Death of an Old Goat (7 page)

‘See what I mean?' said Merv. ‘Just plain bloody ignorance. Do you wonder that we get fed to the teeth here with being the poor relation? Nobody cares a damn about us over there.'

‘Yes,' said Belville-Smith. The conversation went on in this fashion for quite some time.

• • •

Dr Day sat in the middle of the rose-bed, picking a few late blooms, and murmuring tenderly to them.

‘Christ, she was a marvel,' he said to a pale pink bush. ‘You've never seen such tits. Well, she used to go to all the lectures they had there, and she got a bit of a name around the place. She always went up and talked to the lecturers afterwards. So I heard all about her before I ever set foot in the place. Peter, my boy, I said, that's for me. So when I got her home, I'd hardly taken off my coat, when would you believe it, she . . .'

• • •

‘That's the last of the booze,' said Bill Bascomb, pouring a few drops of gin into his red-wine glass. ‘Do you think we ought to be getting the old man home?'

‘Not really our job,' said Alice. ‘But he looks as if he should have been home hours ago.'

They looked towards the sofa, where Professor Belville-Smith was still seated, still gazing at the ceiling, and making little or no attempt to cope with Mr Turberville, who was patiently, but drunkenly, doing his duty by the old man.

‘Trouble with a drought,' they heard Mr Turberville say to his empty glass, ‘is you've got nothing to fall back on. You've just got the bloody sheep dying on you the whole time, nothing but skin and bone, and you've nothing to fall back on — see?'

‘Difficult though we undoubtedly find it,' murmured Professor Belville-Smith to the chandelier, ‘to enter the magic circle of
Cranford
, how rich are the rewards, and how subtle are the pleasures of those of us who are willing to . . .'

Bill Bascomb hurriedly drained his glass and interrupted this meeting of intellect and wealth.

‘Professor Belville-Smith,' said Bill, ‘don't you think you
ought to be getting back to the motel?'

‘What?' he said, starting.

‘Back. Don't you think you should be getting back? You have a lecture to give tomorrow.'

‘Lecture?'

‘I thought you might be a little tired.'

‘Yes. Yes, I am tired. Call me a taxi.' He stood up imperiously and looked around the room. ‘Call me a taxi at once,' he said loudly.

‘Of course, of course,' said Professor Wickham, bustling up from the opposite corner, where he had been the last of a long line of recipients of Mrs Turberville's monologues. ‘I'll do it at once. I should have thought of it before.'

Belville-Smith focused upon him, and mentally associated him with some grievance or other from earlier in the day. His grievances were very dear to Professor Belville-Smith.

‘Yes, you should,' he said severely. ‘Call me a taxi at once. You have been most remiss. And tell the driver to knock up Smithers when we get there.'

Professor Wickham, already dialling, was somewhat nonplussed.

‘Smithers, Professor Belville-Smith?'

‘The porter, of course,' said his guest tetchily. ‘Give me your arm, young man.'

This last was said with a grandiose condescension which was so overdone that Bill decided that the distinguished guest was by now very drunk indeed. The heavy pressure on his arm bore out the diagnosis. Professor Belville-Smith, however, was by now quite unaware of his condition.

‘I'm not feeling very steady, young man,' he said, resuming his imitation of the Grand Old Man of Letters. ‘Just age, you know, just age. I trust the night will be clement. The autumn nights of Oxford can be treacherous, most treacherous to a man of my age.'

‘I believe the night is . . . clement,' said Bill, conscious
of Alice O'Brien's sardonic gaze on him as he brought out the adjective.

They came to the hall where Professor Wickham was bustling around with coats and scarves; Alice opened the front door to give Belville-Smith a breath of fresh air, which he seemed to need. Outside it turned out to be a bitterly cold early autumn night.

‘Where is the taxi?' he said grandly. ‘It should be here. Negligence on somebody's part.'

‘I'll drive him home,' said Alice. ‘Just a minute while I get my car keys.'

‘No, you will not, Miss O'Brien,' said Lucy, emerging from the lounge. ‘We don't want any accidents. We'll wait for the taxi, thank you.'

