form. Indeed her own form. Did she believe she had discovered a shared bond with him that he and I had not shared? The possibility affronted and angered me. What nonsense. Pat
had
no ideal of the feminine form. She has understood nothing.

So, has the biographer begun to compete with her subject for ownership of her subject’s story? Is she to read her own destiny
in mine, displacing me little by little and inserting herself where I rightfully belong? I nearly lost my life searching for those drawings, but once they were found they held no interest for me. Adeli insisted on helping me to sit up so that I could look at them. She was right, those vast thighs and swirling buttocks were her own. I did not need to see her without her clothes to know this, any more than Pat had needed to see Mr Creedy’s daughter without her clothes to see in the eye of his imagination those trembling balloons of naked flesh.

I said, ‘I could do with some of that fat myself.’ But my irony was of no use to me. The fact is his drawings mean more to her than they do to me. The realisation drained me. I lay down and told her to take them away. ‘You’re interrupting me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I knew you’d want to see them.’

She waited but I said nothing. I felt as if it was all slipping away from me and I feared I might not have the power to hold it in place any longer.
This
, I mean. Everything. The hillside breaking from its ancient hold and easing down into the valley of its dissolution. Unstoppable. I felt the panic rising in my chest.

Adeli said, ‘I thought you were just resting.’

‘I am
thinking
,’ I cried out. ‘Do you know what that is?’

She collected the drawings and left, unabashed by my outburst. The last of those drawings, with the poem, the one that betrayed Pat to Sir Malcolm as neither quite artist nor quite poet, was not among them. I told her to close my door on her way out.

When she had gone I lay there for some time looking at Edith’s painting, seeing Pat down there in that little white cottage doing those drawings that evening, caught up in the
energy of his big idea, putting together what he blithely called his folio to impress Sir Malcolm. His trek the following day culminating in the discouraging discovery of the Wyndham Lewis, painted well before he was even born, and finally his humiliating rejection by the critic Guy Cowper; ‘You are a charlatan.’ By the time he arrived at Arthur’s office Pat had run out of options, and his confidence in himself was shaken. He was, after all, a young man who had accomplished very little at that time. And even self-confidence as vaunting as his must have had its limits. When I met him later that evening I believe he was at his lowest point ever and was close to abandoning his hopes of becoming an artist. For the first time in his life, Pat knew himself to be without a way forward. He had set out that morning to take the citadel of the enemy by storm and by the end of the day had done little more than make a fool of himself. By the time I saw him he was demoralised, afraid that what lay ahead of him were the ties of fatherhood and a job at the tramway depot alongside his dad. It had been a long way down for him that day and I detected the fear and aggression in him when he walked into the library with Arthur.

In the first few minutes of meeting Pat I thought Arthur had made a dreadful mistake inviting such a person to our home. Old Farm was our haven. It was the temple of our beliefs and the base for our chosen group of like-minded artists and thinkers. Pat Donlon did not seem to me when I first saw him that evening to be the sort of person who would fit in with our friends or our aims, or who would even possess the grace to respect our hospitality. I was right about this, but not quite in the way I had imagined. My initial reaction was to be annoyed with Arthur. For when we are in doubt we blame our spouses.
We all know that. It wasn’t until Pat vomited helplessly in the kitchen later that I saw how truly vulnerable he was and felt some sympathy for him, and even a desire to take care of him. Or at least to help him out for that moment. He was like a boy trying to be a man and I saw that he needed my help, not my disdain. And so my response, you will say, was to mother him. My unrewarded instinct. Which is probably all true.

Arthur had telephoned me twice that evening, the first time to tell me he had missed his train and the second to warn me he was bringing someone home for dinner. ‘I’ve met this interesting bloke. I think you might like him.’ Arthur’s brief description of ‘this interesting bloke’ had not prepared me for Pat. Expecting an interesting man to come home with Arthur I had gone to some trouble with dinner and had made one of my famous rabbit pies, with crème caramel to follow. In those days my pastry was the envy of every woman who ever had the good fortune to taste it, and those few of our men friends who were not in love with me were, without exception, in love with my pastry. Rabbit or apple pie, gooseberry tart or peach flan, they were my triumphs. We didn’t have the gas on up here in those days and I loved cooking on my wood stove and had become expert at it. Unlike modern stoves, which are clones of each other, wood stoves each had their own personality and could be moody if not treated with deference. My dependable Rayburn and I were a team.

My Rayburn has been the heart of this home since the day it was delivered from Scotland in its wooden crate and installed by Stony. It is keeping the kitchen cosy with Stony’s reliable wood this afternoon as I sit out here on the veranda writing this. Adeli has no idea how to deal with wood stoves.
She needs an on/off switch for things or she is lost. I’ll go in soon and draw a chair up to the firebox and rattle the stove into life. I’ll select one or two pieces of red gum from the wood box and will not close the door of the firebox at once after I’ve put the wood in but will sit looking into the orange glow of the embers, the new wood catching with blue and yellow flames, and I shall enjoy the heat on my face and the smell of the wood smoke. I will allow a curl or two of the fragrant smoke to escape into the kitchen—I wish it would penetrate as far as the bathroom and defeat the chemical stench of Adeli’s pressure pack. And, if I have enough energy left, as I sit there looking into the firebox I shall daydream of being young again. If Adeli is not about I’ll smoke a cigarette and probably have a little cry. I don’t like her to see me shedding tears. My sense of the situation with Adeli is that she is not really a support but undermines me. I must remain strong with her or she will not be satisfied with having established herself in her end of the house but will invade me utterly and take over. She is a fat cat—and remember, I have known cats all my life. Confined at first to a basket in the wash house and forbidden to enter the house, they are not satisfied until they are sleeping on the pillow next to one’s head. True, Sherry never made it that far with me, which is just as well. Adeli will have everything if she can get it. But she will never be mistress of my Rayburn. My comforter. All those years ago—how many is it?—when Pat first came to see us, the Rayburn was my pride and joy. I was never content to be merely a bluestocking but had worked hard to become expert in all the branches of the art of housekeeping. I was proud of being unlike my mother. She scarcely knew how to flick a duster, let alone prepare a fine dinner on a wood stove.