The Brush-Off (20 page)

The architectural style was the local specialty, Mudbrick Gothic. Clay-coloured adobe walls set with clerestory windows, the whole thing slung low into the slope. Somewhere down below, the river wound between the trees. We went around the side, looking for the door. Dry leaves crackled under our feet and bellbirds pinged loud in our ears. ‘Careful of snakes,' I reminded the boys. It would be typical of Tarquin to get himself bitten.

‘I trust you're not referring to me.' The man who spoke was sitting at a garden table beneath the shade of a pergola on a wide terracotta-tiled terrace. Behind him, glass doors opened into a house filled with pictures, rugs and books. In front of him, spread on old newspapers, was a punnet of tomato seedlings.

He was a desiccated little old rooster, with alert rheumy eyes and a complexion hatched with spidery blood vessels. The draw-string of his wide-brimmed straw hat sat tight under his neck and he wore a pair of canvas gardening gloves. Stripping off the gloves, he stood up and put his hand out, laying on the charm. ‘Giles Aubrey,' he announced. ‘And you are?'

It was Red he addressed and for a moment it looked like the kid was going to disgrace me. Then he took Aubrey's hand and pumped it gravely. ‘Redmond Whelan,' he said. That about exhausted his supply of etiquette.

‘Well, Redmond Whelan,' said Aubrey, relinquishing his hand. ‘If you two boys go down that path, you'll find a very good place to swim. No matter if you haven't got a costume. It's my secret spot.'

The boys, braced to run, waited on my okay. ‘It's quite safe,' Aubrey assured me. ‘And I'm well past being a risk to anyone.'

I nodded and the boys bolted down the hill. Aubrey picked up a duck-headed walking-stick and pointed to the tray of seedlings. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring those.' Walking gravely with the aid of the cane, he led me to a vegetable patch down a set of steps made from old railway sleepers. The earth was hard packed, the lettuces going to seed. A steep track ran down the slope and sounds of splashing and laughter wafted up through the trees. Aubrey lowered himself to his knees and jabbed the dirt with a small trowel.

‘I heard about young Marcus on the radio,' he said. ‘Tragic. Didn't quite make the connection at first. He used to be Marcus Grierson. Grierson's the mother's name, of course. Had a bad feeling about it, all the same. Then when you rang and mentioned the painting, it all fell into place. Szabo means ‘tailor' in Hungarian. Rather predictable that way, Marcus was. Now I suppose the genie is out of the bottle. It was all in this suicide declaration they mentioned, I take it?'

Well, well, well. ‘The note did make some allegations,' I said. ‘But we'd like to hear what you have to say before we take the matter any further.'

‘To lose one's reputation'—Aubrey tamped the ground around the seedlings, taking his time—‘at my age.' Tomatoes planted this late in the season would probably not ripen.

‘If you could start at the beginning.' The impersonal bureaucrat, that was the approach to take.

Aubrey gripped my knee and levered himself upright. His weight was so insubstantial I could barely feel the pressure. The horticulture was for my benefit, a demonstration that age had not wearied him. ‘I'll put the kettle on.' Hospitality required certain rituals. He watered in the seedlings and we went back up the slope.

Aubrey's domesticity was an eclectic mixture of quality heirlooms and superseded modernity. Earth-toned paintings, over-framed. A French-polished sideboard bearing blobs of runny-glazed hand-wrought pottery. Persian rugs. Well-used Danish Deluxe armchairs. Giles Aubrey had once danced on the cutting edge.

A place for everything and everything in its place. The tea things were already laid out. ‘Shall I pour?' he said. ‘Gingernut snap?'

I sat my cup on my knee, cleared my throat and waited. Confession, too, had its protocols.

‘The early seventies could have been a very good time for Victor Szabo,' he began. ‘There was a growing appreciation of his work, thanks mainly to the popularity of the American photo-realists.' He gave a resigned shrug. The cultural cringe must have been an occupational hazard in Aubrey's line of work. ‘But Victor was a difficult man, a perfectionist, neurotic and unpredictable. And a drunkard. He'd work on a picture for months, then go on a bender and burn it. What he did produce was good work, but I was lucky if I could get three or four paintings a year out of him. I had him on a retainer, not uncommon in those days. A hundred dollars a week to cover his living costs and materials, recouped from his sales. Costing me a fortune, he was. He was renting an old farm house, up at Yarra Glen. It's gone now, a housing development.' He was meandering off.

