Autumn Laing (8 page)
‘You sound like your mother,’ he said, not pausing in the work. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ Sheet after sheet. Nothing to stop him. Travelling his wild ink trail. On the train. It was, he often observed to himself with a pleasurable detachment, as if some weirdo inside him believed the application of a consuming impatience to create would force paper and ink to yield their astonishing perfections to him. A weirdo. Yes. Himself. His other self. He wasn’t going to ask him to stop or to slow up. Without the liberty of untutored energy that weirdo’s life would not be worth living. Without his liberty, Pat knew he would drown in the sorrows of self-loathing. He had not been offered a choice. It had been born in him. To lay it down would be to lay himself down. Life was good only so long as the genie had his freedom. He had no idea what he could expect from his genie. And that was the way he wanted it to be. In the dark with the fear till the new light struck him. No guarantees. No commercial opportunities sidelining him.
Edith was shouting at him that he was being unbending and too filled with pride for his own good. ‘There’s a limit!’ she shouted again, her voice rising, leaning to look into his face. ‘We need the money!’
No doubt she was right and there was a limit. And wasn’t he intent on finding that limit? And then going beyond it? Wasn’t he already beyond it? Wasn’t that just what he was doing? Liberating himself from her limits. Not just being unbending. Unbending wasn’t it at all. Wasn’t he repudiating the confines of a dead tradition by the shortest cut? He had not reasoned his way out of it. He chanted Rimbaud loudly over
the sound of her angry voice. ‘
Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! The others advance. Tools, weapons … time! … Fire! Fire on me! Here! Or I surrender.—Cowards!—I’ll kill myself! I’ll throw myself …
’ He couldn’t remember the next line. But if Rimbaud could do it, then so could he. They were both men. Both human beings. Both young. So why not? Who was to stop him? He had the energy.
At the edge of his vision he was aware of Edith leaving the studio. The gentle loving part of him wanting to catch up with her and give her a cuddle and be nice to her and make things fine and glorious between them. But the weirdo wasn’t having any of that. The berserker Egil Skallagrimsson swept his brush across the large sheet of paper in which meat was supposed to have been wrapped by Mr Creedy, or by his assistant, his big dark-complexioned daughter with the eyes of black glass. Jet, wasn’t it, that he was thinking of? The black jewel of women’s mourning. So was it
her
figure he was after here? The rounding of her ample thighs and arms, her weighty breasts? And here she was, found for a line, then lost again. A figure in the torment of lust. Elusive and not to be invoked by artifice or technique. She had smiled a smile of womanly welcome at him with those jet-black eyes of hers when he went into the shop. He had asked if she could please let him have some of her paper. Without a word, as if she had been expecting his request for years, as if it was her destiny to know his need, she turned her back and rolled up this generous bundle, her eyes catching at his in the mirror with the arch conspiracy of it, dimples in her elbows as well as in her cheeks, lifting her bare arm and tying the roll of paper with the twine her father used to tie the rolled roasts with, snapping it with an expert jerk of her chubby
wrist, then turning back from the mirror and presenting him with the paper, her understanding of what she did swimming in the generous Gulf Stream of her gaze, her offering to the artist for the work he was to undertake. And would there be something else the artist might be wanting from her? Body and soul would it be that he wanted from her? Is that all then? He had tied the paper on the back of his bike and ridden home with his booty. And as he rode he daydreamed that big motherly girl waiting in her father’s shop all her life to render this service to him when he came by, knowing through some primitive instinct in the welcoming warmth of her bowels that he, the warrior artist and poet, would surely be coming one day, her destiny to become his accomplice. It was a nice little daydream that he played with as he pedalled hard up the hill, the chain creaking, the tyres spitting stones. He had no idea then what he would do with the daydream, but here it was. She was a fitting mistress for a warrior poet … Black ink staining the paper now instead of the carmine blood of the slaughtered sheep and cattle and the screaming pigs. She was his satanic apprentice. He didn’t know her name. He would not ask it of her next time he went into the shop. He might have called her his muse for this enterprise, but muse was a notion he had rejected along with all the other old nonsense from the Gallery School masters. Satanic apprentice had more energy in it. More possibility. More concealment and uncertainty. More brutality. What, after all, did he mean by it? He knew, and he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He was not after understanding. He just wanted to enjoy the feel of it on him. In his sweat. In his balls. That was the way he liked it. Fuck their understandings. Perhaps over time the richness of its
meanings would unfold to him: his satanic mistress. He liked the sound of it, carrying her generous body with it. That was enough. The glow of possibility in her black eyes. It was a story. A poem. Her plump fingers gripping his cock. That would do. Who gave a fuck what it meant? It was private. It didn’t have to have a meaning. It was just for himself. It was a story that hadn’t been told yet. They wouldn’t be hearing about it. His own private truth in it. They wouldn’t be getting the chance to tell him it wasn’t any good and would have to be improved. He was done with them. They’d hear from him when he was ready for them to hear from him.
