Steve said, “I never went to the races in Sydney. Just had no interest at all in horses.”
He and Kate were driving out to the race-track on the edge of town. This was the third and last day of the meeting, the day of the Winnemincka Cup. The last two days had been hot, and to-day promised to be even hotter: far out the sea was a blue glare that hurt the eyes, and beyond the town the mountains were without solidity in the shimmering haze. As the truck moved along a breeze blew in its open windows, but it was not cool: it only served to blow away the flies. The tide was out and the mile of black mud off shore stank in the heat: a miasma danced above it, as if its smell were so thick you could see it. A gull came down, skidded along the mud, and took off again, a magpie now: it headed for the distant sea to wash itself clean.
“I went to the races at Flemington when I lived in Melbourne,” Kate said. “I saw the Melbourne Cup. A hundred thousand people were there that day. Oh my, I couldn’t get home soon enough. What a crush!” She spread her dress out over her knees. “You haven’t said whether you like my dress. A different dress for each day of the meeting – I feel like one of those society girls down south. I make all my own,” she said, half-proudly, half-defensively.
“You do a good job,” Steve said, but he was no judge: the dress was too tight across the seat and too loose in the back, but he didn’t know if that was bad cut or good design: you couldn’t tell with fashion to-day. “I like that one on you.”
“What are the girls you know in Sydney like? I mean are they good dressers?”
“I didn’t think you were interested in things like that,” he said, evading the question. He had written Rona last night, only two pages: it had been a poor letter and a difficult one to write. He had told her nothing of what he was doing up here, not even that he had become a Flying Doctor. It had been full of trite news of the weather, complaints about the flies and mosquitoes; he had finished the letter before he realised he had not told her he missed her. It was not something you could put in as a postscript: Rona was a girl who could spot an afterthought even at four thousand miles. He had sealed the letter and gone down to post it immediately: he had known that if he had waited till this morning he would have torn it up. He had said nothing in the letter, but at least he had written: she would not be able to complain about that. And he knew that if he had torn up the letter, there would not have been another one written while he was up here in Winnemincka.
“I’m not, really.” Then with the frankness that was characteristic of her: “Perhaps it’s just envy. I don’t know, I don’t think I could live that sort of life, I hate the city—” She looked directly at him. “But at least their lives seem to be full ones. Up here—” She turned away, looking out at the deserted country through which they drove: they were less than two miles from the heart of Winnemincka and this was already wilderness. “Steve, is everyone unhappy, no matter where they are?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Are you unhappy, Steve?”
He wondered. He had never expressly wished for happiness; and that, perhaps, implied that he had been relatively happy. He had never been morose nor pessimistic: at least not till just recently: pessimism, perhaps, was a late developing pain, like gout. He had been unhappy when his mother, and then his father, had died; but that was not the sort of unhappiness Kate meant: grief was not a yardstick by which to measure the world you lived in. No: unhappiness meant discontent, unfulfilment, frustration, a sense of being lost. And all those feelings had happened to him in the last six months. But he had not consciously thought of being unhappy; he had, perhaps, subconsciously judged himself against others and known he was happier, or anyway less vexed, than they. But how would he feel if he measured himself against, say, Mother Maria, the old nun from Crocodile River? Hers was a sublimation of feeling to which he could never aspire; but there was no doubt that she was happy. Phil Covici? He was probably deathly unhappy now; but he had been a happy man when Steve had first met him. And why were both those people, Mother Maria and Dr. Covici, happy? And he knew that both of them would have given him the same answer: they were doing a job to which they were dedicated. And, if he were unhappy, that might be his own trouble: he did not have, and never had had, a sense of dedication. But that, of course, eliminated 99.9 per cent of the world’s population from true happiness – and he knew there was not so much unhappiness in the world. He had no proper answer to Kate’s question, but he knew she would press for an answer of some sort. He wondered which side of the day-to-day suspension of real thought that conditioned so many of us, lay the truth about himself.
He steered the truck carefully down the dirt road. A flock of grey and pink galahs blew out of a tree, like gale-swept blossoms; beside the road a consistory of crows argued over the corpse of a dingo. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Why?”
But he didn’t know her well enough to tell her, and he was glad when he saw the race-track come into sight through the scrub. He swung the truck in under the shade of a bloodwood, got out and said, “I’ll tell you that some other time. What makes you think the world is so unhappy?”
She got out of the truck, adjusting her hat, brushing the flies away. “I’ve seen so much of it. When I was down south at school – I went there for a year when I was fourteen, I couldn’t stand more than a year – in the dormitory at night I used to listen to the girls talk. About their parents—”
“Schoolgirls have vivid imaginations,” he said, and thought of Rona and her tales of dormitory life at her school: the dive of innocence with its cigarette under the blankets, the love letters from the boy who treated them as English compositions, the girl who wore the knowledge of her broken hymen as if it were a Crown jewel. “There are a lot of happy people.”
“Why aren’t you happy then?” she said with the directness of the dormitory, and again he was saved, this time by a shout from Jack Tristram.
“Come on,” he said, and led the way over to Tristram. “Let’s lay our bets.”
Tristram had borrowed one of Charlie’s bright red shirts. It was too large for him, and he wore it outside his trousers: with his bookmaker’s bag hung round his neck he looked like an Eastern gully-gully man about to produce his tricks. He was one of three bookmakers and his voice, after three days of shouting the odds, was just a hoarse cackle: he had taken his teeth out and what he said now was even more unintelligible than the usual bookmakers’ shouts. Grace Hudson and Betty Pilcher stood below the packing-case that was Tristram’s stand, studying the board on which Tristram had chalked his prices.
“Just like women,” Tristram said, as Steve and Kate came up. “Trying to find a horse with a fancy name. They’d choose it with a pin if they could stick one in the board.”
“I’d stick a pin in you if I had one,” said Grace Hudson. “I’ll have a pound on Charlie’s horse, whatever it is.”
“Betting on the jock,” said Tristram, taking her money and making hieroglyphics on the ticket he gave her. “That shows some system, anyway. What about you, love?” He grinned at Pilcher, gummy as a baby.
“I’ll bet on Billy’s horse,” Pilcher said, and blushed. “It’s an outsider, but I think someone should encourage it.”
“You talking about the horse or Billy?” said Tristram, and showed his gullet as he laughed.
Steve put a bet on the horse that Charlie was to ride, then turned as he felt a hand on his arm. It was Mrs. Fogarty, dressed in a flowered maternity coat that made her look like a windowful of wind-filled curtains.