‘Marcus?' I said.

‘Turned up in mid '72. Just twenty, he was. Victor was quite awful to him, denied ever knowing his mother, even though Marcus had pictures of them together. Denied he was the boy's father, even though the resemblance was unmistakable. Marcus didn't want anything, mind you, except to be an artist. He'd sought Victor out contrary to his mother's wishes. I think he'd rather imagined himself as Victor's protege. Brought his folios with him, laid them at his father's feet. Quite competent he was too. Skilful, anyway. That appealed to Victor's ego, I think. So he let Marcus stay on as a kind of unpaid slave. I'd go up there and find Victor raging around his studio with a paintbrush in one hand and a bottle in the other, Marcus on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor preparing his canvases for him. Marcus was there for nearly two years and his presence seemed to have a good effect. Victor didn't drive, but Marcus had an old station wagon and every few months he'd turn up at my gallery in South Yarra with three or four pictures in the back. Never quite enough for a exhibition. I suppose I should have suspected something, but Victor had cost me so much money by then I just didn't want to think about it.'

The tea had gone tepid. I glanced out the open door, cocked an ear to the river, heard no sound of the boys. Aubrey levered himself up and picked up his walking stick. ‘Perhaps the bunyip got 'em,' he said.

Just beyond the vegetable garden, we stopped at the top of the track. The river was immediately below us, shallow over a gravel bottom. Red and Tarquin lay side by side, face-down on the pebble bottom, letting the water ripple over them. Their naked skin showed white against the dappled brown gravel.

Aubrey took in the sight with a sigh. ‘
Quam juvenale femur!'
he exclaimed.

My grip on the third declension had only ever been tenuous, but I got his drift. Old Giles was a leg man. ‘Your suspicions,' I said. ‘When were they confirmed?'

‘When I arrived unannounced one day and found Victor passed out drunk and Marcus working in the studio. He admitted then that most of what he'd delivered in the preceding year hadn't been Victor's work at all, but his own. Victor had no idea what was going on. Marcus begged me not to tell him.'

‘And one of those pictures was
Our Home
?'

‘The best of them, by far.'

‘But you sold it to Max Karlin anyway.'

‘Karlin had already bought it. I should have told him, I know. But the subject matter, the execution, everything except its actual authorship was classic Victor Szabo. And I did insist that Marcus stop it. Even offered him his own exhibition. Embarrassing it was. Pretentious art-school abstract expressionism. The only thing that sold, I bought myself out of pity. Victor wouldn't even come to the show. Soon afterwards they had a big blow-up and Victor turned him out. They never spoke again. Two years later I sold the gallery and retired.'

‘So you and Marcus Taylor were the only ones that knew that
Our Home
was a fake?'

Aubrey winced at the word. ‘As far as I know. I was afraid it would all come out at Victor's death. The will was a bitter blow to Marcus, but when he didn't say anything at the time, I put it to the back of my mind and it's been there ever since.'

‘The will?'

‘Marcus harboured hopes that Victor would eventually acknowledge him in some way. But he didn't even mention him. Not a word. Left everything to that Lambert woman. Marcus was devastated.'

What a depressing little saga. Father-and-son relationships are notoriously vexed, even at the best of times. This Victor Szabo sounded like a worst-case scenario. Marcus Taylor must have been lugging around enough psychological scar tissue to sink anybody, the poor prick. Fortunately, my own son had already won his Oedipal battle. Half of it anyway. I couldn't vouch for his mother.

‘He was susceptible to women, Victor, and Fiona Lambert was scarcely a third of his age. Not that he had a lot to bequeath, just a few pictures and a growing reputation. But she made sure she milked that for all it was worth.'

‘The Black Widow.'

Aubrey snorted derisively. ‘Don't believe a word of it. She made that up herself. Shameless self-promotion. Victor died of liver disease, the result of poor personal hygiene and a surfeit of cheap wine.'

