‘Just a moment, sir.’ After a few seconds, he came back with a phone number. The first three digits, denoting the local exchange, were unfamiliar. Somewhere in the eastern suburbs gentility belt, I assumed.
‘That’s Eaglemont, is it?’ A locale of faintly arty pretence.
‘Coldstream,’ said eyebrows, eager to send me packing.
Coldstream, of course. Eltham, Kangaroo Ground, Christmas Hills, Yarra Glen, Coldstream. Out where the Food Plusses and the Furniture Barns gave way to plant nurseries and pottery shops. A bushland bohemia of mudbrick and claret in whose sylvan glades colonies of freethinking artists once made their abode, sculpting wombats out of scrap metal, listening to jazz, swapping wives and growing their beards. Where shadow Cabinet ministers in turtle-neck sweaters once went to have their portraits painted by polygamous libertarians. Long before art was an industry, when it was a talisman against the triumphant philistinism of encroaching suburbia, these scrubby hills on the urban fringe were its Camelot.
Not a lot of Camelot left out there any more, not since art had decamped to the inner city, gone post-modern, started pleading its multiplier-effectiveness and cost/benefit ratios before the Industry Assistance Commission. Not since the bird-watching suburban gentry had parked their Range Rovers in its driveways and paved its bush tracks with antique-finish concrete cobblestones available in an extensive range of all-natural designer colours. Only the artists’ half-feral children remained, gone thirty, still barefoot and stinking of patchouli oil. And old Giles Aubrey, retired to some bend in the river.
His phone rang a long time, long enough for me to rehearse my approach, long enough for me to think he wasn’t going to answer. ‘Giles Aubrey speaking.’ A voice with rounded vowels and clipped diction, the sort of voice that would once have been called educated, that suggested I forthwith state my business and heaven help me if I was a fool.
Anyone hoping for Giles Aubrey’s assistance would need to play it deferential, keep their wits about them. I apologised for disturbing him at the weekend, inferred that I was calling at the express instructions of the Minister for the Arts, and wondered if he might spare me a few moments of his unquestionably precious time to provide some background on Victor Szabo. ‘The minister is currently reliant on a limited number of sources of expertise. Ms Lambert, Szabo’s biographer, has been very helpful, naturally.’
For all the archness in his voice, Giles Aubrey deigned not to rise to the temptation of petty rivalry. ‘Exactly what is it you wish to know, Mr Whelan?’
‘It’s more the personal aspect. Family details, children, that sort of thing,’ I told him.
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’ His voice quavered with age, but he was following me all right.
‘Victor Szabo is still largely unknown to the general public.’ I was groping my way here. ‘So naturally there will be a great deal of interest in his background when it is announced that a government-funded gallery is spending six hundred thousand dollars on one of his paintings.’
‘That much? For one of Victor’s? Really?’ Behind the patrician disbelief was something else. Vindication, perhaps. ‘Which one, may one ask?’
I told him. There was a long silence and when finally he spoke it was as if recognising the arrival of something long anticipated. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Oh dearie, dearie me.’
Coldstream was a good ninety minutes away. ‘I’ll be in your area a bit later this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I could drop around?’
‘Very well.’ His acquiescence was immediate, total. ‘Some things are better discussed face to face.’ The last house, he told me, bottom of the hill.
But first things first. The fruit of my loins was making his descent. I hiked my purchases up to Parliament House, tossed them into the Charade and made the airport with seconds to spare.
Tullamarine was thick with Italian families, there to meet the Alitalia flight from Rome, cooling their heels while customs frisked their grandmothers for contraband salami. Red’s flight was running ten minutes behind schedule— which gave me a chance to read what the Saturday paper pundits had to say about the Cabinet reshuffle.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was the recurrent phrase. Since these were the same luminaries who’d confidently predicted our defeat at the previous election, I tried not to take offence. We had, after all, won by two seats. The Herald’s Moat Death Puzzle story ran to five paragraphs, covered only the bare bones and took the anticipated line. A side-bar profiled famous artistic suicides.
All up, I’d been waiting at the gate lounge for half an hour by the time the flight landed and the last of the exiting passengers streamed through the door. Red was not among them.
