The Tax Inspector

53

At four o’clock Maria Takis had been in her one-bedroom cottage in Balmain with her puffy feet elevated, staring at the discolouration on her freshly painted ceiling. At eight-fifteen she was standing beside Sydney Harbour with a long glass flute from which very small bubbles rose slowly through straw-coloured Dom Perignon. At four o’clock she had had red eyes and a headache. At eight-fifteen waiters with black shirts and pony tails brought hors d’oeuvres to the sea wall where she sat with a man with curly blond hair and a tanned face. The light was mellow, the water of the harbour pearly, touched with pink and blue and green. It was like nothing so much as a television commercial.

That she should like the too-good-looking man, that the setting itself – terra-cotta tiled terrace, flapping striped awnings, elegant men and women in black dresses – should be actually pleasant was disturbing for her.

She had been in homes like this before, often, professionally, but she had never allowed herself to think of wealth as attractive, was so accustomed to seeing it as a form of theft that it was shocking for her to feel herself responding to it at all, as if she were allowing herself to be sexually excited by a criminal.

The harbour licked and lapped against the wall she sat on. It slapped against the sandstone and smelt of sea-weed. She wondered if people in these houses bothered to fish. If ever she had a house like this, she would fish. She saw her mother on the sea wall casting out towards where the water boiled with tailor.

‘I thought about you all day,’ he said.

But she was suddenly so uncomfortable with his attractiveness, his straight, perfect teeth – he was a ‘type’ she would once have labelled superficial or yuppy – that she could not bring herself to say she had thought of him – although she had, often – or even that she was pleased and excited to be here.

‘Should we be mingling?’

‘We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do,’ he said.

But then it turned out that they must sit, not merely apart, not merely at separate tables, but at tables in rooms separated by french doors.

‘Surely we can sit together?’ she said.

‘I’ll fix it,’ Jack said, and disappeared into the house.

She stayed alone on the wall, looking out at the harbour where a long, low, wooden boat slowly putted past, no more than five metres away. A little girl, no more than ten, sat alone at the tiller. The girl waved. Maria waved back. She thought: I could handle this. That’s the truth. I would actually love to live in a house like this.

When Jack came back to admit he could not change the seating she was disappointed, but not greatly.

‘I’ve decided to enjoy myself,’ she said. She held his hand.

‘Are you sure? I’m sorry. We can leave straight after the pudding.’

When he put his hand against her stomach, she did not mind – the opposite.

‘I like it here.’ She kissed him softly on his expensive-smelling cheek and went to sit at the long dining-table in the room closest to the harbour. She found her name card, seated herself, permitted herself to take pleasure from the white linen, the Lalique bowl – she peered around the base and found the signature – even the heavy chandeliers above their heads. She was here to enjoy, not cross-examine.

A tall blond Englishman on her left introduced himself as ‘Terry’. His hair fell over his forehead in a stiff lick. He had a black cotton shirt with overlapping double collars which she noticed straightaway. Later she intended to ask him where he bought it.

‘Are you the de Kooning man?’ she asked.

‘Well, not the de Kooning woman,’ he said, smiling.

‘Well, I’m grateful for that,’ Maria said, also smiling.

‘Oh,’ he said, pushing his lick of hair away, ‘you’re not fond of them?’

‘He’s such an extraordinary painter,’ she said. She was pleased to be here. Tax Department people never talked about painting. Alistair was an educated man, but he would barely have known who de Kooning was. ‘I love his work, but the women always frighten me.’

This made the man smile at the edges of his mouth. His eyes became thoughtful.

‘Seen the butter?’ he asked.

Maria looked for the butter, but could see none. ‘He’s so lyrical and beautiful,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s like I’m giving my heart to him and then I walk into the next room and feel I’m in the power of a serial killer. I mean, is he Ted Bundy?’

The man turned towards a puffy-faced dark-haired woman on the other side of the table. Maria imagined he was going to ask for butter. Instead he said: ‘Janice, I was very impressed by your piece on our mutual friend, although I really do think you could have taken the matter even further.’

Maria saw she had been cut. She thought: how could you be so unkind to someone who was a stranger and not at home?

She looked across the table towards a man and woman engaged in conversation. The table was very wide. The conversation seemed too far away to enter. The woman was in her early fifties with large eyes and a way of listening that must have been most flattering to the man, who was short and smooth and shaved so close his red cheeks shone like soup bones.

