Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

He allowed enough space to register the change of subject, but when he spoke his eyes were soft again and his manner as charming as before. ‘Would I seem too nouveau to you if I said I owned one?’

‘Oh please, Jack, do I really seem that bad? Which one?’

‘“Daisy’s Place”,’ he said.

‘I’m impressed,’ she said.

His lower lip made an almost prim little ‘v’ as he tried not to smile. ‘It’s only tiny.’

‘What I hate,’ she told him, ‘is how impressed I am.’ She laughed and shook her head in a way she knew, had known, since she was sixteen, made her curling black hair look wonderful. ‘I hate being happy here with all these people.’

‘With me too?’ he smiled.

‘With you too,’ she said and allowed him to hold her hand a moment before she reached towards her glass of water.

44

At half-past ten on Tuesday night, Maria Takis left Chez Oz to see the Daniel Makeveitch painting at Jack Catchprice’s beach house.

As Chez Oz was on Craigend Street, and as the Brahmachari ashram was around the corner, it was not astonishing that they should, in hurrying out into the night, bump into Vishnabarnu on the pavement, but Maria was astonished none the less.

‘Hi,’ she said, with an exuberance and a familiarity totally new in her relationship with Vish. ‘Small world.’

‘Not really,’ said Vish, and nodded at Jack.

He was with another Hare Krishna, a soft, olive-skinned man of forty or so who had noticeably crooked teeth and a scholarly stoop.

‘The ashram is here,’ Vishnabarnu pointed to the grey stucco block of flats. ‘The temple is round the corner from the fire station. I walk past here six times a day.’

‘That’s an ashram?’ Maria smiled. She was excited and happy. ‘I always imagined something more exotic.’

The other Hare Krishna took a step away and stared off into the night.

‘I could have given you a lift to town,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?’

Vishnabarnu looked at his friend. Something passed between them. When Vish looked back to Maria he was almost laughing.

‘No,’ he said.

The older Hare Krishna began to walk towards the ashram.

‘This is goodbye.’ Vish shook Maria’s hand. ‘Excuse me.’

And then, without saying a word to his uncle, he followed his friend, who was already in the dark, arched doorway of the grey stuccoed building.

‘He thinks I’m the devil,’ Jack said as he let her into the Jaguar.

‘I don’t like them generally,’ Maria said. ‘The way they treat their women …’

‘It’s about what you’d expect from people trying to duplicate life in a sixteenth-century Indian village …’

‘But they do feed the street kids in the Cross and also when your sister was trying to have your mother committed. Yes, that happened on Monday. He was very good then. You get the feeling he’s capable of doing what’s needed.’

‘What was needed?’

‘Well not much as it turned out. But you get the feeling from him that he is timid but that he would go to the wall with you. That’s a very impressive quality.’ She paused. ‘Even if he does think you’re the devil.’

They drove down past the lighted car showrooms in William Street with their back-lit, bunny-suited, teenage prostitutes and the long, slow line of cruising traffic in the kerbside lane. They turned right down into Woolloomooloo beneath the Eastern Suburbs railway bridge and up beside the art gallery and on to the Cahill Expressway which cut like a prison wall across the tiny mouth of Port Jackson.

‘If you look at the Cahill Expressway,’ Jack said, ‘you can understand almost all of this city. I had an investor here from Strasbourg last week. It was his observation. That you can see how corrupt the city is from looking at it.’

‘Because of the Expressway?’

‘Things like the Expressway.’

‘Was this a good thing or a bad thing, from an investor’s point of view?’

He looked at her, bristling a little. ‘A disappointing thing,’ he said at last. He was silent for a minute as they came up the rock cutting and on to Sydney Harbour Bridge, but then he went on more softly. ‘You can read a city. You can see who’s winning and who’s losing. In this city,’ he said, ‘the angels are not winning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I sound offensive?’

‘No,’ he said, but she was sure he was sulking and she had, as they drove beneath the high, bright windows of insurance companies and advertising agencies in North Sydney, one of those brief periods of estrangement that marked her feelings for Jack Catchprice.

‘It’s true I go to work in the swamp each day,’ he said, ‘but I do try to wipe my boots when I come into decent people’s homes.’

‘Oh relax,’ Maria said. ‘Please.’

‘I am relaxed,’ he smiled. ‘Well, no, I’m not relaxed. I probably want you to like me too much.’

‘I like you,’ she said uneasily.

At the top of the hill above The Spit, he took the long, lonely road which cuts across the back of French’s Forest.

‘I never came this way,’ she said.

‘You normally go through Dee. Why? This is much nicer.’

Maria did not like the countryside particularly. She did not like the lonely gravel roads she saw disappearing into the bush on either side of the road. The signposts to places like Oxford Falls did not sound romantic to her, but reminded her how foolish she was being taking this drive with a single man who kept special pillows for pregnant women’s legs.

He was a Catchprice, for Chrissakes. He came from a disturbed and difficult home. Anything could have happened to him. It was stupid to place herself in this situation to see a painting she had already seen in the Makeveitch retrospective at the art gallery of New South Wales.

He began to play Miles Davis, ‘Kind of Blue’. She imagined his father holding his sheet music, roaring like a beast in a fairy tale. She loved this music, but now she knew he was tone deaf it suggested a sort of inauthenticity and forced an unfavourable comparison with Alistair, who was musically gifted and whom she saw, in the soft green glow of the Jaguar’s instrument lights, Jack Catchprice rather resembled.

‘It’s farther than I remembered,’ she said, a little later as they emerged from the bush into the brightly lit coastal strip at Narrabeen.

‘Are you tired?’

‘A little, I guess.’

‘You could sleep there if you wanted. There’s a guest room.’

‘Oh no,’ she said.

‘Or I could take you back.’

‘I’ll just stay a moment and look at the painting.’

But it was not the painting but the house that captivated her, and when she was standing there at last, she could not fear a man who lived in a house whose main living-room had an arched roof which opened like an eyelid to the night sky, whose side walls were of pleated canvas, a house whose strong, rammed-earth back wall promised all the solidity of a castle but whose substance then evaporated before her eyes as Jack, clambering first on to the roof, and then round the walls, opened the house to the cabbage tree palms which filled the garden and in whose rustling hearts one could hear brush-tailed possums.

It was a night of clouds and moon, of dark and light, and as Maria sat in a rocking-chair in the middle of the teak-floored living-room she felt as she had previously felt one late summer afternoon in the Duomo in Milan, a feeling of such serendipitous peace that she felt she could, if she would let herself, just weep. She sat there rocking gently, looking up at the moon-edged clouds scudding across the belt of Orion and all the dense bright dust of the Milky Way while Jack Catchprice made camomile in a small raku teapot.