In the Frame (14 page)

I laughed ‘Very neat.’

‘It’s easier to establish a tradition,’ Hudson said, ‘than to get rid of it.’

‘You’re establishing a great tradition for fine wines, Donald says.’

The sad-looking eyes twinkled with civilized pleasure. ‘He was most enthusiastic. He travelled round all the big vineyards, of course, besides visiting us.’

The horses for the third race cantered away to the start, led by a fractious chestnut colt with too much white about his head.

‘Ugly brute,’ Hudson said. ‘But he’ ll win.’

‘Are you backing it?’

He smiled. ‘I’ve a little bit on.’

The race started and the field sprinted, and Hudson’s knuckles whitened so much from his grip as he gazed intently through his binoculars that I wondered just how big the little bit was. The chestnut colt was beaten into fourth place. Hudson put his race-glasses down slowly and watched the unsatisfactory finish with a blank expression.

‘Oh well,’ he said, his sad eyes looking even sadder. ‘Always another day.’ He shrugged resignedly, cheered up, shook my hand, told me to remember him to Donald, and asked if I could find my own way out.

‘Thank you for your help,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Any time. Any time.’

With only a couple of wrong turnings I reached ground level, listening on the way to fascinating snippets of Australian conversation.

‘… They say he’s an embarrassment as a Committee man. He only opens his mouth to change feet…’

‘… a beastly stomach wog, so he couldn’t come…’

‘… told him to stop whingeing like a bloody Pommie, and get on with it…’

‘… won twenty dollars? Good on yer, Joanie…’

And everywhere the diphthong vowels which gave the word ‘No’ about five separate sounds, defying my attempts to copy it. I’d been told on the flight over, by an Australian, that all Australians spoke with one single accent. It was about as true as saying all Americans spoke alike, or all British. English was infinitely elastic; and alive, well and living in Melbourne.

Jik and Sarah, when I rejoined them, were arguing about their fancies for the Victoria Derby, next race on the card.

‘Ivory Ball is out of his class and has as much chance as a blind man in a blizzard.’

Sarah ignored this. ‘He won at Moonee Valley last week and two of the tipsters pick him.’

‘Those tipsters must have been drunk.’

‘Hello Todd,’ Sarah said, ‘Pick a number, for God’s sake.’

‘Ten.’

‘Why ten?’

‘Eleven minus one.’

‘Jesus,’ Jik said. ‘You used to have more sense.’

Sarah looked it up. ‘Royal Road. Compared with Royal Road, Ivory Ball’s a certainty.’

We bought our tickets and went up to the roof, and none of our bets came up. Sarah disgustedly yelled at Ivory Ball who at least managed fifth, but Royal Road fell entirely by the wayside. The winner was number twelve.

‘You should have
added
eleven and one,’ Sarah said. ‘You make such silly mistakes.’

‘What are you staring at?’ Jik said.

I was looking attentively down at the crowd which had watched the race from ground level on the Members’ lawn.

‘Lend me your raceglasses…’

Jik handed them over. I raised them, took a long look, and slowly put them down.

‘What is it?’ Sarah said anxiously. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘That,’ I said, ‘has not only torn it, but ripped the bloody works apart.’

‘What has?’

‘Do you see those two men… about twenty yards along from the parade ring railing… one of them in a grey morning suit?’

‘What about them?’ Jik said.

‘The man in the morning suit is Hudson Taylor, the man I just had a drink with. He’s the managing director of a wine-making firm, and he saw a lot of my cousin Donald when he was over here. And the other man is called Ivor Wexford, and he’s the manager of the Yarra River Fine Arts gallery.’

‘So what?’ Sarah said.

‘So I can just about imagine the conversation that’s going on down there,’ I said. ‘Something like, “Excuse me, sir, but didn’t I sell a picture to you recently?” “Not to me, Mr Wexford, but to my friend Donald Stuart.” “And who was that young man I saw you talking to just now?” “That was Donald Stuart’s cousin, Mr Wexford.” “And what do you know about him?” “That he’s a painter by trade and drew a picture of you, Mr Wexford, and asked me for your name.”’

I stopped. ‘Go on,’ Jik said.

I watched Wexford and Hudson Taylor stop talking, nod casually to each other, and walk their separate ways.

‘Ivor Wexford now knows he made a horrible mistake in letting me out of his gallery last night.’

