Autumn Laing (31 page)

At the time it seemed to us both that to attempt to deal with the charged enigma of Edith’s painting would be to risk touching off an explosion of unreason that would finish us. Eventually distance and time, the loss of friends, ill health, and finally a kind of forgetting eroded our interest, until at last we were alone again with each other, she and her picture no longer a feature of our horizon. A buried city of the plain whose ramparts I have begun to unearth.

The morning after our return from Ocean Grove I woke to the sun streaming through the French doors and the sound of Arthur singing in the kitchen. I lay listening, disbelieving, seeing the pale green leaves of the Algerian oak he had planted out in the middle of the lawn. A blackbird stood on the oak’s topmost branch challenging all comers. Tom was flattened in the grass, staring up at him with evil in his eyes. Arthur didn’t bring me a cup of tea. Perhaps he had tried my door in the night and knew it to be locked. I got up and looked at myself in my dressing-table mirror. My eyes were red and had little lines in their corners. I put on my dressing-gown and went into the kitchen.

He was at the Rayburn. There was the comforting smell of toast and coffee and the kitchen was bright with the lovely day. He turned to me and smiled and said good morning, not as if
nothing
had happened, but as if he was determined to demonstrate to me that we could proceed
as if
nothing had happened. So in a way nothing
had
happened. But all was changed. I had become a liar and a hypocrite.

‘I can do you a couple of boiled eggs?’

He was not over-cheerful. In fact he did it very well. Almost as if he were a practised hypocrite himself. I thanked him and lit a cigarette and stood in the doorway looking out at my garden. Stony was among the tomatoes, pruning and tying them up. There were birds busy everywhere, going for it after the rain. I suppose the leaves and weeds were alive with insects. The sun was already warm. Arthur came to my elbow and handed me a cup of coffee and kissed my neck. I turned and kissed him on the cheek. He fetched his coffee and stood beside me. I prayed to my godless god that he would not mention last night. The smell of the country was in the morning. It was why we had come here, this smell of our reality, this peace, this beauty.

It was a Sunday so he was home for the day. After breakfast we walked down to the river together and sat on our log and watched the water. Owing to the heavy rain the night before the river was up and had a lovely strong energy to it. Arthur pointed. ‘There!’ he whispered. A tawny water rat slipped along the bank into the churning water. Arthur took my hand in his.

When he came home from the office on Monday he looked tired and worried. I had cooked a beef pie, which was his favourite meal, and had opened one of his better clarets. We sat at the table in the kitchen eating our dinner. I just wanted life
to go on. He looked up at me in a way that made me realise he was about to say something important. His fork was halfway to his mouth. I waited, cold creeping into my stomach.

‘Something seems to be coming apart in the Ponty,’ he said. He kept looking at me as if he was expecting a strong response from me, possibly an explanation, even a convincing reassurance from me that all was well with his precious car.

I said, ‘You mean that noise you think you heard?’ I hated having to speak of anything to do with Saturday night. But he was forcing me to it. I wondered where the conversation would lead and was terrified he would bring it around to Pat and to Edith’s painting and, well, to the whole sordid mess of my exhausted emotions. I did not think the ticking he had complained of was something that could be worth talking about on its own.

‘
Thought
I heard?’ he said.

‘That you
heard
, then,’ I said with care.

He forked the paused food into his mouth and chewed. ‘It was there again on the way to the station this morning and when I drove home this evening.’ He reached for his glass and took a good swig of claret.

Did he murmur,
Thought I heard
? Or did I only imagine it?

I waited, but he said no more. The evening was charged with nasty possibilities. I had lost my appetite and pushed my plate away and lit a cigarette. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. ‘Smoking already? Not hungry, darling? Are you feeling okay?’

‘I had a late lunch with Barnaby,’ I said.

‘The pie’s terrific. How’s Barnaby?’

I knew we were not done with the ticking in the car, but the initiative was not mine and there was nothing I could do to
hurry things to a conclusion. I drank some claret and smoked my cigarette. ‘He’s going up to Sofia Station on Wednesday. Harry can’t come down. He wanted me to go with him. He complains that he knows our home and our lives in every detail and we only know most of his life thinly and from hearsay.’

