The Good Doctor (17 page)

‘What other explanation?’

I shrugged.

‘There isn’t one. There’s no other explanation. Oh, wow, Frank, I can’t believe this.’ He’d actually gone pale. His expression had the shock of somebody forced to look directly at something he’d
been trying to pretend wasn’t there. Then it cleared. ‘But what’s your dilemma?’

‘Well, obviously... I don’t know what to do now.’

‘Don’t know what to do? But you must tell Dr Ngema.’

‘It’s not as simple as that, Laurence. There are issues to be considered.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like Tehogo’s background. He’s had a rough time. It doesn’t feel right just to —’

‘But he’s stealing.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the only issue, Frank. You can’t think about anything else.’

So simple: one issue, all the complexities and contradictions reduced to a single moral needle-point. And that was Laurence. Something was either good or bad, clearly and definingly so, and you
acted accordingly.

‘I don’t think it’s that easy,’ I said with sad satisfaction.

‘Why not?’ The shock was back in his face now, tinged with dismay; he was balanced on a brink, dark gravity pulling at him.

‘Let’s leave it. We don’t see things the same way.’

‘But I’m trying to understand, Frank. Tell me!’

‘I don’t know how to explain.’

‘You’re too good, Frank. You have too much sympathy.’

‘Anyway, it’s my problem.’

But I could see – though we didn’t talk any more about it then – that I had handed the problem on to him. He looked troubled and preoccupied for the rest of the evening, while some of the noise
and ribaldry of the place rubbed off on me. I had a good time.

It was the next day, while he watched me throw some clothes into a suitcase, that he brought it up again. ‘Have you decided,’ he asked tentatively, ‘have you worked out... what to do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But you’d better do something soon, or it’ll be too late.’

‘Better that way.’

He looked pained. ‘It’ll just go on. He’ll just carry on taking and stealing...’

I sat down, smiling. ‘Do you really care about it so much? It’s just an abandoned building, when you come down to it.’

‘No! I mean, yes – I do care about it.’

‘I think, in this case, human feelings are more important.’

After a pause he said awkwardly, ‘You know, I could do it if you like.’

‘Do what?’

‘Report... what happened.’

‘But you didn’t see it.’

‘Yes, I know that, but... somebody has to do something. And if it’s too difficult for you... I just thought that...’

He squirmed, the ethical dilemma all his now, while I looked down on his battle in the real world. I said, ‘I don’t know about that. It doesn’t seem right.’

‘It’s just a thought, Frank. I wouldn’t use your name at all.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must follow your conscience, Laurence. Whatever you think is best.’

We didn’t talk more about it, but he seemed suddenly relieved. And so was I. The future was taking shape, untainted by my hands; and an unwitting complicity had drawn us closer.

He said, ‘Do you have time for some table tennis before you go?’

‘Um. Yes, okay. I’m only leaving tonight anyway, I prefer to drive in the dark.’

And over in the recreation room, while we jumped around in the sun, knocking the ball back and forth to each other, it was almost the way it had used to be – companionable and friendly, a happy
connection. Later we got tired. He threw the bat down and collapsed on to the couch, pushing a long strand of hair out of his eyes.

‘I got a letter from Zanele,’ he announced.

‘That’s good.’

‘She’s split up with me. She says it’s over.’

‘But I thought you two had such plans and schemes.’

‘So did I.’

‘What did she say?’

For the first time today a real feeling touched his face: a distant pain, like a subterranean tremor. ‘Oh, you know. It’s false... the whole thing wasn’t working... too long apart, no connection
any more.’ His expression closed over again. ‘The usual story. Blah blah.’

Now it came: the guilt, spreading in me like a stain. I avoided his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Laurence.’

‘That’s okay.’ He shrugged. ‘The funny thing is, I don’t care too much. You think you love something so badly, but when it’s gone you find out you don’t care so much.’

‘Sometimes that’s true.’

‘Work,’ he said. ‘Work is the only thing that matters.’

