Death of an Old Goat (23 page)

‘Christ, you bloody Pommies,' said Merv, unconsciously stepping up the Australian content in his accent; ‘you're still living in the colonial age, the lot of you. You'd like to send out some bloody chinless wonder from the Royal Family to be Governor-General, like in the old times.'

‘We can't,' said Bill. ‘The army needs all the men it can get at the moment.'

‘You'd like to rule us from Whitehall,' said Merv, who could never forgive Britain for giving Australia independence without making her struggle for it, ‘you'd like some snotty little civil servant to make all our decisions for us, ruling the savages for our own good.'

‘We've got enough savages to rule in Northern Ireland, thank you,' said Bill. ‘We're not taking on any more at the moment.'

‘You bloody toffs from Oxford,' said Merv, his voice becoming more and more like a disagreeable Indian stringed instrument, ‘you never done a hand's turn in your lives, put
your shoes outside your door at night, leave the washing-up for the servant to do, call your man to fetch your buttered scones from the JCR . . .'

‘I always got my own teas,' said Bill. He glanced over to where Mr Doncaster was gracefully handing Dr Porter a glass of lemon squash, and made off in their direction. He was in no mood for a great Australian punch-up. Merv looked highly deprived by his departure, and seemed to be looking around for another Englishman.

• • •

‘Very confusing, the political situation,' said Mrs Turberville, to a lanky student who was feeding her with cheese-filled footballs, ‘very confusing indeed.'

‘Too right,' said the student.

‘I've always said,' said Mrs Turberville, raising her considerable voice as if she were addressing a public meeting, ‘that this fellow Whitlam ought to be tried for treason, and then put against a wall and shot.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said the student tolerantly.

‘The trouble with the university,' said Mrs Turberville, ‘is that it's red, through and through, infiltrated by Peking . . .'

• • •

‘Of course, Augustan satire is quite beyond the average student's comprehension,' said Dr Porter to Mr Doncaster and Alice O'Brien.

‘Certainly we don't find much in the way of subtlety among our boys,' said Mr Doncaster, seeking desperately with that furtive wandering of the eyes people who are cornered at parties get for some means of escape from Dr Porter's idea of party small-talk.

‘Take the Modest Proposal, for example,' said Dr Porter.

‘I beg your pardon,' said Mr Doncaster.

‘Relax,' said Alice; ‘she's not making you an offer.'

Mr Doncaster smiled vaguely, as if this was witty conversation at a level in which he could not hope to participate,
and turned with relief as Bill Bascomb approached in flight from Merv Raines.

‘Very confusing, the political situation,' he said.

‘I've just had that one,' said Bill. ‘Do you think we could try the drought for a change?'

But he looked very preoccupied, and he was. He paid little attention to the attempts at conversation. A word was buzzing around at the back of his mind . . . half-formed . . . tantalizing . . . screaming to come out . . . a word . . . something he had been reminded of . . . a word . . . a memory.

‘Let me fill your glass,' said Doncaster in desperation to Alice.

• • •

‘Have you tried the new toffee-flavoured laxatives on your girls?' said the Principal of Daisy Bates College to Miss Tambly. ‘I've had some very interesting results from them.'

‘Don't believe in all this coddling,' said Miss Tambly brusquely. ‘Toffee-flavoured, my fat aunt. If medicine's going to do any good, it's got to be damned unpleasant. We give cod-liver oil for most things. Tried and tested. If we didn't do that, we'd have them round to the dispensary the whole time. The governors are very down on that sort of expenditure, you know. Never make a profit that way.'

‘How difficult for you to have to think of things like that,' said the Principal, with genuine sympathy.

Miss Tambly was just about to say something very Australian about institutions which were supported by taxpayers' money when they were interrupted.

‘What ho!' said a voice from the door. ‘A festive scene, eh? Hospitality? Conviviality?'

‘Christ,' said Alice in her least sound-of-music voice, ‘who invited you?'

