The Passage of Love

Alex Miller

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781760630676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781760638252
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Robert Crofts, a young Englishman, arrives in Australia in the 1950s, determined to inhabit the outback. After five years of life on the land, he makes his way to Melbourne where, living in a boarding house, working as a cleaner, he finds himself consumed by a burning need to read, write, draw, create. When he meets the enigmatic Lena, she instantly becomes his staunchest champion but as their tortured marriage evolves and gradually erodes she ultimately becomes an obstacle. This intensely autobiographical novel has much to say about the compulsion to create, and the fundamental unknowability of even our most intimate partners. As the reader sinks into the text of this singular book, the artifice of fiction gradually melts away, leaving nothing but truth on the page. In The Passage of Love Alex Miller has given us a masterful work which will come to define his career as one of the great writers of our time.

PART ONE

1

When I drove the twenty kilometres from my home to the prison it was a soft cloudless afternoon such as we often enjoy here before the summer heat arrives. Once I’d left the last houses of the town behind, the road wound through the low hills of the box-ironbark forest. The original native timber of the forest trees was harvested in the nineteenth century to fuel the steam engines of the goldmines that then flourished in the area. In the more than one hundred years since it was felled, the forest has regrown into a modified version of its native form. Each stump of what was once a single tree now supports several trunks, giving the impression of a uniform age to the trees, as if the forest had always been there just as I was seeing it that afternoon, timeless and undisturbed. But for some time, for years, after the tree-fellers left, there must have been a disheartening expanse of bare stumps. It was this image that remained with me as I drove on.

The road emerged from the forest and passed through the old township of Maldon. The modest mid-Victorian buildings on either side of the main street remain much as they were at the time the forest was felled. When goldmining ceased in the early part of the twentieth century, the town, like the forest, was more or less abandoned. Two or three kilometres beyond the town I crested a hill and a view of extensive grasslands opened out in front of me. The treeless savannah was interrupted here and there by the bold forms of rounded hills topped with enormous granite boulders. From a distance these grey, lichen-adorned boulders looked like shaggy prehistoric beasts at rest, the progress of their journey arrested by some mysterious instinct.

A large green sign advertised the prison. I didn’t want to arrive before the scheduled time of my talk, so I didn’t drive into the prison grounds yet but parked in the shade on the side of the road. I could see the prison through the roadside trees: a cluster of new buildings, low and neat, painted a pale shade of green. Until I was invited to speak to the members of the prison book club, I’d thought young male offenders were held there, as in the dreaded borstals of my childhood in London. Among us schoolboys the borstal had a fearsome reputation as a place where brutal older boys and vicious guards would tyrannise us. The idea of the place terrified us. The boys from among our number whose rebellious natures attracted the attention of the authorities and who were sent to borstal, we knew to be lost to us and to the small compass of our lives forever. I had no memory of any boy ever returning. I suppose they did return, or some of them surely did. Others, their temperament of rebellion confirmed by the brutality of the experience, no doubt moved on to prisons for adult men. We knew from an early age that the forces of the law were not for our protection but for the protection of property. And as we and our parents possessed no property that needed protecting, the only times we saw the police in our neighbourhood streets were when they came to arrest one of our fathers, usually on suspicion of stealing someone else’s property that they, the police, had failed to protect. The friendly English bobby was not a feature of our Council estate.

In 1963, when I was a student at the University of Melbourne and was reading the English Romantics and the humanist educators of the Italian Renaissance, the borstal came to my attention once again. Though it was not prescribed reading in any of my courses, it was the Irish writer Brendan Behan’s novel Borstal Boy that left the strongest impression on me during my second year at Melbourne. In Behan’s book, the borstal of my childhood fears was vividly brought to life. The Irish-Catholic connection with Behan was real for my mother, but I never heard her invoke it against her love of England, which she required us to respect. As a boy I knew that my mother’s immediate forebears, and therefore my own, lay in unmarked graves in the yard of the ruined Catholic church at Donoughmore in Kilkenny, and while neither I nor the friends of my childhood ever thought of becoming traitors to the country of our birth, when I read Behan’s book in 1963 I nevertheless saw that in an important respect he had spoken for the subject conditions of my own caste in England, as well as for those of his people in Ireland. Behan’s description of the English doctor before whom he was required to stand naked when he was first admitted to the prison was a reminder to me of those men who were placed in authority over us as children and whose contempt we endured every day. ‘He was a dark man,’ Behan wrote of this prison doctor, ‘not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive.’

It was these memories of my childhood, ghosts of the old shame of knowing myself despised by those in authority over me, that came unbidden into my mind as I sat in the car looking down the hill at the prison buildings. It still troubled me that I had never quite rid myself of these early insecurities. They were faded, to be sure, like tattoos on the arms of old men, but they still possessed the power to unsettle me.

Over to the left of the prison buildings the open grasslands fell away from the crest of the hill into a distant haze. On the far horizon I could just make out the bold forms of Mount Moorookyle, Mount Buninyong, and maybe even as far as Mount Warrenheip, the remains of the volcanic forces that had shaped this land. The grandeur of the setting rendered the prison buildings temporary and out of place.

