This Dr. Dupont didn’t exactly match my idea of how a physician should look. He was quite young — in his mid-thirties, perhaps — with green eyes that always seemed to have a gleam in them as though everything in the world was amusing. He had long, thin brown hair that hung to his shoulders. More noticeable was his beard: it was quite short and was combed into two symmetrical parts that hung from his jaw like those stalactites I’d seen in the bat caves at Duncairn. Even more curious: the two points were tipped with green beads the same colour as his eyes. Woven into the hairy tufts were little silver bells that would tinkle when he talked, especially when he used words that required any amount of chin wagging.
My first conversation with him was memorable.
He asked a few questions about the symptoms of my seasickness. Then he gave me a little brown bottle he’d brought with him onto the deck, containing a half-dozen pills: I was to take one each night.
“It’s a pity you have to keep on working,” he said. “The pills are more effective if you’re lying down.”
I noticed he spoke with a slight accent and didn’t seem in any rush to leave. He began asking me sociable, non-medical questions about how I came to be a member of the Otago’s crew. I didn’t go into much detail, only that I was from Scotland, that I’d just finished university, and that I wanted to see more of the world.
“Ah,” said Dupont. “Another man trying to flee from his past.” He said this in a humorous way and seemed to be including himself in the category. He himself was on his way back to Africa where he was in his second two-year term at a remote hospital inland, at the meeting place of jungle and desert. He certainly didn’t seem like a man cut out for too much sun. He had light skin and his face was permanently rusted with freckles.
When he’d come out on deck, he’d been carrying a paperback book which he laid on an awning. I glanced at its cover while we talked — on it a young woman wearing a very short skirt was being stabbed in shocking colours by a man in a mask.
“It’s a whodunit,” Dupont said when he saw me looking at it. “I used to be embarrassed at being caught reading them. The truth is I enjoy them. They’re a pleasant break from the medical literature I normally have to read — and they’re not half so graphic. And, according to my good friend Clara, what genre could be more appropriate than mysteries for shedding light on the great mystery that is humanity?” He laughed and his beard tinkled.
I hadn’t yet taken one of his pills, but just having someone on the ship talk to me was already making me feel much better. I asked him about his accent — he didn’t sound quite like the North Americans in the movies.
“That’s because I’m from Quebec,” he said. “French is my first language and I spoke it almost all the time when I was young. Whenever I used English, I felt a bit like a squirrel obliged to walk on the sidewalk.”
I didn’t know much about Canada or Quebec, for that matter, except that they had always seemed to be very pleasant places compared to the Tollgate. Why would anyone choose to leave them and work in such a backwards and dangerous region as I’d heard Africa was?
He rolled his eyes.
“Ah, that’s a long story,” he said.
Just then the gong for lunch sounded from the passenger area.
“I’m afraid my story will just have to wait till another time,” he said. “Meanwhile, I hope those pills help. It’s been nice talking to you. I’ll come back tomorrow and see how you’re feeling.” Then he headed towards the companionway door and disappeared inside.
2
Dupont did come back to see me the next day and indeed every day of the voyage thereafter. He gave me the impression, without ever saying so, that his fellow passengers weren’t interesting companions and had as little in common with him as my crewmates had with me. We’d talk sometimes for as long as an hour, and the deck foreman never seemed to mind — there was an unwritten ship’s policy that paying passengers should have as much leeway as they wished.
Some nights after my duties were over we’d go to his cabin for a drink. The cabin was small but luxurious compared to my space in the crew’s quarters. Aside from his bed and desk, there were two chairs and even a little bookcase with some paperback novels alongside more austere-looking medical journals. We’d sit on the chairs at either end of the desk and he’d pour us each a hefty glass of scotch.
I hadn’t had much acquaintance with scotch, so on the first of these occasions, it opened me up and I told him a good deal about myself — about the deaths of my parents, about Jacob and Deirdre and their cats and how that had led me to Duncairn. My heart had been broken there by Miriam Galt. I suppose I must have gone on about that quite a bit, but he listened patiently.
“The place and that girl obviously left their mark on you,” he said after a while. “I’m afraid doctors don’t have any pills for a broken heart. I can’t even offer you some good advice. All I can say is, I know how you feel.”
Naturally I didn’t believe that. No one could have gone through what I’d gone through.
But it was now Dupont’s turn to talk, and talk he did.
“The other day you asked me why I chose to work in Africa,” he said. “I’ve met people who think it must be a saintly quality that would drive a person to give up the luxuries of Canada and go work in some dangerous backwater. But believe me, there isn’t a bit of the saint in me. No, the fact is, I actually enjoy working in dangerous places. Maybe that’s partly because they take my mind off something that happened to me twelve years ago. As in your own case, it was a matter of the heart.”
He poured us another scotch and explained what he meant.
DUPONT HAD ATTENDED medical school in Montreal with the aim of becoming a surgeon-cum-anthropologist. There he met and married the woman he loved. She was tall and delicate, with long black hair, a student in fine arts who worked during the summers in a little jewellery boutique. Between them, they’d very little money but were able to get along because of her part-time job.
One day when she came home from work she told him that the owner of the boutique, who had several others across the country, wanted her to forget about finishing her degree and come and work full time for his business. He’d heard from some of his wealthy clients that she had an eye for just the kind of items that appealed to them. So he wanted her to represent the chain at the big jewellery markets in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, where he bought his stock. The increase in her salary would be more than enough to make their lives very comfortable while Dupont went through medical school.
She and Dupont talked the offer over and eventually agreed that she should accept it. It was understood that, after Dupont completed his degree and established himself, she’d go back and finish her own studies.
So when the fall term began, instead of heading for the university together each morning as they once did, she began her new job. It involved spending a lot of time on planes and living in hotels. She’d be gone sometimes for a whole week, but whenever she was home they couldn’t get enough of each other and would spend every spare minute together. They’d bought a car by now, rented a big new fifth-floor apartment looking onto the mountain, and ate at the very best restaurants in town. She was able to buy expensive clothes, suitable to her new position. Indeed, as a form of advertising, she wore some of the firm’s costliest necklaces, rings, and brooches when they were out together. A little safe had to be installed in the apartment especially for these jewels.