by Alex Miller
He turned back to the painting. ‘So you don’t know who did it.’
‘I don’t like it. I don’t care who did it. It’s Sir Malcolm’s great prize. I can’t imagine what he sees in it. I liked the picture he had here before. That one was signed. It was real art. It was of cows in a paddock. A wonderful artist. The sun was just coming up—or maybe it was going down, but I liked to think it was coming up. There was a lovely mist lying along the ground. I couldn’t imagine how an artist could do that. It was so real and beautiful you could smell the freshness of the morning. The smell of the grass and the cows.’ She looked up at him. ‘You know? The rays of the rising sun were shining through the mist among the gum trees.’ She thought for a moment, turning and looking at the large abstract canvas but evidently seeing in her imagination the painting it had replaced. She made a rounding gesture with her hands. ‘And mountains in the background, blue and distant and mysterious. It was lovely.’ She looked at Pat looking at the picture. ‘Which do you prefer in a landscape, sunrise or sunset?’
‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about nature.’
‘You can’t be an artist then,’ she said coolly, ‘if you don’t care about nature.’
‘I didn’t say I was an artist.’
‘Why would anyone go to all the trouble of painting something like this?’ She looked again at the picture on the wall behind her desk, her head on one side, her red lips pursed. ‘What sort of pictures do you do yourself?’
‘You’ve stopped calling me sir,’ he said.
Their eyes met and she smiled.
‘I’m Pat,’ he said. She had nice eyes, grey with flickers of green. If you ignored her front teeth she wasn’t too bad. A decent girl from a modest home. He could see that. His mother would have described her as one of our own people, and would have warned him not to give the girl the wrong impression about his intentions. Standing here chatting to this girl he was aware that his life was in crisis. It was as if he had just been told that someone dear to him had suddenly died. Someone he had always relied on for his confidence. For his sense of who he was. For his certainty of where he was headed. They were gone and so was his certainty. He would never see them again. He had been set adrift. There was no one he could tell. No one with whom he could share his sense of loss. No one to know his panic and his fear. He remembered then who it was this girl reminded him of. Catherine Phillips, a girl he had gone to school with. Catherine had the best legs in the class. They were lovely and shapely even when she was only eleven years of age. He could look at the backs of her knees all day and not get sick of them. He could see the enticing little dimples in them now. For years Catherine had sneered at his lustful stares and he had grinned back at her. Then one Saturday afternoon she and her friend were in the queue behind him and Gibbo at the Palais. Catherine was his first girl and for a week or two he was in love. Sometimes when he went home he saw her down the street pushing the pram with the baby in it, her older girl holding onto the pram handle. She always gave him a smile and asked how things were going for him. She was a lost woman.
‘I’m Helen,’ the girl on the desk said and looked around the empty foyer. She lowered her voice. ‘If someone comes in you’d better call me Miss Carlyon. What are you looking like that for?’
‘Don’t you get sick of sitting here all day, Miss Helen Carlyon?’
‘It’s interesting. I like watching people. Did you just come in to look at this picture?’
‘This picture has changed my life,’ he said. He considered telling her everything. ‘Do you want to come out for a drink?’ He was going to be a father. It would be as if he and Catherine had got married after all and he had stayed in St Kilda and worked on the tramway. He could smell the grease of the pulley.
‘Don’t be silly. Are you serious?’
‘About this picture? Yes. I came to see your boss.’ He knew there was really no way of telling this girl his story.
‘Which boss is that?’
‘Sir Malcolm. How many bosses have you got?’
‘You won’t get in to see Sir Malcolm without an appointment. What’s your surname?’
‘Donlon.’
She turned to her desk and ran her slim forefinger down a sheet of pencilled names that lay on the desk in front of her.
‘I’m not there,’ he said. Her nails were rounded and pink. ‘You’ve got nice hands. You look after them.’
‘Thank you.’ She looked at her hand holding the pencil. ‘No, you’re not. No Mr Donlon here.’
He leaned over her shoulder and tapped the sheet. ‘Put me in.’ Ash from his cigarette fell on the incline of the paper, disintegrating across the page, a tiny avalanche of silver. He wondered if he would really go through with it.
