Читать книгу Back of Sunset - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

Stephen miraculously found a parking place right outside the building in Macquarie Street where he and Charles Goodyear had their rooms. He dexterously swung the Jaguar convertible into the space, and switched off the engine. Maybe this was going to be a good day after all: he was superstitious of such small portents: his life was signposted by doors opened at the right moment, letters of resignation mislaid and not posted in time, tax rebates arriving unexpectedly in the mail. He looked up at the sky: it was cloudless, another good sign. Then he wondered why he had been expecting a bad day, and could find no answer. His only conclusion was that over the past few months he must have begun to turn into a pessimist.

He ran a comb through his long dark hair, straightened his tie, then, carrying his hat, got out of the car and crossed to the front steps of the building. He had begun wearing a hat only in the last six months: preparing for England, he had remarked to Charles Goodyear; but he was still not used to it and he wore it on his hand as much as on his head. He wore a cream silk shirt, a blue silk knitted tie, a blue flannel suit and brown suede shoes; and he had enough vanity to think that he looked elegant and well-dressed. His father, who for years had worn the same old cardigan, whether reading alone, entertaining friends, or seeing patients in his surgery or on his rounds, would have laughed at the suggestion that a doctor’s dress could count as much as his potential ability. Yet Stephen knew it was so. Australians, who had once liked to boast of their being a pioneer nation, had graduated to the snobbery of dress. The men in Macquarie Street, with the exception of the politicians in Parliament House across the road, were as well dressed as the men in Harley Street and Park Avenue.

Stephen and Goodyear had a suite of rooms on the eighth floor: a waiting-room, a small office and a room for each of the doctors. It was possible to enter the office from the corridor without going through the waiting-room: Goodyear had arranged it this way because, as he said, he had got to the age where there was something frightening about seeing patients en masse, even at three guineas a head. Miss Watkins, the secretary, and Miss Mack, the nurse, were in the office when Stephen entered.

They both looked up and smiled: they were always pleased to see him, even if he was already another woman’s property.

“Mrs. Hector had to cancel her appointment,” said Miss Watkins, perfectly composed but the derisive laughter there behind the dark-eyed good-looking face: “Her husband is due back from abroad tomorrow. She has to have her hair done.”

“The hairdresser will probably do her as much good as I could,” Stephen said, and despised himself. There was nothing very much wrong with Mrs. Hector, but he should not have joined in the joke with Miss Watkins: the patients, no matter how spurious their ills, paid for his loyalty.

Miss Mack said nothing, but she didn’t need to: her square plain face was as expressive as a roomful of eyes. “Mrs. Crepello is in with Mr. Good-year,” she said, in the soft pleasant voice that went so oddly with the blunt face and the aggressive walk. “You have no other appointment till noon. Unless you’d like to see the man waiting outside, a Mr. Tristram. Although he asked for Mr. Goodyear.”

“Let Mr. Goodyear have him,” Stephen said.

Then an inner door opened and Mrs. Crepello was ushered out by Charles Goodyear. Mrs. Crepello was a stout woman, a bulging faille sack held together by ropes of pearls; a strict diet and a few strong words from Goodyear would have cured her condition, but she was not the sort of woman to accept either stricture. She needed a doctor in attendance now as much as she had needed an escort in her younger days: sympathy had replaced flattery and was as necessary to her as breathing. It was worth a hundred guineas a year to her to be told she had angina pectoris.

Her small self-sympathising voice fluted round the room; she made a donation to Stephen of her fat be-ringed fingers.

“Dr. McCabe, why can’t I have you attend me? Why must I get an old fogy like Charles here?”

The old fogy somehow managed a gallant smile; Goodyear had learned to act as well as he could operate. “Dr. McCabe has to. wait his turn for the interesting cases. I had to wait for mine.”

