White Dog (9 page)

On the way back, I passed a woman retching dryly, and, in the alley, two boys grabbing and snarling, both pale and pinched, chapped lips and flaking skin, noses leaking.

It was after eight, I was home, behind the label of the Maglieri, deep in a melancholy reverie, not listening to Abdullah Ibrahim, once Dollar Brand, when the bell rang. I went down the narrow and dangerous staircase, more perilous now, and opened the door with caution.

A big man in dirty jeans and T-shirt, no hair to speak of, a beard or a painful shave coming on.

‘G’day, mate,’ he said.

‘Len,’ I said. We shook hands. I always expected to come away with splinters in my fingers.

‘Time again,’ he said. ‘Christ knows why you buggers need fires.’

Melbourne cold was a joke to Len. He was from beyond Avoca, Melbourne was like Bali to people from beyond Avoca.

The old Ford truck was backed in, wheels against the kerb, ready to unload the last two cubes of redgum, dry, split small. It came in autumn and in mid-winter, heavily discounted courtesy of a horse owner for whom Harry Strang had managed a sizeable coup.

I sat on the stairs and watched Len and his offsider, a silent ginger youth, unload and stack in the recess beneath me. We talked football. There was no point in trying to help. These were pros, you got in their way. When they were finished, Len said, ‘The boss says thirty bucks will be fine.’

Money paid, thanks said, hands shaken, I was halfway up the stairs when the phone began to ring. I made haste.

‘A shortness of breath?’ said Drew. ‘Is this a bad time? Or is awkward the word?’

‘Just getting wood,’ I said. ‘Downstairs.’

‘My instinct confirmed. I’ll be brief. The party’s father wants words, contacted me directly. From my position, that’s … what is the word?’

‘Awkward,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Ever the slotter of the black ball. I’d prefer to take instructions from the client. Perhaps my associate could call on him.’

‘In the billable universe, anything is possible,’ I said. ‘Is this part of my Cyril employment?’

‘It is. There’s no reason to speak of that to the client. Ten tomorrow at the Macedon estate?’

I thought of humming up the Calder Highway in the Alfa. Perhaps the day would be sunny. ‘Directions? Or will any forelock-tugging rustic in the vicinity be able to direct me?’

I went back to the kitchen. More wine needed. What to eat was also a question becoming urgent. Left over was a complete sausage and another biggish bit, just under half. Also a lot of mustard mash. How can you eat the same food two nights running? I tried a spoonful of the mash. How can you not?

I put the mash on to warm up, plus a bit of milk, sliced the cold sausage into thick coins and added them. Peas wouldn’t hurt. I microwaved the last of the tiny frozen peas with some butter, leant against the sink, rolling the Maglieri in the mouth. A balanced meal coming up, all major food groups represented: the dead animal group, the lumpish underground vegetable group, the things hiding in pods group, pungent seeds group, fat cows group. Preceded and accompanied by the fermented grapes group.

I ate while watching television and reading the
Age
. The eating was the best part. Bed and book. To hell with Istanbul and knowing too much, I attempted something else, bought on the title,
Greek Kissing
. It was about two English families holidaying together on the island of Leros. An Australian artist was introduced at the end of the first chapter. Soon after, I slipped back into my gloomy trance, sightless eyes on the ceiling, endless running of negative thoughts, just registering the sound of the city, a low wet thunder spiked with shriek and squeal and shot and slam.

Sir Colin Longmore came out of the rose garden, tall and gaunt, big-nosed, like General de Gaulle in stooped old age at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. A dog, a spaniel, sagging like a sofa, followed.

‘Jack Irish,’ I said.

He walked across the terrace, pulling off a gardening glove finger by finger, and put out a hand.

‘Longmore,’ he said. ‘Good of you to come.’

‘My pleasure.’ I said. His hand felt more like that of a brickie than of the man who owned the brickworks, passed down the generations from Ronald Calway Longmore, mine-owner, grazier, land speculator, founder of Longmore Brick and Tile, whose products built a lot of nineteenth-century Melbourne.

‘Irish,’ he said. ‘Not a name you hear a lot. Had an Irish work here before the war.’

I felt a stiffening in the neck and shoulders, deliberately turned to look at the massive house with its turreted roofs, gables and battlements, mullioned windows, rusticated brickwork and stone quoins. ‘I imagine you had most of Melbourne work here at one time or another,’ I said.

