Autumn Laing (27 page)
In that moment of euphoria I could not have imagined that I was not to be the one in charge, but that in Pat Donlon I had encountered not a boy but a man who would prove more than my match at controlling the tone of our relations. The strange flatness of his style, his plainness quite beyond my experience of artists, his unaffected attitude to the work of the painter, and his astonishing rejection of the conventional training, which he feared would limit his ability to see with a fresh eye, had all impressed me. The idea that he might become a tramway inspector and devote himself to the narrow life of supporting a growing family of children in some dreary hovel in a St Kilda back street appalled me. I was determined not to let that become his fate. I would save him from it. And Arthur would help me save him.
I couldn’t wait to tell Barnaby all about it. I went back into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil on the Rayburn. When Barnaby arrived he was so full of the news that his friend, Harry Croft, a Central Queensland policeman, was coming down to stay with him for six weeks during Christmas and the New Year that I could scarcely get a word in. Barnaby’s limp, which he made the most of, was from a riding accident when he was a boy mustering cattle on his father’s station. Scrub bashing, he called it, and made it sound both thrilling and hazardous to man and horse. He posed for me in the kitchen doorway that morning, leaning on his shillelagh and smoking a
cigarette, gazing out at the garden and the paddock beyond as if he viewed the broad landscape of his childhood adventures, telling me the story of his days as a boy in the wild outback of Queensland’s hinterland and how he met there the son of the local sergeant of police. His first lover, and still, twenty years on, his most deeply cherished friendship. When he was drunk and it was late at night, with just a few trusted friends, Barnaby often said, ‘Harry is my darling wife.’ And if he was asked if he was married he would always answer with an emphatic, ‘Yes, I am very married.’ Harry died the year before Barnaby committed suicide. He returned to Sofia Station at least twice a year for a month or two to see his friend and, as he put it, ‘To refresh my poetic soul.’
In the end I didn’t tell Barnaby the story of Pat Donlon that day. He was in one of his large self-absorbed moods and I let him have his head. My story was too good to waste. Barnaby could have it when the rest of them got it. He had missed his chance at an exclusive. It annoyed him greatly whenever I reminded him of this later.
Pat was different to the others. That much I had seen. But despite my confident assumptions about him I had not seen just how very different he was any more than had Sir Malcolm or Guy Cowper. Pat was not to be easily understood. He kept his truths to himself and eluded us all. But at that time I believed implicitly in the gift Uncle Mathew had told me was mine when I was seventeen. And I still think Uncle Mathew was right. But he was only partly right. And a partial truth that is held sacred by us can be more corrupting of our behaviour than a lie. When I took on Pat Donlon I saw myself as a kind of Mother Courage, feeding and caring for the spirits and aspirations of
my little tribe of artists. Pat was to be the principal among them. But I misjudged him. And I misjudged our situation. There is a perversity in us, however, that knows no limit. And thinking of our day at Ocean Grove as I write this my heart even now beats a little faster and I would change none of it.
But I must stop this and go in and see to the Rayburn. The air is suddenly cold out here. I put my weight on Barnaby’s stick and rest my free hand on the table top but I can’t rise. I sit back and rest and try again. I don’t want to go on about old age. It bores me to do so. But the plain fact is that after sitting still for some time I have scarcely enough strength in my legs to get myself upright. As if she senses my call, Adeli comes out onto the veranda and says in her best coaxing Californian, ‘It’s time we went in, Mrs Laing. We can’t have you catching your death out here.’
We? My death.
How bitterly I resent my dependence on her. How I would love to swing Barnaby’s great lump of a stick at her big soft gut and watch her go bouncing down the slope of my abandoned garden. Is there a magic word that will summon my youth back to me?
