the roadway. Not that I could hear them. The cocoon of the Mercedes was a world apart.
‘Old loyalties run deep,’ said Eastlake, catching my mood. ‘I’m a Labor man, born and bred. You don’t change your football team just because you change your address.’
This Lloyd Eastlake was not at all what I had expected. A wheeler-dealer ex-carpenter with a penchant for modern art. A party player with a back-stairs fast-track to ministerial ears. I toyed with the idea of asking him how his meeting with Agnelli had gone. Shake the tree, see what fell out. I decided to sit, not give anything away until I had a clearer sense of the lie of the land.
‘You’ll have to tell me all about the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee,’ I said, making myself comfortable, putting both of us at our ease. ‘I’m on something of a steep learning curve here, as Angelo no doubt told you. And what’s the story on this Centre for Modern Art?’
Eastlake took a blank card out of his wallet and scrawled a couple of telephone numbers on it with a small gold pen. Private numbers. High-level access. ‘Call me next week and I’ll bring you up to speed on the policy committee.’ He tucked the card in my breast pocket. My backstage pass.
‘As for the Centre for Modern Art, it’s a bit of a pet project of mine, to be frank.’ He reassumed his relaxed posture and proceeded to expound. ‘The National Gallery is all Old Masters and touring blockbusters. And the commercial galleries are little more than the unscrupulous peddling the unintelligible to the uncomprehending. The CMA’s mission is to fill the gap, to provide public access to the full range of modern Australian art, from its originators through to the creative work of contemporary young artists. Being relatively new, we don’t yet have our own collection, but we’re working on it.’
Art really turned the guy on. I could sense the genuine enthusiasm. For art, and for the games that went with it. The pleasures of collecting. And of getting someone else to pay.
‘Quite successfully too, judging by the government’s $300,000 contribution to your acquisition fund.’
Eastlake looked at me sideways, crediting my homework, sensing criticism. ‘Good art costs money,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how much government money the trustees of the National Gallery have got over the years? The nobs are never slow to stick their hands out, believe me. The old masters are more than happy for the public to pay for their Old Masters. Isn’t it time that someone else got a fair suck of the sausage? Newer artists. Or the forgotten ones the art establishment has written out of history?’
He wasn’t going to get any argument from me on that point. He saw that and got down off his high horse.
‘I started off as a carpenter, you know.’ He slipped into an avuncular tone. ‘It’s a cliche, I know, but when I first began to succeed in business, I felt that people were contemptuous of me. Not that I particularly cared what they thought, but I didn’t want anyone thinking they had the edge on me just because of my background. I’d always had a bit of an interest in art, so I cultivated it. I started going to exhibitions, asking questions, buying pictures. Eventually, I got invited onto exhibition committees and boards of directors. Not the National Gallery, of course. I’m still a bit beneath its dignity. I don’t entirely flatter myself that it’s because my taste and judgment are held in high esteem. I know it’s partly because of my business and political connections. But nobody looks down his nose at me any more. Art is an even greater status symbol than having a chauffeur. Isn’t that right, Noel?’
‘That’s right, Mr Eastlake.’ Spider was smarmily obliging, sharing a little private joke with the boss.
I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror and found him observing me, stony faced. He tilted his head upwards and literally looked down his nose at me. Making a point. He’d recognised me all right, back in the garage, and knew that I’d recognised him. There was no mirth in the gesture. None whatsoever. I stared back into his mirrored eyes until he returned them to the road.
‘The thing to keep in mind’-Eastlake had resumed his briefing mode, oblivious-‘is that most arts practitioners, the creative people, are Labor supporters.’
We passed the squat pyramid of the war memorial and turned down an elm-lined side road. The Mercedes cruised to a gentle stop outside a small white house standing by itself in the middle of the park, complete with a front veranda and an old-fashioned rose garden.
‘We’ve arrived,’ Spider announced. Eastlake opened the door and stepped out. As I made to follow, Spider slung his elbow casually onto the seat back. ‘Haven’t we?’ he said, pointedly. ‘Mate.’
‘Hello, Spider,’ I said.
