Autumn Laing (46 page)
Freddy was silent a while, holding her hand in his. Then he said, ‘Let’s face it, Aught. We hardly knew him.’
•
There was something missing in all this. Something flat and not alive in her response to it. Long after she was up and about and back in the garden spreading piles of last year’s mulch
with Stony, she was still bothered by the troubling conviction that she had missed something important. She had been in shock. But that was no excuse. She was not in shock now. She stopped digging, the fork held upright in the earth, and stared off towards the wattle flat and the river. She left the fork standing in the ground and walked up to the house and dropped her gloves on the steps.
She had not written in her journal since their return. She took up the book and sat at the kitchen table and read over her Sofia entries and she saw at once what it was that had been nagging at her. It was obvious. She wrote:
I learned that for the people who live there the outback is elsewhere. Further out, that is where they say the outback is. But it is this very outback sense that weighs on them with its encompassing silence and renders them mute. When I brought up the subject while Margery and I were having a cup of tea she said, ‘Oh, this is nothing, Autumn. Here is not the outback.’ That is what they say. And say very little else. They deny the reality of their lives, and it is this denial that silences them. ‘You should go right out,’ they say. ‘Then you would see the real outback.’ I asked her, ‘And have you been yourself?’ She laughed. ‘No! No, Bill and I have not been.’ They know they are speaking of a place that has no location. No reality of its own. Their governing illusion is that they themselves are not the inhabitants of the outback they speak of. To go in search of the true outback would shatter this illusion and leave them defenceless before the truth. The truth that they are without imagination for their own country, silenced by their denial. They have divorced
themselves from it with this lie of the land. So they speak of the outback as of something sacred, but they may not go in search of it. They know that if they were to go, their goal would be elsewhere. The outback is a mirage of itself and moves away from us as we approach it. Pat painted the truth of this in his floating animals and people, in the trees that had lost touch with the ground and melted in the haze of heat, and in the death and the daisies, the fragments of dismembered things that established no connections with the country.
I was mistaken to write that the outback is the Australian land of myths and heroes. It is this that is the governing illusion by which we deceive ourselves. The lie by which we live. I wrote it when I first arrived at Sofia and knew no better. And there is no escape for
us
, no exemption by writing of them and of us—
their
illusion,
our
enlightened state. For in truth the outback is not a place but is the Australian imagination itself. It is always elsewhere. A steady thunder of silence is imposed on the inhabitants of this island by the impossible weight of isolation in space and history. The truth is not admissible, so we deny it. Pat saw the truth, grasped it intuitively, and painted it during those few extraordinary days in the machinery shed at Sofia Station.
She screwed the cap back on her pen and blotted the page of her notebook and closed it. She got up from the table and retrieved her gloves from the back steps and went down into the garden and resumed spreading the compost from last year’s bins. While she worked she knew the satisfaction of having
understood something. She would talk to Barnaby and Freddy about it. Arthur would hum and agree with her and change the subject and ask what was for his dinner.
Stony staggered towards her across the dug ground pushing another barrow loaded high with the black and reeking compost. He tipped it at her feet and she dug into it with her fork, exposing dozens of tiny pink worms. Next week she and Stony would plant out the seedlings in neat rows.
SENSING MY END, THE SCAVENGERS ARE GATHERING. ONE OF THEM threatened to do something to me she called a Lomi Lomi full-body massage. When she pulled back the bedclothes and would have lifted my nightie I shrieked at her, ‘Get your hands off me, you bitch, or I’ll have you charged with assault.’ She was young and fled from me in tears. I was thrilled with this little surge of power. Andrew accused me of being cruel and told me he had apologised to the girl on my behalf. He brought the aged-care specialist and a nurse with him. The three of them have ganged up on me, watched over by a sad-eyed Adeli, who serves them tea and cake at my kitchen table, while they admire through the open door the spreading arches of Arthur’s Algerian oak, as if my garden is no longer mine but is just there. I have served my purpose (whatever they think that might have been) and they are eager for me to be out of the way.
