AS DORRIGO EVANS filled out in middle age, his looks grew to be outsized and quixotic, as though he was overdone and overwrought in every sense, as if, Ella was fond of saying, the volume was turned up to eleven: formidable in presence but with an odd remove and strange, inquiring eyes. For his admirers it added up to charm, elegance even. For his detractors it was one more element of his infuriating difference. His masculine resolve remained. Aided by his height and a middle-aged stoop, he understood that it was often misunderstood as gravitas, and he was not ungrateful for the mask such confusion afforded.
Through the decades following the war he felt his spirit sleeping, and though he tried hard to rouse it with the shocks and dangers of consecutive and sometimes concurrent adulteries, outbursts, and acts of pointless compassion and reckless surgery it did no good. It slumbered on. He admired reality, as a doctor, he preached it and tried to practise it. In truth, he doubted its existence. To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter—professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space—was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter—pleasure, joy, friendship, love—was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally.
He found himself no longer afraid of enclosed places, crowds, trams, trains—all the things that pressed him inwards and cut out the light—but he saw many other things now as an evasion of that light. He had seen too much to be frightened any longer of the rest of the filler that packs out evenings, days, years, sometimes the best part of a life, but he did find it dull. Still, he could do boring, and boring he did at countless memorial dinners, fundraising breakfasts, charity events, sherry parties and the vertiginous horror of dinner parties, and later at the meetings of hospital and college boards, of the numerous charities, clubs, and societies that prevailed on him to be a patron.
It all bored him. Ella bored him. Ella’s friends bored him. Home brought on a weary headache. He bored himself. He was more and more bored by routine surgery, which was what he knew responsible surgery should strive to be; it was the non-routine where complications occurred, where things went wrong, where lives were ruined or abruptly ended but sometimes saved. He was bored by the sex of his adulteries, which was why, he presumed, he pursued them ever more ardently, imagining that there must be somewhere someone who could break the spell of torpor, his soul’s strange sleep. Occasionally a woman misunderstood him and imagined a future life with him. He would quickly disabuse her of the malady of romance. Thereafter, they thought him only interested in the pleasures of the flesh; in truth nothing interested him less.
The more he advanced forward, the further the windmill receded. He thought of the Greeks’ idea of punishment, which was to constantly fail at what you most desire. So Sisyphus succeeds in rolling his boulder to the top of the cliff, only for it to fall back down, and he must return to the bottom and repeat the identical task the next day. So the forever starving, thirsty Tantalus, who brought the food of the gods to mortals, is condemned to stand in a lake and watch the water recede every time he stoops to drink, and the fruit-laden branch above his head rise out of his grasp every time he reaches to pick something to eat. Perhaps that was what hell was, Dorrigo concluded, an eternal repetition of the same failure. Perhaps he was there already. Like Socrates discovering the undying soul as he dies drinking hemlock, Dorrigo discovered the true object of his love where it was always absent: with other women who were not Amy.
When ardour began to fail him, he reverted to a theatre of sensuality that he found even drearier than sex unadorned. It was ridiculous, comic, beyond belief and certainly beyond conversation at the Melbourne society events that were now his milieu. He would have liked to have laughed at himself in the company of others, but it was not possible.
There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things. He drank—why would he not drink? A few wines at lunch, sometimes a whisky in his morning tea, a negroni or two before dinner (a habit he had picked up from an American major while with the occupying forces in Kobe) and wine with it, brandy and whisky after and some more whisky after that and after that again. His moods came upon him now in a more unpredictable and uncontrollable fashion and were sometimes vile. A lion in winter, he hurt Ella frequently with his words, his indifference, his rage at her affections and industry. He shouted at her after her father’s funeral for no good reason or even a bad reason. He wanted to love her, he wished he could love her; he feared he did love her but not in the way a man should his wife—he wanted to hurt her into the same realisation, a recognition that he was not for her, to elicit a response that might break him out of his sleep. He waited for a denouement that never arrived. And her hurt, her pain, her tears, her sadness, rather than ending his soul’s hibernation, only deepened it.
4