Death of an Old Goat

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Just one glass when they arrive for the academics,’ she said to her son Richard. Richard was ten, and premature beyond all imagining, and had insisted on officiating with the drinks for the early part of the evening.

  ‘Just one for the whole evening?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Well, no. I don’t suppose that’s possible. But leave them empty for as long as you can.’

  ‘All right. But I can’t see how I stop them coming to ask for more. What should I say to them then?’

  ‘Tell them you’re not yet sure whether there’s enough to go round. Say they weren’t expected.’ Lucy thought for a moment. ‘And no spirits for them. Just the red wine. For God’s sake don’t ask them what they want — just give them the red as soon as they arrive.’

  ‘OK. I’ll give them the Oliver Twist treatment,’ said Richard, and sipped a glass of sherry experimentally.

  Lucy looked around the room again: cheese twisties, potato crisps, peanuts, pretzels. Would the Turbervilles be expecting salted almonds? She looked at her husband coming in: when there were guests to see it, she’d have to straighten that tie. He enjoyed these little public humiliations.

  ‘Now, the academics, Bobby. If we must have them, you’ll have to take full charge of them. If you get the first two or three over to the corner there, they’ll probably all go there as soon as they arrive. That will get them nicely out of the way of the real guests, and they’ll be a long way away from Richard and the bar.’

  ‘Yes, dear, I’ll do my best. But you can’t trust some of them. That O’Brien woman just goes off and introduces herself to people.’

  ‘Just leave her to me. I’ll take care of the old man. I don’t imagine he’s the wandering type, so I’ll keep him down this end. I’ll introduce him to the Turbervilles and some of the nice people. If this O’Brien comes near I’ll freeze her.’

  ‘She knows him already, you know. They met last night — in Beecher’s I think.’

  ‘Really? Bloody impertinence, muscling in like that. You’ll have to get rid of that girl. With her accent she’s not fit to teach in an outback infants’ school. Well, if she comes near, I’ll just suggest she shouldn’t try to monopolize — in Beecher’s I think.’

  Lucy walked over to the window. It was dark, and the only sound was of semi-trailers, and the local yobs in their hotted-up cars. She looked out.

  ‘No prizes for guessing who will arrive first. Bound to be an academic, they’re always so bloody thirsty. And pretty sure to be that bastard Day.’ (Lucy Wickham was a miner’s daughter from Western Australia, and in the privacy of her own home her vocabulary tended to betray her origins.) ‘Why you keep him I don’t know. He’s the world’s worst lecturer, and he’s never sober.’

  Professor Wickham tried to explain — as always when his wife seemed to confuse his powers with those of Ivan the Terrible — that it was hardly a question of ‘keeping’ him, since once he had been engaged he could hardly be sacked for anything short of rape or communism. But as usual, Lucy wasn’t listening. She interrupted him:

  ‘Bobby. He’s here already. Now that really is too much. Five minutes to go before the time we said. For heaven’s sake — you’d think he’d have the decency . . .’

  ‘I’ll do something with him, dear, don’t worry.’

  ‘You’d better, or I’ll skin you. Take him into your study. I don’t want him in here before twenty past eight at the earliest. Even then he’ll be drunk by half past.’

  Peter Day seemed to have anticipated her, however. His progress up the pathway was instinct with laborious concentration — it was the walk of one who knows that if he relaxes his vigilance for a moment he will sway or swerve. He kept his finger on the door-bell just five seconds too long, and Professor Wickham counted himself lucky that he did not have to catch him when he opened the door. With the fear of Lucy in his heart, he took him by the arm and led him into the study. Peter sat down firmly in the easy chair, and then looked round with an air of surprise and grievance. Clearly he felt he’d been had. Professor Wickham, à propos of nothing, forced him into a detailed conversation about the merits of the Ricks edition of Tennyson, and surveyed with despair the bloodshot eyes and the grubby shirt (he had been made to change the torn one, but though his wife tried to send him out clean, she could do little about keeping him that way). This is what one gets for employing Adult Education lecturers who got their degrees at Leeds, thought Wickham grimly. His opinion of the man was not improved when Day seemed to cotton on to the game they were playing, and launched into a lengthy disquisition on some textural nicety from one of the Tennyson dialect poems, with incomprehensibly broad and lengthy quotations. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was being got at or not. Sometimes he felt that his staff seemed to be taking a kind of revenge on him — but for what he was never able to fathom.

