Autumn Laing (45 page)

In her room they put their clothes on without drying themselves and went back to the shed.

‘We ought to prime those other pieces of board,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

He went on with his painting while she primed the squares of ply with a flat white paint that Bill and Peter had used for the garden gate posts and which had lime in it and was quick-drying. She wasn’t sure it was a good idea to prime the masonite with it but she was loving the two of them working together and said nothing about her doubts. Being with him was having the effect of making her feel his age, like a girl again, without responsibilities, an excitement in everything they did. The silence of the valley had ceased to trouble her. She called across to him, ‘Let’s go swimming in the moonlight tonight.’

‘Is there a moon?’ He didn’t pause in his work.

‘We can make one if there isn’t.’ She had a sudden flash of the gesturing arms of the dead tree rearing out of the water.

He painted the same three-tiered arrangement on each square of ply. A dark green sky (there was no blue paint), shading down to pale, then the hard brown and black mass of the jagged citadel range, and the deep creamy foreground of the savannah sweeping right up to the foot of the viewer. Each picture the same
arrangement and more or less a copy of its predecessor. He put the paint on without hesitation in broad sweeps of the brush. It didn’t take him long to do one and he was soon out of squares.

He went over to the truck and picked up the square he had finished first and tested the paint with his thumb to see if it was dry enough to work on. ‘I might put in some figures. What do you think? Should they be black?’

She said, ‘I saw a huge black boar up past the stockyards this morning.’

‘I don’t know if I can do a boar.’

‘He will be
your
boar and no one else’s.’

He picked up the narrow sash cutter and scooped on some of the citadel dark and made a quick drawing of something. He stepped back. ‘Is it a pig? It’s not sitting on the ground properly.’ He leaned in and drew a quick stick figure against the green sky. ‘Let them float if that’s what they want to do. This one’s called
The Pig Hunter
.’ He gave the stick figure a gun, or maybe it was a spear. He began putting in a blazing sun. ‘Is the pig a symbol of anything?’

‘Swine,’ she said. ‘Filth and gluttony.’

‘That’ll do.’ He bent down and worked in his black pig, stepping back to see how it was looking, then stepping in close again and adding a dab. ‘Swine,’ he said. ‘I like that. The swine of Sofia Station. Do you think Bill and Marg would mind if we called it that?’

The clanging of the ploughshare called them to lunch. Barnaby and Bill were sitting at the table in the kitchen while Margery
dished up plates of steaming corned beef with boiled potatoes and carrots. Bill ladled several spoons of hot English mustard onto his corned beef. There had been a suspicious death after the dance the previous night and Harry had had to stay in town to investigate it. After lunch Barnaby came down to the machinery shed to see what they were doing. He stood looking at the painted squares of board.

Pat said, ‘They’re not finished. This is just the start.’

Barnaby turned to Autumn. ‘Your little Irishman’s revved up. There’s going to be no stopping him now.’ They stood watching Pat putting in detail, a horseman in the sky on a red horse, an upside-down cow, dismembered limbs and other odd bits and pieces that took his fancy. A teapot with flowers on it floating by. Trees liberated from the embrace of the earth, levitating in the undulations of the air. He was enjoying himself. ‘None of this has to stay in,’ he said. ‘I can paint it all out if I want to then put it all back in again the next day.’

Barnaby said, ‘I think we’re going to remember what happened in the machinery shed at Sofia Station today for some time.’

‘D’you think your dad would mind if I put your mum here? The green and red lady in the flowered dress with the yellow straw hat?’ He was already drawing her in with his brush.

During the rest of the week the majestic ironbarks became black and green shimmers in his pictures, vaporising in the waves of heat. Forty paintings all the same and each different from the next. A suite, Barnaby called them. Like aspects of a man (Pat himself, no doubt) at different times of his life, in different moods, with different longings and appetites. One thing and many. Busy with movement over here, still as a
corpse over there. And the picture Pat most favoured was the one with the grinning corpse withered in the grass, yellow daisies growing through its shirt pockets. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘My first self-portrait.’

Autumn wondered if it might be a portrait of his grief for the loss of his Edith.

No narrative emerged. There was no linear story connecting one picture with the next. The bloated green carcass of a pig attracted him and he kept going back to it for days, the detail of its worm-eaten innards fascinating him. ‘I see this pig when I’m nearly asleep. I’m never going to be done with some of these pictures.’