“I heard about young Colin Nevin, Doctor.” She waved her arms about her as she spoke, keeping the four children who trailed her in check. She wore a large floppy straw hat that kept hiding one eye as she turned her head to speak to the children: it was like talking to a placid female Cyclops. “That was bad luck. Oh, I don’t mean just for Peter and Nelly Nevin. I mean for you, too. I was listening in when Peter told you what the symptoms were. You couldn’t be blamed for not thinking he would get bad so quickly.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Fogarty,” he said, and felt Kate press his arm.
“I’m a stickybeak,” Mrs. Fogarty said, clipping one of the children under the ear, smiling expansively at Steve and Kate. “Now I’m like this, like an old mare, I just sit by the radio all day and tune in, just to see what’s happening. I heard you radio in about bringing in the Japs.” She turned her head to chip at another of the youngsters; Steve caught a glimpse of the single eye like the chilling glance of a basilisk. Then she had turned back full-face, had pushed the hat up from her brow and was smiling. “I know what it’s like when you have to stage a diver with paralysis. My old dad was a pearling man. You’re all right, Dr. McCabe. I’m looking forward to having you around when my baby turns up. How long are you going to be here?”
This was a friend: he felt too grateful to her to disappoint her.
“I hope I’m here long enough to deliver the baby, Mrs. Fogarty.”
She laughed, swung her arms and brought the children in beside her and sailed off through the crowd. Steve looked down at Kate and smiled. “You asked me if I was unhappy. No, not now.”
“Good,” she said, and took his arm. “Because you look a damn’ sight nicer when you smile.”
A three-piece brass band was a long way from Tipperary; over by the big tent that was the bar a quartet of stockmen mourned “Sweet Adeline.” Women in dresses that didn’t fit and shoes that pinched sat on the tailboards of trucks and elaborated on the remarks they had made to each other over the air each week for the past year; children approached each other shyly, then suddenly were joined in a giggling catherine wheel of excitement. An old Afghan trader stood beneath a tree; he was dressed in faded khaki shirt and trousers but sported a bright blue turban. He was the last of a dying caste, the turbaned bearded men who with their camels had wandered the wilderness for fifty years and more, the travelling salesmen of the Outback. Out on the edge of the track, by the scrub on the far side, the blacks had come in to see the races: tonight was their corroboree and the young men were already beginning to paint themselves for it: the black stockmen from the stations, resplendent now in their bright red and yellow shirts, strutting like peacocks among the whites, would join the tribesmen later, taking off the vivid plumage they had borrowed from the whites and putting on the paint of their ancestors.
Charlie stood by the bar drinking lemonade with Ben Carslake, the old half-caste who plagued the hospital staff with his imagined ailments. Charlie was dressed in riding-breeches and silks, a jacket of yellow and black stripes. He had proved the most successful rider of the meeting so far: he smiled shyly but with pride when men slapped him on the back and wished him luck. Ben Carslake was dressed in his Sunday best, a black old-fashioned suit and a striped flannel shirt with a gleaming ruby stud but no collar. He was almost seventy now, thin as a fence post and twice as tall, and the black in him was coming to the surface now as he got old. The lines in his grey face were dark, so that he looked as if he were streaked with charcoal, and his hair looked like stiff grey wire: grey was his whole colour, and he looked out of place in this burnt brown land.
He, too, was drinking lemonade: he took the glass from Molly, the barmaid, and paid meticulously with pennies, counting them out as if he were paying off a life-long debt. He turned to Charlie. “When are you leaving for Wattle Creek, boy?” Everyone was boy to him: he looked on his age as some sort of honour..
“A little while,” said Charlie, smiling at a woman who stopped to say she was going to back his horse in the Cup. “Waiting on word now.”
“You happy, boy?” said Carslake, drinking the warm lemonade and burping loudly: he put his hand to his chest and complained of his indigestion. “I mean, you said goodbye to the tribe for ever?”
Charlie looked across the track towards the scrub: there was a moment of silence in the crowd’s hubbub and he heard the deep sound of a didgeridoo, like a ghostly echo from the past. He would go back there some day, he knew there was no real future for him anywhere else: the blacks were dying out and the best place to die was among your own kind. Then he turned and stared over the heads of the crowd, saw the red-shirted figure of Jack Tristram, and he smiled with amusement and affection. “Dunno, Ben. You find a mate – like I done – and you forget about the tribe.”
“You never forget the tribe, boy.” Ben Carslake finished his lemonade, burped three times in rapid succession and looked as if he were having a heart attack. “Not even when you’re half-white, like me, and never even belonged to the tribe. It makes its tracks and you follow 'em, boy. Your footprints match perfect, no matter how long you worn boots.” He looked across the track shaking his head: he was suffering from an illness that was real, that no amount of pills and drugs could ever cure. “It’s a real bastard, boy.”
Then the bell rang for the riders for the Winnemincka Cup and Charlie went off to find his horse. The horses were stock horses from the stations and drovers’ plants: they had no more pedigree than old Ben Carslake. The riders were stockmen, white and black, and one of two of the shearers: they had a variety of styles, but there were few better horsemen in the world: McGrowdie, Piggott, Hartack could not have got these horses home quicker than their riders to-day. The judge was the police-sergeant, and his chair was a steel windmill stand: he sat high above the crowd, bellowing out the results like a muezzin crying the evening prayers: he waved once to the old Afghan and the latter touched his forehead in acknowledgement. Packy Quilpie was the starter: he stood on the back of a truck, dropped a red flag, yelled Go! in a foghorn voice, and the Winnemincka Cup was under way.
Kate was standing on a kerosene tin and Steve held her by the waist to steady her. He was aware of her body through the thin dress she wore, and he tried to make his hold impersonal, as if he were no more than a doctor grasping a patient; but he knew that he wasn’t being very successful at the impersonation, although in her excitement at the progress of the race she did not seem aware that he was holding her at all.
Hudson, Pilcher and a crowd of young half-caste girls stood on the back of a nearby truck, a mixed chorus in praise of Billy Brannigan: they yelled his name, as if he alone were running the race and not his horse. On the far side of the track the horses swept round by the blacks’ camp: the blacks leapt into the air with hysterical shouts, as if Australia had just been given back to them. The bright silks strung out, then congealed; the colours ran into each other, then the field came round the bend. The crowd stood on its own and each other’s toes; the women screamed with excitement and pain, as their fancied horse came into view and their new shoes bit into their corns. Two pieces of the three-piece band had stopped playing; the cornet player’s face was a red balloon behind the galloping rhythm of “D’Ye Ken John Peel?” A drunk collapsed and his mate dragged him feet first into some shade, then rushed back to cheer home the winner. The horses came down the straight in a bunch, the last few running blindly through the dust-storm raised by those in front; a yellow and black striped jacket edged out ahead and was joined by a crimson jacket; the two horses came plunging down towards the winning-post, heads bobbing, necks straining, eyes showing white; the crimson jacket rose up in the saddle, heaving the horse forward; and Billy Brannigan went past the post a winner by half a head.