It was definitely his flight. Definitely. The airline woman at the service counter verified it, ratting her glossy nails across a keyboard, consulting her monitor. Unaccompanied child, Redmond Whelan. Ticketed, confirmed and boarded. Might I have simply missed him in the crowd, she asked? There were quite a lot of families on the flight, returning from holidays. Had he perhaps proceeded directly to claim his baggage?
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I said, anxiety mounting, and turned with a sweep of my arm to prove my point.
‘Tricked ya!’
Red stood behind me, grinning from ear to ear.
We embraced, his cheek on my sternum, the bill of his baseball cap obscuring his face. It was a solid hug, but brisk. Even a ten-year-old has an image to think about.
‘So,’ I said, holding him at arm’s length the better to examine him. Every time I saw Red, he’d changed in some subtle, inexpressible way. His face still had the same cherubic quality as always, but the body below was whippier, carried less puppy fat. His eventual shape, I allowed myself the conceit, would owe more to me than to his mother. ‘How you been?’
‘Good.’
‘How was the flight?’
‘Good.’
‘How was your holiday?’ Three weeks on the beach at Noosa Heads with Wendy and her barrister boyfriend. I didn’t want the details.
‘Good.’
So far, so good. ‘Good,’ I said.
Quite the frequent flier, Red travelled light. A backpack and a Walkman were his total luggage. Everything else he needed—several hundred comics, a skateboard and a change of clothes—was waiting in his room at my place. Our place, I thought, brimming with the fact.
Back when Red was seven and his mother was in Canberra securing her future in the affirmative action major league, the boy and I had lived together for the best part of a year. Wendy had returned home at regular intervals and phoned frequently, but for weeks at a time it was just the two of us, living the life of Riley. Okay, so we ate out often enough to have our own table at Pizza Hut, slept in the same bed to cut down on housework and missed the odd day of school. But I always ordered pizzas with a high vegetable content, insisted Red brush his teeth at least once a week and kept him relatively free of parasite infestations. And it was only by unavoidable accident that Wendy discovered him home alone one morning when she arrived earlier than anticipated. The olive-skinned beauty in my bed and the Hell’s Angel on the roof with a crowbar had a perfectly innocent explanation, if only she’d stuck around to hear it.
‘What did the orthodontist say?’ I asked as we headed for the carpark.
Red indicated the problem, open-mouthed. ‘E ed I eed a ate.’
‘Why do you need a plate?’ Aside from further enriching some overpriced gum-digger, I was already sending Wendy five hundred dollars a month. Not that I begrudged a penny.
‘E ed I ot a oh a ite.’
‘You haven’t got an overbite,’ I said. ‘Your face is the same shape as mine. I look okay, don’t I?’
Red eyed me sceptically. His gaze lingered on my bandaged ear. He didn’t say anything, but I could already sense them gift-wrapping my birthday copy of First Aid for the Home Handyman at the Sydney branch of Mary Martin.
‘You think Tark’s home today?’ This was Red being sensitive, no
t wanting me to think it wasn’t me he was here to visit. Tarquin Curnow was his best mate in Melbourne, possibly the world, and doubtless the two of them had already been on the phone, cooking up plans for the weekend. Whenever Red came to stay, he headed directly to Tarquin’s place and the two of them hung out like Siamese twins.
I took no offence. Tarquin Curnow had been Red’s friend since kindergarten, and the clincher when I bought my house was that it backed onto the same lane as the Curnows’ big terrace. Tarquin’s parents, Faye and Leo, were old friends and better ones than I deserved, especially Faye who tended to worry about my unattached status. It affronted her sense of the natural order. I was beginning to share her sentiments. The temperature had long hit the forty-degree mark and my shopping was beginning to go whiffy by the time we tracked down the Charade and blew the carpark. We headed straight for Tarquin’s place. Not much point in going home just to put a piece of cheese in the fridge. Faye’s would be just as cold.
The Curnows’ front door was opened by a four-year-old girl in a pair of faded pink cottontails. Ignoring me, she took one look at Red, pirouetted on the hall-runner and bolted into the shadowy interior. ‘He’s here. He’s here. Red’s here.’ This was Faye and Leo’s youngest, Chloe. No wonder Red liked it here. If Chloe had a basket of rose petals, she’d have strewn them in his path.
