Autumn Laing (16 page)

A short fat woman with neat grey hair tied in a bun and wearing a brown wool cardigan over a flowered dress was
standing behind a desk set at an angle midway between the lifts and the far wall. The woman was resting her chubby fists on the desk, her enormous bosom squeezed between her upper arms, stretching the material of her flowered dress and threatening to burst out in a riotous blossoming of pink flesh—the jungle plant that blooms monstrously at midnight once every ten years. To be there when her breasts made their rare appearance! She was examining him over her spectacles, as if she had got up from her chair in readiness to greet him when the lift arrived. She was not the fierce guardian angel Helen had prepared him for.

‘I’ve just this minute made Sir Malcolm his cup of tea,’ the woman said, giving Pat a big smile, her cheeks pink and dimpling, a light sheen of perspiration on the tight skin of her forehead. ‘Would you like a cup yourself, Mr Donlon?’ Her accent was a soft Glaswegian. Homely, his mother would have called it. Bairns and hobs and wee things strung on the line to dry. ‘Helen tells me you’ve come all the way from Ocean Grove in this terrible weather without a bite of lunch. You must be chilled to the bone.’

He stood before her. He felt like a schoolboy receiving the favoured attentions of the headmistress. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That would be lovely. Are you Miss Barquist?’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘I hope Helen didn’t frighten you with her stories about me. That girl has a wicked sense of humour. Please!’ She pointed to the leather armchair beside him. ‘Sit down, won’t you?’ She came around the desk. ‘Do you have milk and sugar in your tea, Mr Donlon?’

He lowered himself into the armchair, cradling his bundle across his knees, the damp brim of his hat gripped between
thumb and forefinger. ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘Yes, please. That would be lovely.’ He was conscious of the slightness of his own stature beside the heavy body of this woman. The Irishness of himself, he thought of it, and was remembering the picture of himself standing between Edith’s giant brothers. Why did the Scots have to be so big in their bodies? Weren’t we all related once? What happened?

She smiled down at him. ‘Well, I’ll just see to it then. The kettle’s only boiled this minute. I could make you a piece of toast and honey to have with it? Would you like that?’

He looked up at her. ‘I would. That would be great.’ As she went by him Pat caught a whiff of the same rose perfume he’d smelled on Helen’s hair. He imagined the elaborate friendship of these two women, sharing their scent and lipstick, braving the weather and going out for tea together at the teashop on the St Kilda pier on weekends, holding onto each other and laughing, the wind blowing their dresses against their legs, one short and fat and struggling to keep up, the other slender and slipping along like a little sailboat dipping and rising over the waves. Telling each other their gossip. He wondered he hadn’t seen them. His head thumped gently. It wasn’t too bad. A reminder that he was going to die. That was all. Nothing serious.

The lift woke with a quack of surprise. Pat started. He turned his head and watched it sink into the void of the building, grumbling to itself. A man was laughing in a nearby room. It was a big confident laugh of pleasure and goodwill. He eased himself deeper into the chair. He could smell himself, dampness and something warm and human. He was proud there was nothing rancid about his smell. Proud that it was a clean manly smell like his dad’s smell. Whatever else they might be,
they weren’t a family of stale-smelling people. It was surely the laugh of the contented man whose cigar had perfumed the lift.

Miss Barquist came back and handed him a cup of tea. The teacup and its saucer were flower-patterned, like Edith’s mother’s cups and saucers. Two patterned shortbread biscuits rested on the saucer.

‘I thought you might like a couple of these instead of the toast,’ Miss Barquist said. ‘They’re Sir Malcolm’s favourite. Dundee shortbread.’

The tea smelled like the kitchen at home. Did the biscuits come in a tartan tin like the one on the mantelpiece where his mother kept her housekeeping? He looked up. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. His stomach made an eager little gurgling sound, preparing itself for the hot drink and the biscuits.

Miss Barquist caught him looking at her as she was tugging her dress into shape against the struggle of her breasts to make their escape. She must be always at it. She sat down, putting her arms on the desk and clasping her fingers. ‘Isn’t our Helen a dear?’ She spoke as if they were all old friends and knew everything about each other.