There was almost total collapse on the truck where Hudson, Pilcher and the half-caste girls had shouted for their hero. They jumped off the truck and converged on the bookmakers; Tristram handed out money like a man throwing away samples. Then Kate was presenting her ticket.
“And that skins me,” said Tristram. “Three days of shouting me lungs out, and I finish up as broke as when I started.”
Kate took the money and stuffed it into her bag. “Steve and I were talking about unhappy people. You just bear out my point.”
“Whoever heard of a happy bookie?” said Steve. “Get down off that box, Jack, and rejoin the human race.”
Tristram wiped his face on the tail of the red shirt and replaced his teeth. “Two beers, I think, and the human race may be bearable again.”
“I’ll shout you,” said Kate, and she and Steve each took one of Tristram’s arms and carried him towards the bar.
Steve felt gay and happy: it was a long time since he had felt so light-hearted. He arrived at the bar, laughing aloud, said “Excuse me,” to the man in front of him, and Dave Keating turned round and said, “Why would I wanna excuse you anything?”
There was a letter from Goodyear in the mail that had come in that afternoon: You may not believe this, Stephen, but in a way I envy you. I don’t mean that I should like to be a Flying Doctor – I am not built for sacrifice of any sort (but, then, who of us is? Cynic that I am, I am convinced that Christ fust wasted himself by his example of sacrifice. Half the world to-day would have thought more of him if he had joined the money-changers in the temple. Getting cakes and cream …) No, I mean you have escaped – only for a while. And from what? That, I can’t honestly answer. But since you have been away I’ve been aware of chains of some sort – Mrs. Crepello, perhaps? I’m too old and set in my luxury ways to do anything but envy you your youth and your few weeks up there. … Peggy and Rona are coming back this week – the relations grew tired of Peggy or vice versa. They both have my sympathy. Give my regards to Jack, and tell him to watch that heart of his. Mack and Watkins miss you, and so does Mrs. Crepello.
It was a rambling letter, and somehow sounded as if it came from a lonely man. Steve read it through twice, then put it aside to give to Tristram later. He did his rounds at the hospital, checked if any medical calls had come over the air, then went into the operating-room. He had looked in here perfunctorily on his first day in the hospital, hoping he would not be called upon to use it. To-day, however, a woman had been admitted with a mediastinal tumour. She had been under treatment by Covici for several weeks and he had been trying to get her down to Perth for surgery, but she had adamantly refused. She was a woman of low intelligence, the wife of a road-worker and the mother of five children; she would not leave her husband and family and her husband had been as adamant as the woman herself that she should not go south.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Hudson, as she and Steve inspected the operating-room. “The husband goes on benders and belts hell out of her every week-end, but there’s some sort of love there between them. I just feel sorry for the kids, that’s all. If the mother doesn’t come through this—” She stopped, then smiled. “I’m sorry, Doctor. That doesn’t show much faith in you.”
“Frankly, I’d rather she went south,” Steve said. “You’re not equipped here for severe emergencies.” He looked about the room. It was clean and its equipment was adequate for normal surgery; but against the memory of the theatres at Prince Alfred and other hospitals in Sydney, the only ones he had known, it was almost primitive. But he was not afraid this time: with adequate equipment he had always had confidence in his skill. “How are Pilcher and Scott in the theatre?”
“Scott is good, but I don’t think Pilcher has had much experience. If it’s a long op, the heat gets her down. Dr. Covici used to operate at six o’clock, so he could get through before the day got too hot.”
“I wish I’d thought of that,” Steve said. “The morning after the Race Ball and having to operate at six o’clock.”
“The first five years are the worst up here,” said Hudson. “After that you’re either dead or you’ve developed an iron constitution.”
“I’ll have an early night tonight, anyway. Just in case.”
“Kate will be disappointed,” said Hudson, at a cupboard, checking on towels and gowns: she was too casual in her remark, and Steve waited for her to go on. She said nothing, waiting for him to give her an opening, but he didn’t help her at all. At last she said, “The girl is gone on you, Dr. McCabe.”
He had been checking the inhalator attached to the anæsthetist’s apparatus: he squeezed it in surprise and there was a loud hiss of air. “I don’t like jokes like that, Matron.”
She recognised the formal stiffness of his answer. “I am not joking, Dr. McCabe. However, if you’re offended, I’m sorry I made the remark. I apologise.”
He was silent for a moment, still standing with the inhalator mask in his hands. He was not sure whether Hudson was warning him or chiding him: he remembered her opinion of Billy Brannigan for his attitude towards Pilcher.
“I think you’re mistaken,” he said at last. “There’s been nothing like that between us—”
“I told you once before, Doctor. I’m a woman besides being a matron. We have instincts for that sort of thing. And as a matron, I’ve been responsible for scores of girls. You get that way you can spot a lovesick girl a mile away on a dark night. Kate may not be lovesick, but no man who has ever come to this town has had the effect on her that you have had.”
“What am I supposed to do? She knows I’m going back to Sydney as soon as the new doctor arrives.” He put down the inhalator and walked across to the switch and turned on the big lamp above the operating-table. It threw the rest of the room into darkness, and he looked vainly for Hudson on the other side of the blaze of light. Two beetles flung themselves up against the light, and he said automatically, “See there are no insects in here tomorrow morning when I operate.”
“It isn’t always possible,” Hudson said, just a voice in the darkness on the other side of the room. “But we’ll do our best.”
“That’s all any of us can do,” he said meaninglessly, and switched off the light. He felt bewildered, as if he himself had just been on the table under the light and all the rest of the world had been in the darkness beyond. He wondered why he should be so concerned because a girl imagined she was in love with him: four or five girls had at times told him they loved him and all he had experienced was a sense of being flattered: the girls had been in love with someone else in another month and he had gone on his way unhurt and un-humiliated. But Kate was different: he knew that falling in love for her was a major surrender: with her it would be a question of putting her life in his hands, just as much as would the woman who would come into this room tomorrow morning and be laid on this operating-table. He found himself hoping that Hudson was wrong in her surmise, that she had misjudged Kate; and he wondered how he could get out of taking Kate to the ball tonight. He welcomed an emergency now: a call from one of the stations would solve everything. For a moment he thought foolishly of bringing tomorrow’s operation forward to tonight; but that would keep Hudson and the nurses from the ball, and he had no right to do that. He said, “I’ll wire Dr. Covici first thing in the morning, tell him to hurry up with the new doctor. I just hope you’re wrong in what you think about Kate. It wouldn’t work out.”
