The Tax Inspector (22 page)

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.

‘The clones are looking at you,’ Jack said, breaking his bread roll immediately and spilling crumbs across the cloth. Maria saw she was indeed being looked at.

‘They’re anxious,’ Jack said. ‘They’re thinking – what if this is the new look? How will I know?’

‘Is it too extreme?’ said Maria who realized slowly she was the only person, of either sex, whose clothes were not predominantly black or grey. Many of the men, like Jack, wore black shirts. ‘I suppose I look like a circus to them.’

‘You expose them as the bores they are.’

‘You know them?’

‘A few. Now,’ he picked up the wine list, ‘I take it we have to throw this away.’

‘I’m permitted one glass.’

‘Then we’ll both limit ourselves to one glass of something wonderful.’

Alistair would never have done that, not even Alistair at his charming best. He would have confidently gone on doing exactly what he wanted to do and assume that this was why you would like him, which was mostly true. He was gentle and loyal but he also had a will of iron, and when she felt Jack Catchprice bend his will to hers she felt a gooeyness at her centre which surprised her.

He guided her through the menu and she was amused to find herself enjoying the experience of being pampered until he said: ‘You should have protein, am I right?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’ But it made her distrust him and he saw this, she thought, because his smile faltered a second and his mouth seemed momentarily weak and vulnerable. She was immediately sorry.

‘This restaurant is perfect for protein,’ he said, looking at his menu. ‘It is famous for protein.’

If she had known him better she would have laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘sorry’. Instead she did something she had never done in her life – encouraged him to order for her. He chose oysters from Nelson Bay and, for their main course, duck breast with a half bottle of 1966 Haut Brion. It was, admittedly, a little more than one glass each.

Maria sipped the Haut Brion and smiled. ‘I can’t believe this.’

‘The wine?’

‘You,’ she said.

‘What about me?’

‘From Catchprice Motors in Franklin.’

‘From that terrible place, you mean?’

‘I didn’t mean that at all. Although,’ she paused, not quite sure if she should smile or even if she should continue, ‘you seem so totally unconnected with them. You’re Cathy McPherson’s brother. It seems impossible.’

‘I’m like my mother, physically.’

‘But you’re not
like
any of them.’

‘Well they got stuck there. They didn’t want to be stuck there, but by the time they realized it they had no other choices. The environment affects you. If I’m different it was because I had to get out. If I hadn’t got out, I would have been just like them, different of course, but the same too.’

‘But you got out. That makes you different.’

‘You know why I am sitting here tonight?’ Jack said, wiping the corners of his very nice mouth with the crisp white napkin. ‘It wasn’t discontent. It was because I couldn’t sing.’

She laughed expectantly.

‘If I was musical, I’d still be there. Mort and me, side by side.’

‘But you love music. You have great taste in music.’

‘I love it, but I listen to it like an animal,’ he said. ‘If you want to picture how I listen, think of the dog on the HMV label. Intelligent, attentive, and ultimately-puzzled.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Oh dear, exactly. No matter how many times I listen to that Wagner, I never know what’s going to happen next. Every second is a surprise to me.’

‘Well I guess we’re all the product of little tragedies,’ Maria said. ‘This wine is amazing. I have never tasted wine like this in my life.’

‘Mort and Cathy have really very good voices,’ he said. ‘Our father loved music, so he loved them. He had them up in the middle of the night to sing, not rubbish – opera. He had them singing Mozart to drunken farmers. He couldn’t help himself. He’d come into the room and shake them and shake them until they were awake. He was like me though – he couldn’t sing. No one ever knew this, but I found him once, in the back paddock, trying to sing. I watched him for an hour. He had sheet music. It was really terrible. One of the worst things I ever saw, like an animal trying to talk. You could not believe all the effort in the face and the terrible noise.’

‘The poor man.’

‘Well it’s worse than what I’m saying, obviously.’

‘I hear lots of bad things,’ she said.

‘You’ll tell me your bad things, too?’

She thought: surely he doesn’t want to go to bed with me. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you want.’

He cut a piece of perfect white potato and joined it to a piece of duck which he had already neatly dissected. ‘He messed around with them,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

He tore his bread and mopped up a little gravy.

She drank from her water glass. ‘How horrible.’

‘He was always at them in the night. I don’t really know what happened. Sometimes I think I invented it, or dreamed it. I stood beside Mort in church last Christmas and he was miming the words. He wouldn’t sing out loud.’

‘He told me your father was a wonderful man.’

Jack shrugged.

‘And your mother?’

‘Who would have any idea what goes on in that head? Who would guess what she knew or understood? But it was definitely my father who decided there was no room for me in the business. I was very hurt, at the time. Can you believe it – I cried. I really wept. All the things I’m lucky about, they hurt me at the time.’ He hid his eyes in the depths of his wine glass. ‘Your turn.’

‘I sort of lived with a man for a long time and he had a wife and I wanted a baby and I made a choice and this is it.’

‘You were happy with him?’

‘Yes,’ Maria said, then: ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I think I was rather depressed for rather a long time. I’m just noticing it. I think I must have got used to it.’

‘Now?’

‘Well, yes, now.’

‘Now you’re what?’

‘I’m not depressed right now,’ she laughed, and then looked down, unable to hold his eyes, aware of the movement of his knee an inch or two away from hers.

‘Do you know who Daniel Makeveitch is?’ she asked.

‘A painter sitting two tables to your right.’

‘You know him?’

‘You mustn’t seem so surprised,’ he said. ‘I know I’m a property developer and I even used to be a second-hand car salesman …’

He was smiling, but his eyes were hurt and Maria was embarrassed at what she had said.

‘I’m sorry. I thought you would have mentioned it.’ She put out her hand and touched his sleeve. ‘When we sat down.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I used to spend a lot of time being offended, but I’m not any more.’ None the less his face had closed over and showed, in the candlelight, a waxy sort of imperviousness. ‘When I was a car salesman in the Paramatta Road – I worked for Janus Binder and I started buying paintings because he collected them. People were always amazed – gallery owners, people who should have known better. It was as if there was something ludicrous about car dealers having any sensitivity or feeling. But once I was a property developer, no one was surprised at all. They expect it of me. There’s a great relief, socially, in not being a car dealer.’

‘Like being a Tax Officer.’

‘You don’t even half-believe that, Maria.’

She blushed. ‘In its social isolation, I meant.’

He paused and looked at her and she felt herself seen as dishonest. She blushed.

‘Do you like Daniel Makeveitch’s work?’

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.