‘Yes, she’s very nice,’ he said. He munched the first biscuit. While he sipped the hot tea and ate the crumbly biscuits Miss Barquist watched him from behind her desk. The warmth of the tea going down his throat and spreading into his chest and his stomach. He had a small fart coming. He smiled at her and held it in.

‘So you like our Wyndham Lewis?’ she said. ‘Sir Malcolm will be delighted to hear your opinion of it. Most of his friends hate it and don’t make any bones about telling him so. I don’t like it much myself.’

Wyndham Lewis. So that’s who it is. But it didn’t matter now. He was no longer pointing in that direction. Was he pointing in any direction? The painting in the foyer was the blank wall where the dead end of his mistaken journey into abstraction had come to a halt.

Miss Barquist’s features settled into a thoughtful alertness suddenly, as if a sombre thought had stalked across her view of things. The look in her eyes revealed to Pat a corner of the depths of fortitude that must enable Sir Malcolm to rely on this woman in all kinds of stressful weather. ‘We’ll go in when you’ve finished your tea,’ she said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

But there was. He felt it in her now. An impatience to get on with it. He was hoping his nerves weren’t going to get the better of him. Why couldn’t Sir Malcolm be this woman? My God, life would be so much easier if they were all homely women with big tits instead of old men with heavy eyebrows and thick moustaches. ‘So he
will
see me then?’ he said. He knew he sounded like a boy. If only he were more measured and steady, more a man of the world in his style, a man certain of his direction. To be sure of his own worth, like the portraits in the foyer. How was it done? It was going to be hard to make any sort of real substance out of his claims for himself in this place. He could see that.

‘Of course he’ll see you, dear. Sir Malcolm loves meeting young artists.’

He set the cup and saucer on the edge of her desk and stood. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was just what I needed.’

She struggled to her feet, lifting the load she carried with her everywhere. Fancy having those great things on your chest all day.

He had the sudden childhood feeling of being called in from the waiting room to see the dentist, gripping his mother’s hand as if the demons were going to rip her from his grasp before they got stuck into him with their instruments of torment.

Without knocking or any other to-do, Miss Barquist opened the panelled door behind her desk and stepped half into the room beyond. Holding the door open and standing to one side, she announced into the room, ‘Here’s the artist, Sir Malcolm.’ She put her hand to Pat’s shoulder and urged him forward. ‘Go on in, Mr Donlon. Sir Malcolm doesn’t bite at this time of day.’

Pat stepped into the room. The door closed behind him with a snick of the latch. It wasn’t a weasel who came forward to meet him but another big Scot, like Edith’s brothers, over six feet tall with a great round head like a bullock set squarely on broad shoulders above the solid carriage of a deep chest. Pat was the weasel himself. Sir Malcolm’s hair was dark with grey at the edges and parted flat down the left side, slicked neatly into place with a dab of cream just the way Pat usually wore his own hair, just a light sheen to it. His eyes were dark brown and sharply focused, as if he were aiming a weapon, or was looking for something he wasn’t sure of, something he hoped or expected to see but feared he might not recognise when he saw it. He was not exactly frowning, but was straining after this something, an interrogation in his carriage and his features. A big question in the whole set of the man. He was not handsome but was a physically strong-looking man, upright and sound, a year or two beyond his fiftieth birthday. He was dressed in a dark three-piece suit and a striped tie—no tie pin. As he extended his hand the white cuff of his shirt came out of his jacket sleeve a good four inches or more, to permit the
sparkle of a gold cufflink. The back of his hand and the backs of his fingers were covered with a pelt of bristly black hairs. And if it was a smile he wore on his face it could also have been an expression less welcoming, needing only a fine adjustment to sail out into cold evasion, or even a direct rebuff. Pat could see his likeness done by Longstaff, fitting and appropriately stern-faced, framed in gilt and hanging in the reception area alongside his brothers in the money and the power of things. The chairman of the board. Someone to be taken seriously. There was no doubt about it.

Pat took his hand. ‘How do you do, sir.’ The hand was large and cool and dry, the grip firm and encompassing, and those dark brown eyes looking out from under the shrubbery of his heavy brows, probing for that something he was afraid might elude him, the little extra thing that would slip past him if he didn’t remain alert. The telephone rang. Sir Malcolm withdrew his hand and excused himself. He stepped to his desk and picked up the telephone. His manner to his caller was calm and courteous but it was clear he was not pleased.

