Autumn Laing (37 page)
She had been terrified all day, in fact, that Arthur was going to bring out her painting and show it to them, or that he was going to announce to them that she too was an artist. She was grateful to him that he’d had the grace to do neither of these things, and also had not hung her picture somewhere in a prominent position where they would have all seen it and felt compelled to rubbish it in their sophisticated way, while
making it sound as if they were praising it. If he had shown her painting to them she didn’t know how she would have managed the situation without telling them the truth of what she thought of them. She knew she would have had the courage for that if she had been pressed. But Arthur was not quite as they were. He wanted to be more human and more relaxed and was not out to make a big impression on everyone. He was like one of the flies she had watched in horrified fascination as a child, he was still struggling a bit. His weak struggling made his life seem futile to her, and he seemed to know this futility in himself and to acknowledge it with her in a silent way that they both knew they would not be able to talk about openly—mainly because to have done so would have been to betray Autumn. Edith had sensed this already at Ocean Grove when they had had their talk while Autumn and Pat were at the beach. Arthur was trapped too, but he was still trying to attract the sympathies of outsiders like herself, as if he thought there might be a chance of being rescued. She knew she was right about this. For the others, art and life were the conditions of a kind of war that preoccupied them to the exclusion of everything else (including the real war that would soon be upon them). This meeting in the house was not really a gathering of friends, with all the strangeness and surprise that friendships have, but was a meeting of a clan with its own secret signs and codes. She was glad she had not been present in the kitchen when Pat had his disagreement with them. She enacted in her mind now how she would have stood behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders and looked her defiance at them boldly. Pat was worth more than all of them put together.
She wished they had never come here. And she could not wait to be gone. The moment they were alone she would take his hands in hers and tell him, We must never come back here, ever again. It will change you if you go on knowing these people. You will become like them. Their influence will hold you. Would she use the metaphor of Mrs Kemp’s fly paper in the service of her argument? Perhaps not. We can do this on our own, would be a better thing to say. Thankfully Pat had recovered from his obsession with the solitary ideals of Rimbaud, but he still liked to think they could do things on their own and without the charity of others. She felt suddenly dizzy and reached for the doorjamb to steady herself.
Arthur said with concern, ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ His hand tentatively extended towards her shoulder, but he did not quite touch her. He felt she had asked him not to touch her. She had rebuked him. He liked her and felt sad for her and for himself and he did not know why he should feel this sadness. Perhaps he was just exhausted. The long night had drained his spirits.
‘I’ll have to go and lie down,’ she said. She thought she was going to be sick. She turned and walked away from the door and the night and the garden of death. Once she was in the bedroom she could no longer hold back her tears. She climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up close around her and closed her eyes. When she stopped crying she said a prayer to the old god of her childhood, murmuring it aloud as she had done then, ‘Please God, make everything be all right.’ Just as if she was a little girl again in her bed at home on the farm or at her mother’s house in Brighton when something was going wrong, when there had been no rain and the grazing
had failed, or when her mother and father had an argument. And she thought of her dear grandfather and saw herself pressed against his coat in the library at Brighton, his smell of Erinmore tobacco, his hand guiding her hand safely across the Great Southern Ocean to the shores of Australia. There we are, the two of us. See us? I can. ‘Dear God, please make everything all right.’
She must have gone to sleep. She opened her eyes. The door was opening slowly. She watched through slitted lids. Pat crept in and turned and closed the door, holding the knob with one hand and easing the door to with the other. He wasn’t wearing his singlet. The room was filled with a grey light and she could see his features contorted with the effort to be silent. When he turned towards her she closed her eyes. She heard him taking off his shorts, the soft hush of material against his flesh. The next minute he was easing himself into the bed beside her. Now she smelled the sour river water on him and knew it must be her she smelled.
