The Goodyears’ parties were always the same: too many people, too much noise, too much drink. Neither Charles nor Peggy Goodyear drank, but Peggy’s idea of hospitality was to discover everyone’s taste and then surfeit them. Her dinners were gargantuan affairs that would have kept a mob of medieval plunderers happy; her week-end parties, as Stephen described them, were like the combined centenary celebrations of a distillery and a brewery. The largest collection of drunks in Palm Beach was to be found under the Goodyear roof every Saturday or Sunday evening during the summer.
“A weird mob,” said Tristram. “I wouldn’t give you tuppence for the lotta them.”
“Appearances are deceptive,” Stephen said. “From Monday to Friday some of these men here work harder than cane-cutters.”
“Doing what? Chasing money?”
“You sound old-fashioned, Jack. There’s nothing criminal about trying to earn money.”
“I am old-fashioned.” Tristram looked out of place in the big crowded living-room; he had looked out of place in it Friday night when it had been empty. He had come into it, stared round at the vari-coloured walls, at the one wall that from floor to ceiling was glass, at the copper-hooded freestanding fireplace in the centre of the room, and the click of his false teeth had been like the disapproving sound of a judge’s gavel. Now, on this Sunday evening, in his shiny blue suit trousers held up by braces and his starched white collar supporting its plain black tie, he looked like a man in fancy dress among the bright linen and cotton trousers and shorts, the shirts with patterns that fractured the gaze, and the vivid scarves and neckerchiefs, of the other men. “In my day people worked for money, but they didn’t talk about it all the time. I been listening to some of this mob. Somebody says to ‘em, ‘How’s old So-and-so?’ And they say, ‘Oh, he’s great. Making three or four thousand a year, got a new car, coupla television sets – oh, he’s great. Don’t worry about old So-and-so.’ Stone the bloody crows, what sorta answer is that when you ask how a bloke is?”
Stephen felt uncomfortable. He knew Tristram was right: Australians were now worse than the Americans, at whom they had sneered for so long: Australians didn’t keep up with the Joneses, but had outpaced them: money had become the only standard, even among those who didn’t have any. But, though they sometimes annoyed him and sometimes bored him, these people whom Tristram was criticising were his friends. He had made his life among them for several years and he knew that, as with all friends, some of their faults were his own. All at once he felt weary again, and something else besides; a feeling of aimlessness, of wandering through a world that would never remember him, that would never show the 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 have to stay late—”
“No, darling.” He shook his head again; he was getting to be like Goodyear, underlining his negatives. He had a confused moment when he wondered if he had been too long with Charles, but he put that thought aside at once. He was confused enough as it was. “I’m going home. Tomorrow morning I’m due at St. Vincent’s at eight o’clock to operate on Mrs.—” He racked his memory, the memory that was usually so phenomenal with names; his head ached with the effort. “Mrs.–Mrs. Pitman. Mrs. Esther Marigold Pitman.”
“Who is she?”
“Nobody the Neilsons know. She’s from the public ward. She has an exophthalmic goitre.”
“Can’t someone else do the op.? Darling, if you’re so tired, wouldn’t it be better if you turned Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is over to someone else? Perhaps Daddy would do the op. for you. He’d understand how important it is to see the Neilsons—”
Stephen stared out at the distant blinking eye of the Barren-joey Light, which had just come on. Below them, down the steep slope on which the house stood, a koala was stirring in the white armpit of a eucalypt, and possums were beginning to materialise from the invisibility that was theirs during the day-time. The house was bright with chatter and light, the swarthy dusk came gipsying up the tangled hill, crows flew home against the last light of the dying day, taking their mournful song over the edge of the world. Stephen felt a creeping sense of loss, as if something he had valued had begun to slip from his grasp.
“No, Rona.” Mrs. Pitman had all of a sudden become very important to him, more important even than the first patient he had ever had. “I’m going home. Now.”
Then a voice said, “Miss Goodyear, Dr. McCabe. May I have a picture?” They turned round and a photographer stood there. His smile was bright and false: he despised everyone here, but a man had to work, had to deliver pictures of these useless empty-headed bastards to his magazine or newspaper. Rona, with the skill born of long practice, turned graciously and smiled. Stephen did his best to imitate her: the three of them smiled brightly and falsely at each other while the camera clicked. Then the photographer was gone.
“Stephen.” He could sense the anger in her: when she was angry her voice always lost the floweriness they had taught her at the expensive school: he liked her voice best when she was angry. “You’re not serious. This is my last night with you—”
“You’re not going away for ever. Only three weeks. I’ll be rested and compatible when you come back. I might even go with you to meet the Neilsons.”
