‘Our visitor from the capital,’ said the doctor. ‘We meet again.’
‘Please, join me,’ said the fat man. ‘I dislike eating alone.’
The doctor looked down at the fat man’s plates, and his smile grew wider.
‘I believe that’s my dinner you’re eating,’ he said. ‘Eva is always fickle with her favours. Where is the lovely lady, by the way?’
‘She’s gone to the grocer’s,’ said the fat man, ‘so I think we may assume she’ll be back soon.’ He laid down his fork. ‘Forgive me. It was not my intention to deprive you of your meal.’
The doctor laughed, and as he took a seat at the table, patted the fat man’s shoulder.
‘Eat, friend, eat!’ he said. ‘You’re doing me a favour, giving me a night off from dyspepsia and heartburn. Eva’s no cook, as you’ll have found; unfortunately, food is her favourite weapon, these days, in her fight to bag a man. I’m her usual target, but for now it seems she’s turned her sights on you. So eat, friend, and I’ll enjoy the spectacle of you taking the punishment. Just be sure you’ve plenty of Milk of Magnesia on hand for when you’ve finished. I can drop you off a bottle, if you’re stuck.’
The fat man took another forkful from his plate. The food had not improved.
‘You think I’m ungallant, of course, criticising the lady’s good intentions,’ said the doctor. ‘But believe me, the good intentions are all on my side. It’s not every man who’d sit night after night and eat food not fit for a dog.’ He took out his briarwood pipe and his pouch of tobacco, and taking a pinch of soft-looking strands, began to pack them into the pipe’s bowl, watching the fat man with eyes bright with mischief. ‘So, tell me, how’s the detective work coming along?’
‘Well enough,’ said the fat man. ‘But you’ll understand it’s not appropriate for me to discuss my findings.’
‘He’ll not see again, of course. And just as well, if you ask me.’
The fat man looked at him in surprise.
‘That’s an extraordinary remark,’ he said, ‘especially as a medical man, who must understand both the pain and the psychological trauma of such a terrible injury.’
‘We must look on the bright side. It’ll stop him ever practising medicine again.’
Again, the fat man showed his surprise.
‘Is this the view of a man who wants his job back?’ he asked. ‘Now the situation’s vacant again, will you be putting in an application, yiatre?’
The doctor shook his head.
‘Indeed I shall not. Almost forty years I doctored these people, and shall I tell you something? Doctored or not, they die. Some die quickly, and some die slowly, but we’re all on the same road. You can’t keep any alive indefinitely, and many you wouldn’t want to. With some of them, you have to restrain yourself not to help them along. And those that are worth saving, you can’t save either. Modern medicine just masks the symptoms and buys some a little time. You might just as well stick to the old cures – honey and bed-rest and a couple of aspirin. They work just as well, in the end. If you’ve finished eating, I’ll light my pipe.’
The fat man laid down his fork, and the doctor put a match to his pipe-bowl, puffing on the stem until the tobacco glowed red and rich smoke filled the air.
‘May I suggest, yiatre,’ said the fat man, ‘that with your fatalistic view of modern medicine, the people here perhaps were better off with Dr Chabrol.’
Slyly, the doctor looked at him.
‘Do you think so? I think in Dr Chabrol – Dr Louis, as he was fondly known – the people thought they had a general practitioner. But I found him to be something of a specialist.’
‘What sort of specialist?’
‘Perhaps specialist is the wrong word. Shall we say, his range of expertise seemed very narrow. If you ask Vangelis, you’ll find the range of his prescriptions was limited to match. Almost as if, in fact, he knew of very few medicines to prescribe. Perhaps at heart he was, like me, a believer in the simple cures of healthy diet and fresh air.’
‘You didn’t like him.’
‘I didn’t like him, no. Is that a crime?’
‘Not unless you took your dislike to a malevolent degree.’
‘On the contrary. My dealings with him were professional and polite. Let me tell you something. When I studied for my degree, we learned all there was to know about modern medicine, as it was then. I came here to practise what I’d learned, and what did I find? Superstition and fear. So I gave most of them aspirin or prescribed the old cures. But when this new man came along, I was keen to hear what was new and exciting, how the world had moved on since my days at the university. But our French friend wasn’t one for professional discussion. He didn’t respond to my interest. I found him stand-offish.’
