It was not yet dark, only gloomy, but the street lights came on. George Takis left his daughter alone on the street next to the mail box with the silhouetted palm tree stencilled on it. The light was really weak and still rather orange but Maria suffered a terrible and unexpected feeling of abandonment. There was nothing to protect her from the judgement of the street. She could not run back into the house, she could not come forward, and yet she had to. Stanley Dargour had put down his tools – she heard them clink – and was standing so that he could get a better view of her over the top of the Jaguar.
Jack Catchprice had stayed in the car with the door shut even while the Tax Inspector’s father had come directly towards him. He had blackened windows and thought he knew what Maria Takis wanted of him, but then the door was opened and he had no choice but to turn the music off and get out.
They shook hands under the gaze of the street.
Then George Takis put his hand up on Jack’s shoulder and guided him into the house. Sissy Katakis called out something to Ortansia Papandreou but Maria did not catch it properly.
In the painfully tidy neon-lit kitchen George Takis made Maria and Jack Catchprice sit on chromium chairs while he fussed around in cupboards finding preserves to put out in little flat glass dishes and then he poured brandy into little tumblers which bore sandblasted images of vine leaves – the Easter glasses. He watched the stranger all the time, casting him shy looks. He was small and shrunken as an olive, his eyebrows angrily black and his hair grey and his whiskers too, in the pits and folds of his shrunken, fierce face.
‘So,’ he said at last. ‘You got a British car, Mr Catchprice.’
‘Yes.’
‘I used to make them cars,’ said George Takis. ‘When the British Motor Corporation became Leyland, we made some of these in Sydney. They are a good motor car, eh? They got a smell to them? That leather?’
‘Yes.’
‘No rattles. Tight as a drum. You could float it on the harbour, it wouldn’t sink.’
Maria frowned. She knew they had made a grand total of ten Jaguars in Australia and that the men had been mortified to be told that the production was ceasing because the production quality was too low.
‘She don’t like them,’ George said. ‘You have one of them cars, you’re a real crook. That’s what she told me, mate. Now she’s changed her mind, eh, mori?’
‘Ba-Ba, lay off.’
‘Ha-ha,’ said George, so eager to make a pact with the new ‘intended’ that he could not worry about the feelings of the daughter he was so afraid of alienating. ‘I always tell her, there are nice people have these cars. Some bastards, but not all. You know what? You know the trouble? You never met one, mori. You never had a chance to discover the truth.’
Maria said, ‘That is about half true.’
‘No, no,’ George said, waving his finger at her in an imitation of a patriarch, topping up his glass with brandy and then Jack’s. ‘Completely true.’
‘Half true,’ said Maria. ‘We never did like people with money in this house. We mostly grew up thinking they were crooks, or smart people.’
Jack smiled and nodded, but Maria thought there were strain marks on his face.
‘We didn’t like Athens Greeks, did we Ba-Ba? That was about the worst thing to be in our view.’ She was irritated with her father.
‘You’ve got to be careful with this brandy,’ George said, adding a little to Jack’s glass. ‘You ever drink Greek brandy before?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘You’ve been to Greece?’
‘Ba-Ba, we’ve got to go. I just came round to see you were O.K.’
Her father ignored her. ‘So,’ he asked Jack Catchprice, ‘you single? Would you like to marry my daughter?’
‘Ba-Ba!’
‘She looks after me real good,’ George Takis said. ‘Here.’ He tugged on Jack’s lapel and led him to where his dinner stood, in the brown casserole dish on the bare stove. ‘Keftethes,’ George said. He lifted the lid. Jack looked in. ‘Meat balls. You want to taste? She can cook.’
‘Ba-Ba,’ Maria said. She was trying to laugh. She knew she was blushing. ‘Mr Catchprice is a client of mine. There’s nothing going on here, Ba-Ba. He just gave me a lift, O.K.’ She rearranged the knife and fork and place mat he had set for himself at the table. She could not even look at Jack. She felt him sit down again at the table. She heard him scrape the preserves from his little glass plate.
George was spooning cold keftethes on to a dish. ‘Every night she comes, or if she can’t come, she calls.’ He fossicked in the cutlery drawer and found a knife and fork. ‘I know people have to pay some service so if they get a heart attack there is someone will know. I said to the fellow, mate, I don’t need one. I’m a Greek.’
He placed the cold keftethes in front of Jack who sat looking back at him with an odd, shining, smiling face.
‘You interested?’ George asked.
Jack picked up the fork. Maria put her hand out and took it from him.
‘Sige apo ti zoemou,’ she said.
She stood up. Her ears were hot. She carried the fork, not the knife, back to the cutlery drawer. She picked up her handbag and put it over her shoulder. Her father – standing alone in the middle of the lonely neat kitchen where her mother’s eyes had once burned so brightly – she was sorry, already, for what she had said: keep out of my life.
In English she said: ‘You’re very naughty, Ba-Ba.’
‘She works too hard,’ George said.
