Doctor's Wife

by Brian Moore

  In the lift, she was squeezed in with a French couple, a youngish man and his wife. The man looked up at her in that cold, appraising French way, and then dismissed her. Too tall. It was all done in a moment, familiarly, with no malice. She got out alone on her floor.

  In the small bathroom, Mrs. Redden ran hot water, then went to the bedroom and took off her clothes. Naked, she looked at herself in the dresser mirror, thinking about a good tan. She was slim and her height made her seem more so; a girlish body with white milky skin that Kevin used to say made him think of sin. She liked hot baths, the hotter the better. She lay now in the water, letting the tub fill, her right hand resting on her stomach, her fingers riffling the wet bush of her pubic hair. Sometimes in the bath she would feel herself, touching and fondling her breasts, thighs, and stomach as though her body were not hers. Sometimes she would think of men and would drift off into a little story, an imagining, and, in the hot bath, would make herself come. She always felt lonely after that.

  Now, lying in the bath, she thought of phoning home. Would he announce another delay? All of her life, it seemed, he had forced her to wait. He was the breadwinner: he made the plans, and he changed them. He rarely consulted her. He was the man, he paid the bills: he played on that. My God, how he played on it.

  When she got out of the bath it was after six. Mrs. Milligan would be frying up some awful mess for supper while Kevin and Danny watched the television news. As she began to dry herself, she decided she would ring in half an hour’s time. She must remember to ask Danny about his rugby match. But as she finished toweling her back, the phone rang in the bedroom. Naked, she ran from the bathroom to answer.

  “Il y a quelqu’un en bas pour vous, Madame.”

  “Qui?”

  “Un monsieur. Voulez-vous descendre?”

  Mrs. Redden did not answer. What gentleman?

  “Will you come down,” the voice repeated in English, “or do you wish the gentleman to come up?”

  “I’ll come down.” But I’m not dressed, my hair or face fixed. “In a few minutes,” she added.

  Dressing, she told herself it must be a mistake, or perhaps it was someone from British Airways, something to do with the airline tickets? If Kevin had changed his mind and was here, he would have come straight up to the room. Hurrying, she put on bra, pants, her Donald Davies dress, and sandals, a quick touch of lipstick, a comb through her damp hair, and out and down in the lift. When the lift reached the ground floor and paused for that litde airbrake moment before it finally settled, all at once she knew. The lift door opened, showing the lobby, him standing there, throwing his head up at sight of her, very excited, smiling, awaiting her reaction. “Hello, Sheila. Mind if I join you?”

  It was then she saw how nervous he was.

  “But what on earth are you doing here?”

  “I hate to be left behind at airports.”

  She stared at him. “When did you get here?”

  “I just arrived. I got myself a room in a little place up the road. It’s called Les Terrasses.”

  “You got a room?” she repeated stupidly.

  “Look, you don’t have to see me.”

  “Oh no.” She felt herself blushing. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking about you. It’s nice to see you again.”

  “I mean, you said you’d be alone till Friday. I thought you might like some company till then.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was just going to call home and find out if Kevin is coming on Friday.”

  “Oh,” he said, embarrassed. “Well, don’t let me interrupt. I mean, if you’re going to ring now.”

  She glanced up at the hotel clock. “Look, I’ll just go upstairs and make the call. And then let’s have a drink together.”

  “Okay. Should I wait for you?”

  She remembered her face and hair. “No, let’s say I’ll meet you here at seven. All right? In an hour?”

  “Fine.” He seemed disappointed.

  As she went into the lift, she looked over her shoulder and he waved to her. It was, she thought, the unconfident gesture of someone who was afraid she might not come back.

  Twenty minutes later, as she sat on the bed drying her hair with a hand drier, the call came through. “Parlez, c’est Londres à la ligne.” London put her through to Belfast. She heard the phone ring at home and thought of the black receiver sitting on the worn whorled top of the monk’s bench in the hall below the carved elephant tusks, which held an old brass dinner gong once owned by Kevin’s grandfather. The phone rang and rang. But she knew they were there, sitting in the den at the back, stuck in with the damned telly.