The aged-care specialist told me I needed to be in an aged-care facility.
‘A correctional facility, you mean,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you people ever say what you mean?’
Death is what she means. They are careful not to use the word, but it is they who are afraid of death, not I. Well, I’m not quite done yet. ‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ I told the aged-care facilitator. (Facilitator! I almost gagged.) ‘Get out of here and leave me to the privacy of my pain. You’ll get yours soon enough.’
She smiled. They have been trained to smile. To counterfeit kindliness and to bear with the irritation and helplessness of the aged without impatience. They give credence to nothing I say. They are conditioned to be unmoved by my pleas and dismiss them as the deluded ramblings of an old woman in her last days. I am to be pitied, to be sure, but
la pietà
is not a professional position, so they conceal compassion—if they ever feel it. With them nothing in our relations is permitted to be real. Andrew, however, is vulnerable to my reality. I have long had the measure of him and know his family and the private conditions of his life.
‘This is my home,’ I said to the aged-care bitch. (Unlike the Lomi Lomi girl, this one is large and matured in oak and is not to be trifled with.) ‘I told you to get out. So would you please go?’ No, she would not go. She bared her perfect teeth and stayed and measured me and weighed me and humiliated me with her instructions to lift this arm and flex that leg. I can’t defend myself against her. How can I resist her? She is far stronger than me. She enters my privacy as if I deserve none and leaves the door wide open for the others to follow. I am a public thing. The respect of intimacy means nothing to them.
When she leaned over me I thought of biting her elbow, but was afraid I might crack a tooth on her pointy bones.
When she had gone Andrew reasoned with me, ‘You know, Autumn, there are many residents [inmates] in the aged-care facility who are a lot worse off than you are.’ It was the same old story from childhood: Think of the starving millions and eat your greens. It never made greens (cabbage?) taste better to be told there were people who did not have to eat it.
While he was cutting the plaster off my arm he gave me one of his pep talks. ‘Living there could give your life a new sense of purpose,’ he said brightly, as if he might take his family and go and live there himself. ‘You would have a community.’
‘I already have a sense of purpose, Andrew, thank you. You’re pinching me! And I don’t want a community. I’ve had one of those.’
‘Many of these people suffer from advanced macular degeneration and are no longer able to read. You could read to them.’
‘They have talking books for that,’ I told him. ‘Are you going to cut that thing off my arm or not?’
They torment me in the name of their new invention, professional ethics. Once upon a time it was enough for us to behave decently to each other if we could manage it. Now they are trained by experts in ethical behaviours.
‘Adeli can’t look after you on her own any longer. It’s too much to expect her to do her work and look after you at the same time.’
‘Did
she
tell you that?’
‘You’ve become a full-time job, Autumn. We have to face the facts.’
‘Face your own facts, Andrew. Your wife’s having an affair with the postman. What are you going to do about that?’
He threatened to take my writing materials away from me. Am I to be interred in the great Australian gulag of aged care to wait for my end? I have my four little pills and will take my life in my own time and depart when I am ready. These people are bullies and tyrants acting in the name of professionalism and their precious new ethics. I can scream at them but who will defend me against their cruelties? Where are Freddy and Barnaby? Where is my dear Uncle Mathew? My friends. My champions. My men. And poor Arthur, where is he? They have all gone on ahead of me. That other one has gone too. He would not defend me. Would he even defend his own child if it distracted him from his work? His mother? Perhaps he would have defended his mother. Barnaby used to say, ‘The poets are my consolation,’ and would recite a long passage to me from the
Inferno
in the original medieval Italian and grin and say, ‘It can’t be translated.’ I hear him now walking up and down the back veranda, swinging his shillelagh and declaiming in the language of true poetry,
Al tornar della mente, che si chiuse dinanzi alla pietà de’ due cognati
… But at the end even the poets could not console him. I have begun to understand his state of mind during his last days. My dear friend Barnaby, the closer I get to my own great day, the more fondly I recall you. Friendship is my consolation.
