by Robert Gott
The entrance to the drawing school was in LaTrobe Street in an annexe to the gallery that clung to its northern side like a ghastly afterthought. After I passed through its doors I found myself in a strange otherworld peopled by plaster casts — some life size, some larger than life and some on a more modest scale. Scattered among these copies of the world’s masterpieces were fragments of arms, feet and hands and one or two weird and frightening sculptures of flayed bodies, their muscles and veins exposed. This long shed allowed no natural light, but was lit by overhead bulbs that made the space seem bleak and cold.
There were three people scratching at boards but the place was so quiet the sound of charcoal on paper was absurdly amplified. I approached a young woman who was producing a serviceable charcoal copy of the Venus de Milo and asked her if Mr Wilks was anywhere to be found. She pointed towards a door at the end of the room and said that he was in there, conducting a life-drawing class.
‘And why are you out here?’ I asked.
‘This is my first year. You don’t get to do life drawing until your second year. I don’t mind. I like statues. They don’t talk back.’
‘Neither do life models, I assure you.’
She looked me up and down and asked in an offensively dubious tone, ‘Have you worked as a life model?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but mostly I’m an actor.’
‘I guess they need all types,’ she said dismissively and returned to her drawing.
‘When will Mr Wilks be free?’
She shrugged.
‘About ten minutes I should think.’
She drew back from her drawing, lined up her charcoal stick with the plaster cast, and pretentiously made a small correction before she put her charcoal down and wiped her hands on her filthy smock. She was young and rather lovely but I could see in her demeanour that art was making her hard and superior. I wouldn’t like to be dissected and delineated by her sharp, stabbing little pencil.
The other students were a young man, labouring over an elaborately realised acanthus leaf, and a woman who must have been in her fifties, erasing highlights into a dull representation of a sandaled foot. I walked among the chaotically displayed casts and marvelled at their power to intimidate and excite, despite lacking the sheen and white blood of marble. This was as close as I was going to get to the Belvedere Apollo and it seemed like an adequate substitute for the real thing.
The sudden intrusion of voices into the relative silence of the cast room indicated that the life class had finished, and half-a-dozen young men emerged followed by a thin, red-faced and red-bearded man who looked half asleep and whose features exhibited the ravages of alcohol — clearly they were getting their models from among Melbourne’s most desperate classes.
I went into the room and found Mr Wilks carefully examining a partially completed drawing. He looked up and said, ‘Oh, you’ve come for some work. Excellent. That last chap stank.’
I hastily corrected him on this point — not the smelliness of the sitter, but my looking for work. I told him that I was actually a private inquiry agent and that my client was interested in the whereabouts of George and Gretel Beech. I hoped this half-truth might jolt his memory. He hadn’t known, he said, that Gretel was married to George.
‘So you managed to find this George chap at some stage, did you?’
‘Oh, yes, and it was the right George. He was able to confirm this by producing his penis.’
‘I got the impression when he was modelling for me that he wasn’t a shy man. He managed to put his member front and centre, as it were, in every pose he struck. My ladies were quite distracted by it. Only Nigella Fowler drew it as she saw it. The others reduced it to more classical proportions. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Power?’
There was a long table in the tearoom of the drawing school, with one young man seated at the far end eating a sandwich out of a brown paper bag, and smoking.
‘This used to be quite busy,’ Mr Wilks said. ‘The war has badly affected our numbers.’ The attendance problems of the art school were of no interest to me and I started to think I’d made a mistake in allowing myself to be trapped in a pointless conversation. Mr Wilks, obviously skilled in watching the subtle movement of muscle under flesh, observed, quite correctly, that I seemed agitated.
‘I was rather hoping that you could help me, that’s all.’
‘I’ll be frank with you, Mr Power. When you modelled for my class you told me a blatant lie about Gretel owing you money. It wasn’t the debt that gave you away; it was the ridiculous size of the debt. Now you tell me that you’re some sort of spy.’
‘A private inquiry agent, not a spy. I’m simply a private detective.’
To me, the sound of these words was thrilling. They didn’t have the same effect on Mr Wilks.
‘I don’t like private detectives,’ he said. ‘They poke about in other people’s business and bring misery to them. You’re just the grubby tool of jealous husbands and vindictive wives, and vice versa.’
‘You seem to speaking from personal experience.’
‘Oh, I am, Mr Power, I surely am.’
‘Let me assure you that my client is not concerned about sexual morality. He would be the first to acknowledge that his own morals are, shall we say, flexible.’
I suddenly found myself on an explanatory course that might take me into turbid waters. Having started, I couldn’t stop.
‘My client’s interest in the Beechs stems from his concern that Gretel Beech, with whom he was having an affair — that should allay your fears about his reasons for employing me — that Gretel Beech has gone missing.’
I knew this was a risky disclosure. Mr Wilks was now the only other person to know that Gretel’s whereabouts were unknown, and that this fact was sufficiently suspicious to justify the employment of a private detective.
‘By gone missing I presume you mean your client suspects foul play?’
