‘I know that’s what you think.’ Gia drained her glass for the second time and waved her hand.
‘I think it’s horrible. I think it’s really frightening.’ Maria said. She held her friend’s forearm and stroked its pale soft underside. ‘Who can ever know if they would have or not?’
‘I’m sure you would have behaved quite differently.’
‘No. I think you were amazing. I wouldn’t have known what to do. You were very brave.’
‘What’s your fellow’s name?’
Maria Takis bit her lip and raised her eyebrow and coloured. She dabbed her wide mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Which fellow?’
‘Maria!’
‘What?’
‘Stop blushing.’
‘Jack Catchprice? He’s actually a classic investigation target.’
‘Is he nice looking?’
Maria smiled, a tight pleased smile that made her cheekbones look even more remarkable.
‘Is he married?’
Maria looked up and saw Jack Catchprice walk into the Brasserie. He was ten minutes early. Jack was talking to Peter. Peter was pointing out towards the garden. Maria shook her head at Gia.
‘Is this what I think it is? Maria what have you been doing?’
‘Shush. Don’t look. I’ve been trying to tell you. Don’t look, but he’s here.’
It was not a good idea to say ‘Don’t look’ to Gia. She turned immediately, and looked straight back, grinning.
‘Maria,’ she said in that same whisper that had started the trouble with Wally Fischer, ‘he’s a doll.’
42
Jack had asked her out while they stood in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment. Rain fell from the overhang above the rusting little steel-framed window behind the sink. The rain was loud and heavy. It fell from the corrugated roof like strings of glass beads. Water trickled through the plaster-sheeted ceiling and fell in fat discoloured drops on to a bed of soggy toast and dirty dishes. A red setter tried to mount Jack’s leg.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I can’t go out with clients.’
‘I’m not your client.’
‘But you have an interest, you know.’
‘I have no interest, I swear.’ He looked around and screwed his face up. ‘I got out of this family a long, long time ago. Their problems are their problems.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said. ‘Cross my heart. Check the share register.’
‘Well,’ she said, but the truth was that she had already clearly communicated, through a series of well-placed ‘I’s’, her single status, and she would like to be taken out to dinner more than anything else she could think of. ‘I leave Franklin at three. It’s a little too early for dinner.’
‘God, no, not Franklin. I didn’t mean Franklin.’
‘I have drinks with a friend at the Blue Moon Brasserie at six.’ She did not say it was the attractive friend Jack had already talked to.
‘The Blue Moon Brasserie?’ he asked. ‘In Macleay Street? I could meet you there. We could eat there. Or we could walk over to Chez Oz. I was thinking of Chez Oz. It’s round the corner.’ And when she hesitated, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can decide later.’
‘Oh, I can’t …’ Maria’s face betrayed herself – she would dearly love to be taken to Chez Oz.
‘Jack,’ Mrs Catchprice was calling him from the other room. ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself.’
‘I have to drop in on my father at half-past seven. He’s certainly not round the corner. Nowhere near Chez Oz.’
‘Then I can meet you at the Brasserie and we could have a drink and then I could drive you to your father’s. You like Wagner? You could put your feet up. I could play you some nice Wagner. It doesn’t have to be Wagner. I have the Brahms Double Concerto that is very appropriate to this weather. I have a nice car. I would wait for you while you visited your father. I won’t be bored.’
She did not prickle at the ‘nice car’ although she knew he had a Jaguar from John Sewell’s. She had sat in John Sewell’s herself, two years before, copying down the names of Jaguar owners as starting points for tax investigations.
‘I’ll be driving my own car to the Brasserie.’
‘I’ll drive you back to it after dinner.’
‘My father lives in Newtown.’
‘That’s O.K., I can find Newtown.’
‘I mean it’s not a very exciting place to sit in a parked car for half an hour.’
‘Oh,’ he smiled. His whole face crinkled. She liked the way he did that. He had nice lines around his mouth and eyes and his face, tilted a little, had a very intent, listening sort of quality which she found immensely attractive. ‘I think I can manage half an hour in Newtown.’
She was in the middle of an investigation of his family business. She might be the one who made his mother homeless, but he was flirting with her, more than flirting and she was reciprocating. He was the first man to treat her as a sexual being since she began to ‘show’.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It is an odd situation in Newtown. I have to sneak into Newtown sort of incognito. I might have to ask you not to park outside the house.’
He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows comically.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said, ‘I know.’
‘I used to go out with a Jewish woman called Layla. She was twenty-four and I was nearly thirty but I could never take her home. I had to sit outside in the car.’
‘Yes, but you’re not “going out” with me,’ Maria smiled.
‘No, of course not.’ He coloured.
What was weird was that this embarrassment was pleasing. Indeed, the prospect of this ‘date’ gave everything that happened for the rest of the day – including her second serious chat with Mrs Catchprice about the company books, and her unpleasant phone conversation with her section leader where she requested one more day on the job – a pleasant secret corner, this thing to look forward to.
She had never planned to introduce him to her father, or have him sit in that little kitchen drinking brandy. That only happened because they were a little late and because, even after two circuits, the only parking spot in Ann Street was right in front of George Takis’s house where he was – in spite of all the rain – hosing down the green concrete of his small front garden. It was the mark of his widowed state – it was the woman who normally hosed the concrete.
Maria got out of the Jaguar in front of him but he was so taken by the car he did not recognize her.
‘Ba-Ba.’
‘Maria?’
Maria started to walk towards the house but George was drawn towards the Jaguar. When she called to him he did not even turn but patted the air by his thigh, as though he was bouncing a ball.
‘Ba-Ba, please.’
But he knew there was a man in that sleek, rain-jewelled car and he became very still and concentrated, a little hunched and poke-necked, as he stalked round the front of it, not like a poor man in braces and wet carpet slippers who is shamed in the face of wealth, but like a man coming to open a present.
George Takis opened the door of Jack Catchprice’s Jaguar and solemnly invited him out into the street.
It was not yet dark in Ann Street. You could still see the flaking paint sign of the ‘Perfect Chocolate’ factory which made the cul de sac. You could see the expressions on the neighbours’ faces. They were out enjoying the break from the rain, sitting on the verandas of the narrow cottages which gave the street its chequered individuality—white weather-board, pale blue aluminium cladding, red brick with white-painted mortar, etc., etc. The Katakises and the Papandreous were sitting out, and the Lebanese family were in their front-room sitting down to dinner in the bright light of a monster television. Stanley Dargour, who had married Daphne Katakis’s tall daughter, was redoing the brake linings on his Holden Kingswood but he was watching what was happening in front of George Takis’s house, they all were, and George Takis not only did not seem to care, but seemed to revel in it.