by Peter Temple
But it would be too late for me.
I woke up thinking about Lyall and determinedly switched thoughts to my daughter, Claire. She was pregnant to Eric, her Scandinavian fishing boat skipper. Before my recent visit, I hadn’t seen her for more than two years and, in full adult, barefoot, tropical bloom, she was shockingly different. She’d looked like my mother. My mother young and happy. I could not remember seeing my mother either young or happy, but I knew from the photographs that this was how she had looked. Claire was now very beautiful and my first sight of her had left me wrong-footed, unabled.
I had no guilt to carry in regard to Claire. Well, less guilt perhaps. It is all a matter of degree.
Her mother, my first wife, Frances, had left Claire’s place in Queensland only hours before I’d arrived. She was still married to the man she’d left me for long ago, a surgeon, thin and pinstriped Richard, and Claire had two half-siblings, boys I’d encountered three or four times a year while Claire was growing up. Richard was your normal medical specialist: straight As for maths and science, no personality that would show up on any test. Nevertheless, he’d clearly touched something in Frances when he’d operated to fix an old tennis injury. Soon after, she departed without warning from the conjugal dwelling, taking with her one-year-old Claire. The next day, Richard arrived at my old law office in Carlton.
‘Mr Wiggins to see you, Mr Irish,’ said the secretary.
He was as pink and clean as a newly bathed baby and wearing a suit worth more than I was making in a fortnight, gross. Primed to the eyebrows, hardly inside the door, he said, spitting it out, ‘I’m here to tell you I’m in love with Frances and plan to marry her when she’s free.’
I was late for court, looking for things. ‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘Now what Frances is that?’
He coughed. ‘Your, ah, wife. Frances.’
I said, ‘Right, that Frances. You plan to do what with her?’
‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I know this is a painful…’
‘Wiggins,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you her surgeon?’
Richard touched his razor-abrased chin. ‘I did first meet Frances as a patient, yes, but…’
‘Professional misconduct,’ I said. ‘I think your future lies in medical missionary work. Leper colonies, that kind of thing.’
His lips twitched. ‘Jack, I assure you that I have not in any way contravened—’
‘What’s your first name?’ I interrupted.
‘Richard.’ He saw hope, shot a cuff, put out a slim white-marble hand.
I ignored it. ‘Save the assurances for the disciplinary hearing, sunshine. Now, I’m busy, so see yourself out will you?’
He gathered his dignity, head to one side. ‘Unless the patient is the complainant, Jack, there really isn’t…’
I was putting papers into my briefcase. ‘Wiggy,’ I said, ‘you cut the flesh, I’ll do the legal argument. In case she turns out not worth sacrificing a career for, try the sister. Some of the blokes prefer her.’
Cruel. Cruel and unnecessary, but the wounded animal is without compunction.
On this chilly Melbourne morning, many years later, time having healed some wounds, put fragile scabs over others, inflicted new ones, I drove down Carrigan’s Lane, its sole streetlight making gleams on the bluestone gutter. It was still dark as I unlocked the side door to Taub’s Cabinetmaking, clicked on the lights, noted the bulbs gone: three. Charlie wouldn’t have fluorescent lighting and no day passed there without me risking my life up a ladder replacing incandescent bulbs.
The workshop was as Charlie had left it on the day he flew to Perth to attend the marriage of his youngest granddaughter to someone in the quarry business. His idea had been to be back inside twenty-four hours but he had been prevailed upon to spend ten days with another grandchild and his family.
Before he left, Charlie said to the workshop, not to me, ‘For what do I need a holiday?’
I was under a three-metre-long table, made of red cedar cut in northern New South Wales before World War One. Charlie bought the timber in 1962, wrote the date on it in pencil. I was examining the perfect fit of the wooden buttons that fixed the tabletop to the frame and would allow the timber to move seasonally for a few centuries until it stabilised.
‘You’ll probably never want to come back,’ I said. ‘It’s still warm. Hot. More than hot.’
He banged a huge fist on the tabletop directly above my head, causing me to feel that I was fainting.
‘Hot? You tell me what’s hot good for. One thing, you tell me.’