“No,” said Hudson. “I don’t think it would.”
As he came out of the hospital the old Japanese was waiting on the steps for him. The pearling lugger had been delayed and now was coming in on the morning tide. The old man said something in Japanese but Steve could only shake his head and smile. The old man then tried pidgin, but Steve could pick up only one or two words: the old Japanese was trying to express his thanks. He took Steve’s hand in his and Steve felt something pushed into his palm; when he opened it he saw he was holding a pearl. He knew nothing of the value of pearls, but this one was big and to his inexperienced eye looked perfect. It rolled in his palm like liquid silver, and he knew, without knowing how, that this was all the old man possessed in the world. This, and his son. He handed it back to the old man.
“No, Dad,” he said, and shook his head, trying to bridge the language barrier between them: he dug up the only Japanese word he knew: “Sayonara.”
The old man’s face suddenly cracked: it was as if the word were a bond that would link them for ever. He grabbed Steve’s hand again and pressed it: there was strength in his hands and Steve felt the pressure of them: the man’s gratitude was expressed by the giving of pain. Steve returned the grip, and they stood like that on the steps for a moment, hurting each other.
“Sayonara,” said the old man, and said something else in Japanese.
“Sayonara,” repeated Steve, and escaped: he had always been embarrassed by gratitude and he would never become accustomed to it; it was the quality that would save him from ever becoming smug.
Tristram and Charlie were in the living-room when he entered. Though they still camped out in the scrub, they came in here each night for supper and Steve looked forward to their company. Even in medical school he had not much enjoyed the company of men, and in the last few years he could not remember when he had spent more than two consecutive hours with a party of men. He belonged to the Royal Sydney Golf Club, the University and the Royal Automobile, but he was not at heart a club man and had joined them only on Goodyear’s advice and insistence. He played golf and squash with other doctors, but he knew he was welcome with them only because of his skill at the games and not for his conviviality in the bar afterwards. But now he looked forward to the company of Tristram and Charlie almost as much as he had looked forward to the company of Rona in the early days of their romance.
He threw Tristram Goodyear’s letter, and went outside to wash. When he came back Tristram said, “Charlie is another bloke that’s going downhill to the grave.” Charlie Pinjarra looked up, surprised, and Tristram shook his head. “Not you, mate. This city Charlie.”
“How do you mean he’s going downhill to the grave?” Steve said, sitting down at the table and beginning to carve the roast goat, Kimberley mutton, as it was called. “Charles will live till he’s ninety. I’ve never met a man who takes such good care of himself.”
“He’s going downhill, nevertheless,” said Tristram, taking a moth from his gravy and dropping it on the floor. “He’s got nowhere to go but downhill. He’s a success, he won’t go any higher – and he knows it. He may get a knighthood, but that won’t mean anything to Charlie.” He began to eat, chewing on the goat with a loud clicking of his teeth. “There’s one thing about being a failure. You’ve always got the thought, if you’re that way inclined, that you can go uphill to the grave.”
“You going uphill?” said Charlie, smiling at him across the table.
“No, mate. I’m coasting on the flat. And I’ll bet I’m a bloody sight happier than Charlie Goodyear.”
It was the hottest night Steve had experienced since his arrival. The warm food lay heavily in his stomach; perspiration dripped into the gravy as he leant forward. He pushed the plate away and sat back. “I’m not looking forward to dancing tonight. I think I’ll talk Kate into sitting out the ball with you and Charlie.”
“We’re not going,” said Tristram, eating heartily. “We leave tomorrow morning for Wattle Creek. Word came through from the manager on the six o’clock schedule.”
“But you’ll come to the ball—!”
Tristram shook his head, pushing his plate away and wiping his mouth. “I’m tired, Steve, fair worn out. Charlie and I have got a ten-day ride ahead of us, we’re taking in our own plant of horses, and we’ll have to be leaving first thing in the morning.”
Steve looked with concern at the older man: he did look tired, grey under his tan. “You should take it easy, Jack. You did too much yelling of the odds these last three days. You know what Charles and I told you about your heart.”
“What about his heart?” said Charlie suddenly.
Steve looked at him. “He didn’t tell you? He’s got – well, in plain language a strained heart. If he’s not careful of it—” He stopped: he could not sentence a friend to death.
“It’ll be all right, mate.” Tristram nodded across the table at Charlie: he was more concerned that Charlie should not worry about him. “When we get out to Wattle Creek, I’ll take it easy. The Wet’ll be here soon, and there’ll be nothing to do then but sit around. I’m gunna be like Charlie Goodyear. Live till I’m ninety.”
“You better,” said Charlie. “I don’t wanna go back to the tribe for a long time yet.”
Steve and Kate went out to the tribes that night, to see the corroboree before they went to the ball. This was not a sacred corroboree, and there were other whites there to watch it; a ceremonial “manhood” corroboree would have been performed far away from the eyes of strangers. This was no more than the whites were having in the town, a ball to finish up the race meeting.
The men of the tribes had spent hours over their make-up. The town and the wilderness had supplied their costumes: birds’ feathers, strings of shells, woven strips of kangaroo fur, an old striped football jersey, even one of the racing silks of this afternoon. The men’s faces and bodies were streaked with ochre and other coloured clays: they looked out at the audience through a brightly-coloured grid, like prisoners who carried with them the stripes of their window-bars. The music came from the didgeridoo, the great primitive oboe hollowed out of wood or bamboo, the piping gil-gil sticks, the clicking of boomerangs, the beating of yam sticks in the dust, the drumming of cupped hands on thighs and above all the singing of the tribesmen and their women.
Steve and Kate sat in the truck parked beneath an old boab. The moon came over the rim of the mountain behind the town, and the clearing in the scrub was lit by its glow. The deep notes of the didgeridoo began, and the voices came in softly, almost imperceptibly growing in volume. Beyond the circle where the dancers would enter, old men, gins and piccaninnies, their eyes and teeth white in the glow of the fires, kept time to the singing. Dancing was the aborigine’s one real art, and Steve felt the excitement rising inside him as the moment of entry for the dancers approached. He had never been interested in dancing, ballet, folk or just ballroom; but this was different, the last surviving expression of a dying people. The aborigine was doomed, but he would go out into the darkness of the Never-Never, back of sunset, singing and dancing as he was tonight.
The singing was at a crescendo now: the night air throbbed with its meaningless words. Suddenly it stopped dead: the echoes flew away into the scrub. The silence seemed to quiver: Steve looked at his watch, half-expecting it to have stopped. Then the music began again, softer this time, and a solitary voice took up the singing.