Pat was in awe of the energy the series had released in him and feared the day his energy for them would wane and desert him. He did not wish to be done with the painting. He believed in himself with an excited fear that maybe it was all wrong after all and he would wake up and realise he had done nothing.

‘So what do you think?’ He must have asked for their reassurance a hundred times. He slept the night with Autumn and woke early each morning and went straight across to the machinery shed to reassure himself that his pictures were still alive for him, still needing his attention in their growing towards a maturity he had not foreseen, eager to see that maturity come into being, surprised by what he did, by what he saw, as if they were strange plants and were to present him with unknown fruits and blossoms. ‘This is my country,’ he said to Barnaby. ‘God, I feel it right here!’ And he poked his chest hard with his finger.

Barnaby put an arm around his shoulder. ‘You’re doing it, old mate.’

‘You guys believed in me. I wouldn’t be doing it without you two. I’m too scared to think about it. I hate to think what I might see if I did think about it.’

On the day before they were due to go home Autumn and Pat and Barnaby stood in the machinery shed looking at the collection before packing it up. Pat said, ‘So what are we going to call it?’

Autumn said, ‘Well, we’ve been calling it
The Citadel Range
.’ He said nothing and she saw he was not content with such a title. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘
Hinterland
,’ he said with certainty. ‘That’s what this is. Guy Cowper and his mates can make something of that. They’ll see it as a metaphor for all kinds of shit. My interior life as a swine for sure.’ He laughed. ‘What do you reckon?’

And so the machinery-shed collection became
Hinterland
. Without the article. The last painting contained the only hint of narrative or sequence. A final addition of the brush, that was perhaps at first no more than an accident, and a corner of the homestead found its way onto the far right-hand edge of the picture. A narrow vertical of white-painted weatherboard topped by a triangle of green tin roof. A face at the only window. A woman looking out towards the citadel range. Pat turned to Autumn. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘You’re in here too. You and me both. Your eyes will always be in these pictures. They wouldn’t have come into being without you.’

Barnaby found some hairy pink twine and they tied the paintings in four bundles of ten. When Barnaby had gone back to the house Pat and Autumn went down to the creek and swam naked in the cool clear water, ducking under to meet and embrace. That night they made love for the last time
on her narrow iron bed in the so-called cottage (just a few feet away from the green frogs, which she was never to forget, the frogs and the supplicating arms of the drowning woman and the old boar under the lime trees).

•

And that (except for the details of saying goodbye to Bill and Peter and Margery and getting the shiny red aeroplane back to the coast and travelling for all of two days from Rockhampton by train to Melbourne) was more or less the end of their visit to Sofia Station in the Central Highlands of Queensland. Another country, that Autumn would come to think of as a country entirely foreign to her mind and way of thinking. Pat revisited Sofia and the country around the ranges whenever he returned to Australia from England during his long and fruitful career, but Autumn never did go back there. Pat found there his source and drew on it confidently for the material of his art until his last days, painting his strange pictures of those uncelebrated landscapes, those silent people, their broken dreams and unspoken hopes, the passions that flew around their heads like imprisoned ghosts. But always really painting himself, if you knew him. Snow or shine you could have found him there in his converted barn at the back of his fine old flint and greystone house in the West Midlands, painting the Expedition Range. He had his own copy of the first edition of Leichhardt’s
Journal
. Purchased from Quaritch in Golden Square for a goodly sum of English pounds.

Autumn returned to the creek and the supplicating arms of the drowning woman and to the narrow iron bed many times
in her dreams, in her thwarted passion, and in her helpless nightmares. And in the persistence of memory. The citadel range haunted Autumn throughout her long life. Right to the end. Green frogs and all, the musty smell of the striped ticking mattress, the pallid gecko on the ceiling with the black eyes (like an angel in disguise, knowing everything before it had come to pass), looking down on them making love for their last time together. And the eyes of the black boar that had seen into her soul.

If there has to be a last time for everything (and how can there not be?), it is just as well we do not know it when it comes to us.