  “Double-four-one-double-five,” said Mrs. Milligan, giving the number the way Kevin had taught her.

  “Mrs. Milligan, this is Mrs. Redden.”

  “Is it yourself?” Mrs. Milligan said in her Donegal accent. “Are you all right, missus? Are you in France or where? Do you want me to get the doctor?”

  “Yes, I’m grand. How’s everything there?”

  “They done Divis Street last night,” Mrs. Milligan said. “A big bomb. They say it was the UDF. Anyway, there’s two dead and a whole lot of people hurt. One family was patients of the doctor. The poor doctor, he was out half the night.”

  “Is he in now?”

  “Aye, certainly, he’s ate-ing his supper. Hold on now, I’ll get him for you.”

  Kevin came on. “Sheila?”

  “Yes, how are you?”

  “Busy.”

  “Mrs. Milligan said you were out last night.”

  “Yes, a bomb in Divis Street, blew in the front of a house, patients of mine. The father, poor bastard, was killed and I have two of the kids up in the Mater now with their faces half blown off.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, but she felt nothing. She had heard it so often, had felt sick so often.

  “So, how are you?” he asked. “How’s Villefranche, has it changed much?”

  “Not one bit. Listen, what about Friday, do you think you’ll still manage?”

  He did not answer at once, pausing just long enough to let her know he hadn’t thought about it. “I’m not sure. I have a patient going into emergency surgery on Thursday morning. It’s one operation I really should do myself.”

  “Kevin, do you not want to come, is that it?”

  “No, that’s not it. It’s just that a lot of things have happened all at once. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more definite.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it.” When she heard herself say that, it was as though some shocking stranger spoke inside her.

  “Look, I’ll give you a ring Thursday morning,” he said. “You’re having a good time, are you?”

  “Yes, it’s lovely here.”

  “Not too lonely?”

  “No. It would be nice to see you, though.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, is Danny there? Can I have a word with him? Is he all right?”

  “Oh, he’s in great form,” Kevin said and there was a sudden cheerfulness in his voice, as though he had suddenly guessed that he might not have to come to France at all. “Trouble is,” he said, “he’s not here. I let him go off to spend the night with young Kearns.”

  “Oh, well. Tell him I was asking for him, will you.”

  “I’ll do that, Shee.”

  Shee was his private name for her. He used it rarely. “Well, good night, Kevin,” she said.

  “Good night.”

  She hung up. If I put a few rollers in now, I can still be downstairs by seven. She sat again in front of the dressing-table mirror and saw that there was a special mirror light, which she switched on, the light coming on all around the edge of the glass, as though she were an actress in her dressing room. She began to sing, her voice small, wavering, reminiscent:

  Dancing in the dark,

  Till the tune ends, we’re dancing in the dark . . .

  •

  She was on time at seven. The bar was crowded and waiters kept coming up to the coun
ter to fill drink orders. “Why don’t we go for a walk instead?” she said.

  “Great.”

  But then she remembered her hair. She asked him to wait while she went upstairs to get a scarf. It was that time of day when the hotel guests were all coming down for dinner, so she had to wait a long time for the lift. When at last she reached her room, she took out the big flame-and-white Givenchy scarf that had been a Christmas present from Kevin’s mother, and tied it, babushka fashion, around her head. It was all wrong. She retied it, but it was no better. There was another scarf, a yellow cotton one, but she had an awful time finding it, and when she tried it on, it was worse than the first scarf, and then her hair was mussed so she ran a comb through it and took the Givenchy scarf again and tied it another way and felt she could weep, why was it when you had more clothes than you ever used to have, nothing looked right? She tried a last time, wanting the mirror to be kind, but the mirror was not her friend. God, I look like the Queen at some gymkhana.

  Going down again, with the lift stopping at every floor, squeezed in with four other people, she remembered the dark-blue sun hat she had bought, maybe she should run back up and get it? But if, after the walk, we go straight into dinner some place, what would I be doing wearing a sun hat?

