Authors: Belva Plain
He still looks like a doctor, she thought, and that’s odd, because what does a doctor look like? Yet he does.
For the last half hour and for two weeks before that she had been resisting a confusion of emotions: stubbornness and pride, worry and embarrassment and cowardice, along
with anger at the circumstances that were forcing her into a supplicant’s position. Still, she reminded herself, she was doing this for Claire: for Claire she would take sword against monsters if need be. Happily, Martin was no monster, she thought with a certain grim humor; he was Claire’s father and as concerned this minute as she was herself.
“It’s cost you a good deal to come here, Jessie, and only serious need could have brought you. I want you to know I understand that.”
“Quite so.”
Once more the doctor had spoken: comprehending, kindly and firm. Through Jessie’s head went scraps of flitting thought:
It seems a century (another age of man) since we walked in Kensington Gardens while Claire in her yellow coat rode the tricycle. It seems yesterday since Cyprus
. A bit of poetry went flitting, something about “time in its flight.”
That summer he bought painful new white shoes. The little car jounced over the back-country roads and the doctor’s bag lay on the seat between us. Fern wore blue linen and our mother’s pearls
.
There was a queer turmoil in her chest. Weakened, she sat up, straightened and spoke decisively. “Claire mustn’t know I’ve been here, or ever know I’ve told you how she dreads your kind of work. This must come from you as if it were your own idea. That is, if you agree.”
“She really hates the work all that much?” Martin repeated with disbelief.
“Apparently so. It’s tearing her down.” And I’m tearing you down by telling you, but I can’t help it.
“When—when did she first know this about herself?”
“How can anyone say exactly ‘when’ anything happens inside one’s head?” Like falling in love or out of it: does anybody know exactly ‘when’? Answer that if you can, Martin. “It’s tied up somehow with Ned, that I know. Maybe that’s when it started. I don’t know. At any rate, it’s been growing more and more—the conviction that she doesn’t want your kind of work. She’s absolutely devastated at the thought of a lifetime of it.”
“Why hasn’t she ever told me? For God’s sake, why?”
“She knew it would be a terrible wound.”
Martin was looking at his hands, which gripped the edge of the desk. She understood that it was difficult for him to look at her. Her eyes, too, avoided him, as they circled the room. On a shelf near the desk stood the photograph of a woman with a quiet face, a trifle too round, and timid, pretty eyes. Claire’s description of Hazel had been remarkably accurate. Yes, Jessie, thought, he’s had trouble enough for one lifetime, whether of his own doing or not doesn’t matter.
“Such a waste of her skilled mind!” Martin cried abruptly. “She’d be doing the most rudimentary medicine. Does she know that?”
“Of course she knows it. It’s what she wants.”
“She’ll deliver babies, but if there should be complications, she’ll fail because of not knowing enough. She’ll set a broken bone, but if it’s a compound fracture of the shoulder, she’ll be unable to cope with it. She’ll do a lot of things passably, but nothing expertly.”
Jessie replied with patience, “She understands all that.”
“I had been counting on her more than I knew. Looking forward to something so special! Father and daughter. She, in a way, beginning where I, in not too many more years, will leave off.” He tapped a pencil. With a small shiver of recognition, Jessie remembered the habit. “There’s so much new. Every day it comes piling in. One would need five lifetimes to learn it all.” His face sank into a tired sadness.
Again she looked away and was silent. A typewriter clacked in the outer office. A fire engine screeched past the windows. The stillness when these sounds ceased was bleak and lonely.
At last Jessie spoke. “I’m remembering something,” she said softly, “that you may have forgotten. I’m thinking of you and your father.” It was the only personal remark that had passed between them.
And now Martin gave her a long look. “I haven’t forgotten … What you’re reminding me is that every human being must develop in his own way. And that I ought to be the first to see it.”
“True, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes. You always did like to get at the heart of things in a hurry, didn’t you? Well, you’re right, of course. And I’ll tell her. You can depend on it. I’ll tell her that I’ve been thinking it would be better for us both if she were to go her own way. I’ll find words to make it convincing.”
“I thought you would. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come.”