He really meant it. I stood looking down at him on the couch, considering this. He was almost sexless; his only real passion was in work. But work had never carried that sort of meaning for me;
it was just one more version of futile activity, going nowhere.

He said abruptly, ‘I suppose you’re thinking about your wife.’

I was completely startled by this; I wasn’t thinking about her at all.

‘What does it feel like to be married?’

I didn’t know how to answer, but I had a memory of the first night after the wedding. We’d gone away into the country for a honeymoon. The woman who had somehow transformed into the other half
of my life was in the bathroom and suddenly the whole world outside the room also seemed strange, unknown, maybe dangerous. I had a sensation of panic that was indistinguishable from happiness. The
feeling was intense, but it passed quickly.

I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

When I started on the long drive that night, I saw three things close to the town that became connected in my mind. The first came on the little stretch of tributary road,
before I reached the main road. Whenever I got to the bend from where the old army encampment was visible I always slowed down; usually there was nothing to see, just blackness and bush, but
tonight there was a light burning. It could have been a fire or a lamp: a tiny spark almost buried in the dark. Then it went out, or I was past.

That got me thinking. I’d been bothered by something
the Brigadier had said to Zanele, that night in the garden:
It is hard. Very hard. One day to be living here. Next day living in a tent.
The point about a tent, of course, is that it can be
uprooted and moved; he could have meant anywhere. But the old army camp still had its old tents, at least two or three of them, and it was the place, after all, from which he’d come. His ghost had
always felt thicker there, more substantial; and now I wondered.

I remembered the two men working in the garden, and the brown military overalls they were wearing, and I was still thinking about them when more army uniforms showed up in the headlamps. New
uniforms, the new army; but for a moment it was like the old days again, with soldiers looming in the night, guns in their hands. A line of lights on the road, metal barriers dragged across the
tar, a torch drawing me over to the side. A roadblock. But this was Colonel Moller and his men, doing a different sort of work. I recognized the upright bodies I’d seen strung along the line of the
bar, but tonight they were searching through car boots and cubby-holes, covering each other with rifles. The black man who questioned me was brisk and polite. Where are you coming from? Where are
you going? Would you open up the back, please, I want to take a look.

As I pulled away again I looked for Colonel Moller. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him near by somewhere, another kind of ghost, one that stayed with me through all the bends and dips in
the road until I got to Maria’s shack.

And then it happened. The third thing. I hadn’t gone back to visit Maria on the night I promised I would, or on the night that followed. I’d been too preoccupied with what was going on at the
hospital – Tehogo and the stealing – and I knew the shack would still be there, whenever I was ready to go. I had it in mind to stop there tonight on my way, but I saw now that the white car was
parked outside.

And that was it: the white car. An arbitrary image, one I carried around unthinkingly in me, but now I remembered, with an inner flash like lightning, the white car parked outside the
Brigadier’s house on the hill. And though I didn’t even know whether that other car resembled this one, I became instantly certain that they were the same.

Instantly certain – and then uncertain again... but the connection was made. And the sense that I had, as I drove on and on through the dark, a sense that was like a huge disquiet powering me
along, was of the interlocking pieces of a puzzle just beyond my grasp, eluding me.

I drove with the window down, letting the hot wind go through the car. The escarpment rose and lifted me, and soon I was clear of the forest and in the open grassland of the veld. The night was
very big here, spread like a huge canvas on the taut wires of the horizon. The car rose and fell on dark undulations, the light from the headlamps tiny and lost. There was comfort in being so
small. At one place there was a veld fire burning. I could see the flames from a long way off and, as I got closer, a congregation of cars and people. The flames were very big and bright and black
smoke boiled and rolled in the artificial yellow light. I slowed, but I was waved past and the heat of the fire beat on my face as the weird midnight coven sank away in the mirror.

Then the little towns, shuttered, sleeping, barred. Other roads joined this one, feeding it, fattening it up. Pylons and smokestacks against the sky. Garages lit in neon with shivering
attendants sleeping in booths. Far off in the distance, cities burned like smouldering piles of coal. All the elements of a foreign world were coming together for me, assembling to make a picture
of the past.

