The Tax Inspector

42

Jack had asked her out while they stood in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment. Rain fell from the overhang above the rusting little steel-framed window behind the sink. The rain was loud and heavy. It fell from the corrugated roof like strings of glass beads. Water trickled through the plaster-sheeted ceiling and fell in fat discoloured drops on to a bed of soggy toast and dirty dishes. A red setter tried to mount Jack’s leg.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I can’t go out with clients.’

‘I’m not your client.’

‘But you have an interest, you know.’

‘I have no interest, I swear.’ He looked around and screwed his face up. ‘I got out of this family a long, long time ago. Their problems are their problems.’

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘Cross my heart. Check the share register.’

‘Well,’ she said, but the truth was that she had already clearly communicated, through a series of well-placed ‘I’s’, her single status, and she would like to be taken out to dinner more than anything else she could think of. ‘I leave Franklin at three. It’s a little too early for dinner.’

‘God, no, not Franklin. I didn’t mean Franklin.’

‘I have drinks with a friend at the Blue Moon Brasserie at six.’ She did not say it was the attractive friend Jack had already talked to.

‘The Blue Moon Brasserie?’ he asked. ‘In Macleay Street? I could meet you there. We could eat there. Or we could walk over to Chez Oz. I was thinking of Chez Oz. It’s round the corner.’ And when she hesitated, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can decide later.’

‘Oh, I can’t …’ Maria’s face betrayed herself – she would dearly love to be taken to Chez Oz.

‘Jack,’ Mrs Catchprice was calling him from the other room. ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself.’

‘I have to drop in on my father at half-past seven. He’s certainly not round the corner. Nowhere near Chez Oz.’

‘Then I can meet you at the Brasserie and we could have a drink and then I could drive you to your father’s. You like Wagner? You could put your feet up. I could play you some nice Wagner. It doesn’t have to be Wagner. I have the Brahms Double Concerto that is very appropriate to this weather. I have a nice car. I would wait for you while you visited your father. I won’t be bored.’

She did not prickle at the ‘nice car’ although she knew he had a Jaguar from John Sewell’s. She had sat in John Sewell’s herself, two years before, copying down the names of Jaguar owners as starting points for tax investigations.

‘I’ll be driving my own car to the Brasserie.’

‘I’ll drive you back to it after dinner.’

‘My father lives in Newtown.’

‘That’s O.K., I can find Newtown.’

‘I mean it’s not a very exciting place to sit in a parked car for half an hour.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled. His whole face crinkled. She liked the way he did that. He had nice lines around his mouth and eyes and his face, tilted a little, had a very intent, listening sort of quality which she found immensely attractive. ‘I think I can manage half an hour in Newtown.’

She was in the middle of an investigation of his family business. She might be the one who made his mother homeless, but he was flirting with her, more than flirting and she was reciprocating. He was the first man to treat her as a sexual being since she began to ‘show’.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It is an odd situation in Newtown. I have to sneak into Newtown sort of incognito. I might have to ask you not to park outside the house.’

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows comically.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said, ‘I know.’

‘I used to go out with a Jewish woman called Layla. She was twenty-four and I was nearly thirty but I could never take her home. I had to sit outside in the car.’

‘Yes, but you’re not “going out” with me,’ Maria smiled.

‘No, of course not.’ He coloured.

What was weird was that this embarrassment was pleasing. Indeed, the prospect of this ‘date’ gave everything that happened for the rest of the day – including her second serious chat with Mrs Catchprice about the company books, and her unpleasant phone conversation with her section leader where she requested one more day on the job – a pleasant secret corner, this thing to look forward to.

She had never planned to introduce him to her father, or have him sit in that little kitchen drinking brandy. That only happened because they were a little late and because, even after two circuits, the only parking spot in Ann Street was right in front of George Takis’s house where he was – in spite of all the rain – hosing down the green concrete of his small front garden. It was the mark of his widowed state – it was the woman who normally hosed the concrete.

Maria got out of the Jaguar in front of him but he was so taken by the car he did not recognize her.

‘Ba-Ba.’

‘Maria?’

Maria started to walk towards the house but George was drawn towards the Jaguar. When she called to him he did not even turn but patted the air by his thigh, as though he was bouncing a ball.