Pat placed his bundle and his hat on the floor beside a chair and looked around the room. It was panelled in the same manner as the reception area. Through the window behind Sir Malcolm’s vast desk, over beyond the railway yards, the white tower of Government House thrust up through the green canopy of elms in the park on the other side of the river, the Governor’s imperial yellow ensign stretching out in the breeze—look at me! Look at me!

Pat turned back to the room. Not one of the half-dozen paintings on the walls was as large or as imposing as the one in the foyer downstairs, but like that painting these too were
examples of the work of British and European modernists. There was something familiar about each of them, but Pat could not have named the artists with any confidence. He hoped he was not going to be tested. The great European modernists and the less than great. It made his stomach ache to see them. A geometric group of shapes occupying multiple overlapping perspectives at the centre of one canvas might have been a Braque. He could take a punt on that one, but his judgment had no certainty in it and the painting could as easily have been the work of a follower—someone like himself, trying to catch up. He had seen the work of none of these painters in real life and had acquired no eye for what might be authentic among them. In their presence he was aware of his provincialism and the vastness of his ignorance.

On a low coffee table by the chair, where he had put down his bundle and hat, recent copies of
Apollo
and the
Burlington Magazine
and one or two other expensive art journals whose titles were not familiar to him were neatly displayed. No doubt artfully arranged by the hands of Miss Agatha Barquist. A woman you might easily underestimate.

He was in a place where an interest in art was supported by a great deal of money. He made a new decision. It was a simple enough decision, and not so different from the audacity of the original one made on an impulse as he rode his bicycle to Mr Creedy’s butcher’s shop yesterday morning (was it only yesterday morning?). It was a decision that had a less audacious feel to it now that he stood in the heart of the citadel. Sir Malcolm, after all, talking on the telephone a few feet from him and looking out calmly towards the river and the tower with the flag waving from its pole, was just like any other man, and
at worst could decline a modest call on his bounty from an aspiring young Australian artist. Sorry, son, there’s nothing I can do for you. Followed by a smile and handshake of farewell. There was nothing to be lost here.

Sir Malcolm was off the phone. He waved at the chairs that stood on either side of the coffee table and came around his desk. They sat facing each other across
Apollo
and the
Burlington Magazine
, the newspaper tycoon in his suit and the would-be artist in his mock rags. Neither spoke. Pat looked at the picture of a pale Chinese celadon vase on the cover of
Apollo
. He raised his eyes and met Sir Malcolm’s steady scrutiny. Pat cleared his throat. Was Sir Malcolm waiting for him to get to the point? No doubt the chairman was used to men who knew their own minds and spoke their minds freely.

Pat said, ‘I came to see you, sir, to ask you to grant me one of your bursaries.’ There, it was done. Not so difficult. Simple really. Just out with it. What was the problem with that? Would anyone else have had the cheek to do it? The unimaginable hurdle cleared at a single bound. Pat smiled. Sir Malcolm’s expression did not change. There was no inner response to Pat’s smile. A little flutter arose in Pat’s stomach and he would have liked to light a cigarette. He noticed that a fly had got into the office and was buzzing around the back of Sir Malcolm’s head. He watched it settle on the shiny nap of Sir Malcolm’s hair. Sir Malcolm moved his head and the fly took off, then landed on the shoulder of his suit and began cleaning its legs.

Oblivious to the fly busying itself on his shoulder, Sir Malcolm regarded Pat steadily from under the dense hedgerow of his eyebrows, like a sniper gazing out from the concealment of his hide. He had only to pull the trigger and this irritating
young man would be blown away. Pat began to doubt the wisdom of having come so abruptly to the point. Might not this hurry to talk about money have seemed to the great man to be a display of bad manners? Wasn’t he accustomed to evasion and delicacy and even to charm, flattery and diplomacy from the numerous mendicants who came to call on him? Maybe Sir Malcolm even felt that his dignity and intelligence were belittled by this crude frontal attack, reducing a meeting whose potential pleasures might have involved a discussion of the higher values of art to the question of a small amount of cash. Pat was wishing he had waited, had left the issue of a bursary to find its own way into the conversation.