“That’s the maker,” Kate whispered. “The composer of the corroberee.”
The voice was thin and high-pitched, eerie as a cry from the dead: it went through the blood, touched the heart with a cold finger. Then out from the trees, from the shadows of the paperbarks, the lemon gums and the boabs, came the swaying writhing figures of the dancers. AH of them wore head-dresses of some sort: bright sprays of white cockatoo feathers, eagle-hawk wings, cages of sticks covered with hair, fur and bark: the lead man wore something that Steve at last recognised was a caricature of a horse’s head. Leaves fastened to their elbows and knees whispered as they moved; hard-soled feet thudded into the dust. The long line of men came into the clearing, weaving and swaying, circling and bunching closer together, a long dark snake eating its own tail. On the edge of the clearing the old men and women complemented the movement of the dance: their shoulders rolled like a black wave on the shore of the clearing. Nothing goes back further than this, Steve thought: this was the beginning of joy and evil, this was where we all once were.
He felt Kate’s hand groping for his; he took it and pressed her fingers. She was completely engrossed in the dance: the firelight danced on the mask of her face. She was dressed for the ball, in the blue evening dress; she wore no necklace, but had a jewelled clip in her hair. The dress was low cut, too low cut: Tristram, after all, had not had a good eye for size: when she leaned forward her breasts were almost as bare as those of the aboriginal women on the edge of the clearing. She was beating time to the rhythm with her foot; now and again a tremor ran through her body as one of the dancers broke away and went into an individual step.
The dance was approaching its climax now. The man representing the horse was now in the middle of the clearing; the others danced round him in a flurry of arms and legs. They were simulating the race of this afternoon, the dance had all the excitement and confusion of the race, but it never lost the faultless rhythm. The moon rose into the sky, the fires flared up, and the corroboree maker shrieked the end of his song.
Kate’s grip on Steve’s hand relaxed. She turned towards him, her eyes shining. “That’s part of what I love about this country! Where else in Australia could you find anything as exciting?”
“You’re a primitive,” he said, looking at the bright eyes, the heaving breasts rising from the Dior dress; he wondered if Paris designed its dresses with ever a thought to where they would finish up.
“Perhaps I am. Anyway, I’m not too damned sophisticated to lie about what excites me – Ah, there I go again! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, Steve. But you did enjoy it, didn’t you?” She stared at him intently, yearning for him to share her excitement.
He put his hand in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, found he had left them at home, touched instead the aboriginal charm. Don’t let her be in love with me, he thought, and at once smiled at himself: he was as primitive as she, wishing on a charm that belonged to the dancers now congregated round their fires. “Yes, I enjoyed it. Let’s go to our own corroboree now.”
“I’m going to enjoy that, too!” she said, and hugged herself. “Oh, my God, I’m happy! I take it all back – the world isn’t an unhappy place!”
They drove back to town, through the moonlit, mosquito-humming night. Before they got out of the truck Kate smeared her bare arms and breasts with repellent: ripples of light showed on her tan. “It’s a hell of a perfume. But all the women will smell the same – we’ll at least all start from scratch.” Then she laughed aloud: he had never seen her so gay. “That’s a pun. We’ll all start from scratch!”
Steve laughed with her, scratching his wrist where a mosquito had bitten him. They got out of the truck and went across the street and up the steps into the ballroom: the shell of the old Music Hall.
The orchestra sat on what remained of the old stage: a violinist, a pianist, a drummer and the cornet player from the three-piece band at the races. They wore open-necked shirts and their sleeves were rolled up; it was hard labour being a musician in this climate, and the sweat poured from them. Behind them the wall of the hall had collapsed: the backdrop was more exotic than any painted scene: the agonised arms of a boab, a dark cloud of bougainvilaea, the mountain like a black anvil beneath the bright hammer’of the moon. The orchestra thumped out its music, and the crowd, sweating, mosquito-bitten, waltzed down the Danube.
All the women wore evening dress of some sort: this was their one opportunity in the year to dress up and they were not going to miss it. Sewing machines had been humming for weeks in the town and on the stations; the mail plane for the past month had been bringing in dress boxes from down south. Not all the dresses fitted, nor did all of them suit their wearers; but it didn’t matter, anything was a change from the drab dresses they wore the rest of the year. One or two men wore dinner jackets: these were owners of the big stations, men who spent part of each year down south: in older lands they would have been the landed gentry, but here they were just Bill and Harry. One man wore tails: he had gone south last year for the first time in ten years and his wife had bought all his clothes for him: he glided about the floor elegant as a gigolo, the effect spoiled only by the riding-boots he wore beneath his ribbon-striped trousers. But most men were coatless, their only concession to formality the wearing of a tie.
Steve, on the advice of Kate, had come dressed that way. He had naturally brought no evening wear with him; somehow the thought had never occurred to him that there would be any social life in Winnemincka. He had been glad of the opportunity to come without a jacket; even just in his shirt he was sweating within a minute of being on the dance floor. He held Kate away from him and took her gently through the motions of the waltz.
He had been a regular, if not enthusiastic, attendant at balls and dances in Sydney. Rona was on several charity committees, and each year these committees held balls; for a certain strata of Sydney society attendance at these functions was a ritual of caste. For days before photos would appear in the social pages of the newspapers of what certain prominent women would be wearing; year after year the same faces appeared, looking a little more faded, showing more and more the high cost of holding on to beauty that, in most cases, had been very meagre to begin with. Ageing ex-beauties wore imported gowns that only emphasised their futile struggle against time: they came to the balls in parties, feeling safe only in comparison with women like themselves: they smiled with tight condescension, afraid of cracking their make-up, on the younger women like Rona who waited to take their place. The men, Steve included, hovered in the background, footing the bills and, if not liking it, at least accepting it. If ever the Australian nation turned into a matriarchal society, historians would find that it had begun in Sydney and Melbourne, in Society with the big S.
Kate glowed with happiness. She smiled up at him, making no secret of how she felt; she had eyes for no other man in the room. He felt frightened and a little sick; he held her farther away from him. They passed Mrs. Fogarty sitting in a chair against a wall, resplendent in what could only be described as an evening tent; she waved to them, then put her hand abruptly on her stomach, as if the baby had kicked in protest at being brought to the ball. Molly, the barmaid, went by in the arms of Packy Quilpie, the two of them looking like a couple of wrestlers rather than waltzers; her hair shone like a torch and she glittered like a chandelier in a dress studded with sequins; Packy’s sleeves were rolled high on his arms and his sweat-soaked shirt was stuck to his back. He grinned at Steve as they gallumphed by, but Molly turned her head, massive in her ignoring of him. With Kate in his arms, Steve felt that the barmaid, vicious and stupid in her hatred of him, was the woman he could deal with best.
