In the Frame

8

Jik called through on the telephone at eight next morning.

‘Come down to the coffee shop and have breakfast.’

‘O.K.’

I went down in the lift and along the foyer to the hotel’s informal restaurant. He was sitting at a table alone, wearing dark glasses and making inroads into a mountain of scrambled egg.

‘They bring you coffee,’ he said, ‘But you have to fetch everything else from that buffet.’ He nodded towards a large well-laden table in the centre of the breezy blue and sharp green decor. ‘How’s things?’

‘Not what they used to be.’

He made a face. ‘Bastard.’

‘How are the eyes?’

He whipped off the glasses with a theatrical flourish and leaned forward to give me a good look. Pink, they were, and still inflamed, but on the definite mend.

‘Has Sarah relented?’ I asked.

‘She’s feeling sick.’

‘Oh?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I hope not. I don’t want a kid yet. She isn’t overdue or anything.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.

He slid me a glance. ‘She says she’s got nothing against you personally.’

‘But,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘The mother hen syndrome.’

‘Wouldn’t have cast you as a chick.’

He put down his knife and fork. ‘Nor would I, by God. I told her to cheer up and get this little enterprise over as soon as possible and face the fact she hadn’t married a marshmallow.’

‘And she said?’

He gave a twisted grin. ‘From my performance in bed last night, that she had.’

I wondered idly about the success or otherwise of their sex life. From the testimony of one or two past girls who had let their hair down to me while waiting hours in the flat for Jik’s unpredictable return, he was a moody lover, quick to arousal and easily put off. ‘It only takes a dog barking, and he’s gone.’ Not much, I dared say, had changed.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘There’s this car we’ve got. Damned silly if you didn’t come with us to the races.’

‘Would Sarah...’ I asked carefully, ‘... scowl?’

‘She says not.’

I accepted this offer and inwardly sighed. It looked as if he wouldn’t take the smallest step henceforth without the nod from Sarah. When the wildest ones got married, was it always like that? Wedded bliss putting nets over the eagles.

‘Where did you get to, last night?’ he said.

‘Aladdin’s cave,’ I said. ‘Treasures galore and damned lucky to escape the boiling oil.’

I told him about the gallery, the Munnings, and my brief moment of captivity. I told him what I thought of the burglaries. It pleased him. His eyes gleamed with humour and the familiar excitement rose.

‘How are we going to prove it?’ he said.

He heard the ‘we’ as soon as he said it. He laughed ruefully, the fizz dying away. ‘Well, how?’

‘Don’t know yet.’

‘I’d like to help,’ he said apologetically.

I thought of a dozen sarcastic replies and stifled the lot. It was I who was the one out of step, not them. The voice of the past had no right to break up the future.

‘You’ll do what pleases Sarah,’ I said with finality, and as an order, not a prodding satire.

‘Don’t sound so bloody bossy.’

We finished breakfast amicably trying to build a suitable new relationship on the ruins of the old, and both knowing well what we were about.

When I met them later in the hall at setting-off time it was clear that Sarah too had made a reassessment and put her mind to work on her emotions. She greeted me with an attempted smile and an outstretched hand. I shook the hand lightly and also gave her a token kiss on the cheek. She took it as it was meant.

Truce made, terms agreed, pact signed. Jik the mediator stood around looking smug.

‘Take a look at him,’ he said, flapping a hand in my direction. ‘The complete stockbroker. Suit, tie, leather shoes. If he isn’t careful they’ll have him in the Royal Academy.’

Sarah looked bewildered. ‘I thought that was an honour.’

‘It depends,’ said Jik, sneering happily. ‘Passable artists with polished social graces get elected in their thirties. Masters with average social graces, in their forties; masters with no social graces, in their fifties. Geniuses who don’t give a damn about being elected are ignored as long as possible.’

‘Putting Todd in the first category and yourself in the last?’ Sarah said.

‘Of course.’

‘Stands to reason,’ I said. ‘You never hear about Young Masters. Masters are always Old.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Sarah said. ‘Let’s go to the races.’

We went slowly, on account of a continuous stream of traffic going the same way. The car park at Flemington racecourse, when we arrived, looked like a giant picnic ground, with hundreds of full-scale lunch parties going on between the cars. Tables, chairs, cloths, china, silver, glass. Sun umbrellas optimistically raised in defiance of the rain-clouds threatening above. A lot of gaiety and booze and a giant overall statement that ‘This Was The Life’.

To my mild astonishment Jik and Sarah had come prepared. They whipped out table, chairs, drinks and food from the rented car’s boot and said it was easy when you knew how, you just ordered the whole works.

‘I have an uncle,’ Sarah said, ‘who holds the title of Fastest Bar in the West. It takes him roughly ten seconds from putting the brakes on to pouring the first drink.’

She was really trying, I thought. Not just putting up with an arrangement for Jik’s sake, but actually trying to make it work. If it was an effort, it didn’t show. She was wearing an interesting olive green linen coat, with a broad brimmed hat of the same colour, which she held on from time to time against little gusts of wind. Overall, a new Sarah, prettier, more relaxed, less afraid.