I crawled out, tympana still vibrating, got to my feet, braced myself against the table. ‘People go outside and do things, go to the beach, swim.’
Charlie made his pitying noise, a sort of snort enhanced with nasal sounds. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘They waste time. You think Mozart went to the beach? You hear that Liszt was a lot of the time swimming? What use is swimming, anyway?’
‘It keeps you from drowning,’ I said. ‘In deep water.’
He rolled his cheroot between thumb and two fingers, puffed at it, shook his head in a worried way. ‘Jack, Jack,’ he said, ‘don’t go in the deep water, how can you drown? What use is swimming then?’
‘I need some time on that,’ I said. ‘What do I do while you’re away?’
He turned away, walked off towards his machines to touch them goodbye, said over his shoulder, ‘Pack up and deliver the library, the lady’s waiting.’
I followed him. ‘Me? Are you mad? Mrs Purbrick’s paying a fortune for Charlie Taub.’
‘I told you already, Charlie Taub the woman got. You put a couple screws in the wall, that’s it. When I come back, I check.’
‘Charlie, that’s not a good idea. I could ruin your reputation.’
He wound the blade of a table saw up, wound it down, an action serving no purpose. ‘So ruin,’ he said, subject closed. He turned his head in my direction. A new subject. ‘The one with the horsetail, you know?’
I knew. The property developer who’d turned the old chutney factory in Carrigan’s Lane into four desirable inner-city New York-style loft apartments, lifestyle choice plus once-in-a-lifetime blue-chip investment opportunity not to miss.
‘I know,’ I said, with an icepick in my heart.
‘Six hundred thousand dollars.’ Charlie pointed around the space.
‘An offer?’
‘From the agent. Clive, Clive somebody.’
‘Clive Miller,’ I said. The repulsive Clive, gone on from accepting fellatio in lieu of rent and from dudding poor tenants out of their rental bonds to sitting on boards and living in the best part of Kew. Clive Miller embodied the recent history of Fitzroy.
‘That one. Nine hundred pounds I paid. One hundred and fifty cash down, five quid a week.’
‘So?’ I said.
Charlie straightened, ran a hand the size of an oven glove over the burnished surface of the cabinet, tested the stability of the fence.
‘So?’ I repeated, wanting to know, at that moment.
‘So?’ Charlie said. ‘So?’
‘Are you selling?’
‘Selling?’ The large head turned around, eyes under thatch bundles regarded me. ‘My workshop? So I can go to Perth and learn to swim? So I don’t drown?’
‘Just asking,’ I said, trying as nonchalantly as possible to get oxygen to my gasping little lung sacs.
Now I walked around the workshop, touched a few machines, just to comfort them, spent five minutes studying Mrs Purbrick’s library. It was pure Charlie Taub: classical elements – pilasters, mouldings, cornices – but pared of all showiness. The eye was drawn first to the beauty of the wood, then to the perfect balance of the design, its understatement and severity, and then, perhaps, to the craft of the joiner.
The ensemble, missing only its top and bottom trimmings, stood assembled in a corner of the workshop. It had been sanded, grain-sealed, shellacked and polished by Charlie’s finishing man, the voluble Arthur McKinley, retired coffin-maker. That
work had taken six weeks. To reach the stage where the finishing could begin had taken a mere eight months because Charlie had set aside three days a week for the library. Progress might have been even faster had he had someone other than me to assist him. But speed had never been a concern for Charlie. He didn’t hear clients’ questions about how long a job would take.
Once, in the early days, entrusted with a small table, anxious about my progress, I asked, ‘When does this have to be finished?’
Charlie had been rough-planing an 18-inch walnut board with a block plane, working at an angle to the grain to avoid tear-out. The thick plane steel, sixty years old at least, honed and strapped, could clean shave a Gulf Country feral pig. With each stroke, long translucent shavings whispered through the plane’s throat, bending back with the grace of a ballerina’s arm.
‘When it’s finished,’ he said, ‘that’s when.’
I went to the storeroom at the back and got out the packing blankets, World War Two army blankets Charlie had bought in the 1950s. Then I disassembled the library. There was not a screw in it; secret wooden locking wedges held it together. By 8.30 a.m., I’d finished wrapping and taping the pieces. I was waiting for the water to boil and thinking about my anchovy-paste sandwich when I heard the vehicle outside.