Miss Mack turned away and went into Goodyear’s room; to Stephen her walk had the aggressiveness of a disgusted Spartan. Miss Watkins remained at her desk, offering a painted smile: she could use lipstick more cleverly than any girl Stephen had ever met: a slight movement of the painted, rather full lips, and Miss Watkins could offer sympathy, interest, encouragement, at the same time as she made out the accounts and checked the appointments for next month. She is untouchable, Stephen thought, looking at her now, and what an asset that is in this game.

Mrs. Crepello left on a wave of perfume, her fluttering hand trailed behind her like a diamond-encrusted pennant; she was talking as she went out the door, leaving words behind her to be picked up as soon as she re-entered the room next month. She talked without caring if anyone was listening, as if the sound of her own voice was another of the encouragements she needed.

Stephen followed Goodyear into the latter’s room, standing aside to allow Miss Mack to pass out, then closing the door behind her.

“That fat old bag,” Stephen said.

“Miss Mack?” said Goodyear, smiling slightly.

“You know who I mean. To think she’s part of our bread and butter.”

Goodyear shook his head. “No, Stephen. Mrs. Crepello is part of our cakes and cream. When did you last eat just bread and butter?”

Stephen dropped into one of the purple-tweeded lounge chairs. Rona had a talent for colour and decoration, and last year she had completely redecorated the suite of rooms. She had solved the trick of combining the clinical and the personal: patients felt they were welcome here, but bacilli made straight for the windows. The windows were wide and deep and looked out across the Botanical Gardens to the harbour. A patient could sit here and admire the view, one of the best in the world, while Charles Goodyear, in his flat dry voice, told him he had only six months to live. If the patient, the pain perhaps a little sharper inside him now, craned forward he might be lucky enough to see the Governor strolling in the grounds of Governmént House; a turn of his head to the right and he might see the politicians coming down the steps of Parliament House, their faces dark with something that could be honest thought or the pain of corruption. Stephen, standing at the windows one bright crystalline day, watching the yachts like slow-flying birds on the sun-freckled water, had remarked that there were many worse places where one could receive the sentence of death. Goodyear, who that morning had seen two doomed patients, had however remained silent. Successful, pickled slightly with cynicism, he was still capable of twinges of conscience when he looked about the brightly sumptuous room.

“You sound as cynical as Rona sometimes,” Stephen said now.

“Not quite.” Again Goodyear shook his head; all his negatives and affirmatives were underlined by a movement of his head. “Rona is much more ambitious than I ever was. She needs more cynicism than I did – too much, I sometimes think, for a young girl. She gets it from her mother – the ambition, I mean.”

“How did you combat it?”

“I didn’t.” Goodyear waved a hand round the room, at the expensive furniture, the wall-to-wall carpet so deep that it could reduce even the thump of a fainting body to no more than a soft thud, the Dufy watercolour on one wall and the Dobell portrait of Goodyear himself on the opposite wall; he looked at it all without possessiveness, like a consort in the domain his queen had planned for him. “This is what Peggy wanted for me. Here I am.” And he smiled almost apologetically.

“What did you want?”

“I never ask myself that question,” said Goodyear. “I’ve forgotten the answer.”

And Goodyear shook his head again, but this time in amused bewilderment at himself. He was a small thin man, bald but for the pink fuzz on the edges of his small well-shaped head, with the sad hook-nosed face of a jester tired of his own jokes. He had the same complexion as he had passed on to Rona, but he was not as careful of it, and dark freckles, the tribal markings of yachtsmen, showed the effects of days spent in his cruiser on the harbour. His wife Peggy bought his clothes, as Rona had lately begun to buy some of Stephen’s: the suits and shirts both men now wore had come from Richard Hunt’s, but Goodyear gave the effect of having been dressed in something bought at a church fête. Even the Italian silk tie he wore, bought by his wife at one of the speciality shops run by pansies that had lately sprung up in Sydney, somehow looked like a navvy’s neckerchief. The only neat things about him were his feet, small and beautifully shod, and his hands, strong, long-fingered and the best surgeon’s hands in the State.

“You look tired,” he said, turning his back on his own problem, the one he had forgotten the answer to.