‘Champagne?’ Jik offered, popping the cork. ‘Steak and oyster pie?’

‘How will I go back to cocoa and chips?’

‘Fatter.’

We demolished the goodies, repacked the boot, and with a sense of taking part in some vast semi-religious ritual, squeezed along with the crowd through the gate to the Holy of Holies.

‘It’ll be much worse than this on Tuesday,’ observed Sarah, who had been to these junkets several times in the past. ‘Melbourne Cup day is a public holiday. The city has three million inhabitants and half of them will try to get here.’ She was shouting above the crowd noises and holding grimly on to her hat against the careless buffeting all around.

‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay at home and watch it on the box,’ I said breathlessly, receiving a hefty kidney punch from the elbow of a man fighting his way into a can of beer.

‘It won’t be on the television in Melbourne, only on the radio.’

‘Good grief. Why ever not?’

‘Because they want everyone to come. It’s televised all over the rest of Australia, but not on its own doorstep.’

‘Same with the golf and the cricket,’ Jik said with a touch of gloom. ‘And you can’t even have a decent bet on those.’

We went through the bottleneck and, by virtue of the inherited badges, through a second gate and round into the calmer waters of the green oblong of Members’ lawn. Much like on many a Derby Day at home, I thought. Same triumph of will over weather. Bright faces under grey skies. Warm coats over the pretty silks, umbrellas at the ready for the occasional top hat. When I painted pictures of racegoers in the rain, which I sometimes did, most people laughed. I never minded. I reckoned it meant they understood that the inner warmth of a pleasure couldn’t be externally damped: that they too might play a trumpet in a thunderstorm.

Come to think of it, I thought, why didn’t I paint a racegoer playing a trumpet in a thunderstorm? It might be symbolic enough even for Jik.

My friends were deep in a cross-talking assessment of the form of the first race. Sarah, it appeared, had a betting pedigree as long as her husband’s, and didn’t agree with him.

‘I know it was soft going at Randwick last week. But it’s pretty soft here too after all this rain, and he likes it on top.’

‘He was only beaten by Boyblue at Randwick, and Boyblue was out of sight in the Caulfield Cup.’

‘Please your silly self,’ Sarah said loftily. ‘But it’s still too soft for Grapevine.’

‘Want to bet?’ Jik asked me.

‘Don’t know the horses.’

‘As if that mattered.’

‘Right.’ I consulted the racecard. ‘Two dollars on Generator.’

They both looked him up, and they both said ‘Why?’

‘If in doubt, back number eleven. I once went nearly through the card on number eleven.’

They made clucking and pooh-poohing noises and told me I could make a gift of my two dollars to the bookies or the T.A.B.

‘The what?’

‘Totalisator Agency Board.’

The bookmakers, it seemed, were strictly on-course only, with no big firms as in England. All off-course betting shops were run by the T.A.B., which returned a good share of the lolly to racing. Racing was rich, rock-solid, and flourishing. Bully for Australia, Jik said.

We took our choice and paid our money, and Generator won at twenty-fives.

‘Beginners’ luck,’ Sarah said.

Jik laughed. ‘He’s no beginner. He got kicked out of playschool for running a book.’

They tore up their tickets, set their minds to race two, and made expeditions to place their bets. I settled for four dollars on number one.

‘Why?’

‘Double my stake on half of eleven.’

‘Oh God,’ said Sarah. ‘You’re something else.’

One of the more aggressive clouds started scattering rain, and the less hardy began to make for shelter.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and sit up there in the dry.’

‘You two go,’ Sarah said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because those seats are only for men.’

I laughed. I thought she was joking, but it appeared it was no joke. Very unfunny, in fact. About two thirds of the best seats in the Members’ stands were reserved for males.

‘What about their wives and girl friends?’ I said incredulously.

‘They can go up on the roof.’

Sarah, being Australian, saw nothing very odd in it. To me, and surely to Jik, it was ludicrous.

He said with a carefully straight face, ‘On a lot of the bigger courses the men who run Australian racing give themselves leather armchairs behind glass to watch from, and thick-carpeted restaurants and bars to eat and drink like kings in, and let their women eat in the cafeterias and sit on hard plastic chairs on the open stands among the rest of the crowd. They consider this behaviour quite normal. All anthropological groups consider their most bizarre tribal customs quite normal.’

‘I thought you were in love with all things Australian.’

Jik sighed heavily. ‘Nowhere’s perfect.’

‘I’m getting wet,’ Sarah said.

We escalated to the roof which had a proportion of two women to one man and was windy and damp, with bench seating.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sarah said, amused at my aghastness on behalf of womenkind. ‘I’m used to it.’

‘I thought this country made a big thing about equality for all.’

‘For all except half the population,’ Jik said.

We could see the whole race superbly from our eyrie. Sarah and Jik screamed encouragement to their fancies but Number One finished in front by two lengths, at eight to one.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Sarah said, tearing up more tickets. ‘What number do you fancy for the third?’

‘I won’t be with you for the third. I’ve got an appointment to have a drink with someone who knows Donald.’

She took it in, and the lightness went out of her manner. ‘More... investigating?’