She should not have said it. It was wrong to see him take this from a daughter. She was shocked to see his eyes, not angry at all, a grate with the fire gone out. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘O.K., Ba-Ba?’
Jack was standing, buttoning his suit jacket, tucking in his tie.
‘You come again,’ George said to him. ‘We’ll drink brandy together.’
Jack smiled this shining, bright smile. You could not guess what it might mean.
George detained them a fraction too long in the harsh light of the front door and then again, at the open door of the Jaguar he made a fuss of retracting the seat belt and making some suggestions about the best seat position. Jack Catchprice watched tolerantly while George Takis adjusted and readjusted the rake of the seat while the street looked on.
‘O.K.,’ he said, crouching by the window when they were leaving. ‘Now just relax, O.K.?’
He stepped back, still crouching, with his hand held palm upwards in a wave. Sige apo ti zoemou. She should never have said it.
The Jaguar window slid up silkily without Maria touching the handle. The car slowly rolled out of Ann Street.
‘Oh God,’ said Maria. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. I liked him. It was fine.’
Jack braked at the corner beside the cut glass and gilt jumble of fittings of PLAKA LIGHTING and nosed the car into the eight o’clock congestion of King Street. He pressed a button and the Brahms Double Concerto engulfed her in a deep and satisfying melancholy so alien to Ann Street in Newtown.
‘Greeks!’ she said.
‘It must be hard for him.’
‘Yes, it’s hard for him,’ Maria said.
‘But he doesn’t have to have the baby, right?’
She laughed.
‘There’s a sleeping bag down there,’ Jack said. ‘You might like to rest your legs on it.’
She accepted gratefully. She shifted her legs up on to the top of the feather-soft cylinder and kicked her shoes off. The seat was absolutely perfect. She shut her eyes. The music in his car sounded better than the music in her house. The smell of leather engulfed her.
She said: ‘I hope you weren’t too embarrassed.’
He turned the music down a little in order to hear her better.
‘He is so obviously smitten with you. It was very touching. It’s impossible to be embarrassed by that.’
‘I would have thought we were at our most embarrassing when we were smitten.’
<
br /> ‘Oh no,’ said Jack, turning right into Broadway. He turned to her and smiled. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘How are the legs?’
Maria was silent for a moment. ‘Do you entertain a lot of pregnant women?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’ he asked, discomforted.
He passed his hand over his mouth as if hiding his expression and she had the sense that she had touched an ‘issue’. He was too good-looking, too solicitous. His interest in her legs suddenly seemed so unnatural as to be almost creepy.
‘Not a lot of men would think about the legs.’
‘My partner’s wife is due next week. I just drove her home before I picked up you.’
It was not the last time Maria would judge herself to be too tense, too critical with Jack Catchprice, to feel herself too full of prejudices and preconceptions that would not let her accept what was pleasant and generous in his character. She sought somehow to make recompense for her negativity.
She said: ‘It’s a lovely car. Do you get a lot of pleasure from it?’
‘Well it’s a sort of addiction.’
‘A pleasant addiction?’
‘I never had one you could say was pleasant. It’s an addiction – it’s something I think I can’t do without, but every now and then I “feel” it – just like you’re feeling it now. Not often.’
‘I don’t think I’d ever get used to it.’
‘Oh you would.’
‘And it wouldn’t make me any happier?’
‘No. Make you worse. Make you a bad person, an Athens Greek.’
‘Oh,’ Maria said. ‘I thought my father made me seem like a vindictive person, full of envy. I’m sure that it all fitted so neatly together – how I would obviously end up being a Tax Officer.’
‘He didn’t make you seem like that at all.’
‘No?’
‘Not at all. You came out of it very well – calling every night, cooking his meals. A little moralistic perhaps,’ he raised his eyebrows, ‘but that’s no bad thing,’ he smiled. ‘It’s actually attractive.’
He was coming on to her, and she was excited, and suspicious.
‘I do have a moralistic streak, but I do like this car. I’m surprised how much I like being in it.’ She didn’t say how surprised she was to be having dinner with a property developer.
‘You shouldn’t be surprised. None of these addictive things would be addictive if they didn’t make you feel wonderful. Do you think crack is unpleasant?’
‘I bet it’s wonderful.’
‘How about Chez Oz?’
‘I bet that’s wonderful too.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘Hey,’ Maria said, ‘I’m a Tax Officer. I’m doing very well on $36,000 a year. You work it out. How am I going to get to Chez Oz? I don’t know anyone who could afford Chez Oz. I was thinking about this last night, and you know – almost everyone I know works for the Australian Tax Office, or did. That’s how it is in the Tax Office. We divide the world up into the people who work there and the people who don’t. Tax Office people socialize with Tax Office people. They marry each other. They have affairs with each other. When I was younger I used to be critical of that, but now I sympathize with them. Now I usually lie about what I do, because I can’t bear the thought of the jokes. You know?’
‘I can imagine. It must be horrible.’
‘It’s rotten. And people, mostly, are not well informed about tax. So I live in a ghetto. Something like Chez Oz I read about in the paper and I see on American Express bills when I audit.’