“I’m more than that,” said Stephen, and leaned back, closing his eyes. “I’m run down, Charles. Maybe I should see a doctor, eh?”

Goodyear smiled, went to reply, but was interrupted by Miss Mack at the door. “There’s a patient to see you, Mr. Goodyear. A Mr. Tristram—”

Goodyear looked at the open diary on his desk. “I’m due out at St. Vincent’s in an hour. There’s no appointment down—”

“Have I gotta make an appointment to see you after twenty years? I been sitting out there in the bloody waiting-room for half an hour.”

The little grey-haired man came past Miss Mack into the room with a peculiar rolling walk, almost as if he were pretending he was riding a bicycle. Something blew in with him, and Stephen, opening his eyes a little late, blinking in the sudden lance of sunlight that had just struck into the room wasn’t sure what it was: it was as if the small grey-haired man had brought with him another presence, another atmosphere, that spun restlessly in the elegant confines of the room.

“Jack!” Goodyear came round his desk in a hurry, one hand outstretched to the newcomer, the other waving Miss Mack away. “God Almighty, where have you been? Stephen, hey Stephen, this is Jack Tristram! You should remember your father talking about him – well, stone the crows!” When he was excited, and it was a long time since Stephen had seen him as excited as this, Goodyear dropped back into the slang of his youth. “Holy mackerel, I’ve often thought of you!”

“You never wrote, you baldy old bastard,” said Tristram, false teeth clicking loudly in his widely grinning mouth.

“Where would I have written, you old bastard yourself?” Goodyear’s clothes seemed to crease even more with his excitement; the silk tie had begun to creep round under his ear. Stephen, standing up to take the knobbly-jointed, calloused hand Tristram thrust towards him, marvelled at the change in Goodyear.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Tristram said, biting at the air as if trying to catch his teeth before they slipped from his mouth. “You were a nipper when I saw you last, about twelve or thirteen. You’ve grown, son. A big skinny bastard just like his old man, eh, Charlie? Well, how are you, mate?” Tristram dropped Stephen’s hand and turned to look about the room. “That was a bloody silly question. It’s pretty obvious how you are. I been reading about you. I’m surprised they haven’t made a bloody knight of you. Sir Charlie. They’ve given titles to worse bastards than you.” Tristram appeared able to talk without taking a breath; his teeth clicked continuously. He squinted about him, looking for something. “Where’s your degree, Charlie?”

Goodyear pointed to the framed degree, hung on a side wall and almost obscured by the drawn-back curtains. “There.”

“What’s the matter, you ashamed of it or something? Or ain’t it as decorative as them two paintings?” Tristram had unwittingly hit on the truth, the reason why Rona had hung it where it was, but he hadn’t stopped talking to note the effect of his comment. “Well, I’m glad you’re still a doc, even if you do hide your proof of it. That’s why I’m here, Charlie. I been feeling crook lately. Well, not exactly crook, just a bit off, you know what I mean? About six months ago a horse fell on me, up Noonkanbah way, and busted a coupla ribs. It’s been sorta coming back on me lately.”

Goodyear looked at his watch. “I’m due out at St. Vincent’s at twelve for a lecture. But come on, Jack. You’re not going to any other doctor in Sydney while I’m still in practice.”

“That’s why I come to you,” said Tristram, winking at Stephen. “Why should I pay good money to a stranger when you owe me about ten quids’ worth of treatment? You never did pay me back that ten quid you borrowed on your wedding day.”

“You’ll leave here with a cheque, plus interest,” Goodyear said. “What a memory!”

“Me memory is all I’ve had sometimes,” said Tristram, and drew his shirt over his head: the crackling voice was all at once hushed, the clicking teeth silent. “It’s been a long time, Charlie, and I been gone a long ways. Memory is a good thing, Charlie, you know what I mean? And not for just remembering ten quids you’re owed.”