  By the time Wickham led his captive into the lounge it was nearly half past eight, and Dr Day had sobered up considerably. He always sobered up quickly, which was why he drank almost constantly. Wickham noted with satisfaction that he pointed himself immediately at the party of academics, which Lucy, without his aid, had shunted into the far corner away from the bar. He hoped that she hadn’t simply told them to go there. She was quite capable of it.

  ‘Hallo, Alice,’ said Day loudly. ‘You’ve got a drink. Is this a drinking party, or did you bring it with you?’

  Wickham went to get Dr Day a drink.

  ‘Enjoy the lecture?’ said Day to Mervyn Raines. ‘Had the quality of surprise, what? What do you think we get tomorrow? The whole thing in reverse? Start with Jane, then half-way switch to the Gaskell? One thing about visiting lecturers: they make the students appreciate the lecturers they’ve got already.’

  ‘Nothing would make the students appreciate some of the lecturers they’ve got already,’ said Beatrice Porter, an acidulated spinster of twenty-four or thereabouts, a protégée of Professor Wickham, who engaged her because she was one woman Lucy could not suspect him of having amorous designs on.

  ‘Alcohol does nothing for some women,’ said Day, to no one in particular. ‘Thanks,’ he said, as a glass was pushed into his hands. As he took his first gulp he caught sight of Lucy Wickham entertaining one of the local headmasters and a grazier’s wife in the other corner.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘look at Lucy’s dress. Practically inviting us to pop our arm down.’

  Professor Wickham grinned nervously, and Bill Bascomb put his hand on Day’s arm to stop him going to experiment in the direction he had indicated. There was still quite a lot of Englishness about Bill Bascomb. Beatrice Porter turned on the swaying figure:

  ‘Do you have to come drunk and behave coarsely at every social gathering the Department has, Dr Day? Couldn’t you save your drunkenness for your lecturing days?’

  It was well known that one of the few things Day was sensitive on was the fact that the students sent a token force of two or three persons on the days when he was lecturing. Beatrice Porter prevented anything similar happening to her by the bluntest of threats about what would happen in the exam to those who were not seen regularly at her own lectures. When Peter Day seemed about to remind her of this, the little group showed signs of breaking up with strain. Professor Wickham desperately tried to keep them together by broaching to them a plan for the reorganization of the syllabus which had never entered his head until that moment. The academic group dutifully stayed around him, most of them looking into their empty glasses.

  Lucy, meanwhile, her eyes on the window and the road outside, had caught the arrival of Professor Belville-Smith. She excused herself from the dull and decorous little group around her, and bounced to the front door. She walked up the drive her arms outstretched in front of her in a gesture of welcome she had copied from a post-war Anna Neagle film about spring or summer in one of the more exclusive areas of London. The distinguished guest appeared to be waiting for the taxi-driver to open his door, and the taxi-driver appeared to be waiting for the stuck-up old geezer to get
out of his cab. Lucy opened the door, and welcomed her guest in her best vein of fulsome flattery.

  ‘We really are honoured, Professor Belville-Smith,’ she began; ‘we have been looking forward to this for so long.’

  The old man’s polite demurs were muffled; so convinced was he of the inferiority of everything in this country that he was beginning to believe that he did indeed confer on it a signal honour merely by his presence. He was not looking very well. His blanched face and cloudy eyes altogether suggested to Lucy a dim, snuffed-out frame of mind, as if he had taken five or six sleeping pills by mistake before setting out. Lucy guided him by the arm up the path, rubbing her delectable little body against his (‘treat for the old idiot,’ she thought to herself), and then steered him into the lounge. He looked round the smoky, noisy room, blinking like an owl. Lucy found out his alcoholic requirements, and thanked heavens they had not indulged in cheap Australian scotch. She poured him a fairly generous glass, hoping that he had not indeed taken sleeping pills recently, and led him to her little party at the notables’ end of the room. The little circle opened out somewhat reluctantly at her approach.

