Death of an Old Goat (20 page)

It was a sound he was puzzled to identify — was it animal or human? Was it a car or some sort of musical instrument? Just ahead of him was a track, branching off to the right from the main gravel road which would lead him straight to Kenilworth. Bending down he peered at the surface, and noticed it had been recently disturbed: cars had passed along there recently, he felt sure, and had turned off. Where to? This side track didn't lead to anybody's property, that was for sure. As far as he knew it ended up in a rather pretty little natural valley, with a few gum-trees and some smooth rocks for sitting on. Nothing spectacular as scenery, but pleasantly regular, and standing out from the prevailing Australian sameness. He believed it had been used for picnics by the local Country Party supporters association, and once the local wives had tried to get up a country dancing club which had met there once or twice
but which had collapsed amid a considerable amount of male ridicule. At any rate this lot wouldn't be doing Scottish reels, unless Mr Gordon had an even more effective tongue than he had realized. But what sort of business could they have there at this time of night? He sighed, and pressed on.

Another ten minutes' solid walk and Royle was feeling still more fed up and distinctly unsure of himself. He was not usually a jumpy person, as everyone knew. Though a physical coward, he had too little imagination to think every shadow was a murderer or a poltergeist. He was afraid of real threats, but not of shadows. But this was something that he had never experienced before. From time to time, proceeding it seemed from the darkness ahead, there had come to his ears sounds — sounds that meant nothing to him, sounds which connected themselves with nothing that he knew, but which wrapped themselves round him in the night. They were isolated sounds, sometimes followed by similar ones which sounded like imitations. They said no more to him than would the music of Anton Webern, but they left him similarly irritated and uneasy. Finally, just as his steps were becoming hesitant, and he was in the classic state of indecision as to whether to continue forward or go back — and with all the indications being that he would flee — he became conscious of the dim outline of a car. Going forward towards it, he struck his shin on a fender, and cursed outright — the words luckily being drowned by another of those isolated notes, this time nearer and louder. He looked around, and realized there were vehicles all around him — large, capacious graziers' cars, most of them parked around a large gum-tree. Suddenly he knew that he could not bear the torment of not knowing exactly what was going on. His mind was made up for him, and his course would have to be forward.

Stealthily he made his way through the little knot of cars. He realized that this was the end of the track — the road
circled round the tree, and then proceeded back the way it came. On Royle's left the land rose gently, to dip down more steeply on the other side to form the natural valley. It was here, clearly, that the men were congregated. It was from here that the occasional note still emerged — menacing, but somehow preparatory, like a clearing of the throat. Reluctantly Royle turned to his left. There was a path up to the summit he felt sure, but it might be as well to keep off it, just in case the men were looking in that direction, expecting someone else. He would have to go round a bit before putting his head over the top. The going was a bit rough at the spot where he chose to ascend. He carefully measured each step in advance, and thought out where to place his foot. He didn't want a twig to crack if he could help it: if those men were in anything like his state, they would be quite unusually aware of sounds in their vicinity. He did not even swear when he trod in something soft that felt very like cow dung. He had not known he was capable of such self-control.

As he pressed on and neared the summit, the occasional, isolated notes ceased, but in their place he heard something else: movements, scuffles, a muttered curse or two. Confident that these noises would cover his own, Royle increased his speed, and had nearly gained the ridge of the slope when he was transfixed by a sound which made his hair bristle on his scalp, and sent goose-pimples down the fatty length of his body, as if he had suddenly had the cold shower turned on him. It was a noise like nothing he had ever heard — menacing still, but at the same time soulful, rhythmical, as if imploring something. It wasn't drunken singing, it wasn't rugby-club celebrations. It was . . .

Suddenly it came to him. For once in his life Royle solved a mystery without having the solution thrust in front of his nose — albeit the mystery was a tiny one, and its solution was never to contribute to the official recognition that he craved. He was no longer inhibited by fear. Speeding up
still further he approached the summit and dropped swiftly to his stomach. The sight that met his delighted, incredulous eyes was one to gratify the minds of those who loved to watch the mingling and fruitful interaction of civilizations old and new.