Sarah looked searchingly at my face. ‘You really do think that’s very serious.’

‘Yes I really do.’ I loosened a few tightened muscles and tried a smile. ‘At the least, he’ll be on his guard.’

‘And at the most,’ Jik said, ‘he’ ll come looking for you.’

‘Er…’ I said thoughtfully. ‘What do either of you feel about a spot of instant travel?’

‘Where to?’

‘Alice Springs?’ I said.

Jik complained all the way to the airport on various counts. One, that he would be missing the cricket. Two, that I hadn’t let him go back to the Hilton for his paints. Three, that his Derby clothes would be too hot in Alice. Four, that he wasn’t missing the Melbourne Cup for any little ponce with a bow tie.

None of the colourful gripes touched on the fact that he was paying for all our fares with his credit card, as I had left my travellers cheques in the hotel.

It had been Sarah’s idea not to go back there.

‘If we’ re going to vanish, let’s get on with it,’ she said. ‘It’s running back into fires for handbags that gets people burnt.’

‘You don’t have to come,’ I said tentatively.

‘We’ve been through all that. What do you think the rest of my life would be like if I stopped Jik helping you, and you came to grief?’

‘You’d never forgive me.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘You’re dead right.’

As far as I could tell we had left the racecourse unobserved, and certainly no one car had followed us to the airport. Neither Greene with an ‘e’ nor the boy non-artist appeared underfoot to trip us up, and we travelled uneventfully on a half-full aircraft on the first leg to Adelaide, and an even emptier one from there to Alice Springs.

The country beneath us from Adelaide northwards
turned gradually from fresh green to grey-green, and finally to a fierce brick red.

‘Gaba,’ said Jik, pointing downwards.

‘What?’

‘G.A.B.A.,’ he said. ‘Gaba. Stands for Great Australian Bugger All.’

I laughed. The land did indeed look baked, deserted, and older than time, but there were track-like roads here and there, and incredibly isolated homesteads. I watched in fascination until it grew dark, the purple shadows rushing in like a tide as we swept north into the central wastelands.

The night air at Alice was hot, as if someone had forgotten to switch off the oven. The luck which had presented us with an available flight as soon as we reached Melbourne airport seemed still to be functioning: a taciturn taxi driver took us straight to a new-looking motel which proved to have room for us.

‘The season is over,’ he grunted, when we congratulated and thanked him. ‘It will soon be too hot for tourists.’

Our rooms were air-conditioned, however. Jik and Sarah’s was down on the ground floor, their door opening directly on to a shady covered walk which bordered a small garden with a pool. Mine, in an adjacent wing across the car park, was two tall floors up, reached by an outside tree-shaded staircase and a long open gallery. The whole place looked greenly peaceful in the scattered spotlights which shone unobtrusively from palms and gums.

The motel restaurant had closed for the night at eight o’clock, so we walked along the main street to another. The road surface itself was tarmacadamed, but some of the side roads were not, nor were the footpaths uniformly paved. Often enough we were walking on bare fine grit,
and we could see from the dust haze in the headlights of passing cars that the grit was bright red.

‘Bull dust,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve never seen it before. My aunt swore it got inside her locked trunk once when she and my uncle drove out to Ayers Rock.’

‘What’s Ayers Rock?’ I said.

‘Ignorant pommie,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s a chunk of sandstone two miles long and a third of a mile high left behind by some careless glacier in the ice-age.’

‘Miles out in the desert,’ Jik added. ‘A place of ancient magic regularly desecrated by the plastic society.’

‘Have you been there?’ I asked dryly.

He grinned. ‘Nope.’

‘What difference does that make?’ Sarah asked.

‘He means,’ Jik said, ‘our pompous friend here means that one shouldn’t make judgments from afar.’

‘You haven’t actually got to be swallowed by a shark before you believe it’s got sharp teeth,’ Sarah said. ‘You can believe what other people see.’

‘It depends from where they’re looking.’

‘Facts are not judgments, and judgments are not facts,’ Jik said. ‘A bit of Todd’s Law from way back.’

Sarah gave me a glance. ‘Have you got iced water in that head?’

‘Emotion is a rotten base for politics. He used to say that too,’ Jik said. ‘Envy is the root of all evil. What have I left out?’