He didn’t like to be reminded. ‘Bit of a snob these days, Murray? You didn’t say hello this afternoon. And a bit of an art buff, too. Moving in all the best circles. Haven’t turned into a poofter, have you?’
‘Even if I had,’ I said, feet on the footpath, ‘you’d be safe.’
The Centre for Modern Art looked more like the lawn cutter’s residence than the cutting edge of the avant- garde. Its function as an art gallery was betrayed only by a rather inconspicuous sign on the gate and people spilling out the front door with drinks in their hands. Clearly Labor voters to a person.
Eastlake led me up the garden path, nodding hellos. He surged into a narrow hallway with a polished-wood floor, track-lighting, and white walls hung with pictures of dwarfs with enormous penises. Through archways opening on either side I could see people milling about, drinking, chatting and pretending to look at crucified teddy bears and scrap-iron dingoes. ‘I’m just the front man here,’ Eastlake was saying. ‘The real work is done by the our director, Fiona Lambert. You’ll like Fiona. Everyone does. Bright as a button. Darling.’
Darling? Eastlake and I were getting on pretty well, but it seemed a little early in our relationship for this degree of affection.
‘Dahling!’ The word echoed back from the far end of the hall. A woman of export-quality glamour elbowed her way through the crowd towards us. She was somewhere in her late twenties. Her skin was extraordinarily pale, translucent almost, and lustrously moisturised. She was wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps, its colour exactly matching her finely arched eyebrows and the precisely engineered bob of hair that framed her face. It was a face with too much character to be called pretty, but it was still well worth looking at. Her legs were bare and went all the way to the floor where they ended in a pair of low-heeled brilliantly shiny shoes, one black, one white. If it hadn’t been for the slash of postbox red at her mouth, she could have got a job as a pedestrian crossing. But not one I’d ever cross. She was so far out of my price range she might as well have been the Hope diamond. She offered Eastlake one of her cheeks.
‘Fiona, darling.’ He pecked the air beside her ear. ‘I’ve brought you a present.’ He meant me.
Fiona Lambert inspected me with shrewd green eyes, and politely showed me some teeth that must have cost daddy a pretty penny. Her LBD was cut low to display a divine declivity, dusted with barely visible pale-yellow freckles. Not that I noticed.
Eastlake was right, she was as bright as a button-as neat, as highly polished, and just as hard. He introduced us, explaining the change of ministers and embellishing my credentials somewhat. Ms Lambert smiled non- committally and extended her fingertips. The handshake was slight, barely making contact, but there was a firmness of muscle there that made me think of ballet points and horses. I felt like a politician’s yes-man in a cheap suit.
Eastlake promptly bailed out. ‘Why don’t you induct Murray into the mysteries, Fiona darling, while I get us a drink.’ He merged into the throng, waving ineffectually at a disappearing waitress. More people were arriving. I felt conspicuously overdressed in my workaday collar and tie. The only other men in suits were very old and slightly bewildered. The rest of the crowd was haphazardly casual, the women with stylishly eccentric spectacles, the men meticulously louche.
Fiona Lambert put her hand lightly on my elbow and steered me out of the hall. We went into a room hung with minimalist paintings so well executed I had to look twice to make sure they were really there. The room was filling and there was a slight crush of bodies. Fiona Lambert stood disconcertingly close. Sooner or later I would be asked my opinion of the stuff on the walls. There was bound to be some sort of formula, but I didn’t know what it was. A heavy bead of perspiration broke from under my arm and trickled down inside my shirt. ‘Lloyd was somewhat vague about the occasion,’ I said, groping for small talk.
‘Primarily, it’s an opportunity for some of the more promising newcomers to show what they can do.’ Fiona Lambert was nothing if not well-bred, and she knew her job. ‘More of a social thing, really. So our friends and supporters don’t forget us over the summer.’
‘You make it sound like the night football,’ I said. Might as well play the part.
She forged a mechanical little smile. Her attention was elsewhere. A couple were walking through the door, making an entrance. He was well into his sixties, gnomically stocky and almost completely bald. His heavily lidded eyes and well-tanned skin made him appear simultaneously indolent and cunning. He was wearing a sixty-dollar
