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 not 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?’
Well, well, well. ‘The note did make some allegations,’ I said. ‘But we’d like to hear what you have to say before we take the matter any further.’
‘To lose one’s reputation’-Aubrey tamped the ground around the seedlings, taking his time-‘at my age.’ Tomatoes planted this late in the season would probably not ripen.
‘If you could start at the beginning.’ The impersonal bureaucrat, that was the approach to take.
Aubrey gripped my knee and levered himself upright. His weight was so insubstantial I could barely feel the pressure. The horticulture was for my benefit, a demonstration that age had not wearied him. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Hospitality required certain rituals. He watered in the seedlings and we went back up the slope.
Aubrey’s domesticity was an eclectic mixture of quality heirlooms and superseded modernity. Earth-toned paintings, over-framed. A French-polished sideboard bearing blobs of runny-glazed hand-wrought pottery. Persian rugs. Well-used Danish Deluxe armchairs. Giles Aubrey had once danced on the cutting edge.