“What about that—other affair? She never talks to me about him.”
“Nor to me, until that night. It shocked me so! Claire almost never cries, you know she doesn’t.”
“Everything’s bottled up inside.”
“That’s what worries me! Not that there’s anything to be done about him, to be sure.”
“He was a fine young man. I tried hard not to like him, but”—Martin threw out his hands—“it didn’t work.”
“A fine young man? It was an impossible situation! Impossible!”
“I grant that But then—human situations often are.” Martin hesitated. “I suppose there’s no way of finding out where he is? That old aunt of yours?” He broke off and Jessie understood he meant that Aunt Milly could write Fern and find out.
“Aunt Milly died last year. Anyway,” she said, suddenly indignant, “I wouldn’t dream of asking! Claire would never forgive it and I wouldn’t blame her. Pride is the last thing a woman wants to lose.” Martin would be thinking, no doubt:
Well, you ought to know
. And well I ought, Jessie said to herself. Aloud, she went on, “With a little effort I could hate the fellow for the mess he’s made of her life.”
Surprisingly, Martin replied, “It was Claire’s fault, too.”
“You don’t mean you would welcome him back, for Heaven’s sake?”
“He’s not my first choice. But if she wants him?”
“This is all academic, and may I add, I’m glad of it?” She stood up. “But I might as well bring you something pleasant along with all the bad before I leave. You remember a patient named Jeremy from Tucson?”
“Yes. I operated on him a few months ago.”
“His sister-in-law is a customer of mine. She’s been singing your praises everywhere.”
“That’s nice to know.” The quick smile was youthful, as though praise were an embarrassment.
“She was telling everyone he’d been given up. Something about the tumor being in both lobes and six other doctors said it was impossible, but you said you could do it?”
“Well, yes.”
“She said his doctor came from Arizona to watch you. He’d been convinced it couldn’t be done.”
“Yes.”
“So those people all think you’re something of a hero.”
“Hero? I know my work and I love it, that’s about all.”
“That’s enough, isn’t it? Well, call me if there’s anything I should know about Claire. Otherwise, of course, I won’t expect to hear from you.”
“Of course,” Martin said courteously.
He came from behind the desk and opened the door. It was like taking leave of one’s lawyer or banker, and she was grateful for his calm tact which had so eased the difficult meeting for them both.
She put out her hand. “So, having told you what I came to tell you, I’ll be going.”
“I’m thankful you came. I had no idea, none at all. But I’ll set her free—for India or wherever she wants to go. Without guilt or any looking back.”
“India,” Jessie murmured, going through the door. “Of all places.”
For long minutes Martin sat looking at the wall, the bookshelves and the windows all blurring in the wintry light. He was vaguely aware when the typewriter fell silent and when Jenny Jennings poked her head in at the door to say good night. The sight of him sitting here in a fog of abstraction aroused no concern in her, for his people were used to seeing him puzzle ova: his problems.
But this problem hurt so much! He turned it over and over in his mind, examining it as though it were an X-ray. Jessie would never have come to him, after all these proud years, unless it were really serious and she were really alarmed. It took a good deal to alarm Jessie, too. Well, he would break the tie, that was all! How could he have
known it had become so painful? Never by one word had Claire revealed herself. Poor little soul! May this be the right thing for her! May she never regret it! May I get over my loss with good grace!
Then he thought of that other pain of hers, the man-woman thing. What it could do to a human soul! So she wanted him still, that boy! There was no sense in it, when the world was full of young men who would gladly have her. Claire, with all that life in her, that bright life! And her eyes, with their grave gaze, and their soft lashes, flashed through his memory. No sense in it at all!
She wanted Ned Lamb. He could see them still: handsome couple! They had looked as though they belonged together. There had been something between them which, although one might not wish to admit it, one recognized. Little Claire, so proud, so foolish! And remembering how close she had come to dying, he trembled. Her longing—if it was anything like what he had suffered over that boy’s mother—was dreadful. He tried to remember how it had felt and could only recall that he had felt it, been sick with it, almost overcome by it and that every day had been a struggle against it. And remembering, he actually began to feel it again. A soft ache, creeping, settled like a lump in his throat …
It had grown quite dark. Suddenly he sat upright and turned on the desk lamp. He looked in his telephone book for a number, and dialed it.
