Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ what had happened in the theatre. “That’s the first time I’ve ever had to call it quits during an op. If I’d have gone on, I might have done some damage to old Mrs. Pitman.”

      “Thank God I’m not operating to-day.” Goodyear wiped a weary hand across his face. He had the look of an over-age whippet that had joined with younger, more rugged dogs in a kangaroo hunt and had been run off its feet. He was a rational man, and he had done an irrational thing in getting drunk; it both amused and dismayed him, as if he had absent-mindedly sewn up an instrument in some unfortunate patient’s belly. Early in his career that possibility had haunted him: after an operation he had searched the incision with the thoroughness of a poor man looking for the last threepence in his purse. He had rationalised himself out of that nightmare, as he had rationalised every other problem or possibility of a problem that had confronted him since: to strangers he sometimes presented an impression of coldness, but those who met him for a second time, or those who worked with him, knew that the man had a spontaneous warmth in him that no amount of rationalisation would ever dampen. His getting drunk last night had been no more than a sudden blazing of the fire that had once been his youth. And though he was amused and dismayed by it, he was also saddened: it was as if he had gone back for a while to look down another road that he might have taken, a road where two familiar figures trudged in the distance: Tom McCabe and Jack Tristram. “We’re a fine pair, eh? I wonder what old Jack would think of us?”

      “I’ve been wondering what my father would think of me,” Stephen said quietly, and was surprised at the look of pain that crossed Goodyear’s face. “I need a holiday, Charles. It’s been two years since I had a break. All we’ve been doing is making money—”

      Goodyear looked up. “Not all the time. This morning’s op. wasn’t for money, was it? Don’t be too hard on yourself, Stephen, just because of a few words of judgment from Jack Tristram. Nor because you think your dad mightn’t have approved. Times have changed since the war.”

      “You’re arguing against yourself as much as against me,” Stephen said. “You know as well as I do that Dad would never have got himself caught in any rat race.”

      Goodyear jumped to his feet and walked to the window: behind his head the hospital laundry blew off some steam. “Don’t start comparing me to your father!” It was a long time since Stephen had seen him as angry as this. “He was a better man than I was, I know that. But he made no more of his life than I have! And neither has Jack Tristram! A week-end of Tristram and he has you talking just like him, sermonising as if there were something criminal about being successful—”

      “Take it easy, Charles. I’m fed up. But not with you – nor with what we’ve had together these past seven years. I like the cream and cakes as much as you. It’s just” – he searched for the right words, trying not to be melodramatic – “I’m lost, Charles. I haven’t got the faintest bloody idea where I’m going. Oh, I know, next year I’m going to England, I’m going to be just as successful over there – if Rona has her way—” His voice trailed off. He stood beside Goodyear at the window, watching two nurses hurry across the yard, their heads ducked against the first flurry of rain that had begun to fall: their cloaks stood out behind them like wings, but they were not angels of mercy, just two laughing girls rushing to get in out of the rain.

      The steam had gone out of Goodyear. “You’re not keen on going?” Stephen shook his head. “What do you want to do then?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe if I had a holiday, got away, had a chance to sort things out—”

      “I’m sorry for what I said about your dad.” Goodyear nodded his head emphatically. “I admired him, Stephen, you’ve got no idea how much. He was too much of an idealist, though, too much of a dreamer. That was what killed him in a way – he always took more care of other people than he did of himself—”

      “I know. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it – a doctor dying of a chill? But he got up at three o’clock that morning, after having been on his feet all week – remember, that was the bad polio scare? – and he went out into that storm to attend to a drunken woman who turned out only to have a sprained muscle. The thing was, though, he’d have gone anyway, because she was terrified. Would you have gone, Charles?”

      Goodyear was honest: “I don’t think so. Especially if I’d known it was a drunken woman. I’m a moralist when it comes to drunken women.” He put a hand to his head. “Or drunks of any sort.”

      “I wouldn’t have gone,” said Stephen. “And that’s one of the questions I want to ask myself, if I can get away – Why wouldn’t I go out in the rain for a frightened woman? Aren’t doctors supposed to be good for moral comfort as well? Is that where my work stops – at operations and pills and bandages and making money?” The rain spattered against the window: he looked out at a world blurred as if by tears. “I wonder what ever happened to that woman that night? I wonder if she ever feels remorse if she knew that Dad died because of her?”

      “No patient ever thinks that of his doctor.” Goodyear sounded cynical, but it was the truth. “Has any patient told you you looked tired these past couple of weeks? Last year when you had Asian ’flu, did any of them ask how you were? Me, neither. They pay us their bills and some of them add their gratitude as an extra. But none of them ever gives you any sympathy. When you die some of them might grieve for you, if you were a good enough bloke – I think a lot might have grieved for your dad. But none of them ever gives a thought to the fact that he might have killed you. The most heartless one in the doctor-patient relationship, believe me, is the patient.” Goodyear straightened his tie; the long hands shook a little. “Where would you go for your holiday?”

      Where to go? The mind, as much as the body, needed the holiday. And where to take it? Stephen thought. Mentally, he was lazy; he had never been one for exercising his mind. When he read for instruction or the banking up of a little wisdom, he read only medical books; all his other reading was purely for entertainment, library souffle. He had never played chess or mah-jongg or indulged in esoteric contemplations: his mind, if it was tired, was tired because it had had such little exercise to condition it: it was run down from a surfeit of small talk. And yet where was he to go, that it might be revived? He was not an intellectual, a professor of philosophy who could benefit from a sabbatical amid European founts; nor an artist, who could break away from the back-biting galleries crowd and go off on his own. He would not gain by going to Melbourne or Brisbane, to talk with other doctors in an atmosphere of abstraction, away from the schedule of operations, visits and surgery hours: he was clear-sighted enough to know that, practically speaking, he was not backward in the art of healing. Australia was a vast place, but now all at once it seemed to offer him nowhere to go.

      “I don’t know.” Stephen shoved his hands deep into his jacket pocket. His fingers came up against something hard and sharp: without taking it from his pocket he knew it was an aboriginal charm. His hand closed on it: it could be another portent, another door opening somewhere to a future he had never glimpsed. He was a Catholic, but all his life he had believed in pagan luck, and he knew he was not alone.

      “I’m going to Winnemincka,” he said, and looked with something like triumph at the expression that could have been envy on Goodyear’s face.

Chapter 3

      At first in the glare, with the world tilted sideways against the window of the plane, Stephen didn’t see Winnemincka. All he saw was the great greenish-blue shield of the gulf and the black wounds on the yellow land that he knew were the shadows behind the flat-topped mountains. Then there was a glint, like a tear in the giant jaundiced eye that was the round window of the plane; the plane dropped lower СКАЧАТЬ