He had forgotten for a minute or two why he was doing this. His idea for getting away overseas. That was it. A folio of drawings of the butcher’s daughter, then, to impress the great man. It was a liberating discovery to know whose body it was he was drawing. A confirmation to know who the subject of all this was. The particularity of it giving the enterprise a new force of its own, as if it was coming from outside himself. From some authentic and mysterious source. The weirdo in touch with the ocean of the unconscious. Was that it? He had been sure he was drawing someone or other and was very glad to discover it was her. The big girl in the butcher’s shop. The need for such generous volumes of flesh was beginning to make sense to him. He would never have thought of it himself. She couldn’t have been much more than seventeen and already had a young child of her own. Her maternally noble manner, that she was surely not aware of. Just as statues are not aware of the thoughts they kindle in poets who stand and gaze at them in the moonlight. A young woman conceived by
the generous hands of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and not simply the splendid daughter of Mr Creedy, the Ocean Grove butcher. A treasure waiting here for him. And him not knowing it till he had the idea of going in and asking for some paper. Our triumph must be our own secret. Triumph belongs to the interior life of the artist, not out in the street. Such things wither when exposed to the sceptical gaze of social realities. So it was for himself. All this, it was just for himself.
Later, after he had sobered up a bit and he and Edith had made up, he told her his plan. When they had eaten their sardines on toast and Edith had gone to sleep, murmuring an apology to him for a last fishy burp (she had complained during their lovemaking about the distraction of the rats in the ceiling cantering back and forth above their heads. He told her the rats were having a polo match up there and made her laugh), he got up and went out to the studio and sat at his work table, the Tilley lamp humming to itself beside him, casting its trembling light against the walls. He bent and picked up the last sheet of butcher’s paper from the strewn collection of drawings on the floor, and underneath the generous buttocks of the butcher’s daughter he wrote the poem of his day:
The Chinese masters of the brush
Wrote their poems with the blood of horses.
To dwell secretly in the solitude
Of my convictions,
What a state! What an achievement!
To know there the triumph
Of the old Wen-jen masters
In the final flourish of my brush,
My triumph secret, my brush loaded
With the blood of horses.
He didn’t read his poem but pushed it to one side and sat looking at nothing, dreaming of his audacious plan for the next day, the first day of the battle, the day his forces would engage in a frontal assault on the headquarters of the enemy. They would not be prepared for him. He was sure of that. He was wondrously tired and elated, a surge of oxygen in his blood and his brain—it was a state of meditative lust that required no immediate action from him. If he’d had a cigarette and a bottle of beer now he would have been in everyman’s heaven.
THAT’S WHERE I LEFT HIM, SITTING THERE SURROUNDED BY HIS drawings of the butcher’s voluptuous daughter. It was Arthur’s generosity that brought Pat Donlon into our lives the following day. Arthur’s innocent announcement to me over the telephone from his office that evening that he was bringing someone home for a meal. ‘I think he might interest you.’
I’ve been ill. I collapsed. I shan’t bore you with it. It’s more than two months since I’ve had the energy or the courage to come near this. Writing their portraits exhausted me. I had no idea it would be such an ordeal, all that recollecting and imagining.
