‘What I was trying to find out, during these talks,’ Randlong continued, ‘was Bedford’s object in visiting Australia. He’s a painter by profession – there’s no doubt about that – but he admitted himself he’d no idea of painting and selling pictures here. He knows we export artists, we don’t import ’em. Then when I really challenged him to tell me, he hummed and ha’d and finally came up with some stammering lie about coming after a girl. I didn’t ask him what girl. I didn’t believe him and he knew I didn’t. I’d already made up my mind he’s one of these dangerous crypto-Communists – and that he’s here as an undercover man.’
‘What did I say to you, Inspector?’ cried the Major triumphantly. ‘Of course he is.’
‘Is this being recorded?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind, Lord Randlong?’
‘Not at all. Why should I? Just doing my duty.’
‘We appreciate your attitude, your lordship. Well, Bedford – it’s all being recorded. So what?’
‘I want to make a short statement, just to have it recorded. As I said before, I’m not a Communist – crypto or otherwise. Lord Randlong knows this very well. He’s using you as catspaws. His object is to prevent my being a nuisance. He thinks I might be because during the last twenty-four hours or so he’s been told that I’m trying to investigate a very peculiar society or organisation. I believe now he’s a member of it. If you people can get me deported or stop me moving around, to find out more about this organisation, then that’ll be very convenient for him and his friends. I don’t expect you to believe this – even though I’m ready to swear any oath you choose that I think it’s true – but I’m making this statement to get it into the record. It may be needed sometime. That’s all.’
To give Major Jorvis his due, he’d listened to me quite attentively, not trying to interrupt. I think he couldn’t help being a bit impressed not by what I’d said but by my air of sincerity. He looked at Randlong, who smiled contemptuously, the man of the great world, and then said: ‘Will you allow me, Major? Thank you.’ He looked at me, all easy mockery in front but with a chill glitter of purpose behind it. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bedford, and I don’t believe you do. To start with, I must belong to fifty societies and organisations, some here, some in the old country. No fellow member of any of them has spoken to me about you, Bedford. You’re overestimating your importance, aren’t you? And I’ve never suggested you ought to be deported or locked up. But I wouldn’t be happy, as a good Australian who knows what Communism can do, if I thought you were being allowed to go anywhere and everywhere doing anything you wanted to do.’ He stood up. ‘I’d like a word with you in private, Major Jorvis, if you please.’
They went out. The Inspector, the same big wooden-faced fellow who picked us up in the pub, stared hard at me in an impersonal way, as if I was something in a shop window. To prove I could talk, I said: ‘Don’t forget that Mike – I don’t know his other name – was bar steward and had been serving me drinks for nearly three weeks. So when I ran into him this afternoon and he asked me to have a drink, I agreed.’
‘That bastard’s been in trouble ever since the old I.W.W. days,’ said the Inspector. ‘Understand him being a Commie. But what they got for you?’
‘I can’t tell you because I don’t happen to be one. As I keep saying.’
But the Inspector had put me back into the shop window, where obviously I wasn’t worth the price on the ticket.
When Major Jorvis came back, he was smiling and clearly pleased with himself. This put me on my guard, not off it. ‘I’ll go easy with you, Bedford, for the time being. You’re free to go, but you’ll report to the Inspector here at twelve noon on the dot tomorrow.’
‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve other things to do.’
‘Not at twelve noon tomorrow, you haven’t. And if you fail to report, you’ll commit a serious offence.’ He sat down at his desk as if I’d already gone.
‘Out,’ said the Inspector, opening the door. But as we went along the corridor together and then down the steps towards the entrance, I noticed he deliberately wasted some time, even taking my name and address all over again. Now I felt fairly sure what the plan was. Once out in the street I walked very quickly, then suddenly wheeled and stopped, to look at a tobacconist’s window. I repeated the performance a few hundred yards further along. The tall young man with the long neck wasn’t in uniform but he just as well might have been.