He studied me, old bird eyes under sloping grey thatch, he’d taken my meaning. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

I followed him across the rose-brick terrace, down three steps and through an archway of entwined creepers. A gravel path at least a hundred and fifty metres long stretched out between close-planted poplars, yellow leaves hanging on. The eye went to the end, to a stone archway with two iron gates.

We walked side by side, crunching the gravel. His brogues needed polishing, they were cracked over the little toes.

‘I remember these poplars going in,’ he said. ‘We grew them in the tree nursery. We had that then. Associate. What’s that mean?’

It took a second to adjust. ‘I used to be Andrew Greer’s partner. Now we sometimes work together.’

Longmore didn’t respond, a raised eyebrow. I offered nothing.

‘What’s your role in this?’ he said.

‘To help prepare Sarah’s defence.’

‘Defence? Had the gun, she tells me.’

‘Gave it back, I understand.’

He sniffed. ‘Defence’ll need a QC. Team of QCs.’

‘Andrew impressed that upon her. She doesn’t want one.’

Behind us, the spaniel farted, a drawn-out emission.

‘Fire in your own time,’ said Longmore.

We walked.

‘Bad business,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

The poplars’ branches were woven. We were in a sky-roofed tunnel. Colin Longmore stopped. I stopped. He dipped into his jerkin pocket, came out with a stubby pipe, a short-stemmed piece of plumbing for burning tobacco outdoors, a decent hat brim would shelter it from the rain.

I couldn’t remember when last I’d seen anyone smoke a pipe.

Longmore found a lighter, a Dunhill, flared on the sides like a Chevrolet of the 1950s, an item from the golden age of smoking. The lighter flamed. He applied the flame to the bowl, sucking like a calf on a teat.

We walked down the crackling path. A cold day, autumn on the north slope of the hill of Macedon. The hill had early provided Melbourne’s rich with relief from the town in its septic delta, the rivers fouled with tallow and tannin and excrement, the air sallow from the smoke of mills and foundries and smelling of the steam of tanneries and tobacco factories. The Dandenongs, the other hills, the hillocks, were an alternative but the properly rich favoured Macedon. England was home and every kind of European tree their gardeners planted thrived at Macedon – oak, elm, plane, ash, chestnut, holly, medlar, quince, crab apple, linden, hornbeam, hazel, birch, beech, box – box clipped into hedges and box allowed to be trees. It was also the case that you couldn’t get trees to produce their best autumn display in the Dandenongs, the sea was too close, there was a humidity. You needed a crueller climate, one that would make the sugar in the maple and liquidambar leaves turn to fire, convert it to blood in the perfectly heart-shaped leaves of the katsura.

‘A difficult woman, Sarah,’ said Longmore. ‘She was an impossible girl. Nothing like it in her mother. Sweetest nature, her mother.’

‘Impossible how?’ I said.

He seemed not to hear me, walked shaking his head. Then he said, ‘She’s been in trouble. I suppose she’s told you that.’

‘Not the details.’

‘Terrible temper, even when she was little, nine, ten. Then one day she had this … well, not a temper, it’s a madness, a fit. We had her seen by the psychiatrists. Professor Whatsis-name, Bently, Benleigh, something like that, at the university, supposed to be an expert – they’re all supposed to be experts, charlatans, wouldn’t have a clue. Dreams, bloody nonsense, looking for something to blame. Bred in the marrow, that’s what it is. Her mother’s brother had it too.’

The spaniel came between us, speeding, galvanised for a few dozen paces. Then it stopped and started again, plodding.

‘What happened?’ I said.

Longmore looked at me.

‘When she was in trouble.’

Silence. There was something calming about being confined by tall trees, walking down a narrow path towards a gateway that could be an exit or an entrance to some other confinement.

‘Well, they were living like pigs,’ said Longmore. ‘Take that back, I’ve got some regard for pigs. We had pigs here once, my father thought it would be nice to grow your own bacon, ham, that sort of thing. Not at all dirty, pigs. Humans make them dirty. Bugger up everything, humans, a disgrace, don’t deserve the planet.’

We were nearing the end of the allée. A building could now be seen through the wrought-iron gates, a small two-storey stone building with its steep roof sheathed in copper that was green with verdigris. It stood at the centre of a brick-paved square, perhaps an acre in area, bordered by high clipped hedges. Around it was a narrow moat, stone-edged, brimming with dark water.