The ball went on. Some of the young shearers yelled for rock ’n’ roll; the orchestra gave a stiff-jointed imitation of Presley. Old Ben Carslake, still dressed in his Sunday best, stood on the veranda outside the hall and looked in through the glassless windows. Beside his head a faded torn poster advertised a touring company’s production of Girl of the Golden West: he had fallen in love with the leading lady, worshipped her from the other side of the footlights and the far side of the colour bar. He turned to the girl who stood beynd the buffet table that had been set up on the veranda.
“I dunno, watching ’em dance these days, you wonder which are the blacks and which are the whites. We’re in-betweens, you and me, girl. Maybe we’re the lucky ones. Look at the antics of that mob in there. Just like it was over at the corro-boree. Makes you wonder sometimes which mob you’d wanna belong to.”
“I ain’t any gin, that’s one thing.” The girl was coffee-coloured and beautiful: she had missed the broad nostrils of so many of the half-castes, and the thick soft skin: there was an almost patrician line to her jaw and chin. There was nothing patrician about her body or her dress: the cheap red dress, tight as another skin, showed every contour of the body of which she was as much aware as any man was who passed her or who came to the table for something to eat. The spark in her eye was as much amorality as coquetry: a man, any man, was fair game. She wore a sparkle of brilliants on each ear, and her face was as made-up as any woman’s on the dance floor inside. Only the small white apron round her middle identified her as a waitress.
Ben Carslake looked at her, but before he could answer Steve had come out to the veranda. “Hullo, Doc. I’ll be in to see you in the morning. Me arthritis is killing me again.”
“In this heat?” Steve said, going to the supper table and looking over what was available.
“Weather don’t make no difference, Doc. I’m just one of them unlucky bastards.” Carslake had branded the girl as one like himself by swearing in front of her: he would not have done it in front of a white woman. Steve, who had not taken much notice of the waitress, looked up at her now, and was surprised at the frank bold stare she gave him.
“The sausage-rolls are nice, Doctor,” she said.
Steve grinned: he wondered if they served sausage-rolls at balls in London: they were an Australian institution, the antipodean answer to caviare and pâté de foie gras. “Yes, I think sausage-rolls would be just the shot. Would you have any saveloys?”
“No,” said the girl, not really interested in what she served him: sex was what she offered, a universal dish. Steve grinned at her again, not taking her inviting stare seriously and turned away.
“Don’t come too early in the morning, Ben. I’m operating.”
“I’ll put up with it, Doc,” said Ben, a martyr as well as a hypochondriac. He watched Steve go back into the hall, then turned to the girl. “He’s all right, that doc. Lay off of him. I dunno who you are, girl, you’re a stranger to me. But I can see you’re one of us. Stick to us, girl. The in-betweens.”
“If I wanna tip me hat to a white man, that’s my business,” said the girl, and rolled a shoulder: her movements were almost those of burlesque. She picked up a sausage-roll and threw it contemptuously to Ben, who caught it. “Go back to the mulga, darky.”
Ben squeezed the roll in his hand, the sausage smearing his fingers: he raised his hand to throw it back, but at that moment Dave Keating came up on to the veranda. Keating was the worse for drink; he tripped on the top step and almost fell. Ben hesitated, then turned away. In his lifetime he had been in more than enough fights with white men: he knew that when they were drunk, white men were inclined to turn on half-castes more than on their own kind or the blacks: some sense of sin, of shame, shook the drunken minds and it was as if the men were intent on destroying all evidence of what their own kind had committed. Ben had never tried to fathom why the half-castes should be the butt of drunken whites; at one time he had fought with a hatred he had also never tried to understand; now in his old age he turned away and avoided trouble as soon as it hove in sight. He turned away now and went into the hall.
Keating rolled up to the table and leaned on it. He was about to pick up some food when he saw the girl. “Hullo, love. What’s your name?”
“Mary. Mary Hammond.”
“I never seen you before, love. Where you from?”
“I come down from Darwin on the plane yesterday.”
“You gunna stay long, love?”
All men were fair game, but she did not take aim at scrub turkeys: this half-drunken white man could be a beach-comber, and she wanted something better than that. “Depends. You live here in Winnemincka?”
He shook his head, rolling a little as he did so, and bit into a sausage-roll: tomato sauce streaked his cheek like blood. “Nah. I ain’t a townie. I’m a cattle man. I run Emu Downs.”
“You own it, you mean?” She straightened up, throwing out her breasts: she had the obvious approach, but she had never needed more on this northern coast.
“Nah.” Keating winked at her. “If I owned it, I wouldn’t stay up here, love.”
She was disappointed, but a station manager was better than some of the men she had teamed up with in the past. Inside the hall the orchestra was playing “Love Is A Many Splen-doured Thing”: it included the lust of drunken station managers. “You wanna see me after the ball?”
Keating nodded, his mouth studded with crumbs and smeared with tomato sauce. “I’ll be waiting for you, love. Mind, don’t you go off with anybody else. You’re mine, all right?”
She had surrendered in the past with less persuasion. She smiled and dropped dirty plates into the tub of hot water below the table: a gin knelt there, like a shadow of the girl’s black mother. “See you later, mister.”
Keating went into the hall, stared at the dancers for a moment, then found a chair and slumped into it. Up on the stage Billy Brannigan had joined the orchestra and was playing his mouth-organ. Betty Pilcher stood in the wings of the stage, smiling at him as he would turn to wink at her: she had won him for herself tonight over the half-caste girls: he sat there on the stage like a lottery prize waiting for collection.
Hudson was just going out the door, escorted by the manager of one of the inland stations. She was going back to the hospital to take over from Scott. Down south it would have been Scott, plump, plain, the girl nobody would want to see home, who would have had the early session at a ball; here in Winnemincka, where any girl was acceptable just so long as she was a girl, Hudson had done the sporting thing and allowed Scott to do some good for herself in the later stages of the ball. It was problematic whether Scott, soured and frightened by years of neglect, would take advantage of what was offered, but Hudson, caring for her nurses as much as for her patients, had insisted Scott should at least attempt the cure.
The wheel of the ball was spinning well now, oiled by drink, conviviality, flirtation and the thought in the minds of most that another twelve months’ isolation and loneliness would begin again tomorrow. Mosquito repellent had been washed off by sweat, but no one noticed the mosquitoes now. The orchestra, reduced now to slow fox-trots, was saturated; they played like men on a sinking ship, already washed by the waves. Molly, the barmaid, stood on the stage and sang, the too-solid shade of the soubrettes of long ago; Ben Carslake looked at her, closed his eyes and dreamed of the Girl of the Golden West, opened his eyes and shuddered. This country had produced a writer or two, but never an artist: it cried out for a Breughel, but the Breughels of to-day were in the cities, where the money was. The north-west was full of legends, and tonight’s ball would become another one, recorded only in the memories of those present.
