‘Goodbye Ireland,’ said Roger.
He drank.
His empty glass. The fizziness suddenly coming up into his nose.
His eyes watered and he flushed a beetroot red.
The Bosun flopped into his chair, pointed at him in glee and broke into a high peal of laughter.
He stopped himself at last, thumping the table with a rosy pink fist.
‘I – I must tell you,’ he said.
He swallowed down the last of the giggles.
‘I must tell you before I forget about a rather naughty thing I did. You won’t hear about it if you’re not going back to An Scoil or whatever it is. But when I was poking around there in my deplorably amateurish way I came across that perfectly dreadful secretary woman, Miss Dragon or Miss Hogan or something. Well, I even got to the point of following her about at one stage to see if she was corruptible or anything, and I saw her post one of those unmistakable football coupon things. You know, in the stripey envelopes. So do you know what I did? I posted her a cheque for five thousand pounds winnings.’
‘So that was it.’
‘I worked it all out, you see. She’s just the sort of person who goes in for the pools without really ever thinking she’ll win. When she got her cheque I bet she was furious. And then she would have been well used to the idea before she discovered it was a fake.’
He dived at the entrée dish and whipped off the cover. The dish was full of succulent pinky bacon, bursting brown sausages, deep bloody red kidneys and floppy fried eggs. The Bosun seized a spoon, dolloped them out high piled helpings, and then began shovelling up great forkfuls into his mouth.
‘I was a bit surprised you left it so long to do anything about that chap Fergus Peck,’ he said.
The words mixed up with a slobbering piece of egg.
‘It was just that Professor O Nuallain forgot to mention him,’ Roger said.
He put down his glass suddenly.
Perhaps after the long spell of bad food the richness of his present meal was upsetting him.
‘I’ve got something to tell you about O Nuallain,’ the Bosun said. ‘But first I must let you hear about my interview with friend Fergus. In some ways it was the funniest thing of the lot.’
Roger tried a piece of bacon. It was superbly cooked, tender and grease-free.
‘I tried to corrupt Fergus, of course,’ the Bosun said. ‘I didn’t know much about him really, and there didn’t seem to be anything to blackmail him about so I was reduced to offering him money. And it so embarrassed him. I have never in my life seen anyone so embarrassed. But, and this is the point, he was embarrassed for me. For me. He was filled with the deepest feelings of shame because a member of the British academic class could bring himself to stoop so low. He actually wriggled, you know, wriggled.’
‘That explains it.’
‘Explains what?’
‘Why he behaved so suspiciously when I mentioned your name to him in O’Brien’s Bar. That was what kept me hanging on to him when I knew you were coming at any moment.’
The Bosun held on to his champagne glass with both hands.
‘Oh but lovely,’ he said, ‘lovely. That’s the final touch. I think that makes it beat the Boycott affair.’
‘The Boycott affair?’
‘Oh yes, I forgot you didn’t know about that. There’s so much to tell you. We’ll talk about it all for years to come. But I’ll give you the bones of it now. You see, I tried to bribe old Austin Boycott too. I tell you I was ruthless, utterly ruthless. I’d have bribed that appalling bore Wyndham if he’d been bribable. You know Wyndham?’
‘Yes. I suspected him of course. Why do you say he isn’t bribable?’
‘Oh, think, my dear chap, think. All this champagne must be watering down your brains.’
The bottle tipped, the bubbling liquid streaming out.
‘He’s much too wrapped up in himself to want the things money can buy,’ the Bosun said. ‘But I was in the middle of the Boycott saga. Do you know he used to teach at my prep school? We called him the Drum: you know, he made a deep booming noise and was hollow inside. I take full credit for the joke: it showed my early promise. Well, generally I avoid him like the plague, but I decided in the interests of the grand design that I would have to make use of him.’
He leant forward and energetically scraped up the last of the bacon and eggs. He divided them with punctilious fairness between their two plates.
‘So I approached him, and told him there was a lot of money in it. He seemed to be co-operating at first. He actually got himself in at your place – which I made a sort of preliminary condition. So I sent him some money. And do you know what the old apostle of honesty in personal relationships did?’
‘I’ll buy it.’
‘He cashed the order and wrote me a letter telling me to go to hell.’
The Bosun tipped back his chair and regarded his empty plate and Boycott’s behaviour with equal regretful satisfaction.
‘And Etain?’ said Roger. ‘Did she succumb to bribery?’
The Bosun tipped his chair forward. The shock to the fragile legs.
‘My dear boy, you were rather smitten, weren’t you? But you must forget all that. It was your own fault, you know.’
Earnest eyes shining with Pickwickian benevolence.
‘Your own fault. You never got out and about enough. Consequently the first pretty face that comes along and you’re bowled over. But you wait till we get back. I’ll put you on a strict rota of social activities. In no time at all you won’t know which way to choose. That’s an absolute promise.’
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Roger said.
He leant forward and looked at the Bosun across the debris of their gargantuan breakfast.
‘I really am looking forward to it,’ he said, ‘all of it. What on earth possessed me to kick over the traces like that I can’t imagine.’