‘Will you go?’

‘I’m thinking about it. Would you mind?’ I was certain I wasn’t going to Sofia Station with Barnaby, then or ever. Eventually, but not on this occasion, I was to change my mind. The results of my change of mind could not have been foreseen and were momentous. The biggest thing, in fact, to happen to me and to Australian art during my lifetime.

Arthur ate more pie and drank more claret and frowned and sniffed a couple of times. ‘I would a bit,’ he said. He looked up at me, obviously unsure of what he was letting himself in for. It hadn’t been easy for him to say this. ‘But if you’d really like to go …’ He didn’t finish what he was about to say but voiced a new idea. ‘Perhaps I should take a couple of weeks off and we could both go?’

I knew he didn’t mean it any more than I had meant that I might go with Barnaby. ‘There’s too much to do here,’ I said. Would Pat arrive at the door one day and demand to become part of our lives? Or demand that I run away with him? In this last fear (or was it a hope?) I wasn’t so far off predicting what eventually happened. I said, ‘Will you take the car into Martin and King and have them look at it?’ I knew that for Arthur the suggestion there might be something amiss with the bodywork of the Ponty was about as acceptable to him as sacrilege to a nun—there was a moral dimension to his faith in that car.

His frown deepened. ‘Oh, I doubt if it’s in the body,’ he said, dismissing the idea as a form of idiocy. How dare I suggest such a thing? What did I know of the bodywork of the masters? If it came down to it, what did women know of anything much? For his time Arthur wasn’t particularly sexist, but I knew he could reach for the popular male view of women whenever he was feeling insecure about himself. Arthur’s sexism was, as it usually is, a form of self-defence against a sense of his own inadequacy to meet a particular challenge. His implied belittling of my opinion on this occasion was a useful means for diverting his anger away from himself and its real cause. I don’t know that he ever understood things in this way, but it is how I understood them.

We left it at that for the time being. Was he thinking of having been done out of children by my condition? This often worried me. My barren condition was itself the result of my youthful search for a kind of wild mythical freedom that does not exist, mistaking at seventeen the idea of free sex for something far more substantial and elusive. Particularly, I knew, Arthur regretted not being able to have a son. I can’t say how I knew he was thinking of this at the time, I just knew it. And knowing it froze something in me. There was no obvious sign, and of course he didn’t say anything about it. If we had not concealed our true feelings from each other that evening, we might have had our big row and got it over and done with. Or is this too simple? I fear it may be. The big row, after all, was as dangerous for him as it was for me. We never had it. Its potential, like nuclear weapons, was useful as a deterrent. To have resorted to it would have left the survivor with little to celebrate. Was it our mistake to have secret lives? I know I
should believe this, but I can’t make myself regret what we did. The open and the concealed. The concealed leaking dangerously into the open, like a levee bank beginning to give way and threatening to drown the entire town when the pressure of the flood outside becomes too great.

Arthur drove the Ponty into Melbourne the following Friday. The people at Martin and King took him for a drive around Albert Park Lake. One mechanic (were they mechanics or something else?) stuck his head under the dashboard and the other drove at over a hundred miles an hour. When they were unable to detect the rattle, as Arthur was now calling it, they drove the car at various speeds and changed drivers and listened again. They said that whatever it was, it must have righted itself. Their joint conclusion (and it annoyed Arthur that they stuck together on this) was that something, a piece of wire or a twig, had probably lodged in the chassis during the drive home from Ocean Grove in all that rain and that it had been dislodged during the high-speed circuit of the lake.

On Arthur’s way home it began again; ticker-ticker-ticker.

He was sitting up in bed beside me (we only spent the one night sleeping apart) trying to read his Wilenski, which he was making rather a labour of. He said, evidently speaking out of a conversation he had been having with himself, ‘It’s quite clear.’ He was being comically earnest and I was glad I was able to shield my expression from him with my book. He turned to me. ‘Will you come for a drive with me in the morning and tell me what you make of it?’

