by Alison Booth
‘No thanks,’ Barry said, beaming. ‘We’ve just eaten. Judith is going to join the practice. From tomorrow.’
‘As the missing Associate?’ The words were out before Anika had time to consider what she was saying.
Barry looked surprised and Judith amused. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’ll be a partner. The practice will be Armstrong and Oreopoulous once she joins. There’ll be no more Barry Oreopoulous and Associates.’
No more associates. That meant they were all going to be sacked. Anika’s throat constricted and an icy coldness gripped her stomach.
‘Can you pull out the McConnachies’ site plans and bring them into my office?’ Barry said, as casually as if he hadn’t just hurled a grenade into the works. ‘Judith is going to take over that job.’
After Anika handed over the drawings, she backed unacknowledged out of Barry’s office. A moment later she saw, through the glass partition, Barry’s and Judith’s heads bent cosily over the drawings, grey spiky hair and black curls almost touching, like they’d been working together for years. Quickly she told the others what she’d learned.
‘We’re not going to be sacked,’ Tim said confidently. He meant he wasn’t going to get sacked. ‘I’d heard that Barry was competing with Howard Meyer to hire her.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Anika said.
‘You know me, I never gossip.’
‘There’ll be more work for us all,’ Greg said.
Anika saw that Greg was trying not to show his unease, though the jiggling that had started up in his left leg gave him away. It made his shoe scrape against the metal footrest of his draughting stool in an irritating squeak. She wasn’t so sure there’d be enough work for them all. With another partner on board there’d be less need for one of them, and that one would be her. She went into the ladies’ room by the lifts and locked the cubicle door behind her. There was a new poster on the back of the door about genital herpes that further depressed her. Sitting on the closed lid of the WC pan, she considered her options.
She hadn’t seen any advertisements for draughting jobs though she’d been keeping an eye out. If something came up, Barry would probably give her a good reference although she’d been getting mixed signals from him lately. According to him the other day, when he was so grumpy, she was a poor draughtsman. Yet the rational part of her pointed out that there could have been another reason for his bad mood last week. If Tim was right, he and her tutor Howard Meyer had been competing to induce Judith Armstrong to join their practices.
And Howard Meyer would have to be Anika’s second referee. He’d definitely give her a glowing reference; she was convinced of that from his enthusiastic reaction to her sketch plans for the Butler’s Stairs apartment project. A sensitive design, he’d said, that takes away none of the integrity of the nineteenth-century arches.
Of course, if her painting hadn’t been stolen she could have put it up for auction. That might have solved all her job insecurity problems. She unbolted the cubicle door and dashed back into the office. Picking up the phone extension near her drawing board, she dialled the number for Balmain Police Station. Eventually, after endless minutes on hold, she was connected to Tom Warburton, the taller of the two rugby forward lookalikes who’d come around after the robbery. Sounding harried, Warburton told her they’d found nothing.
Sadly, Anika put down the receiver. She would give up on the Rocheteau now. There was no point in brooding over its loss, no point in drawing up her own list of suspects. The painting could have been taken by anyone. Anyone who knew her, knew her friends and their friends, knew the gallery curators, knew the curators’ contacts. Someone who’d seen her coming and going with a package that was obviously a painting. It could have been stolen by any one of a lot of people.
When it was time for her to leave the office, Judith and Barry were still deep in conversation. No chance for Anika to ask if she still had a job until after the weekend, and the prospect of that delay filled her with gloom.
* * *
Waiting for Anika when she got home was a heavy cream envelope. Her name and address were inscribed on it in a spidery hand that she didn’t recognise. On the back was the sender’s address: 137 Gallery, Queen Street, Woollahra. She ripped open the envelope, panic clutching at her throat. Inside was a postcard. A picture of a painting, Impressionist in style, of a man standing in an overgrown garden and reading a newspaper. On the other side of the card, tiny printed letters indicated that the artist was Antoine Rocheteau. The message on the card was written in the same handwriting as that on the front of the envelope.
Dear Miss Molnar,
I was sorry to read of your loss. Your loss is not my gain. Let me assure you that I had nothing to do with this and I hope that the whereabouts of the painting will soon be known so it can be restored to its rightful owner.
Yours sincerely,
Julius Singer
Anika was startled by these words. Contrition was not something she expected from Julius and he could hardly have been sorry. Not when on her visit to his gallery he’d said the painting wasn’t hers. With a trembling hand she shoved the card back into the envelope.
Yet perhaps the message was genuine. She pulled the card out and read it once more. Julius didn’t need to deflect attention from himself; after all, he had an alibi for the night of the robbery. Maybe he really was hoping the painting could be restored to her. Puzzled, she put the card and envelope in her bottom drawer. This was where she kept the things she never looked at, never thought of. Things like her passport and hairdressing qualifications. Maybe by osmosis this card might absorb their irrelevance to her everyday life.