‘Really? Yet according to the pharmacist, his patients loved him.’
‘Especially the ladies, yes?’ He touched the stem of his pipe to his nose. ‘There’s nothing like a Frenchman to charm the ladies, is there?’
‘Would I be wrong in thinking,’ asked the fat man, with a wink that Dr Dinos almost missed, ‘that you have been, in the past, a bit of a ladies’ man yourself?’
The doctor sucked on his pipe, but the pipe had gone out. He reached for his matches, and took his time in striking one and putting its flame to the tobacco.
‘You’re not asking me to be indiscreet?’ he said, at last.
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Then we’ll leave it at that.’
‘Would it be fair to say, then,’ said the fat man, ‘that Dr Chabrol’s practice of medicine was perhaps a little more modern than your own? Is that where your differences lay?’
‘I didn’t say we had differences,’ said Dr Dinos. ‘You’re putting words into my mouth. And it wasn’t his “modern ways” that I had problems with. It was his incompetence.’
‘Incompetence?’
‘Misdiagnosis would be a kinder word.’
‘Please, tell me,’ said the fat man, drinking the last of his beer. ‘I’m sorry our hostess isn’t yet here, or I’d gladly buy you a drink.’
‘You may not be a policeman,’ said Dr Dinos, ‘but you operate like one. Buy me a whisky, and loosen my tongue – is that how it works? No matter. In fairness, all doctors – including myself, on thankfully rare occasion – are prone to error. Symptoms may mask each other; one disease looks very much like another. Experience is the great teacher and there’s no substitute for it. I bailed him out, that’s all. There was a young woman with stomach pains; he diagnosed a pelvic inflammation. When she grew worse, the family turned to me, and I recognised the case for what it was – appendicitis. If she had been left much longer, she might have died. I was glad to have been able to help. I said nothing to him, of course.’
‘But surely, as a professional, you should have taken him to one side and pointed out his error.’
‘Do you think so? Unfortunately, I could think of no way of approaching the subject discreetly; I didn’t want him to think that I was crowing. Besides . . .’
The door opened, and Evangelia entered, carrying a bag of potatoes in the crook of one arm, in the other hand a bag full of groceries.
‘Here she is,’ said Dr Dinos, ‘our lovely hostess. Lay down your burdens, koritsi mou, and be good enough to bring us both a drink.’
Evangelia kicked the door closed behind her, and making her way puffing to the counter, put down her bags.
‘A whisky for me, if you please, and for our Athenian friend, another beer.’ Dr Dinos turned to the fat man. ‘No bribery needed here, you see, my friend,’ he said. ‘I’m happy to give you all the help I can, and for nothing.’
‘I’ll get the gentleman a beer in a moment,’ said Evangelia, taking dried chickpeas and canned mackerel from her bag. ‘But there’s no time for you to be drinking, yiatre. Orfeas the sheep-man has come off his motorbike, and they’re waiting for you to patch him up. A lot of blood, they say – a lot of blood. If you go quickly, you might be in time to save
him.’
Paternally, Dr Dinos shook his head. Evangelia began putting away groceries in near-empty cupboards.
‘They never learn, kyrie; take it from me, they never learn. This generation is obsessed with speed and their own convenience. And old Orfeas is a hypocrite, to boot; it’s not five minutes since he told me he’d never own one of those things. But I’ll go, of course I’ll go.’ The doctor knocked the ash from his pipe and held out his hand to the fat man. ‘You see how it is? As soon as the Frenchman is gone, they call for me, night and day.’ His smile was cheerful. ‘It seems I must step into the breach, once again, so I’ll wish you kali spera. Eva, put this gentleman’s next drink on my bill.’ Leaning on his cane, he stood. ‘There’s no rest for the wicked, friend; that never changes. There’s no rest for the wicked, in this town.’