He lay still beside her. She waited, hardly daring to breathe. If he went to sleep she would wake him and ask him. She could not hear his breathing and thought he must be breathing with his mouth open. She could smell his fear. The sourness of his body. She waited. Slowly the room grew lighter. She heard a shout and something being banged or struck a number of times in another part of the house. Then silence. She was sweating. She waited. She felt Pat ease his limbs.
She said, ‘Did you make love to her?’
His silence screamed in her head like her brothers at the bench-saw, cutting wood for the winter fires. She waited, her
heart pounding. She felt her baby stir. She waited for Pat to deny it. It was light now. Pat said nothing.
She pushed the bedclothes off her and felt for her slippers. She stood up and went over to the door.
He said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To call Dad.’ She went out and closed the door. In the passage she picked up the telephone and dialled their Brighton number. Her brother Phillip answered immediately. ‘Dad’s up at the farm,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and pick you up, Sis. Did he hit you?’
She said she would get a lift to the railway station and he should meet her there. She put the phone down and turned and saw Arthur silhouetted against the morning sky at the far end of the passage. She asked him to take her to the station. ‘I’ll wait there for my brother.’
She went back into the bedroom and put her clothes on and packed her few things in her bag. Pat lay watching her. He did not ask her to forgive him. She knew he had been weeping. She did not say goodbye when she went out the door with her bag and she did not look around.
At the station she sat on a bench under the awning and waited for Phillip’s green and red International to come around the corner at the top of the incline. When they were reading Grote’s
History of Greece
in her senior years at school she had begun to address her letters to him as Phillip of Macedon. ‘You are my hero,’ she wrote, ‘oh noble son of Amyntas.’ And such like. It was a game. But it was a true game. She knew Phillip would come and rescue her if she was ever in trouble. He was ten years older than her. There was a photograph in the sitting room at the Brighton house of him holding her in his
arms when she was newly born, a look of pride and exquisite delight on his face, his joy and responsibility to have a little sister to champion.
Arthur had tried to insist on waiting with her until Phillip arrived, but she told him to leave. ‘It will be better if my brother doesn’t meet you.’ She was sorry to see that Arthur seemed to take this as a personal rebuff, which it was not. She felt sorry for him. He seemed like a very sad man to her. She could not think of what had happened. She knew she was crushed. Something was holding her together. People would call it courage.
She waited, watching the people coming and going across the station forecourt. Frowning mothers with prams, their older children at their heels or holding the pram handle. Fathers striding ahead, gripping a boy or girl’s hand, and calling to their families to hurry up or they would miss the train. Old people who could hardly move faster than a snail, their legs caught in the sticky paper of life’s end. She watched them and she didn’t watch them. She saw them and she did not see them. She had been buried alive beneath the cold earth. Her womb was still. Her baby dared not move for fear it would bring about the end. She did not weep. She no longer prayed. She waited. She had lost him. It was the end.
PAT WALKED UP THE LAST PINCH OF THE GRAVEL TRACK CARRYING his bag. Gerner was on the hill above him with his dogs. The old man was calling and waving, his hands going about wildly in the air, the dogs howling and straining at their leashes. Stuck up there in his wheelchair, Pat thought. He raised his hand in a greeting to the old man and kept going. Lonely old bugger, he was always wanting something. The yellow oxalis was flowering again. Wasn’t it flowering all the time? Or did it have a season? He had taken no notice. If Helen Carlyon had not given him Arthur’s card that day and he had not gone to Arthur’s office as a last resort but had caught the train to Geelong, none of this would have happened. If he’d spent the rest of his ten bob at the pub that day he would have been better off. You made the right choice and finished up in the shit. You made the wrong choice and came out smelling sweet. You could never tell which way it was going to go. Planning was not enough to determine destiny.