In the middle of the valley, shouting enthusiastically to the four winds, was a dark naked body. In one hand was some sort of a musical instrument, in the other something long and deadly — a primitive weapon which he was waving. The figure was capering round, as if in ecstasy. Around him was a ring of figures whose abandonment was apparently less complete. They were also waving what looked like broomstick handles, and were shifting from one foot to another with considerable embarrassment, like parents at a teenage party. They were shouting more or less in time to gesticulations from their leader. All of them were stripped to their underpants, and their movements became the more frenzied as the chill night air struck their bare skins and ate into their paunchy bodies. They chanted wildly, and as Royle lay watching, scarcely able to believe his eyes, they became more confident, more abandoned. Their song had all the heartfelt pathos of men who see their bank-balances daily diminishing.

Down in the valley Mr Guy Turberville, Mr Ben Lullham, Mr Tim McKay, Mr Pete Nolan, Mr Bert Coogan, Mr Alistair Gordon, Mr Geoff Dutton, Mr Gabby Johnson and Mr Andy Pryce-Jones, under the knowledgeable leadership of Mr Johnny Marullah, were beginning to perform the age-old Australian ceremony of rain-making.

A
LICE
O'B
RIEN
was walking heavily up and down her study-cum-sitting-room in Daisy Bates College, peering short-sightedly at her bookshelf, her desk, in fact anywhere but at the sofa, where a thin, sandy-haired student of nondescript appearance was wringing her hands, a gesture which her literary studies had taught her was an appropriate sign of repentance. Alice was trying to work up her stern-housemistress face before going any further with the interview. By dint of sucking in her lips and throwing back her shoulders (a gesture she had seen Miss Tambly accomplish to perfection) she finally succeeded, and turned around in her tracks.

‘What a
bloody
silly thing to do,' she said — it was a convention throughout the various colleges of the university that all acts of a criminal, spiteful, immoral or vicious nature were to be referred to as ‘silly'. The theory seemed to be that if one made the erring students feel childish they would be rendered more amenable to discipline, though in fact it seemed more often to result in an unfortunate marriage of the appetites of an adult with the random destructiveness of a child.

‘I
do
agree, Miss O'Brien,' said the Dickensian waif on the sofa. ‘I do
so
agree.'

‘Robbing the shops in town is one thing,' said Alice; ‘they fleece the students right and left all through the year, so you could say they ask for it in a way . . .'

‘They
do
,' said the girl, with an air of committing this remarkable piece of moral tutoring to memory.

‘. . . but pinching things from a fellow student is another
thing altogether . . .'

‘I quite see that,' said the student, having another quick wring.

‘. . . especially as you were bound to be caught out as soon as you wore the things.'

‘I didn't intend to wear them till I got home for the vac,' said the student sharply, apparently stung by the aspersion on her intelligence. ‘But Norm O'Farrell had invited me to the Menzies Ball, and when my long skirt and blouse didn't come back from the dry cleaners, I hadn't any choice.'

‘That doesn't alter the moral aspect at all,' said Alice.

‘No, I
do
see that,' said the girl, reverting to her chosen role, and looking more like the Marchioness every minute. ‘If you asked me why I did it, in the first place, I just couldn't tell you.'

This was exactly what Alice had been going to ask her, and she had quickly to think up another question.

‘
How
did you do it?' she asked rather wildly.

‘Eh?' said the Marchioness, caught off her pious guard.

‘Er, how did you get in to Kathy Fowler's room? I gather it was locked at the time.'

‘Oh, I used a hairpin. You must know how easy it is . . .'

‘No, I didn't actually. What do you do?'

The Marchioness plunged a much-wrung hand into her hair, and started a demonstration.

