Autumn Laing (11 page)

‘Mary Mother of God,’ Pat said. (It was the only blasphemy his mother ever permitted herself.) ‘There’s nothing I hate so much as having to leave the work to make money.’ Every day was a day for painting with him and any day lost to painting was a day lost to himself. The thought of losing a day was putting him in a bad mood.

If it had not been for their dire need of some cash, nothing would have convinced him to set out on this desperate caper this morning. He’d be down there in the village buying tobacco and papers and a bottle of beer at the pub with the ten bob instead of wasting the best part of it getting himself into Melbourne and back. It was just the weather today for stoking the wood stove and staying indoors, and giving himself up to painting and reading, and maybe writing another poem—if one happened to come his way, and he had the feeling it might have, if only he’d had a moment to himself. He loved days like this, grey and cold and isolating. He and Edith snugged away down here cosily in this little cottage at the bottom of the world, getting on with their work in the quiet of their own time. He was going to have to wrap the roll of drawings in something or the
absorbent paper would disintegrate in the wet. He’d better get on with it, or the day would slip away and his resolve with it.

He held up her mirror and smirked at himself. There! It wasn’t such a bad picture, was it? He could see the fine hairs up the fellow’s nostrils. They flickered palely as he breathed in and out. Little golden hairs, they were, and surely rather nice for nose hairs. He had always kept a neat appearance and until today had almost never missed having a shave in the mornings. When he’d told her his plan last night over their sardines on toast and a cup of tea, Edith said, ‘If you’re going to stand in front of a man like Sir Malcolm and have any chance of convincing him you’re worth his money then you’re going to have to do something about your appearance.’ She laughed at him. ‘You look more like an accountant than a bohemian. Appearances are everything with these people. I know them. They’re
my
people. If you look as if you’re starving for your art you might have a show of convincing them you’re the real thing.’

She didn’t see how it was going to work, this absurd charade he was proposing, and she told him so. And mightn’t it even be illegal? ‘They don’t part with their cash that easily. That’s why they’ve got so much of it.’

He set her mirror down on the sink (where it became an oval of grey sky) and went out to the studio and collected the drawings from the floor. He shuffled them together into a neat pile on the table, standing a moment considering whether to put the drawing with the poem on top, where it would be the first to be seen. He put it under the others, where it belonged—under Mr Creedy’s daughter’s great swaggering bottom. If he’d been at all interested in depicting the realities of the girl’s anatomy he might have asked her to pose naked for him. But it was
something in himself he was after, not another picture of a girl’s bare bum.

He felt uncomfortable with the idea of making himself up to look like your typical art student, unshaved and his clothes unpressed. It wasn’t him. ‘We might be poor,’ his mother said to him time and again, slapping at the back of his jacket with the flat of her hand before he went out, ‘but we’ll keep that to ourselves.’ The only times he ever saw his father unshaved was on Sunday mornings. His dad sat in the front room reading the newspaper by the light from the window, in his braces, his collar off and his boots not shined. But he never went into the street looking like that. Not even just to go next door for a yarn with Don Foley. Pat had always worn his hair short and neatly parted on the left side. Looking in the bathroom mirror over the sink at home, his head at an angle to concentrate, his tongue between his teeth, drawing the comb over his scalp from back to front to get the white line of demarcation clean and straight, like his dad’s. When he thought about it, it seemed a funny thing to be doing, but he did it all the same, like everything else he did. Wanting to be the man his dad expected him to be. Even when he was little they didn’t hold hands, he and his dad, but walked down the street side by side, going for a swim on Saturday at the sea baths with the other men from the tram depot. None of the others taking their boys with them. They had always been mates, he and his dad, from the beginning.