‘Lovely little thing, isn’t it?’ said Longmore. ‘Come down here every day, twice in summer.’ He coughed. ‘Just as well, given the limited number of summers left.’

It was a lovely thing, not little but small, perfectly proportioned, with bluestone foundations, walls of dressed sandstone, and sills and arches of granite. It would stand unchanged and beautiful when everyone now alive was dead and forgotten.

We crossed the moat by a short iron bridge. Longmore opened the front door and saw me in: one big square room, the floor of polished pink stone, the slabs butted so tight, the cutting so clean that in places no edges could be seen. In the centre of the room, surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped bench, a mahogany staircase rose in a tight spiral. I walked to one of the narrow gothic-arched windows on the west wall. A shallow alcove between the windows held a stone cup full of wax. A wick had burnt to the bottom and died.

‘Peaceful place,’ said Longmore. He was standing at the single back window, hands in his pockets.

I joined him. We were looking directly at a long stone rill that fed the moat, a dark line drawn across the paving to the hedge.

‘My mother designed this,’ he said. ‘When she was little, Sarah used to sit upstairs for hours reading. You never think at that age they’ll ever bring you pain.’

‘The trouble Sarah was in,’ I said.

‘They had to take the chap to hospital. Head injuries, collarbone broken, they said he was like someone who’d been in a motor accident.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Damn near killed him. They’d been taking drugs. He said she gave him no warning. Broke a bottle over his head. Full bottle of wine. Hit him with other things.’

Longmore had a coughing bout, recovered. ‘Her mother was always nervous after that if the phone rang, couldn’t answer the telephone.’

I gave up on the victim’s identity. ‘How old was Sarah then?’

He eyed his pipe bowl without pleasure. ‘About eighteen,’ he said. ‘Walked out on school when she was sixteen. We were in the Toorak house. The school was delighted, I can tell you.’

‘She was living at home when it happened?’

‘No. She’d cleared off, met this crowd in Fitzroy, they called themselves artists, just smeared paint around like babies, took drugs. Of course, the public galleries bought the rubbish, they weren’t actually after paintings. Young bum, that’s what they were buying. Taxpayer-subsidised sodomites.’

The spaniel plodded around the corner. It walked to the rill, looked at it hopelessly, turned and looked at us, head on one side, sad. Then it sat down, a slow going down, always looking at us, a sinking of an old bum.

‘Won’t cross the bridge,’ said Longmore. ‘Doesn’t like bridges. A bit like me.’

‘He was one of the artists?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘The man Sarah attacked.’

‘Oh. Hopeless bugger, not an ounce of talent. Gary Webber. I could have understood beating him up on aesthetic grounds.’

He got out the lighter and applied it to the pipe, sucking, sucking, his eyes on the bowl. Then they turned on me, thoughtful.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes, the point of this.’

I followed him out of the front door, the only door. He turned right and we went around the building, inside the moat. On the north flank, the dog side, he stopped and pointed at the wall below the window.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s the point.’

He moved on, gave me room. I bent and looked. On a bluestone foundation block, a thin strip was polished to tombstone smoothness. Letters and numbers were chiselled into it. Unless pointed out, you would not notice the inscription. It said:

J. I. Irish. AD 1936.

‘Built this,’ said Longmore. ‘Six of them on the job for the masonry, he was the master. I came here every day, got here early, before them most days, stayed all day. I brought my own sandwiches, tried to help. Got in the way, I suppose. They were rough the young ones, said things I didn’t understand until years later. Still, they tolerated me.’

‘The employer’s son,’ I said and regretted it.

He didn’t look at me, chewed his pipe stem. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Be a fool not to consider that. Anyway, they were kind to me and I was happy.’

The spaniel barked at us, aggrieved, cut off from his friend by a border he could not cross.

We walked around the building.

‘Always happiest here,’ said Longmore. ‘We had all the summer holidays here, my mother and I. My father came up sometimes. She didn’t like the sea, not a sea person. Nor am I.’

‘Do you remember him?’ I said.

‘My father?’

‘No. The stonemason.’

Longmore took the blunt elbow joint out of his mouth. ‘There’s a photograph my mother took,’ he said. ‘A big man. Big shoulders, big hands.’