The Bosun shrugged.
‘Don’t worry about it, my dear boy. You were working a bit too hard or something. It was very natural. My fault in many ways I shouldn’t wonder. I mean, I’ve no doubt that if you were working too hard it was because I was spurring you on. The truth of the matter is that I’m a wee bit obsessed with it all.’
He clasped the edge of the table and leant towards Roger. The light shining in his eyes.
‘Think of it,’ he said, ‘just think of it. A little more work, just a tiny bit, and we’re there. Ready with a complete technique for brainwashing a whole nation – in one intense campaign to be able to wipe out from a whole people all the false ideas that they’ve been brought up on from birth, bred on. It’s the unique solution. If no one can disagree with us, no one can fight us. It’s the Pax Britannica, and it’s only just round the corner. You should see what we’ve done in the last three years. Can you blame me for wanting you back when a man of your capabilities could really speed up the final burst?’
‘I certainly don’t blame you,’ Roger said. ‘I really must have been hallucinated all the time.’
He stood up.
‘Let me say it just once now I’m seeing things in black and white again. Thank you. Thank you for pulling me out of it. You ought to have finished me off like Eric, you know.’
The Bosun heaved himself to his feet.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘you’ve spoken your piece. Now don’t let’s hear any more about it. It had to be that way over Eric, though I can’t pretend I liked doing it. But now you’re back and the end is in sight, and things are going to go like one o’clock for ever and ever.’
‘For ever and for ever.’
‘But let’s get a move on. I’d be furious if we missed that plane. There’s only one a day for Manchester, and I can’t wait.’
Roger yawned.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, ‘but I don’t feel much like hurrying. I’m so sleepy.’
The Bosun smiled.
‘I’ll let you sleep on the aeroplane,’ he said. ‘I promise I shan’t utter a word.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Roger said.
He grinned sheepishly.
‘I really am worn out,’ he said. ‘But all the same I feel better. Better than I’ve felt for a long, long time.’
Another yawn.
He staggered after the Bosun towards the door.
A sleepy haze.
Dimly he remembered a loose thread.
‘Oh, I know,’ he said, ‘what was it you were going to tell me about O Nuallain?’
The Bosun opened the door and set off ahead of him through the house.
‘Oh, he died. Yesterday morning, as a matter of fact. I heard it on the wireless. We’ll buy an Irish Times at the airport and see what sort of an obit they give him.’
He toddled comfortably along ahead of Roger. In the small barely furnished entrance hall he fumbled with the bolts on the front door.
Unconscious of his mistake.
Chapter Twenty-One
For a long moment Roger stood stock still. Paralysed by the clash of forces inside his brain. He had not an atom of strength left for any other activity. He stood frozen at the very point at which the Bosun had so off-handedly announced the death of Professor O Nuallain. He even ceased for those tumultuous half-seconds to breathe. The blood almost halted in his veins.
And the old order rose up from its grave to win. The Bosun’s work had been too hurriedly done. Its effect was, after all, not as permanent as it had appeared to be. Perhaps the sole fact capable of reactivating Roger’s dying beliefs had been casually put in his way. The death of the man who had symbolized for him all that was good in the new way of life he had hacked out for himself had ripped the distorting veils away. Once again he saw things as he had taught himself to see them.
The death of the hero had given birth to the unquenchable legend.
As suddenly as the vital forces in Roger had been suspended for the moment of battle they sprang back with renewed strength after the victory.
He moved forward again in the Bosun’s wake. Easily, calmly. In full possession of his faculties. At a peak.
‘I wonder if the Irish Times will do the old boy full justice,’ he said.
The right note of faint denigration. Unfailingly hit on.
The Bosun giggled a little. A rippling in the balloon bulk.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to wait till we get back home to see what he rates in the real Times.’
With puffy pink hands he tugged open the front door and pit-patted out of the house. His obscene waddle.
Roger followed him.
He found himself under a grey sky in a short driveway that might have belonged to any outer suburban house in any biggish town in England or Ireland. Only the sight of a green pillar box on the far side of the tidy road reassured him that he was still on the right side of the Irish Sea.
The house lay ten or twelve yards back from the road. A low wall and a privet hedge separated the garden from the broad pavement. Most of the space between the wall and the house was occupied by the drive on which stood the Bosun’s familiar black overblown American car.
Underneath the privet hedge there was a border filled with the dry stalks of dead clumps of Michaelmas daisies with here and there a tiny light green shoot of some bulb thrusting up through them. Beside the chestnut paling fences that divided the house from its neighbours on either side were two narrower flower beds planted with chrysanthemums. One or two blooms that had defied the winter made pale splodges of faded colour.
Roger turned round and looked at the house itself. Two stories of quiet coloured brick with bow windows neatly paned in leaded diamonds on either side of the front door. The roof was of subdued green pantiles. The woodwork and drainpipes were painted in a discreetly gay shade of blue. At each corner of the roofline there was a large white ornamental vase.
Not a prison-like place.