His hair was without a curl, fine and pale and sitting flat to his skull. Whenever he had let it get a bit long it looked lank and wispy, framing his features with an unflattering weakness, especially around his eyes, which he was inclined to squint. He was squinting now thinking about it. His were not the glorious
locks of a wild bohemian. He knew that. Edith was right, he looked more like an accountant. His mother had slicked a wayward forelock with her spit for him, ‘There!’, before sending him off to school with a quick peck on his cheek, which he had begun to close his eyes to and flinch from when he was seven or eight years of age. ‘Oh, you big man, you. Now get on with you!’ The minute he was out of her sight he wiped the kiss from his cheek with the back of his hand, not because he didn’t treasure his mother’s affections, but because he was afraid his friends would detect the cool imprint of his mother’s lips on his cheek if he didn’t wipe away the feel of it—it had a lovely private smell to it, sniffing the back of his hand, like nothing else, faint and delicate and suggesting her love for him, like the elusive scent of a wildflower on the breeze one spring day. The smell of his mother’s kiss was the smell of home and of love.

He carried the roll of drawings into the bedroom. Edith was sitting up reading her book, her green velour dressing-gown draped around the soft curve of her shoulders and her breasts, the green uplands of his beloved landscape. He smiled to see her. She was in her own quiet world of reading. He envied her the ability to be so content. He set the drawings down on the bed. ‘Is your tea not right?’

She put her finger on her place and leaned and looked into her cup. ‘I forgot it,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. Thank you, darling.’ She picked up the cup and took a sip of the tea. ‘I like it cold.’

He put on the old pair of paint-spattered trousers with the hole in the left knee and the frayed turn-ups. They smelled damply of the back of the cupboard. He was reminded of his early death. The trousers of a dead man. He had woken up
with a headache and it hadn’t quite left him. It wasn’t much of a headache, but he worried about it. Surely it signified the onset of the disease that would carry him off before his next birthday? Rimbaud had quit writing his poetry when he was, what? Nineteen or twenty, wasn’t it? The deep malady of the body that will defeat a young man. The first sign, this throbbing of a piston in an unvisited chamber of his being, driving the engine of his demise. His premature death … It worried Pat a great deal. The notion that he was sure to die young. He often thought about it but was too superstitious ever to write about it or to speak of it to Edith. To express his fear (he feared) would be to give it encouragement, proffering to the dread of it a foothold in his reality, from where it would flourish, the roots of its being drawing sustenance from the roots of his own strength and sapping him. Hollowing a great space beneath him. Undermining him.

There were times when he was so besieged, so alone and vulnerable with the thought of this great echoing vault of nothingness beneath his life’s enterprise, that he completely seized up. In this state he could neither think nor do anything. A seizure of silent panic, it was. Gripping him. If he were ever to speak of these episodes to Edith he feared she would plead with him to submit to the discipline of the great tradition and be like all the others. Be like herself, following her beloved grandfather. She would ask him to retreat from his solitary enterprise and play it safe with the support of companions and fellow students. Everyone in the same boat. The comfort of it. But he would never do that. He
couldn’t
do it. He didn’t know why this was so. Secretly he was proud that it was so and knew that his isolation was necessary to him. Knew he would either
succeed on his own or would fail on his own. But he would not withdraw from his isolation and join the others. It was how he was. He couldn’t change and it was no good trying.

Often he was in such a hurry to get work done that the least interruption enraged him. He excused his rages. He understood the reason for them. There was so much he had to do. And there were days when his fear of premature death drained him. If he had a few bob he found someone to drink with. Something his father had warned him against. For there had been a run of the drink among the uncles of Wicklow, his father’s five brothers. It was not his rages but his drinking that shamed Pat.

He buttoned the fly of the smelly trousers and tied them at the waist with a length of Gerner’s pink baling twine then sat on the side of the bed and put his bare feet into the ancient pair of plimsolls. Their rubbery soles were colder than his feet and he gave a shiver. Both his little toes poked from holes in the sides of the plimsolls, the frayed edges of the material like lashes, his toes the eyes of crustaceans peeking nervously from their shells, knowing they were in for it any minute.

Edith leaned over the side of the bed and looked. ‘Your feet will get wet in those things. Hadn’t you better wear your boots? You’ll catch a chill.’