She blew on the ash gently, hurrying it, then brushed her hand across the polished surface of the desk.
‘My name’s not here,’ Pat said. ‘But I’m here. Okay? Write me in, Helen. I’ve come all the way from Ocean Grove. I’m going to ask him for money. What do you think he’ll say?’
‘Writing you in won’t help.’ She dusted with her fingers at the last of the ash. ‘It’s Miss Barquist you’ll have to convince, not me. She’s Sir Malcolm’s keeper.’ She laughed. ‘He calls her his guardian angel. If you’re not on Agatha Barquist’s list you won’t get past her.’
‘I bet you I will,’ he said.
‘How much?’
‘Five bob.’
‘You’re on.’
They shook hands on the bet.
‘Tell Miss Agatha Archangel Barquist that Mr Threshold has given me a private recommendation to Sir Malcolm for one of his bursaries.’ He was just taking it along now as far as it would go. He was not sure if he was kidding or serious. But what was he going to do if he didn’t go through with it? Head for the nearest pub and spend the few bob left from old Gerner’s ten-shilling note? Was that it? Do what his uncle would have done.
‘Is that true? Has he really?’
He looked into her honest green-flecked eyes. ‘Would I have come all the way from Ocean Grove on the off-chance of being admitted into the presence of the great Sir Malcolm McFarlane without having a personal recommendation? Do I look that silly?’
She thought about it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You do look pretty silly actually, Mr Patrick Donlon.’
He tapped the phone. ‘Just mention the name of Mr Threshold to her,’ he said. ‘That’ll do the trick. You may as well give me the five bob now. You’ve done your dough on this one, Miss Helen Carlyon who knows all about art.’
‘Don’t worry, I know who Mr Threshold is. I’ve met him. He’s nice. He often comes in to see Sir Malcolm. They go to lunch together at Sir Malcolm’s club.’ She frowned. ‘If I lie to Agatha it will spoil things between us. She trusts me. We’re loyal colleagues.’
‘Loyal colleagues,’ he said. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? She’s your boss, for God’s sake. The bosses are only out for themselves.’
She looked up at him. ‘She’s not that kind of boss. She chose me from a dozen applicants. All of them qualified. I’m not going to lie to her. Anyway, she’d know I was lying. Agatha’s not stupid, not like some people.’
‘But you wouldn’t be lying.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ She was disbelieving.
He looked around for an ashtray.
Without taking her eyes from him she pulled open the top drawer of her desk. A small circular brass ashtray lay sleeping quietly in the corner of the drawer, a collection of lipstick-stained cigarette butts snuggled inside it like a litter of pink piglets.
‘Can I trust you?’ she said.
He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Give us a go, Helen! I need this. You won’t be lying to your mate. Honestly.’ It looked as if he was going through with it. A worm of anxiety twisted in his empty stomach. Fuck him anyway. What could they do? They couldn’t have him shot. He laughed. It was not a happy laugh.
She slid the drawer closed on the crumpled remains of his cigarette, a wisp of sm
oke making a quick escape, the throat-catching smell of the cheap tobacco. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. She was uneasy with his attempt to charm her. ‘Are those your own pictures?’ She indicated the bundle under his arm.
He flourished his bundle, the belt buckle dangling free. ‘My passport to Europe, Helen. My fate’s in your hands now. You can turn it all around for me.’
‘I don’t know why I’m doing this,’ she said. She picked up the phone and dialled a single digit.
He leaned over and whispered, ‘You won’t regret it.’
She drew away from him, cupping her hand over the phone and speaking too softly for him to catch what she was saying.
He put his mouth close to her free ear. ‘Tell Miss Barquist I want to know who painted this picture.’
Helen hung up the phone. ‘You can go up. It’s the fourth floor. You won’t get past Agatha. She’ll tear a strip off you for trying to con me. And don’t forget to pay your debt on your way out.’ She pointed. ‘The lifts are over there.’