‘I can drive on a lot more grog than I'm likely to get my hands on in this dump,' muttered Alice to Bill, enraged. And to do her justice, she could.

The taxi drew up outside, and they led Professor Belville-Smith down the garden path, Lucy pushing Alice aside from his right arm. Lucy found the conversation a little bewildering. He was apparently reminiscing to Bill about a meeting he had had with Jane Austen at Winchester shortly before her death:

‘Charming woman, charming. Sick, you know, very sick, but brave. Quite what you would expect from the novels, and most witty, even though she must have been in pain.'

Bill opened the door of the taxi, and they eased him into it, still talking, the others expressing their profound interest.

‘You must let me tell you more about it some time,' said Professor Belville-Smith. ‘Now, I feel rather too tired.'

Bill spoke to the driver and told him to make sure he got to his room in the Yarumba Motel.

‘St Peter's, driver,' said Professor Belville-Smith. ‘And drive carefully if you please.'

The car moved off, and they all wandered back to the
house. The party was undoubtedly breaking up, and tempers were frayed. Lucy found Peter Day in the middle of a highly anatomical description to a yellow rose-bush, and told her husband to throw him out. Merv Raines had found some cooking sherry in the kitchen cupboard, and was sharing it around among a favoured few.

‘Do you think he understood the point I was trying to make about Henry Handel Richardson?' he asked Bill.

‘Don't suppose he even heard it,' said Bill.

‘Bloody pommies are all alike,' said Merv. ‘And elderly pommies even more so.'

‘Perhaps if you'd got hold of him before you were both pissed to the rooftops,' said Bill.

‘I simply can't understand the need of some people to drink,' said Beatrice Porter to Alice O'Brien.

‘What do you use — vinegar?' said Alice.

‘Just like the Wickhams to let the drink run out,' said Mrs McKay, a little tipsily, to Mrs Lullham. ‘They're only academics, after all, however much they try to hide it. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to happen.'

‘Back to the prison-house,' said Miss Tambly to Mr Doncaster at the door. ‘Still, makes a change to get out once in a while, doesn't it? See how the outside world lives.'

‘Yes, indeed,' said Mr Doncaster. Since the Drummondale School was an institution of infinitely higher prestige than the Methodist Ladies' College, he felt compelled to add: ‘I find the difficult thing, though, is to limit the number of invitations.'

‘Funny. I've never found that,' said Miss Tambly.

‘So glad you could come,' said Lucy Wickham to Mrs Turberville at the door, closely watched by Bill Bascomb. ‘I wish you could have heard him tell us about his meeting with Jane Austen. Fascinating!'

By nine-thirty next morning Lucy Wickham had been immortalized by a further celebrated comment, destined to be quoted long after Drummondale knew her no more.

P
ROFESSOR
W
ICKHAM
was giving a tutorial. Or rather, he was being given one. Every year he put Hardy as late in the term as possible, hoping that by then his first-year students would have become reasonably chatty. This was because he never could be quite sure which Hardy novel it was he had read. Whichever it was, it had left on his mind a vague impression of doom and landscape, but nothing much else remained. So he sat there, encouraging the students to tell him about their response to
The Return of the Native
, and letting his mind wander freely over his own personal concerns.

Lucy had been angry this morning. It had been a pleasure to get away to the University, even though she had only given him toast for breakfast on the grounds that they couldn't afford anything more. If you give a party, Wickham thought, you must expect the drink to go. It was quite unreasonable to get annoyed about it — but then, reason and Lucy had merely an occasional friendship of convenience. Someone or other, aggravated beyond endurance presumably by her lack of logic, had once given her
Thinking To Some Purpose
, and now and then she would produce some scrap which remained from her reading of it to demolish him in argument. Otherwise her mind had been quite unaffected.

Still, at least the party had not been a total disaster. If Professor Belville-Smith had been bored, he had nonetheless stayed for a long time, and talked to a lot of people. This was an improvement on some of their other visiting celebrities. Professor Wickham doubted whether his own
staff had shown up in a sparkling light intellectually, but then they never would. How was one to attract sparkling intellects to a cultural Golgotha like Drummondale? Only to someone with the mental level of Guy Turberville could his staff appear like brilliant minds. Still, all in all, he had known worse. Much worse.

