What he proposed was to have the collection entered on the books of his partner in Zurich, who would then advance Miss Holland the equivalent of £2,000 in Swiss francs. This would be paid into an external account at her Southampton bank, thus enabling her to draw on it for payments in any currency. The only stipulation he made was that I sign an undertaking on her behalf that the collection would be put up for sale at his Birmingham auction house. ‘We’ll put it up in the autumn, when I hope to have a really big sale, and I won’t charge her any interest on the monies advanced. Okay?’
It was as good an arrangement as I could have hoped for, and with my departure for Australia so imminent I was relieved to have the whole thing settled. It was only when I was out in the Strand again that I remembered what Tubby had said about the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp having been printed by an American banknote company. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Perkins Bacon. But that was Keegan’s problem now. As far as I was concerned, the collection was out of my hands. Perenna Holland had £2,000 spending money in the form of a guaranteed minimum, and the prospect of at least double that if he was right about the interest the collection would arouse.
As soon as I got home, I wrote to her care of the bank. Then I rang Tubby. There was no reply. I rang him again later that night, when I had broken the back of the things that had to be done before I left. There was still no reply. My curiosity unsatisfied, I got out my own collection. It always gave me a feeling of satisfaction to look through the colourful print mosaics of my careful lay-outs and to realise that most of the stamps had been acquired long before inflation had got into its stride. But not this time, for I was very conscious that there was nothing in my collection that was in any way out of the ordinary, nothing that would get Josh Keegan talking the way he had about the Solomons Seal.
In the end I locked the albums away and went to bed. It was after one. An owl was hooting from the big cedar across the moat, and though it was already Saturday, and tomorrow I would be on my way to Australia, the forlorn sound of it seemed to reflect my mood.
A new country, the possibility of a fresh start — I should have been feeling eager, full of anticipation. Instead, the feeling I had was one of despondency, almost foreboding. And that night I had a very strange dream. I was back in that empty house, and everywhere there were masks and strange obscene figures staring at me, and a voice was calling. I don’t know whose voice it was or what it was trying to say; it just boomed meaninglessly around the empty rooms, and I woke with the feeling that somebody, something had been trying to get through to me.
I don’t often dream, and when I do, my dreams are usually fairly innocuous. But this wasn’t, and I automatically reached out to the next bed for comfort. But it was empty, as it had been for far too long now, and I lay there in the dark, trying to remember some detail that would provide a rational explanation.
In the end I switched on the light, got myself a Scotch and took it back to bed, thinking about that girl, and about Australia. What would she do when she got my letter? The memory of her was very vivid in my mind, and I lay there sipping my drink, telling myself it was nothing to do with me and no chance our paths would cross again. It was finished, but the knowledge that she was gone out of my life for good didn’t stop me indulging in fantasy. And all the time I was remembering that booming, unintelligible voice.
Dawn was breaking before I dozed off, and when I finally woke, it was past nine. I rang Tubby, but again I got no answer. I didn’t bother about breakfast, but drove straight down to the Crouch. His boat was gone. I went on board my own then, got the anchor up and beat down the river against the tide, tacking through the first yacht race of the day until I was out in the fairway and thumping around in a growing nor’easter off Foulness. It did me a world of good, the voice of my dream and that dreadful little house blown away by the stiff onshore breeze funnelling up the estuary.
Back at my moorings I cooked myself a meal, and afterwards I sat in the cockpit with a drink in my hand, wondering whether I would ever see my boat again. The wind had died with the setting sun, the Burnham waterfront gleaming white in the fading light, everything very still except for the ripple of the tide against the bows and the waterborne sound of voices from the last yachts drifting up on the tide. No sign of Tubby, so clearly he was away for the weekend. The pale glow of the town, the estuary, the tide … I had lived in East Anglia ever since finishing my National Service, and the thought of leaving it for good filled me with nostalgia. Would I always have to be shifting from job to job? Was that the pattern of my life, some flaw in my character, a lack of stability? Two months past forty, and here I was planning to start all over again.
I finished the bottle, slept the night on board and in the morning drove home, closed up the house and took an afternoon train to London. The following morning I was breakfasting at over 30,000 feet and looking down on the bare arid hills of Muscat and Oman.
Part Two
Chapter Three
It was July 2 that I arrived in Sydney, a southerly buster blowing and low cloud obscuring the harbour as we came in to land. It was Australia’s winter, so no problem in finding the people I needed to contact in their offices. I saw little or nothing of Sydney the first two days, moving from office block to office block in the central part around George Street, so that my first impression was of a rather drab, modern, dollar-hungry city full of scurrying raincoats and umbrellas. It took me those two days to decide on Kostas Polites amp; Co. as the estate agents I wanted to handle Rowlinson’s Munnobungle station. They were an old-established firm of Greek origin commonly referred to as Castor amp; Pollux, and they had a branch office in Brisbane, which would enable the sale to be pushed locally with the farming community in Queensland, as well as with the institutions in Sydney.
It was lunchtime on Thursday before I had settled all the details. I had a word on the phone with Cooper, the manager of their Brisbane office, told him I would be flying up to see him the following day, and having booked out on the Ansett flight, I took a taxi to the Ferry Terminal. It was only a short walk along Circular Quay to the sail-like complex of the Opera House, and I had lunch there, looking out to the Harbour Bridge and the bustle of ferries coming and going. The wind was still kicking up little whitecaps in the broad expanse of Port Jackson, but it had stopped raining, and the clouds were broken. I should have been in a buoyant mood, everything fixed and fleeting glimpses of sun through the plate-glass windows. But now that I was on my own with time to think about my own future, I found myself depressed by all the stories I had heard of large properties that had broken the backs of their owners. No doubt the estate agents had exaggerated to emphasise the difficulty of disposing of a place like Munnobungle, but the cases they had quoted were undoubtedly true, and I was beginning to realise how huge and hostile the outback of Australia was.
I had intended having a look round the docks on the off-chance I might pick up information about the Holland ships, but then I remembered the stamp dealer Josh Keegan had asked me to visit. The slip of paper on which he had written Cyrus Pegley’s address was still in my briefcase where I had put it the night I had packed my things. I paid my bill and walked through the Botanic Gardens and The Domain to the crowded streets of Woolloomooloo.
In just over half an hour I was in Victoria Street, in a narrow-fronted shop packed with stamps and coins, talking to a little wisp of a man with an untidy mop of black hair and bright birdlike eyes that peered at me from behind steel-rimmed spectacles of extreme magnification. When he heard why I had come, he handed the counter over to a plain young woman with pebble-thick glasses who might have been his daughter and took me through into an office at the back, where two more girls were busy sorting stamps.