I went back to the garage where I’d arranged to hire the Buick for a week. In the little central office, surrounded by cars, I found a different man on duty, but he knew about the Buick transaction and thought I’d called for the car. ‘Not yet,’ I told him, then obviously hesitated. He was a black Irish type, with centuries of rebelliousness behind him, and I decided to chance it.
‘I want your advice. I’ve hired this car to take me tomorrow up into the back country to find a girl I know. But I’m having a little trouble with the police here – no crime, just a technical offence – ’
‘Don’t I know the silly bastards?’ he cried. ‘Never satisfied till a man’s in trouble.’
I told him about the tall young man with a long neck, who was probably waiting for me now at the garage entrance. He went to have a look at him, and came back jeering. ‘The like o’ that fella’s no bloody brains at all. He ought to be in the water disguised as a swan. I could lose him if I was driving a hearse.’ We sat in the office, with a can of beer each, occasionally interrupted by callers on the telephone he told not to bother him, and we worked out a police-dodging scheme for the next morning. He was to take part in it himself, and I promised him five pounds if it came off, though I believe he’d have done it for nothing.
In the morning I packed my two cases, took them down to the desk and told the porter they’d be called for shortly (by my Irish colleague in the Buick), paid the bill and went out. The swan sleuth was in attendance. I went to a bank and cashed some travellers’ cheques. When I left, he followed. The next was the tricky part. My Irish colleague had had a job once in a large store. As well as a dozen public entrances along the front, it had a staff entrance down a small alley. Into this alley, at exactly five minutes to eleven, he would reverse the Buick, keeping its door open and engine running until five-past, ready for a quick getaway. What I had to do, just before eleven, was to try to keep plenty of people in the store between me and the policeman, make for the stairs, then on the first half-landing turn down a little corridor to the right, towards a door marked Staff Only, then make like a bat out of hell for the outer door and that back alley. And it worked. I don’t know how close behind me the policeman was, because to have turned round then might have given something away, but I do know there was a great swarm of us going up those stairs and my quick turn to the right could easily have been missed. The Staff Only door was opened and then closed behind me in under two seconds. I hurried along a corridor past washrooms and cloakrooms, clattered down some narrow stone steps, almost leapt past the clock-punching department and the man who’d just time to cry ‘Hey yew!’ and then was outside, into the Buick, and off. It was important of course that the policeman shouldn’t get out in time to recognise the Buick. And he didn’t. I looked back as we nosed our way out of the alley, and he wasn’t there.
My Irish friend drove me almost out of the sprawling city, very sensibly because he knew the roads and could make better time, and also provided entertainment by sketching twenty other ways, most of them much simpler, of dodging the police to get out of Melbourne. ‘I could lose them fellas, silly bastards, pushing an emu tied to a handcart an’ me stark naked. In Melbourne, not in Sydney. In Sydney they’re just plain bastards. They’ll run you in and get you fined there for saying good-morning.’
After pocketing the fiver, which he proposed to spend on drink and the races, he put me on the road to Ballarat. I found my way there without any trouble. The Victorian ironwork along the balconies of the older buildings looked aloof and elegant
, like some women in crinolines among a crowd of rock-and-rolling tight pants and bobby socks and hair like dirty string. I drank some beer so cold it made my throat ache, and tried to eat two large sandwiches made of very white bread and dark leather. It was much cooler and pleasanter here than it had been down in Melbourne, but I pushed on quickly, wondering if I wouldn’t have enjoyed Ballarat more a hundred years earlier. Anyhow, I knew roughly where Charoke was, and these Australian miles seemed on the long side, and even down in this corner of the island continent, there were obviously a devil of a lot of them. So I lashed the Buick’s thirty invisible horses along the trail.
