4

The phone call I got that night from Dozy Boylan would make me laugh for days to come. "Mate," he said, and I knew that he was hiding in his bathroom because I could hear the echo.

"Mate, she's hitting on me."

He was full of shit, I told him so, although not without affection.

"Shut up," he said. "I'm bringing her back to your place now."

I expressed loud amusement and that was rude and stupid and I have no excuse except—my overactive friend was a sixty-yearold farmer with soup in his moustache and trousers curling above his cinched-in belt. She was hitting on him? I snorted into the phone, and when he turned on me soon after I never doubted why.

In an astoundingly short time he came roaring across my cattle grid. I'd had a drink or two already and this was perhaps why it seemed so wildly funny, the audible panic of his off-road lugs rippling across the wooden bridge. By the time I had changed into a clean shirt, the old man had already performed a highspeed Y-turn and when I emerged on the front porch the taillights of his All Terrain Invention were disappearing into the night. I was still smiling as my visitor entered. Her hair was drenched again, flat on her head, dripping down her cheeks, collecting in the lovely well of her clavicle, but she was also smiling and—for a moment anyway—I thought she was about to laugh.

"How was the crossing?" I asked. "Were you scared?"

"Never by the crossing." She sat heavily in my chair and exhaled—a different person now, messier, less brisk. She produced from the folds of her borrowed poncho, a magnum of 1972 Virgin Hills which she held like a trophy in the air.

Later she told me that I had cocked my head, looking at the wine like a sulky dog, but that was a misunderstanding. This was a prize bottle from Dozy's cellar. There was nothing to explain it and the mystery was made deeper by her manner—she was suddenly so full of energy, kicking off her gumboots, opening up a drawer—did she wait to ask permission? She located a corkscrew, ripped out the cork, brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me.

"OK," I said. "What happened?"

"Nothing," she said, her eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. "Where's your brother? Is he OK?"

"Asleep."

Whatever dark visions she then conjured—probably the drowning dog—she could not stay with long. "The good thing," she said, raising her glass, "is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real."

"Jacques Leibovitz?"

"That's the one."

"Dozy owns a painting by Jacques Leibovitz?"

I know now that my astonishment seemed put-on to her, but the secretive bugger Dozy had never breathed a word about his treasure. Also, you do not go to northern New South Wales to look at great paintings. And again: Leibovitz was one of the reasons I became an artist. I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black-andwhite reproduction in Foundation of the Modern. None of this I was prepared to confess to an American in Manolo Blahniks but I was really offended by Dozy, my so-called mate. "We never even talk about art," I said. "We sit in his miserable kitchen, that's where he lives, amongst all those piles of the Melbourne Age. And he showed it to you"?"

She raised an eyebrow as if to say, Why not? All I could think was that I had given him lovely drawings of the Wombat Fly and Narrow-waisted Mud Wasp and he had stuck them to his fridge with fucking magnets. It was hard to believe he had an eye at all.

"Are you insuring it?"

She laughed through her nose. "Is that what I look like?"

I shrugged.

She returned a clear appraising gaze. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

I fetched her a saucer and she blew some dungy-smelling fumes across the table. "My husband," she said finally, "is the son of Leibovitz's second wife."

If I did not like her, I liked the husband way, way less. But I was startled and impressed to understand whose son he was.

"Dominique Broussard is his mother?"

"Yes," she said. "You know the photograph?"

Even I knew that—the tawny blonde studio assistant lying on an unmade bed, her new baby at her breast.

"My husband, Olivier, he's the baby. He inherited the Leibovitz droit moral" she said, as though having to explain a story she was weary of.

But I was not weary, not at all. I was from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. I hadn't seen an original painting before I turned sixteen.

"You understand how that works?"

"What?"

"Droit moral."

"Of course," I said. "More or less."

"Olivier is the one who gets to say if the work is real or fake. He signed the certificate of authentication for Boylan's painting. That is his legal right, but there have been people making mischief, and we have to protect ourselves."

"You work together, you and your husband?"

But she was not being drawn into that. "I've known Mr.

Boylan's painting for a very long time," she said, "and it is authentic right down to the zinc tacks on the stretcher, but the point has to be proven again and again. It's a little boring."

"And you know that much about Leibovitz?"

"That much," she said dryly, and I watched as she butted out her cigarette, grinding it fiercely into the saucer. "But when someone like Boylan is told that his investment is at risk, he is bound to get upset. In this case he showed the canvas to Honore Le Noel who persuaded him he'd bought, not quite a fake, but close enough. May I have more wine? I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a day."

I poured the wine without comment, not revealing that I was completely gobsmacked to hear Le Noel's name spoken as if he were the local publican or the owner of a hardware store. I knew who he was. I had two of his books beside my bed. "Honore Le Noel has become a joke," she said. "He was Dominique Leibovitz's lover, as you probably know."

This sort of talk upset me in ways I can hardly bring myself to name. At the heart of it was the notion that I was a hick and she was from the centre of the fucking universe. What I knew you could read in Time magazine—Dominique had begun as Leibovitz's studio assistant; Le Noel was Leibovitz's chronicler and critic.

Now that my visitor was halfway through her second glass, she was talkative as hell. She revealed that Dominique and Honore had spent almost eight years, from just after the war until 1954, waiting for Leibovitz to die. (I recalled that the artist's strength was very acutely sketched in Le Noel's monograph—a force of life, short, thick legs, huge square hands.)

It was not until his baby son was five, his daughter-in-law now told me, when Leibovitz himself was eighty-one, that the grim reaper came sneaking up on the old goat, pushing him forward as he stood at the dinner table with a wine glass brimming in his hand. He pitched forward and slammed his broad nose and tortoiseshell spectacles into the Picasso cheese plate. That is how my visitor told it, fluently, a little breathlessly. She finished the second glass without remarking on its character and for this, of course, I judged her quite severely.

The plate cracked in half, she said.

I thought, How would you fucking know? Were you even born?

But I was a stranger to the notion that one might know famous people and of course she was married to the witness, the child— an olive-skinned boy with very large watchful eyes and protruding ears which could not even begin to spoil his beauty.

When his father had fallen dead he apparently had been about to ask if he might be excused, but now he looked to his mother and waited. Dominique did not embrace him but stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.

"Papa est mort."

"Oui, Maman."

"You understand. No-one must know yet."