The Tax Inspector

‘If it’s fun, I’m up for it.’

‘Are you O.K.? I worried you had gone into labour.’

‘My fingers look like sausages,’ she said, ‘and I’ve had my worst day all year …’

‘Nothing good happen at all? All day?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’

‘Did my legs look sort of funny last night? Were my knees puffy?’

‘No!’

‘Are you sure? Because if they looked like they do right now, I’m going to die of embarrassment.’

‘Maria, you’ve got great legs. What happened that was so bad?’

‘Something very shitty. I don’t want to even think about it.’

‘But your investigation stopped, right?’ He had done the fucking impossible. He had fixed what she had failed to fix. ‘You got called back to your office? Catchprice Motors is out of your life?’

Remember me? The generalist?

There was a pause. ‘Jack, how do you know this?’

‘How do you think?’ he said. I did the fucking impossible for you. I crawled down sewers. I shook hands with rats. ‘How would you reckon?’

‘Oh, your mother told you.’

He made a silent face.

‘Well,’ Maria said. ‘She’s pleased.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘you can rely on that, but I’m sorry you’re not happier.’

‘Oh, I want to have fun now.’

He felt anxious that now she would not like him, angry that she did not appreciate what he had done for her, indignant at what he suspected were her double standards, relieved she would probably come out to dinner with him, even if it was at Corky Missenden’s.

‘You might say no when you hear – but there’s a dinner party at Rose Bay I thought you could have a good laugh at.’

‘I like the laugh part.’

‘You know this fellow Terry Digby – Lord Digby – who just paid $23 million for the de Kooning? He’s in Sydney, and there’s a dinner. It’s Corky Missenden – she’s good at this sort of thing. There’ll be money and art, mostly, but the Attorney General will be there so that might be amusing. In any case, the food should be very good and we could leave early if you were bored – you’d be a perfect excuse for me to leave.’

‘What would I wear?’ she said.

He persuaded her she could wear exactly what she wore the night before, that it would be perfect. He said it because he figured that was who she was, but also because he was not going to lose her because she had nothing suitable to wear, and when they arrived out at Rose Bay, it made Corky Missenden raise a questioning eyebrow in his direction.

He had too much on his mind to be offended by Corky’s eyebrow. He had seen that she was setting up her dinner party with two tables in two rooms, and, as he and Maria passed through the house, even as he pointed out the less embarrassing choices in Corky’s erratic art collection, Jack’s mind was racing, thinking what he could offer Corky, what he could trade her, how he could make her have Maria Takis sit at his table. He had Maria drink champagne. He looked at the harbour and pointed out a school of leather-jackets swimming up against the sea wall, but he had none of the lightness of heart his creased-up eyes and loose curly hair suggested – he knew that he would be sent, in a moment, to be charming to the Attorney General and Maria would be bumped into the second room with the rich and reactionary George Grissenden and the snobbish Betty Finch. He had fucked up. It was the wrong way for her to see his life.

53

At four o’clock Maria Takis had been in her one-bedroom cottage in Balmain with her puffy feet elevated, staring at the discolouration on her freshly painted ceiling. At eight-fifteen she was standing beside Sydney Harbour with a long glass flute from which very small bubbles rose slowly through straw-coloured Dom Perignon. At four o’clock she had had red eyes and a headache. At eight-fifteen waiters with black shirts and pony tails brought hors d’oeuvres to the sea wall where she sat with a man with curly blond hair and a tanned face. The light was mellow, the water of the harbour pearly, touched with pink and blue and green. It was like nothing so much as a television commercial.

That she should like the too-good-looking man, that the setting itself – terra-cotta tiled terrace, flapping striped awnings, elegant men and women in black dresses – should be actually pleasant was disturbing for her.

She had been in homes like this before, often, professionally, but she had never allowed herself to think of wealth as attractive, was so accustomed to seeing it as a form of theft that it was shocking for her to feel herself responding to it at all, as if she were allowing herself to be sexually excited by a criminal.

The harbour licked and lapped against the wall she sat on. It slapped against the sandstone and smelt of sea-weed. She wondered if people in these houses bothered to fish. If ever she had a house like this, she would fish. She saw her mother on the sea wall casting out towards where the water boiled with tailor.

‘I thought about you all day,’ he said.

But she was suddenly so uncomfortable with his attractiveness, his straight, perfect teeth – he was a ‘type’ she would once have labelled superficial or yuppy – that she could not bring herself to say she had thought of him – although she had, often – or even that she was pleased and excited to be here.

‘Should we be mingling?’

‘We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do,’ he said.

But then it turned out that they must sit, not merely apart, not merely at separate tables, but at tables in rooms separated by french doors.

‘Surely we can sit together?’ she said.

‘I’ll fix it,’ Jack said, and disappeared into the house.

She stayed alone on the wall, looking out at the harbour where a long, low, wooden boat slowly putted past, no more than five metres away. A little girl, no more than ten, sat alone at the tiller. The girl waved. Maria waved back. She thought: I could handle this. That’s the truth. I would actually love to live in a house like this.

When Jack came back to admit he could not change the seating she was disappointed, but not greatly.

‘I’ve decided to enjoy myself,’ she said. She held his hand.

‘Are you sure? I’m sorry. We can leave straight after the pudding.’

When he put his hand against her stomach, she did not mind – the opposite.

‘I like it here.’ She kissed him softly on his expensive-smelling cheek and went to sit at the long dining-table in the room closest to the harbour. She found her name card, seated herself, permitted herself to take pleasure from the white linen, the Lalique bowl – she peered around the base and found the signature – even the heavy chandeliers above their heads. She was here to enjoy, not cross-examine.

A tall blond Englishman on her left introduced himself as ‘Terry’. His hair fell over his forehead in a stiff lick. He had a black cotton shirt with overlapping double collars which she noticed straightaway. Later she intended to ask him where he bought it.

‘Are you the de Kooning man?’ she asked.

‘Well, not the de Kooning woman,’ he said, smiling.

‘Well, I’m grateful for that,’ Maria said, also smiling.

‘Oh,’ he said, pushing his lick of hair away, ‘you’re not fond of them?’

‘He’s such an extraordinary painter,’ she said. She was pleased to be here. Tax Department people never talked about painting. Alistair was an educated man, but he would barely have known who de Kooning was. ‘I love his work, but the women always frighten me.’

This made the man smile at the edges of his mouth. His eyes became thoughtful.

‘Seen the butter?’ he asked.