‘Show me on my door,' said Alice, peering rather confusedly. ‘If it is as easy as all that, I ought to know how these things are done.'

‘Glad to oblige,' said the Marchioness.

• • •

Bill Bascomb came in from Hall, flung his gown on his bed, and went straight to the full sherry-flagon with which he had equipped himself earlier in the day. This was going to be an arduous evening. Waiting for him after his afternoon trudge through the drearier stretches of restoration ‘comedy'
had been a thick envelope of manuscripts and photocopies from his friend Jim Timmins of the
Oxford Mail
. He would have missed dinner on a normal day, but the fact that a visiting Professor of English from Melbourne was dining there changed his mind: he cherished the hope that other parts of Australia were less of a living death than the part he had happened to land in, and he had adopted the policy of building bridges wherever possible. However, any thoughts of bridges thrown out in the Melbourne direction had been abandoned after some incautious remarks he had made about Dr Leavis had led to a frosting-over which no amount of social chit-chat had been able to remove. So now he intended to console himself for a misspent hour and a half with sherry and gossip.

Jim Timmins was a journalist who believed in saturation coverage. He was usually sent by his editors to investigate problems of incredible complexity, which kept him away from the office for weeks. The results usually appeared when news was short, either because it was the silly season, or at other dry times such as the last days of December. His investigations of the state of college kitchens had once made the whole town throw up its Christmas fare. He was the only journalist on the paper who could make two columns out of a minor motor accident. Certainly his literary merits hardly included the pithy saying or the apt summing up. He had filled up page after page with what he had discovered, such as it was, and his commentary was as voluminous as a
Hamlet
editor's, though hardly as imaginative. Bill Bascomb spread it all out over his coffee-table, took a couple of quick gulps of sherry, and settled in to it. As he read on, he was surprised to find that he was not surprised. Somehow, all this was very much what he had expected from these people. There was a dull shock of recognition, but little leaping of the heart at the manifold variety of human folly.

Professor Wickham, as befitted his status, had by far the
largest folder. His university career had begun in 1948, when Oxford was still full of ex-servicemen. For his first year he had been unmarried, though he was already engaged to Lucy, whom he had obstinately insisted on calling his ‘forces' sweetheart', to everyone's embarrassment. He had lived in college — the college being Oriel. He had come there with a first-class degree from Australia, but in spite of this he had made very little impression. ‘Of course, the competition was hot in those days,' said one of his contemporaries, now a city-councillor and Liberal candidate somewhere in East Anglia, ‘but even in an average year, you got the impression he'd have to work hard to be mediocre.' Apparently he had only scraped through Prelims, but that was not uncommon for bright students, and at the end of his first year he had married. Lucy Wickham had been escorted from Australia by some Caroline-Chisholm in-reverse, an arrangement master-minded by Professor Wickham's family who suspected her morals, but after the wedding ceremony she seemed to have reverted to the happy amorality of the milieu from which she came.

‘Here I'm having to rely a lot on gossip that can't be checked,' said Jim Timmins, with unjournalistic caution. Uncheckable gossip had it that after the Wickhams had set up house in a flat in Cowley Road the family budget had been eked out by Lucy, who had made herself discreetly available to a few selected ‘friends' while her husband fought for a place in the cold and crowded libraries and lecture-rooms. This activity was pleasantly arranged on a quite un-professional level, and no one was quite certain how far her husband was aware of it. Uncheckable gossip also had it that Wickham's old scout at Oriel had helped in making this service known to various gilded youths whose family fortunes had survived the war and the aftermath of socialist austerity (austerity which Lucy was apparently in the habit of comparing rather bitterly to conditions back home, which had not endeared her to those healthy young
men living on near-starvation rations who were her husband's contemporaries). Jim had visited the aforementioned scout, now retired, but beyond the fact that he had a disreputable eye, and was living in a poverty less extreme than that usually ordained by the Oxford colleges for their faithful servants, he had been able to get out of him almost nothing of substance.