It was midnight when Steve led Kate out through the back door of the hall: above their heads the faded letters still showed: Stage Door. The ball would go on till daylight, but Kate had agreed that Steve could not stay up all night and still operate in the morning.
They came out into the brightly moonlit lane that ran behind the Music Hall. A dog scurried away and dust rose in a thin blue mist behind it. There were sheds, stables and one or two cottages backing on to the lane; their shadows and those of some paperbark trees broke the moonlit ground into a confusing pattern. Steve stepped on a broken box, knocking his shin; he put his arm about Kate while he stood on one leg and rubbed the sore part. She stood laughing up at him, her lips parted, and he was about to bend his head and kiss her when they heard the scuffle in the shadows to their left.
Steve turned his head, peering into the darkness, and saw the man struggling with the girl. He said, “Hey, cut that out,” and the girl’s face appeared for a moment over the man’s shoulder. It was the half-caste waitress, the one who had served him with sausage-rolls an hour or so before.
He would never know that he had made a mistake in interfering in what he thought was the molesting of some girl by a drunk. What had looked like a struggle had been only the clumsy approach of the half-drunken Keating; the girl had only held him off because she had wanted somewhere more private and comfortable than the lane for their love-making When Steve had spoken, she had been about to tell him to mine his own business; then she had recognised him and had at once changed her mind. A doctor was always a better prospect than a station manager, and she had found out that this young doctor was unmarried. She was naϊve in her thinking, in her assessment of her chances, but all her life she had survived by grasping at any small opportunity that offered. She began to struggle now, calling to Steve for help.
Steve broke away from Kate and moved in on the struggling figures. Only as he pulled the man away by grasping his shoulder did he realise he had come up against Keating again. It was too late to do anything about it now; if, indeed, he had had time to think of retreat. Keating swung at him, and Steve leaned away from the wild punch. He cocked his fist, all at once full of hot anger, glad of this opportunity to hit Keating, to answer him in some way, no matter how stupidly, for the insults Keating had hurled at him personally and over the air. His punch was already on its way when Kate rushed between them; it grazed her cheek and skidded off Keating’s shoulder.
“No!” Kate leaned back against him, pushing him away. “Stop it, Steve!”
Steve grabbed her shoulders to force her out of the way. Then cool reason came flooding back in. He stopped, still holding Kate by the shoulders, and then was aware of the crowd hanging out the back windows of the Music Hall. The orchestra was still playing and Molly, the barmaid, was comforting her melancholy baby: her voice and the cornet had the same spittle-thick brassy sound; but someone must have been sitting at the windows and had called others as soon as Steve had grabbed Keating by the shoulder. No one said anything, just hung there out of the glassless windows, and behind them the raucous voice and the orchestra kept their steady beat.
“Come on, you mug!” Keating snarled. “Put your dukes up – don’t let a sheila get in your way!” He was blind with drink, hatred and frustrated lust; he did not recognise Kate. “Come on—you!”
Steve almost hit him when the word came out, but Kate grabbed his arm. He stood still for a moment, wanting to go on with the fight, then abruptly he capitulated. He turned and walked rapidly away with Kate into the shadows of the lane.
Behind them Keating was yelling, “Dingo! Yeller guts! Come back and have a go, you—ing mug!”
“That’s the one thing I have against men in this country,” Kate said. “They think everything can be settled by a fight. And to fight over a girl like that!”
“It wasn’t over her,” said Steve. “You know that.”
“The crowd wouldn’t have known it. They didn’t see the beginning of it. Everyone in the Kimberleys would have known of it tomorrow – that the doctor had been in a fight over a half-caste girl.” She opened the screen door and they stepped up on to the veranda of her cottage. “I know what it can be like. I’ve had trouble with Billy like that. None of the women up her, the white ones, really trusts him. Except Betty Pilcher. And she’s a fool.”
The glow of happiness had gone out of her: in her last words there had been the bitterness he had noticed when he had first arrived here. She left him for a moment and went in and dismissed the half-caste boy who had been left on duty to watch for any emergency calls. If emergency calls came at any time outside the schedules, a light would glow on the receiver and a bell would ring; the boy would then have summoned Kate from the ball and she would have been on the air within a minute or two of the emergency call. The boy, a slim shy youth of eighteen, came out now, murmured good night to Steve, and went down the steps and out through the garden. Kate came out a minute or two later, and Steve saw that she had done her hair and repaired her make-up, which had been damaged in the scuffle with Keating. He would have felt more comfortable if she had come back without having gone to that trouble. He tried not to be conceited, but he wondered if she would have shown that much vanity a week or two ago.
He was sitting on an old cane lounge and she sat down beside him. Then abruptly, moving with the schoolgirl awkwardness, she got up, found a spray gun and vigorously sprayed the veranda. “That’ll get rid of the mossies,” she said, and sat down again.
He sneezed as the spray came down. “It might get rid of me, too.” He sneezed again, and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose hard. “Some people are allergic to that stuff.”
“Oh damn!” She spoke with annoyance: everything had a knack of going wrong for her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Steve, I don’t know – everything I do is wrong—” She put her hand on his arm. “Perhaps I did the wrong thing tonight – maybe I should have let you fight Dave Keating?”
He shook his head, suddenly sorry for her. “No, you did the right thing, stopping me. It wouldn’t have solved anything – for me, I mean. A bruised knuckle, a moment’s satisfaction – it wouldn’t have been worth it.” He smiled, almost tenderly, as if on a favourite niece. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be the circumspect one—”
“I’m not usually,” she said, and smiled wryly in return. “I’m a great one for putting my foot in it. Steve—” She lay back in the lounge, her shoulder close against his; it would have been more comfortable for both of them if he had raised his arm and put it round her, but he didn’t move. “Why did you come up here?”
“He hesitated: was she really interested in the truth? And if he did tell her the truth, how would it sound to her? She had different values, a different perspective: it might be like asking a diamond buyer to form an opinion on a cattle sale. Half the truth would be enough: “I just seemed to be at a standstill in Sydney. I’m a junior partner in Macquarie Street – and partnerships aren’t much good for doctors. Not for the junior one, anyway. All the really interesting cases only want to see the senior partner, the one with the name.”
“Did you get on well with your partner?”