But she felt unnerved anyway. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she rested her head in her hands and stared at the carpet. Breathe, breathe, get that air deep into your lungs, think of something else, something calming. All at once she felt inundated by an overriding desire to go home. For a visit, that was all. For a chance to throw her arms around her mother, for a chance to feel her mother’s arms around her. To feel Nyenye’s arms around her too, and to see her father and Miklos. And most of all to pose those questions that she so desperately wanted answered but at the same time didn’t want to have to ask. For she had to discover the truth about how that painting came into her family and the only person who would know for sure was her beloved Nyenye.
Chapter 21
Saturday morning and Anika was at the corner shop far too early. The mesh security screens were bolted in place across the shop front, and on the pavement outside there were piles of packaged newspapers waiting to be lifted inside. There was a chill in the air and she was in such a hurry when she rushed out of the house that she hadn’t thought to put on a jacket. Hopping about to keep warm, she resisted the temptation to untie the string around one of the bundles of the Sydney Morning Herald and yank out the classifieds section.
The Cataldos were surprised to see her loitering outside when they opened up not long after six. ‘We could deliver, you know,’ Mrs Cataldo said.
Anika muttered some excuse. Tabilla used to get the morning paper delivered but it came erratically. She suspected it was being picked up from the front path by passers-by, and anyway she wanted to be able to pick and choose daily which paper to buy. To behave promiscuously with broadsheets was how she described it.
‘You look tired,’ Mrs Cataldo said after Anika had paid for the paper. ‘Burning the candle everywhere, are you?’
Once Anika understood what Mrs Cataldo meant, she laughed, and the lovely thing about laughter was that it drew some of the tension out of you, and before she knew it Mrs Cataldo had drawn her close in a warm embrace. ‘Don’t work too hard,’ the newsagent said. ‘You must remember to have fun too.’
‘That’s a bit rich coming from you,’ Anika mumbled into Mrs Cataldo’s springy grey hair. ‘I bet you’ve worked hard every day of your life.’
> When Anika got the newspaper home, she found that Tabilla was already up, and sitting, fully-dressed, at the kitchen table in front of the cafetière. ‘I heard you go out,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sleep either.’
Anika unfolded the Sydney Morning Herald and gave her aunt the front section. Then she spread out the classified sections at the other end of the table.
‘Anika, why are you looking through the jobs classifieds with that felt-tip pen? I thought you were happy where you are.’
‘I am. But I’m not sure Barry is all that happy with me.’
Anika told Tabilla about developments at work and the transition from Oreopoulous and Associates to Armstrong and Oreopoulous.
‘You can’t possibly let things run on like this,’ Tabilla said. ‘Why don’t you just call Barry? The phone is not an instrument of torture. It is something to be used for your own benefit.’
‘Maybe I will. But I’d like to have a fallback position first.’
‘That seems illogical to me. Why not call him this morning?’
‘It’s the weekend, that’s why.’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake, ring now. Or give him till eight-thirty if you must. You want to get him before he goes out shopping or sailing or running or whatever he does on a Saturday morning. I don’t see why you should have to wait until you go in to work again.’
Anika decided to take her advice. At eight-thirty, after a furtive tot of Tabilla’s medicinal brandy that was kept at the back of the pantry cupboard, she dialled Barry’s home number. The phone rang on and on. Eventually there was a pickup. She was ready to launch into her prepared speech but it turned out it was only Barry’s recorded voice suggesting that she leave a short message after the beep. She wittered on, her message so lengthy that she’d only just got around to leaving her phone number and name before the machine cut out.
* * *
The next morning Barry called back. ‘I’m so sorry, Anika, I should have explained things to you last Friday. It was really too bad of me.’ His tone was apologetic. Like a criminal on trial waiting for the verdict, Anika braced herself for what he was going to say next.
As he carried on in this contrite vein for a time, her anxiety increased. While he was berating himself, she thought of the advertisements for part-time work that she’d found in the classifieds. One was at St Leonards and much too far to travel each day from Rozelle, and it would be difficult to get from there to uni for lectures. The other one was over at Bondi Junction; this would be a bit easier but it would still involve a lot of travelling. And neither job was with a good firm of architects. Sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, she waited nervously for Barry to get to the point.
‘We certainly don’t want to get rid of you,’ he said at last. ‘I’m really impressed with your design skills and your drawing has improved. In fact, I’d like it if you could work some more hours but I understand that you can’t because of your studies. Anyway, don’t worry, your job is secure.’
Your job is secure. She felt like a prisoner who’d just been acquitted. Before the conversation was even finished, she began to dance around the kitchen as far as the phone cord would allow her, hip hop, she was a teenager again, and in the money, and a little bit in love with Barry who was impressed with her design skills, and how wonderful that was! After she’d hung up, she heard the front gate open and was out the front door in a flash, thinking it might be Tabilla back early from her jaunt. But it turned out to be Mrs Thornton’s gate not theirs, and Anika was left standing like a statue of an athlete in mid-action while Mrs Thornton beamed at her across the low fence dividing their yards.
