‘There you are,’ Jik said. ‘Such a pity you can’t paint.’
‘Thanks very much.’
We reached the restaurant and ate a meal of such excellence that one wondered at the organisation it took to bring every item of food and clothing and everyday life to an expanding town of thirteen and a half thousand inhabitants surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction.
‘It was started here, a hundred years ago, as a relay station for sending cables across Australia,’ Sarah said. ‘And now they’re bouncing messages off the stars.’
Jik said, ‘Bet the messages aren’t worth the technology. Think of ‘See you Friday, Ethel’, chattering round the eternal spheres.’
With instructions from the restaurant we walked back a different way and sought out the Yarra River Fine Arts gallery, Alice Springs variety.
It was located in a paved shopping arcade closed to traffic, one of several small but prosperous-looking boutiques. There were no lights on in the gallery, nor in the other shops. From what we could see in the single dim street light the merchandise in the gallery window consisted of two bright orange landscapes of desert scenes.
‘Crude,’ said Jik, whose own colours were not noted for pastel subtlety.
‘The whole place,’ he said, ‘will be full of local copies of Albert Namatjira. Tourists buy them by the ton.’
We strolled back to the motel more companionably than at any time since my arrival. Maybe the desert distances all around us invoked their own peace. At any rate when I kissed Sarah’s cheek to say goodnight it was no longer as a sort of pact, as in the morning, but with affection.
At breakfast she said, ‘You’ ll never guess. The main street here is Todd Street. So is the river. Todd River.’
‘Such is fame,’ I said modestly.
‘And there are eleven art galleries.’
‘She’s been reading the Alice Springs Tourist Promotion Association Inc.’s handout,’ Jik explained.
‘There’s also a Chinese Takeaway.’
Jik made a face. ‘Just imagine all this lot dumped down in the middle of the Sahara.’
The daytime heat, in fact, was fierce. The radio was cheerfully forecasting a noon temperature of thirty-nine, which was a hundred and two in the old fahrenheit shade. The single step from a cool room to the sun-roasting balcony was a sensuous pleasure, but the walk to the Yarra River gallery, though less than half a mile, was surprisingly exhausting.
‘I suppose one would get used to it, if one lived here,’ Jik said. ‘Thank God Sarah’s got her hat.’
We dodged in and out of the shadows of overhanging trees and the local inhabitants marched around bareheaded as if the branding-iron in the sky was pointing another way. The Yarra River gallery was quiet and air conditioned and provided chairs near the entrance for flaked-out visitors.
As Jik had prophesied, all visible space was knee deep in the hard clear watercolour paintings typical of the disciples of Namatjira. They were fine if you liked that sort of thing, which on the whole I didn’t. I preferred the occasional fuzzy outline, indistinct edge, shadows encroaching, suggestion, impression, and ambiguity. Namatjira, given his due as the first and greatest of the Aboriginal artists, had had a vision as sharp as a diamond. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that he’d produced more than two thousand paintings himself, and certainly his influence on the town where he’d been born had been extraordinary. Eleven art galleries. Mecca for artists. Tourists buying pictures by the ton. He had died, a plaque on the wall said, in Alice Springs hospital on August 8th 1959.
We had been wandering around for a good five minutes before anyone came. Then the plastic strip curtain over a recessed doorway parted, and the gallery keeper came gently through.
‘See anything you fancy?’ he said.
His voice managed to convey an utter boredom with tourists and a feeling that we should pay up quickly and go away. He was small, languid, long-haired and pale, and had large dark eyes with drooping tired-looking lids. About the same age as Jik and myself, though a lot less robust.
‘Do you have any other pictures?’ I asked.
He glanced at our clothes. Jik and I wore the trousers and shirts in which we’d gone to the races: no ties and no jackets, but more promising to picture-sellers than denims. Without discernible enthusiasm he held back half of the strip curtain, inviting us to go through.
‘In here,’ he said.
The inner room was bright from skylights, and its walls were almost entirely covered with dozens of pictures which hung closely together. Our eyes opened wide. At first sight we were surrounded by an incredible feast of Dutch interiors, French impressionists and Gainsborough portraits. At second blink one could see that although they were original oil paintings, they were basically second rate. The sort sold as ‘school of’ because the artists hadn’t bothered to sign them.
‘All European, in this room,’ the gallery keeper said. He still sounded bored. He wasn’t Australian, I thought. Nor British. Maybe American. Difficult to tell.
‘Do you have any pictures of horses?’ I asked.
He gave me a long steady peaceful gaze. ‘Yes we do, but this month we are displaying works by native Australians and lesser Europeans.’ His voice had the faintest of lisps. ‘If you wish to see horse paintings, they are in racks through there.’ He pointed to a second plastic strip curtain directly opposite the first. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’
I murmured the names of some of the Australians whose work I had seen in Melbourne. There was a slight brightening of the lack-lustre eyes.
‘Yes, we do have a few by those artists.’
He led us through the second curtain into the third, and from our point of view, most interesting room. Half of it, as promised, was occupied by well-filled double tiers of racks. The other half was the office and packing and framing department. Directly ahead a glass door led out to a dusty parched-looking garden, but most of the lighting in here too came from the roof.
Beside the glass door stood an easel bearing a small canvas with its back towards us. Various unmistakable signs showed work currently in progress and recently interrupted.
‘Your own effort?’ asked Jik inquisitively, walking over for a look.
The pale gallery keeper made a fluttering movement with his hand as if he would have stopped Jik if he could, and something in Jik’s expression attracted me to his side like a magnet.
A chestnut horse, three-quarters view, its elegant head raised as if listening. In the background, the noble lines of a mansion. The rest, a harmonious composition of trees and meadow. The painting, as far as I could judge, was more or less finished.
‘That’s great,’ I said with enthusiasm. ‘Is that for sale? I’d like to buy that.’
After the briefest hesitation he said, ‘Sorry. That’s commissioned.’
‘What a pity! Couldn’t you sell me that one, and paint another?’
He gave me a small regretful smile. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Do tell me your name,’ I said earnestly.
He was unwillingly flattered. ‘Harley Renbo.’
‘Is there anything else of yours here?’
He gestured towards the racks. ‘One or two. The horse paintings are all in the bottom row, against the wall.’
We all three of us pulled out the paintings one by one, making amateur-type comments.
‘That’s nice,’ said Sarah, holding a small picture of a fat grey pony with two old-fashioned country boys. ‘Do you like that?’ She showed it to Jik and me.
We looked at it.
‘Very nice,’ I said kindly.
Jik turned away as if uninterested. Harley Renbo stood motionless.
‘Oh well,’ Sarah said, shrugging. ‘I just thought it looked nice.’ She put it back in the rack and pulled out the next. ‘How about this mare and foal? I think it’s pretty.’