‘No, Maisie.’
‘Yes, dear. Now be a good boy, dear, and do as I say.’
You could see, I thought, why she’d been a good nurse. Swallow the medicine, dear, there’s a good boy. I didn’t like accepting her offer but the truth was that I would have had to borrow anyway.
‘Shall I paint your picture, Maisie, when I get back?’
‘That will do very nicely, dear.’
I pulled up outside the house near Heathrow whose attic was my home, and from where Maisie had picked me up that morning.
‘How do you stand all this noise, dear?’ she said, wincing as a huge jet climbed steeply overhead.
‘I concentrate on the cheap rent.’
She smiled, opening the crocodile handbag and producing her chequebook. She wrote out and gave me the slip of paper which was far more than enough for my journey.
‘If you’re so fussed, dear,’ she said across my protests, ‘you can give me back what you don’t spend.’ She gazed at me earnestly with grey-blue eyes. ‘You will be careful dear, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Maisie.’
‘Because of course, dear, you might turn out to be a nuisance to some really nasty people.’
I landed at Mascot airport at noon five days later, wheeling in over Sydney and seeing the harbour bridge and the opera house down below, looking like postcards.
Jik met me on the other side of Customs with a huge grin and a waving bottle of champagne.
‘Todd the sod,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ His voice soared easily over the din. ‘Come to paint Australia red!’
He slapped me on the back with an enthusiastic horny hand, not knowing his own strength. Jik Cassavetes, longtime friend, my opposite in almost everything.
Bearded, which I was not. Exuberant, noisy, extravagant, unpredictable; qualities I envied. Blue eyes and sun-blond hair. Muscles which left mine gasping. An outrageous way with girls. An abrasive tongue; and a wholehearted contempt for the things I painted.
We had met at Art School, drawn together by mutual truancy on racetrains. Jik compulsively went racing, but strictly to gamble, never to admire the contestants, and certainly not to paint them. Horse-painters, to him, were the lower orders. No serious artist, he frequently said, would be seen dead painting horses.
Jik’s paintings, mostly abstract, were the dark reverse of the bright mind: fruits of depression, full of despair at the hatred and pollution destroying the fair world.
Living with Jik was like a toboggan run, downhill, dangerous, and exhilarating. We’d spent the last two years at Art School sharing a studio flat and kicking each other out for passing girls. They would have chucked him out of school except for his prodigious talent, because he’d missed weeks in the summer for his other love, which was sailing.
I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.
He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.
‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’
He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreen wiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’
‘But you like it?’
‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’
‘And how’s business?’
‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’
‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’
‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.
‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’
‘To your brain? As in the old days?’
‘Those were pastimes.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’
‘Arson and murder, to date.’
‘Jesus.’
The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.
‘I live right out on the other side,’ Jik said. ‘God, that sounds banal. Suburban. What has become of me?’
‘Contentment oozing from every pore,’ I said smiling.
‘Yes. So O.K., for the first time in my life I’ve been actually happy. I dare say you’ll soon put that right.’
The car nosed on to the expressway, pointing towards the bridge.
‘If you look over your right shoulder,’ Jik said, ‘You’ll see the triumph of imagination over economics. Like the Concorde. Long live madness, it’s the only thing that gets us anywhere.’
I looked. It was the opera house, glimpsed, grey with rain.
‘Dead in the day,’ Jik said. ‘It’s a night bird. Fantastic’.
The great arch of the bridge rose above us, intricate as steel lace. ‘This is the only flat bit of road in Sydney,’ Jik said. We climbed again on the other side.
To our left, half-seen at first behind other familiar-looking high-rise blocks, but then revealed in its full glory, stood a huge shiny red-orange building, all its sides set with regular rows of large curve-cornered square windows of bronze-coloured glass.
Jik grinned. ‘The shape of the twenty-first century. Imagination and courage. I love this country.’
‘Where’s your natural pessimism?’
‘When the sun sets, those windows glow like gold.’ We left the gleaming monster behind. ‘It’s the water-board offices,’ Jik said sardonically. ‘The guy at the top moors his boat near mine.’
The road went up and down out of the city through close-packed rows of one-storey houses, whose roofs, from the air, had looked like a great red-squared carpet.
‘There’s one snag,’ Jik said. ‘Three weeks ago, I got married.’
The snag was living with him aboard his boat, which was moored among a colony of others near a headland he called The Spit: and you could see why, temporarily at least, the glooms of the world could take care of themselves.
She was not plain, but not beautiful. Oval-shaped face, mid-brown hair, so-so figure and a practical line in clothes. None of the style or instant vital butterfly quality of Regina. I found myself the critically inspected target of bright brown eyes which looked out with impact-making intelligence.
‘Sarah,’ Jik said. ‘Todd. Todd, Sarah.’
We said hi and did I have a good flight and yes I did. I gathered she would have preferred me to stay at home.
Jik’s thirty-foot ketch, which had set out from England as a cross between a studio and a chandler’s warehouse, now sported curtains, cushions, and a flowering plant. When Jik opened the champagne he poured it into shining tulip glasses, not plastic mugs.
‘By God,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’
Sarah toasted my advent politely, not sure that she agreed. I apologised for gatecrashing the honeymoon.
‘Nuts to that,’ Jik said, obviously meaning it. ‘Too much domestic bliss is bad for the soul.’