He saw them before they saw him and stopped on the track. He said, ‘Shit!’ He knew who they were. There was a pile of stuff burning in the front garden, the spade still sticking in the ground beside the fire, more or less where he’d left it last spring. Their truck was parked on the sidling to the right of the gate. A flat top. One of them was tying something onto the tray body of the truck, throwing the rope over and going around to tie it off at the cleats on the other side. Pat watched him. It was the younger one, Euan. A weird name for a weird bloke. The nasty sod. Pat’s stomach knotted with fear. The other one, Phillip—the older one, Edith’s favourite—would be in the house for sure. He realised Gerner had been trying to warn him. He could turn around now and walk back down the track and no one would be any the wiser. He would not even need to make a run for it. Just walk away. He wondered how bad it was going to be. It’s my house, he thought, resenting them. The bastards are in my house. He knew she wasn’t there. She would be at the farm in Bairnsdale with her mother by now. He could feel her up there in that big cool house with the veranda looking out over the valley, the river glinting here and there in the distance through the trees, that range of hills, cattle all facing in the same direction in the paddocks, heads down, feeding forward as if they had been trained to it. He could see Edith sitting on the veranda with her mother, having a cup of tea and telling the story of being betrayed by the little Irish bastard they had all warned her against.
He went on towards the gate. His legs were weak and shivery. He drew in a couple of breaths. The brother at the truck was out of sight now. Pat went on through the gate. It was a pity he couldn’t close the gate properly and tie it shut.
It would have given him that extra bit of time. Phillip was the one he might be able to talk some sense into. This other one was not a talker. He went over to the fire and looked at what they were burning. His pictures and books and some bedding and clothes. His best trousers. He could smell the kerosene they’d doused it with. Father Brennan’s book of the sagas was face up, burning. He thought of Njál’s house burning around him, his wife refusing at the last minute to plait him a new string for his bow. He felt sick to see the book go. There was no use trying to rake it out with the spade.
Pat stood looking at the smoking ruin of his book and wished he had the wild courage of the Viking warriors. It was lucky, he supposed, that he had left his drawings of Creedy’s daughter at the Laings’ place. A small piece of luck that, sitting in this disaster like a word of encouragement from a friend. Which friend would that be, then? He laughed despite everything. He was deeply sorry to lose Father Brennan’s book. There would be no replacing it.
He heard the brother coming up behind him. He didn’t turn around but started walking away towards the house.
The man behind him called, ‘The conductor’s here to look at our tickets, Phil!’ And laughed. ‘You fucking little mongrel!’
Pat sensed him closing in and dropped his bag and sprinted the last yards, taking the steps in a flying jump and going in through the kitchen door. The older brother, Phillip, was coming towards him along the passage from the studio. He was carrying the square table Pat used as his painting table. He was even bigger than Pat remembered. A country footballer. Pat stepped to one side of the door and got his back to the wall. There was nothing handy to smash at the bastards with.
He was going to have to think of something pretty smartly. ‘Get out of my house!’ he said, leaning at the older one as if his intention was to go for him. The older one was calm. He set the table down and looked at the doorway. The younger one came through the doorway with the spade in his hand. The older one said, ‘There’s no need for that, Eu. We don’t want to kill this piece of shit. He’s not worth going to jail for.’
But Euan didn’t always heed his brother’s advice. He swung the blade of the spade at Pat’s head.
Pat was too quick for him. He ducked the blow and snatched the spade out of his hand and ran at them both with it, screaming and swinging wildly. ‘You’re fucking dead now, you maggots!’
The brothers collided with each other then pushed off, collecting themselves, the older one going to the left and the younger going to the right. Pat did not hesitate but swung the spade at the legs of the younger one. The older one hit him hard with his body and brought him down in a tackle. Euan piled on and smashed Pat’s face with his closed fist. He kept smashing until Phillip hauled him off. ‘He’s done,’ he said. ‘He’s done, for Christ’s sake.’ Both men were panting heavily, the older holding his younger brother to his chest with both arms around him. They stood looking down at Pat.
He was unmoving. His face covered in blood. One eye was half open, the pupil unseeing. His teeth gleaming behind his bloodied lips.