“Is the doctor in?” I asked, raising my hat, knowing if anyone would appreciate courtesy she would.
“Why, yes.” The voice sounded defeated, too. “He’s in the garden at the back. I’ll call him.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I’d as soon go around and see him there. I’m not a patient. I just wanted to ask him a question.”
“Yes.” The look of hope which had begun to climb into her eyes faded away. Not a patient. No fee. Just a healthy young husky with a question. “You won’t keep him long, will you? He doesn’t like being disturbed.”
“I won’t keep him long.”
I raised my hat, bowed the way I hoped in her better days men had bowed to her, and retreated back to the garden path again. She closed the front door. A moment later I spotted her shadow as she peered at me through the front window blinds.
I followed the path around the bungalow to the garden at the back. Doc Bewley might not have been a ball of fire as a healer, but he was right on the beam as a gardener I would have liked to have brought those three Crosby gardeners to look at this garden. It might have shaken up their ideas.
At the bottom of the garden, standing over a giant dahlia was a tall old man in a white alpaca coat, a yellow panama, yellowish-white trousers and elastic side-boots. He was looking at the dahlia the way a doctor looks down your throat when you say ‘ Ah-aa’, and was probably finding it a lot more interesting.
He looked up sharply when I was within a few feet of him. His face was lined and shrivelled, not unlike the skin of a prune, and he had a crop of coarse white hair sprouting out of his cars. Not a noble or clever face, but the face of a very old man who is satisfied with himself, whose standards aren’t very high, who has got beyond caring, is obstinate, dull-witted, but undefeated.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”