Death of an Old Goat (2 page)

The rhythm of the wheels changed: ‘
PUN
gent she
CAN
be;
CRU
el she
NEV
er is.' His eyes watered a little. Dear Jane Austen! Looking around the other occupants of the compartment
he comforted himself with the thought that they never, never in a million years, would appreciate Jane Austen. She was his Jane! A combination of Mrs Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, with very little of the real Jane. He had got a good deal of quiet enjoyment out of giving that lecture to those vulgar-shirted yokels in those disgustingly dirty cities he had just come from. He felt an emissary from a forgotten world, bringing a fragrant lost culture to the raw, raucous civilization which now and then had forced itself on his notice in the last few weeks, but had mostly drifted past his old eyes, unattended. Perhaps he had planted some seeds . . .?

A welcome feeling in his stomach told him that he was hungry, and then his brain, slowly reacting, told him that he was in Australia. An acute pang of disappointment made him pout out his lower lip like a baby. His hunger was unlikely to be satisfactorily appeased. To cover his gastronomical experiences of the last few months he had come up with a formula of ‘quantity rather than quality' — not an original observation, but one he was rather proud of. Because it didn't apply only to food, though he applied it mainly to food, because food was what he thought of for much of the time. He peered out at the endless, dusty landscape. Quantity rather than quality.

Suddenly there were two or three houses together, and then more, in a sort of improvised road. They were coming to a little town. He looked closer. Surely this could not be a University town. No. Obviously just another of those little country places they had been passing all day.

The train pulled into a station, and the placard along the platform, hardly legible for the accumulated dust of this throat-clotting country, read
DRUMMONDALE
. The name rang a vague bell in the back of his mind. Oh dear. He must have arrived.

• • •

It struck Professor Belville-Smith, or rather it edged its
way into his consciousness, that the little man who had met him was distinctly in a hurry. The handshake had been twice up and down, and he had been hurried through the ticket-barrier as fast as the ticket-collector, whose hand seemed deftly able to grasp any ticket but his, would allow. Now he was being hustled into a dusty Ford Cortina as if he were a troublesome old nanny on a family outing, and he was not at all sure that he liked it. Of course the car refused to obey the driver in a hurry. This was no doubt partly due to the fact that he did not put the clutch in before trying to start it. They drove off jerkily into the monotonous streets, with the shabby wooden houses and the tired grass and hedges, like every suburb he had seen in this old young country, only tireder and shabbier. Professor Belville-Smith tried to formulate a description of it all. ‘Like a recent settlement in Purgatory,' he said to himself. He smiled: that was really rather good. Should he suggest it to the funny little man beside him? Perhaps not. He had noticed in Australians a certain touchiness about their own country. Certain remarks he had made, intended to be only obliquely insulting, had met with disconcertingly violent retorts. It didn't do to tempt Providence when you were hungry.

‘You must be very tired,' said Professor Wickham.

‘Just a little, just a little,' said the Distinguished Guest, feeling much refreshed by his phrase-making.

‘We must have a chat about your work on the Augustans, when you're feeling less tired,' said Professor Wickham.

The Distinguished Guest racked his brains to remember what work he might once have done on the Augustans. Of course — the pamphlet on the lyrical poetry of John Gay, the product of an unusual outburst of energy in early middle-age. How strange that anyone should still be reading that.

‘Delighted,' he murmured urbanely.

‘Not now, of course,' said his host. ‘It is
such
a tiring journey.'

‘But
most
interesting,' lied Belville-Smith, gallantly, with an unpleasant feeling that he was in the way, and would shortly be disposed of.

‘I always fly myself,' said Wickham, changing gear with a horror-film shriek. ‘Less tiring.'