‘Thanks, Helen.’ He bent and kissed her on the top of her head. Her hair smelled surprisingly of roses.
‘You’re too cheeky by half.’ She reached up and touched her hair. ‘Get on with you.’ She was blushing.
As he straightened he caught a whiff of his warm rubbery plimsolls—or was it his body warmth bringing out the cupboard smells of his damp trousers? Would the fearsome Agatha Barquist be repelled? He was nervous. He turned away and lifted his hand in a gesture of helpless farewell, then walked across the foyer towards the lifts.
Helen Carlyon called after him, ‘You’re a sight, Pat Donlon. I bet you haven’t even got five bob on you.’
He waved again, not looking around, a wordless sign of acknowledgment. He was still behaving like a free man. What would his dad think? He was going to be a father. Holding their baby in his arms at midnight and shushing it to sleep before he knew it. Helen was right. He did look a sight and had only three shillings and sevenpence in his pocket. He knew the amount exactly. He had counted his change after he bought the fags. As he walked across the empty foyer he felt the great painting at his back.
The feeling was with him now that he had nothing to lose. He could see Edith at the cottage in her shadowed end of the back room, painstaking in the sincerity of her pursuit of her art, the cottage and the green rise of the paddock to be rendered on her canvas in oil paint in a manner worthy of praise from her dead grandfather, a work true to the academic standards of her teachers. She would complete the work. She believed in it. He envied her having something to belong to but he could never be like her. He waited for the lift to descend, watching the arrow drifting steadily from 7 towards 0, as if time were speeding past. He felt indifferent to it all. Indifferent to his own fate. He turned and looked across the foyer towards Helen. She was speaking on the telephone.
Pat stepped into the lift and pressed the brass button with the red number 4 on it. The lift obediently shook itself and began its unsteady journey upward, murmuring some little ditty of its own. There was a lingering fragrance of someone’s cigar, the smell putting him in mind of something he might have called a man’s mature ease. A smell of quiet comfort and enjoyment, it was. Money. What he had come for. The smell of confidence in living. In front of him a photograph mounted behind glass was set inside a brass frame that evidently received the vigorous attentions of someone whose duty it was to shine it up every morning. The polished frame of the photograph was let into the panelling on the back wall of the lift. It showed the front of the building from a vantage point across the railway yards; the impressive descending parachute canopy at the doors was already a familiar feature to him, as if it belonged to the history of another self in a past life. With a contented sigh the lift arrived at its destination and stopped. It had no further responsibility. The rest of this was up to him. ‘Thank you,’ he said and hauled open the door.
He stepped into a glade of deep green, the carpet liberally spread with a self-patterning of ferns, something to invite the cushioned footfalls of the invited guest. For a moment he had forgotten his purpose in coming. The morning’s headache was returning, the piston starting up again, thumping quietly in the back room of his brain. He saw his mother bending over his corpse, giving his marble forehead a kiss of last farewell. There were moments when he would not have minded dying.
The walls of the reception area were lined to the height of a man’s head in panels of softly lustrous native cedar. The wood glowed in the warm light from several large glass bowls set into the elaborate plaster of the ceiling. Above the cedar panels, on the long wall facing the lifts, was a row of portraits of serious-looking men, all framed in gilt and rendered in the gloomy academic manner of Sir John Longstaff. Not a smile or a wink from any of them. The seven members of this earnest tribe might have been brothers, or a line of fathers and sons. The patrimony, wasn’t it? Pat could not see them dancing with their girls or enjoying a beer with their mates. All the money in Melbourne was with the Scots. That was the trouble. There never had been enough left over for the likes of the Donlons and the Egans. It was all tied up here. With the likes of Edith’s people. This was the citadel of her mob too. Her brothers would have felt at home here.
A short fat woman with neat grey hair tied in a bun and wearing a brown wool cardigan over a flowered dress was standing behind a desk set at an angle midway between the lifts and the far wall. The woman was resting her chubby fists on the desk, her enormous bosom squeezed between her upper arms, stretching the material of her flowered dress and threatening to burst out in a riotous blossoming of pink flesh—the jungle plant that blooms monstrously at midnight once every ten years. To be there when her breasts made their rare appearance! She was examining him over her spectacles, as if she had got up from her chair in readiness to greet him when the lift arrived. She was not the fierce guardian angel Helen had prepared him for.