‘The thing I object to,’ the man said, ‘is to pay my taxes, fine, but not to subsidize some bored housewife so she can be pleasured by a doctor.’

It was a moment before she understood his use of ‘pleasured’. He meant a vaginal examination. Maria looked at his listener who was studiously brushing toast crumbs off the table cloth. You hate him surely. You are nodding your head while you despise him.

‘I agree, I agree,’ she said. ‘I like the American system.’

‘No one ever goes to the doctor in the States just because they’re bored.’

‘My God, no.’

‘But these women are bored,’ the man with glistening cheeks said. ‘Probably hubby is ignoring them. So they go along to good old Doctor-of-your-choice with their little green and yellow Medicare card.’

When Alistair was running the department it had been flexible enough to accommodate the passions Maria Takis now felt. (You wrote down a Rolls-Royce number plate and checked it out. You saw a lot of marble on a building site, it was enough.) She would have taken pleasure wringing the tax out of the complacent little gynophobe. Indeed, she might yet do it, or have someone do it for her. She looked across the table trying to read his place card upside down.

‘I think you’re absolutely correct about the de Kooning women,’ the man on her right said. ‘I never knew how to take them either.’

He introduced himself, but she already knew who he was. She knew his paintings and admired them. She responded to their spareness, their austerity, their refusal ever to be pretty. They did not mesh with the face, which was rather pudgy, and pasty, but rather with the flinty light in his small grey eyes. The colour clung to the canvas like crushed gravel, and it was through them that Maria had learned to love the Australian landscape which she still saw, everywhere, in their terms. It was exhilarating to be in agreement with Phillip Passos about de Kooning.

‘Did he buy a “Woman”?’ she whispered. ‘I feel such a fool. I’ve insulted him.’

‘Him? He’s not Digby.’ Passos was breaking his bread roll with his shockingly small white hands.

‘Then who is it?’

‘No one to worry about. Digby’s in there, at the Big Table. He bought a rather nice abstract piece from the early fifties. Not “pivotal”,’ he smiled, ‘but “major”. He paid $23 million for it.’

‘I heard.’

‘Well, he thought he had a bargain, because the market is so soft, but now he’s in a panic because maybe the market is still falling and he’s got to decide whether he has to bid for the next de Kooning. And that’s a “pivotal” one. Sotheby’s auction it in New York next week. He’ll have to be over there to prop up his own investment.’

‘I wonder what de Kooning thinks of all this.’

‘Not much. He has Alzheimer’s, I believe.’

‘Well he should be benefiting somehow.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Passos, looking a little vague.

‘Doesn’t France have something like this? A Droit de Suite? Don’t French artists now get a cut on all future sales of their work?’

Passos cut his smoked salmon carefully. ‘What do you do?’ he asked.

‘Oh, just a public servant,’ she said, and was disappointed and relieved to see she had satisfied his curiosity.

‘You know what this dinner party is about, do you?’

‘The de Kooning man.’

‘Nah,’ said Passos. ‘He’s just a bowl of fruit on the table. He’s a nature morte. He’s a thing you arrange other things around. The hidden agenda is Droit de Suite.’

‘Oh, you’re lobbying? Now?’

‘The Attorney General wants artists to love him, and so he introduced this Droit de Suite legislation. Now he’s hurt because we don’t want it.’

‘I would have thought it was great for artists.’

‘So did he. So did I. But if it’s going to work the art galleries have to keep honest records on how much people paid for paintings.’

Maria was already acting like a spy. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so is that a problem?’

‘Not if you pay tax. But they don’t. They pay cash. Over half of it is funny money. So what the commercial galleries are saying to the government is Droit de Suite is too complicated to administer, and what they’re saying to their artists is that over half our collectors will just stop collecting once the Tax Department can check on what is really going on. I can see I’ve disappointed you.’

‘No, really. It’s fascinating. Really.’

‘Well, you know, we took dirty money from the Medicis, so I guess we’ll take it from Jack Catchprice too.’

The smoked salmon on Maria’s plate was subtle and flavoursome, and it became, as she separated it from itself on her plate, not like a fish, but something at once alive and abstract, which had been bred for the pleasure of the connoisseur and about whose death she would be wise not to enquire too closely.