I arrived as dawn was breaking. But I didn’t go straight to the house. I drove aimlessly for a while through the suburban streets, feeling the presence of people in the houses,
behind the walls, in the gardens. Even the first stirrings of activity – a few cars, a couple of workers on the pavements – made the place seem unnaturally full to me.

My father lived out in the southern part of the city, in a rich, exclusive suburb. Broad tree-lined streets, a sense of distance and light. It was the house I’d grown up in from my early teenage
years, though the bottom half of the garden had since been divided off and sold. Another change was the wall that had sprung up around the property. In my day there had been only a fence. Now the
wall just seemed to climb and climb.

My stepmother answered the intercom when I buzzed. ‘This is Frank junior,’ I told her, and the gate swung heavily open for me on its big hinges. I parked outside the garage at the top of the
driveway. Plants grew green and heavy under looming trees, the brick castle leaned overhead.

She came out to meet me, dressed in smartly casual clothes, face heavily made up. But all the makeup couldn’t conceal a little pained place in her expression. Valerie was my father’s fourth
wife, but she was in fact a few years younger than me. We had never found a comfortable level at which to speak to each other.

She kissed me awkwardly on the cheek. ‘Dad’s in the bath. How was the drive? Do you need help with your bag? You must be tired.’ Her anxiety buoyed me up the stairs, into the house. Two maids
danced and grovelled in blue uniforms with frilly aprons, both of them barefoot so as not to spoil the carpets. Of which there were many, oriental with cryptic designs; they were a passion of my
father’s.

‘Let me see you. Oh, you look more and more like Dad.’ I wished she wouldn’t call him that, as if he was father to both of us; she was too much like a sister already, with her small, painted,
worried face hiding secret rivalry with me. ‘You can have your old room, Frank. I’ve kept it just the way it was.’

Each of my father’s wives had insisted on redoing the house – a way, maybe, of staking a claim when they sensed that their stay was temporary. Since I’d left home my room had been changed and
repainted a few times, so Valerie’s idea of preserving my little childhood refuge was to hang my old model airplanes from the ceiling and to set up some embarrassing photographs from my schooldays
on the windowsill. Frank in the fifth rugby team. Frank as deputy head boy, shaking the hand of the headmaster. Otherwise the room was as pretty and clinical as a mid-range hotel, full of fabrics
and colours my mother would never have contemplated.

‘Do you want to shower after the long drive? You must be tired, do you want to sleep? Do you want some breakfast?’

I sat out on the back patio, drinking black coffee. I could hear my father in the bathroom, splashing and humming to himself. Once he burped. He sounded in a good mood. Valerie came out and made
a pretence of fiddling with the pot plants on the stairs, then called out instructions to a gardener hidden somewhere in the foliage outside. She went back in and busied herself until she could
hear my father was on his way, then came out with her own coffee and sat herself near by.

‘How long are you down for, Frank?’

‘Just a day or two. I’m here to see Karen.’

‘Karen? Oh, that’s nice.’ Her voice had a hopeful upward note.

‘No, no.’ But before I could explain, my father came out on to the patio.

Frank Eloff senior was in his middle sixties by now, but he had the body and voice of someone fifteen years younger. A big, loose, long frame, a handsome face that was always, however faintly,
smiling. He was groomed and clipped and elegant – even now, first thing in the morning, shaved and scented, in his paisley dressing gown and Turkish slippers. He shook hands with me, his customary
greeting or farewell even when I was a boy, and his hand carried some of the damp warmth of the bathroom, or maybe his hair oil.

‘Frank!’

‘Dad.’

‘It’s an unusual surprise. To see you, I mean. I hope you’re taking a proper holiday for a change.’

‘No, this isn’t a holiday, Dad. I have some personal business to attend to.’

‘Personal business.’

‘He’s here to see Karen,’ Valerie said primly.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘It’s to sign the divorce papers, actually,’ I said, and there was a noticeable lowering of pressure on the patio. My father was of the opinion that my separation from Karen was responsible for
the decline of my career, and he frequently expressed the hope that we’d get back together again.