15
It may seem odd that my final adventures with the Wavy Eight people should have happened in Australia. But I believe you would feel this only if you hadn’t ever seen Australia. In its own way the country seemed to me just as mixed-up and contradictory, peculiar and mysterious, as the Wavy Eight setup was. Take that drive of mine from Ballarat to Charoke, across a good section of the State of Victoria. Sometimes I might have been driving through an emptier and warmer bit of Bucks or Northants, or passing central sections of Watford or Nuneaton that had been left out in the sun. Twelve coach parties from Women’s Institutes might arrive at any moment. But then at the next turning the road might run straight into some lost world. If there were woods, then there were strange trees and giant ferns, good grazing for dinosaurs. But mostly, and especially later in the afternoon, I’d find myself running along a road, like a hammered rod of blue metal laid across the landscape, apparently going nowhere past a lot of nothing. That Buick might have been the Time Machine arriving at either extreme. At one place, where I stopped to use the thermos I’d bought and had filled at Ballarat, I had the whole visible world to myself. If anything else was alive, it kept dead quiet. Under silvery clouds the horizon all round was simply so much grey-blue haze. Between that and the road and me was desert that started as a light yellow ochre in the foreground and then deepened to a dark ochre and some patches of raw umber. And there was nothing else to be seen there except some blackened stumps of trees, which might have been slashed into a pale water-colour by somebody who was impatient and wanted to try a stick of charcoal. It was like drinking tepid strong tea and then lighting a pipe when somehow you’d missed your own time by a million years. Anybody who could look at that landscape and still think in terms of votes, taxes, annual revenues and radio sets, would have to have either a lot less imagination or a lot more than I have. And I might as well add here that all the time I was in Australia this sense of the huge dusty old continent, haunted not by men and their history but only by ghostly gum trees, never left me, just seeped through everything. So no matter how crazy the Wavy Eights turned out to be, they couldn’t be out of place, so far as Tim Bedford’s ideas of a normal life and background were concerned, here in Australia. If this was to be the last act, as I hoped it would be, then it had been given the right setting.
The sun was going down, the dusty world was on fire, when I got to Charoke, a crossroads where there was a combined garage and small general store. I soon learnt that what I wanted was the new College of Applied Psychology (Modern Methods in Salesmanship and Personnel Management), only a mile down a good road it had made for itself. It wasn’t quite as solidly built and expensively rigged up as the Institute at Uramba, and it hadn’t anything to compare with von Emmerick’s Black Forest façade at Osparas, but Steglitz and his friends, whoever they were, had made quite an impressive job out of this College a long way from anywhere. No corrugated-iron dinkum-Aussie rough stuff for Dr Steglitz. It looked like some of the better sheep stations I’d passed, though of course on a bigger scale and much newer. There were about twenty large huts, white-walled and red-roofed with a few big trees for shade and plenty of flower beds. The main building, facing the entrance, was only one storey high but was long and looked roomy, and had a dark roof that came curling forward, over a railed verandah, and was supported by white pillars. Nobody, I felt, was roughing it in there. But very soon, T. Bedford, arriving uninvited, might be. Unless of course I was simply told to go away – and where I went away to, I couldn’t imagine. Cheerless thoughts of this sort kept me still sitting in the car, pretending to myself to be looking the place over, when I ought to have been out and ringing the doorbell. Even when I drove in, I hadn’t sufficient confidence to park the car among some others on the far side, but left it, looking as if it didn’t belong, near the entrance.
There were several young men hanging around just inside the entrance, and I told one of them that I was Tim Bedford and that I wanted to see Dr Steglitz and that we’d been fellow guests in the Arnaldos house in Peru. He asked me to wait, and I went on waiting, also wondering if this was the silliest move I’d made yet, for at least five minutes. Then he took me along a corridor to the left and showed me into a kind of Top Man office, where Dr Steglitz was just putting down the telephone. He looked even more of a brown Humpty-Dumpty than I’d remembered him as being, bigger and balder in the head, longer and fatter in the body, shorter in the legs. My recollection of him simply hadn’t done him justice. He was also more informally dressed than he’d been at Arnaldos’s, and seemed to be wearing a subtropical Casual Living outfit that wouldn’t have looked much worse on a hippopotamus. But for all these brave sneers, I’ll admit that I was even more relieved than astonished, which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t astonished, when he gave me a wide welcoming smile and held out his hand. There could be no doubt about it. Dr Steglitz was delighted to see me.
