‘I’ll pour you out a white.’
‘I’d prefer red.’
‘There you have it. Not going to sit on the fence after all.’ John tipped out a generous splash. ‘Our Shiraz Viognier, she’s a ripper, took out silver in the Adelaide show.’
A number of emptied glasses later, Lil crept up, apologising for having interrupted the tasting taking place. ‘Will you be staying for lunch, Bernard? I’ve set a place for you in the restaurant.’
‘Right, there’s a restaurant. I suppose I should have a try, get the full Tenterfield experience.’ He followed Lil down a hallway and around a bend and was caught off guard by an expanse of rolling green grapevines viewed through a wall of plate glass. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Shall I seat you near the view?’
‘I think you better.’
He ravished a scallop entree before ordering the cassoulet. Afterwards, he sat back, satiated, tapping out a tattoo on the tablecloth and eyeing the leather-bound dessert menu.
He was spooning up a pear tart tartin with persimmon custard when John dragged a chair over.
‘How was everything then?’
‘I’d have to say it was one of the best meals I’ve eaten. I’d be more than happy to recommend the place.’
‘You don’t say?’ John appeared embarrassed by the praise. ‘Good for you. Can I interest you in a coffee?’
‘Strong and black.’
The coffee arrived along with three small glasses and a bottle of cognac. John poured. ‘Not one of ours—this is from my own private stash. Lil should be joining us in a tick.’ He waited for his wife to arrive before detailing their vision for the estate’s little-known wine label, a vision that now included Bernard in their hopes to turn the winery and restaurant into a popular daytrip destination.
Bernard gestured at their impressive surroundings. ‘You appear to be doing all right.’
‘This wasn’t built from wine,’ John scoffed. ‘We made our money in ballooning. I got airsick one time and never recovered. I figured instead of looking at vineyards from the air all day I might try looking at them from the ground for a while.’
The sun was low in the sky when Bernard finally performed his leave-taking, out on the gravel drive with magpies warbling overhead. A young waiter appeared, bearing a wooden crate. John relieved him of the burden, resting the box on his knee as he opened Bernard’s back door and slid the crate onto the seat.
‘Just a little something to remember us by.’
Bernard followed the black strip of bitumen home, reliving the meal and relishing the prospect of further invites. The case of wine clinked merrily in the back seat. He watched a tree loom in front of the windscreen, feeling strangely light-headed as the car entered its trunk.
Bernard woke to a tapping at his window and looked up to see a face peering in at him.
‘You all right, mate?’
Two men from the power company drove him home. As their repair van pulled out from the verge, Bernard took a final glance back through the window; his Audi and the tree appeared locked in an embrace: the car nuzzled into its trunk, the tree bowing into the caress—it was eerily beautiful. A starfish crack crossed the Audi’s windscreen as though it had shut its eyes in anticipation of the cuddle.
The ACRU energy van dropped Bernard off outside his house. ‘Make sure you get seen by a doctor,’ the driver said.
‘Will do.’
The passenger appeared sceptical. ‘Someone at home in there? Maybe we should take you to Emergency?’
‘No, no, my wife’s home.’ Bernard slammed the van door. ‘Then again, you should probably stick around, I might need a ride to the hospital after she’s done with me.’
The joke appeared to satisfy his saviours. They chortled in agreement as the van executed a dicey U-turn and drove away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ruby and Angela spent three hectic days in Adelaide, a much-needed respite from oceanic scenery and charming coastal towns. They left the motor home at a hotel on the outskirts of the city and caught taxis in and out of the centre each day. They ate in overpriced bistros and gastropubs (‘I mean really,’ Ruby remarked, ‘which bright spark thought to add the prefix “gastro”?’), saw two crummy films, and went shopping in boutique clothing stores the likes of which Ruby normally never ventured into; she even managed to buy an item or two. Adrift in the labyrinth of a floodlit department store they happened to come upon a now obsolete music section. Angela had forgotten to bring any CDs with her. On the highway between Somewhere and Some Other Place she’d ejected Ruby’s Bee Gees disc and sent it skimming like a frisbee out through her window. ‘I couldn’t stand that effeminate caterwauling any longer.’