I nodded.
‘Why hasn’t he gone to the police?’
‘There are sensitive issues here and he wants discreet inquiries made first. I’m not really privy to his motives. I imagine he’s reluctant to have the police blundering about in his private affairs until he’s certain there’s a good reason to expose himself in this way.’
I was pleased with this neat improvisation. Mr Wilks was satisfied with it as well.
‘And you think George Beech — her husband you say — might have something to do with her disappearance.’
‘It’s possible. He’s a violent man.’
‘He did that to your face, did he?’
‘He took me by surprise, and he threatened to do worse. He’s a man with something to hide.’
‘A secretiveness that doesn’t extend to his penis.’
Mr Wilks’ willingness to make a small joke indicated that the facts of this case had softened his attitude to my new profession.
‘All right, Mr Power. I’m reluctant to do this but I can find Gretel Beech’s address for you. She’s on our books as a regular model and her details are filed away.’
‘But you said you didn’t know where she lived.’
‘I wasn’t about to give her address to a stranger, and anyway, I don’t actually know it. I’ll have to look it up.’
This was a tremendous breakthrough. There was, however, a price to pay for the information.
‘I’ll get you the address, Mr Power, on the condition that you do something for me. Quid pro quo. I assume Gretel is going to miss her next session with my ladies, and finding a replacement for such an amateur group is difficult. So, next Thursday? Same time?’
I agreed, thinking that between now and Thursday any number of things could happen to prevent me keeping the appointment. The important matter was to get the address. Mr Wilks duly went off and returned with the add
ress of a boarding house in St Kilda written neatly on a scrap of paper. It was only outside the gallery, in the shadow of Frémiet’s Joan of Arc bronze, that it occurred to me that Nigella Fowler would be in the drawing class again. I couldn’t possibly keep the appointment. After what I’d told her, the imbalance of my being naked while she looked on, clothed, was too much to contemplate.
With some time to spare I wandered slowly through the city. It was much quieter than on a weekday but there were still people window shopping — mostly couples, and mostly Americans with local girlfriends or companions. The windows seemed dismal to me, victims of the notion that it was in poor taste and unpatriotic to flaunt luxury. I noticed that there were frequent, low-level displays of unpleasantries whenever a shabby Australian soldier passed a dapper ally. The tension was palpable, and I thought how this made a mockery of the catchy little tune that was current and which insisted that we were all in clover because the Aussies and the Yanks were here.
As I crossed Princes Bridge, and passed Wirth’s Circus, I thought how tawdry circuses looked in daylight. The big top was diminished to grubby canvas and guy ropes by the illusion-shattering blast of the sun. Hobbled camels grazed desultorily, and a shackled elephant swayed with boredom. I kept to the left hand side and walked along the path that James Fowler had called the ‘chicken run.’ I wondered how many pints of semen had been ejaculated the previous evening onto the ground I traversed, and I made a mental note to pause before walking barefoot through any park again.
I mounted the steps of the Shrine and passed into the Sanctuary — a place that had made me a bit weepy on the two or three occasions I’d visited it in the past. The centre was surmounted by a monumental cap, shaped to evoke the great temple at Helicarnassus; but to me it was reminiscent of the inside of a camera’s snout. There were a few people in the Sanctuary, maintaining the silence the space demanded. At the back I turned right and walked down a short flight of steps, then turned right again where a longer flight felt like the approach to a pharaoh’s tomb.
The crypt was dimly lit and smaller than I’d remembered it. Regimental colours hung beneath the ceiling and the air smelt of wet sandstone. I was alone. I could hear the echo of footsteps above, and muffled, subdued voices as people moved around the Shrine. For no rational reason I experienced a kind of panic. The damp, dark, flag-bedraped crypt suddenly became less a place of reflection and more of a trap into which I’d walked. I began to sweat and feel dizzy; the claustrophobia to which I was prone came creeping from my subconscious into the wide open spaces of my susceptible mind.
‘Will?’
James Fowler’s voice was low.
I turned, expecting to see a gun pointed at me. Instead he was standing with his hands on his hips. Even in the poor light, my pale, glistening, panicked face caused him to ask if I was feeling ill.
‘Hay fever,’ I lied. ‘Could we go outside do you think?’
‘That seems a little illogical, Will, but if you insist.’
I followed Fowler up onto the exterior balcony of the Shrine. From here the centre of Melbourne lay before us, and my eyes skipped over the ugly factories on the Yarra River’s bank to collide with the lumpish, failed grandeur of Flinders Street Station, and then onto the true splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral.
‘All these things will I give thee,’ Fowler said, and swept his hand over the vista, ‘if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’
‘That sounds like something you’d hear on the chicken run.’
‘Do you mean me, personally, or is that a more general “you”?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said hastily, ‘it was just a poor joke.’
‘Have you thought any further about what we were discussing last night?’
Without hesitation I told James Fowler that I would do whatever Army Intelligence asked me to do.
