The Rainbow and the Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

vicar. He has two rooms in the vicarage and Mrs Haynes does for him.’
    ‘He isn’t married?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Does he have his surgery in the vicarage?’
    He slipped the gear in and looked over his shoulder as he backed the car out. ‘He’s got a surgery in a room in the office building, over Woodward’s shop. That’s where he sees people mostly, but he won’t be there yet. I’ll take you to the vicarage.’ He swung the car round into the road. ‘We never had a doctor here in Buxton till he came, two years ago,’ he observed. ‘He’s squatting, you might say. We used to have to get a doctor out from Devonport before.’
    ‘Do people like him?’
    ‘Oh, aye. He’s Tasmanian – his father has a fruit farm on the Huon River. He’s only a young chap, you know.’
    We drove about a quarter of a mile up to the church. Itwas a stone-built church with a square tower, very like an English church as many in Tasmania are. Beside it was a forbidding, two-storey vicarage with Gothic windows and a slate roof. There was a brass plate on the gate leading into the front garden, unpolished for a fortnight. We parked the car and went up the front steps of the house and knocked on the Gothic, ironbound, hardwood front door. We pressed a button and a clockwork bell rang on the inside of the door.
    Presently the handle clanked, and it was opened by a boy of ten, in grey shorts and a sweater. The sergeant asked if we could see the doctor. He stared at us without speaking, and then he ran back to the kitchen at the rear of the house, leaving the door open. We heard him say, ‘Mum, there’s people to see Alec.’
    The vicar’s wife came to us at the door, a little grey, a little portly, with a good-natured face, wearing a rough apron over a black dress; she smoothed worn hands upon it as she came because she had been getting breakfast. ‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Did you want to see the doctor?’
    ‘If we can,’ he replied.
    She stood smoothing her hands on the apron. ‘I was letting him lie,’ she said. ‘He was out till four in the morning with Mrs Jardine’s baby. Is it anything urgent?’
    ‘It’s Captain Pascoe,’ the sergeant said. ‘We want him to fly down to Lewis River.’
    ‘Oh … Had I better wake him, do you think? He’s only had three hours in bed.’
    ‘I think you’d better, Mrs Haynes. There’s not much time to lose.’
    ‘Well, come upstairs.’ She turned and led the way up polished and uncarpeted stairs to the top floor. Here the boards were out of sight of the front door, and were unpolished. She opened a door for us. ‘Just wait in there and I’ll tell him.’
    It was the doctor’s private sitting room, and it wasn’tmuch. There was a square of threadbare carpet in the middle of the floor, an oval table with a knitted doily in the middle of it and an ashtray upon that. There were two upholstered chairs with broken springs before a fireplace in which no fire had burned that winter, and one small wicker-seated chair at the table. There was an antique, horsehair sofa with one leg missing, supported on a chunk of wood. A faded print of the Good Shepherd hung above the fireplace. A small bookcase housed an array of medical volumes, some copies of the
Australian Medical Journal
, and three or four paper-backed novels.
    We stood in the cold room, waiting, listening to the murmur of voices in the next room followed by the creak of bed springs. We heard the woman go downstairs again, and presently the doctor came in at the door in his pyjamas, bleary-eyed from sleep, hair tumbled, doing up the cord of his dressing gown. ‘Morning, Sergeant,’ he said thickly. ‘What can I do for you?’
    He looked incredibly young. I learned later that he was twenty-eight, but that morning he looked about fifteen. He was only about five foot seven in height and he had the clear skin and staring red hair of a boy, that generally darkens quickly in the twenties. He was slight in build; both