Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Dr Henderson was a small broad man with a shiny ruddy face and thin ginger hair. He answered the door with a vase of lilacs in his hand.

Horace did not notice the vase. He noticed the doctor's tie. It was an Old Scotch Collegians tie and he was so desperate that he, quite literally, grasped it in his desperate hands and hailed his fellow Old Scotch Collegian as a long-lost friend.

"What year?" asked the poet, softening his vowels in accordance with the social requirements of such a tie.

It did not occur to the doctor that the dishevelled tramp on his doorstep might be claiming membership of a particular elite, but rather that he had lost his mind, knew not where he was or what year he was in.

"1921," he answered, looking down his nose to where the warty hand grasped his old school tie.

The poet thought this a great joke. Far too great a joke. He released the tie and slapped his thighs. "Ha, ha," he said, "damn good.1921."

The doctor smoothed his tie with one hand, holding his vase of flowers at some distance where it would be safe from the enthusiasms of the stranger. "July 1921/' he said. "And half-past eight at night."

"I was there in 1915," Horace said.

"You're a returned soldier," the doctor said, imagining a different "there".

"No. An Old Scotch Collegian."

"I see," said Dr Henderson, looking at him with suspicion. "And what can I do for you?"

Horace was so pleased to claim some fellowship with the doctor that all his fears immediately evaporated and he felt ridiculously safe. He told the whole sad story to the doctor who never, all the while, ceased to hold his vase of flowers at arm's length. The effect of the story was slightly spoiled by the laughter he used to punctuate his sentences. This was unfortunate, for it gave the impression that he thought the whole thing was some prank or rag whereas the laughter was produced by relief that he had not, after all, fallen into the power of a hostile stranger.

The doctor did not believe a word he said. He could smell alcohol on his breath and he judged him drunk. Therefore he began to shut the door, stepping back quickly, withdrawing the vase as a tortoise will bring its head back into its shell.

Horace placed his muddy shoe inside the door and would not let it shut.

The doctor stamped on Horace's toe. But Horace seemed insensible to pain. He left it there. The doctor stamped again. But the only effect the stamping seemed to have was to stop Horace's nervous laughter. Horace thought the doctor totally insane.

He left his foot there to be stamped on while he made a speech. It was a bit flowery, a tendency that he had in any case, but which he was inclined to exaggerate whenever he wished to establish himself as a person of substance.

"Sir," he said, "you are behaving foolishly. My name is Horace Dunlop. My father," he lied, "is Sir Edward Dunlop. I am a lawyer. And should you decide not to honour your Hippocratic oath and come to the assistance of this poor woman, I will sue you. I will sue you for neglect, for malpractice and if the poor woman dies I will see you charged for murder. I will sue you for such a sum that you will lose this house, if you own it. You will lose your automobile (and I'm sure you have a good one). The Australian Medical Association will debar you. It causes me great pain, sir, to make such threats against an Old Scotch Collegian who I would have imagined to be both charitable and a Christian, but by God, I will have you sued for every penny you have and every penny you can borrow and you will spend the rest of your life working to repay the loans you will have to undertake to cover the debt you are on the brink of incurring."

Half-way through this extraordinary speech the doctor ceased stamping on Horace's foot and so, given confidence by this reprieve, he finished his speech fortissimo, giving it all the splendour proper to the nineteenth-century novels that had inspired it and Molly, sitting in the car outside, was able to hear the true story of her daughter's poisoning.

The door opened. The doctor stood there with the vase still stretched before him. It was a Dalton vase in the art nouveau style. He smashed it at the poet's feet and made him jump.

"All right," said Dr Ernest Henderson, "I will deal with you."

Horace waited among the shards of pottery and broken lilacs, pondering his own position vis-a-vis the law.

Dr Ernest Montgomery Charles Maguire Henderson had a hell of a temper. It always surprised those who witnessed it, for ninety-nine per cent of the time he was a taciturn bachelor not given to loud noises. And then: whizz, bang, a plate or a horse's shoe or an Oxford dictionary was sailing through the air, on its way to a windowpane or towards a painting or a wall, and the chunky little man (as hard as an armchair stuffed with too much horsehair) would seem, momentarily, to compress, to compact his muscled frame, and just when you expected the poltergeist that had propelled the object through the air to take possession of him and expand with a malevolent rush, he would go quite limp, bite his small moustache thoughtfully, and go back to the ordinary business of life.

Discovering shards of pottery or dictionaries with broken spines he would be inclined to regard them with surprise, and move them around a little with the toe of his shoe as if they were birds run down by speeding automobiles.

Yet the thing that had made him lose his temper was exactly the same thing that made him, on this April night, leave his empty echoing house happily, with relief, and follow the Hispano Suiza eagerly: he was in love with a lady already spoken for.

The lights of the doctor's Packard, which blazed into the back windows of the Hispano Suiza, seemed to Horace to be charged with the malevolence of an inquisitor.

"I'm in for it now," he told Molly who had been silent since her tyre-squealing departure from the doctor's house. "He'll have me charged."

Molly sucked in her breath and expelled it. She accelerated grimly. She had heard every word of Horace's speech as it swooped from high falsetto to surprising baritone.

"Love her," she snorted, attacking the gearbox with anger. "Love her. Some way to show your filthy love."

"She begged me," Horace said, aghast to find one more enemy. "She wept. Dear lady, please…"

"Don't 'dear lady' me," said Molly grimly. "If she dies I'll charge you too. I have one hundred thousand pounds", she said, "and I'll spend every penny of it on lawyers if I have to."

"Oh God," moaned Horace. "Oh God, dear God."

"You pray to God. Pray to God she doesn't die."

"The love is platonic."

Molly shuddered at such a dirty-sounding word. She fled from its filth at seventy miles an hour down Ballarat Road with the doctor's Packard roaring at her tail.

"She asked me to do it," Horace cried as they bounced on to the track to the house. As Molly ploughed into her rose bed with the handbrake full on, Horace was catapulted upwards from his seat and slammed his shorn head against the roof.

She turned off the engine. "Pray," she said, "if you know what's good for you."

Ernest Henderson, arriving a minute later, caught the sight of a woman in a huge black taffeta dress splendidly decorated with rose appliques. Seen in the headlights of his car, she appeared large and blowzy and theatrical. She strode towards the house with the poet stumbling miserably behind.

No one stayed to escort the doctor inside. He entered the kitchen to find the large black taffeta dress at prayer with her knees on extravagant linoleum and her head on the kitchen table. The poet was leaning against a window and staring out into the night.

The doctor coughed.

Horace turned to face his executioner.

"She's praying."