Fifteen
The morning sky was still heavy with the rain that had fallen all night. Around the new fountain, the leaves on the plants were vibrant green, their flower buds swollen and ready to bloom. Adonis Anapodos rode his moped carefully between the puddles on the square, the hood of a quilted anorak pulled over his head, his bald tyres hissing through the wet. With a boat hook, the grocer knocked pooled water from the summer-striped canopy outside his shop, not moving fast enough to dodge the deluge which soaked his shoes. The men who should have been working on the sewerage pipes had left their shovels in the truck and taken coffee at the kafenion; now they’d finished coffee, they called to Evangelia for a round of beers. A youth in a shirt so wet it clung to his skin rattled by on a bicycle without brakes; a blond-haired youth called out to him, and waved.
The fat man had waited patiently for the rain to stop, and as it did so, he stepped from the kafenion doorway into the square, and crossed the wet cobbles to the side street where he had parked his car. From the overhanging trees, water fell in cold and weighty drops on to his head and shoulders, and as he slid into the driver’s seat, he brushed them from his coat. Putting the car in gear, he drove up to the junction.
The rain began to fall again in earnest, blurring his view through the windscreen. The fat man threw the switch for the windscreen wipers, but the wipers did not move.
With care, he reversed back into the parking spot he had just left; and, rain pattering on the roof, he folded his arms over his chest, and settled down to doze until the weather cleared.
At the garage, the fat man pulled up alongside the pumps. Reaching down to his holdall, he unwrapped his galoshes from their newspaper and folded the newspaper for reuse. Slipping the galoshes over his tennis shoes, he stepped out of the car.
There was, today, no hammering or banging from the workshop; instead, the air was noxious with the fumes of paint, and the ghost of its scarlet colour hung in the finest of mists across the forecourt. The workshop door was closed; inside, a radio played loud enough to be heard over a paint sprayer’s pneumatic hiss.
Leaning back into the car, the fat man pressed the Mercedes’s horn, twice. For a minute, there was no response; then the workshop door opened and the mechanic appeared, a woollen hat pulled down to his eyebrows, his face covered by a gas mask of the type issued to civilians in the last world war. Peeling heavy-duty rubber gloves from his hands, he handed them to someone unseen inside the workshop; he handed over his hat and mask, too, and whoever took them closed the workshop door behind him. The mechanic rubbed his face to restore the circulation inhibited by the mask’s tight seals, and ran a hand over his blond hair to ensure that it lay flat. Then he turned towards the pumps.
‘We meet again, mechanic.’ The fat man strode towards him, hand outstretched.
The mechanic seemed wary, but held out his own hand, with black oil behind the fingernails and grime in the creases of the palm.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked.
‘My car still has a small defect,’ said the fat man. ‘You did your work too well; the windscreen wipers have gone from working constantly to not working at all. Do you have a few minutes, perhaps, to look at the problem?’ He looked up at the sky. Towards the sea, grey clouds threatened. ‘It’s a disadvantage at this time of year to have a car that can’t be driven when it rains.’
The mechanic crossed his arms over his chest.
‘I fixed it,’ he said. ‘It worked fine; you saw it did.’
‘I agree; but the old girl is temperamental, and what’s fixed one day fails the next. If you could oblige me, I’d be grateful. Of course your rate will be the same, and I’ll pay cash, as before.’
The mechanic hesitated.
‘My lad’s helping me on this re-spray,’ he said at last, ‘so I’ll have a quick look. But if it’s a big job, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’
‘I’m sure it will be straightforward – a loose wire or something of that kind. But may I wait inside the workshop? I’m afraid I’m prone to feel the cold.’
‘Five minutes in there without a mask’ll set your lungs like concrete,’ said the mechanic. ‘You can go up to the house. My wife is up there.’
The fat man remembered the cake and good coffee; he remembered too the mechanic’s hard-eyed suspicion, and his remarks about the doctor’s too-regular visits. But the cake had been excellent.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I will.’
