Gay Phoenix Read Free Page A

cigar. ‘And I don’t feel at all chilly. Although no longer, on the other hand, decidedly the reverse.’
    ‘It has certainly been one of our warmer days. But the cool change has turned up. You will sleep soundly, I’m glad to say, even down in that hotel.’
    ‘They have air conditioning, as a matter of fact.’
    ‘Ah, yes.’ Budgery clearly thought poorly of air-conditioned hotels. ‘But the old-fashioned among us still have faith in living up here, you know. And in digging our houses well into the side of a hill. This one – my great-grandfather built it – has a whole storey pretty well underground. We can dwell as troglodytes all summer long, if we have a mind to.’
    ‘A most judicious disposition of things.’ Appleby looked down at the city. It was an early March night, and all through the day the plain had swum in staggering heat. Even up here in the Mount Lofty range it couldn’t have been exactly temperate. ‘The hall porter told me there was coming up a change.’
    ‘His precise expression, that.’ Budgery laughed comfortably. ‘You have an ear for idiom, Sir John.’
    ‘Just where does the change come up from?’
    ‘From Antarctica, one must say.’ Budgery’s gaze went in the direction to which Appleby’s own had lately travelled. ‘You are looking down on what – on the dry-bulb thermometer – is about the hottest capital city in the world. But Mount Lofty looks to Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, and in that direction our nearest neighbours are the penguins.’ Budgery appeared to take pride in these geographical and zoological circumstances. ‘The region gives a puff from time to time, and Adelaide’s temperature drops dramatically.’ Budgery’s hand went to a pocket. ‘Matches, Appleby?’ he asked politely, and passed on to other guests.
    Two or three ‘Sir Johns’ and then ‘Appleby’. English, not American, conventions. It seemed a rather homeward-looking part of what had been the Empire long ago. Appleby sat back and lit his cigar. Even the dinner jacket he’d been given a hint to don. But then there had been a hint, too, of something mildly formal about this all-male dinner at Budgery’s house. Presumably Budgery was a bachelor. ‘A few of us who dine together from time to time,’ the professor of medicine had said. It was some sort of dining club, in fact – and when playing host one could ask a guest of one’s own from outside. Appleby, doubtless naively, was impressed by meeting ordinances so familiar so far away.
    Appleby conversed with Mr Justice Somebody. You couldn’t have anything more English-sounding than that. The judge knew about Appleby, and expressed civil interest in the lectures he had been giving to certain higher echelons of the Australian police. But he was also taking pleasure in revealing his own extensive acquaintance with members of the English bench and bar. He told a story about the Lord Chancellor, and drove the point home with another about the Lord Chief Justice. Appleby, himself acquainted with these legal luminaries, listened respectfully, but didn’t pretend to be awed. From Adelaide you could now fly to London and back for a short weekend – to shoot a few pheasants, say, or attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. But the brute distance remained. So there lingered this business of Home Thoughts from Abroad, and of people not knowing how lucky they were in what they still lurkingly thought of as their outposts, even their banishment. There must have been plenty of times when Roman Bath was a lot more salubrious than the city of the seven hills itself. But that wouldn’t have prevented prosperous Romano-British gentry – taking the waters, pottering in the baths, enjoying the excellent provincial restaurants of Aquae Sulis – from nostalgic chat about their connections with Top People in the palaces of Rome the Great. Distance lent enchantment to the view. Appleby found himself wondering what else it did. Take crime, for instance –