“I want to leave a message for Mr. Fordyce,” he said. “He always books my trips. Can he get me a flight to London toward the end of the week? Yes, Thursday or Friday would be fine.”
From the hotel window Martin looked out on a dull sky, out of which beat a steady rain. An English winter: he had forgotten. He had ordered breakfast in his room. The rented car would be delivered shortly so he could make an early start. The route was clear in his mind. That he had not forgotten.
Night had just faded away. A car with headlights on moved slowly in the street below, the light picking out the remains of a discarded Christmas tree that had been tossed in the gutter. It was a mournful sight so late in the winter, those broken branches with tinsel scraps still clinging. A cat came prowling, foraging for food perhaps, and finding nothing, set up a bitter wail. Hunger? Or hunger of another kind, a tomcat crying for a female shut up somewhere in a house?
Thoughtfully he drank his coffee, still not sure he ought to be where he was. On the plane above the Atlantic, he’d had his moments of thinking he’d made a mistake, that he would just turn right around at the airport and take the next plane back. He’d had moments at home, too, in which he’d tried to extricate himself from his own undertaking. Calling the New York office of Ned’s firm to ask whether he was still in Hong Kong, all he’d found out was that Ned wasn’t even with them anymore. Only the remembrance of Jessie had spurred him to persevere. Sheer guts it had taken for her to have come to him! But she had done it for their daughter, and he could do no less than try, at least, to straighten things out for Claire, if it was not too late, and if he could.
And thinking with some pity of his daughter, he recalled something Mr. Meredith had said on the day she was born, something about the Achilles heel: “Whatever happens to that child will happen to you,” he’d said. Yes, yes. If Jessie
were correct in her report, and there was no reason to think she wasn’t, how Claire must suffer! Fantasies of reunion: imagining what you would say if you should meet by chance; imagining yourself walking haughtily away, wanting to hurt, leaving him or her staring helplessly after you. Or imagining outstretched arms and healing tears.
Fantasies! Had he not had more than a few himself? He had meant to do right; yet had he not wronged all the women he had known? He should never have gone back to Mary during the war. In his heart he must have known what was bound to happen. He had only made it hard for her to find someone else. His fault.
He looked at his watch. Too early. Now that he had made up his mind, time was going too slowly. And he sat on, brooding and mulling over, denying and reconsidering, a thing he had never dared to examine in the light of day. It began to take shape. It grew so rapidly that he knew instinctively it must have been lying there, stifled inside him, for longer than he could know.
They called from the desk to say that the car had been delivered. He went downstairs and took the wheel. A sudden enormous excitement possessed him, an astounding surge of energy. The tension made him hot and he lowered the window, not minding the rain.
The last he had heard, she was still living at Lamb House alone. What if, as long as he was going there to speak for Claire, what if he were to speak for himself as well? Why not? Was it absolute madness? Why not?
The rain ceased. Fog lay in shreds and tatters, snagged on the lower branches of the trees. A pure light touched the tops of the worn old hills. The wind rushed in his ears like ringing silence. He was almost there. And he had a curious sensation, an expectation of reward as at the theater in the moment before the curtain rises.
The maid said, “There’s only Mr. Ned at home. He’s in the studio. Shall I fetch him?”
“Thanks. I know where it is.”
For a moment Martin stood in the doorway, watching Ned who, in shirt-sleeves and work clothes, was removing a painting from a crate. At the sight of this stranger, who
could possess such power over his daughter as to bring her father here to beg for her, strong feelings of resentment, shame and grief churned up in Martin. With them was mixed the memory of Claire lying ill and drained, of Claire so hurt, so still. Strange! It was only after Jessie had pointed it out to him that he remarked how the stillness had lasted. She had always been so vigorous; why, then, had he not noticed the change? And all these feelings were so strong in Martin now that they pounded in his head; he felt almost ill with the pressure of them as he stood there.