Read Online Autumn Laing by Alex Miller - Free Book Online

original? Was it possible? And French. To hear Rimbaud as Rimbaud had heard himself. He envied Edith the fluency of her French. In his mouth the words were tortured out of shape, chipped, hard and separate, insisting on being Australian. She made the flow of them all running together sound as natural as thought. A song she had learned in her infancy. How could he ever get to that? There was so much to read. So much to learn. So much catching up to be done. Surely he had started too late and would never be convincing on their terms. Hadn’t he always known that he would have to do something else? His own thing. Something they were not already expert at. Something they and their teachers had never thought of. There was already one thing he had done the others had not, and which stood him in advance of their reading. For while they were poring over the novels of D.H. Lawrence, he had been reading the Icelandic sagas.
    Father Brennan had given him them. ‘The man who has not read the sagas remains uneducated in the literatures of his race.’ Which was the way Dan Brennan spoke. Grandly. As if ordinary life itself were a heroic epic, and there was something vast and nostalgic and lost to the world that would never be recovered. A kind of melancholy dream, it was, for Father Dan Brennan, that he might have shared with the poets themselves,but never claimed to, out of modesty, a light of secret pleasure in his green eyes, some inner conviction of a greater humanity in it all than the inbred resolutions of the Vatican’s official bleating. The only priest Pat’s mother had ever had any time for. It’s something, she used to say, to thank religion for, an educated priest. Pat still had the volume. If only there were a way of instant reading, holding a book tightly in your hands and closing your eyes and thinking yourself into it. But enough of this! He had to get on. Right at this minute he could have downed a cold beer. He dried his face and hands on the tea towel and tossed it onto the bench and called, ‘Are you there, darling?’ He picked up the letter and the ten-shilling note and walked down the dark passage and out into the wonderful light of the back room.
    ‘I’ve got a plan,’ he announced. Edith was at her easel but she wasn’t working. Standing there troubling herself about something, pale and thoughtful in her white blouse and blue skirt, the light soft where she stood, half her lovely features cast in shadow. So neat and careful in her manner of work there was not a dab of paint anywhere to be seen on her clothes, not even on the wrists of her blouse. He felt himself smiling. His admiration for her was enormous, a rich pleasure and gratification in seeing her standing there that he could not talk about, not even to himself. He wasn’t a talker. Or measure. Well, it was bigger than anything he could think of. His gratitude, wasn’t it? His envy of himself almost. That this young woman should have chosen to love him. But she had. In another’s life, a life that could never have been his own whichever way you looked at it, he would have liked to share with her something of the quality of the love she’d shared with her dead grandfather,the conservative old painter from Scotland. To have known something of that quiet richness between the two of them. He didn’t have it. A calmness in it that was not in himself. There was a need for quietness, too, wasn’t there? A paradox for him, this desire for quietness of the soul.
    His existence was a torment of contradictions. A torrent of ambition and disgust. Tides in him that swirled and drove against each other. Powerful undertows that dragged him out into the deeps and sucked him down to solitary places where there was no bottom to his despair and his longing. The dance force in him was never still. Reeling and swaying to the speeding minutes of his days. It was all beautiful and terrible. He wanted to touch his lips to the soft bloom of her cheek and close his