‘I sort of lived with a man for a long time and he had a wife and I wanted a baby and I made a choice and this is it.’
‘You were happy with him?’
‘Yes,’ Maria said, then: ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I think I was rather depressed for rather a long time. I’m just noticing it. I think I must have got used to it.’
‘Now?’
‘Well, yes, now.’
‘Now you’re what?’
‘I’m not depressed right now,’ she laughed, and then looked down, unable to hold his eyes, aware of the movement of his knee an inch or two away from hers.
‘Do you know who Daniel Makeveitch is?’ she asked.
‘A painter sitting two tables to your right.’
‘You know him?’
‘You mustn’t seem so surprised,’ he said. ‘I know I’m a property developer and I even used to be a second- hand car salesman …’
He was smiling, but his eyes were hurt and Maria was embarrassed at what she had said.
‘I’m sorry. I thought you would have mentioned it.’ She put out her hand and touched his sleeve. ‘When we sat down.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I used to spend a lot of time being offended, but I’m not any more.’ None the less his face had closed over and showed, in the candlelight, a waxy sort of imperviousness. ‘When I was a car salesman in the Paramatta Road – I worked for Janus Binder and I started buying paintings because he collected them. People were always amazed – gallery owners, people who should have known better. It was as if there was something ludicrous about car dealers having any sensitivity or feeling. But once I was a property developer, no one was surprised at all. They expect it of me. There’s a great relief, socially, in not being a car dealer.’
‘Like being a Tax Officer.’
‘You don’t even half-believe that, Maria.’
She blushed. ‘In its social isolation, I meant.’
He paused and looked at her and she felt herself seen as dishonest. She blushed.
‘Do you like Daniel Makeveitch’s work?’
He allowed enough space to register the change of subject, but when he spoke his eyes were soft again and his manner as charming as before. ‘Would I seem too
‘Oh please, Jack, do I really seem that bad? Which one?’
‘“Daisy’s Place”,’ he said.
‘I’m impressed,’ she said.
His lower lip made an almost prim little ‘v’ as he tried not to smile. ‘It’s only tiny.’
‘What I hate,’ she told him, ‘is how impressed I am.’ She laughed and shook her head in a way she knew, had known, since she was sixteen, made her curling black hair look wonderful. ‘I hate being happy here with all these people.’
‘With me too?’ he smiled.
‘With you too,’ she said and allowed him to hold her hand a moment before she reached towards her glass of water.
44
At half-past ten on Tuesday night, Maria Takis left Chez Oz to see the Daniel Makeveitch painting at Jack Catchprice’s beach house.
As Chez Oz was on Craigend Street, and as the Brahmachari ashram was around the corner, it was not astonishing that they should, in hurrying out into the night, bump into Vishnabarnu on the pavement, but Maria was astonished none the less.
‘Hi,’ she said, with an exuberance and a familiarity totally new in her relationship with Vish. ‘Small world.’
‘Not really,’ said Vish, and nodded at Jack.
He was with another Hare Krishna, a soft, olive-skinned man of forty or so who had noticeably crooked teeth and a scholarly stoop.
‘The ashram is here,’ Vishnabarnu pointed to the grey stucco block of flats. ‘The temple is round the corner from the fire station. I walk past here six times a day.’
‘That’s an ashram?’ Maria smiled. She was excited and happy. ‘I always imagined something more exotic.’
The other Hare Krishna took a step away and stared off into the night.
‘I could have given you a lift to town,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?’
Vishnabarnu looked at his friend. Something passed between them. When Vish looked back to Maria he was almost laughing.
‘No,’ he said.
The older Hare Krishna began to walk towards the ashram.
‘This is goodbye.’ Vish shook Maria’s hand. ‘Excuse me.’
And then, without saying a word to his uncle, he followed his friend, who was already in the dark, arched doorway of the grey stuccoed building.
‘He thinks I’m the devil,’ Jack said as he let her into the Jaguar.
‘I don’t like them generally,’ Maria said. ‘The way they treat their women …’
‘It’s about what you’d expect from people trying to duplicate life in a sixteenth-century Indian village …’
‘But they do feed the street kids in the Cross and also when your sister was trying to have your mother committed. Yes, that happened on Monday. He was very good then. You get the feeling he’s capable of doing what’s needed.’
‘What was needed?’
‘Well not much as it turned out. But you get the feeling from him that he is timid but that he would go to the wall with you. That’s a very impressive quality.’ She paused. ‘Even if he does think you’re the devil.’
They drove down past the lighted car showrooms in William Street with their back-lit, bunny-suited, teenage prostitutes and the long, slow line of cruising traffic in the kerbside lane. They turned right down into Woolloomooloo beneath the Eastern Suburbs railway bridge and up beside the art gallery and on to the Cahill Expressway which cut like a prison wall across the tiny mouth of Port Jackson.
‘If you look at the Cahill Expressway,’ Jack said, ‘you can understand almost all of this city. I had an investor here from Strasbourg last week. It was his observation. That you can see how corrupt the city is from looking at it.’
‘Because of the Expressway?’
‘Things like the Expressway.’
‘Was this a good thing or a bad thing, from an investor’s point of view?’
He looked at her, bristling a little. ‘A disappointing thing,’ he said at last. He was silent for a minute as they came up the rock cutting and on to Sydney Harbour Bridge, but then he went on more softly. ‘You can read a city. You can see who’s winning and who’s losing. In this city,’ he said, ‘the angels are not winning.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I sound offensive?’
‘No,’ he said, but she was sure he was sulking and she had, as they drove beneath the high, bright windows of insurance companies and advertising agencies in North Sydney, one of those brief periods of estrangement that marked her feelings for Jack Catchprice.
‘It’s true I go to work in the swamp each day,’ he said, ‘but I do try to wipe my boots when I come into decent people’s homes.’
