The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How was the flight?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How was your holiday?’ Three weeks on the beach at Noosa Heads with Wendy and her barrister boyfriend. I didn’t want the details.

  ‘Good.’

  So far, so good. ‘Good,’ I said.

  Quite the frequent flier, Red travelled light. A backpack and a Walkman were his total luggage. Everything else he needed-several hundred comics, a skateboard and a change of clothes-was waiting in his room at my place. Our place, I thought, brimming with the fact.

  Back when Red was seven and his mother was in Canberra securing her future in the affirmative action major league, the boy and I had lived together for the best part of a year. Wendy had returned home at regular intervals and phoned frequently, but for weeks at a time it was just the two of us, living the life of Riley. Okay, so we ate out often enough to have our own table at Pizza Hut, slept in the same bed to cut down on housework and missed the odd day of school. But I always ordered pizzas with a high vegetable content, insisted Red brush his teeth at least once a week and kept him relatively free of parasite infestations. And it was only by unavoidable accident that Wendy discovered him home alone one morning when she arrived earlier than anticipated. The olive-skinned beauty in my bed and the Hell’s Angel on the roof with a crowbar had a perfectly innocent explanation, if only she’d stuck around to hear it.

  ‘What did the orthodontist say?’ I asked as we headed for the carpark.

  Red indicated the problem, open-mouthed. ‘E ed I eed a ate.’

  ‘Why do you need a plate?’ Aside from further enriching some overpriced gum-digger, I was already sending Wendy five hundred dollars a month. Not that I begrudged a penny.

  ‘E ed I ot a oh a ite.’

  ‘You haven’t got an overbite,’ I said. ‘Your face is the same shape as mine. I look okay, don’t I?’

  Red eyed me sceptically. His gaze lingered on my bandaged ear. He didn’t say anything, but I could already sense them gift-wrapping my birthday copy of First Aid for the Home Handyman at the Sydney branch of Mary Martin.

  ‘You think Tark’s home today?’ This was Red being sensitive, not wanting me to think it wasn’t me he was here to visit. Tarquin Curnow was his best mate in Melbourne, possibly the world, and doubtless the two of them had already been on the phone, cooking up plans for the weekend. Whenever Red came to stay, he headed directly to Tarquin’s place and the two of them hung out like Siamese twins.

  I took no offence. Tarquin Curnow had been Red’s friend since kindergarten, and the clincher when I bought my house was that it backed onto the same lane as the Curnows’ big terrace. Tarquin’s parents, Faye and Leo, were old friends and better ones than I deserved, especially Faye who tended to worry about my unattached status. It affronted her sense of the natural order. I was beginning to share her sentiments. The temperature had long hit the forty-degree mark and my shopping was beginning to go whiffy by the time we tracked down the Charade and blew the carpark. We headed straight for Tarquin’s place. Not much point in going home just to put a piece of cheese in the fridge. Faye’s would be just as cold.

  The Curnows’ front door was opened by a four-year-old girl in a pair of faded pink cottontails. Ignoring me, she took one look at Red, pirouetted on the hall-runner and bolted into the shadowy interior. ‘He’s here. He’s here. Red’s here.’ This was Faye and Leo’s youngest, Chloe. No wonder Red liked it here. If Chloe had a basket of rose petals, she’d have strewn them in his path.

  At its far end, the hallway opened into a haphazardly furnished room, part kitchen, part lounge, scattered with the customary detritus of family life and heavily shuttered with matchstick blinds. The blinds made about three degrees worth of difference, so the room felt like it was in Cairo rather than Khartoum. Torpor blanketed the house. Tarquin unfurled himself like a praying mantis from a beanbag in front of the television and the boys scooted upstairs in conspiratorial glee. Chloe dogged them optimistically.

  Leo was upstairs, napping. Faye was standing at the sink in a shortie kimono thrashing a handful of greenery under a running tap. I opened the fridge. ‘I’ll have one, too,’ said Faye.

  The fridge was a cornucopia of everything from anchovies to zucchini. I deposited the ham and fetta, ripped the tops off a couple of stubbies of Cooper’s Pale Ale and sank into the nearest beanbag, beginning to unwind at last.

  A ferociously modish cook, Faye was a journalist by profession. She wrote for the Business Daily -one of those papers that runs stories with titles like ‘GDP Gets OECD OK’ and ‘Funds Pan Mid-Term Rate Hike’-while Leo 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 nice
ly. 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.