‘What does that do?’
‘Well, let’s say it makes me pay attention.’
‘Good,’ said Jack. ‘That’s perfect. I want you to pay attention.’
43
Maria dressed well. On the one hand, she knew she dressed well, but on the other she feared she did not understand things about clothes that other women knew instinctively. She had invented her own appearance, part of which was based in a romantic, ‘artistic’ idea about herself, part in defiance of her mother (an embrace of ‘Turkishness’), part in the Afghan-hippy look of the early seventies which had never ceased to influence her choices. She collected red, black, gold, chunky silver jewellery with such a particular taste that she was, as Gia said, beyond fashion. She had herself so firmly into a look that she could not choose anything that did not, in some way, fit within its eccentric borders. She did not know how to dress differently, and whenever she tried – her black suit, for instance – she felt inauthentic. She was as inextricably linked with her wardrobe as men often were with their motor car.
In her parents’ house there had been no money for female fashion. Her mother wore black as she had in Letkos and fashion was something you made over a noisy sewing machine in Surry Hills. Maria had grown up in a house without clothes just as someone would grow up in a house without books or music. It had affected her sister Helen in the way you could see – she bought clothes at Grace Bros at sale times, and so even though she and Con now owned five electrical discount stores Helen still dressed like a piece-goods worker from Surry Hills.
As Maria entered the very small foyer at Chez Oz, pressed in behind the bare tanned shoulders of women with blonde coifed hair and little black dresses, she suddenly felt herself to be vulgar and inelegant, and not in the right place.
‘Am I dressed well enough?’ she asked her partner who, although she had not even thought about it in Franklin, so obviously was. Now she saw the insouciant crumpled look was 100 per cent silk.
‘Perfectly.’
She was thirty-four years old and thought herself at ease with herself, but now she was self-conscious, and on edge. Through a gap between the bodies in front of her she saw a famous crumpled face – Daniel Makeveitch – a celebrated artist whose work she much admired. She was shocked, not merely to see him in the flesh for the first time, but by the juxtaposition of this old Cassandra with these black-dressed women with expensive hair. He comes here? He was their enemy, surely?
They were guided through the restaurant. Maria hardly saw anything. She felt herself being stared at. They sat beside the glass brick wall she had seen glowing from the street.
‘The clones are looking at you,’ Jack said, breaking his bread roll immediately and spilling crumbs across the cloth. Maria saw she was indeed being looked at.
‘They’re anxious,’ Jack said. ‘They’re thinking – what if this is the new look? How will I know?’
‘Is it too extreme?’ said Maria who realized slowly she was the only person, of either sex, whose clothes were not predominantly black or grey. Many of the men, like Jack, wore black shirts. ‘I suppose I look like a circus to them.’
‘You expose them as the bores they are.’
‘You know them?’
‘A few. Now,’ he picked up the wine list, ‘I take it we have to throw this away.’
‘I’m permitted one glass.’
‘Then we’ll both limit ourselves to one glass of something wonderful.’
Alistair would never have done that, not even Alistair at his charming best. He would have confidently gone on doing exactly what he wanted to do and assume that this was why you would like him, which was mostly true. He was gentle and loyal but he also had a will of iron, and when she felt Jack Catchprice bend his will to hers she felt a gooeyness at her centre which surprised her.
He guided her through the menu and she was amused to find herself enjoying the experience of being pampered until he said: ‘You should have protein, am I right?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’ But it made her distrust him and he saw this, she thought, because his smile faltered a second and his mouth seemed momentarily weak and vulnerable. She was immediately sorry.
‘This restaurant is perfect for protein,’ he said, looking at his menu. ‘It is famous for protein.’
If she had known him better she would have laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘sorry’. Instead she did something she had never done in her lif
e – encouraged him to order for her. He chose oysters from Nelson Bay and, for their main course, duck breast with a half bottle of 1966 Haut Brion. It was, admittedly, a little more than one glass each.
Maria sipped the Haut Brion and smiled. ‘I can’t believe this.’
‘The wine?’
‘You,’ she said.
‘What about me?’
‘From Catchprice Motors in Franklin.’
‘From that terrible place, you mean?’
‘I didn’t mean that at all. Although,’ she paused, not quite sure if she should smile or even if she should continue, ‘you seem so totally unconnected with them. You’re Cathy McPherson’s brother. It seems impossible.’
‘I’m like my mother, physically.’
‘But you’re not like any of them.’
‘Well they got stuck there. They didn’t want to be stuck there, but by the time they realized it they had no other choices. The environment affects you. If I’m different it was because I had to get out. If I hadn’t got out, I would have been just like them, different of course, but the same too.’
‘But you got out. That makes you different.’
‘You know why I am sitting here tonight?’ Jack said, wiping the corners of his very nice mouth with the crisp white napkin. ‘It wasn’t discontent. It was because I couldn’t sing.’
She laughed expectantly.
‘If I was musical, I’d still be there. Mort and me, side by side.’
‘But you love music. You have great taste in music.’