‘I’m glad you’re on board,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Clutterbuck thinks that he can rely on you to help him, advertently or inadvertently, in whatever he’s got planned. He’s slippery enough to arrange things so that you’re never told quite what it is you’re being used for.’
I resented, slightly, the implication that I mightn’t be bright enough to know when I was or wasn’t being exploited. Nevertheless, I agreed that it would be satisfying to know that while Clutterbuck thought he was keeping an eye on me, it was actually me who was keeping an official eye on him.
Fowler was anxious to point out that he didn’t expect, indeed didn’t advise, that my role in infiltrating the Order of the Shining Knights would be a very active one. All that was required was that I attend a few of their meetings and pass on the gist of their discussions to him.
‘They won’t tell you anything of real significance probably, but you might be able to tip us off about something.’
‘Both Oakpate and Crocker have been sacking people from their factories. I know that,’ I reported.
‘Nasty but not illegal. But we have had some vague intelligence about an attack of some sort which may be planned. We don’t know where or when, or even if, really. That’s what I need you to keep your ears open for.’
As Fowler was outlining the job he wanted me to do, I waited for an opportunity to raise the issue of bringing Brian in on all this. The more he spoke, the more certain I became that the less he knew about my plans for Brian the better. Army Intelligence was all very well, but there was something to be said for Power Intelligence. It always pays to have something up your sleeve.
James Fowler and I parted on excellent terms. I was tempted to mention my conversation with Nigella. I didn’t, because such an intimacy was at odds with the professionally distant relationship I wanted to maintain with him, at least until the whole Paul Clutterbuck issue had been resolved.
‘I have to get back to my cubby-hole,’ he said. ‘Be careful, Will. Don’t take any risks or you’ll give yourself away.’
We shook hands.
‘I’m an actor James. I can play the wide-eyed naïf. I won’t be giving anything away.’
It was very late in the afternoon when I returned to Mother’s house. The football season had finished so the hoi polloi wasn’t milling about in Princes Park. There was a baseball game in progress, watched by a handful of locals and quite a number of grunts from Camp Pell. I assumed that Darlene and the father of her unborn foal would have left. They hadn’t. The living room door was closed but I could hear Darlene’s flat, penetrating voice through the wood. I found Mother in the kitchen and she told me that they’d been talking for hours, the three of them. They hadn’t even stopped for a cup of tea. Voices had been raised, but generally it had been a civilised affair. I said that I thought it was extraordinary that Darlene could be so deaf, dumb and blind to decency that she would bring her adulterous gigolo to the very house that had welcomed her as my brother’s wife.
‘He’s not a gigolo, Will, and you’ve certainly never been guilty of welcoming Darlene.’
‘How can you defend her?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not defending her, but I have no patience for that tone of yours. It’s most unpleasant and unhelpful.’
It’s remarkable how one’s childhood can be summoned by a single, sharp reprimand. Conversation was now impossible. I’d grown out of the sullen silence with which I used to meet correction, obviously, but I didn’t feel I had anything to apologise for so I simply made myself a cup of tea. I put the teapot on the table without offering to pour Mother a fresh cup. I hoped she’d appreciate this gesture as a pointed riposte to her short-tempered reaction to my perfectly reasonable question.
‘I’m going upstairs to write to Fulton,’ she said. Before leaving the kitchen she added, ‘When you speak to Brian try to keep the awful note of glee you sometimes get, out of your voice.’
I ran my hand over the stubble on my face in lieu of a rejoinder.
‘You really
are frighteningly like your father sometimes, Will.’
With that, she went upstairs, and I was left to ponder whether this observation was a compliment or an insult.
The door to the living room opened — I could see it from the kitchen — and the American came down the corridor towards me.
‘I’m after some water for Darlene,’ he said.
I hadn’t really had the chance to examine him closely the night before. I noticed he was a captain, though without his uniform he would have been Darlene’s equal in colourlessness. If I were casting him in a play I’d put him somewhere down the back, his only use to ‘swell a progress.’
‘You’re the guy I slugged last night. Darlene’s brother-in-law. I guess I should apologise for that.’
He put out his hand. I ignored it.
‘OK,’ he said and withdrew it. ‘Darlene warned me that you were an asshole.’
‘Darlene has specialist knowledge in that area, and I see she’s exercised it in her choice of lover.’
‘You talk like a homo.’
‘You Americans have never really got the hang of English have you.’
‘Water,’ he said, and nodded in the direction of the tap. He found a glass and filled it.
‘Darlene’s usually more comfortable with a trough,’ I said.
‘You’re a funny guy. You could get hurt you’re so funny.’
He returned to the living room and only a few minutes later he re-emerged, this time with his arm through Darlene’s. I was standing in the kitchen doorway and watched as she pulled gloves over her trotters and pointlessly attempted to improve the way her hat sat before going into the street. It was pleasing to note that her pregnancy was wreaking havoc on her appearance. She wasn’t glowing; merely swelling and sloughing. She saw me and curled her lip. She said nothing, words as usual failing her.
In the living room Brian was standing by the bay window, staring at them as they walked down Garton Street.