She smiled. “I’ll miss it – you and the others. But I’ve made my decision.”
They drank in silence for a time. A gecko darted across the wall behind Ben. Cicadas thrummed outside like faulty electrical appliances. It was mercilessly hot within the room and Sally was sweating.
“Do you know why I became a doctor?” she said at last.
“You told me...” He waved his glass. “Wasn’t it something to do with your Marxist ideals?”
“That was why I volunteered to work in Africa,” she said. Ideals, she thought, that had long perished. What was that old saw: If you’re not a communist when you’re twenty, then there’s something wrong with your heart; if you’re still a communist when you’re forty, then there’s something wrong with your head... Well, she was just over forty now and had lost her faith years ago.
“When I was fourteen, Ben, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable and terminal cancer. My father had died of a heart attack when I was two. I have no memories of him. When my mother told me she was ill...” She stared into her whisky, recalling her thin, pinch-faced mother, in her mid-forties, calmly sitting Sally down after dinner one evening and telling her, with a light-hearted matter-of-factness that must have been so hard to achieve, that mummy was ill and might not live for more than a year, but that Aunty Eileen and Uncle Ron would look after her afterwards.
She felt then as if she had run into a brick wall that had knocked all the breath from her body; and, later, a sense of disbelief and denial that had turned, as the months elapsed and her mother grew ever thinner and more and more ill, into an inarticulate anger and a sense of unfairness that burned at the core of her being.
An abiding memory from near the end of that time was when Dr Roberts came to her mother’s bedside and simply sat with her for an hour, holding her hand. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Sally that she wanted to become a doctor. Not the cures Dr Roberts might have effected, or the pain she might have relieved, but the fact of the woman’s simple humanity in giving up so much of her time to hold the hand of a dying patient.
Now she told Ben this, and he listened with that tolerant, amused smile on his handsome face, and nodded in the right places, and commented occasionally.
They finished their whiskies and he refilled their glasses.
“What will you do when you leave here, Sally?”
“Probably take up a practice in some leafy English village.” How her younger self would have railed at her for admitting as much. She recalled, vividly, wondering how her fellow graduates could consider taking up practices looking after privileged English patients when men, women and children were dying of diarrhoea in Africa. What a sanctimonious little prig she must have been back then!
Ben broke into her thoughts. “So, Sally – and don’t be offended when I say this – but you think that you have paid your dues?”
She said nothing, just stared down at the desiccated linoleum curling in the sunlight by the door. She felt terrible. She shook her head. At last she said in a whisper, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I did feel this, Ben. It would be... understandable. The thing is, I don’t feel I’ve paid my dues, and I probably would never think that I had, even if I stayed here for the rest of my life. My reasons are more personal, selfish if you like, than that. You see,” she looked up, “it’s just that I look at what’s happening here and I despair.”
He smiled. “Don’t we all?”
“Do you know, Ben, in the five years I’ve been here, nothing, not one bloody thing, has got better. Nothing! The government is still corrupt, full of rapacious fat cats all sincere smiles one minute, and behind your back raking off profits that should go to help their people. And then the Chinese and the Europeans and Americans... using the continent like a gameboard. It makes me sick, Ben, what the Chinese are doing north of here.”
“They’ve brought wealth, jobs, security for thousands,” he said.
She stared at him. “You don’t really believe that, don’t you? You’re not toeing the party line?” She held up her hand and counted off points on her fingers. “Eighty-five per cent of all profits