Read Online Autumn Laing by Alex Miller - Free Book Online Page A

eyes and be gently with her. To still the agitation in his brain. He loved her. He supposed it was love. How are we to know? ‘Vows are nothing,’ he said to her the night of their marriage as they lay in each other’s arms. He had still been feeling irritated by having to mouth those stupid matrimonial promises. The glum sweating oaf in the registry office nodding his big ugly head as if he thought he was getting the better of the two of them. ‘It is how we feel, not what we vow,’ he said to Edith as they lay in bed naked together that warm summer night, their new home a single room above a tobacconist’s shop in Swanston Street.
    She had turned to him and touched his cheek with her fingers. ‘Feelings change, my darling. It is our vows that are forever.’
    In what Edith said there was a contradictory view to his own and his mother’s view, and it unsettled him to hear it from her. He was intending to keep quiet and let it pass. Thensuddenly he was saying, with more heat and impatience than he’d intended, ‘Vows are just an expression of the principles of the church and the state.’ His mother would not have wanted him to let such a view go unchallenged. ‘It’s them getting us to conform to their stupid bloody rules. It’s our feelings that are us. We’ll make our own rules.’ He lay beside her frowning into the silence until Edith leaned over and kissed him and put her hand on him and murmured in his ear, ‘I want you again.’
    And when the high moment of their passion was reached she cried out with a kind of despair in her voice, the breath catching in her throat, ‘I love you, Pat! I love you!’ Why was love so painful?
    He stood in front of her now holding out the blood-smeared envelope. ‘A letter from your mother,’ he said. ‘Old Gerner gave me ten shillings for doing the horse.’ He waved the note at her then folded it and tucked it into the back pocket of his trousers. There was a button on that pocket, which he fastened. Edith reached and took the letter from him. He would have kissed her but she drew back from him. ‘You’ve got something on your forehead,’ she said, making a face.
    He put his hand up to his forehead. ‘It’s only blood,’ he said, scratching at the dried scab of it. ‘I thought I’d got it all.’ He stood looking at her picture, his head on one side. ‘It’s very good. Do you know that?’ He put this to her with a certain seriousness, and not in his usual bantering way. ‘Your grandpa would have been proud of you.’
    She thanked him. His approval was a joy she had not been expecting at this moment, and she saw her picture with a sudden new confidence, as he might be seeing it, through the window of his eyes. And for that brief glimpse her doubts werebanished and she too thought her work accomplished. She was grateful. ‘Maybe I’m getting somewhere at last. Thank you,’ she said again. ‘It’s nothing like anything you’d do.’
    He shrugged and turned away, and walked over to his work table.
    She wished she had let him kiss her, but she was not yet sure that she had forgiven him for the horse. Seeing that axe rising and falling she had felt a loss within herself, something more intimate than the loss of a farm animal. A portent. It was him, wasn’t it? She did not know what it was, and was not able to attend to it. But it wasn’t just the brutal death of the old brood mare. There was always brutality in the butchering of the animals. Something deeper had been signified, something had been touched for which she had no name. Wounded, she might have said. She knew Pat’s generous mood was partly due to the ten shillings; but it was lovely all the same, whatever its cause, when he was feeling like this, meaning his compliments instead of giving them an edge of derision. And was he shocked himself by the killing of the old beast? Or had he dismissed it from his thoughts already? She didn’t know him well enough to be sure. She thought of asking him