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

but decided not to. He was standing there looking down at his work, the sun falling across his features, across his work table. She knew not everyone thought him as beautiful as she did.
    She took the two one-pound notes from her mother’s letter and put them in the pocket of her skirt. She turned so that the light from the window fell on the letter—the felled horse before her, falling … One day she would know what it was. My very Dearest Girl, Our great news here is that the Reverend Golder Burns (how auspiciously named he is for your father!) has accepted a call to Scots. At last Melbourne is to have its own minister again after these years of uncertainty … Her mother’s austerely beautiful hand, every word inscribed as if the perfection of the script would endow it with lasting significance, the familiar broad and narrow strokes, the newness of the nib she had fitted to the holder before beginning. Keeping unused in its box on her desk the expensive fountain pen her husband had presented her with. The stately ritual it was for her mother, the writing of letters to loved ones, the attention, the care, the pleasure, the skill and the thought that went into it. She wrote letters to the members of her family the way her own grandmother had written them, responsible to her highest sense of the task, to her finest sense of her relations with the person she was writing to. Living at home Edith had taken such refinements for granted and had not appreciated how precious they were until she saw that in the life of Pat’s home there had never been anything of that sort. Her mother’s hand was as familiar to Edith as her own embroidered eiderdown on her childhood bed in the Brighton house, a warm and loving home. Reading her mother’s letter, Edith could smell her old home. She could smell her mother.
    He stood at his work table looking at his picture. ‘Horse’s blood,’ he said aloud, talking to himself without knowing it. He was gripping the edges of the table with his outspread hands, leaning forward and looking down onto his picture. He might have been a general examining a map of the terrain over which his forces were to engage with those of the enemy. Puzzling after a strategy that would give him the advantage. How to deploy his strengths so that their disposition would leave no opportunity for the enemy to mount a successful defence.Outrage, that would be their response when he showed this painting. Boot polish and cardboard. His materials alone would provoke them. They would conclude that his intention was to insult them and their standards. It would make them squeal and tremble like little pigs. They would not know which way to turn. They would see his work as an affront to the grand dignity of their sacred calling to teach their students how to draw after the manner of Leonardo. Not for art’s sake, of course, but for the coveted travelling scholarship. What else? A recommendation to Sir Malcolm for the annual travelling scholarship. A privilege bestowed upon the Gallery School’s anointed. A ticket to freedom from Australian provincialism for which every young artist and writer of Pat’s acquaintance would be happy to pawn his soul. For a year or two, at any rate. He was smiling. He would title his picture Homage à Rimbaud . Partly to rub it in, but also because that’s what this piece of work really was, a homage to the boy poet’s visionary response to life. That’s what everything was that he did these days. They would be affronted by the sight of it. His offensive against their conformity. The banality of their souls. His repudiation of them and their academy of ideas. They would snort and ask each other, Who the devil does he think he is, giving his bloody nonsense a French title? He lifted the painting from the table and set it with its face to the wall. An instinct in him revolted against submitting himself to their approval. He would find another way. His own way. And now he had a plan. To