‘No one,' said Dr Day, steadying himself against the back of an armchair, ‘but I am not insulted. I am willing to subscribe to a polite fiction that the invitation was lost in
the post. Provided, of course . . . provided that now I have smelt you all out, you keep me well filled for the rest of the evening.'

‘I wonder,' said Lucy Wickham, gazing through the thick air towards the ceiling, ‘why we have to be embarrassed everywhere we go by the behaviour of Bobby's staff.'

‘Lucy, old fruit,' said Dr Day, making an alcoholic lunge in her direction, ‘long time no see. I hear you've been getting friendly with the police force, is that right? I suppose that's why you've been neglecting your old friends.'

At a sign from the Master, who had thus far in the evening fulfilled his hostly duties by keeping to a dark corner and emitting waves of taciturnity and discomfort, the student waiter-guests left their various positions and clumsily guided Dr Day to the drinks alcove, where they surrounded his swaying form and shielded the sensibilities of delicately-nurtured Australian females from the shock of his bleary appearance.

‘The English department does it again,' said Alice cheerily to Mr Turberville.

‘That chappie seems to have a drink problem,' said Turberville, surprisingly quick on the uptake.

‘His only problem is how to get enough,' said Alice.

• • •

‘You look as if you had a headache coming on,' said the Principal of Daisy Bates College kindly to Bill Bascomb. ‘I have some very good tablets here that you can actually dissolve in whatever you're drinking, and it removes the nastier effects.'

‘Seems a pity to ruin good grog, doesn't it?' said Bill. ‘Anyway, it's not a headache.'

‘Some personal problems, I suppose,' said the Principal. ‘I can understand that. It's so difficult for you young men, just out from England. Tom between two civilizations . . .'

‘Two?' said Bill, passing his glass through the phalanx
of students' bodies around Dr Day, and receiving a full one in exchange. ‘But it's not a personal problem either. I'm too young to have personal problems. It's just a word . . .'

‘A word?'

‘A word I'm looking for. It's buzzing around my head. It came to me earlier in the evening, then it went away, and I can't get it back. It's quite an ordinary word, I remember that.'

‘I didn't know you were
creative
?' said the Principal, with an odd mixture of admiration and disapproval.

• • •

The evening ended as these evenings almost always did. The drinks ran out rather earlier than usual, and it was generally agreed that it had not been a good idea to closet Dr Day and five healthy, thirsty students together around the drinks table. Still, there wasn't much acrimony on this score, because most members of the party were fairly satisfied with the high number of suspects that had been assembled to appease their appetite for sensation. Some had even got a mild frisson out of conversing with one or other of them; it was, in fact, the first time Dr Porter's conversation had ever caused a frisson. Most of the suspects saw quite enough of each other in the general course of events to be happy at a fairly early termination to the evening, especially as most of them had been sufficiently ‘in' to get an adequate supply of the lethal red liquid; and the number of empty flagons piled up under the table testified that no one had positively gone without. So they drove off into the night in straggling groups: bumpers were dented, jovial curses were uttered, cats were slaughtered on the roads home. Gradually a sort of peace descended on Menzies College, except around one far block, from which a country and western record in praise of the Vietnam war could be heard through an open window.

The fresh air hit Bill Bascomb hard. He had been conversing for some time with the Principal of Daisy Bates,
and had convinced her that he was a very nice boy, possibly going to the bad, but still very pleasant and understanding. His head was also filled with sherry, and filled with a word. A word that would not form itself into letters or into sounds. A word that was a mere notion, a shade, an ambiguity. He staggered along in the waste land between the five blocks, confusedly looking round and wondering where he was and which block was his own. The music did not lessen the confusion in his mind. ‘What We're Fighting For', a paean in praise of napalm, juggled around in his head, and he stood clutching a crude wire fence, and hazily imitating the imagined gesture of the singer. That boy is all soul, he said to himself. He saw a tree, and made for it, seeing it as a stable centre in a shifting world. A shifting, spinning, tipping, crumbling world. The white blocks all around him danced, changed positions; some of the stars in the sky zoomed towards him, and then zoomed away again. Suddenly, as he clutched the trunk for safety, the word came to him, from nowhere, from the sky, put itself in his mind, and exploded there, adding sparks to the dancing, shifting stars.