  In the hotel lobby there was a floor-length mirror which she could not pass but must stop in front of it for a last masochistic look. As she stared into the glass, she saw, reflected, the front doorway of the hotel and, just outside, Tom Lowry waiting for her. He was leaning against the iron railing, looking down at the people promenading on the quay below. Seen thus through the mirror, he seemed strange, a young conspirator waiting for his accomplice. Yet, at the same time, she felt an overwhelming urge to be seen with him, to go with him and leave everything else behind. She turned from the mirror and hurried out to meet him.

  “I’m sorry. I had to wait ages for the lift.”

  “That’s all right.” He pointed to the sweep of the bay. “Is that a beach down there?”

  “It is. A stony one.”

  “Let’s walk that way.”

  And so they went down a flight of steps, walking side by side along the quay in the same direction she had taken that afternoon. The sky was fading to dark, the restaurants were filling up with people, and the strolling performers were out, just as she remembered them. There was the familiar type of trick cyclist, wheeling back and forth on a unicycle, wearing a frilly woman’s hat. A swarthy young man sang Italian songs, cradling a monkey in the crook of his arm. The monkey, tiny and frail, was dressed in a tutu and clung to its owner like a frightened child. And there were new, less professional, entertainers, a trio of young Americans in jeans who drifted from restaurant to restaurant, playing guitars and singing rock songs in wispy, wist-ful voices.

  Suddenly, as on a given signal, lights went on on each dining table in the restaurant they were passing and soon it was lights up, too, on the boats moored along the quay. Far out in the bay a huge luxury yacht flared in ostentatious display, a chain of colored bulbs illuminating its outline from rigging to deck, prow to stern. Within minutes, lights twinkled on from Villefranche to Cap Ferrat, as though the whole bay were a stage while, behind it, like some vast amphitheater, the sky went to black. Music came up loud, and Mrs. Redden, hearing the singing voices, seeing the constant parade of people, felt her eyes fill with pleasant tears. Walking with Tom Lowry down toward the stony beach, passing the entrances to the narrow back streets of the old town behind the seafront, she began to reminisce about Villefranche, telling him how, years ago, the U.S. Sixth Fleet used this town as a base port, how the Americans put up American street signs in these narrow Mediterranean alleys. She told him that the local nightclubs and bars presented Wild West songs and American music and how the tough Shore Patrol moved up and down the streets searching for drunken sailors. And how, that summer, the local hotel proprietors protested the way American naval wives went to the beach with their hair done up in plastic rollers. It ruined the tone of the resort.

  Chat. But edited chat, for not once did she mention the year, or that she had been here on her honeymoon. He asked about the best place to eat and she told him Mère Germaine’s, and when they went in, with that good luck which now attended on their every action, an elderly couple paid the bill and ceded them a table with a splendid view of the port. The waiter brought a local rosé wine and as Tom poured it Mrs. Redden realized that she was still wearing the ugly scarf around her head. Embarrassed, she unknotted it, pulling it into her lap, shaking out her hair, smiling at him. “Tell me,” she asked, “do you often do things like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like picking up and coming five hundred miles when the notion strikes you.”

  “Never,” he said. “I wanted to be with you. When we said goodbye there at the airport, I felt lonely. It was crazy. I never felt anything b’ke it before.”

  “By the way,” she said, “I talked to my husband on the phone. The trouble about being married to a doctor is that they can’t plan anything in advance. He won’t be here before Friday at the earliest, and I’ve got a feeling he may not come at all. He’s going to ring me Thursday to let me know.”

  “He mightn’t come at all?”

  “No. He’s very busy. Anyway, Kevin’s not really keen on holidays abroad. He’s quite content with the seaside at home.”

  “Well,” he said, “the seaside in your part of Ireland is beautiful. That northern coast.”

