In the Frame

9

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.

‘All European, in this room,’ the gallery keeper said. He still sounded bored. He wasn’t Australian, I thought. Nor British. Maybe American. Difficult to tell.

‘Do you have any pictures of horses?’ I asked.

He gave me a long steady peaceful gaze. ‘Yes we do, but this month we are displaying works by native Australians and lesser Europeans.’ His voice had the faintest of lisps. ‘If you wish to see horse paintings, they are in racks through there.’ He pointed to a second plastic strip curtain directly opposite the first. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

I murmured the names of some of the Australians whose work I had seen in Melbourne. There was a slight brightening of the lack-lustre eyes.

‘Yes, we do have a few by those artists.’

He led us through the second curtain into the third, and from our point of view, most interesting room. Half of it, as promised, was occupied by well-filled double tiers of racks. The other half was the office and packing and framing department. Directly ahead a glass door led out to a dusty parched-looking garden, but most of the lighting in here too came from the roof.

Beside the glass door stood an easel bearing a small canvas with its back towards us. Various unmistakable signs showed work currently in progress and recently interrupted.

‘Your own effort?’ asked Jik inquisitively, walking over for a look.

The pale gallery keeper made a fluttering movement with his hand as if he would have stopped Jik if he could, and something in Jik’s expression attracted me to his side like a magnet.

A chestnut horse, three-quarters view, its elegant head raised as if listening. In the background, the noble lines of a mansion. The rest, a harmonious composition of trees and meadow. The painting, as far as I could judge, was more or less finished.

‘That’s great,’ I said with enthusiasm. ‘Is that for sale? I’d like to buy that.’

After the briefest hesitation he said, ‘Sorry. That’s commissioned.’

‘What a pity! Couldn’t you sell me that one, and paint another?’

He gave me a small regretful smile. ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Do tell me your name,’ I said earnestly.

He was unwillingly flattered. ‘Harley Renbo.’

‘Is there anything else of yours here?’

He gestured towards the racks. ‘One or two. The horse paintings are all in the bottom row, against the wall.’

We all three of us pulled out the paintings one by one, making amateur-type comments.

‘That’s nice,’ said Sarah, holding a small picture of a fat grey pony with two old-fashioned country boys. ‘Do you like that?’ She showed it to Jik and me.

We looked at it.

‘Very nice,’ I said kindly.

Jik turned away as if uninterested. Harley Renbo stood motionless.

‘Oh well,’ Sarah said, shrugging. ‘I just thought it looked nice.’ She put it back in the rack and pulled out the next. ‘How about this mare and foal? I think it’s pretty.’

Jik could hardly bear it. ‘Sentimental tosh,’ he said.

Sarah looked downcast. ‘It may not be Art, but I like it.’

We found one with a flourishing signature; Harley Renbo. Large canvas, varnished, unframed.

‘Ah,’ I said appreciatively. ‘Yours.’

Harley Renbo inclined his head. Jik, Sarah and I gazed at his acknowledged work.

Derivative Stubbs-type. Elongated horses set in a Capability Brown landscape. Composition fair, anatomy poor, execution good, originality nil.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Where did you paint it?’

‘Oh... here.’

‘From memory?’ Sarah said admiringly. ‘How clever.’

Harley Renbo, at our urging, brought out two more examples of his work. Neither was better than the first, but one was a great deal smaller.

‘How much is this?’ I asked.

Jik glanced at me sharply, but kept quiet.

Harley Renbo mentioned a sum which had me shaking my head at once.

‘Awfully sorry,’ I said. ‘I like your work, but...’

The haggling continued politely for quite a long time, but we came to the usual conclusion, higher than the buyer wanted, lower than the painter hoped. Jik resignedly lent his credit card and we bore our trophy away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Jik exploded when we were safely out of earshot. ‘You could paint better than that when you were in your cradle. Why the hell did you want to buy that rubbish?’

‘Because,’ I said contentedly, ‘Harley Renbo is the copier.’

‘But this,’ Jik pointed to the parcel under my arm, ‘Is his own abysmal original work.’

‘Like fingerprints?’ Sarah said. ‘You can check other things he paints against this?’

‘Got brains, my wife,’ Jik said. ‘But that picture he wouldn’t sell was nothing like any Munnings I’ve ever seen.’

‘You never look at horse paintings if you can help it.’

‘I’ve seen more of your pathetic daubs than I care to.’

‘How about Raoul Millais?’ I said.

‘Jesus.’

We walked along the scorching street almost without feeling it.

‘I don’t know about you two,’ Sarah said. ‘But I’m going to buy a bikini and spend the rest of the day in the pool.’

We all bought swimming things, changed into them, splashed around for ages, and laid ourselves out on towels to dry. It was peaceful and quiet in the shady little garden. We were the only people there.

‘That picture of a pony and two boys, that you thought was nice,’ I said to Sarah.

‘Well, it was,’ she repeated defensively. ‘I liked it.’

‘It was a Munnings.’

She sat up abruptly on her towel.

‘Why ever didn’t you say so?’

‘I was waiting for our friend Renbo to tell us, but he didn’t.’

‘A real one?’ Sarah asked. ‘Or a copy?’

‘Real,’ Jik said, with his eyes shut against the sun dappling through palm leaves.

I nodded lazily. ‘I thought so, too,’ I said. ‘An old painting. Munnings had that grey pony for years when he was young, and painted it dozens of times. It’s the same one you saw in Sydney in “The Coming Storm’.”

‘You two do know a lot,’ Sarah said, sighing and lying down again.

‘Engineers know all about nuts and bolts,’ Jik said. ‘Do we get lunch in this place?’

I looked at my watch. Nearly two o’ clock. ‘I’ ll go and ask,’ I said.

I put shirt and trousers on over my sun-dried trunks and ambled from the outdoor heat into the refrigerated air of the lobby. No lunch, said the reception desk. We could buy lunch nearby at a takeaway and eat in the garden. Drink? Same thing. Buy your own at a bottle shop. There was an ice-making machine and plastic glasses just outside the door to the pool.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome.’

I looked at the ice-making machine on the way out. Beside it swung a neat notice: ‘We don’t swim in your toilet. Please don’t pee in our pool.’ I laughed across to Jik and Sarah and told them the food situation.

‘I’ ll go and get it,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

Anything, they said.

‘And drink?’

‘Cinzano,’ Sarah said, and Jik nodded. ‘Dry white.’

‘O.K.’

I picked up my room key from the grass and set off to collect some cash for shopping. Walked along to the tree-shaded outside staircase, went up two storeys, and turned on to the blazing hot balcony.

There was a man walking along it towards me, about my own height, build and age; and I heard someone else coming up the stairs at my back.

Thought nothing of it. Motel guests like me. What else?

I was totally unprepared both for the attack itself, and for its ferocity.