It was time to go. I drove on and turned in at the prison entrance. I parked in the shade of an old peppermint gum and took from the seat beside me the copy of my book that we were to discuss. I got out and walked across to what looked like the main building. There were no signs or directions. When I checked my watch I saw it was a quarter past four. I was still a few minutes early. The count of prisoners, I’d been told, was taken at ten past four. I was expected at the reception area at twenty minutes past four. My talk with the members of the book club was scheduled to begin at four-thirty. The woman who’d invited me had been precise about these times—she’d bolded them in her email.

As I walked across the deserted car park towards the principal building I was impressed by the blank face presented by the prison to the outside world. There was no bell or handle to the door, but before I could knock it was opened by a woman in her fifties, slim and fit-looking, wearing a crisp summery dress. She looked as if she got up every morning at five and went for a ten-kilometre run along the country roads. Her teeth were even and white. She offered me her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jill.’ Her grip was cool and firm, her manner not hurried exactly, but businesslike. ‘You found us okay then?’

‘Hi, Jill. You’re pretty conspicuous out here.’

‘Isn’t it a lovely setting?’ She might have been proud of the position of her own home. She stood to one side and I stepped past her through the door. Before closing the door she took a quick look out into the car park, as if she wanted to make certain there was no one with me.

A telephone on the desk behind the counter was making a soft burring sound, like a repeated shudder. She ignored it.

I followed her along a short passage which opened into a space much like a seminar room at one of the new universities. Four tables were arranged into a hollow square, with four chairs behind each of three of the tables, and one chair in the middle of the table at the front of the room. Copies of my back titles lay spread out fanwise on the front table. My books looked vulnerable lying there, something forlorn about this collection of prison library books with their protective plastic coverings—my life’s work! I was sure the opinions of the prisoners were going to be more challenging than the opinions of my regular book-club readers and I was feeling a little anxious.

Through a single narrow strip of window high on the wall facing me across the meeting room the rugged contours of the granite hills were softened in the hazy afternoon sunlight. The land had never looked so lonely or so poignantly beautiful to me as it did through that window just then. This place, obviously, wasn’t the brutal borstal of my childhood fears, but it was still a prison. The feeling of being enclosed and contained was palpable.

A woman of around forty was sitting at the end table facing us. She was making notes in an exercise book, an open copy of my last novel lying on the table beside her. She didn’t look up when we came in but paused to consult the novel, placing her finger on a line of the open page before returning her attention to the exercise book and writing something. Her dark brown hair was cut fashionably short and caught the light as she moved. She was wearing a fresh white blouse with short sleeves, her bare arms evenly tanned. She looked like an attractive middle-class woman. She did not look like my idea of a prisoner, and I did not feel any of that shame at brandishing one’s freedom before the eyes of the captive that Henri de Monfreid speaks of so eloquently in his book La Croisière du Haschich.

Jill introduced me to the note-taking woman. She stood up and offered me her hand confidently and looked directly into my eyes. ‘I’ve prepared some questions for you, Mr Crofts.’ She was very serious and might almost have been about to interview me for a job.

I said, ‘Please call me Robert.’

She continued to hold my gaze. I was aware of being assessed, in a way that implied the expectation of something substantial from our meeting. She evidently wished to let me know she was well prepared for her encounter with the author of the book she’d just read. Her name had vanished from my mind the moment Jill uttered it and I regretted not making a conscious note of it.

More women were coming into the room behind us through the door Jill and I had entered by. Jill introduced the women to me one by one and I shook their hands—their names flitting through my mind one after the other like bats whizzing into the night sky from the mouth of a cave. They talked with each other in low voices as they found places for themselves to sit. Once settled, they looked at me with interest. There were eleven of them. Jill took the instructor’s chair at the front table, making our number thirteen in total. Every seat was taken.

Four of the women were Asian, three Chinese and the fourth Japanese. Two of the Chinese women sat close together at the table directly across from me, the older of the two frowning at me as if she didn’t know what to expect from the meeting. When I smiled at her, she looked away and shifted closer to her friend. The Japanese woman sat alone. The third Chinese woman sat immediately to my right, the sleeve of her t-shirt touching my shoulder. The Japanese woman’s features had the closed serenity of a character from Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. She might have been the author of Ise’s line, In longing my soul has ventured forth alone. She gave an impression of being disconnected from the others—an errant spirit from a time long past to which I would never gain access or understanding. Her beauty and her exemplary solitariness. What had all these normal-looking women done to end up in here?

In choosing to sit midway along the table facing the only window, I’d claimed a view of the stony hills. Gnarled and twisted yellow box trees of great age rose from the crevices between the grey humps of the granite boulders. I spotted a pair of wedge-tailed eagles riding the thermals above the nearest hill. No sound from the world outside found its way into the room with us. Mesmerised by the slowly circling pair of eagles above the grey boulders, I realised I’d become momentarily disengaged from what was going on in the room.

The chatter had stopped. It was very quiet. They were waiting.

Jill was holding herself erect, her shoulders back, both hands spread above the table in front of her—the readiness position of a woman with a tight schedule to meet. She had a typed sheet of paper and a copy of my latest book on the table between her hands. When she saw she had my attention she picked up the sheet of paper and began to read what turned out to be a long and rather elaborate introduction of me and my writing. I recognised some of it from an old publicity blurb. She didn’t refer to the women in the room as prisoners, but spoke of them as the women—just as she had avoided the word prison when I arrived and had referred to it as the facility.

I spoke about how the idea for the book had come to me, and then made some general remarks about my approach to writing. I’d been speaking for some time and had paused with the intention of further developing my remarks when the note-taking wo...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Acknowledgements