Tristram lay on the table against one wall and Goodyear began to examine him. Stephan stood by, listening to the continuous crackle of Tristram’s voice, his mind stumbling through the misty memories that were now coming back to him: a younger, dark-haired Tristram seen from the larger-than-life viewpoint of a twelve-year-old boy; his own father greeting Tristram with the same excitement as Goodyear had just shown; Tristram, talking a multi-coloured streak, his teeth clicking even then, telling him stories of the Outback that had made his boy’s heart leap till he was dizzy.

“Shut up, Jack,” said Goodyear. “I’m trying to hear what’s going on inside you.”

“Nobody ever hears what’s going on inside a man,” said Tristram, and winked again at Stephen. “You know what I mean?”

“A bush philosopher,” said Goodyear. “Shut up!”

Twenty years, thought Stephen, and the world and himself had changed for ever: he saw the world now through the wrong end of a telescope and his heart no longer leapt. But Tristram hadn’t changed, except in the flesh, where none of us could avoid it. His hair was grey now and thinned by years of sweat and neglect; the square, broken-nosed face was gullied with deep lines, and the eyes had faded, washed in too much sun; and the body now exposed on the white-sheeted table had begun to loosen round the belly and the legs and arms had begun to thin, the muscles atrophying and the flesh slackening off. But the energy and spirit were still there, and the voice was tireless.

“See that? A croc took a bit outa me up on the Roper. Had a good year that year, ‘48 it was, shooting crocs. Me and me mate ud do a hundred and fifty, two hundred crocs in a season. That? Got that breaking in some brumbies up on Gogo. That? Got that—”

He talked on and on without pride in his scars or wonder at the life he had led, lying there on the table in the elegant room in the building high above the roaring city while Goodyear probed and listened and grew increasingly sober. “Shut up for a while, Jack,” Goodyear said at last. “Get dressed.”

Tristram began to dress, struggling with the starched old-fashioned collar he wore. “Are you always as cranky as this during consultations? Wonder anyone comes to you.”

“Jack.” Goodyear was sitting at his desk, drumming a gold pencil on the pad before him. He had taken off his jacket and his tie was now loose; it suddenly struck Stephen, seeing the two older men in their shirt-sleeves, that there was almost a likeness between the two of them. It wasn’t so much a physical likeness, and yet whatever it was he knew that he himself didn’t share it. And taking off his jacket would bring him no closer to them. They shared something that seemed to have gone out of the world he knew, and he wasn’t sure what it was.

“Jack, I want you to go into hospital.”

“Hospital?” Tristram stopped struggling with the collar. “Ah, don’t be silly, Charlie—”

“Jack.” Goodyear looked at him with affection. “You’ve got a heart murmur that I don’t like. I think you were fortunate you chose me to come to – or did you remember I was a heart specialist?”

“I remembered all right, Charlie; But I come to you – well, you know why.” Tristram made a small gesture with a rough hand: it took in a friendship that had lasted years of separation. “There’s nothing wrong with me heart, Charlie.”

“You always were an argumentative coot.” Goodyear was talking now in the language of his youth; he had dropped even the hard-acquired smoothness from his voice. “I tell you, you’ve got a bad heart and I want you in hospital for a couple of weeks so I can have a good look at you. And I don’t want any flaming argument.”

“It’s outa the question,” Tristram said emphatically, his teeth clicking sharply. “I’m leaving Monday night by Quantas to go back home.”

“Where’s home?” Goodyear said.

Tristram waved a vague hand. “Well, not exactly home. I ain’t had a home for years if it comes to that, not since I went bush. But I keep going back to Winnemincka, and that’s where I’m going this time. Me mate’s waiting there for me. We got a job coming up, managing a station during the Wet while the bloke comes south on leave.”

“As your doctor—”

“You ain’t my doctor, Charlie,” Tristram said, with a kindly grin, and looked about the room again. “I could never afford anyone like you.”

“You’ll never owe me anything,” Goodyear said. “I’m the one who’s in debt, Jack.”