I struggled to assimilate the significance of what Aubrey was telling me. The news that the CMA's Szabo was not a Szabo at all was dynamite. It had the potential not merely to embarrass Fiona Lambert, the self-declared expert, but to expose to ridicule the competence of the government which had funded the purchase. ‘Legal proceedings are inevitable, I suppose,' said the old man, wilting on his cane.

‘That's not for me to say. May I suggest we keep this conversation confidential at this stage?'

He nodded penitently, as though receiving conditional absolution. There were other questions I should have asked Aubrey while I had the chance. But his tale of Taylor and Szabo had pricked my parental conscience. Down below, Red and Tarquin were swinging off an overhanging branch into dangerously shallow water. So I thanked Aubrey for his candour, assured him of my discretion and left the shrivelled old bird standing there, Tiberius among his tomatoes.

Shedding my clothes on the sandy bank, I hit the water running, scattering Red and Tarquin before me like startled cranes. Thigh-deep in mid-stream, I plunged to the bottom, luxuriating in the water's cool embrace.

Was it really possible to drown yourself in water this deep? Could any sense of grievance, any urge to self-dramatisation, be strong enough to overcome the body's fundamental instinct for survival? I kicked forward, propelling myself along the dappled gravel, holding my breath by sheer force of will. Could anyone really master that reflexive lunge for air that was propelling me so inexorably upwards? I broke the surface, scattering water, gasping.

No, Salina Fleet was wrong. Marcus Taylor hadn't killed himself. His death was an accident. It just couldn't have come at a better time, that's all.

Forty kilometres downstream, the Yarra berthed oil tankers and container carriers in the biggest port south of Singapore. Closer to its source, at the height of summer, it was little more than a series of shallow pools strung out along a narrow bed that meandered through the low hills.

We went exploring. The banks rose steeply on either side, thick with pencil-straight stringybarks and scrubby undergrowth, punctured with granite outcrops. Giles Aubrey had no immediate neighbours and within minutes we might have been in some trackless wilderness. Here, in the eternal bush, man and boy could test their masculinity against the challenges of raw nature.

‘Ow,' said Tarquin. ‘That tree scratched me.'

Pushing on intrepidly, we clambered over boulders and along bridges of fallen tree-trunks. ‘But aren't there snakes?' insisted Tarquin.

‘Keep your eyes open,' I said, drawing on my inherent knowledge of bushcraft. Pioneer blood flowed in my veins. My father's grandmother had once run a pub in Ballarat. ‘Make plenty of noise as you go.' The advice was superfluous. If Tarquin managed to get himself bitten, it would be nothing short of miraculous.

‘What do you do if one bites you?' Red wanted to know.

Snakes weren't exactly my forte, not in the zoological sense anyway. But the habitat did seem custom-made— sun-warmed rocks, cracks and fissures everywhere, plentiful frogs and other creatures coming down to the water to drink. I owed it to the boys to pass on the time-honoured lore of the bush. ‘You have to get somebody to suck out the poison,' I explained. ‘That's the standard treatment. Except if you get bitten on the backside.'

‘What happens then?' said Tarquin, apprehensively scrutinising the riverbank.

‘You put your head between your legs,' said Red, racing me to the punch line. ‘And kiss your arse goodbye.'

Where a massive red gum overhung the water, I lingered in the shade and smoked a cigarette while the boys scouted ahead. A crystal stream bubbled at my feet. Dragonflies flitted hither and thither. The scent of eucalyptus perfumed the air. Kookaburras carolled distantly. Luxuriating in the tranquillity of the bush, I banished all thoughts of work—of Agnelli, of the press and Marcus Taylor, of Spider and the duplicate Szabo. I let my eyes close.

‘Help!' came a scream from around the bend. ‘Come quick.' Red. Not mucking around either, by the sound of it. It was black, thick as my wrist, coiled at Tarquin's feet. Red was circling at a distance, stick in hand, bellowing for help. Tarquin stood frozen with fear. He must nearly have stood on the thing. ‘Don't move,' I yelled. ‘If you die, your mother will kill me.'