A LARGE OLD-FASHIONED MIXING BOWL STOOD ON A WOODEN crate beside Edith’s bed. A lamp without a shade, a book and a tin cup half filled with water beside the bowl. The green cloth cover of the book damp-stained in the shape of Italy, the title in gold,
Une vie
, partly obscured by the toe of the boot. The bowl was made of yellow glazed stoneware with a raised pattern of acanthus leaves around its belly. Autumn could not resist peeking into its sallow interior. An inch of opalescent bile, green, translucent and still—a lens drawn up from a mysterious ocean deep. The air in the room was sour and smelled of stale bed warmth. A solitary fly dragged its heavy body slowly up the grimy windowpane towards a spider web already damaged and hung about with the embalmed corpses of various luckless insects.
Autumn was sitting on the side of the bed. She was holding Edith’s hand in hers. Edith’s eyes were closed, her hand cool and slightly damp resting slackly in Autumn’s. The two women had
fallen silent, the sound of the men’s voices from the kitchen and the steady drip of rainwater striking the galvanised top of the tank below the window. Autumn watched the fly climbing the window glass towards its doom. Edith’s hair was spread around her skull on the pillow, her forehead pallid and gleaming with an unhealthy perspiration. The top two buttons of her nightdress were undone, her chest rising and falling unevenly. Her lips, which were dry and cracked, were apart and after every few breaths she gave a little gasp, or a sigh.
The fly encountered the web and panicked, becoming at once hopelessly entangled. Autumn watched but no spider appeared to embrace its captive prey. It seemed to her the web was so old and dusty and so in need of repair the spider must have died or gone elsewhere long ago, leaving its deadly trap behind—like a sin committed in the past. She would have liked to have got hold of a broom and swept the whole thing away and given the window a good wash and the room a thorough airing. The fly was frenzied, its legs and wings more securely entangled in the sticky skeins every second. The sound of its frenzy was of a remote aeroplane high up somewhere in a clear summer sky.
Autumn saw that Edith’s eyes were open. She realised, with an uncomfortable feeling of having exposed her private thoughts to the other woman, that Edith had been watching her.
Edith said, ‘Please go in and join them, Autumn. He’s been talking about nothing else ever since he met you both. He can’t wait to spend some time with you. I’m feeling much better. Honestly. I might sleep for a while.’
Autumn bent and touched her lips to Edith’s sweating forehead. She closed her eyes and held her lips against the cool
skin for a long moment, then slowly straightened, a faint taste of salt and something of animal decay on her mouth.
The two women held each other’s gaze. Neither spoke.
A faint imprint of Autumn’s lipstick on Edith’s forehead reminded Autumn of the pinkish export stamp on New Zealand legs of lamb. She said, ‘Well,’ with the sense that everything between them was inconclusive. She took her hand from Edith’s and pressed her freed palm on the sheet where the bed had been roughly turned back at Edith’s side. She looked at her hand pressing into the used and rumpled bedding, and she thought of Pat’s boyish body lying there naked. ‘I’ll come in and see you again a bit later,’ she said, and patted the bed and stood up. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ The drone of the trapped fly ceased suddenly, as if it listened, expecting imminent rescue or death.
‘If you wouldn’t mind closing the door when you go out,’ Edith said.
Autumn gave Edith’s hand a little pat then she turned and went out of the bedroom and closed the door. She stood with her back to the closed door and gathered her thoughts. She could not help feeling pleased that Edith was too unwell to join them. She wiped her lips with her handkerchief and walked down the passage to the studio, the drone of the fly’s death struggle in her head, the dark of the sickroom behind her, the sourness of Edith’s skin persisting on her mouth. Her throat was dry. She needed a drink.
In the studio the two men were leaning together over Pat’s work table. There was no sun but the room was bright and filled with signs of life and work, paintings and drawings piled against the far wall and pinned to the plaster. Both men looked
at her as she came into the studio. A bottle of champagne and an empty glass stood on the work table. Arthur poured champagne into the empty glass and handed it to Autumn. ‘How’s Edith?’
Autumn looked at Pat. ‘She’s going to sleep for a while.’ She drank the champagne.
Arthur refilled Pat’s glass then his own. Pat drained his glass in one go and set it down on the table. He watched Autumn examining his painting.
She put down her glass beside his and picked up the square of cardboard and held it to the light from the window. It was Pat’s boot polish and house paint abstract of what might have been a squashed chocolate layer cake, or perhaps a mood of despair.
