The Narrow Road to the Deep North(118)

There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies—the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other’s breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden—as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. For he was bound to Ella. And yet it all created in Dorrigo Evans the most complete and unassailable loneliness, so loud a solitude that he sought to crack its ringing silence again and again with yet another woman. Even as his vitality leached away, he laboured on in his quixotic philanderings. If there was no real heart to any of it, if it was dangerous in so many ways, that added to it for him. But far from ending the scream of his solitude, it amplified it.

As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy’s absence shaped everything, even when—and sometimes most particularly when—he wasn’t thinking of her. He flatly refused ever to visit Adelaide, even when major professional or veterans’ events were held there. The only interest he ever showed in gardening—which he otherwise left to Ella and the gardener—was to have a large and very beautiful red camellia ripped out, much to Ella’s fury, when they moved into a new house in Toorak. His perennial infidelity was, in a strange way, a fidelity to Amy’s memory—as if by ceaselessly betraying Ella he was honouring Amy. He did not conceive of it in this way and would have been horrified if anyone had said it, yet no woman he met in those years meant anything in particular to him.

So the women came and went, angry, mystified, shocked; his marriage continued; his work went on and his standing grew. He headed departments, reviews, national enquiries into health, discovered that people’s goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position, and felt completely baffled when at a dinner he heard a speaker describe with such profligacy his own life as a glittering career. The feeling passed, and shaded into a bewildered disappointment. He was compelled to travel frequently; long periods of tedium and waiting, interspersed by unnecessary meetings with people similarly suffering the vertigo of achievement. During sleepless nights in hermetically enclosed rooms that had the persistent, unpleasant underscent of chemicals, he wondered why fewer and fewer people interested him. Inexplicably to him, his reputation continued to grow. Newspaper profiles, television interviews, panels, boards, the incommunicable tedium of social events to which he had to go, so flat and endless that he feared he might see the curvature of the earth if he looked too hard. The world is, he would think. It just is.

One evening he was called back to the hospital late for an emergency appendectomy. The young patient’s name was Amy Gascoigne.

Amie, amante, amour, he murmured as he scrubbed up.

The head nurse at the next sink, used to the surgeon’s recitations, laughed and asked what poem that came from. As they walked into the operating theatre, Dorrigo Evans realised it was the first time he had consciously thought of Amy in several years.

I’ve forgotten, he said.

He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking.





8



IT WAS DURING these years that Dorrigo Evans renewed his relationship with his brother, Tom. He found in this some salve for the loneliness he otherwise felt, even with—and sometimes most particularly with—Ella and their children. He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom—by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently—that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared soul to be expressed through the most trivial of small talk. If beyond their blood relation they had almost nothing in common, Dorrigo Evans still increasingly felt with Tom that he was but one aspect of a larger thing, of which his brother was another, different but complementary part, and their meetings were not so much an assertion of self as a welcome dissolution of it in each other.

Their father had survived their mother by only a few years, dying of a heart attack in 1936; as the youngest of seven, Dorrigo had little to do with his older siblings, who had scattered around Australia in the years before the Depression looking for work. Four sisters went to the woollen mills in the western districts of Victoria; he never really knew them, and he attended their funerals through the 1950s as they passed away, broken by life. He looked at their children and husbands as strangers, but he still helped them all when they came to him. The last of them, Marcy, who was also the oldest and whom he supported entirely for more than a decade, died in Melbourne in 1962 of an undiagnosed cancer. His eldest brother, Albert, who had found work as a cane-cutter in far north Queensland, had died there in an explosion in a sugar refinery in 1956. Tom had ended up in Sydney in a childless marriage, a labourer in the vast works of the Redfern railway yards, and after retiring had spent his days tending his vegetables in his Balmain backyard and playing darts at his local pub.