He got rid of them at ten to eleven, and went to borrow a cigarette from one of his staff. He always chose one of the most junior members, and they regarded the supplying him with cigarettes during work hours in the light of a payment of tithes. They knew why it was, and in a way forgave him. Lucy was a very expensive wife. To their minds she didn't pay very handsome dividends, but then she might have talents they knew nothing of. As he let Merv Raines hand him two Peter Stuyvesants (‘one for after the lecture'), and then let him light one, Professor Wickham inclined towards expansiveness.

‘I hope you enjoyed the party,' he said.

‘Real nice do,' said Merv, in his surly way.

‘We must do it more often,' said Wickham, with a mental shudder in the direction of Lucy.

‘Beaut idea,' said Merv.

There was silence. Somehow they never found much to say to each other.

‘Better be getting up the hill for the lecture,' said Wickham, dragging heavily on his cigarette.

He fetched his gown, and started up to the lecture-room, chatting with such members of his staff as were around about the previous evening. He was, as always, completely unembarrassed about his own or Lucy's delinquencies as hosts. Probably they had already passed completely out of his mind. Quite a short period of time enabled him to throw a haze of conviviality over the dreariest or most disastrous occasions. So he chatted on quite unself-consciously as he walked with Merv and Bill Bascomb up the hill. It was
only when he stood in the doorway to the lecture-theatre and surveyed the rather thin assembly there that a thought struck him. He turned around to his little band of followers:

‘Where's Belville-Smith?'

Everyone looked at him.

‘Didn't anyone go and get him?' asked Wickham, with his familiar gesture of banging his fist against his forehead.

‘We thought naturally you'd be doing that on your way in,' said Bill Bascomb.

‘I had a tute. Oh Christ in Hell. Stand at the door, and don't let any of these students out.' And throwing a glare at all his staff, as if the negligence was entirely theirs, he hared off down the hill.

‘Mrs McArthur,' he shouted to the secretary as he went past the office. ‘Phone for a taxi to go to the Yarumba Motel. Why do I have to think of everything?'

He picked up the phone in his room and dialled the motel. He'd have to make it right with the old man. Again.

‘Yarumba Motel? I want to speak to Professor Belville-Smith. At once, please.'

The genteel voice at the other end answered calmly: ‘I'm awfully sorry; Professor Belville-Smith has been found with his throat cut. Is there any message?'

• • •

On the little shelf by the outside wall in the room at the Yarumba Motel occupied by Professor Belville-Smith stood a large and well-filled breakfast tray. Coffee in a little jug, with another little jug of milk and two little paper pouches with sugar; three pieces of toast made from pre-sliced bread, with plastic-packaged portions of butter and marmalade. And a large plate of steak, bacon, sausages and kidneys, with two overdone fried eggs on top. It was not the breakfast Professor Belville-Smith had ordered, but he would never now get a chance to tell them so.

On the bed, pyjamaed, lay the body of the distinguished visiting literary figure. His throat had been cut from ear to ear, and there was a great deal of blood, red blood, over the sheets and the pillows. There was a large red stain on the wall, and another pool on the floor, quite spoiling the nondescript beige carpet. There was nobody to utter the obvious quotation from
Macbeth
, but sentiments appropriate to the play were not wanting. The cool, tanned receptionist in her tasteful floral print frock looked with mild distaste at the scene from the safety of the doorway, and said: ‘Dreadful to think of it happening in this motel.'

And the motel caretaker, standing by the bed until such time as the police turned up, said: ‘Not a very nice thing to happen anywhere.'

The rebuke went unnoticed.

‘We've always tried to have things so nice here, haven't we?' the receptionist continued. ‘Never any trouble with the police before, except that case of the manager and that girl under the age of consent, and he hushed that up, though it cost him a packet. Do you think he might be able to hush this up?'

‘Not a hope,' said the caretaker. ‘Might be if the chap was an Abo, but he's not.'

Now the receptionist really was shocked.

‘I should think not! Watch your language! An Abo in this motel!'