‘You look happy, love,’ Mrs Thornton said. ‘Happier than I’ve seen you for a while.’
Anika told her about her job and the firm’s name change. Mrs Thornton listened all the while so sympathetically, nodding her head and tut-tutting from time to time, that Anika started to wonder if she’d misjudged her, for she could receive news as well as give it. Perhaps Anika had never given her a chance before. She’d certainly never told her anything much. It struck her that it was an act of generosity to talk to other people about what had been happening to you, and an act of trust too. Trust that they wouldn’t exploit you, trust that they wouldn’t use to their own advantage the information that you’d given away.
Their chat was terminated by the sound of Tabilla’s phone ringing. ‘Have a good day,’ Anika said and dashed inside again to pick it up.
Jonno’s voice was mellow rather than sharp, and yet she felt his call as an intrusion into her life, a piercing of her bubble of happiness.
‘Can I come around this afternoon?’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Is it about the painting, by any chance?’
‘No. It’s something else.’
‘Can’t you say it on the phone?’
‘I’d prefer not to. Will it be OK if I drop around at about three? We can go somewhere for a drink if that’s not too early for you.’
Jonno seemed tense when he collected her and she wondered if his news was bad. They managed to find a table in the small and crowded beer garden of a pub not far from Balmain Wharf. ‘What’s been happening with you?’ he asked, ripping the top off a packet of dry-roasted peanuts and pushing it her way.
‘I haven’t lost my job.’
Although he congratulated her on her job stability, he took the news with equanimity. Anika supposed this was because he hadn’t known that only this morning she’d thought she was going to lose it, so to all intents and purposes what she’d told him was an item of non-news, a bit like saying, ‘I didn’t get run over by a bus this morning’, or ‘the earth didn’t stop spinning today’.
‘What’s your news?’ she said, thinking he could have tried harder to rustle up some enthusiasm. She sipped her beer and waited.
‘I’m going away.’
This gave her a jolt. If he was going away he wouldn’t be inviting her for interviews or turning up unexpectedly or making her uncomfortable in the variety of other ways at which he was expert, and that was all to the good. But why then was his news making her feel a little unsettled? It was another option closing, that must be it. She avoided his eyes by grabbing hold of her glass and swilling down a few mouthfuls of beer, looking nonchalant all the while, as if she didn’t care whether he went or stayed.
‘Did you hear me, Anika?’
‘Yes, I’m just rather thirsty. Where are you going?’
‘I’ve been posted overseas.’
‘Congratulations, Jonno, that’s wonderful. But I thought you were freelance. Are you posting yourself? Or are you giving up being freelance?’
‘Well, in a sense I’ll continue being freelance but I’ve also been commissioned to write a series of articles on what’s happening in the Soviet Bloc countries.’
The Soviet Bloc countries. That made her nervous. Hungary was one of those. She said with an assumed calmness, ‘Any particular country?’
‘Poland and East Germany,’ he said. ‘Roving between the two.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Next week. I won’t be able to do that article, Anika. I’m so sorry.’ He leaned forward and did the staring into her eyes thing that he’d done when they’d first met. The eyes are a portal to the soul, that’s what he’d said when they sat together in the café opposite the Art Gallery of New South Wales. As she looked at those beautiful blue eyes flecked with topaz and fringed with sandy eyelashes that glinted in the light, she felt as if he were willing her to fall for him. It must be an automatic thing with him. Since he was leaving next week there was no point in him sweeping her off her feet. He said, his voice as intent as if making a declaration, ‘You will let me know if anything happens, won’t you?’
‘Like what?’ She made her voice flat.
‘Like get
ting your painting back.’
That wretched painting that Jonno was much too interested in. ‘I’ve given up all hope of getting it back,’ she told him.
‘I’ll send you my address when I get there.’
She smiled to herself, doubting she’d ever hear from him again.
When he dropped her back at the house he came into the front yard with her. She was astonished when he bent down and kissed her on the lips. But it felt good, very good, and it was not long before she was kissing him back. When they came up for breath, she pushed him gently away.
After he’d gone, she congratulated herself on her gift for choosing men to pash on with. A dishy man who was just about to go overseas looking for stories was an excellent pick. She was pretty safe here.
He was a top-notch kisser though, she’d say that for him.
* * *
On the bench in the kitchen was another note from Tabilla saying that Daniel had called. Of course, Anika wouldn’t phone back. But the message was disquieting. Any interaction with Daniel, any mention of his name, resurrected all those anxieties that she tried to keep suppressed, for she could see no way of resolving them without going back to Budapest. Tabilla’s note was letting the genie out of the bottle and her first thought now was to wonder if Daniel was right when he’d hinted the Rocheteau was looted art. And if he was, it might well be the case that some of the other artworks in Nyenye’s flat had been looted too, and this was an even more disturbing thought. They could have been bought unwittingly by her grandparents thinking there were no issues of ownership.