Illywhacker (28 page)

Dr Henderson was a small broad man with a shiny ruddy face and thin ginger hair. He answered the door with a vase of lilacs in his hand.

Horace did not notice the vase. He noticed the doctor’s tie. It was an Old Scotch Collegians tie and he was so desperate that he, quite literally, grasped it in his desperate hands and hailed his fellow Old Scotch Collegian as a long-lost friend.

“What year?” asked the poet, softening his vowels in accordance with the social requirements of such a tie.

It did not occur to the doctor that the dishevelled tramp on his doorstep might be claiming membership of a particular élite, but rather that he had lost his mind, knew not where he was or what year he was in.

“1921,” he answered, looking down his nose to where the warty hand grasped his old school tie.

The poet thought this a great joke. Far too great a joke. He released the tie and slapped his thighs. “Ha, ha,” he said, “damn good. 1921.”

The doctor smoothed his tie with one hand, holding his vase of flowers at some distance where it would be safe from the enthusiasms of the stranger. “July 1921,” he said. “And half-past eight at night.”

“I was there in 1915,” Horace said.

“You’re a returned soldier,” the doctor said, imagining a different “there”.

“No. An Old Scotch Collegian.”

“I see,” said Dr Henderson, looking at him with suspicion. “And what can I do for you?”

Horace was so pleased to claim some fellowship with the doctor that all his fears immediately evaporated and he felt ridiculously safe. He told the whole sad story to the doctor who never, all the while, ceased to hold his vase of flowers at arm’s length. The effect of the story was slightly spoiled by the laughter he used to punctuate his sentences. This was unfortunate, for it gave the impression that he thought the whole thing was some prank or rag whereas the laughter was produced by relief that he had not, after all, fallen into the power of a hostile stranger.

The doctor did not believe a word he said. He could smell alcohol on his breath and he judged him drunk. Therefore he began to shut the door, stepping back quickly, withdrawing the vase as a tortoise will bring its head back into its shell.

Horace placed his muddy shoe inside the door and would not let it shut.

The doctor stamped on Horace’s toe. But Horace seemed insensible to pain. He left it there. The doctor stamped again. But the only effect the stamping seemed to have was to stop Horace’s nervous laughter. Horace thought the doctor totally insane.

He left his foot there to be stamped on while he made a speech. It was a bit flowery, a tendency that he had in any case, but which he was inclined to exaggerate whenever he wished to establish himself as a person of substance.

“Sir,” he said, “you are behaving foolishly. My name is Horace Dunlop. My father,” he lied, “is Sir Edward Dunlop. I am a lawyer. And should you decide not to honour your Hippocratic oath and come to the assistance of this poor woman, I will sue you. I will sue you for neglect, for malpractice and if the poor woman dies I will see you charged for murder. I will sue you for such a sum that you will lose this house, if you own it. You will lose your automobile (and I’m sure you have a good one). The Australian Medical Association will debar you. It causes me great
pain, sir, to make such threats against an Old Scotch Collegian who I would have imagined to be both charitable and a Christian, but by God, I will have you sued for every penny you have and every penny you can borrow and you will spend the rest of your life working to repay the loans you will have to undertake to cover the debt you are on the brink of incurring.”

Half-way through this extraordinary speech the doctor ceased stamping on Horace’s foot and so, given confidence by this reprieve, he finished his speech fortissimo, giving it all the splendour proper to the nineteenth-century novels that had inspired it and Molly, sitting in the car outside, was able to hear the true story of her daughter’s poisoning.

The door opened. The doctor stood there with the vase still stretched before him. It was a Dalton vase in the art nouveau style. He smashed it at the poet’s feet and made him jump.

“All right,” said Dr Ernest Henderson, “I will deal with you.”

Horace waited among the shards of pottery and broken lilacs, pondering his own position
vis-à-vis
the law.

Dr Ernest Montgomery Charles Maguire Henderson had a hell of a temper. It always surprised those who witnessed it, for ninety-nine per cent of the time he was a taciturn bachelor not given to loud noises. And then: whizz, bang, a plate or a horse’s shoe or an Oxford dictionary was sailing through the air, on its way to a windowpane or towards a painting or a wall, and the chunky little man (as hard as an armchair stuffed with too much horsehair) would seem, momentarily, to compress, to compact his muscled frame, and just when you expected the poltergeist that had propelled the object through the air to take possession of him and expand with a malevolent rush, he would go quite limp, bite his small moustache thoughtfully, and go back to the ordinary business of life.