‘That's it,' said Bill loudly. ‘I bet that's it.'

Then his legs gave way, and he sank to sleep around the roots of the college gum-tree.

‘B
UT
I'
VE GOT IT
,' said Bascomb, late next morning, sitting in the arm-chair of his office at the department and looking scruffy and dishevelled. ‘I've got it.'

‘You quite patently have
not
got it,' pointed out Alice O'Brien, ‘since you've forgotten it again.'

‘It came to me,' said Bill, drumming his fingers distractedly on the arms of the chair. ‘Just before I conked out, it came to me suddenly — I knew that was it.'

‘Are you sure it wasn't just some drunken dream or other? I wouldn't mind betting it was that. You've been thinking pretty hard about this — for you. I expect it all got into your dreams, and you just think you got the answer.'

‘It wasn't a dream at all, I tell you. If I can just get on to Timmins to check for me, it will solve the whole thing. Just one word . . .'

‘Obviously a dream,' said Alice, who never gave up. ‘The word will suddenly come back to you, and it will be something absolutely useless like “cucumber sandwiches” or something.'

‘It was not a dream, and it did mean something,' said Bill with dignity. ‘But it certainly will come back — I'm sure of that.'

‘Oh God; so we're going to have you going round agonizing over that blasted word for the next few weeks, are we?' said Alice. ‘If I were you, I'd forget it entirely — then if there really is anything in it, it will come back when you least expect it.'

‘I've got plenty else to think about, heaven knows,' said Bill. ‘The Master sent me a note this morning asking me to explain how come I was found curled up around a tree by one of the domestic staff.'

‘
Pas devant les domestiques
is very much his code,' said Alice. ‘Well, good luck with your explanations. If you could only bring yourself to salute and call him sir you'd be all right. Still, I can't imagine you'd break your heart at getting the push, would you?'

‘Well, no,' said Bill, ‘not as far as the company is concerned. But it's all that cooking I shouldn't like if I set up on my own. You'll have to invite me to all the guest-nights you can. Do you think I could get a season-ticket?'

‘Possibly. The Principal did say at breakfast that you
were a well-conducted young man. But she looked suspicious when I burst out laughing, and anyway she's probably heard already about your love-affair with the gum tree. She doesn't like anything out of the ordinary.'

Left to himself Bill groaned, and put his face in his hands. It was tormenting — to have had the word and forgotten it. And it the clue to the whole damned business. This way madness lies, he thought. He resolved to follow Alice's advice and try to put the matter out of his mind altogether. He grabbed a book from his case willy-nilly, opened it, and began to read:

And as in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk before I can remember where), so . . .

‘I must be drunk before I can remember where . . .' Bill let the book rest on his knees, then turned over to look at the title. It was
Edwin Drood.

‘Bloody good advice, Charley boy,' he said.

• • •

The saloon bar of Beecher's Hotel was aswill with beer, and so was Bill Bascomb. He was at that stage where one begins not to notice one's surroundings, which was just as well, for no Australian saloon bar at six-thirty in the evening really bears noticing. One can count oneself lucky if one can get one's feet out of the spreading puddles of beer on the floor. Bill had finally found himself an uncomfortably high stool, and he sat there looking red and dyspeptic. He belched very loudly every ten minutes or so in the approved manner, and the other drinkers around thought that he might be, in spite of appearances, a very nice type of chap. There was a little party of station hands beside him, with wide hats and long limbs, and high brown boots which allowed them to scorn the swirling puddles beneath them.
When Bill drained his glass and ordered his third schooner, one of them said to him kindly: