The Good Doctor (18 page)

I heard Valerie say, ‘Oh.’

‘Well, Frank, I’m sorry to hear that.’ My father put on his sombre look, which didn’t quite erase his smile, and made his voice low. ‘Is that final? Whose decision is that? Wouldn’t it be better
to wait a little longer?’

‘Her decision. It’s final, yes. They’re getting married and moving to Australia.’

‘Oh. Well. Yes. A lot of the young people are moving away. Very sad.’

‘I’d move,’ Valerie announced. ‘I’d move tomorrow. But your dad won’t have it.’

‘Still the best country in the world,’ my father said, grinning. ‘Still the best quality of life. Now I have to get dressed.’

The morning sun was hot on the patio, so while my father dressed we moved inside to the study. This was the biggest room in the house, lined with books and the prominently displayed accolades of
my father’s career. The strongest memory of my adolescent years – which seemed to be one memory but was really many, overlaid on each other – was of facing him across his desk, with that clutter of
photographs and publicity like a cloud suspended behind him.

I went up close to look at them now. Most of the pictures showed Frank senior in his early forties, with his broad gleaming grin and backswept hair. In some he was posing with actors and
politicians from twenty years ago. I was surprised to see a couple of newer photographs among them; he still wasn’t forgotten.

My father had been something of a smash hit in his time. An unusual fate for a doctor. But he’d seized his moment when it came. He’d started out as a small-town boy from a poor family, who’d
gone to medical school on a scholarship from a mining company. After he qualified he went to work for this same company as a doctor on one of their mines. Bad beginnings: but everything turned
around for him when there was a terrible accident underground one day and he was on the scene. For one straight forty-eight-hour period, my father crouched in a crumbling tunnel, setting bones,
performing amputations, stitching up wounds. He saved the lives of six or seven miners who would almost certainly have died.

The achievement was real. But it’s hard, a quarter of a century later, not to see it through cynical eyes. This was back in the time when the big white dream was turning grey; they needed a
poster boy to make them look good, and for a while Frank senior was it. He did look good. He had the dash of a matinee idol, with his boyish forelock and toothy grin. And the media jumped on him.
There were front-page articles in the national papers, interviews on the radio, magazine features on his difficult struggle to success. Never mind the miners, who went back to their underground
obscurity; my father was the hero of the day.

It all might still have faded again, as quickly as it began, if it hadn’t been for television. TV had just started in South Africa and, after an appearance on the news, somebody decided that my
father would be ideal as the host on a new programme. It was a medical quiz show, featuring Frank senior as the suave quiz-master, asking questions of various local personalities. The public loved
it, and him. The media attention went on and on. Piles of fan mail arrived at the house. Somewhere in the middle of all this my mother died, but I truly think he hardly noticed – though he did get
some more press coverage out of it.

He somehow managed, through all of this clamour and glamour, to keep a serious career going too. Not at the mine any more: he’d moved on from there. But by all accounts he was a gifted surgeon
and much in demand. Of course the publicity couldn’t have hurt much either. He’d also branched out into marketing his own products – hair straightener and skin light-ener for black people, all
kinds of cosmetic creams for white women. These things were still on the shelves, still bringing in money for him.

It was a spectacular, unlikely rise to stardom, and it hadn’t quite faded yet. He was still feted and dined and dandled, wheeled out for special events, giving honorary lectures and appearing on
panels. It was a circus. Nobody cared that the one singular achievement of my father’s life was five, ten, thirty years ago and that he’d never done a substantial thing since. No, he would be young
and brilliant for ever.

So there was pressure on me. I had something to prove. I imagined not only that I wanted to be like him, but that it would be easy to do. But of course it hadn’t happened like that, and now the
pictures and words on the wall were like a judgement on me.

I heard him coming and went to sit down. He’d changed into golf clothes, slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Frank, it’s a game I arranged before I knew you were
coming.’

‘No problem, I’m going to see Karen this morning anyway.’

‘What is this all about anyway, this thing with Karen?’ He settled himself seriously behind the desk. ‘Do you want me to have a word with Sam?’

Sam was Karen’s father, an old friend of my father’s.

‘What? No, no. That wouldn’t change anything.’

‘Are you sure? A bit of discreet pressure —’

‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ Valerie said.

‘No, don’t. It’s not for discussion.’ I sounded very firm. The last thing I wanted: my father having a quiet word, as though the whole matter could be settled by him. But he didn’t like to be
spoken to this way. He said angrily to Valerie, ‘Those flowers are dead.’

He was referring to a big bouquet on the mantelpiece, which was turning brown.

‘I’ve told Betty to take them.’

‘Well, tell her again. I don’t like them there.’ This was the other side of his expansive charm, a mood of petulant fury that was also centred entirely on himself.

I got up. ‘I’m going to shower and change. I’ll see you both later.’

‘I’m not trying to interfere, Frank. You know that.’

‘Of course I know that, Dad.’

I went to my room and showered and shaved and dressed myself in clean clothes. All the time the noises from the big space of the house radiated in: the throb of the washing machine, the hum of
air-conditioners, the almost-noiseless flurry of servants cleaning. All strange sounds to me, remembered from long ago. And the face that looked back at me from the bathroom mirror was the same
combination of memory and strangeness. If you looked hard you could just make out the schoolboy from the photographs on the windowsill. But he was very different now. The rosy flush had gone, the
hair was darker and thinner, the flesh on the cheeks and throat had thickened. It was a face in slow decay, tumbling and sliding down from its bones, sprouting veins and moles and blemishes. You
could see an old man in it already, and the expression on his face had a quality of defeat.

Karen and Mike lived in a large penthouse apartment in an area of the city that was almost entirely flat-land. A middle-class area, not very rich. But Sam, Karen’s father,
owned the whole block, as well as a number of other blocks near by. That is not to mention his other properties around the country. He’d given the penthouse to Karen as a wedding present when she
married me.

Sam had known my father since the early days, when they’d both been at university together. My father was fond of telling me how he and Sam had been close long before money had entered the scene
for either of them. In those days Sam was just a hopeful studying law, my father still the poor country mouse trying to shape his future. The moral, I suppose, was that their friendship was based
on real values of liking and respect, not the transitory shifting sands of fame and income.

Sam didn’t like me. He never had. Maybe he saw what neither I nor my father was willing to acknowledge: that my future wasn’t glorious, that I wasn’t made of the same fine stuff as Frank Eloff
senior. Nevertheless, he was gracious when his youngest daughter and I fell in love. I’d known and hung around with Karen from my earliest years. There was something inevitable, in a social sense,
about our coming together. Similar backgrounds of privilege and wealth, similar families forged almost single-handedly by the efforts of determined men with low beginnings. It didn’t matter that
neither Karen nor I had exceptional qualities. Our lives could be made exceptional by money.

Karen was a bit aimless, a bit of a drifter. She started studying one thing, then dropped it and moved on to something else. She finally completed a degree in drama, which she claimed to feel
passionate about, but after a few thankless walk-ons she dropped that too. At the time that I married her, just after my two years in the army, she had gone into a business with her mother, running
a couple of gift shops that did quite well, but after a while she got bored. It was in the empty period that followed, when she was playing at being an idle madam at home, that her affair with Mike
started; for a time I tormented myself with the idea that if she’d only been working...

These days she called herself an interior designer. And I must admit she had an eye. She’d redone the whole penthouse, transforming it from an expensive mausoleum to something airy and
comfortable, if a little upmarket for my sensibilities. Lots of open space, wooden floors, tall windows looking out on the city.

Karen’s mother, Jacqui, was just leaving as I arrived. She was walking carefully in high heels, as if to keep the tall pillar of hair balanced on her head. Old and immaculate, mummified under
makeup that threatened to crack with even her driest smile, she offered one cheek without a change in expression. ‘Frank,’ she murmured. ‘I know you have an appointment, I’m on my way out.’

‘I thought you and Sam were in France.’ They’d emigrated six years ago.

‘Back for business. The third time this year. You know Sam, he never lets go.’

‘No.’

‘And you, Frank. Still working so hard?’

‘Um. Yes. As hard as ever.’

‘I hear you do such wonderful work up there. Amongst the rural blacks.’

Karen only greeted me when her mother had gone. She pressed her lips to my cheek, a quick dry peck, and there was the momentary feeling of her bony hips in my hands.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ I told her.

‘You’ve put some on. You look terrible, Frank. What’s happened to you?’

‘Nothing. Same old life.’

‘Let’s go through to the lounge.’

Once we had settled ourselves on the big leather armchairs, above the city skyline, she picked up a sheaf of papers from the coffee table. ‘Here. Business first. I have it all ready.’

‘So I see.’

‘I’m sure you’ll want to have your lawyer look it over.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll sign it now. Give me a pen.’

She was astonished. ‘Don’t you even want to read it through yourself?’

I tried to, but even from the first line –
the marriage of Karen and Frank has broken down irretrievably
– my eyes slid off the words. It had all been talked about so endlessly, and none
of it had anything to do with the way my life was now.

‘Is there anything in here I should know about?’

‘Meaning what? That I would cheat you? I wouldn’t cheat you, Frank. What a horrible suggestion. It’s all just confirming the arrangement we have now. What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours.
What do you have, for God’s sake, that you think I would want?’

‘Just checking.’ I took the gleaming fountain-pen she had set down on the table and signed the last page. The scratching of the nib made an almost inaudible rustle that maybe only my ears were
tuned to: the sound of eleven years collapsing.

‘There,’ she said. She turned each page for me to sign. Then she took the document and the pen and carried the whole lot through to the bedroom, out of reach, as if I might change my mind. When
she came back in she was more at ease with me.

‘You shouldn’t just sign things without checking, Frank. It’s typical of you, not to care. You never know what could happen.’

‘It’s typical of you to get irritated that I might think you were cheating me, and then irritated because I didn’t check that you aren’t.’

She smiled as if I’d complimented her. ‘Well, it’s done. The court thing is just a formality. I’ll let you know when it’s over. Do you want something to drink?’

‘No, thanks. I’ve had some coffee already.’

‘I always drink juice in the morning. I’m going to give you some juice, Frank. It might improve that colouring of yours.’

There were maids flitting through the background here too, but Karen went to the kitchen herself and came back with two tall glasses of orange juice. She sat in a different chair now, closer to
me, and I realized we were going to have a personal chat.

‘Frank. I want to ask you something. Bluntly.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘How do you feel towards Mike? I mean, these days, now that the dust has settled.’

‘How do I feel towards him? I think he’s a snake who stole my wife from me.’

‘Oh, Frank. Come on. It’s been years. Can’t we move on?’

‘I have moved on. But I haven’t forgiven him.’

It was odd how clear this was to me: even though my love for Karen had dwindled to a faint interior glow, my hatred for Mike still burned big and bright. Past a certain point, maybe, a person’s
character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind. I could see Mike’s picture on the wall, a recent one, and even though the balding, corpulent figure hardly resembled the young man I’d been
friends with, something in him – or in me, perhaps – felt constant, unchanging, immovable.

‘That’s such a pity, Frank. It’s such a pity you’re so... vengeful. Mike wants to get past it. He wants to... I don’t know, purge himself before we go. He’s told me, actually, that he misses you
sometimes.’

‘Has he?’

‘Oh, why do I bother? I thought that maybe now the divorce is all signed and official... but I can see it’s a waste of time. Why are you so bitter, Frank? Is it from being stuck up there in the
bundu
for so long? Don’t you think it’s time to come back to civilization?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think we feel sorry for you? Mike says you like to suffer to get attention.’

‘I don’t care what Mike says.’

‘Well, it’s a pity. That’s all I can say. He likes you, actually.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You may not believe it, but I want to be there. In my own way I’m nearly happy.’