‘The most damaging lies are told by those who believe they’re true.’

‘There you are,’ Jik said. ‘Such a pity you can’t paint.’

‘Thanks very much.’

We reached the restaurant and ate a meal of such excellence that one wondered at the organisation it took to bring every item of food and clothing and everyday life to an expanding town of thirteen and a half thousand
inhabitants surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction.

‘It was started here, a hundred years ago, as a relay station for sending cables across Australia,’ Sarah said. ‘And now they’re bouncing messages off the stars.’

Jik said, ‘Bet the messages aren’t worth the technology. Think of ‘See you Friday, Ethel’, chattering round the eternal spheres.’

With instructions from the restaurant we walked back a different way and sought out the Yarra River Fine Arts gallery, Alice Springs variety.

It was located in a paved shopping arcade closed to traffic, one of several small but prosperous-looking boutiques. There were no lights on in the gallery, nor in the other shops. From what we could see in the single dim street light the merchandise in the gallery window consisted of two bright orange landscapes of desert scenes.

‘Crude,’ said Jik, whose own colours were not noted for pastel subtlety.

‘The whole place,’ he said, ‘will be full of local copies of Albert Namatjira. Tourists buy them by the ton.’

We strolled back to the motel more companionably than at any time since my arrival. Maybe the desert distances all around us invoked their own peace. At any rate when I kissed Sarah’s cheek to say goodnight it was no longer as a sort of pact, as in the morning, but with affection.

At breakfast she said, ‘You’ ll never guess. The main street here is Todd Street. So is the river. Todd River.’

‘Such is fame,’ I said modestly.

‘And there are eleven art galleries.’

‘She’s been reading the Alice Springs Tourist Promotion Association Inc.’s handout,’ Jik explained.

‘There’s also a Chinese Takeaway.’

Jik made a face. ‘Just imagine all this lot dumped down in the middle of the Sahara.’

The daytime heat, in fact, was fierce. The radio was cheerfully forecasting a noon temperature of thirty-nine, which was a hundred and two in the old fahrenheit shade. The single step from a cool room to the sun-roasting balcony was a sensuous pleasure, but the walk to the Yarra River gallery, though less than half a mile, was surprisingly exhausting.

‘I suppose one would get used to it, if one lived here,’ Jik said. ‘Thank God Sarah’s got her hat.’

We dodged in and out of the shadows of overhanging trees and the local inhabitants marched around bareheaded as if the branding-iron in the sky was pointing another way. The Yarra River gallery was quiet and air conditioned and provided chairs near the entrance for flaked-out visitors.

As Jik had prophesied, all visible space was knee deep in the hard clear watercolour paintings typical of the disciples of Namatjira. They were fine if you liked that sort of thing, which on the whole I didn’t. I preferred the occasional fuzzy outline, indistinct edge, shadows encroaching, suggestion, impression, and ambiguity. Namatjira, given his due as the first and greatest of the Aboriginal artists, had had a vision as sharp as a diamond. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that he’d produced more than two thousand paintings himself, and certainly his influence on the town where he’d been born had been extraordinary. Eleven art galleries. Mecca for artists. Tourists buying pictures by the ton. He had died, a plaque on the wall said, in Alice Springs hospital on August 8th 1959.

We had been wandering around for a good five minutes before anyone came. Then the plastic strip
curtain over a recessed doorway parted, and the gallery keeper came gently through.

‘See anything you fancy?’ he said.

His voice managed to convey an utter boredom with tourists and a feeling that we should pay up quickly and go away. He was small, languid, long-haired and pale, and had large dark eyes with drooping tired-looking lids. About the same age as Jik and myself, though a lot less robust.

‘Do you have any other pictures?’ I asked.

He glanced at our clothes. Jik and I wore the trousers and shirts in which we’d gone to the races: no ties and no jackets, but more promising to picture-sellers than denims. Without discernible enthusiasm he held back half of the strip curtain, inviting us to go through.

‘In here,’ he said.

The inner room was bright from skylights, and its walls were almost entirely covered with dozens of pictures which hung closely together. Our eyes opened wide. At first sight we were surrounded by an incredible feast of Dutch interiors, French impressionists and Gainsborough portraits. At second blink one could see that although they were original oil paintings, they were basically second rate. The sort sold as ‘school of’ because the artists hadn’t bothered to sign them.