Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘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.’

‘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.