The Bosun went over to the car, which was parked facing the curly ironwork gates neatly fastened back on their hooks. He opened the boot and glanced in.
‘I was afraid they had forgotten to pack my stuff,’ he said. ‘We really ought to be on our way. To tell you the truth, I can’t wait till I’m out of this country. There’s a desperate ramshackleness about it that depresses me.’
He looked at the watch swamped in the puffy flesh of his wrist.
‘Where the hell is Collins?’ he said. ‘He should have been out here waiting for us.’
He turned and looked at the prosaic façade of the house. Spleen.
‘Get in, my dear chap,’ he said to Roger. ‘I’m going to rout out Collins if it’s the last thing I do.’
He strode angrily round the car, jerked open the front door on the passenger’s side and held it open.
Roger went round the car the other way. He paused for one instant while he was out of sight of the Bosun.
A moment to take control of his pounding heart.
At the door of the car he stopped and stretched his arms wide before starting to get in.
He looked up at the Bosun’s balloon face.
He glanced at the open road sweeping away round the corner. He raised an eyebrow.
The Bosun gave a short pig grunt of laughter.
‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘why shouldn’t I leave you here on your own? After all, it’s obvious my little course of treatment has been a complete success.’
The insufferable, high piping voice.
Roger settled himself on the wide bench seat of the car. The Bosun leant in before shutting the door.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the treatment was very much a field version of the proper thing, but it was basically quite standard. First, a disorientation spell. Darkness, irregular meals, characterless food, all that sort of thing. Then when the time is ripe: the interrogation. A preliminary bout of unresponsiveness by the interrogator producing inevitably doubts by the subject about his own identity. I rather liked you when you were three parts convinced you were a defence expert.’
Roger laughed.
‘Next,’ the Bosun went on, ‘you start putting a few thoughts into the subject’s head, just to add to the confusion. And then you go the rounds with some carefully chosen questions designed to hit on any likely weak places in the subject. Of course, I was extremely lucky to get on to the subject of boils so soon in your case. Still, I deserved some luck.’
Roger looked up at him.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘we each had our bits of luck in our marathon duel.’
The Bosun giggled.
‘Did you like the way I handled the next bit?’ he said. ‘The harnessing of the nail filing noise? You see, you latch it on to the disliked questions, you set up a conditioned reflex, and then you match it to the entirely irrelevant question. Nine times out of ten it brings on the abreaction, the emotional crisis. And, of course, after that you get that interminable drivelling out of hopes and fears, and you wait till you judge the moment is ripe and then gently push the subject into that declaration in direct opposition to the previously held views.’
Roger forced the tensed muscles of his feet to relax.
‘Now,’ said the Bosun, ‘this is where you have to act quickly. I’ve known beautifully caught fish wriggle off the hook just here because the interrogator wasn’t quite quick enough. You’ve simply got to leap in and get the declaration turned from words into an act, some action performed once and impossible ever to expunge.’
Roger looked at the house door. If Collins came out now …
The Bosun straightened up and declaimed into the cold suburban air.
‘The Moving Finger writes; and having writ
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.’
He bobbed down again.
‘In your case booking the aircraft tickets,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘And then I revert to my familiar role of father figure to put the experience in perspective for you as it were. And you get comfort and good food and all the rest of it.�
�
He straightened up again. The heaving balloon shape.
He gave a little grin. His tiny slit mouth curling.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘as the wretched Collins has still failed to appear I shall have to leave you.’
He grinned ferociously.
‘I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.’
The pointed words.
He carefully closed the door on Roger and went back to the house.
The huge puffed-up body moving evenly forward with padding, noiseless steps.
He took out his keys and opened the front door. Roger turned his head to watch.
Lazily, unconcernedly.
The Bosun went into the house. The discreetly gay blue door began slowly swinging to.
A simple question of mechanics. Merely a matter of weight and the friction effect of the hinges. The factor of the age of the Yale lock to be taken into consideration, and whether at any time in the past it had been oiled.
If all the circumstances were right the door would click shut. If not, it would remain tantalizingly open. The Bosun from where he would stand in the hall shouting for Collins, who responded only to a shout, would have Roger under complete observation. Within range.
The door swinging slowly towards the jamb. Nearer, nearer.
The Bosun’s inflated figure was cut off from sight. Roger began sliding along the bench seat into the driver’s place.
He kept his eyes on the front door. Nearer, nearer.
At last it clicked to.
In the still air the sound of the latch was distinctly audible in the car.
Roger softly turned the ignition key, slipped off the handbrake and pulled back the choke. He paused a second and then tugged sharply at the starter. The engine broke into life. He jammed his foot hard down on the clutch pedal, wrestled for an instant with the gear lever, eased back the clutch and gave the engine a touch of acceleration.
Would he stall the unfamiliar vehicle?
He risked a flicked glance at the gay blue front door. Still closed.
The car was moving forward now. Slowly, lumberingly and quietly.
Roger negotiated the curly ironwork gates. The wide suburban road was free of traffic in either direction. He swung the big car into it. The engine seemed to be running entirely smoothly.
The Dog It Was That Died Page 21