Stephen stood on the outskirts of the conversation, feeling like a trespasser in the world of the past that bound these two men. His own father had belonged to that world, and he had talked to Stephen of it with the regret of a man who had seen the sun of his life pass the yard-arm. Tom McCabe had been a dreamer, and Stephen recognised now that there were still traces of a dream left in these two men as they talked.

“Why did you come all the way south to see me, Jack, if you’re not going to take any notice of me?”

“I come south mainly to tidy up the family’s estate. Me two sisters are dead, and I’m all that’s left. There ain’t much, but I can take a few quid back north with me – I know some people up there could use it. No, I come to see you, Charlie, partly because of this pain I’ve had, but I dunno—” He looked about the room again, at Stephen, and then back at Goodyear: the crackling voice was slow now: “I come to see you because of old times, Charlie. When I left here back in 1921, when they said I had T.B. and gimme twelve months to live, I said good-bye then, remember? I come back for your wedding, when was that, ‘28, and then again in ‘38, it was the sesquicentenary celebrations that year. I was still alive, and I bought meself a new suit, can’t remember what I was celebrating, being still alive or a hundred and fifty years of Sydney. This is it, the same one. Cost me twenty quid, I remember saying to the bloke price was no object.” He looked at Stephen. “That was when I met you, Steve. And the last time I saw your dad. I said good-bye to him then, and that was the end of that. He was dead two years before I knew about it. Read it in an old Herald I picked up one day in a pub in Derby. It was lining one of the drawers in the wardrobe in me room.” He was silent for a moment, contemplating the devious ways news went round the world: bad news could never be hidden, not even in a drawer in a fly-blown room in a ramshackle hotel in Derby, two thousand miles from where the story had been written. He blinked, all at once old, and looked back at Goodyear. “I come to say good-bye, Charlie. For the last time.”

“I never say good-bye to my patients,” said Goodyear. “Or my friends. It’s bad psychology for a doctor.”

Tristram grinned, shaking his head. “Well, we’ll think of another word for it, Charlie. But I’m catching that plane Monday night. Me mate is waiting for me.”

“Write him a letter.”

“He can’t read,” said Tristram, grinning. “No, Charlie, I’m grateful for your diagnosis, but hospital’s out. When I hand in me chips, I don’t want it to be down here.” He looked out of the windows, at one of the most beautiful views in the world. “I know a better place.”

Goodyear attempted to argue, but to no avail: Tristram was a man you would have to knock unconscious before he would concede defeat. At last Goodyear rose, straightening his tie and pulling on his jacket. “I’ve got to go. Look, the family is going down to our place at Palm Beach for the week-end. Stephen is coming. You come, too.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t start another argument. You’re coming. Tell Stephen where you’re staying and he’ll pick you up.” He began to usher Tristram towards the door. “You’ll be interested in our house at Palm Beach. More glass than brick. The possums sit on the outside and we sit on the inside and stare at each other with equal curiosity. It’s called outdoor-indoor living or something. Peggy found the architect. Didn’t look the type that could ever look a possum in the face, but that’s what he prescribed for us. Do you ever regret having to give up architecture?”

“Never a regret, Charlie.”

“I’ve often wondered about you. Where you were, what you were doing—”

“Been all over the north and north-west. Never stopped any particular place, never designed even an outhouse, never built even a humpy. Anywhere back of sunset was good enough, anywhere where there weren’t too many people.”

“You’ve got something against people?” Goodyear said, smiling.

“Some of ‘em. City people, mostly. No offence.”

“And you don’t feel you’ve wasted your life?” Goodyear said, still smiling. “You had talent, Jack. You don’t feel you wasted it?”

Tristram looked about him. “I could ask you the same question, Charlie. I dunno you could give any better answer than I could.” He turned to Stephen and put out his hand. “I’m at the Metropole, Steve. Pick me up any time you like. It’s been nice seeing you again, son.”

“It’s been nice seeing you,” said Stephen, and looked at Goodyear standing in the open doorway, the web of the past, of dreams gone for ever, thick on his unsmiling face.