He studied me, narrowed eyes. ‘You’re from where?’
‘Burnley, part-time.’
‘Teach architecture there now?’
‘It’s a landscape design project,’ I said. ‘We’re encouraged to see the buildings as part of the landscape.’
Klinger nodded. ‘Enlightened of them. I did a bit of teaching at Melbourne, place was full of career-change hopefuls. Didn’t have a clue what they were getting into, most of them, not a clue. This practice’s been going since 1956 and on average I doubt whether we’ve made more than the basic wage. People don’t understand that. Bloody brickie makes more, much more. Go and be a brickie, that’s what I used to tell them. They didn’t like that.’
‘I’m holding on to my day job,’ I said.
He was studying the view without seeing it, glass in one hand, tapping the bony knuckles of the other on the table. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Melbourne Uni will let you see the thesis on the gurus, get what you need out of that.’
‘I’ve seen the thesis,’ I said. ‘But what I wanted to do was talk about your partnership. I wanted to talk to you about how you worked together, how you influenced each other.’
Klinger laughed, it turned into a cough. He stilled it with wine, a little warmth came into his gaze. ‘Won’t have a drop? The Queen Adelaide, all I can afford these days. Price of wine’s bloody outrageous. Influenced each other? I don’t know about influencing Len. I’d studied in Europe, of course. Len never left Australia, very narrow was the guru.’
‘So you brought a wider vision to the practice.’
He drank wine, turned his lips down. ‘I was younger,’ he said. He burped. ‘Excuse me.’
‘That would’ve made a difference.’
‘Nothing made a difference to Len. He was a bulldozer. Get in his way, he’d go right over you, didn’t give a damn. Got into these fearful rages.’
Klinger finished his glass, filled it, most of the bottle gone. ‘Didn’t drink before sundown in the old days,’ he said. ‘Can’t stay awake long after sundown now.’
‘Lennox had a bad temper?’
‘Tantrums. Like a child. Ellen told me, that was his wife, died in an accident. Tragedy. I loved that woman.’ He fell silent, stared at his glass. Then he looked up. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Ellen told you…’
‘Yes, the tantrums. Len’s father was the same. Ellen’s father-in-law. He was a doctor, used to rage at his patients, felt they were letting him down. Ellen said he went to see a patient in hospital one day and shouted at the poor fellow so violently the man had a heart attack on the spot.’
‘That kind of thing can run in a family,’ I said. ‘Did he pass it on to the children?’
Klinger sighed, sipped. ‘Sure you won’t?’
‘Perhaps half a glass. That would be nice.’
‘Excellent.’ He was pleased to have drinking company. ‘I’ll just get a glass. Frank, it’s Frank, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘David. Call me David. No one’s ever called me Dave. I wouldn’t have minded that. Dave.’
He went to a cupboard in the corner and came back with another goldfish-bowl glass, splashed it three-quarters full.
‘What were you saying?’
‘His temper. Passed on to the children?’
‘Ah, the children.’ Klinger’s good mood dimmed a little. ‘The twins, well, they were a worry from early on in the piece. There’s something about twins, something mysterious, I don’t know. They were both late developers, didn’t start talking properly until they were, oh, five, thereabouts. But they had this private language, they made these sounds, not quite words. Word-like sounds. Only to each other, didn’t respond to their parents or to Cassie for ages, more or less ignored them.’
‘That would be a worry,’ I said.
‘Yes. Ellen took them around the medical profession, they weren’t any help. As usual. Len of course was too wrapped up in himself to take much notice. And then one day Keith, right out of the blue, started talking to Cassie. Advanced speech too for a child. Ellen came around here, she was in tears. Tears of joy and relief. I cried with her, I can tell you. And a few days later, Victor started up, also to Cassie.’
I drank some wine. ‘So they were fine after that?’
Klinger shrugged, drank. ‘Brilliant, both of them. Reading like teenagers at six, playing the piano by ear. Writing stories, plays. Then Victor attacked a girl at school. He was about eight. She’d been taunting him but he didn’t do anything, not in class. He waited until playtime and he called this little girl around a corner of the building and attacked her. A serious attack, an assault. Premeditated assault. That was the real concern. He beat her with an empty soft drink bottle, got her down and rained blows on her. A teacher was there in seconds but the girl had teeth knocked out, her whole face was a big bruise. She was in shock, had to be taken to hospital. No one had ever seen an eight-year-old hurt someone else like that.’
He shook his head. ‘Terrible. Murderous streak, that would be from his father, no question. Len had a conviction for assault. Knocked an electrician right off a building, he fell twenty feet. And that was the one that ended up in court. There were others. I was scared of him, I don’t mind saying that.’
I said, ‘Someone mentioned an illegal firearms charge.’
‘Didn’t put that in the thesis, did she?’
‘No. I heard it somewhere.’
‘Len started going weird after Ellen’s death. Survivalist rubbish, Indonesian invasions. Built this bunker, year’s worth of food, even bloody cold storage, some silent fridge thing he devised. And this in bloody Eltham. Hardly your backwoods mountain hideout, huge city on the doorstep. But it wasn’t a logical matter.’
‘Illegal arms. What was that?’
‘Part of the lunacy. Len bought guns from a bloke in Fitzroy. Back then, you could simply have applied for a licence, they handed them out like lollies. But the conspiracy theory said the traitors were going to give the Indonesians a list of all the people who had licensed firearms. So you had to have unlicensed guns, then the Indonesians wouldn’t know and you could take to the hills of Eltham and fight back.’
‘He got caught?’
‘He had them in the four-wheel-drive and he got stopped for drunken driving. They separated the charges.’
‘I sidetracked you,’ I said. ‘You were talking about Victor at school, the assault.’
‘School wouldn’t have either of them back. They’d had complaints about Keith too but not about violence. I never quite gathered what, Ellen didn’t want to talk about it. That was unusual, we talked about everything.’
He drank, reached for the bottle, topped up our glasses. ‘I’ll get the cork out of another one, just in case,’ he said.
He got up and went to a small fridge I hadn’t noticed, opened the door. It was full of wine bottles on their sides.
I said, ‘What did the twins do about school after that, David?’
He was applying a sleek black device to the top of a bottle. ‘Ellen taught them at home. Had to, no school would take Victor. That School of the Air stuff the kids in the bush do. And Cassie, she was five years older, very smart, behaved like a real teacher. That went on till Ellen’s death. They were eleven then.’
Klinger turned his back to me, holding the bottle in one hand, the corkscrew machine in the other. ‘That was the biggest waste of a human being I know of. Ellen’s death.’
There were tears in his voice, probably in his eyes. He didn’t want me to see them, but he wanted to tell me.
‘On the Eastern Freeway. Drunks in a stolen car, bloody police chasing them at a fantastic speed, car came right across the middle, over the dip. Head-on collision.’
Nothing I could say. I looked at his back, at the rigid set of his thin shoulders under the teeshirt.
‘I loved that woman. From the moment I came into the room and saw her. The first time. The day I came for the interview with Len. Loved her. She loved me, you know. Loved me.’