took it. And when it no longer shone for him he did not try to repair it or to develop it or to shine it up again but abandoned it and never looked back at it. Not till the very end. Then he made the mistake of looking back, just once. It was the same with his friendships and his lovers. When they ceased to shine for him they were discarded. Pat never nurtured anyone and he didn’t expect nurture from anyone. Sentiments that were formed into a harshpoetry in which sentiment had no place. He made great art and strewed suffering and disillusion in his wake. In this he was like his heroes of the sagas. Cruel. There were those who never recovered from their encounter with him. And those who never understood him. And perhaps my deepest and most hidden motive in writing this is not to deal with my guilt about the wrong I did to Edith but to discover if I am one of the ones who never recovered from him. The permanently damaged. Am I?
Pat always said that the stuff we erase with our rewriting and repainting is more revealing of our truth than the stuff we overlay it with, our second and third thoughts. Our unconscious motive in rewriting and repainting, he claimed, is always to conceal ourselves. The unbidden truth that stares at us, ugly and blemished. So we erase and rework in the name of art, in the name of refinement and perfection. And we do this not to reveal the reality of the thing, but to distract ourselves from the problems of depicting its reality. Art is the expert lie, he said. It was one of Pat’s favourite provocations at the table. He wasn’t much of a talker but whenever the conversation began to bore him he would come out with something like that. Art distracts us from reality. That’s what he said. People thought he was being provocative, but he meant it. He believed it.
From the moment I opened the first of these exercise books, here at the kitchen table, and put my fine black pen to paper and wrote This is where it began fifty-three years ago , I promised myself I would write those very things I felt most strongly prompted to leave out. Erase nothing, I said to myself. DearGod in Heaven, let Edith live! Let me see her once again and look into her eyes and know she lives. Let me keep the illusion of my purpose. This is not my prayer. It is the prayer my mother would have said had she been in my position. Dear God in Heaven; this invocation so often prefacing her statements is on my lips now.
Pat made his way to my darling Arthur by a roundabout route the day after the horse slaughtering. It was only by chance that Arthur was still in his office and had not already set off for the station by the time Pat called on him. Usually he was out of there as soon as he could decently manage it. So their meeting, the meeting that changed all our lives, was the opposite of Burke and Wills missing their rendezvous with the support party. The amazing chance of it all. So I shall attempt to follow Pat’s tracks that day from the cottage at Ocean Grove to Arthur’s office in Collins Street. Only one thing, one small decision, one trivial incident, need have been a little different during those hours and we would not have met. Whither then our fates?
The meeting between the two men in my life to whom my soul will remain in thrall to my last breath—there can be no more important moment for me. I dread to approach it. But I need to approach it more than I need do anything else in this remnant of living that is left to me.
Sometimes I pray despite myself. Pray even though I don’t believe in Him. To whom, then, do I address my prayers?
Your Honour, I ask no more than to find the courage to tell his story and mine truthfully and in my own words. Forthis, imagination will be required. It is not fiction and truth that oppose each other. Fiction is the landscape beyond reality and has its own truth, the truth of our intimate lives. The place of empathy.
5
Edith’s announcement
PAT WAS STANDING AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW FOR
Pat always said that the stuff we erase with our rewriting and repainting is more revealing of our truth than the stuff we overlay it with, our second and third thoughts. Our unconscious motive in rewriting and repainting, he claimed, is always to conceal ourselves. The unbidden truth that stares at us, ugly and blemished. So we erase and rework in the name of art, in the name of refinement and perfection. And we do this not to reveal the reality of the thing, but to distract ourselves from the problems of depicting its reality. Art is the expert lie, he said. It was one of Pat’s favourite provocations at the table. He wasn’t much of a talker but whenever the conversation began to bore him he would come out with something like that. Art distracts us from reality. That’s what he said. People thought he was being provocative, but he meant it. He believed it.
From the moment I opened the first of these exercise books, here at the kitchen table, and put my fine black pen to paper and wrote This is where it began fifty-three years ago , I promised myself I would write those very things I felt most strongly prompted to leave out. Erase nothing, I said to myself. DearGod in Heaven, let Edith live! Let me see her once again and look into her eyes and know she lives. Let me keep the illusion of my purpose. This is not my prayer. It is the prayer my mother would have said had she been in my position. Dear God in Heaven; this invocation so often prefacing her statements is on my lips now.
Pat made his way to my darling Arthur by a roundabout route the day after the horse slaughtering. It was only by chance that Arthur was still in his office and had not already set off for the station by the time Pat called on him. Usually he was out of there as soon as he could decently manage it. So their meeting, the meeting that changed all our lives, was the opposite of Burke and Wills missing their rendezvous with the support party. The amazing chance of it all. So I shall attempt to follow Pat’s tracks that day from the cottage at Ocean Grove to Arthur’s office in Collins Street. Only one thing, one small decision, one trivial incident, need have been a little different during those hours and we would not have met. Whither then our fates?
The meeting between the two men in my life to whom my soul will remain in thrall to my last breath—there can be no more important moment for me. I dread to approach it. But I need to approach it more than I need do anything else in this remnant of living that is left to me.
Sometimes I pray despite myself. Pray even though I don’t believe in Him. To whom, then, do I address my prayers?
Your Honour, I ask no more than to find the courage to tell his story and mine truthfully and in my own words. Forthis, imagination will be required. It is not fiction and truth that oppose each other. Fiction is the landscape beyond reality and has its own truth, the truth of our intimate lives. The place of empathy.
5
Edith’s announcement
PAT WAS STANDING AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW FOR
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