Cam was in his stockbroker gear – chalk-striped charcoal suit, blue shirt, silk jacquard tie – and carrying a dark-blue cardboard box. He put it on the steel trolley Charlie used as a table.
‘Breakfast,’ he said and opened the box. ‘Scrambled eggs and barbecued pork New Orleans style on Greek bread. Coffee. Blue Mountain.’
Fusion cooking was completely out of control. What chance did an anchovy-paste sandwich and a cup of tea stand? We got going, sitting on the chairs Charlie had rescued from a skip. The pork melted in the mouth, the scrambled eggs had a faint mustard and cream taste.
‘Southern barbecued pork? Greek bread?’
‘Good?’
‘That’s not strong enough. Who’s the cook?’
‘Greek bloke in Brunswick, used to live in New Orleans. He’s got a brick oven out the back, looks like a rocket ship. Fat rocket ship. Little pig’s in about eight at night, comes from his brother in the bush, the neighbour comes off shift at 4 a.m., checks it. Bit of bastin. Ready at seven.’
‘Write down the address.’
He nodded, looked at me reflectively, tongue running over his upper teeth. ‘Talked to Cyn again. She’s gettin better, not so vague now.’
‘That’s good.’
We chewed in silence.
‘The one, he’s got a tatt down the middle finger. Right hand.’
‘What kind?’
‘The Saint.’
‘No, don’t say that.’ The stick figure with the halo was St Kilda’s emblem.
‘She says she was at the stove, it came to her. The head and the halo. Halo bigger than the head.’
I took the cap off the coffee cup.
‘Can’t drink it without sugar. Needs sugar,’ said Cam.
‘No.’ I sipped. This was coffee, Harry Palmer coffee, sugar ruined it. ‘That’s it?’
‘No. Ring each side she thinks, gold.’
‘She should go back to the jacks.’
Cam opened his coffee, added sugar from two little paper bags, stirred with the plastic implement, tasted. ‘She’s not happy to do that.’
Our eyes conversed. I said, ‘Yes. Leave it with me. It’s an exceedingly long shot and I’ve exhausted my welcome. But.’
He nodded, not looking at me, eyes on his coffee. ‘Can’t find any other way.’
‘The vehicle,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about the vehicle.’
‘The vehicle?’
‘From a carpark.’
‘A carpark.’ Cam looked up, into the distance, turned the eyes on me, yellow eyes, the sinews bracketing his mouth showing. Nothing more to be said.
‘Do the tatt,’ he said, ‘then we’ll do the carpark.’
‘This breakfast, I owe you.’
‘Dinner. Owe me dinner.’
When he’d gone I made a call about the tattoo. The man at the other end groaned.
‘Jesus, fuck,’ he said. ‘Use the phone book.’
‘Robbery with violence, maybe serious assault. Not inside on February 20.’
‘Use half the phone book. Tomorrow it’ll have to be. Six-thirty.’
‘Not fucking bad,’ said the driver.
It was 10.40 a.m. and we were in the furniture van outside the wrought-iron double gates of Mrs Purbrick’s neo-Georgian mansion in Kooyong. The greasy rain on Punt Road had turned to a soft, clean mist here, further testimony to the preferential treatment handed out to the extremely rich.
The driver’s name was Boz and she was a film grip, an occupation whose essence, as I understood it, was the moving of things. When not gripping films, she used this skill to cart stuff around in her vintage van. I’d met her through Kelvin McCoy, a conman artist and former client of mine who leased the building across the street from my office. Boz transported McCoy’s appalling creations to his gallery in the city. He had not been receptive to my suggestion that, on these missions, the Boz vehicle should display a Hazardous Waste sign.
‘There’s a side door,’ I said. ‘Just beyond, it’s probably best.’ I’d hired her for the day; one person couldn’t move the library bits around.
I got out and pressed the button in the wall, could have smoked a full cigarette before David, Mrs Purbrick’s personal assistant, came down the gravelled driveway. His hair was wet and he bore the telltale signs of someone not long vertical.
