Dick Francis - In the Frame

“Not to me, Mr Wexford, but to my friend Donald Stuart.”

“And who was that young man I saw you talking to just now?”

“That was Donald Stuart’s cousin, Mr Wexford.”

“And what do you know about him?”

“That he’s a painter by trade and drew a picture of you, Mr Wexford, and asked me for your name.”’

I stopped. ‘Go on,’ Jik said.

I watched Wexford and Hudson Taylor stop talking, nod casually to each other, and walk their separate ways.

‘Ivor Wexford now knows he made a horrible mistake in letting me out of his gallery last night.’

Sarah looked searchingly at my face. ‘You really do think that’s very serious.’

‘Yes I really do.’ I loosened a few tightened muscles and tried a smile. ‘At the least, he’ll be on his guard.’

‘And at the most,’ Jik said, ‘he’ ll come looking for you.’

‘Er...’ I said thoughtfully. ‘What do either of you feel about a spot of instant travel?’

‘Where to?’

‘Alice Springs?’ I said.

Jik complained all the way to the airport on various counts. One, that he would be missing the cricket. Two, that I hadn’t let him go back to the Hilton for his paints. Three, that his Derby clothes would be too hot in Alice. Four, that he wasn’t missing the Melbourne Cup for any little ponce with a bow tie.

None of the colourful gripes touched on the fact that he was paying for all our fares with his credit card, as I had left my travellers cheques in the hotel.

It had been Sarah’s idea not to go back there.

‘If we’ re going to vanish, let’s get on with it,’ she said. ‘It’s running back into fires for handbags that gets people burnt.’

‘You don’t have to come,’ I said tentatively.

‘We’ve been through all that. What do you think the rest of my life would be like if I stopped Jik helping you, and you came to grief?’

‘You’d never forgive me.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘You’re dead right.’

As far as I could tell we had left the racecourse unobserved, and certainly no one car had followed us to the airport. Neither Greene with an ‘e’ nor the boy non-artist appeared underfoot to trip us up, and we travelled uneventfully on a half-full aircraft on the first leg to Adelaide, and an even emptier one from there to Alice Springs.

The country beneath us from Adelaide northwards turned gradually from fresh green to grey-green, and finally to a fierce brick red.

‘Gaba,’ said Jik, pointing downwards.

‘What?’

‘G.A.B.A.,’ he said. ‘Gaba. Stands for Great Australian Bugger All.’

I laughed. The land did indeed look baked, deserted, and older than time, but there were track-like roads here and there, and incredibly isolated homesteads. I watched in fascination until it grew dark, the purple shadows rushing in like a tide as we swept north into the central wastelands.

The night air at Alice was hot, as if someone had forgotten to switch off the oven. The luck which had presented us with an available flight as soon as we reached Melbourne airport seemed still to be functioning: a taciturn taxi driver took us straight to a new-looking motel which proved to have room for us.

‘The season is over,’ he grunted, when we congratulated and thanked him. ‘It will soon be too hot for tourists.’

Our rooms were air-conditioned, however. Jik and Sarah’s was down on the ground floor, their door opening directly on to a shady covered walk which bordered a small garden with a pool. Mine, in an adjacent wing across the car park, was two tall floors up, reached by an outside tree-shaded staircase and a long open gallery. The whole place looked greenly peaceful in the scattered spotlights which shone unobtrusively from palms and gums.

The motel restaurant had closed for the night at eight o’clock, so we walked along the main street to another. The road surface itself was tarmacadamed, but some of the side roads were not, nor were the footpaths uniformly paved. Often enough we were walking on bare fine grit, and we could see from the dust haze in the headlights of passing cars that the grit was bright red.

‘Bull dust,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve never seen it before. My aunt swore it got inside her locked trunk once when she and my uncle drove out to Ayers Rock.’

‘What’s Ayers Rock?’ I said.

‘Ignorant pommie,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s a chunk of sandstone two miles long and a third of a mile high left behind by some careless glacier in the ice-age.’

‘Miles out in the desert,’ Jik added. ‘A place of ancient magic regularly desecrated by the plastic society.’

‘Have you been there?’ I asked dryly.

He grinned. ‘Nope.’

‘What difference does that make?’ Sarah asked.

‘He means,’ Jik said, ‘our pompous friend here means that one shouldn’t make judgments from afar.’

‘You haven’t actually got to be swallowed by a shark before you believe it’s got sharp teeth,’ Sarah said. ‘You can believe what other people see.’

‘It depends from where they’re looking.’

‘Facts are not judgments, and judgments are not facts,’ Jik said. ‘A bit of Todd’s Law from way back.’

Sarah gave me a glance. ‘Have you got iced water in that head?’

‘Emotion is a rotten base for politics. He used to say that too,’ Jik said. ‘Envy is the root of all evil. What have I left out?’

‘The most damaging lies are told by those who believe they’re true.’

‘There you are,’ Jik said. ‘Such a pity you can’t paint.’

‘Thanks very much.’

We reached the restaurant and ate a meal of such excellence that one wondered at the organisation it took to bring every item of food and clothing and everyday life to an expanding town of thirteen and a half thousand inhabitants surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction.

‘It was started here, a hundred years ago, as a relay station for sending cables across Australia,’ Sarah said. ‘And now they’re bouncing messages off the stars.’

Jik said, ‘Bet the messages aren’t worth the technology. Think of ‘See you Friday, Ethel’, chattering round the eternal spheres.’

With instructions from the restaurant we walked back a different way and sought out the Yarra River Fine Arts gallery, Alice Springs variety.

It was located in a paved shopping arcade closed to traffic, one of several small but prosperous-looking boutiques. There were no lights on in the gallery, nor in the other shops. From what we could see in the single dim street light the merchandise in the gallery window consisted of two bright orange landscapes of desert scenes.

‘Crude,’ said Jik, whose own colours were not noted for pastel subtlety.

‘The whole place,’ he said, ‘will be full of local copies of Albert Namatjira. Tourists buy them by the ton.’

We strolled back to the motel more companionably than at any time since my arrival. Maybe the desert distances all around us invoked their own peace. At any rate when I kissed Sarah’s cheek to say goodnight it was no longer as a sort of pact, as in the morning, but with affection.

At breakfast she said, ‘You’ ll never guess. The main street here is Todd Street. So is the river. Todd River.’

‘Such is fame,’ I said modestly.

‘And there are eleven art galleries.’

‘She’s been reading the Alice Springs Tourist Promotion Association Inc.’s handout,’ Jik explained.

‘There’s also a Chinese Takeaway.’

Jik made a face. ‘Just imagine all this lot dumped down in the middle of the Sahara.’

The daytime heat, in fact, was fierce. The radio was cheerfully forecasting a noon temperature of thirty-nine, which was a hundred and two in the old fahrenheit shade. The single step from a cool room to the sun-roasting balcony was a sensuous pleasure, but the walk to the Yarra River gallery, though less than half a mile, was surprisingly exhausting.