Close to the house, the air lost the choking stink of paint. Instead, the fat man breathed the scent of wet grass, the rain-battered blossom of a crab-apple tree and the slightly acrid scent of the lemon-yellow margaritas which flourished amongst the long grass, out of the goat’s reach. The kitchen door was closed against the breeze blowing off the sea, and when he knocked, there was no answer. Cautiously, he turned the handle, and opening the door a little way, called out. A woman’s voice invited him to enter, and so he stepped inside, wiping his feet on the mat.
The kitchen held the damp warmth of boiling pans and the savoury smell of lunch – melted cheese, baking pastry. A girl’s fur-trimmed jacket was draped round the back of a chair; a bag of school books was thrown down in a corner. From the dresser, the faces in the silver-framed photographs were still smiling.
He crossed the kitchen, looking back to check he had left no footprints on the clean floor tiles. The far door opened on a hall from which other rooms led off; at its end was a bedroom, where an elderly woman was propped up on several pillows in a bed. In a chair beside her sat the mechanic’s wife.
‘Forgive me,’ said the fat man. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’
He turned away, but the mechanic’s wife beckoned him forward.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in.’
She didn’t smile as he approached. The lines of worry in her face seemed deeper than they had only a day or two before.
‘Do excuse me,’ said the fat man. ‘I don’t want to disturb you. Your husband said I might wait in the house. I’ll sit in the kitchen, if I may.’
The old woman did not move; there was, from her, no turn of the head, no blink of the eyes, just the stillness of catatonia, as if she were already a corpse. But the mechanic’s wife again beckoned to the fat man, inviting him into the bedroom.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘come and meet my mother. She’ll enjoy the company. Won’t you, Mama?’
The fat man gave a small bow of his head and entered the bedroom. It was a small room, with a single window looking out towards the hen house and beyond that to the mountains, where the clouds were clearing and sunlight touched the highest slopes. On the head-board of the bed, five icons hung on nails hammered into the wood: St Nektarios and St Ilias, St Marina and the Virgin, the largest and most splendid of Christ himself. On a pre-war dressing table whose deteriorating mirror reflected the mountain view, a plaster statue of the Virgin was draped in amber worry beads; a lamp burned before the statue, giving off the smell of hot oil and smoke. At the end of the bed stood a dowry chest of greater age than the dying woman, ornately carved and carefully polished.
But the walls made the room extraordinary. Everywhere, there were photographs – i
n black-and-white and sepia, a few in poor-quality, early colour, all mounted in rough, homemade frames of pine and panel pins. Simple, almost naive in composition, they illustrated a rural life now extinct: men scything fields of grain; women stirring pans of goats’ milk on a fire; a donkey being whipped to turn the grinding stones of an olive press; a chandler outside his shop; a fisherman holding up a pair of octopuses; men struggling in mud to haul a cart out of a stream. But the pictures’ simplicity was also their genius, and the fat man moved in fascination from photograph to photograph, studying faces alive with character and settings which captured perfectly the landscape’s soul.
Then his eyes fell on a portrait on the dressing table, the only photograph professionally framed. The head and shoulders of a woman of singular beauty were caught against an uncertain background; turning from the camera, she was beginning to laugh, as if distracted from her pose by some irresistible joke. The shot was natural and relaxed, emphasising her lovely profile and capturing the fall of sunlight on her shining hair.
The fat man’s eyes lingered on the portrait; the mechanic’s wife noticed.
‘She was lovely, wasn’t she?’ she asked. She turned to the old woman in the bed. ‘You were a real beauty, weren’t you, Mama?’
The old woman made no movement, nor gave any sign of having heard; she lay as still as the dead, except for the working of her jaw and a faint clicking as her false teeth slipped over her receding gums, and as the fat man looked at her, a muscle spasm at its corner made her eye twitch in a parody of a wink. The hair that had been luscious in the portrait was sparse and white; fluffed with recent washing, it lay thin on the shoulders of the moss-green cardigan she wore over a nightdress buttoned tight at the neck. The bed sheets were recently changed, with the creases of ironing still in them, and the blankets which covered them were clean; but the once lovely woman carried the smell of age: behind the talcum and soap was something insanitary. As if suddenly aware of it, the mechanic’s wife stood up and opened the window behind her, just a crack.
The Doctor of Thessaly Page 13