‘Of course, of course I remember you, Mr Bedford. We had quite an interesting discussion over the excellent dinner our friend Arnaldos gave us. You have heard perhaps that he is now having to rest almost all the time? A pity for such a remarkable man. But that is how it is. And now you have come to see what we are doing here. First – the Institute. Then Osparas, I believe. Now our College here at Charoke. And why not – why not? As you see, I am very pleased you are here. This is how it is.’
I didn’t know how to take this. Steglitz might look like a caricature out of a fifty-year-old copy of Simplicissimus but I’d no illusions about his intelligence, the mind working at full speed somewhere behind that huge smiling face. I knew without being told that he was in a higher class than von Emmerick and Merlan-Smith and Randlong. So what, then, was he up to? But he didn’t give me any time to think.
‘Now what was the name of the friend – the bio-chemist – you were looking for? Of course – Farne. I knew about that when we met before. And you still haven’t found him?’ he asked, almost playfully.
‘No, Dr Steglitz.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘Joe Farne left Osparas just after I arrived there.’
‘So this is how it is. All very stupid, in my opinion, Mr Bedford. But I will tell you this – on my honour or whatever you wish. He is not here. If you are looking for him here at Charoke, you are wasting your time. That is how it is. You believe me?’
‘Yes, I do.’ It was easy to say this with sincerity because it had never occurred to me that Joe Farne, in whatever shape he might be now, would come thousands of miles to trap himself all over again. Only a chump like Bedford –
But he was off again, smiling and twinkling. ‘You have come to stay a day or two of course. Later, somebody will take you to your room. But now we have not the time. I will explain why – perhaps while you remove the dust of the road – in here.’ He opened the door of a small washroom behind his desk, and while I cleaned myself up in there, he stood in the doorway and went on talking. ‘When I was told you were here, Mr Bedford, I was speaking – not in this office but in the next room – to a few members of my staff and one or two other guests. It is a little special time we have here – I am very fond of it myself. It comes when work for the day is over. It is, you can say, the cocktail time. But it is also a little seminar. I discuss freely any ideas that might be of some value to the people who are invited – both to this cocktail-seminar, shall we call it, and to eat afterwards. This is how it is. And of cours
e now you are invited, Mr Bedford. So if you are ready – nice and clean – let us go in.’
He sounded as if he was talking to me from the top of the world. He was pleased to see me, he was pleased with himself, he was delighted with everything. But why? What, I wondered again as I followed him across the office, was the game? Judging by the depths of self-satisfaction on which his phoney host work darted and glittered, I felt it might be some famous Steglitz end game, black to mate, poor white Bedford to pack up, in about three moves.
‘So this is how it is,’ he announced triumphantly in the lounge doorway, making an entrance with his signature tune. ‘Here is Mr Bedford, an artist from London, visiting us.’
I realised afterwards that it was a longish narrow lounge, admirably decorated, furnished and lit. But only afterwards, because the moment after I entered I was staring at the only female member of the company we’d joined – Rosalia Arnaldos. She looked brown and sleek and very handsome, and she was wearing a pale blue linen suit that set off her extraordinary dark blue eyes. It would help at this point if she’d jumped to her feet, cried ‘My God – it’s you,’ and then fainted. But all she did was to lift her eyebrows about half an inch, and then look away, as if all that Steglitz had brought in was a bowl of nuts, and the wrong nuts.
‘Have a drink, Bedford?’ I knew the voice, and when I turned round I knew the man. Mitchell. He kept his long lined face straight, but there was a look in his eyes that suggested he was laughing at me. I must have hesitated about taking the drink. Steglitz seized it, and said: ‘You imagine we have hocus-pocus here with drinks? Never. We are psychologists here, not chemists. You are not at Osparas now, Mr Bedford. See.’ And he downed the cocktail in one gulp. ‘Now Mr Mitchell will bring you another one just like it. Him you know already, I believe – Miss Arnaldos of course – and these gentlemen are members of my staff. Now we all drink – and I talk again. This is how it is.’
Saturn Over the Water Page 21
