Maria was not above feelings of revenge on behalf of all those women he had humiliated. She was pleased to get him, pleased to make him pay, and when he wept at the table she felt only a vague, distanced pity for him. She looked at him and thought: I must tell Mama.
Her mother was battling with cancer in the George V Hospital at Missenden Road in Camperdown and Maria brought flowers and Greek magazines and gossip that would cheer her up. It was for this reason – certainly not for her own pleasure – that she finally revealed what she had previously thought she could never reveal – her pregnancy.
The approaching death had changed Maria, had made her softer with her mother, more tolerant, less angry. She sat with her for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. She bathed her to spare her the humiliation of being washed by strangers. She fed her honey and water in a teaspoon. She watched her sleep. Death had changed the rules between them. The love she felt for her mother seemed, at last, without reserve.
As it turned out, the emotions Maria Takis felt were hers, not her mother’s. She had hoped that the idea of a birth might somehow make the death less bleak. She had imagined that they had moved, at last, to a place which was beyond the customs and morality of Agios Constantinos. But death was not making her mother’s centre soft and when Maria said she was going to have a baby, the eyes that looked back at her were made of steely grey stuff, ball-bearings, pips of compressed matter. Her mother was a village woman, standing in a dusty street. She did not lack confidence. Fear had not shifted her.
‘We’ll kill you,’ she said.
It was a hard death and the story of Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd never did get told.
7
‘Yes, but do we have milk?’ Mrs Catchprice used her walking stick to flick a magazine out of her path. ‘It’s very clever,’ she told Maria. She hit the magazine so hard the pages tore. ‘The roof leaks right into the kitchen sink. It washes my dishes for me.’
‘Mrs Catchprice,’ Maria smiled. ‘It’s nearly eleven.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘I really need to start our meeting.’
‘You sit down,’ Mrs Catchprice said.
‘There are questions I have to ask you, or your accountant.’
‘Vish will get you a glass of milk.’
Mrs Catchprice struck the magazine again. Vish crossed from the kitchen to the plastic and paper confusion of the annexe, holding out a carton of milk at arm’s length. He gently lowered the milk carton into a green plastic bag.
‘You take my chair,’ Mrs Catchprice told Maria. ‘It’s too low for me.’ She pushed the magazine with the rubber tip of her stick and slid it underneath a bookcase.
‘Gran, the milk was off.’
‘Be a dear,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘Go and see Cathy. They’ve got milk in Spare Parts for the staff teas.’
‘I can’t ask Cathy. Cathy won’t give me milk.’
‘You don’t understand Cathy,’ said Mrs Catchprice. She pulled free a dining chair, turned it on one leg so it faced away from the bride dolls, and then sat down on it hard. ‘Ask her for milk,’ she said. ‘She won’t kill you.’
Maria thought: she ‘plonks’ herself down. She is pretty, but not graceful. She is full of sharp, abrupt movements which you can admire for their energy, their decisiveness.
She looked to see what the Hare Krishna was going to do about his orders. He had already gone.
‘Bad milk!’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’ve got old.’
‘We all get old,’ Maria said, but really she was being polite. She had an audit to begin. She wanted to make it fast and clean – a one-day job if possible.
‘One minute you’re a young girl falling in love and the next you look at your hand and it’s like this.’ She held it up. It was old and blotched, almost transparent in places.
Maria looked at the hand. It was papery dry. She thought of bits of broken china underneath a house.
‘I can see it like you see it,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I can see an old woman’s hand. It has nothing to do with me. I think I’ll have brandy in my milk. Did he take an umbrella?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I know he looks peculiar but he’s very kind. He looks like such a dreadful bully, don’t you think?’ She leaned forward, frowning.
Maria had worked in the Tax Office twelve years and had never begun an audit in such a homey atmosphere. She opened her briefcase, removed a pad and laid it on her lap. ‘He’s got a nice smile,’ she said.
‘Yes, he has.’ Mrs Catchprice fitted a Salem into her mouth and lit it without taking her eyes off Maria Takis’s face. ‘The Catchprices all have kissing lips. Actually,’ she said, as if the thought was new to her, ‘he’s the spitting image of my late husband. Did you meet his younger brother, Benny? Vish’s been looking after Benny since he could stand. They told you about their mother?’
‘I haven’t talked to anyone,’ Maria said. ‘I thought my colleague had talked to you to set up this interview. I …’
‘Did you talk to Jack? Jack Catchprice, my youngest son.’ She nodded to a colour photograph hanging on the wall beside the doorway to the kitchen. It was of a good-looking man in an expensive suit shaking hands with the Premier of the State of New South Wales. ‘Jack’s the property developer. He tells everyone about his funny family. He tells people at lunch – Benny’s mother tried to shoot her little boy.’
Maria closed the pad.
‘It’s no secret,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘Benny’s mother tried to shoot him. What sort of mother is that? Nice, pretty-looking girl and then, bang, bang, shoots her little boy in the arm. Benny was three years old. I’m not making it up. Shot him, with a rifle.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? God knows. Who would ever know a thing like that?’
‘What was she charged with?’
‘Oh no,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘We wouldn’t report it. What would be the point? She went away, that’s what matters. We wouldn’t want the family put through a court case as well. Everyone in Franklin gossips about it anyway. They all know the story – on the Sunday Sophie Catchprice was confirmed an Anglican, on the Monday she did this … thing.
The Tax Inspector’s mother was dead, but she said, ‘Greek Orthodox.’
‘How fascinating,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘How lovely.’
It was not the last time Maria would wonder if Mrs Catchprice was sincere and yet she could not dismiss this enthusiastic brightness as false. Mrs Catchprice might really find it fascinating – she brought her Salem to her lips, inhaled and released the smoke untidily. ‘I always told them here in Franklin,’ she said, ‘that if they went in with the Presbyterians I’d switch over to the Catholics. We never had a Greek Orthodox. I never thought about Greeks. But now I suppose we have. We have all types here now. The Greek Orthodox is like the Catholic I think, is it not?’
‘The service is very beautiful.’
‘Oh I
‘Mrs Catchprice, do you know why I’m here?’
‘You mean, am I really ga-ga?’ said Mrs Catchprice, butting her Salem out in an ugly yellow Venetian glass ashtray.
‘No,’ Maria said, ‘I did not mean that at all.’
‘You are a Tax Inspector?’
‘Yes. And I’ll need an office to begin doing my audit.’
‘They’re up to something, all right.’
Maria cocked her head, not understanding.
‘You met her?’ Mrs Catchprice said.