•

It was dark and raining steadily when Barnaby turned into the driveway at Old Farm and reefed on the handbrake. The brake made a loud ratcheting sound. The sharp noise and the lurching stop woke Autumn. She had been sleeping against Pat’s shoulder on the back seat, his left arm around her, his right hand resting in her lap, his fingers lightly gripping her upper thigh through the thin fabric of her cotton dress. He had not been asleep. They sat up and disentangled themselves. He kissed her warm cheek gently and said, ‘We’re here.’ (Which, of course, is where we always are.)

The porch light went on and Arthur came to the door and looked out at them, shading his eyes with his raised hand. Was he not the intrepid explorer Leichhardt himself, gazing into new country? And, no doubt, just as the real Leichhardt before him, wondering what to expect?

They all climbed out of the car and Arthur came across the gravel to meet them. They greeted each other, handshakes for Barnaby and Pat and a kiss on the cheek for Autumn. The rain was fairly coming down. Pat and Autumn stood close beside each other at the open boot, shoulders hunched against the cold rain, sheltering under Barnaby’s umbrella, and watched Barnaby lift out Autumn’s bag. Arthur said, ‘I’ll take that,’ and Barnaby relinquished it to him. Arthur hurried across to the porch with the bag. Barnaby left Autumn and Pat standing on their own by the boot, the pictures stacked at the sides and on the bottom. Pat closed the boot on them.

Barnaby got into the driver’s seat and lit a cigarette and started the engine.

He had left a small space of privacy to Autumn and Pat. It was a very small space as it turned out. Arthur deposited Autumn’s bag on the porch and returned at once to where they stood. Pat had time only to kiss her cheek and murmur, ‘Fare well, my dearest woman.’

Arthur came up and took Autumn’s hand and Pat turned and walked around to the passenger side, leaving Barnaby’s umbrella with the two of them, and he got into the car and closed the door. Barnaby leaned from his window and called to them, ‘I’ll come up and see you soon.’ And with that he waved and drove around the rose bed and out the gate. Pat did not look round or wave or look back when the car turned at the gate.

The shock of Pat’s sudden unexpected departure was so great Autumn did not properly begin to register it until the sound of the car was fading down the hill. Until he closed the boot on the paintings she had been expecting him to come into the
house and go to his old room and for everything to pick up and continue, plans for the showing of
Hinterland
racing in her head alongside her passion for this man.

Standing on the gravel with Arthur’s jacket over her and listening to the fading of the car’s engine, Autumn began to see what Pat had done. And to see that he had planned to do it.

Two weeks later she received a letter from him. There was no salutation. Barnaby had told her Pat was living with Anne Collins in Anne’s flat in East Melbourne. Anne was arranging a one-man show of
Hinterland
at a gallery in Malvern.

You and I can’t build our happiness on Arthur’s misery. Your husband’s grief can never be a foundation for our joy. That is not possible and you know it is not possible. With you and Arthur holding together there is no place at Old Farm for me to be myself. Barnaby told me you were thinking of killing yourself. I don’t believe you will go through with something like that, you are far too fond of life and of yourself. But please don’t go about talking as if you mean to do it, it upsets everyone and they are all beginning to hate me. I don’t want to be the destroyer of another life. I don’t mean yours. I mean Arthur’s. By the way, you can keep those drawings I left with you.

The note was not signed. She burned it and went back to bed and cried for a long time and cursed him bitterly. Arthur took care of her until she was more settled and regained some of
her former sense of life’s possibilities. Freddy came to see her and sat on the side of her bed and held her hand and said very little but listened with his old trust and depth of sympathy. He was not looking well himself and she apologised to him for being so selfish. He laughed and said he was fine. She said, ‘I don’t know how I would have got through this without you.’ But it was Arthur, not Freddy, who had made available to her the safe ground she had needed. She told Freddy the story of Barnaby taking them up to the escarpment and showing them the intricate labyrinth of laneways between the rocks. ‘We came around a corner and there were red hand prints under an overhang and a piece of ochre sitting in a cleft. Barnaby said, It’s been sitting there since the old blackfellow left it there. And he reached for it. Pat grabbed his hand and said, Leave it, Barney! If you touch it now it will only have been lying there since you put your hand on it.’ And she looked up at Freddy and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Whenever she spoke of Pat she was overwhelmed with the feeling of having been abandoned and humiliated by him. She thought there could never again be anything good in her life. ‘I don’t know why I told you that,’ she said, sniffing and blowing her nose on her hankie. ‘None of it makes any difference now.’