Discovering shards of pottery or dictionaries with broken spines he would be inclined to regard them with surprise, and move them around a little with the toe of his shoe as if they were birds run down by speeding automobiles.

Yet the thing that had made him lose his temper was exactly the same thing that made him, on this April night, leave his empty echoing house happily, with relief, and follow the
Hispano Suiza eagerly: he was in love with a lady already spoken for.

The lights of the doctor’s Packard, which blazed into the back windows of the Hispano Suiza, seemed to Horace to be charged with the malevolence of an inquisitor.

“I’m in for it now,” he told Molly who had been silent since her tyre-squealing departure from the doctor’s house. “He’ll have me charged.”

Molly sucked in her breath and expelled it. She accelerated grimly. She had heard every word of Horace’s speech as it swooped from high falsetto to surprising baritone.

“Love her,” she snorted, attacking the gearbox with anger. “Love her. Some way to show your filthy love.”

“She begged me,” Horace said, aghast to find one more enemy. “She wept. Dear lady, please….”

“Don’t ‘dear lady’ me,” said Molly grimly. “If she dies I’ll charge you too. I have one hundred thousand pounds,” she said, “and I’ll spend every penny of it on lawyers if I have to.”

“Oh God,” moaned Horace. “Oh God, dear God.”

“You pray to God. Pray to God she doesn’t die.”

“The love is platonic.”

Molly shuddered at such a dirty-sounding word. She fled from its filth at seventy miles an hour down Ballarat Road with the doctor’s Packard roaring at her tail.

“She asked me to do it,” Horace cried as they bounced on to the track to the house. As Molly ploughed into her rose bed with the handbrake full on, Horace was catapulted upwards from his seat and slammed his shorn head against the roof.

She turned off the engine. “Pray,” she said, “if you know what’s good for you.”

Ernest Henderson, arriving a minute later, caught the sight of a woman in a huge black taffeta dress splendidly decorated with rose appliqués. Seen in the headlights of his car, she appeared large and blowzy and theatrical. She strode towards the house with the poet stumbling miserably behind.

No one stayed to escort the doctor inside. He entered the kitchen to find the large black taffeta dress at prayer with her knees on extravagant linoleum and her head on the kitchen table. The poet was leaning against a window and staring out into the night.

The doctor coughed.

Horace turned to face his executioner.

“She’s praying.”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t charge me, she will.”

The doctor winked. “Let’s see the patient, mmmm?”

Horace took him to the bedroom where they found Phoebe in her husband’s arms. The doctor asked for more light. Horace brought back a second lamp and when he returned he found the doctor standing and silently contemplating the embracing couple. Horace held up the lamp and sadly regarded this evidence of his complete betrayal.

When the doctor had contented himself that the patient’s stomach was quite empty, he administered a draught of Galls solution to stop the spasms and gave her a strong sedative.

In the kitchen he found atheistic Horace kneeling at the kitchen table beside the mother whose bosom, whether from religious passion or anger, was heaving in a manner that was impossible to ignore.

I leaned against the kitchen sink too weary and worried to counterfeit devotion.

It was Horace (looking up from pragmatic prayers) who asked the question about the patient.

The doctor was pleased to announce that both mother and child would survive the ordeal. He helped Molly up from the floor.

“Just the same,” he said to me, “you should be indebted to your lawyer mate. You’d never have got me here if not for him.”

Molly gave the poet and the doctor a look of utter disgust.

“If not for
him?”
she said, sitting with a grunt.

Horace stared at Molly with his mouth open, but when she did not continue, he shut it again.

“What lawyer?” I said. Relief had made my face go as soft and foolish as a flummery.

“He’s just a Rawleigh’s man,” said Molly.

“Is he now?” said the doctor, chewing his moustache and raising his eyebrows at the poet in question.

“For Man or Beast,” said Molly. “Door to door. Horse and cart.”

“Then he makes a prettier threat than any barrister I ever heard. You should have heard him,” he told me. “He would have had me drawn and quartered, locked in gaol and left to rot. He had
judges and juries and clerks of court ready to grab me and tie me up. So if he is a Rawleigh’s man, I’ll wager a quid he will end up a rich one, and he deserves it too.”

Thus Ernest Henderson brought all his power to save the skin of a man in love.

“You should thank this man,” he told me, “and the dear lady who drove so well. It was a performance few men would be capable of.”