‘Ba-Ba, please.’

But he knew there was a man in that sleek, rain-jewelled car and he became very still and concentrated, a little hunched and poke-necked, as he stalked round the front of it, not like a poor man in braces and wet carpet slippers who is shamed in the face of wealth, but like a man coming to open a present.

George Takis opened the door of Jack Catchprice’s Jaguar and solemnly invited him out into the street.

It was not yet dark in Ann Street. You could still see the flaking paint sign of the ‘Perfect Chocolate’ factory which made the cul de sac. You could see the expressions on the neighbours’ faces. They were out enjoying the break from the rain, sitting on the verandas of the narrow cottages which gave the street its chequered individuality—white weather-board, pale blue aluminium cladding, red brick with white-painted mortar, etc., etc. The Katakises and the Papandreous were sitting out, and the Lebanese family were in their front-room sitting down to dinner in the bright light of a monster television. Stanley Dargour, who had married Daphne Katakis’s tall daughter, was redoing the brake linings on his Holden Kingswood but he was watching what was happening in front of George Takis’s house, they all were, and George Takis not only did not seem to care, but seemed to revel in it.

It was not yet dark, only gloomy, but the street lights came on. George Takis left his daughter alone on the street next to the mail box with the silhouetted palm tree stencilled on it. The light was really weak and still rather orange but Maria suffered a terrible and unexpected feeling of abandonment. There was nothing to protect her from the judgement of the street. She could not run back into the house, she could not come forward, and yet she had to. Stanley Dargour had put down his tools – she heard them clink – and was standing so that he could get a better view of her over the top of the Jaguar.

Jack Catchprice had stayed in the car with the door shut even while the Tax Inspector’s father had come directly towards him. He had blackened windows and thought he knew what Maria Takis wanted of him, but then the door was opened and he had no choice but to turn the music off and get out.

They shook hands under the gaze of the street.

Then George Takis put his hand up on Jack’s shoulder and guided him into the house. Sissy Katakis called out something to Ortansia Papandreou but Maria did not catch it properly.

In the painfully tidy neon-lit kitchen George Takis made Maria and Jack Catchprice sit on chromium chairs while he fussed around in cupboards finding preserves to put out in little flat glass dishes and then he poured brandy into little tumblers which bore sandblasted images of vine leaves – the Easter glasses. He watched the stranger all the time, casting him shy looks. He was small and shrunken as an olive, his eyebrows angrily black and his hair grey and his whiskers too, in the pits and folds of his shrunken, fierce face.

‘So,’ he said at last. ‘You got a British car, Mr Catchprice.’

‘Yes.’

‘I used to make them cars,’ said George Takis. ‘When the British Motor Corporation became Leyland, we made some of these in Sydney. They are a good motor car, eh? They got a smell to them? That leather?’

‘Yes.’

‘No rattles. Tight as a drum. You could float it on the harbour, it wouldn’t sink.’

Maria frowned. She knew they had made a grand total of ten Jaguars in Australia and that the men had been mortified to be told that the production was ceasing because the production quality was too low.

‘She don’t like them,’ George said. ‘You have one of them cars, you’re a real crook. That’s what she told me, mate. Now she’s changed her mind, eh, mori?’

‘Ba-Ba, lay off.’

‘Ha-ha,’ said George, so eager to make a pact with the new ‘intended’ that he could not worry about the feelings of the daughter he was so afraid of alienating. ‘I always tell her, there are nice people have these cars. Some bastards, but not all. You know what? You know the trouble? You never met one, mori. You never had a chance to discover the truth.’

Maria said, ‘That is about half true.’

‘No, no,’ George said, waving his finger at her in an imitation of a patriarch, topping up his glass with brandy and then Jack’s. ‘Completely true.’

‘Half true,’ said Maria. ‘We never did like people with money in this house. We mostly grew up thinking they were crooks, or smart people.’

Jack smiled and nodded, but Maria thought there were strain marks on his face.

‘We didn’t like Athens Greeks, did we Ba-Ba? That was about the worst thing to be in our view.’ She was irritated with her father.

