Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary
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en masse, even at three guineas a head. Miss Watkins, the secretary, and Miss Mack, the nurse, were in the office when Stephen entered.
They both looked up and smiled: they were always pleased to see him, even if he was already another woman’s property.
“Mrs. Hector had to cancel her appointment,” said Miss Watkins, perfectly composed but the derisive laughter there behind the dark-eyed good-looking face: “Her husband is due back from abroad tomorrow. She has to have her hair done.”
“The hairdresser will probably do her as much good as I could,” Stephen said, and despised himself. There was nothing very much wrong with Mrs. Hector, but he should not have joined in the joke with Miss Watkins: the patients, no matter how spurious their ills, paid for his loyalty.
Miss Mack said nothing, but she didn’t need to: her square plain face was as expressive as a roomful of eyes. “Mrs. Crepello is in with Mr. Good-year,” she said, in the soft pleasant voice that went so oddly with the blunt face and the aggressive walk. “You have no other appointment till noon. Unless you’d like to see the man waiting outside, a Mr. Tristram. Although he asked for Mr. Goodyear.”
“Let Mr. Goodyear have him,” Stephen said.
Then an inner door opened and Mrs. Crepello was ushered out by Charles Goodyear. Mrs. Crepello was a stout woman, a bulging faille sack held together by ropes of pearls; a strict diet and a few strong words from Goodyear would have cured her condition, but she was not the sort of woman to accept either stricture. She needed a doctor in attendance now as much as she had needed an escort in her younger days: sympathy had replaced flattery and was as necessary to her as breathing. It was worth a hundred guineas a year to her to be told she had angina pectoris.
Her small self-sympathising voice fluted round the room; she made a donation to Stephen of her fat be-ringed fingers.
“Dr. McCabe, why can’t I have you attend me? Why must I get an old fogy like Charles here?”
The old fogy somehow managed a gallant smile; Goodyear had learned to act as well as he could operate. “Dr. McCabe has to. wait his turn for the interesting cases. I had to wait for mine.”
Miss Mack turned away and went into Goodyear’s room; to Stephen her walk had the aggressiveness of a disgusted Spartan. Miss Watkins remained at her desk, offering a painted smile: she could use lipstick more cleverly than any girl Stephen had ever met: a slight movement of the painted, rather full lips, and Miss Watkins could offer sympathy, interest, encouragement, at the same time as she made out the accounts and checked the appointments for next month. She is untouchable, Stephen thought, looking at her now, and what an asset that is in this game.
Mrs. Crepello left on a wave of perfume, her fluttering hand trailed behind her like a diamond-encrusted pennant; she was talking as she went out the door, leaving words behind her to be picked up as soon as she re-entered the room next month. She talked without caring if anyone was listening, as if the sound of her own voice was another of the encouragements she needed.
Stephen followed Goodyear into the latter’s room, standing aside to allow Miss Mack to pass out, then closing the door behind her.
“That fat old bag,” Stephen said.
“Miss Mack?” said Goodyear, smiling slightly.
“You know who I mean. To think she’s part of our bread and butter.”
Goodyear shook his head. “No, Stephen. Mrs. Crepello is part of our cakes and cream. When did you last eat just bread and butter?”
Stephen dropped into one of the purple-tweeded lounge chairs. Rona had a talent for colour and decoration, and last year she had completely redecorated the suite of rooms. She had solved the trick of combining the clinical and the personal: patients felt they were welcome here, but bacilli made straight for the windows. The windows were wide and deep and looked out across the Botanical Gardens to the harbour. A patient could sit here and admire the view, one of the best in the world, while Charles Goodyear, in his flat dry voice, told him he had only six months to live. If the patient, the pain perhaps a little sharper inside him now, craned forward he might be lucky enough to see the Governor strolling in the grounds of Governmént House; a turn of his head to the right and he might see the politicians coming down the steps of Parliament House, their faces dark with something that could be honest thought or the pain of corruption. Stephen, standing at the windows one bright crystalline day, watching the yachts like slow-flying birds on the sun-freckled water, had remarked that there were many worse places where one could receive the sentence of death. Goodyear, who that morning had seen two doomed patients, had however remained silent. Successful, pickled slightly with cynicism, he was still capable of twinges of conscience when he looked about the brightly sumptuous room.
“You sound as cynical as Rona sometimes,” Stephen said now.
“Not quite.” Again Goodyear shook his head; all his negatives and affirmatives were underlined by a movement of his head. “Rona is much more ambitious than I ever was. She needs more cynicism than I did – too much, I sometimes think, for a young girl. She gets it from her mother – the ambition, I mean.”
“How did you combat it?”
“I didn’t.” Goodyear waved a hand round the room, at the expensive furniture, the wall-to-wall carpet so deep that it could reduce even the thump of a fainting body to no more than a soft thud, the Dufy watercolour on one wall and the Dobell portrait of Goodyear himself on the opposite wall; he looked at it all without possessiveness, like a consort in the domain his queen had planned for him. “This is what Peggy wanted for me. Here I am.” And he smiled almost apologetically.
“What did you want?”
“I never ask myself that question,” said Goodyear. “I’ve forgotten the answer.”
And Goodyear shook his head again, but this time in amused bewilderment at himself. He was a small thin man, bald but for the pink fuzz on the edges of his small well-shaped head, with the sad hook-nosed face of a jester tired of his own jokes. He had the same complexion as he had passed on to Rona, but he was not as careful of it, and dark freckles, the tribal markings of yachtsmen, showed the effects of days spent in his cruiser on the harbour. His wife Peggy bought his clothes, as Rona had lately begun to buy some of Stephen’s: the suits and shirts both men now wore had come from Richard Hunt’s, but Goodyear gave the effect of having been dressed in something bought at a church fête. Even the Italian silk tie he wore, bought by his wife at one of the speciality shops run by pansies that had lately sprung up in Sydney, somehow looked like a navvy’s neckerchief. The only neat things about him were his feet, small and beautifully shod, and his hands, strong, long-fingered and the best surgeon’s hands in the State.
“You look tired,” he said, turning his back on his own problem, the one he had forgotten the answer to.
“I’m more than that,” said Stephen, and leaned back, closing his eyes. “I’m run down, Charles. Maybe I should see a doctor, eh?”
Goodyear smiled, went to reply, but was interrupted by Miss Mack at the door. “There’s a patient to see you, Mr. Goodyear. A Mr. Tristram—”
Goodyear looked at the open diary on his desk. “I’m due out at St. Vincent’s in an hour. There’s no appointment down—”
“Have I gotta make an appointment to see you after twenty years? I been sitting out there in the bloody waiting-room for half an hour.”
The little grey-haired man came past Miss Mack into the room with a peculiar rolling walk, almost as if he were pretending he was riding a bicycle. Something blew in with him, and Stephen, opening his eyes a little late, blinking in the sudden lance of sunlight that had just struck into the room wasn’t sure what it was: it was as if the small grey-haired man had brought with him another presence, another atmosphere, that spun restlessly in the elegant confines of the room.
“Jack!” Goodyear came round his desk in a hurry, one hand outstretched to the newcomer, the other waving Miss