‘My dear Jack,’ he said. ‘Apologies in full. I was on the phone, dealing with this most dreadful rug trader. Can you believe the man’s tried the old switcheroo on us?’
‘The switcheroo? That’s impertinent,’ I said.
‘My word.’ He held up a key. ‘I have to unlock these now. It turns out all the high-tech electronic rubbish can’t keep out a 12-year-old armed with an old remote control. So much for maximum security.’
The gates swung open on silent hinges. Boz drove in and lined up the truck with the side steps to within a centimetre.
She got out, broken-nosed, six foot two, near-shaven-headed, a woman in khaki bib-and-braces overalls and a white sleeveless tee-shirt.
I introduced her to David.
‘I can see you work out,’ he said admiringly.
‘Work out?’ said Boz. ‘Work out shit, I’m a manual labourer.’
David was suitably taken aback. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’
It took us half an hour to move the pieces of the library into its home, an empty room with deep windows looking onto the side garden.
Then the real work began.
We started with the plinths, six of them. Their fit was snug but allowed for wood movement. More important were the levels. I worked my way around the room with a long spirit level and a box of maple shims. Fortunately, the floor was true; only three thin shims needed.
Next came the base cupboards, fixed to the plinths with Charlie’s hidden locking wedges. Then we put the shelf cabinets on the bases, again fixing them with secret wedges. As instructed, I screwed each cabinet to the wall with two screws that went through prepared slots. Then I slid into place the decorative cover strips that hid the expansion gaps. Finally, I attached the cornices and the skirtings.
The room was transformed. Boz and I stood looking at it. We’d worked well together, said little as we turned a bare room into a library: woodwork softly glowing, bevelled glass catching the light. With books, a library table, a few chairs, the room would be complete.
‘You blokes know what you’re doing,’ said Boz. ‘It’s beautiful. Best thing I ever carted.’
‘Did your bit,’ I said.
I walked around, tested a few locks, opened and closed a few doors and drawers, admired the fit, even admired my hand-cut dovetail joints and raised panels. This piece of furniture would be giving pleas
ure long after everyone alive on this day was gone, I thought. It was not a bad thing to have helped create.
A voice said, ‘Oh my God, I’m dreaming. Heaven, this room is absolute heaven.’
Mrs Purbrick, owner of the house, danced into the room, head thrown back, came around me, pirouetted with arms above her head, finished leaning back against me. It would have been girlish had not Mrs Purbrick’s girlhood been somewhere in the early 1960s. She was a short blonde with a formidable bosom, all of her lifted, tucked, sucked, puffed, abraded, peeled, implanted, stripped and buffed, and, today, packaged in a short-skirted dark-grey business suit.
‘Mr Taub will check the installation when he gets back,’ I said. ‘This is Boz Bylsma, who did the hard work today.’
Mrs Purbrick was walking around the room touching the woodwork. Her eyes flicked to Boz, summed her up, nodded. She stopped, put her head back and shouted, ‘Daaviid.’
David appeared. He had clearly been waiting in the passage. He looked around the room. ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Quite marvellous. In exquisite taste.’ He tugged at an earlobe. ‘An island of good taste.’
Mrs Purbrick fixed him with her gaze. ‘I want the books in by the end of tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Is that clear, darling?’
‘Clear? What could be clearer? Any preferences? Leatherbound Mills & Boon? Collected works of Danielle Steel? I believe there’s a special on Jeffrey Archer.’
‘Use your exquisite taste,’ Mrs Purbrick said. With difficulty, she raised her eyebrows and showed her top teeth. The teeth were perfect. Some cosmetic dentist probably lay warm and slack beside a pool in Tuscany on the proceeds of that achievement.
‘How I wish that that were a standing instruction,’ said David, not quite tossing his head.
Mrs Purbrick tried to narrow her eyes at him. ‘On your way, you dear little man.’
‘Well, that’s it from us,’ I said. ‘On behalf of Mr Taub, I wish you well to use this library.’
Mrs Purbrick came over to me, came close, the torpedoes prodding my bottom ribs, put a short-fingered hand on my cheek. ‘You are so old-fashioned and courteous, I can’t believe men like you still exist.’
