Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

Maria got out of the Jaguar in front of him but he was so taken by the car he did not recognize her.

‘Ba-Ba.’

‘Maria?’

Maria started to walk towards the house but George was drawn towards the Jaguar. When she called to him he did not even turn but patted the air by his thigh, as though he was bouncing a ball.

‘Ba-Ba, please.’

But he knew there was a man in that sleek, rain-jewelled car and he became very still and concentrated, a little hunched and poke-necked, as he stalked round the front of it, not like a poor man in braces and wet carpet slippers who is shamed in the face of wealth, but like a man coming to open a present.

George Takis opened the door of Jack Catchprice’s Jaguar and solemnly invited him out into the street.

It was not yet dark in Ann Street. You could still see the flaking paint sign of the ‘Perfect Chocolate’ factory which made the cul de sac. You could see the expressions on the neighbours’ faces. They were out enjoying the break from the rain, sitting on the verandas of the narrow cottages which gave the street its chequered individuality—white weather-board, pale blue aluminium cladding, red brick with white-painted mortar, etc., etc. The Katakises and the Papandreous were sitting out, and the Lebanese family were in their front-room sitting down to dinner in the bright light of a monster television. Stanley Dargour, who had married Daphne Katakis’s tall daughter, was redoing the brake linings on his Holden Kingswood but he was watching what was happening in front of George Takis’s house, they all were, and George Takis not only did not seem to care, but seemed to revel in it.

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.