  My part of Ireland. She looked at the colored lights on the millionaire’s yacht out there in the bay. A day, long forgotten, came into her mind: her father, his green summer blazer slung over his shoulder, wearing white tennis shoes and cream flannels, walking with her along the promenade in Portstewart, her hand in his—she was twelve at the time—and on the other side, talking to Daddy, Chief Justice McGonigal, her father called him Johnny. “Oh, Johnny, Johnny,” her father said, “I don’t know. Dan’s children were sent to English schools, they speak with English accents. Poor little West Britons he’s made of them. I want my children to live here in the North, where they belong. Dan has had a great career, of course, the U.N., and Europe, and the trade treaties, he’s done a lot, no doubt about it, but do you know, when I meet him now, my own brother, with his English accent, I feel a slight contempt for him. Poor Dan, he has lost himself. You and I, Johnny, we’re still what we were, only older. But Dan is like an actor, always playing a part.” And then her father turned and lifted her up in his arms and rubbed the tip of her nose with his bushy brown mustache, in the way that he had. “Take this little girl, now,” her father said. “What happens to a child like Sheila when you remove her from her roots? Ah, no, no,” her father said sentimentally. “Maybe I could have been a richer man and cut a finer dash if I’d gone off to London, long ago, when I got a first. But I wouldn’t have had this child, do you see? I’d have some little Londoner here in my arms this minute, some little Samantha or Beryl, some dogsbody of an English-sounding name. Oh, darling,” her father said, looking at her with his grave, hurt, hooded blue eyes. “Promise me you’ll stay in Ireland, will you?”

  “If I say yes, will you buy me a Mars bar?” she had answered and Justice McGonigal laughed and shouted out, “There you are, Tim, it’s all economics, it’s not patriotism, d’you see.” And her father, laughing, put her down and gave her a shilling.

  She looked back now at this eager stranger, this American boy, smiling at her, sipping his wine. “I don’t know,” she said. “Some people never want to go outside the place they were born in. And others seem to want to run away from the day they’re old enough to walk.”

  “And which are you?”

  “A runaway.”

  “But you didn’t leave, did you?”

  “No,” she said. The singer with the monkey had come close to them. Wanting to show the monkey off, he took its paw and held up its long prehensile arm, trying to get the animal to stand up straight on his shoulder. But the monkey scampered down
again and, shivering, clung to its owner’s chest. “He’s afraid,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The monkey. He’s afraid.”

  The waiter arrived with their first course, plates of tiny fried fish. The singer, ending his song, came around to collect, the monkey holding out a tin cup. Mrs. Redden put in a franc, and as the singer left the restaurant, the trick cyclist wheeled suddenly into the view of all the diners, going at breakneck speed toward the edge of the quay, pulling up miraculously short, then backpedaling in a sort of conga weave. Mrs. Redden found herself laughing and, laughing, turned to Tom. And there, in the middle of the music and the singing, found him watching her in the same eager, secret way she had spied on him an hour ago. Kevin and Danny are sitting at home, not knowing this thing that is happening. And then, suddenly, he said something and she laughed, her guilt gone, her mood back up on that high wire of excitement.

  From then on, their evening sailed. They began to exchange silly jokes about their fellow diners, they finished the bottle of wine and ordered a second; they talked about books they had read, plays they had seen, talk she never had at home, and, still talking, excited, left the restaurant to begin a long stroll around the sea wall to Port Darse, where dozens of pleasure craft were moored. They idled on the quays, looking at sloops, sailing dinghies, and catamarans, at a sleek Chris-Craft riding at anchor, its owner sprawled aft on a deck chair, his cigar tip a tiny rosette in the velvet night. They climbed a steep pebbly slope to steps which led to the old town, where, under a lonely street lamp in a grassy alley, four local men played pétanque, the thud and click of the steel bowls strangely sinister at this late hour. Through narrow deserted streets, they came down again to the little square where the front door of the Welcome was still open, the lobby a harsh pool of light in the surrounding darkness, the night clerk dozing at his desk. In the public rooms two shut-off television sets stood, like surrogates for public speakers, surrounded by audiences of empty chairs. They took the lift down to the bar, where a few stragglers sat over a last drink, and moved to a table at the far end of the room. A waiter brought cognacs and Mrs. Redden showed her room key, telling the waiter to put it on her bill.