There were books, that was the first surprise. Some, mostly those that had lost their spines, were picture books. A pasteboard edition of Grimm. A malkin puss in boots with graffito, abstract, as the police in Paris say. There were also notebooks bound together in a decaying rubber band. Under them locked together in a tangle of stiff limbs, a stuffed doll with a hard head, and hard hands, and hard little shoes, and a filthy rubber ducky, and a tiny phonograph, and some heavy contraptions made of a kind of metallic alloy, one of which turned out to be a man dancing with a pig, and one a sedan chair whose passenger was pulling on the ponytail of a Chinese porter as on a pair of reins, and one was a bust of a minstrel figure dressed in a blue suit and a red bow tie. Its arm, hand turned palm out before its belly, was a weighted mechanism. I pressed it with my finger and it swung up to its open mouth, its eyeballs rolling back in its head.
Eliza giggled.
It wants a penny. We can’t sell that I said. Why not, she said. Someone will buy it.
The rubber band had congealed to the surface of the notebooks and it crumbled away over the embrasures where the bloated leaves puckered together like the ripple marks on the rock platforms at Collaroy. Having never before seen a sample of Dodge’s handwriting with the chance to tend to deasil, I found the apparently puerile scrawl impossible to date. We set about studying them. Hurry up and get this over with. There were four notebooks, all bound in thick cardboard with a piece of stuff like gauze along the spine. Two were simply cryptic, covered in what appeared to be a nosediving kind of shorthand but whose crabbed or porpoised coils may have been no more than what the social services would call echopraxic. One had been written on for the first two and a half pages only. What seemed at first to be tables were in fact six diary entries, in different ink, but since there were no dates we couldn’t tell whether they had been made days or months or some other period apart, or sporadically, over wide gaps, or all on the same day. The content was not helpful. Cloudy, with some scattered showers on the seaboard, otherwise mostly mild for the present. Still a tendency to morning coastal fogs. Impure thoughts. Lost a tooth. The last pit of tears turned out to be a phone and address book.
Here look at this said Eliza. She pointed to an entry that barely read ralph Siv 977 8218 will buy beefwood. What do you think of that. Would you know beefwood if you saw it.
I wouldn’t.
Naturally Eliza thought it would be worth looking in the dining room. But the dining room furniture is all maple.
All of it.
It’s a set.
To simplify, the same idea came to us at once. Back in the living room we went over to the bookcase. It was a composite piece. Eliza pulled on an empty draw at random. That’s easy, she said and sniffed. Cedar.
And you know what that is I said tapping the reddish side panel.
Yes.
But the rest. I don’t know. The key to the oval windowed doors was in the lock. If Eliza had been hoping to crack it she was gracious, allowing me to open them and together we removed the things that had been arranged inside. Aside from the framed photograph there was a long legged person getting swept by the wind in bronze that was far too big for the low shelf, a few porcelain ladies and a hairy faced beer mug and a spoon from Government House. We laid them out in a row on the sofa and I got a torch from the kitchen to see if I could show up an inscription, the traces of a stamp, but there was nothing. Eliza pulled open the top drawer and felt blindly along the walls. Here, she said, I think, and took it all the way out onto the carpet. She pointed to a patch of yellow paper disintegrating at the edges and covered with an angular, old fashioned script. By an impurely formal logic the ragged arc where the bottom right hand corner of the label had been torn away led our eyes to the last finished word
King. &so remain
family it is
Beefwood
Bingo.
Too easy.
Eliza shook her head appreciatively. This is real she said. This could be worth something. Nonetheless we put off making the phone call. Nothing happened. We were living on domes of silence. Another rent notice arrived before we took up the address book again. Albert was obviously not in a hurry to take possession (why) but by then our funds were getting low and there wanted less than a week before the notice on our application for letters ran out and we weren’t sure who might start trying to get in contact after that. We had no fear of creditors but there are others. Our level of comfort was also beginning to decline. We were far into the more obscure end of the silver and most of the food had gone rotten. Fancy clothes are no good if you have to eat the lingering pickle. Eliza had put the books without spines in the bathroom. Time had caressed us, as brief and personally riotous as it had been. The welcome had been overstayed, we were being coaxed out.
She thought I should be the one to make the call. I carried the phone from the dresser and put it on the dining table while she recovered the entry for Siv. And if the eights are threes. We can try it again, in different combinations.
I got an answer straight off. I said I was calling about the Beefwood bookcase.
Dodge Rose is selling?
The situation was explained. There was a long pause. He didn’t think he was in a position. He said, he would call back. Perhaps, in the meantime, we could send him some photographs.
Do you think it’s a bargaining technique. We couldn’t afford to wait. We decided to take the bookcase to him. The postal address he’d provided was in Manly. We would catch a ferry.
The next day we took the bookcase in the shopping trolley down on to Macleay Street. After wrapping it in a spare blanket the fit was perfect. For the route we decided to take in Cowper Wharf, the Art Gallery, the Domain, Spring Bent Street, then Loftus to the Quay. That should satisfy the local historians in me. It’s not like I don’t owe it to them. Eliza did the lateral steering and I pushed. We almost ran up the back of a Phoenix but had no serious trouble otherwise. It was good to be out. The controller in the ticket booth at the wharf made us buy three tickets then opened the service gate so we didn’t have to haul over the turnstile. At the end of the platform a man wearing an uncommonly dusty pair of aviator glasses turned his back on us to wait. We sat in the shade of the Freshwater, a hand each on a rickety wheel, rocked on the low waves. The smell of guano and brine was like a purgative, I mean a pick me up. No hang on I do mean the other one. I leant over the edge and watched the seaweed swell and contract around the pillars in the deep green water. Objects beneath the surface are not where they appear. They aren’t there at all. Eliza scrubbed her latterly strawberries and cream then rancid cheeks ecstatically. It’s nice down here. She started laying out plans for moving the rest of the furniture, offered to push from now on. What we ought to do, she said, was get someone to value it anyway. Yes, initiative, that’s what we needed again. The situation was not so dire. After all we had nothing to lose. What a beautiful day. A bar of sunlight had fallen between the ferry and the platform roof and began slanting in on us, warming through the chill breeze. I thought about unlacing my pumps. It was complicated. I might not have time.