I said, ‘If it would help, darling, of course.’

‘I don’t think they believed me,’ he said miserably. He was like a little boy and was hating the difference that had arisen
between himself and the craftsmen he so admired at Martin and King. I believe he had managed to convince himself that this was the principal cause of his unhappiness at that time. He was determined to resolve it. He respected them and wanted to know that they respected him in turn. Otherwise it wasn’t fair. And Arthur liked things to be fair. Despite his loathing of the daily practice of the law, justice in all things was Arthur’s guiding principle throughout his life. Justice and decency. Arthur was a good man.

‘Their explanation sounded reasonable to me,’ I said, as lightly as I was able. I would have much preferred to have read my book but was determined to be helpful. ‘Perhaps another stick has got caught up in the same place,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe you should take it in to the dealers and have them check the chassis and the motor?’ I was not so dumb as not to know the difference between bodywork and chassis and motor, was I? So there.

The dealers were unable to find anything amiss and a week or two after they had looked at it Arthur declared that the ticker-ticker-ticker had deepened and become a much larger jagger-jagger-jagger. ‘It’s impossible to ignore.’ He was alienated now from the dealers and their mechanics as well as the craftsmen at Martin and King. The whole business with the car demoralised him. He had no way of stepping back from it and laughing at it and his own earnest obsession with it. It had caught him. That it was really something to do with his manhood was obvious to me. He was a man, after all. A surrogate problem, I thought it was. That it was not the real, the deeper, cause of his unhappiness only made it more impossible for him to deny its reality. He was stuck with it.
And he couldn’t let go of it. Which is perhaps not surprising. Men cling to these obsessive illusions in the hope they will be saved. But they never are saved by them. The truth remains suspended beneath such surrogate problems like a gondola beneath a hot-air balloon. And sooner or later the whole thing must come down. Men probably know this and it is no doubt this knowledge that makes them cling the more strongly to the illusion that they are sailing aloft when in fact they are sinking into the depths. Pressed to a severe enough desperation, men kill (often their own loved ones) to keep their precious balloon aloft a little longer. All extremes are possible and all have been tried by them. Is there any truth, indeed, no matter how humane and sacred, that has stood in the end against a sufficiently persuasive rationalisation of men under pressure? I had no fear that Arthur would become a killer. But I did fear he might have some kind of breakdown if this thing went on indefinitely.

I soon ceased to laugh, even secretly, at his silliness. I felt sorry for him. I had been persuaded by then that it was serious. ‘Take it in to them again,’ I said, and I stroked his hand. ‘Before something falls off.’ I hardly dared to think what it might be that could fall off. It was his car’s bodywork, its perfection, after all, not his own that was in danger of falling apart. Wasn’t it? I had been unable to hear the first ticker-ticker sound but had not had the nerve to tell him so. There might just possibly have been something, I didn’t know engine sounds well enough to be certain, so I said yes, I heard it, but that it sounded rather too slight to worry about. Now I was being told it was not slight but major. Would I listen again? I did so, reluctantly, but heard nothing to alarm me. When I said I heard something like
a ticking and attempted to mimic it he responded scornfully, ‘That’s the bloody tappets, for Christ’s sake!’

Arthur, unlike the rest of us, didn’t usually swear. Not even mildly. I had never heard, or heard of, tappets before this so far as I knew, but now that I was listening seriously I was able to hear all sorts of things, and after an hour of driving around I became quite confused by the medley of peculiar noises coming from the car. I might have pointed to any one of them. Apparently expert mechanics can ‘see’ inside the engine of a car by listening to the sounds it makes when it is running. The engine of the Ponty, indeed the entire organism of the car, spoke a language of its own. Cars like whales in the ocean depths, clicking and whining and howling to each other across the vastness. I’ve never been very convincing in my attempts at anthropomorphism. It is all just meaningless noise, I think.

But was I hearing
his
sound or not, Arthur wanted to know. His tone by now was edged with anger and frustration. Was I deaf, or daft, or what? Why couldn’t I say something useful?
Bloody women!
Indeed.