‘I’ve just this minute made Sir Malcolm his cup of tea,’ the woman said, giving Pat a big smile, her cheeks pink and dimpling, a light sheen of perspiration on the tight skin of her forehead. ‘Would you like a cup yourself, Mr Donlon?’ Her accent was a soft Glaswegian. Homely, his mother would have called it. Bairns and hobs and wee things strung on the line to dry. ‘Helen tells me you’ve come all the way from Ocean Grove in this terrible weather without a bite of lunch. You must be chilled to the bone.’
He stood before her. He felt like a schoolboy receiving the favoured attentions of the headmistress. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That would be lovely. Are you Miss Barquist?’
‘I am,’ she said. ‘I hope Helen didn’t frighten you with her stories about me. That girl has a wicked sense of humour. Please!’ She pointed to the leather armchair beside him. ‘Sit down, won’t you?’ She came around the desk. ‘Do you have milk and sugar in your tea, Mr Donlon?’
He lowered himself into the armchair, cradling his bundle across his knees, the damp brim of his hat gripped between thumb and forefinger. ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘Yes, please. That would be lovely.’ He was conscious of the slightness of his own stature beside the heavy body of this woman. The Irishness of himself, he thought of it, and was remembering the picture of himself standing between Edith’s giant brothers. Why did the Scots have to be so big in their bodies? Weren’t we all related once? What happened?
She smiled down at him. ‘Well, I’ll just see to it then. The kettle’s only boiled this minute. I could make you a piece of toast and honey to have with it? Would you like that?’
He looked up at her. ‘I would. That would be great.’ As she went by him Pat caught a whiff of the same rose perfume he’d smelled on Helen’s hair. He imagined the elaborate friendship of these two women, sharing their scent and lipstick, braving the weather and going out for tea together at the teashop on the St Kilda pier on weekends, holding onto each other and laughing, the wind blowing their dresses against their legs, one short and fat and struggling to keep up, the other slender and slipping along like a little
sailboat dipping and rising over the waves. Telling each other their gossip. He wondered he hadn’t seen them. His head thumped gently. It wasn’t too bad. A reminder that he was going to die. That was all. Nothing serious.
The lift woke with a quack of surprise. Pat started. He turned his head and watched it sink into the void of the building, grumbling to itself. A man was laughing in a nearby room. It was a big confident laugh of pleasure and goodwill. He eased himself deeper into the chair. He could smell himself, dampness and something warm and human. He was proud there was nothing rancid about his smell. Proud that it was a clean manly smell like his dad’s smell. Whatever else they might be, they weren’t a family of stale-smelling people. It was surely the laugh of the contented man whose cigar had perfumed the lift.
Miss Barquist came back and handed him a cup of tea. The teacup and its saucer were flower-patterned, like Edith’s mother’s cups and saucers. Two patterned shortbread biscuits rested on the saucer.
‘I thought you might like a couple of these instead of the toast,’ Miss Barquist said. ‘They’re Sir Malcolm’s favourite. Dundee shortbread.’
The tea smelled like the kitchen at home. Did the biscuits come in a tartan tin like the one on the mantelpiece where his mother kept her housekeeping? He looked up. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. His stomach made an eager little gurgling sound, preparing itself for the hot drink and the biscuits.
Miss Barquist caught him looking at her as she was tugging her dress into shape against the struggle of her breasts to make their escape. She must be always at it. She sat down, putting her arms on the desk and clasping her fingers. ‘Isn’t our Helen a dear?’ She spoke as if they were all old friends and knew everything about each other.
‘Yes, she’s very nice,’ he said. He munched the first biscuit. While he sipped the hot tea and ate the crumbly biscuits Miss Barquist watched him from behind her desk. The warmth of the tea going down his throat and spreading into his chest and his stomach. He had a small fart coming. He smiled at her and held it in.