Through the deepening darkness they hastened erratically. A short stretch of neon-lighting suggested that they might be in the main street, and a few drunks rolled across the headlights of Professor Wickham's car. But they turned off, and almost immediately approached the illuminated signs of the Yarumba Motel which lit up rows of garishly painted little chalets. Professor Wickham stopped abruptly outside the reception hut, and jumped out. Belville-Smith looked around him with growing distaste. It was
exactly
the same as every other motel he had stayed at in this straggling, beastly country — just a bit smaller, perhaps, but basically exactly the same. He might be in Perth, or Adelaide, or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Newcastle. Or a recent settlement in Purgatory, he said to himself, with a self-satisfied smile.

‘You'll be very comfortable here,' said Professor Wickham, emerging brusquely from reception. ‘Motels are the only places to stay, here in Australia, you know.'

‘So it seems,' said Professor Belville-Smith.

He felt himself speedily decanted from the car and hustled into his predictable room.

‘There's everything here,' said Professor Wickham, glancing around quickly. The room was furnished by the same computer which had furnished the motels in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle. ‘Shower, bath, sofa, table, desk, you see.' He was very clearly making for the door.

‘Food,' said Professor Belville-Smith.

‘I beg your pardon,' said Wickham, caught in midescape.

‘Food. I have not yet eaten my evening meal.'

‘Oh! Well, you just ring. Ring the reception, and give your order. They'll serve it in here.'

Professor Belville-Smith advanced purposefully on the telephone. Wickham made good his escape while he could.

‘I'll pick you up at nine tomorrow.'

• • •

‘Do they serve evening meals at the Yarumba?' said Wickham to Lucy, as they drove out to the barbecue-dance.

‘Of course they don't,' said Lucy, dabbing at her layers of make-up in the driving-mirror. ‘Get a move on, you idiot. You've wasted enough time on that old fool as it is.'

P
ROFESSOR
B
ELVILLE
-S
MITH
perched his tired body irritably on the side of the bed, blinked twice, and picked up the telephone. Really, the man was most inconsiderate — most inconsiderate. Why, he'd hardly even bothered to disguise his intention of dumping his guest, of forcing him to spend a lonely evening in a hideous motel in a one-horse town . . . It was all very well to keep saying ‘You must be tired'; it had never once occurred to him to say ‘You must be hungry'. It was, in Professor Belville-Smith's opinion, a much more pertinent observation. He had found that, as he grew older, he needed less sleep than formerly, perhaps because he spent so much of the day only half-awake. He had
not
found that he needed less food. Quite the contrary. And he could not eat just anything. The meal served on the train had been too disgusting for words. He was conscious,
now, of being very hungry indeed. He banged resentfully on the receiver-rest of the motel telephone.

‘Yes, can I help you, sir?' came a voice of killing Australian gentility.

‘Yes, you can. I wish to order dinner,' said Belville-Smith, in the voice he used for negligent servants.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I . . . wish . . . to . . . order . . . dinner,' he said, spacing out his words as if they were milestones.

‘I'm afraid, sir, you're labouring under a misapprehension. Dinner we
don't
serve.' The implication was that any other meal he might care to name was well within their capacity.

‘What? You don't serve dinner?'

‘No, sir. But if you would care to order your breakfast for tomorrow you will find an order form . . .'

‘I do not want breakfast,' he almost screamed into the telephone. ‘I'm hungry now. I want my dinner.'

He heard, though clearly he wasn't meant to, a muttered ‘They're just like little children, at times.' Then the voice, resuming its Kensington vowel-sounds, came through loud and clear again.

‘You could try Beecher's Hotel, you know. Just down the road and turn to the right. Or there's a very nice little Chinese caf
fay
 . . .'

‘Chinese! Do you think I'm going to eat that rubbish?' shouted Belville-Smith, breathlessly.

‘I couldn't say, I'm sure,' said the voice coolly. ‘But we must try not to be prejudiced, mustn't we?'

