Chapter 5
W
hen the doctor stepped off the airbus that had flown him away from everything he knew and believed in, he thought he was getting the cream on the top of the cake, the golden handshake at the end of a long and illustrious career. This was to be his honorary farewell, a gracious gift for a life of public service. Maria, his steadfast wife through all those years of service, had not been able to accompany him: an ongoing illness that had flared up at the last minute kept her at home, disturbing some of his dreams. But she would get through it, even without his steady doctor’s hand that had been there all those years. And her absence would not deter the doctor—he would still be able to enjoy the charms of this exotic country by himself.‘Go on, Jimmy, you don’t want to be late,’ Maria managed to say before a rattling cough purloined her frail voice.
She was the only person he had ever allowed to call him Jimmy. He was Doctor, professionally; James socially; and Jimmy intimately—there being only one intimate person in his life.
‘Yes, James, do come on.’ Christina said.
When his wife had regained her composure, snatched back her stolen voice, the doctor leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead (a safe distance from the contagions of her respiratory tract, he thought), then he turned to his sister-in-law and said, ‘That is everything I think, Christina, let’s get to the airport.’ He picked up his heavy leather bag and stepped off the verandah.
Maria’s illness had ravaged her body and drawn her features and now the only similarity between the two women was the silver crucifix that they both wore around their necks. Maria, however, kept hers well hidden inside her blouse, invisible even to the sharp eyes of the doctor: for him, there was no longer any resemblance between the two.
The woman wearing the exposed silver cross followed the doctor down the steps, waving a bunch of keys back towards her sister.
Maria had been forcing herself to sit upright, holding herself firmly; but as soon as her husband turned his back on her, she slumped, shoulders going first, then the back, as it slid down the rungs of her cane chair. But her eyes stayed up, just, following his broad shoulders as he walked through the verdure of their Norfolk garden. He was wearing his best white suit and a new Panama hat that she had given him for his last birthday—the third one after his three score years.
James stooped (a life long embarrassment to being tall reinforced now by his heavy travel bag); Maria slumped; and when the man walked through the azhari bushes their postures conspired to make the husband disappear for ever from his wife. Only the hat she saw, briefly, as it bobbed away from her, before her neck finally gave way to the strain. By the time he had left the bushes and was at the white wicket gate she no longer had her eyes up; they were buried in her chest dropping tears, and she missed his face as he looked back over the closed gate, taking it all in one last time, everything that he considered his life.
Minutes later, over the singing of blackbirds, she heard the engine of Christina’s car start. She lifted a delicate white handkerchief to her eye.
The doctor kept the picture with him all through the trip, imprinted on his mind. He meditated on it during the long flight over the Pacific and later through the lonely days and nights of his short exile. Every time he looked, however, Maria would never appear clearly; she was there all right, at the far end of the verandah, but only as a forlorn, pitiful figure drooping in her cane chair, not as the potent woman who had been his wife.
He always thought that he could return to it, to that splendid wooden house with its solid verandah, sitting in a tranquil, green garden. A home where everything would always be the same, where he could pass his retirement writing papers for scientific journals or preparing lectures that he would give to packed auditoriums of respectful listeners, passing on a lifetime of professional knowledge, accumulated in the morgues and hospitals of the East Coast. A home with a wife.
At the beginning of the trip, home was to be the place to return to, a place to unwind in after a few months of exploration and discovery, a place from which to ease into his new life as a retired forensic pathologist; but later, after he had been away for a month or two it had become the light at the end of the tunnel, a sanctuary to flee back to, a place of normalcy where he could at last resume a civilised life.