‘You might have just turned it off,’ Ruby had said stonily.
Aside from the now abolished Bee Gees, Ruby’s CD collection included the Beach Boys, the Carpenters, an Abba Best Of that Angela wouldn’t let her play, and a handful of other celebrated seventies and eighties pop groups—she’d never developed her own taste in music, preferring to accept the musical greats that the radio stations considered classic.
Angela’s stereo cabinet boasted Best Ofs of the classical variety: Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Schubert. They’d arrived by way of Patrick but Angela was proud to possess them (Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was the only tune Angela could place)—all the while nursing a secret penchant for Broadway musicals, particularly the lavish, unashamedly sentimental spectaculars by the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The alarm sounded as they passed through the sensors on the way out of the store, and Ruby looked around in bewilderment, unsure what to do. Angela manacled her forearm and pulled her through the electric doors. A hundred metres down the street, she retrieved two discs from her handbag.
Ruby took a moment to recover. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’
Angela tsked peevishly. ‘No one’s going to suspect a couple of old ducks like us.’
Ruby was baffled. It seemed so out of character for Angela. And her husband had owned a pharmacy for heaven’s sake—wasn’t there a retailers’ code of honour?
‘No one minds if you steal from the big corporations.’
Ruby was unconvinced. She kept glancing over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t being followed. ‘We might have been caught on camera. Our pictures might be posted up in the store. We might be featured on Crime Stoppers. We’ll never be able to come back to Adelaide—’ Hearing it said, though, she didn’t suppose it was any great loss.
‘Since when did you get so high and mighty? This entire holiday is being financed on the back of your pilfering.’
Ruby felt like she’d been struck. ‘There’s no comparison—’ People were beginning to turn and stare. ‘I paid for that picture fair and square.’
‘Fair and square. Highway robbery, more like it.’
A few weeks into her retirement, Ruby had taken the plunge and volunteered at a local op shop. The store was around the corner from where she lived and she occasionally popped in for an eggcup or a woolly hat. Faced with the terrifying prospect of spending her days at home, the idea of chatting with the other volunteers, serving customers and sorting through the donations, all in aid of charity, seemed like an ideal solution.
She hadn’t anticipated how dull the experience would turn out to be: sitting at the counter, inhaling noxious mothball fumes while listening to her coworkers debate the optimum price of a used teapot. She was flummoxed by the well-established pecking order of the place; for the majority of her working life she’d been left to her own devices, spared the worst of educational bureaucracy, only called on to attend the annual staff assembly and not the weekly Thursday meetings.
When Ruby arrived at the store one Tuesday morning intending to dress the dummies in the window she was stunned to be denied—Rosemary saw to the window display, it was her domain and no one else was to interfere. Just as pricing was Leslie’s role and customer relations was headed by Joan, who only came in once a week, meaning cus
tomers with any sort of query or complaint were told to come back Friday. Ruby was frustrated by the rigid folly of it all. Why shouldn’t she be allowed to swap a customer’s item for another, or put a price on a jacket that hadn’t yet been ticketed? It was typical spinsterish pig-headedness, and over time she could no longer stand to be complicit. Ruby took to spending her two days a week in the back room, sorting through the newly arrived stock—a grubby, menial task that required more energy than the other ladies were willing to expend.
Along with bagfuls of clothing, the op shop took in a small amount of furniture and general household goods. The volunteers were allowed to have first dibs at anything that came into the store, though it was expected they’d pay their gold coin along with everyone else—it was a charity after all. Ruby had managed to accrue a lovely dinner setting, a ceramic coffee pot, a couple of lamps and two wool skirts. Generally, the unwanted household lots were brought in by the harried offspring or near relations of the recently deceased—feeling it overly callous to dump their auntie’s prized possessions at the tip, they went second best and offloaded them at the nearest thrift store. Ruby assumed this was how she came to be in possession of the painting: some unsuspecting relative had simply loaded up the back of their station wagon and deposited it all at the shop’s back door.