He found himself sharply and pointedly cut off. He sat down on his bed again, the whimpers rising uncontrollably from his empty stomach. Nowhere else had he been treated like this. If you're an Oxford Professor and consent to come to the back of beyond, you do at least expect to be an honoured guest. You don't expect to be stranded, deserted, left to starve. His mind ran lovingly over the things he
would say to Professor Wickham tomorrow, then tore itself reluctantly away. When you are old, you have to concentrate on one thing at a time. He concentrated unremittingly on food. Buttoning his coat around him again, he aimed himself at the door.

Irritation giving purpose to his steps, he made his way through the courtyard of the motel, through the sounds of love-making and television commercials, and turned towards what he thought must be the centre of the town. The night air woke him up a little and he looked curiously round him. All those square, verandahed houses with their paint peeling off and their drab and dry little gardens. Truly, he was in limbo, he thought to himself. He set off towards the sound of cars and juke-boxes. The centre of the town, he soon discovered, was a street, a short street, intersected, always at right angles, by other streets. Australia, he thought, was a country of circles and squares, and they could plan their towns in no other way. One was intolerably confusing, the other simply boring. Where was this hotel? He peered dimly up the street. It reminded him of what the Wild West of America must have been like in the days of his youth: taverns with long balconies all round them, and posts to tie the horses to. Some of the men were not unlike characters he had once seen in a Wild West film long ago, in the days before films began to talk. If those things with balconies really were taverns, then presumably one of them was his destination. He didn't fancy walking into one; in fact, he rather thought he might get shot at. But he forgot his skin in his concern for his stomach, and he walked along the street peering hungrily about him.

The smell that first assailed his nostrils was of beer rather than food, and the garish advertisements placarded along the wall were of beer too — sun-lit, bubbling glasses, a mere crude appealing to the thirsty. But looking at the sign over the door he realized thankfully that he had reached his destination. As he walked up the steps of Beecher's
Hotel and into the foyer — decorated with an enormous bunch of gladioli — the door to the saloon bar was pushed open, and an intolerable stench of beer and beer and beer flooded in his direction. For a moment the potency of it nearly made him lose his balance, then, gasping, choking, he stumbled faster than he had done for thirty years up the remaining stairs, until he reached the comparative odourlessness of the reception-desk.

‘The dining-room,' he choked hoarsely.

The young man behind the desk surveyed him for a few moments, then jerked his thumb lazily to his left. It was impertinence, but this was not the moment to protest. Professor Belville-Smith turned and tottered towards the sanctum of the dining-room; pushing open the swinging glass doors, he sank gratefully into the first chair that offered.

It took him some minutes to get his breath back. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, and cleaned his spectacles meticulously. As he puffed and tut-tutted himself back to normality some impressions of the place gradually filtered through to him. Colours — off-white (table-cloths) and dirty blue (walls). The place seemed to be empty — ah, no; not quite. There were two young people at the table next to his own. Otherwise the place was entirely untenanted. At any rate there wouldn't be any difficulty in getting service here. His eye ranged down the dreary length of the room. By the door at the far end he thought he could make out the figure of what must be the waitress. She was sitting on a table, apparently cleaning her nails with one of the table-knives, and swapping insults with somebody behind the far door. That, he presumed, must be the kitchen.

He collected his thoughts and signed to her. As if her eyes were unable to penetrate the immense distance she ignored him, and went on cleaning her nails and shouting. He waited, and signed again. She rapped out a little tune with the knife on the table, shouted a last cheerful insult at her
antagonist on the other side of the door, and then slowly made the long trek over to him. She turned out to be a rather cheery slattern, with a stained apron and greasy hair.

‘Me feet are killing me today,' she said genially. ‘Something yer'd like?'

‘I would like the menu, please,' said Belville-Smith, distinctly, as if he were talking to an idiot. As, indeed, he was sure he was. She looked at him doubtfully.

‘We've got a lovely bit of steak,' she said encouragingly. ‘Wouldn't that suit yer?'

‘The menu.'

‘And the fish is nice. Real lovely it smells out there. I'd pick yer a real good bit.'

‘What
kind
of fish?' said Belville-Smith, pettishly.

‘There yer've got me,' said the waitress.