At its far end, the hallway opened into a haphazardly furnished room, part kitchen, part lounge, scattered with the customary detritus of family life and heavily shuttered with matchstick blinds. The blinds made about three degrees worth of difference, so the room felt like it was in Cairo rather than Khartoum. Torpor blanketed the house. Tarquin unfurled himself like a praying mantis from a beanbag in front of the television and the boys scooted upstairs in conspiratorial glee. Chloe dogged them optimistically.
Leo was upstairs, napping. Faye was standing at the sink in a shortie kimono thrashing a handful of greenery under a running tap. I opened the fridge. ‘I’ll have one, too,’ said Faye.
The fridge was a cornucopia of everything from anchovies to zucchini. I deposited the ham and fetta, ripped the tops off a couple of stubbies of Cooper’s Pale Ale and sank into the nearest beanbag, beginning to unwind at last.
A ferociously modish cook, Faye was a journalist by profession. She wrote for the Business Daily—one of those papers that runs stories with titles like ‘GDP Gets OECD OK’ and ‘Funds Pan Mid-Term Rate Hike’—while Leo did something obscurely administrative at Melbourne University. Neither of them were what you might call high fliers and the contrast between Faye’s billion-dollar subject matter and her modestly anarchic personal circumstances never ceased to amuse me.
‘So.’ She added a baptised lettuce to the profusion in the fridge, dried her hands on her kimono and lowered her big-boobed frame into a cat-scratched armchair. ‘You still got a job, or what?’ The question was both personal and professional. Ever solicitous of my personal welfare, Faye also wanted the good oil on the Cabinet reshuffle.
‘Pending satisfactory performance indicators,’ I told her.
‘Arts Ministry, eh?’ she whistled appreciatively. ‘That explains the ear. Trying to wow the art crowd, eh?’
‘And not succeeding.’ I gave her a quick rundown of the previous evening, all the way to the scene at the National Gallery moat. The business about the dead body interested her only mildly—she wasn’t that kind of journalist—but my unconsummated experience with Salina Fleet elicited a sympathetic cluck. ‘Not having much luck lately, are you, Murray?’
‘How come I never seem to meet anyone sane?’ I asked, relaxed enough now to feel philosophically sorry for myself.
‘What about Eloise? You can’t say she’s not sane.’
Eloise was Faye’s most recent exercise in dinner-party matchmaking. A waif-like book editor, she laughed so nervously at my little jokes that the beetroot and orange soup came out her nose. Then she burst into tears on her doorstep when I tried to do the right thing.
‘She was pleasant enough, I suppose,’ I said, not wanting to sound ungrateful. ‘Just not my type.’
‘And what is your type, Murray?’ Faye was beginning to regard me as major challenge. She was constantly inviting me to meals and seating me beside some loudly ticking biological alarm clock. So far, she’d tried to pair me off with a workaholic paediatrician who left when her beeper went off during the osso buco, a lecturer in linguistics who couldn’t stop talking about Pee Wee Herman, and an up-and-coming corporate lawyer with the inside-running on the bottom-line, real-estate wise. And then there’d been Jocasta, about whom the least said the better. The name, I think, speaks for itself.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Someone I don’t have to impress or compete with. Someone who isn’t assessing my genetic material over the entree. Someone nice. Goes off like a rocket.’
‘Someone you can inflate when required?’ said Faye. ‘You don’t want much, do you?’
The boys erupted down the stairs, towels over their shoulders. ‘Can we go to the pool, huh? Huh, can we, huh, can we?’
‘Even better,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up the bush, find a waterhole.’ Coldstream, I supposed, might technically qualify as the bush. Red looked keen.
‘Do we have to?’ whined Tarquin. He’d be a politician one day, our Tark. As a matter of principle, he never did anything without being pressured into it first.
‘I’d take Chloe, too,’ I said, winking at Tarquin, ‘but the seat belt’s broken.’ That sealed the deal. A boys-only expedition into the wild.
‘You stay and help Mummy,’ Faye told the crestfallen girl. ‘And we’ll all have a picnic dinner tonight in the gardens, okay? You can invite your friend Gracie, okay?’