Molly and I exchanged glances. Somewhere in the air, half-way between us, incredulity met a star-bright beam of triumph.

“She can’t drive,” I said. “I know it.”

“She can,” the doctor said. “Like a dream.”

Molly blushed deep red with pleasure.

“Granted,” the doctor said, “it is a fine motor car, but she raced it like a gentleman.”

But Molly could not be appeased quite so easily. She folded her arms across her bosom, as if to ward off further flattery, and demanded to be told the cause of her daughter’s problem. The doctor said that he had no doubt it was caused by a gastric attack similar to many he had seen that day, that it was, if anything, milder than normal; there was no risk to the child.

It was I who raised the question of poison. I raised it meekly, pointed to it, as though it were a household mouse I wished a stronger soul to kill.

Ernest Henderson, if you want my opinion, was not normally an inventive or practised liar. But that night the muse was with him and he constructed such a dazzling thread of pure invention and looped it back and forth so many times that I could not work out where anything started or stopped; he buttoned it neatly with Latin words (like bright-coloured pills with shiny coatings) and, although Molly did not trouble herself to believe a word he said, Horace and I, for different reasons, looked at the fabric he wove with appreciation and relief.

Well, tell me then, what was my choice? To believe my wife deceitful? A liar? A cheat? A collaborator with other cheats? Of course not. I took the lies and held them gratefully. I wrapped them round me and felt the soft comfort a child feels inside a woollen rug. And this, of course, is what anyone means when they say a lie is creditable; they do not mean that it is a perfect piece of engineering, but that it is comfortable. It is why we believed the British when they told us we were British too, and why we believed the Americans when they said they would
protect us. In all these cases, of course, there is a part of us that knows the thing is not true, and we hold it closer to ourselves because of it, refusing to hold it out at arm’s length or examine it against the light.

So I embraced Horace as a friend. I promised the child would bear his name (a promise I later made to several others and all of which I honoured).

We opened beer. I strutted around the kitchen. I found glasses to drink from and a few stale Thin Captain biscuits to eat. I fancy I was like a cocky rooster, with chest and bum thrust out before and after. I erased all memory of bile and tears.

“To wife and child.” I raised my glass of warm frothing beer. “To aviation, to Australia.”

“To wife and child,” they drank.

Ah, they all must have thought I was a mug in their different ways, but their wisdom did not stop them from dying in the end, and my foolishness has not killed me yet.

We had several bottles of that soapy-tasting beer. I became garrulous and told stories about flying. Molly recited Lawson at my request. Horace, unused to alcohol, declaimed two sonnets which confused us mightily.

When the doctor judged his work quite done, he rose to go. I took him by his arm and walked him to the door. There was another matter I wished to discuss with him in private.

I left Horace alone with Molly. The poet was nervous and recited Lawson (whom he loathed) with the same enthusiasm with which he had earlier knelt to pray.

Molly watched him as one might watch a spider that may or may not be venomous.

I would not let the doctor go, and yet I could not bring myself to examine the tender matter which so much occupied my mind. The poor fellow found himself stumbling at my side through the tussocked darkness, wandering into flower beds and stepping into horse shit while I thanked him for his trouble and followed a line of conversation that echoed our odd perambulations through the mist-streaked dark.

Ernest Henderson must have thought I had something contagious to admit: syphilis or TB or both.

But it was legs that were on my mind, and nothing else. What I wanted to know was how it was that one characteristic was passed on to a child and how one was not. I gave not a a damn for the shape of a head, or the colour of an eye, or even (as yet unaware of the stubbornness of my unborn son) such things as character and temperament. I wanted to be set at ease about the question of legs, and wondered out loud whether bowed legs (I could never bring myself to say “bandy”) were the result, as I had heard, of a poor diet or whether they were inherited from father or mother and, if it was inheritance, then whether the male or female would be the most important in the choice of legs, and if this was something that could be guarded against. I did not put it quite so neatly for, although my thoughts were clear enough, shyness hindered their expression. I had words to say about the Chinese, observing that bow-legs were a common condition, particularly amongst the old. I had seen it in members of Goon Tse Ying’s family, seen it before I realized I shared the same condition. Yet I was not quick to come to the point and I confused the matter by discussing the anti-Chinese riots at Lambing Flat where Goon Tse Ying’s father and uncle were killed and where he learned to stand in such a manner as to be invisible.