‘You’ve got to be careful with this brandy,’ George said, adding a little to Jack’s glass. ‘You ever drink Greek brandy before?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘You’ve been to Greece?’

‘Ba-Ba, we’ve got to go. I just came round to see you were O.K.’

Her father ignored her. ‘So,’ he asked Jack Catchprice, ‘you single? Would you like to marry my daughter?’

‘Ba-Ba!’

‘She looks after me real good,’ George Takis said. ‘Here.’ He tugged on Jack’s lapel and led him to where his dinner stood, in the brown casserole dish on the bare stove. ‘Keftethes,’ George said. He lifted the lid. Jack looked in. ‘Meat balls. You want to taste? She can cook.’

‘Ba-Ba,’ Maria said. She was trying to laugh. She knew she was blushing. ‘Mr Catchprice is a client of mine. There’s nothing going on here, Ba-Ba. He just gave me a lift, O.K.’ She rearranged the knife and fork and place mat he had set for himself at the table. She could not even look at Jack. She felt him sit down again at the table. She heard him scrape the preserves from his little glass plate.

George was spooning cold keftethes on to a dish. ‘Every night she comes, or if she can’t come, she calls.’ He fossicked in the cutlery drawer and found a knife and fork. ‘I know people have to pay some service so if they get a heart attack there is someone will know. I said to the fellow, mate, I don’t need one. I’m a Greek.’

He placed the cold keftethes in front of Jack who sat looking back at him with an odd, shining, smiling face.

‘You interested?’ George asked.

Jack picked up the fork. Maria put her hand out and took it from him.

‘Sige apo ti zoemou,’ she said.

She stood up. Her ears were hot. She carried the fork, not the knife, back to the cutlery drawer. She picked up her handbag and put it over her shoulder. Her father – standing alone in the middle of the lonely neat kitchen where her mother’s eyes had once burned so brightly – she was sorry, already, for what she had said: keep out of my life.

In English she said: ‘You’re very naughty, Ba-Ba.’

‘She works too hard,’ George said.

She should not have said it. It was wrong to see him take this from a daughter. She was shocked to see his eyes, not angry at all, a grate with the fire gone out. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘O.K., Ba-Ba?’

Jack was standing, buttoning his suit jacket, tucking in his tie.

‘You come again,’ George said to him. ‘We’ll drink brandy together.’

Jack smiled this shining, bright smile. You could not guess what it might mean.

George detained them a fraction too long in the harsh light of the front door and then again, at the open door of the Jaguar he made a fuss of retracting the seat belt and making some suggestions about the best seat position. Jack Catchprice watched tolerantly while George Takis adjusted and readjusted the rake of the seat while the street looked on.

‘O.K.,’ he said, crouching by the window when they were leaving. ‘Now just relax, O.K.?’

He stepped back, still crouching, with his hand held palm upwards in a wave. Sige apo ti zoemou. She should never have said it.

The Jaguar window slid up silkily without Maria touching the handle. The car slowly rolled out of Ann Street.

‘Oh God,’ said Maria. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. I liked him. It was fine.’

Jack braked at the corner beside the cut glass and gilt jumble of fittings of PLAKA LIGHTING and nosed the car into the eight o’clock congestion of King Street. He pressed a button and the Brahms Double Concerto engulfed her in a deep and satisfying melancholy so alien to Ann Street in Newtown.

‘Greeks!’ she said.

‘It must be hard for him.’

‘Yes, it’s hard for him,’ Maria said.

‘But he doesn’t have to have the baby, right?’

She laughed.

‘There’s a sleeping bag down there,’ Jack said. ‘You might like to rest your legs on it.’

She accepted gratefully. She shifted her legs up on to the top of the feather-soft cylinder and kicked her shoes off. The seat was absolutely perfect. She shut her eyes. The music in his car sounded better than the music in her house. The smell of leather engulfed her.

She said: ‘I hope you weren’t too embarrassed.’

He turned the music down a little in order to hear her better.

‘He is so obviously smitten with you. It was very touching. It’s impossible to be embarrassed by that.’

‘I would have thought we were at our most embarrassing when we were smitten.’

‘Oh no,’ said Jack, turning right into Broadway. He turned to her and smiled. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘How are the legs?’

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.’