‘I have to.’

‘Yes.’ She swallowed and made a visible effort. ‘Well... Good luck.’

‘You’re a great girl.’

She looked surprised that I should think so and suspicious that I was intending sarcasm, and also partly pleased. I returned earthwards with her multiple expressions amusing my mind.

The Members’ lawn was bounded on one long side by the stands and on the opposite side by the path taken by the horses on their way from the saddling boxes to the parade ring. One short side of the lawn lay alongside part of the parade ring itself: and it was at the corner of lawn where the horses’ path reached the parade ring that I was to meet Hudson Taylor.

The rain had almost stopped, which was good news for my suit. I reached the appointed spot and stood there waiting, admiring the brilliant scarlet of the long bedful of flowers which lined the railing between horse-walk and lawn. Cadmium red mixtures with highlights of orange and white and maybe a streak or two of expensive vermilion...

‘Charles Todd?’

‘Yes... Mr Taylor?’

‘Hudson. Glad to know you.’ He shook hands, his grip dry and firm. Late forties, medium height, comfortable build, with affable, slightly sad eyes sloping downwards at the outer corners. He was one of the minority of men in morning suits, and he wore it as comfortably as a sweater.

‘Let’s find somewhere dry,’ he said. ‘Come this way.’

He led me steadily up the bank of steps, in through an entrance door, down a wide interior corridor running the whole length of the stands, past a uniformed guard and a notice saying ‘Committee Only’, and into a large square comfortable room fitted out as a small-scale bar. The journey had been one long polite push through expensively dressed cohorts, but the bar was comparatively quiet and empty. A group of four, two men, two women, stood chatting with half-filled glasses held close to their chests, and two women in furs were complaining loudly of the cold.

‘They love to bring out the sables,’ Hudson Taylor chuckled, fetching two glasses of Scotch and gesturing to me to sit by a small table. ‘Spoils their fun, the years it’s hot for this meeting.’

‘Is it usually hot?’

‘Melbourne’s weather can change twenty degrees in an hour.’ He sounded proud of it. ‘Now then, this business of yours.’ He delved into an inner breast pocket and surfaced with a folded paper. ‘Here you are, typed out for Donald. The gallery was called Yarra River Fine Arts.’

I would have been astounded if it hadn’t been.

‘And the man we dealt with was someone called Ivor Wexford.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

‘I don’t remember very clearly. It was back in April, do you see?’

I thought briefly and pulled a small slim sketchbook out of my pocket.

‘If I draw him, might you know him?’

He looked amused. ‘You never know.’

I drew quickly in soft pencil a reasonable likeness of Greene, but without the moustache.

‘Was it him?’

Hudson Taylor looked doubtful. I drew in the moustache. He shook his head decisively. ‘No, that wasn’t him.’

‘How about this?’

I flipped over the page and started again. Hudson Taylor looked pensive as I did my best with the man from the basement office.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

I made the lower lip fuller, added heavy-framed spectacles, and a bow tie with spots.

‘That’s him,’ said Hudson in surprise. ‘I remember the bow tie, anyway. You don’t see many of those these days. How did you know? You must have met him.’

‘I walked round a couple of galleries yesterday afternoon.’

‘That’s quite a gift you have there,’ he said with interest, watching me put the notebook away.

‘Practice, that’s all.’ Years of seeing people’s faces as matters of shapes and proportions and planes, and remembering which way the lines slanted. I could already have drawn Hudson’s eyes from memory. It was a knack I’d had from childhood.

‘Sketching is your hobby?’ Hudson asked.

‘And my work. I mostly paint horses.’

‘Really?’ He glanced at the equine portraits decorating the wall. ‘Like these?’

I nodded, and we talked a little about painting for a living.

‘Maybe I can give you a commission, if my horse runs well in the Cup.’ He smiled, the outer edges of his eyes crinkling finely. ‘If he’s down the field, I’ ll feel more like shooting him.’

He stood up and gestured me still to follow. ‘Time for the next race. Care to watch it with me?’

We emerged into daylight in the prime part of the stands, overlooking the big square enclosure which served both for parading the runners before the race and unsaddling the winners after. I was amused to see that the front rows of seats were all for men: two couples walking in front of us split like amoebas, the husbands going down left, the women up right.

‘Down here,’ Hudson said, pointing.

‘May we only go up there if accompanied by a lady?’ I asked.

He glanced at me sideways, and smiled. ‘You find our ways odd? We’ll go up, by all means.’

He led the way and settled comfortably among the predominantly female company, greeting several people and introducing me companionably as his friend Charles from England. Instant first names, instant acceptance, Australian style.

‘Regina hated all this division of the sexes, poor lass,’ he said. ‘But it has interesting historical roots.’ He chuckled. ‘Australia was governed nearly all last century with the help of the British Army. The officers and gentlemen left their wives back in England, but such is nature, they all set up liaisons here with women of low repute. They didn’t want their fellow officers to see the vulgarity of their choice, so they invented a rule that the officers’ enclosures were for men only, which effectively silenced their popsies’ pleas to be taken.’

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.