In over four decades tending to sick children, Ruby had come to learn a thing or two about art. She’d read just about every book in the school library twice over and liked to keep a few on hand for her patients to flick through—having long grown weary of farmyard animals and bedtime stories, she resorted to art books, in the hope of kindling some creative urge in her charges. On the days when no pupils happened to fall ill or succumb to the deadly asphalt playground, Ruby would read the books for her own enjoyment. Being that the library was catering to the needs of primary-aged children, the school nurse couldn’t have told you a great deal about Postmodernism or Dadaism, but she’d grown to be something of an expert on early Australian art. Hence, when she extracted the oil painting from a box of other bits and bobs, its gilt frame badly scratched, she immediately thought she recognised the murky Impressionist water scene. Logically, Ruby assumed it must be a copy of a work from Fred Williams’s Billabong series, though certainly a fine reproduction. It was understandable that an uninformed person might see the painting as a bit of old junk, with thick strokes of purple and green, yellow daubs and squiggles. It would clash with their neutral modern décor.
Ruby put the painting aside with her name attached, waiting for Wednesday when Leslie came in and could put a price to it. On Monday morning she found a note waiting for her on the counter: Leslie thought she should pay ten dollars for the picture because the frame might be worth something. Ruby put the money into an envelope along with an extra two dollars for a scarf she wanted. She wrote her name on it and slipped it into the till. She hung the painting above her television where it prevented her from focusing on the screen, so drawn was she to its colour and depth. She was also plagued by its origins. Was it possible it might be the real thing? After consulting a book on Williams from her local library, she convinced herself there was a chance of it being original, despite not appearing within the pages of the book. She finally worked up the nerve to take it to a nearby framer, who offered her two hundred dollars for it. Ruby was chuffed at her windfall, but liked the picture too much to part with it.
Angela had been mortified to learn her neighbour would ever patronise, let alone volunteer at, a charity store. How could she bring herself to wear other people’s cast-offs? The notion of one man’s trash being another’s treasure was completely foreign to her—trash was simply trash. She asked if Ruby needed money. She was subsisting quite comfortably on Patrick’s small life insurance policy and what little superannuation he’d managed to accrue. Ruby assured her money had nothing to do with it—her public service pension enabled her to live within her means. She simply liked the idea of re-using things that still had plenty of life left in them. Angela dismissed the notion as nonsensical and henceforth made a habit of enquiring if Ruby’s possessions or clothing were rejects.
Over coffee one morning, reclining in Ruby’s floral lounge suite, Angela pointed to the painting hanging above the telly and proposed the owner should get a better frame. ‘It looks scruffy with all the gilt chipped away.’ Ruby confessed her suspicions regarding the artwork. Curiosity piqued, Angela urged her to take it to a professional dealer. Ruby was too embarrassed to explain how she came by it. Angela offered to lie on her behalf. They took the oil painting to one of the top auction houses in Melbourne, who held onto the picture in order to consult with their experts. They came back with a ballpark figure of around ninety to a hundred thousand.
It sold at auction for one hundred and thirty thousand, pleasantly surprising both dealer and seller alike. Ruby ceased volunteering at the op shop—and hoped an anonymous donation to the tune of ten thousand dollars might atone for her guilty windfall.
A young woman in an army jacket jostled Ruby in passing. ‘Sorry,’ Ruby said, before realising the girl had headphones covering her ears. She spun back to Angela. ‘You don’t seem to have any trouble living off the proceeds. Sorry,’ she grunted, having been jounced again.
‘That’s okay. No offence taken.’ Angela was staring into the middle distance. ‘You would look marvellous in that dress.’
Ruby turned to stare behind her. ‘Which dress? The green one? I could never get away with that.’
‘You’ve got the height to pull it off.’ Angela never complimented Ruby on anything but her stature.
