She had not been aware there was a call on the line until Fish handed her the telephone and said, without any other preamble, ‘Your office.’ So just as she was steeling herself to threaten Mrs Catchprice, she heard Gia’s voice: ‘I just had a death threat.’
When Maria heard ‘death threat’ she thought it meant a threat of dismissal because of their activities last night.
‘What will they do?’
‘What do you think they’ll do? They’re watching my house.’
‘They’re watching your house?’
‘It was eight o’clock in the damn morning. In the morning. How could he find my name, by eight in the morning, let alone my number? How could he even know who I am?’
‘Who is “he”?’
‘Wally Fischer.’
Mrs Catchprice was holding her ashtray, a small replica of a Uniroyal tyre with a glass centre. She was craning her withered neck towards the conversation.
‘He called you on the telephone?’
‘Not him personally.’
‘Gia, darling, please, tell me what happened.’
‘The phone rang. I was still in bed. I picked it up. It was a man. He said: “This is Dial-a-Death, you insolent little slag.” He said, “Which day would you like to meet your death? Today? We could just burn your car today. Then you could wait while we decided which day you were going to meet your death.”’
‘They’re just scaring you,’ said Maria, but her throat was dry. She had read about Dial-a-Death in a tabloid paper.
‘You’re not listening, Maria. They were watching the house.’
‘They wouldn’t dare. For God’s sake, you’re a Tax Officer.’
‘He said, your slut friend has left. You are alone in the house. It was true: Janet had just left.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘The police? Don’t be naïve, Maria. You don’t ring the police about Wally Fischer. He pays the police. He lives up the road from the Rose Bay police station. I’ve got to ring Wally Fischer. I’ve got to apologize.’
‘Christ,’ Maria said. ‘I hate Sydney.’
‘Maria, I called you for help.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
The phone went dead. Maria closed her eyes.
‘Everything all right?’ said Mrs Catchprice.
‘No,’ said Maria. ‘It’s not.’
She sat for a moment trying to steady herself. She had failed her friend completely.
‘I need those books,’ she told Mrs Catchprice. ‘I need them here right now.’
‘I need them too,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’ll be a lot better when I have the books. Please,’ she said. ‘I want to wind up this job today.’
‘How nice,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’m so pleased. There are so many important things I need to ask you.’
Maria heard herself saying, ‘Mrs Catchprice, my best friend has just received a death threat.’
36
Jack Catchprice loved smart women, although to say he ‘loved’ them is to give the impression of hyperbole whereas it understates the matter. He had an obsession with smart women. He had a confusion of the senses, an imbalance in his judgement where smart women were concerned. Their intelligence aroused his sexual interest to a degree that his business associates, men admittedly, found comic as they watched him – slim, athletic, strikingly handsome, with a tanned, golfer’s face and just-in-control curly blond hair, good enough looking to be a film star – go trotting off to Darcy’s or Beppi’s with some clumpy, big-arsed, fat-ankled woman whom he had just met at some seminar and on whom he was lavishing an amusing amount of puppy-dog attention. If he had been a whale he would have beached himself.
And indeed his sexual radar was somehow confused and his private life was always in chaos as he flip-flopped between these two most obvious types – the bimbos whom he treated badly, and the mostly unattractive geniuses whom he seemed to select from the ranks of those who would despise him – academics, socialists, leaders of consumer action groups.
It never occurred to him that it might be his own mother who had implanted this passion in him. The parallel was there for him to see if he wished to – in the privacy of the Catchprice home there was never any doubt about who the smart one was meant to be: not Cacka, that was for sure, no matter how many ‘prospects’ he shepherded across the gravel, cooing all the time into their ears. It was Frieda who read books and had opinions. She was the one who was the church-goer, the charity organiser, and – for one brief period – Shire Councillor. These things had more weight – even Cacka gave them more weight – than selling cars to dairy farmers, and yet it would have been repugnant for Jack to imagine that the women he fell in love with were in any way like his mother. He imagined he felt no affection for her, and whether this was true or not, there were betrayals he could not forgive her for. She had been the smart one, the one who read the front page of the papers, but she had let Cacka poison her children while she pretended it was not happening.
Jack had driven out from the city in an odd, agitated mood – bored, tense, but feeling the sadness that the various roads to Franklin – the F4, the old Route 81, or the earlier Franklin Road – had always brought with them. These roads, on top of each other, beside each other, followed almost exactly the same course. They made the spine of his life and he had driven up and down them for nearly forty years. It was an increasingly drab second-rate landscape – service stations, car yards, drive-in bottle shops and, now, three lanes each way. It was the path he had taken from childhood to adulthood and it always forced some review of his life on him. Its physical desolation, its lack of a single building or street, even one glimpsed in passing, that might suggest beauty or happiness, became like a mould into which his emotions were pressed and he would always arrive in Franklin feeling bleak and empty.
He would drive back to Sydney very fast, surrounded by the smell of genuine leather, with the Mozart clarinet concerto playing loudly. He left as if Catchprice Motors were a badly tended family grave and he were responsible for its neglect, its crumbling surfaces, its damp mouldy smell, its general decrepitude. And it was true – he was responsible. He had a gift – he could sell, and he had applied it to his own ends, not the family’s. No one ever said a thing about this, but as Jack became richer, the family business sank deeper and deeper into the mud. They could see his betrayal in his expensive cars – which he did not buy from them – and his suits which cost as much as his brother made in a month.
When his mother called for help, he gave it, instantly, ostentatiously. She called him at nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, in the midst of her second meeting with the Tax Inspector. Even while she whispered into the telephone, Jack was mapping pencilled changes in his appointment book and by a quarter to ten he was on the road. He was meant to somehow ‘send away this Tax woman’ who his mother imagined was going to jail her.
It was impossible, of course. He could not do it. Indeed, driving out to Franklin was less useful than staying in his office and talking to some good professionals, but Jack was like a politician who must be seen at the site of a disaster – he felt he must be seen to care.
As for whether he did care or did not care he would have found it hard to know what was the honest answer. He thought his mother dangerous, manipulative, almost paranoid, but he was also the one who sent her the photograph of himself shaking hands with the Premier of the State. He would say he no longer felt affection for her, but he phoned her once or twice a week to tell her what building he had bought or sold and whom he had lunch with. If it was true he felt no affection for her, it was equally true that he craved her admiration.