‘And one of those pictures was Our Home?’
‘The best of them, by far.’
‘But you sold it to Max Karlin anyway.’
‘Karlin had already bought it. I should have told him, I know. But the subject matter, the execution, everything except its actual authorship was classic Victor Szabo. And I did insist that Marcus stop it. Even offered him his own exhibition. Embarrassing it was. Pretentious art-school abstract expressionism. The only thing that sold, I bought myself out of pity. Victor wouldn’t even come to the show. Soon afterwards they had a big blow-up and Victor turned him out. They never spoke again. Two years later I sold the gallery and retired.’
‘So you and Marcus Taylor were the only ones that knew that Our Home was a fake?’
Aubrey winced at the word. ‘As far as I know. I was afraid it would all come out at Victor’s death. The will was a bitter blow to Marcus, but when he didn’t say anything at the time, I put it to the back of my mind and it’s been there ever since.’
‘The will?’
‘Marcus harboured hopes that Victor would eventually acknowledge him in some way. But he didn’t even mention him. Not a word. Left everything to that Lambert woman. Marcus was devastated.’
What a depressing little saga. Father-and-son relationships are notoriously vexed, even at the best of times. This Victor Szabo sounded like a worst-case scenario. Marcus Taylor must have been lugging around enough psychological scar tissue to sink anybody, the poor prick. Fortunately, my own son had already won his Oedipal battle. Half of it anyway. I couldn’t vouch for his mother.
‘He was susceptible to women, Victor, and Fiona Lambert was scarcely a third of his age. Not that he had a lot to bequeath, just a few pictures and a growing reputation. But she made sure she milked that for all it was worth.’
‘The Black Widow.’
Aubrey snorted derisively. ‘Don’t believe a word of it. She made that up herself. Shameless self-promotion. Victor died of liver disease, the result of poor personal hygiene and a surfeit of cheap wine.’
I struggled to assimilate the significance of what Aubrey was telling me. The news that the CMA’s Szabo was not a Szabo at all was dynamite. It had the potential not merely to embarrass Fiona Lambert, the self-declared expert, but to expose to ridicule the competence of the government which had funded the purchase. ‘Legal proceedings are inevitable, I suppose,’ said the old man, wilting on his cane.
‘That’s not for me to say. May I suggest we keep this conversation confidential at this stage?’
He nodded penitently, as though receiving conditional absolution. There were other questions I should have asked Aubrey while I had the chance. But his tale of Taylor and Szabo had pricked my parental conscience. Down below, Red and Tarquin were swinging off an overhanging branch into dangerously shallow water. So I thanked Aubrey for his candour, assured him of my discretion and left the shrivelled old bird standing there, Tiberius among his tomatoes.
Shedding my clothes on the sandy bank, I hit the water running, scattering Red and Tarquin before me like startled cranes. Thigh-deep in mid-stream, I plunged to the bottom, luxuriating in the water’s cool embrace.
Was it really possible to drown yourself in water this deep? Could any sense of grievance, any urge to self-dramatisation, be strong enough to overcome the body’s fundamental instinct for survival? I kicked forward, propelling myself along the dappled gravel, holding my breath by sheer force of will. Could anyone really master that reflexive lunge for air that was propelling me so inexorably upwards? I broke the surface, scattering water, gasping.
No, Salina Fleet was wrong. Marcus Taylor hadn’t killed himself. His death was an accident. It just couldn’t have come at a better time, that’s all.
Forty kilometres downstream, the Yarra berthed oil tankers and container carriers in the biggest port south of Singapore. Closer to its source, at the height of summer, it was little more than a series of shallow pools strung out along a narrow bed that meandered through the low hills.
We went exploring. The banks rose steeply on either side, thick with pencil-straight stringybarks and scrubby undergrowth, punctured with granite outcrops. Giles Aubrey had no immediate neighbours and within minutes we might have been in some trackless wilderness. Here, in the eternal bush, man and boy could test their masculinity against the challenges of raw nature.
‘Ow,’ said Tarquin. ‘That tree scratched me.’
Pushing on intrepidly, we clambered over boulders and along bridges of fallen tree-trunks. ‘But aren’t there snakes?’ insisted Tarquin.
‘Keep your eyes open,’ I said, drawing on my inherent knowledge of bushcraft. Pioneer blood flowed in my veins. My father’s grandmother had once run a pub in Ballarat. ‘Make plenty of noise as you go.’ The advice was superfluous. If Tarquin managed to get himself bitten, it would be nothing short of miraculous.
‘What do you do if one bites you?’ Red wanted to know.
Snakes weren’t exactly my forte, not in the zoological sense anyway. But the habitat did seem custom-made- sun-warmed rocks, cracks and fissures everywhere, plentiful frogs and other creatures coming down to the water to drink. I owed it to the boys to pass on the time-honoured lore of the bush. ‘You have to get somebody to suck out the poison,’ I explained. ‘That’s the standard treatment. Except if you get bitten on the backside.’
‘What happens then?’ said Tarquin, apprehensively scrutinising the riverbank.
‘You put your head between your legs,’ said Red, racing me to the punch line. ‘And kiss your arse goodbye.’
Where a massive red gum overhung the water, I lingered in the shade and smoked a cigarette while the boys scouted ahead. A crystal stream bubbled at my feet. Dragonflies flitted hither and thither. The scent of eucalyptus perfumed the air. Kookaburras carolled distantly. Luxuriating in the tranquillity of the bush, I banished all thoughts of work-of Agnelli, of the press and Marcus Taylor, of Spider and the duplicate Szabo. I let my eyes close.
‘Help!’ came a scream from around the bend. ‘Come quick.’ Red. Not mucking around either, by the sound of it. It was black, thick as my wrist, coiled at Tarquin’s feet. Red was circling at a distance, stick in hand, bellowing for help. Tarquin stood frozen with fear. He must nearly have stood on the thing. ‘Don’t move,’ I yelled. ‘If you die, your mother will kill me.’
Grabbing the stick from Red’s hand, I lunged forward and smashed downwards at the repulsive black spiral. At the same time, I shoved Tarquin out of harm’s way. The snake bucked under the blow, bounced upwards and revealed itself to be the inner tube of a bike tyre.
‘Tricked ya!’ Red and I cackled simultaneously, high-fiving each other in the time-honoured Australian tradition.
‘My ankle,’ writhed Tarquin, prostrate on the ground. ‘You’ve broken my ankle.’
It took me nearly an hour to carry him back downstream and up the hill to the car, slung over my shoulder fireman-style. His foot wrapped tight in my shirt, he whimpered right up to the moment I lowered him onto the back seat. ‘Can we have an ice-cream on the way home?’ he said.
‘Shuddup, Tark,’ said Red. But he didn’t mean it. I suspected he was in on it all along.
It was well past eight when we arrived back in town. A note from Faye instructed us to proceed to the Exhibition Gardens, five minutes away, where a picnic awaited us. While the boys rummaged for frisbees and skateboards, I nicked home, changed into shorts and a t-shirt and put a bottle of pinot vino in a plastic carry-bag.
The shadows were lengthening as we walked to the gardens. The doors and windows of the houses had been flung open to admit the buttery dusk. Cooking smells and guitar riffs emerged, and the old Italian and Greek remnants of the former demographic had come outside to hose down their footpaths and sit fanning themselves on their minuscule front porches. Arms for Afghanistan, said the fading grafitti. Legs for Tito.