He
exhausted me. He drew me into himself again. I developed a terrible headache writing him. I was nearly blinded by the time I put the last word to him:
heaven
. Writing him brought him back. I sat here night after night at the kitchen table, writing him and cursing him and weeping for him and for myself. He was
in
me again. It was the heaven and hell of
us
all over. He and I. I hadn’t expected it, this terrible
reanimation of memory. He drained me and I wonder if I’m going to have the strength to finish it. Writing her was so without conflict for me that I was off my guard when I began to work on him. But I soon discovered that dealing with my regrets had been a breeze compared to the exquisite agony of recalling the love and torment of my tortured life. While I wrote him Pat was with me day and night. I could get no rest from him. The truth, terrifying when you consider it, is that nothing is so forgotten it cannot be brought back to haunt us. In the deeps of memory it seems our past is never put to rest but lives on, preserved and catalogued according to a system unknown to us, every detail retrievable at an unbidden signal, ready to remind us that the comfortable autonomy of our consciousness is nothing but an ignorant illusion.
The night after I began writing Pat’s portrait I was sitting on the toilet when I found myself suddenly remembering Anne Collins’ telephone call. There she was with her coolly dignified tones—a delay in those days all the way from England, how many years ago is it?—telling me he had died the previous night with my name on his lips. He and I had been estranged for years at the time of his death. I was transported at once from the toilet seat and returned to that moment when I had stood in the bedroom here at Old Farm with the telephone in my hand, my gardening gloves held in my other hand, the French doors open to the lovely spring day and to my beloved garden, the smell of lemon blossom in the air, Anne Collins’ voice in my ear. A bee had come in with me and while I listened to Anne I watched it probe in turn each of the blue and citron blooms of an arrangement of fragrant Cupani sweet pea that I had placed on my dressing-table earlier in the day. It was all
there, perfectly preserved for this moment, each bloom of that flower arrangement, the individual items on my dressing-table, the lemon-scented air. In the retrieved memory each detail was charged with meaning. I sat on the toilet, my knickers round my ankles, transported, sobbing to see once again that honeybee at its eternal labour. I had not known there was so much memory and so much weeping left in me. What have I done to open this door? Will I yet regret the day I dared look into the black doorway of my past? Pass through that door and re-enter those times.
While I was writing him I ate buckets of codeine tablets but they scarcely touched my headache. It was more than a headache. After I put the last word to him I woke up under the table with Sherry lying on my face purring, my notebooks scattered around me. I was frozen to the bone. It was a Sunday. I managed to crawl to my bed, howling and moaning, then I rang Andrew.
Andrew, dear foolish man, came around at once and had a look at me. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said, confidently making his diagnosis and arranging himself on the edge of my bed, settling himself into his bedside manner. Being professional. His breath smelling of wine. I’d probably dragged him away from his dinner. He was trying to ignore the stench in this place. ‘You must be more careful,’ he said, drawing breath slowly as if he inhaled a deadly gas. Andrew is a boy. He’s forty but he’s a boy. It hasn’t occurred to him yet that one day soon he’s going to be eighty. Yes, soon.
He asked me what I’d been doing to get myself into such a state. Debilitated was his word for me. I obediently lifted my nightie for him and told him I’d been writing my memoir.
That’s what I called it. A mild enough term for the scourging whip of memory. He raised a tawny eyebrow and repeated the word, ‘Memoir.’ Surprised, no doubt, to discover that memoir writing could be so ravaging. ‘You’ve had an unusual life,’ he said, leaning over me and tapping my ribs with the hard point of his index finger, so that a faint booming could be heard, as if I have an ocean cavern inside me. ‘I’m sure everyone will be interested to read about you and your famous circle of friends.’ That’s how he put it. He advised me gravely to get someone in to help with it. Someone to whom I could dictate my thoughts and who would then go off and type them up and bring them back for me to check over. He has no idea. In Andrew’s world there is a practical solution for every problem. But are there practical solutions for the torments of the soul? What a laugh. I laughed. ‘An amanuensis, you mean?’ I said. But he didn’t know the word for what he was prescribing. I said, ‘Is that the way you prescribe drugs too?’
