Within half an hour we’d cleared the built-up area and entered open countryside, paddocks of stubble the colour of milky tea. At the turn for Kangaroo Ground, the road ran between two vineyards and the boys let me think I’d conned them that there really were kangaroos bounding between the rows of vines. The road crested rolling hills and dipped into lightly wooded valleys, winding through tunnels of dappled darkness. At the top of a bare rise stood a peeling weatherboard church surrounded by moulting cypresses, a dilapidated sign out front: ‘ EEK AND YE SHALL FIND ’.
‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to drop in on someone for a few minutes.’ Acquired with parenthood, the habit of compulsive deception is not easily shed.
‘Aaww,’ the boys groaned in unison, but the wind buffetted the sound away.
At the Christmas Hills fire station, a zincalum shed, volunteer fire-fighters awaited the worst, stripped to the waist in the shade of a concrete water tank, moving only to fan the dust raised by our passing. At the far end of an unmade road, as instructed, I found Giles Aubrey’s house in a tinder-dry forest of stringybark saplings.
The architectural style was the local specialty, Mudbrick Gothic. Clay-coloured adobe walls set with clerestory windows, the whole thing slung low into the slope. Somewhere down below, the river wound between the trees. We went around the side, looking for the door. Dry leaves crackled under our feet and bellbirds pinged loud in our ears. ‘Careful of snakes,’ I reminded the boys. It would be typical of Tarquin to get himself bitten.
‘I trust you’re not referring to me.’ The man who spoke was sitting at a garden table beneath the shade of a pergola on a wide terracotta-tiled terrace. Behind him, glass doors opened into a house filled with pictures, rugs and books. In front of him, spread on old newspapers, was a punnet of tomato seedlings.
He was a desiccated little old rooster, with alert rheumy eyes and a complexion hatched with spidery blood vessels. The draw-string of his wide-brimmed straw hat sat tight under his neck and he wore a pair of canvas gardening gloves. Stripping off the gloves, he stood up and put his hand out, laying on the charm. ‘Giles Aubrey,’ he announced. ‘And you are?’
It was Red he addressed and for a moment it looked like the kid was going to disgrace me. Then he took Aubrey’s hand and pumped it gravely. ‘Redmond Whelan,’ he said. That about exhausted his supply of etiquette.
‘Well, Redmond Whelan,’ said Aubrey, relinquishing his hand. ‘If you two boys go down that path, you’ll find a very good place to swim. No matter if you haven’t got a costume. It’s my secret spot.’
The boys, braced to run, waited on my okay. ‘It’s quite safe,’ Aubrey assured me. ‘And I’m well past being a risk to anyone.’
I nodded and the boys bolted down the hill. Aubrey picked up a duck-headed walking-stick and pointed to the tray of seedlings. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring those.’ Walking gravely with the aid of the cane, he led me to a vegetable patch down a set of steps made from old railway sleepers. The earth was hard packed, the lettuces going to seed. A steep track ran down the slope and sounds of splashing and laughter wafted up through the trees. Aubrey lowered himself to his knees and jabbed the dirt with a small trowel.
‘I heard about young Marcus on the radio,’ he said. ‘Tragic. Didn’t quite make the connection at first. He used to be Marcus Grierson. Grierson’s the mother’s name, of course. Had a bad feeling about it, all the same. Then when you rang and mentioned the painting, it all fell into place. Szabo means ‘tailor’ in Hungarian. Rather predictable that way, Marcus was. Now I suppose the genie is out of the bottle. It was all in this suicide declaration they mentioned, I take it?’
Well, well, well. ‘The note did make some allegations,’ I said. ‘But we’d like to hear what you have to say before we take the matter any further.’
‘To lose one’s reputation’-Aubrey tamped the ground around the seedlings, taking his time-‘at my age.’ Tomatoes planted this late in the season would probably not ripen.
‘If you could start at the beginning.’ The impersonal bureaucrat, that was the approach to take.
Aubrey gripped my knee and levered himself upright. His weight was so insubstantial I could barely feel the pressure. The horticulture was for my benefit, a demonstration that age had not wearied him. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Hospitality required certain rituals. He watered in the seedlings and we went back up the slope.
Aubrey’s domesticity was an eclectic mixture of quality heirlooms and superseded modernity. Earth-toned paintings, over-framed. A French-polished sideboard bearing blobs of runny-glazed hand-wrought pottery. Persian rugs. Well-used Danish Deluxe armchairs. Giles Aubrey had once danced on the cutting edge.
A place for everything and everything in its place. The tea things were already laid out. ‘Shall I pour?’ he said. ‘Gingernut snap?’
I sat my cup on my knee, cleared my throat and waited. Confession, too, had its protocols.
‘The early seventies could have been a very good time for Victor Szabo,’ he began. ‘There was a growing appreciation of his work, thanks mainly to the popularity of the American photo-realists.’ He gave a resigned shrug. The cultural cringe must have been an occupational hazard in Aubrey’s line of work. ‘But Victor was a difficult man, a perfectionist, neurotic and unpredictable. And a drunkard. He’d work on a picture for months, then go on a bender and burn it. What he did produce was good work, but I was lucky if I could get three or four paintings a year out of him. I had him on a retainer, not uncommon in those days. A hundred dollars a week to cover his living costs and materials, recouped from his sales. Costing me a fortune, he was. He was renting an old farm house, up at Yarra Glen. It’s gone now, a housing development.’ He was meandering off.
‘Marcus?’ I said.
‘Turned up in mid ’72. Just twenty, he was. Victor was quite awful to him, denied ever knowing his mother, even though Marcus had pictures of them together. Denied he was the boy’s father, even though the resemblance was unmistakable. Marcus didn’t want anything, mind you, except to be an artist. He’d sought Victor out contrary to his mother’s wishes. I think he’d rather imagined himself as Victor’s protege. Brought his folios with him, laid them at his father’s feet. Quite competent he was too. Skilful, anyway. That appealed to Victor’s ego, I think. So he let Marcus stay on as a kind of unpaid slave. I’d go up there and find Victor raging around his studio with a paintbrush in one hand and a bottle in the other, Marcus on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor preparing his canvases for him. Marcus was there for nearly two years and his presence seemed to have a good effect. Victor didn’t drive, but Marcus had an old station wagon and every few months he’d turn up at my gallery in South Yarra with three or four pictures in the back. Never quite enough for a exhibition. I suppose I should have suspected something, but Victor had cost me so much money by then I just didn’t want to think about it.’
The tea had gone tepid. I glanced out the open door, cocked an ear to the river, heard no sound of the boys. Aubrey levered himself up and picked up his walking stick. ‘Perhaps the bunyip got ’em,’ he said.
Just beyond the vegetable garden, we stopped at the top of the track. The river was immediately below us, shallow over a gravel bottom. Red and Tarquin lay side by side, face-down on the pebble bottom, letting the water ripple over them. Their naked skin showed white against the dappled brown gravel.
Aubrey took in the sight with a sigh. ‘ Quam juvenale femur!’ he exclaimed.
My grip on the third declension had only ever been tenuous, but I got his drift. Old Giles was a leg man. ‘Your suspicions,’ I said. ‘When were they confirmed?’
‘When I arrived unannounced one day and found Victor passed out drunk and Marcus working in the studio. He admitted then that most of what he’d delivered in the preceding year hadn’t been Victor’s work at all, but his own. Victor had no idea what was going on. Marcus begged me not to tell him.’