Pat said, ‘It’s no good.’ He laughed. ‘It’s nothing.’ There was something of nervousness and aggression in him.
‘I can’t say whether it’s good or not,’ Autumn said coolly. ‘But everything you do is disconcerting.’ She looked at him. He shrugged and looked away. She put the painting down on the table. She didn’t like it. ‘I’ve no idea what to think of it. Except that it’s utterly different from anything else I’ve seen.’ She turned to Arthur. ‘We should put it in the show and see what the public have to say about it.’
Pat said, ‘They’ll hate it. What show?’
She sipped her champagne. The wine had lost its chill and tasted bitter. She set the glass down again. ‘You sound as if you
hope
people will hate your work.’
‘Maybe I do. Maybe they should.’ He was noticing things about her.
‘We are hoping to put together a show of modernist work for the winter. There is a new space in Flinders Lane. The freehold is available. Arthur is looking into the possibility of acquiring it. It would become the centre for the new young artists whose work we favour. Our winter show is sure to create a lot of interest.’
Pat said, ‘I’m not putting that thing into a show.’ He had lost his confidence in his ability to make decisions about his work. The energy had gone out of him for it. He was afraid of where his life was going. He felt sure he and his work would never belong with the people these two favoured. It was all a joke. He was sick of the whole thing. Her dress was blue and smooth and had slipped over her body like a skin. There was no shape to her. Her legs were too long and her feet were bony. She had nervous eyes. Slightly mad. Some painters would paint her. Some painters would fuck her. He didn’t like her. He didn’t trust her. She was bony all over. What did she really want with him? Why was she bothering? He was sorry now that he had left his drawings of Creedy’s daughter at their place. Leaving his drawings there might have made it seem as if he had pledged himself to her in some way. He had just forgotten to take them when he left in the morning. That was all it was. They should have brought them with them and given them back today. What were these two doing here anyway, carrying on about acquiring galleries and putting his stuff in a show? It would have made more sense if they’d brought beer with them instead of this French piss. He reached for the champagne bottle and filled his glass and drank it off and grimaced and set his glass down.
‘I don’t think that decision is completely up to you,’ she said, watching him. ‘What an artist makes is his own private
affair, but what he shows to the public is a decision he must share with others. Preferably a decision he must delegate to others whom he trusts to have his best interests at heart. Artists themselves are not to be trusted as judges of their own work. What else have you got for us to look at?’
‘There’s heaps of stuff. None of it’s any good.’ He met her eyes directly for the first time. He rejected what she had just said as a load of crap, but found the thought interesting that others would decide about his work. He was trying to remember this tall self-possessed woman who seemed to imagine she had some authority over him in her apron at the stove in the kitchen of Old Farm. An image he had of her a second or two before he vomited at her feet. The one moment when she had seemed to him to be a real woman. He could still feel the strong grip of her hand on his arm as she led him out the back door. She looked frail but she was strong. He must remember that. Just because people were rich, it didn’t mean they were weak or stupid. Did it? His dad would not have agreed with that idea. The rich were all dogs for his father and his mates. In his heart, despite his reasoning, and despite his love for Edith, he believed as his father believed. He had always known he would have to betray his origins if he was to get on in life. And it worried him. It always had worried him. Maybe it had even held him back. Right now he wanted to ask a simple straightforward question of this woman in front of him and get a simple straightforward answer back from her. But what was the question? He didn’t know and it angered him.
They
angered him. It would not be a bad thing to see them damaged. He would like to try something with this lanky bitch to see just how good she really was. Nothing came to his mind at this moment but he would
think of something. A test. Courage might have something to do with it. Physical courage. He’d see how she performed then. It was always the real test. Front the bastards with fear and see how they did. Who the fuck did she think she was anyway? He realised he was breathing heavily. He cleared his throat and stepped away from the table and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I may not go on with art.’ This was not what he had intended to say. ‘I haven’t decided. I haven’t done anything much for a while. I’ve been working for old Gerner next door trying to get a bit of money together.’