After we first returned from Sofia Station I drank a great deal of wine and walked the paddock all night barefoot in
my nightdress and howled Pat’s name by the wattle flat in the moonlight (if there was a moon). None of it helped. He was gone. I suffered the emptiness of my despair. And when I had exhausted myself I fell ill and took to my bed. Arthur took time off work and nursed me like a mother nursing its sick child. I lay in bed all day weeping. I am ashamed to confess how low my spirits sank before I began to revive. I believe I was unspeakably cruel to Arthur—so I will not speak of it.
Anne Collins had declined Arthur’s offer to curate our exhibition of the new Melbourne modernists and had begun curating for a rival gallery recently established in High Street, Malvern, and for Gallery 5 in Sydney (owned by Ginni Lamont, the flamboyant daughter of millionaire collector and racing identity Jack Lamont). Anne was known for knowing all the right people. We heard news of them from Barnaby. When her exhibition of
Hinterland
was announced Arthur and I saw the advertisement in the paper one Saturday morning. It was the illustration that caught my eye. The shock of it. The grinning corpse in the long grass in the shadow of the citadel range, daisies growing out of its shirt. It was like seeing my own flesh displayed on the page. I had to turn away.
Arthur and I did not receive an invitation to the opening. I felt physically ill for weeks dwelling on this non-invitation and decided I could never again look at those pictures that he and I had made together in our brief magical time in the machinery shed at Sofia Station.
Guy Cowper disdained either to visit or to review
Hinterland
in his column in the
Herald
. Cowper’s silence was the biggest Melbourne critical reaction Pat received. And the most damning. There were others. But their murmurs of incomprehension
scarcely rose above the din of Cowper’s silence. I knew Pat had been hoping for puzzlement and ridicule from Cowper and that silence from his old enemy would be a great disappointment to him. I felt for Pat and longed for him to know success and to receive understanding for his work. No matter how vindictive my mood I never sank so low as to wish failure on Pat. Ever. There were times I cursed him and might have killed him if I’d had a knife in my hand. But I never hoped to see him fail.
When the exhibition had been on for nearly two weeks and it was no longer news, Rodney Armitage’s review came out in the
Sydney Morning Herald
and was reprinted in the
Argus
and suddenly people were talking about
Hinterland
again. Armitage was a friend of Anne’s. It had not been easy for her to convince Armitage it was worth his while coming down to Melbourne to review a show by an unknown young artist. But she had persisted and had eventually convinced him Pat was important enough for him to notice. There was more to it than this, for Armitage was Cowper’s arch-rival. They despised each other and were inclined to despise whatever was going on in each other’s cities. Anne argued that Cowper’s silence on Pat’s show was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Armitage to seriously bloody Cowper’s nose and reveal him to be the self-serving provincial neophyte (Armitage’s words, not mine) of English artistic taste that Armitage was always claiming he was. ‘Let them all know that Cowper has missed the most important art event in Melbourne during the entire period of his tenure.’ Anne was good at this sort of thing. Setting dog against dog in the pit. She enjoyed the feel of it. I think in her heart she probably disliked all men in pretty equal measure but found them far too useful ever to let herself seem to be in open conflict with
them. There were times, I recall, when a certain look came into her eyes at Old Farm. Impossible to describe. But bearing a lethal message. Unmasked in a moment of distraction. And if she caught you looking, her features broke into a perfect smile that managed to convince you of her perfect trust. ‘I am sharing something with you, my dear,’ her smile seemed to say, ‘that I would share with no one else.’ She possessed exactly the right character (is it?) for negotiating the labyrinth of conflicting power plays and bitchery between departments that ruled the Tate when she finally got there. She slid into that world with scarcely a ripple, an eel slipping into a muddy creek. A little flick of her tail and she had propelled herself into the centre of the action. Anne Collins was to become one of that select tribe of Australians who found themselves to be more at home in London than many Londoners ever were. I never did understand why men tried so hard to please her. It was her abiding mystery. She and Cowper and Armitage are all long gone and forgotten now, of course.