Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ slightest effect of his passing. He looked about the room and all at once it was full of strangers: there was no one here whom he would miss if he went to England and stayed there for ever. And if that was the case, then something was wrong with his world.

      Then Peggy Goodyear was at his elbow, grey hair tinted blue, eyes a trifle too bright, her mind intense and deep as a television commercial. “Stephen, darling, Rona wants you out on the patio.” Diamonds on her fingers winked like chorus girls’ eyes; the gem-encrusted watch on her thin wrist showed how valuable time could be. “She’s unhappy. It’s the three weeks she’s going to be away from you.”

      “Where’s Charlie?” Tristram was looking at the aboriginal shield and crossed spears on the wall above his head: native to the country, they looked out of place in this room, chi-chi as an Eastern totem-pole against the noisy, sophisticated crowd that flowed through the house.

      “Charles?” Peggy Goodyear looked at Tristram as if he were a gatecrasher instead of her week-end guest. “Out in the kitchen mixing drinks.”

      “A good place,” said Tristram, raising an empty glass, and moved off.

      Peggy Goodyear looked after him with genuine pity: it hurt her almost physically to see people go downhill socially. “It’s hard to imagine he comes of one of the oldest families in Sydney. One of his great-uncles was a lieutenant-governor, did you know that? And now he looks like some swaggie down for the Sheep Show or something.”

      “He’s old-fashioned,” said Stephen. “He told me so.”

      He circled the room, admiring the women as he went. Australian women were not as confident-looking as the American women he had met, not as chic as Frenchwomen, nor as sexy-looking as the Italian immigrant girls; but they had a little of all those qualities, and it was enough for a man of his temperament. He would miss them, as well as the sun, when he went to England.

      He went by a school of three stout matrons, sisters under the fatty tissue to Mrs. Crepello, and gave them his professional smile; side-stepped a posy of pansy interior decorators gasping over the pink chiffon scarf one of them was wearing; slowed by a group of models, a conceit of young felines posing continuously, as if every man’s eye were a camera lens. He got them into focus, admired the bloom on them but wished they had more flesh on them; then he saw Rona out on the patio, staring at him with anger plain as a bruise on her beautiful face. He moved out of the hot, overcrowded room and ran headlong into the storm.

      “I’ve been looking absolutely everywhere for you! Where the blazes have you been?”

      “Having a beer with Jack Tristram.” He pointed carefully back through the wide open doors. “Right there beneath your latest abstract. People kept asking me if it was a colour X-ray.”

      Rona was an amateur painter, but she was good and she knew it; she ignored his uninformed opinion of her latest effort, and went on: “You’ve spent all week-end with him!”

      “Darling,” he said patiently: his head ached and his nerves twitched, but he would be patient with her: “Darling, you and I spent two hours in bed together yesterday afternoon.” They had borrowed the week-end home of a girl friend of Rona’s, a girl whose husband was in America on business and who herself was spending the week-end at Katoomba with the husband of another of Rona’s friends. Lying in the borrowed bed yesterday afternoon Stephen had patted it almost in wonder: it seemed to him the very simple core of a very complex situation. “Jack wasn’t with us then, if I remember.”

      “Don’t be so crude.” Wooden bangles jangled on her wrists. I’m glad she doesn’t wear diamonds, Stephen thought. It was a small comfort to know she was not as extravagant as her mother. “I’ve been wanting to introduce you to the Neilsons—”

      “Should I know the Neilsons?” Stephen sipped his beer; he felt sleepy and he wondered if he had had too many. He had been keeping pace with Tristram, and Tristram, now he came to think of it, had appeared to have an almost limitless capacity. He bent forward to kiss Rona’s cheek, but she pushed him away.

      “You reek so disgustingly! You know how I hate you drinking beer.”

      “No more beer,” he said. “Just vodka, arrack, plonk and other rot-gut. What do the Neilsons drink?”

      “Darling, look.” She took his arm and led him to the railing of the patio. Her temper was gone and she loved him again. Sometimes he marvelled at her patience with him; he guessed he could be an annoying bastard at times. He went to kiss her again, aware of her loveliness and the odd streak of tenderness that would be there for ever in her, no matter how ambitious she was; then he remembered the beer on his breath, and he leaned away from her. Later he was to wonder what might have happened had he kissed her at that moment.

      “Darling, look. The Neilsons are English. He’s with one of the London banks or something, he has one of those frightfully interesting jobs where they do nothing and get a fantastic salary for it, and they’re out here for a couple of weeks. I’ve been talking to them, they came with the Cudlips, and they know simply everybody in London! They’ve gone now, but the Cudlips want us to go down there and meet them. They’re having some more people in, just a small party, not a drink fest like this—”

      “You have to catch a plane at nine in the morning,” Stephen said, trying to avoid the argument that he knew lurked just out of sight, like a savage watchdog waiting on Rona’s call.

      “I’ll have three weeks in which to rest, darling. What does it matter if I sleep-walk on to the plane? Darling, this could be exciting – the Neilsons might give us just the introductions you’ll need—”

      “They might be a little premature. The introductions, I mean. People aren’t going to wait around till I get my F.R.C.S. And you don’t get far in Harley Street without it.”

      “Oh, don’t be such a terrific obstructionist! You’ll get your F.R.C.S. as soon as you sit for it. Didn’t Daddy get his the first time he went?”

      “That was back in 1928. It wasn’t so difficult then. The market wasn’t overloaded with doctors wanting to be specialists.”

      “The examinations are no more difficult now.”

      “I didn’t say they were.” Stephen finished his beer; he felt the argument was inevitable now. “They just pass a smaller percentage of those who sit for the exams. Plumbers and wharfies have the same policy. It’s known as guarding the door of the closed shop. Ask your father. He belongs to three or four closed shops in the medical profession. Doctors are humanitarians, but they’ve got to keep up their standards of living.” I’m drunk, he thought; I’ve heard those words before, but I’ve never said them. Had Tristram said them some time over the week-end? But the words came from farther back than to-day or yesterday. And then he remembered. Dad, he thought; and heard again the chuckling sardonic voice that he had almost forgotten. “Medical skill has become a commodity—”

      “You sound like a Domain Red-ragger, instead of a doctor. Stop talking like that! We’re going down to see the Neilsons—”

      He shook his head slowly. He was either drunk or very sleepy, he didn’t care which very much. The Neilsons, who knew everybody, had all at once become people he didn’t want to, couldn’t meet. “No, my love. I’m going home, to bed. Not to make love or meet the Neilsons or even to talk to old Jack Tristram. Just to sleep.”

      “Stephen, I told them we’d be down there – we don’t СКАЧАТЬ