Back of Sunset

“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.

II

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—”