I went upstairs to the Curnows’ bathroom and removed the bandages from my ear. It was scabbing up very nicely. I’d certainly come out of my ear-sundering experience better than Vinnie Van G. In two or three days, with a bit of fresh air, my lobe would be good as new.
Smeared with sunscreen, the boys and I piled into the car. ‘Stay in the shade, careful of submerged branches, and don’t get lost,’ suggested Faye helpfully. ‘And watch out for snakes.’ I passed her my squishy fruit, terminating her bushcraft advisory service before Tarquin could chicken out.
We tooled out the freeway, singing along with the radio, the windows wound down. Hits and Memories. Ah bin cheated. Bin mistreated. When will ah be loved. ‘Were you a mop?’ Red wanted to know. ‘Or a rotter?’
Within half an hour we’d cleared the built-up area and entered open countryside, paddocks of stubble the colour of milky tea. At the turn for Kangaroo Ground, the road ran between two vineyards and the boys let me think I’d conned them that there really were kangaroos bounding between the rows of vines. The road crested rolling hills and dipped into lightly wooded valleys, winding through tunnels of dappled darkness. At the top of a bare rise stood a peeling weatherboard church surrounded by moulting cypresses, a dilapidated sign out front: ‘EEK AND YE SHALL FIND’.
‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to drop in on someone for a few minutes.’ Acquired with parenthood, the habit of compulsive deception is not easily shed.
‘Aaww,’ the boys groaned in unison, but the wind buffetted the sound away.
At the Christmas Hills fire station, a zincalum shed, volunteer fire-fighters awaited the worst, stripped to the waist in the shade of a concrete water tank, moving only to fan the dust raised by our passing. At the far end of an unmade road, as instructed, I found Giles Aubrey’s house in a tinder-dry forest of stringybark saplings.
The architectural style was the local specialty, Mudbrick Gothic. Clay-coloured adobe walls set with clerestory windows, the whole thing slung low into the slope. Somewhere down below, the river wound between the trees. We went around the side, looking for the door. Dry leaves crackled under our feet and bellbirds pinged loud in our ears. ‘Careful of snakes,’ I reminded the boys. It would be typical of Tarquin to get himself bitten.
‘I trust you’re n
ot referring to me.’ The man who spoke was sitting at a garden table beneath the shade of a pergola on a wide terracotta-tiled terrace. Behind him, glass doors opened into a house filled with pictures, rugs and books. In front of him, spread on old newspapers, was a punnet of tomato seedlings.
He was a desiccated little old rooster, with alert rheumy eyes and a complexion hatched with spidery blood vessels. The draw-string of his wide-brimmed straw hat sat tight under his neck and he wore a pair of canvas gardening gloves. Stripping off the gloves, he stood up and put his hand out, laying on the charm. ‘Giles Aubrey,’ he announced. ‘And you are?’
It was Red he addressed and for a moment it looked like the kid was going to disgrace me. Then he took Aubrey’s hand and pumped it gravely. ‘Redmond Whelan,’ he said. That about exhausted his supply of etiquette.
‘Well, Redmond Whelan,’ said Aubrey, relinquishing his hand. ‘If you two boys go down that path, you’ll find a very good place to swim. No matter if you haven’t got a costume. It’s my secret spot.’
The boys, braced to run, waited on my okay. ‘It’s quite safe,’ Aubrey assured me. ‘And I’m well past being a risk to anyone.’
I nodded and the boys bolted down the hill. Aubrey picked up a duck-headed walking-stick and pointed to the tray of seedlings. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring those.’ Walking gravely with the aid of the cane, he led me to a vegetable patch down a set of steps made from old railway sleepers. The earth was hard packed, the lettuces going to seed. A steep track ran down the slope and sounds of splashing and laughter wafted up through the trees. Aubrey lowered himself to his knees and jabbed the dirt with a small trowel.
‘I heard about young Marcus on the radio,’ he said. ‘Tragic. Didn’t quite make the connection at first. He used to be Marcus Grierson. Grierson’s the mother’s name, of course. Had a bad feeling about it, all the same. Then when you rang and mentioned the painting, it all fell into place. Szabo means ‘tailor’ in Hungarian. Rather predictable that way, Marcus was. Now I suppose the genie is out of the bottle. It was all in this suicide declaration they mentioned, I take it?’
The Brush-Off Page 14