The dress was a vibrant pea green, very fetching. Ruby dismissed her guilt and allowed Angela, who held a palm up to the oncoming pedestrians, to lead her by the wrist across the stream of foot traffic. Angela was as good as any sedative for her neighbour’s nerves. Ruby commonly worried about big-ticket issues like global warming and terrorism and whether Ballarat’s homeless were sleeping rough because she’d cashed in a painting. Angela suffered no such concerns. Her indifference was reassuring. Ruby only wished she could reciprocate. Her pragmatic response to Angela’s panic regarding a lost earring or a café being out of smoked salmon or a television series ending on a cliffhanger went largely ignored.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Izzy had cut her tongue prying clumps of masticated cereal out of her molars. For three days she’d been sneaking handfuls of Kellogg’s wholegrain confectionery (as her mum called it) from the box in the pantry. Mrs Bronson had bought the cereal as a treat. By the light of the louvred doors, Izzy examined the cartoon characters on the packaging—their euphoric expressions. Carol once told her she’d loved the Coco Pops monkey as a baby: ‘You’d laugh and laugh for as long as I could be bothered dancing the box up and down in front of your face.’
Mrs Bronson had taken Izzy in. She said, ‘Your mummy needs time to recuperate.’ Izzy wondered how much time her ‘mummy’ needed, and why, if her mum hated Mrs Bronson so much, she’d let her boss her around.
Izzy returned to her seat at the kitchen table, where she’d been cutting out pictures from Mrs Bronson’s Women’s Weekly. Her heart wasn’t in it. She used to think there was a chance she’d grow up to be like the shiny advertisement people. She saved their pictures with something akin to affection, as though one day she’d belong to their crowd. Now she felt like chopping their heads off. She knew that life was basically unfair. Some people were born lucky by being rich or beautiful, or both. Some people made their own luck by being really smart or good at something. It was horrible to think you might be among the plain unlucky.
Mrs Bronson swept in. Her eyes slid over the piles of paper cuttings, the colourful scraps and slivers that had made their way onto the floor. She thinned her lips and flared her nostrils, allowing just enough expression for Izzy to gather she’d done something wrong, before relaxing her face again. Izzy had seen this pained look quite a bit from Mrs Bronson over the last few days. Without having to be told, she carefully put down her scisso
rs (the last time, she’d tossed them aside and taken a chip out of the table and Mrs Bronson had stayed in her room all through Millionaire Hot Seat). Izzy began scrunching the cuttings into a ball, even the pictures she’d so painstakingly cut around. It all felt like rubbish to her now.
While Izzy was down on her knees, sweeping the shreds up off the floor, Trent clumped in, dragging out his favourite chair and dropping heavily into it. Mrs Bronson glanced at him from the pantry, where Izzy had noticed her lift and replace the Froot Loops box, measuring its weight.
Trent cleared his throat. ‘Starving,’ he grumbled.
‘There’s food in the fridge.’
‘Bloody newsflash that is.’ He lumbered to the counter and pawed open the breadbin. He tossed a loaf onto the table before taking cheese and ham from the fridge. ‘You want a sanger, Iz?’
Not one made by you.
Mrs Bronson told him, ‘We’ll be having dinner soon. I don’t want her spoiling her appetite.’
In the end, Trent didn’t bother with an actual sandwich, making do with cramming the individual ingredients into his mouth at once.
‘How long does she intend using that cabin?’
Trent’s response, muffled by a gob of wadded bread and cheese, was a garbled, ‘Dunno.’
‘I’ll be needing it when the school holidays come along. It’s superior to their old one. I’ve already had enquiries from some of our holiday regulars.’
‘What holiday regulars? Once is enough for most guests.’ He winked at Izzy.
‘Heaven knows what this will cost in the long run … people thinking we’re a fire risk.’
‘I’m sure you’ll feel much better about it all when the insurance cheque comes in.’
‘If it comes in.’ Mrs Bronson moved to the table to clean up after her son. She collected the transparent skins of his cheese slices, returned the lid to the butter, and attempted to gather up any remaining ham. Trent’s hand sprang out to stop her, relieving her of the plastic bag and pushing its pink contents into his mouth before handing back the empty sack. They grappled briefly over the bread, Trent managing to extract the uppermost crust before his mother swung it out of his reach, twisting the top shut with a brutal airtight knot. Trent enacted his revenge by wiping his hands clean on the ‘good’ tea towel—not the one used to dry dishes, but the display cloth hanging in a perfect rectangle from the oven handle.
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