  A place for everything and everything in its place. The tea things were already laid out. ‘Shall I pour?’ he said. ‘Gingernut snap?’

  I sat my cup on my knee, cleared my throat and waited. Confession, too, had its protocols.

  ‘The early seventies could have been a very good time for Victor Szabo,’ he began. ‘There was a growing appreciation of his work, thanks mainly to the popularity of the American photo-realists.’ He gave a resigned shrug. The cultural cringe must have been an occupational hazard in Aubrey’s line of work. ‘But Victor was a difficult man, a perfectionist, neurotic and unpredictable. And a drunkard. He’d work on a picture for months, then go on a bender and burn it. What he did produce was good work, but I was lucky if I could get three or four paintings a year out of him. I had him on a retainer, not uncommon in those days. A hundred dollars a week to cover his living costs and materials, recouped from his sales. Costing me a fortune, he was. He was renting an old farm house, up at Yarra Glen. It’s gone now, a housing development.’ He was meandering off.

  ‘Marcus?’ I said.

  ‘Turned up in mid ’72. Just twenty, he was. Victor was quite awful to him, denied ever knowing his mother, even though Marcus had pictures of them together. Denied he was the boy’s father, even though the resemblance was unmistakable. Marcus didn’t want anything, mind you, except to be an artist. He’d sought Victor out contrary to his mother’s wishes. I think he’d rather imagined himself as Victor’s protege. Brought his folios with him, laid them at his father’s feet. Quite competent he was too. Skilful, anyway. That appealed to Victor’s ego, I think. So he let Marcus stay on as a kind of unpaid slave. I’d go up there and find Victor raging around his studio with a paintbrush in one hand and a bottle in the other, Marcus on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor preparing his canvases for him. Marcus was there for nearly two years and his presence seemed to have a good effect. Victor didn’t drive, but Marcus had an old station wagon and every few months he’d turn up at my gallery in South Yarra with three or four pictures in the back. Never quite enough for a exhibition. I suppose I should have suspected something, but Victor had cost me so much money by then I just didn’t want to think about it.’

  The tea had gone tepid. I glanced out the open door, cocked an ear to the river, heard no sound of the boys. Aubrey levered himself up and picked up his walking stick. ‘Perhaps the bunyip got ’em,’ he said.

  Just beyond the vegetable garden, we stopped at the top of the track. The river was immediately below us, shallow over a gravel bottom. Red and Tarquin lay side by side, face-down on the pebble bottom, letting the water ripple over them. Their naked skin showe
d white against the dappled brown gravel.

  Aubrey took in the sight with a sigh. ‘ Quam juvenale femur!’ he exclaimed.

  My grip on the third declension had only ever been tenuous, but I got his drift. Old Giles was a leg man. ‘Your suspicions,’ I said. ‘When were they confirmed?’

  ‘When I arrived unannounced one day and found Victor passed out drunk and Marcus working in the studio. He admitted then that most of what he’d delivered in the preceding year hadn’t been Victor’s work at all, but his own. Victor had no idea what was going on. Marcus begged me not to tell him.’

  ‘And one of those pictures was Our Home?’

  ‘The best of them, by far.’

  ‘But you sold it to Max Karlin anyway.’

  ‘Karlin had already bought it. I should have told him, I know. But the subject matter, the execution, everything except its actual authorship was classic Victor Szabo. And I did insist that Marcus stop it. Even offered him his own exhibition. Embarrassing it was. Pretentious art-school abstract expressionism. The only thing that sold, I bought myself out of pity. Victor wouldn’t even come to the show. Soon afterwards they had a big blow-up and Victor turned him out. They never spoke again. Two years later I sold the gallery and retired.’

  ‘So you and Marcus Taylor were the only ones that knew that Our Home was a fake?’

  Aubrey winced at the word. ‘As far as I know. I was afraid it would all come out at Victor’s death. The will was a bitter blow to Marcus, but when he didn’t say anything at the time, I put it to the back of my mind and it’s been there ever since.’

  ‘The will?’

  ‘Marcus harboured hopes that Victor would eventually acknowledge him in some way. But he didn’t even mention him. Not a word. Left everything to that Lambert woman. Marcus was devastated.’

  What a depressing little saga. Father-and-son relationships are notoriously vexed, even at the best of times. This Victor Szabo sounded like a worst-case scenario. Marcus Taylor must have been lugging around enough psychological scar tissue to sink anybody, the poor prick. Fortunately, my own son had already won his Oedipal battle. Half of it anyway. I couldn’t vouch for his mother.