“Oh, yes.” He was surprised she should have asked the question; then he realised she didn’t know Charles Goodyear. “Oh, I had no complaints about him at all. It was just – well, I seemed to work twice as hard as he did, but the cases where I could have learnt something all went to him. And so did the wealthy patients.”
“I didn’t think doctors judged patients by their wealth.”
That showed she did have different values; and a naivete that had gone fiom his world. “Doctors are as much businessmen as they are healers.” He was surprised to hear himself say it. It was an admission he had never made down in Sydney; he knew he would have been branded as a traitorous radical by other doctors if he had made it. Probably in their hearts most doctors admitted it, but they still kept up the outward belief of their being servants of mankind. They were like some administrative clergymen he had met, who went round with a prayer-book in one hand and a cash-book in the other: they all eventually made heaven, he supposed, but he couldn’t imagine them sitting with the saints. And he couldn’t imagine himself or Goodyear or ninety-nine per cent of the doctors he knew sitting with Hippocrates or Father Damien. He said defensively, “You have to be. Idealists just get knocked to their knees these days.”
“No one ever knocked Doc Covici to his knees.”
He had expected that answer. But Covici didn’t have to own or rent a house, pay for and run a car, save for marriage and, when married, save to have children and educate them. He knew that a good many doctors sent their children to the free State schools, but not many of those doctors were in Macquarie Street: the doctors there sent their children to the expensive private schools. He remembered Rona, who disliked children generally, at one time saying that if she had a son she would like him to go to Eton; he had made some sarcastic remark about that, and another argument had developed about his “stupid stubborn Australianness.” He wondered now what Rona would have thought of Covici, who had graduated from Eton not as a snob, as Rona’s son surely would, but as an idealist. “This sort of country up here breeds idealists, it’s tougher country down where I come from.”
“Haven’t you any ideals?”
His arm was beginning to develop pins and needles; he could feel his elbow digging into her ribs. Reluctantly he raised his arm and put it along the back of the lounge; as if it were an invitation she nestled a little closer to him. This is ridiculous, he thought. All his adult life he had taken advantage of every opportunity offered to him by a girl; in love, as in medicine, the idealist to-day was left out in the cold. “I have a few ideals,” he said. “I’ve only just begun to dig them out.”
She turned her head; her face was only an inch or two from his; he could smell the perfume of her lipstick. The skin of her shoulder was damp with perspiration under his hand, and he could feel the heat of her body against his own. “Steve, have you thought of staying on here?”
He hedged, shocked by the question. “What do you mean?”
“Doc Covici won’t be back. You know that as well as £ do. And he’s going to find it hard to get a replacement.”
“Billy told me that.”
“It’s true. About two years ago Doc Covici thought he might have to give up and go south – he had a recurrence of malaria, it kept coming back on him. But they couldn’t get anyone to come up to replace him and so he stayed on. Us told me about it then – young doctors don’t want to come up here. They don’t get the surgical experience they want, they don’t earn enough money—” She stopped.
“It’s just like being a junior partner in Macquarie Street,” he said. “Only there are mosquitoes.”
“Don’t joke about it, Steve. It’s serious for us people up here. You don’t realise what a comfort it is for people to know there is a doctor on call whenever they want him. Look at Mrs. Fogarty – she had no more children after her first one, she told me, because she was scared stiff to have another one without a doctor. Then Doc Covici came up here and she’s had another five, and now there’s this one on the way.”
Steve couldn’t imagine the stout and massive Mrs. Fogarty >ieifig scared; but then he hadn’t known her twenty years ago. Now she was a happy and confident woman – and perhaps Covici, indirectly, had contributed as much as anyone to her happiness and confidence.
“Covici will find another doctor,” he said, and tried to sound confident himself. “There must be one or two who’d jump at a job like this.”
“For a month, perhaps six months. Then they get bored and want to go back. And how do you think the people up here feel about that? Having to get used to a new doctor every few months, a woman having to repeat her secrets to a new man every three or four months – these people up here aren’t charity patients, they need more than just casual attention. They deserve the best – they want someone they can depend on!” He felt the tremor run through her body; she spoke with passionate conviction.
“And you think they would come to depend on me?”
“Yes!” she said, with the same conviction, and sat up in the lounge, turning her body to face him.
Rona had the same confidence that he would make good in London. Yet he wanted neither London nor Winnemincka – but what did he want?” All at once, for the first time that he could recall, he envied his father: Tom McCabe, even if he hadn’t achieved it, had at least known all along what he wanted. And he had wanted Winnemincka. “Kate, I’m not a bush doctor. I know what you thought of me when I first got off the plane – I was exactly your idea of what a city slicker should be.”
She smiled quickly, and nodded. Then she was abruptly sober again. “But I was wrong!”
“You told me the other night you had been wrong once before about a man. How can you be sure you aren’t wrong about me now. I don’t feel any different – I still feel I’m a city slicker.”
She went to say something further, then all at once stood up, awkwardly and angrily. “Oh, damn you! Why should I bother?” She had almost betrayed herself, had almost surrendered to another man who was poles apart from her: Steve could almost read her thoughts. “Who am I to ask you to give up your soft life?”
He stood up. His shirt was stuck to his back with perspira- tion; the inside legs of his trousers and behind his knees were also wet. A mosquito that had survived the spray buzzed close to his ear: its nagging hum was like an audible nerve. “It’s not the soft life I’m thinking of!” The Jaguar, the flat in Macleay Street, the good food and elegant clothes were suddenly no longer important. “But a man doesn’t commit himself to a life like this just on the spur of the moment. It’s not fair to himself as a man. Above all, as a doctor, it wouldn’t be fair to the people you say would depend on him!”
She stood facing him, the light from the inside room striking sideways across her face and body: she would never look more desirable, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about it. He could no more commit himself to her than he could to this life up here. He went to move past her and she put out a hand and held his arm.
“I’m sorry, Steve.” He could just hear her; her voice was a mere whisper.
Weakening, he raised his hand and held it against her cheek: her cheek was damp, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from tears or perspiration. He turned her face slowly to the light and saw with something like pain that it was tears. Feeling he was taking a step that could be fatal, he bent his head and kissed her gently. Her lips were warm and soft beneath his own; she did not return his kiss, but she did not draw away. He did not know whether he kissed her out of pity, sympathy or the beginning of love; nor did her passive acceptance of his kiss tell him how she felt about it. He only knew that in the last hour, as if it were a disease that no one here in the north-west could avoid, he had been stricken with loneliness.
“It’s time I went,” he said, but it was not the thought of the operation in the morning that weighed on his mind. He knew that if he did not go now, he would not leave this cottage at all tonight. And he might never leave Winnemincka.