Her concern for him was like his mother’s concern for him. But it would not be a chill that would carry him off. He stood up for her inspection. ‘So what do you think? Am I shabby enough for him?’

‘You’re putting on a shirt, aren’t you?’

‘I will. Do I look that daft in these?’ He looked down at himself unhappily. To be dressed like this threatened to demoralise him. Disguising himself as a bohemian was surely
as good as pretending to be one of
them
, wasn’t it? Being poor might be a man’s fate, but poverty was not to be mimicked, the disgrace not in poverty itself but in flaunting it in public, in becoming a whining beggar at the table of a rich man. ‘What choice do I have?’ he said, miserable suddenly with the prospect of the day ahead of him. ‘Can you think of something else I can do? I’d drop this in a bloody flash. You know that.’

‘Only what the others do,’ she said. She laid her book face down on the bed cover and held out her arms to him. ‘Come here! You’re not going to do that.’

‘Is it what you want me to do? Give in to them?’

‘No, darling, it’s not. I know you can’t do that. You are my untutored genius. It’s for that I love you most of all.’

He went to her and she took his hands and he leaned down and kissed her.

‘Do you remember the first day we met at the Gallery School?’ she said, looking up, her dark eyes shining with the memory. ‘We’d all caught the tram down to the Swanston Family after the class. You were standing next to me in the doorway looking out at the crowd in the laneway? Do you remember?’

He did remember. He had promised himself at the school that day, If
she
goes to the pub with the others then I’ll go too. And if she stays behind, I’ll stay behind. Their eyes had already met, but not their bodies. Never with other girls, but suddenly with this girl he had been too shy to speak. And then at the pub she came and stood beside him in the doorway to the lane. It was a narrow doorway and her shoulder touched his. Without a word she took his hand in hers. Just like that. As if she trusted her decision. It was a while after that they
kissed. In the park he asked for her name. And she told him, I’m Edith Black. And he knew it should mean something to him.

She reminded him now, ‘You said, when we were in the park afterwards, it was a kind of warning to me and I knew it was a warning, I mean if I was thinking of going with you for good, as I was, you wanted to warn me not to expect anything. You said, and you were being very formal and there was a kind of anger in your tone as you said it. I was a little bit afraid of you. You said, You should know I’m never going to get a proper job and I’m never going to do the kind of art they teach at the Gallery School.’

‘You remember that?’ He was pleased.

‘Whenever I go past the park in the tram I think of you saying it. It thrilled me. I knew you were different to the others. I knew I’d go with you. Wherever you wanted me to go.’

‘It wasn’t my good looks you fell for, then?’ He laughed. He had forgotten to think about his headache and his fear of death. He sat on the side of the bed and took her hands in his lap. Her hands were soft and warm against the chill of his own hands, her fingers long and tapering. Her book lying face down on the blanket, the author’s name on the cover in small black letters, Guy de Maupassant. The title in the same tone of red that reapers and binders were painted,
Une vie
. A life. A woman’s life, he supposed it was. Perhaps it was a premonition of the storm gathering in his head, but after they had made love two nights ago he had felt terribly alone suddenly and was unable to sleep. He asked her to read to him. He did not ask her to translate, but lay with his head against her bare shoulder, smelling her skin and listening to her reading the French the way he listened to music, his thoughts released from anxiety
and free to wander. And after a while the agitation in his mind was soothed and he began to feel sleepy.

He turned to her now and bent to kiss her gently on her lovely lips. He smiled into her eyes. She was tearing up as he expected her to. ‘I didn’t think I had a hope with you. Then you took my hand. I’m not likely to forget it.’

He loved her gentle refinement, her calm, the feeling of abundant time she carried with her, the quiet certainty of her spirit. ‘We are opposites,’ he said. ‘You and I.’

‘That is what I fear sometimes.’

‘I wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t believe in me.’

‘I believe in you.’

‘What is it?’ He squeezed her hands. ‘Is something up? There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be home tonight and we can have a laugh about all this.’

In a voice of quiet tenderness, which was very nearly an admission of her greater fears for them, Edith told him her news. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’