“The Neilsons will be gone when I get back!” The hand on his arm tightened like a claw. “Oh, Stephen, can’t you see I’m trying to help you!”
He leaned forward to kiss her, not caring about the beer on his breath. “Have a nice holiday, darling. I shan’t be able to get to the airport to see you off – I’ll be with Mrs. Pitman—”
“Oh, to hell with Mrs. Pitman! Stephen!”
But he had already left her, working his way past the pansy interior decorators and the models, eyeing each other with mixed jealousy and admiration: both groups had the eyes of all of the men in the room; he went through the crowd, all of them strangers now, and out to his car. Tristram was sitting in it, his hat and jacket on, his brown carboard suitcase resting on his knees.
“I saw you having the blue with Rona. I thought you might gimme a lift back to town.”
“Have you said good-bye to Charles?”
“I said good-bye to him,” Tristram said, and the crackling voice was tremulous. “He said for the first time in his life he was gunna try and get drunk.”
So I’m not the only one who has lost something, Stephen thought. Life stretched ahead of him, lonely and unsignposted as a desert plain.
Stephen had been operating for twenty minutes when he began to feel giddy. He stopped for a moment, his glistening gloved hands motionless above the wide incision. On the other side of the table the assistant surgeon leaned forward, his eyes questioning above the white mask. Stephen closed his eyes for a moment, the giddiness went, and after a further pause he went back to work. Mrs. Pitman’s exophthalmic goitre was in an advanced state: the resection of the thyroid gland, the operation decided upon to relieve her condition, was a task that called for skill, care and a certain amount of speed. He worked fast, straining to concentrate.
He was suturing the incision when the giddiness returned. He knew it was nothing serious; just fatigue, something he had been afraid would catch up with him. He straightened up and looked across at Parkin, the assistant surgeon. “Close this up, will you, Stan?”
Parkin hesitated for a moment, then came quickly round the table. “You all right?”
“I’ll be okay. If anything goes wrong, call me. I’ll be in the main room.”
The sister in charge of the theatre looked at him with disapproval as he turned away. She was an excellent nurse but a poor nun: all her charity was in her hands. She had hinted more than once that she found him too worldly, too sophisticated for a doctor: she looked only for saints, as if the operating theatre were a chapel. She’s had her victory over me, he thought; and let the door swing shut behind him. I wonder if she’ll pray for me tonight?
A nurse had come out of the theatre after him, and took his gown and gloves from him. “Can I get you anything, Doctor?” She still wore her mask; blue childlike eyes stared at him with concern.
“I’ll be all right. Call me if Dr. Parkin runs into trouble.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be all right,” she said, innocently hurling her barbs. “Dr. Parkin is very good.” Then she blushed: he could see the patch of pink between the mask and her cap. “I mean—”
He smiled, telling her he understood, and went into the room reserved for visiting doctors. Two men sat in chairs beside the window sipping tea: they discussed cancer while they munched on biscuits. Stephen nodded to them and crossed to the phone. He asked for a number and waited till it was answered.
“Hallo, Betty.” He knew the voice of the Goodyears’ maid: Peggy Goodyear insisted that no one but the maid should pick up the ringing phone. It kept Charles from unwanted patients, and it impressed the stranger to be told he was calling “the Goodyear residence.” “Has Miss Goodyear left yet?” Rona had left, a half-hour or more before. “Did she leave any message for me?”
“No, Dr. McCabe. Was she supposed to? You could catch her at the airport, there’s still time.”
“Yes, there’s still time,” said Stephen, and hung up. He stood for a moment with his hand on the telephone book: he opened it and began to look for the airport number.
Then the two men put down their cups, got up and passed him on their way to the door. “Haven’t seen you golfing lately, Stephen. Given the game away?”
Stephen looked up. “Just temporarily,” he said, and saw Charles come in the door past the two men as they went out. “Hello, I thought you were going out to the airport.”
“I got drunk last night. Or close enough to it.” Charles sank down in one of the chairs. The light from the window struck sideway across his face: the freckles stood out like ink blots. “Peggy wiped me. Told me she’d see me when she came back from New Zealand, when I was sober.” He squinted up at Stephen. “I gather you’re in the doghouse, too.”
Stephen closed the phone book. “I wasn’t drunk. I thought I might have been last night, but now I know I wasn’t. I was just bloody tired.” He told Goodyear 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.