Hammond Innes: Golden Soak

Automatically I reached for the paper knife, its moss agate handle smooth to the touch. A Christmas present from one of our richer friends. But I knew he wouldn’t be a friend any more. I hadn’t any friends. Not any real friends. Only acquaintances, men who liked my style, who provided me with an audience. I picked up the letters; two bills, an invitation to dinner, a list of foreign cars on offer, but no airmail — nothing from Australia. I sat back then, feeling chilled.

Was he away? Had he moved from Perth? My letter hadn’t only been about Golden Soak. I’d been fishing for a job as well. Why the hell hadn’t he answered? At least he could have told me what the prospects were. But then why should he? I’d only met him once and that was nearly four years ago. We had spent a long evening together drinking on the terrace of an hotel overlooking the Costa del Sol, the night air warm, the sound of dance music and the moon making a silver path across a calm sea. I’d been working for Trevis, Parkes amp; Pierce then, a firm of mining consultants in the City, and it was Kadek who had first put it into my head to form a company of my own. It was about the time Western Mining’s Kambalda prospect was providing the first whiff of the Australian nickel boom to come and he was busy flogging the shares of an unknown Australian company to rich English exiles with tax-free money to burn.

I glanced at my watch. It was past eight already. Soon I would have to make up my mind. I poured myself another Scotch, adding soda this time, and settled back in the chair again, thinking of the only other person I knew in Australia. I had come back from Balavedra on a Friday night to find her in the drawing room with Rosa, sitting silent and very tense. I’d given her a large dry Martini, and after that she’d relaxed and all through dinner she was telling me about the North West — the Pilbara, she called it — the sunshine and the red rock, its wild beauty. And about Jarra Jarra. Particularly about Jarra Jarra. How it was thirty-one miles from one end to the other and they ran three thousand head of cattle and owned an old abandoned gold mine.

Golden Soak. It was just a name, and yet somehow it had stayed in my mind — an idea, a prospect, something to go for if things didn’t improve.

I remembered the freckles and the snub nose and the odd way she’d talked, like somebody out of an old-fashioned magazine. And her eyes, her slightly prominent grey-blue eyes, the bubbling vitality of her. She was just twenty-one, the absolute antithesis of my darling wife, and driving her to the station in the morning she had invited me to visit them at Jarra Jarra, suggesting laughingly that I might have a shot at opening up their mine again the way I’d opened up Balavedra.

I finished my drink. Thinking about Janet Garrety, I was almost glad Kadek hadn’t answered my letter. Clever. That was the word that best described him. And interested only in money. I was sick of men like that — sick of mining, too. An outback cattle station was just what I needed. A chance to sort myself out. I’d write to her on the boat.

I got to my feet then, my mind suddenly made up. The Scotch had warmed me, relaxed my nerves. I went upstairs and changed into dry clothes, a sweater and an old pair of flannels, and then I had a look at the kitchen to see if Rosa had left me anything to eat. There was wind at the back of the house, rain lashing at the scullery window and seeping in under the back door as it always did with a storm off the sea. It would be a wet ride. But that didn’t matter. That was physical. It was the mental beating that had shattered me, the feeling that an unkind fate had stripped me of all I’d worked for these past two years, and in that mood the idea that had leapt into my mind as I stumbled home through the rain after the crash seemed less wild, a logical progression, an escape into anonymity.

Cold chicken, tomatoes, cheese, a bottle of beer. I put it all on the kitchen table. A man on his own, in a state of shock, would hardly bother to take it through into the dining room. Even charred embers contain evidence for those who know what to look for. Everything had to support what I wanted them to think. Sitting there, alone, I had time to go over it all again in my mind. I ate slowly, unconscious of time, working it out step by step, logically and carefully.

It was almost nine by the time I had finished and the only doubt then left in my mind was the motor bike. I had used it to get to and from the mine before the Company had been able to provide me with a car. Since then it had been under an old tarpaulin in the pump house next to the garage. I had checked it over quite recently, knowing that the Company car, and probably our own as well, would have to go. It worried me that somebody might remember its existence, but that was a chance I would have to take.

The garage was in the old stables, separate from the house. I wheeled the bike inside and topped up the tank from a jerrican of petrol kept there for the lawnmower. It started first kick and I left it to warm up while I folded the tarpaulin and rucked it away behind some deck chairs.

Back in the kitchen, I cut myself some sandwiches, wrapped them in greaseproof paper and put them in a suitcase. Into this went the clothes I’d need and everything of value that I thought would not be noticed — a small diamond brooch that had belonged to my mother, my father’s signet ring and an old gold hunter that had been left me by an uncle. I also took the cuff links from my evening dress shirt. And after that I started on the electrics.

I began on the flex of the bedside lamp, roughing it up with a nail file until the copper gleam of the wires stood bare. Then out to the fuse box on the landing to replace the 2-amp wire with a piece of ordinary wire. Finally back to the scullery, where die mains fuse was supplemented by one of those sensitive trip switches. A small piece of grit jammed it successfully. Candles I knew we had and I stuck one on to the plastic top of a jam jar, cut two grooves in it near the base and took it up to the bedroom. There I set it on the floor beside the bed, slipped the bare wires of the flex over it, slotting them into the grooves on either side, and jammed a heavy spring clip over the top.

Now it remained only to set the scene. From the study I brought up the half empty bottle of Scotch, with the soda syphon and a glass on a brass tray, and put it down beside the bed. I had also put a full bottle in my pocket and this I emptied on to the carpet and over the bedclothes. I pulled the whisky-sodden eiderdown on to the floor so that the corner of it overlaid the flex just clear of the candle. Then I took off my wristwatch and put it under my pillow. Finally, I switched on the bedside light and stood looking round the room, checking that everything was as it should be. My pyjamas, of course. It was always possible that a button might survive, and the glass on its side, on the floor, as though it had fallen from my nerveless hands.

I felt strung up then, my nerves taut — memories of the house and of our life together, and that big double bed mocking me. The room reeked of whisky, and the house, solid in the wind, silent, waiting for the end. I shivered, feeling chilled again, depressed by the thought of two centuries of occupation, all those others who had lived there. I bent down quickly, the box of matches in my hand, and lit the candle.

I stopped a moment to see it burning, a golden flame. So small and innocent a thing, hardly bigger than a child’s night-light. I shook myself, knowing the moments precious. An hour at the most it gave me, no more. An hour to be gone from Cornwall into a new life. I turned and hurried down the stairs, leaving the bedroom door open behind me. I had helmet and oilskins ready, the suitcase strapped to the back of the bike. It took only a moment to felt myself dressed for the road, and I was just going out by the back door when something, some instinct, made me pause.