  ‘Mrs McKay, Professor Belville-Smith,’ she said. ‘The McKays have had a property here for three generations. Mrs Lullham — the Lullhams have one of the biggest properties in these parts. Quite like an English county, you know. What a pity you can’t stay longer, so we could really show you what life on a sheep property is like. That’s something you can’t get any idea of from the big city universities.’

  A vision passed before the blinking eyes of Professor Belville-Smith of dirty-brown countryside, of flies, of unshaven faces with large chins and hats down over their eyes.

  ‘That would have been . . . delightful,’ he said.

  ‘And Mr Doncaster,’ said Lucy, turning to a tall, distinguished-looking man, turning grey, with a bonhomous manner, ‘the headmaster of the Drummondale School. We call it the Eton of Northern New South Wales. Ah! I thought that would make you laugh.’

  It hadn’t.

  ‘I’m sure it’s an excellent school,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, it is, Professor,’ said Mrs Lullham. He noted the strong overlay of Kensington, through which the usual strangulated vowel sounds occasionally poked their heads. It reminded him of the young lady at the motel. Where did these people get their idea of genteel English? ‘You should just see how it has changed our eldest son,’ she said. ‘Well, if you’d seen him before he went there, you’d have said he was a real rough Australian lad. But now.’

  She didn’t go on. Mr Doncaster would have liked to compliment her on her eldest, but the memory of the hulking youth, renowned for his complete illiteracy and the predominant foulness of his tiny vocabulary, made him feel that he could not do so without compromising his professional standards. He was grateful for the intervention of Professor Belville-Smith, who was used, from giving tutorials, to jumping into awkward silences:

  ‘Do you . . . er . . . model yourselves on the English schools?’ he murmured, vaguely. ‘Or do you have something . . . er . . . something specifically . . . er . . . Australian, shall we say?’

  ‘Broadly we model ourselves on the English schools, on the big ones,’ said Doncaster, impressively, in his headmaster’s voice. ‘But we do try to bring something new. Rural subjects, for example. They seem more, well, relevant here, perhaps. But in the more academic subjects we do have some difficulty in keeping up the standards. We rely a lot on people from England there, you know. People who are looking for the bigger opportunities Australia has to offer. Quite a lot who think the old country’s on the decline, you know.’

  Professor Belville-Smith snuffled a little. He wasn’t sure that he liked that sort of talk.

  ‘You are English yourself, I can hear. May I ask what school you . . . er . . .’

  It was a question Mr Doncaster always hated, but he put his mouth into a forced smile:

  ‘Charrington,’ he said, naming a nineteenth-century establishment of little distinction.

  ‘Ah yes. We have had some boys at St Peter’s from Charrington, I believe. Quite a good sporting school, I’m told.’

  ‘Quite good,’ said Doncaster noncommittally.

  At this moment Lucy Wickham caught out of the corner of her eye the figure of Alice O’Brien, heading for the drinks corner, and maliciously decided to frustrate her.

  ‘Alice,’ she said, gazing at her loud scarlet and orange frock of unfashionable length, and her peeling face with the too blatant make-up. ‘So glad you could come. How nice you look tonight. But then you always look so nice, of course.’

  Alice gritted her teeth and wondered whether to hand Lucy the empty glass and demand a re-fill. No. Perhaps later. Or perhaps when she became permanent.

  ‘Beaut party,’ she said chattily in her broadest Australian voice. She knew that Lucy would not be able to sustain conversation long in that style. ‘Nice home you’ve got, too.’

  Lucy was struck dumb by the directness of the hint: Miss O’Brien had been on the staff two years, and this was the first time she had been invited to the Wickhams’. Conscious that she was not at her best with animals that would defend themselves, she retreated.

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said, and turned back, defeated, to the Professor. She would have to leave it to Richard to defend the stocks of alcohol against Miss O’Brien.

