Back of Sunset

They were going down the Wakehurst Parkway, through the cool grey dusk of the forest, away from the city and the bad tempers, before Stephen said, “I went home and dug out an old trunk I haven’t looked at in years. I found this.”

Tristram took the small aboriginal charm. It was a rough carving of a bird, hung on a thin strip of kangaroo hide which passed through the closed beak of the bird. The charm had once been painted, but the red and yellow ochre now remained only in cracks in the wooden bird. It looked shabby and useless, a relic of childhood belonging with the broken top and the bent and rusted Meccano part. It’s magic had washed off with its paint.

“I remember it,” Tristram said. “Did it ever bring you any luck?”

“I don’t know,” said Stephen, surprised that another man could believe in portents: did Tristram mark the trail of his day by the first small happenings as soon as he woke? “Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

“I dunno that I got any beliefs at all. I just accept what comes. When it comes to things like these,” he bounced the charm in his hand, “the blacks are no sillier than a lotta whites.”

“Did you give it to me, hoping it would bring me luck?”

“I can’t remember, Steve. But I reckon I must have. Your old man never had much luck. Maybe I was wishing better things for you.” He looked out of the car, at the trees retreating into the dusk, closing ranks against the night. “It shook me when I read he was dead. I went out and got drunk, stayed that way for a week. Your dad was a great man, Steve, and nobody ever knew it. Only me, and maybe Charlie Goodyear.”

Stephen himself had never known it; no man could ever truly judge his father. “He was meant to be more than just a suburban G.P., if that’s what you mean. Though I don’t think he would ever have been as good a surgeon as Charles.”

“There’s more to being a doc than cutting people open. And I don’t mean being a physician, you know what I mean? Hippocrates could have had your old man in mind when he wrote his Precepts.” Education and learning still rode smoothly on the roughened tongue; the voice was the careless one of years in the Outback, but the mind remembered the books of its youth. “Me and Charlie and your old man, we were all idealists once. Your old man used to take pride in the fact that he was born in the same year as the Commonwealth. We were all gunna help build it, we used to say. Him and Charlie building its health, me building its buildings. Stone the crows, we dreamed, Steve. Talked and dreamed and hoped. And then I got T.B., and something happened to the other two. I remember thinking back in ‘38, the last time I saw Tom, he was the only one who still had his ideals. Charlie had forgotten his, and I didn’t need mine any more.” He looked at Stephen, his face chipped and worn as a rock in the pale light from the dashboard. “Your old man should never have given up that Flying Doctor job, Steve.”

“He had to give it up. My mother couldn’t take it up there in the Kimberleys. It’s not woman’s country. We stayed only six months and she hated every day of it. She tried, Jack, I know that. But she just couldn’t take it.”

“Did you like it?”

“I can’t remember much of it. I was only seven then. It was the Wet season and I never got out of Winnemincka.”

“It hasn’t changed since you were there. Maybe got even a bit worse – the pearlers have all gone.” He looked sideways at Stephen, a little slyly. “You oughta come up some time for a holiday.”

Stephen shook his head, smiling at the old man’s naïve approach. “I’m off to England early next year. I’ve been going to go for five years, to do my F.R.C.S.”

“You a good doc, Steve?”

“I’m supposed to be. That’s why Charles chose me as his partner. I don’t think he took me in just because he knew Dad.”

“You gunna take over from him when you come back?”

“That was the idea originally.” Stephen changed gears carefully, turning the car into the main road from the parkway, keeping his eyes on the road as if he were still besieged by the battling traffic they had now left far behind. “I don’t know that I’m coming back.”

“Why not?” Tristram’s crackle had an edge to it. “Too many bloody people leave this country and never come back.”

“I’ve got other plans. Or rather, Charles’s daughter has. We’re sort of semi-engaged.”

“And she’s making the plans for you? Stone the crows, what’s happening to the bloody men of this country? Charlie’s wife running him, his daughter running you – and if it comes to that, your mum ran your dad’s life.”

Stephen felt a surge of anger. “You’re one-eyed about that. My mother tried – don’t you think Dad owed her something?”

“I’m shoving me neck out, not minding me own business.” Tristram’s teeth clicked savagely: the words were awkward in his mouth, too long held back. “Your old man was meant for more than being a good husband, being a father to you, looking after a lotta patients who never appreciated him. He was wasted, son. Christ, I never seen a man whose life was so wasted!”

“How do you know he was wasted?” said Stephen, defending his dead mother but knowing she would never have defended herself: she had loved his father and had tried, really tried, to live where Tom McCabe’s heart had driven him: but her body and her will had been weak, and Tom, loving her as much as she loved him, had given in. “How do you know he was wasted?”

“He knew it himself, son. When I said good-bye to him back in ‘38,I knew which one of us was already the dead one.” He handed back the aboriginal charm. “Here you are, Steve. You may need this yet.”

Chapter 2 (#ulink_518251a6-a965-59f7-8094-4dd894c9b152)

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.