The Narrow Road to the Deep North(5)

Where are you going?

To the war. It’s everywhere, the war, isn’t it?

Will I see you again?

I—

Us? And us?—

Amy—

Dorry, will I see you again?





6



DORRIGO EVANS FELT fifty years pass in the wheezy shudder somewhere of a refrigeration plant. The angina tablet was already doing its work, the tightness in his chest was retreating, the tingling in his arm had gone, and though some wild internal disorder beyond medicine remained in his quaking soul he felt well enough to return from the hotel bathroom to the bedroom.

As he walked back to their bed, he looked at her naked shoulder with its soft flesh and curve that never ceased to thrill him. She partly raised a face damasked with sleep, and asked—

What were you talking about?

As he lay back down and spooned into her, he realised she meant a conversation earlier, before she had fallen asleep. Far away—as if in defiance of all the melancholy sounds of early morning that drifted in and out of their city hotel room—a car revved wildly.

Darky, he whispered into her back, as though it were obvious, then, realising it wasn’t, added, Gardiner. His lower lip caught on her skin as he spoke. I can’t remember his face, he said.

Not like your face, she said.

There was no point to it, thought Dorrigo Evans, Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all. And he wondered why he could not write something so obvious and simple, and he wondered why he could not see Darky Gardiner’s face.

That’s flipping inescapable, she said.

He smiled. He could never quite get over her use of words like flipping. Though he knew her to be vulgar at heart, her upbringing demanded such quaint oddities of language. He held his aged dry lips to the flesh of her shoulder. What was it about a woman that made him even now quiver like a fish?

Can’t switch on the telly or open a magazine, she continued, warming to her own joke, without seeing that nose sticking out.

And his own face did seem to Dorrigo Evans, who had never thought much of it, to be everywhere. Since being brought to public attention two decades before in a television show about his past, it had begun staring back at him from everything from charity letterheads to memorial coins. Big-beaked, bemused, slightly shambolic, his once curly dark hair now a thin white wave. In the years that for most his age were termed declining he was once more ascending into the light.

Inexplicably to him, he had in recent years become a war hero, a famous and celebrated surgeon, the public image of a time and a tragedy, the subject of biographies, plays and documentaries. The object of veneration, hagiographies, adulation. He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He’d just had more success at living than at dying, and there were no longer so many left to carry the mantle for the POWs. To deny the reverence seemed to insult the memory of those who had died. He couldn’t do that. And besides, he no longer had the energy.

Whatever they called him—hero, coward, fraud—all of it now seemed to have less and less to do with him. It belonged to a world that was ever more distant and vaporous to him. He understood he was admired by the nation, if despaired of by those who had to work with him as an ageing surgeon, and mildly disdained and possibly envied by the many other doctors who had done similar things in other POW camps but who sensed, unhappily, that there was something in his character that was not in theirs which had elevated him far above them in the nation’s affections.

Damn that documentary, he said.

But at the time he had not minded the attention. Perhaps he had secretly even enjoyed it a little. But no longer. He was not unaware of his critics. Mostly he found himself in agreement with them. His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others. He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But his attempt to develop a new surgical technique for dealing with the removal of colonic cancers had been unsuccessful, and, worse, may have indirectly led to the deaths of several patients. He had overheard Maison calling him a butcher. Perhaps, looking back, he had been reckless. But had he succeeded he knew he would have been praised for his daring and vision. His relentless womanising and the deceit that necessarily went with it were private scandals and publicly ignored. He still could shock even himself—the ease, the alacrity with which he could lie and manipulate and deceive—and his own estimate of himself was, he felt, realistically low. It was not his only vanity, but it was among his more foolish.

Even at his age—he had turned seventy-seven the previous week—he was confused by what his nature had wrought in his life. After all, he understood that the same fearlessness, the same refusal to accept convention, the same delight in games and his same hopeless hunger to see how far he might push a situation that had driven him in the camps to help others had also driven him into the arms of Lynette Maison, the wife of a close colleague, Rick Maison, a fellow council member of the College of Surgeons, a brilliant, eminent and entirely dull man. And more than one or two others. He hoped in the foreword he had that day been writing—without bothering it with unnecessary revelation—to somehow finally put these things somewhat to rights with the honesty of humility, to restore his role to what it was, that of a doctor, no more and no less, and to restore to rightful memory the many who were forgotten by focusing on them rather than himself. Somewhere he felt it a necessary act of correction and contrition. Somewhere even deeper he feared that such self-abasement, such humility, would only rebound further in his favour. He was trapped. His face was everywhere but he could now no longer see their faces.