  More guests drifted in. The Turbervilles arrived late, and with an air of considerable condescension. They didn’t mix much with the University set. Once you got in with that sort of crowd, they said to their friends, you never knew where it might end. Lucy went over to them, bursting with pleasure, and led them across to Professor Belville-Smith as if they were well-bred poodles. Their clothes were well-cut, and almost hid the fact that they were fat. Nothing could hide the fact that they were stupid. Mr Turberville (OBE for services rendered to anti-Communism) started talking to Belville-Smith about the drought. It was not an ideal choice of subject, but he had talked about nothing else for two years, since the first intimations of a water shortage, and it was widely forecast that when it broke, a great silence would descend on the Turberville household.

  The academic group, still deep in the entirely futile discussion of syllabus changes everyone knew would never be made, was joined by Miss Tambly, the headmistress of the local private girls’ school. Built like a tank and dressed in a tent, she stumped forward and hailed everyone in her ex-Australian-army style.

  ‘Evening all. Filthy weather. Hot as Hades and dust everywhere. Get me a good strong one, Bobby old boy.’

  Professor Wickham bustled off to get her her scotch, and everyone insensibly stood a little to attention, except Dr Day, who was reminiscing to the bookshelves about amorous experiences on his Adult Education Circuit back in Sheffield, and was beyond standing to attention.

  ‘God, I’m tired,’ said Miss Tambly.

  ‘Had a hard day?’ asked Dr Porter.

  ‘Those goddam sluts,’ said Miss Tambly, referring to the scholars of the Methodist Ladies’ College. ‘Have to parade the corridors with a gun soon to keep them in at night. Nothing but men, men, men, on their minds, morning, noon and night.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound any different from a University College,’ said Dr Porter. ‘And we can’t lock them up. At least, not during the day.’

  ‘Mistake ever to let men into the University,’ said Miss Tambly.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Bill Bascomb. ‘Same with the army, don’t you think?’

  Miss Tambly looked at him to see if he was joking. This was something she didn’t like about academics: you never quite knew.

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ she said carefully. ‘Men know their place in the army.’

  ‘Better not ask where that is,’ said Alice O’Brien.

  On the surface it was just a normal academic party.

  CHAPTER V

  PARTY: TWO

  IT WAS getting late, and Professor Belville-Smith was beginning to feel it would soon be ti
me to go back to the motel. The conversation of the local squirearchy was no less intelligent, entertaining or subtle than its equivalent would be at home, but it was different, and though in his earlier days he had been used to being bored by people with money, had rather liked it in fact, still, the differences in the subject-matter were disconcerting, and made it more difficult to put in the right automatic responses. He supposed it was understandable that nobody at home would talk for any length of time about droughts, but now here was this woman — Turberville was it? — with her Queen-Mother blue dress and her Queen-Mother plump figure, going on and on, on the subject of reds. The reds teaching in our schools, the reds indoctrinating our fine young people in our universities, the reds who came over as assisted migrants, and the Australian Labour Party being, as everyone knew, just a front for Moscow.

  Mrs Turberville’s words were by now very near to being meaningless to Professor Belville-Smith. The two whiskies which Lucy had poured for him — contriving to ignore some other empty glasses, he was gratified to notice — had at first sat warmly on his stomach, and perked him up considerably. Now, however, they seemed to be waging war with the sleeping tablets he had taken before his afternoon nap, and his brain was playing odd tricks on him. Every time the word ‘red’ was spat into the conversation it exploded in his brain, like a glorious firework, with shades of pink and orange and scarlet. When he tried to pull himself together and reminded himself that the woman was talking about politics, odd names from the past kept obtruding themselves — Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Stalin, to whom, for some reason, his brain insisted on attaching the label ‘our gallant ally’ — and he managed to summon up no names or ideas from more recent experience. Could it be, he asked himself in the back of his mind, that he was getting drunk? With one hand he gripped the back of a chair, with the other he gripped his glass. Gratefully he registered that someone was stemming the tide of Mrs Turberville’s red menace.