Doctor's Wife

by Brian Moore

  “What money?”

  “Do you remember I told you when you rang up from Villefranche that I’d send you a hundred quid for shopping? Well, I sent it on to Peg Conway’s address. Have you seen her?”

  “Yes. But it isn’t here yet.”

  “Well, it should have arrived by now.”

  “I’ll ask Peg about it. Thank you. I’ll pay you back.”

  “Never mind that. Are you staying with Peg, then?”

  She did not answer.

  “I’m just asking, because if neither you nor Peg are at her flat, the money could be there waiting for you.”

  “No, somebody’s there.”

  “You’d never know it. I rang there the other night and got no answer.”

  “I took the phone off the hook.”

  “So you’re there, then? At Peg’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. And how are you? Or should I ask that?”

  “I’m all right. How’s Danny?”

  “Oh, he’s grand. I didn’t say anything to him, by the way.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, I’m still hoping that he won’t have to know about any of this.”

  She did not speak.

  “Look, Shee, would it do any good if I come over and we could have a heart-to-heart chat? Maybe if we talk about this, we can find out what it is that went wrong.”

  “No.”

  “Shee, people go through these crises. I was talking to Owen the other night. He told me about your brother Ned. You knew about Ned, didn’t you?”

  Ned. Owen told him about Ned? Kitty said we were never to say. “You were talking to Owen? About me?”

  “Yes.”

  “About this?”

  “Well, I had to talk to somebody. I’m very worried about you.”

  “And what did Owen say?”

  “Well, he mentioned Ned, he said Ned had a similar experience three years ago and that it ended in a nervous breakdown. He had to have electroshock, it seems.”

  “Oh, my God, Kevin,” she said, suddenly furious. “What does Owen mean, ‘a similar experience’? Ned was never married, he once studied for the priesthood, remember? And then he started courting some young girl and she wouldn’t have him. It’s as different from this as day from night.”

  “All right, all right, hold your horses. It was Owen who mentioned the possible connection.”

  “What possible connection?”

  “Well, maybe you should talk to Owen about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody.” She couldn’t just tell him, it’s over, Kevin. There’s no sense talking. Not now. Not today. “Look,” she said. “I still have to think about things. I’m going to ring off now.”

  “When will I hear from you?”

  “I’ll call you on Saturday?”

  “Not till then?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I suppose I’ll just have to wait. Is that it?”

  She did not answer.

  “All right. Take care of yourself, will you?”

  “Goodbye. Say hello to Danny for me.”

  “I’ll do that. Poor kid, he’s still expecting you next Monday. He’ll be very cut up if you’re late.”

  “Goodbye,” she said again. As she replaced the receiver, angry tears started in her eyes. Cut up! Danny, with his rugby and his bike team, Danny who hardly knows if I’m in the house or out, as long as his meals are on time.

  She went upstairs and out onto the boulevard. The sky was the color of slate and a wintry wind whipped the pavement debris into a miniature sandstorm. As she put her hand up to shield her face, Ned, wearing his white dentist’s coat, seemed to come before her, tall and awkward, stooping to conceal his height. She saw his sparse rusty hair, his long nose, sharp and red at the tip. In his hand he held a thin steel instrument and grinned when she pulled back, childishly, thinking it was a drill. “Come on, it’s only a mirror,” he said, showing her a small circle tilted at the instrument’s end. “Now, let’s just have a peek.”

  Owen said that when he visited Ned that time in his rooms in Leeson Street, he found him sitting in his dressing gown at twelve o’clock in the day. He burst into tears when Owen spoke to him. He was unable to stir out, unable to look after his simplest needs. “He was suffering from malnutrition, if you’ll believe it,” Owen said. But Ned was all right now. Eily saw him last summer: when she went to Cork he took her out for a drive in his car. They went down to Cobh and the sea. She said he was like his old self, but quieter, not so much fun as he used to be.

  We were never to tell anyone about Ned. Kitty made that rule and we all agreed to it. I never even told Kevin. Because I’d made a promise. Yet the other night Owen told him, just like that.

  •

  “How did it go?” Tom Lowry said, rising to his feet as she came to the table.

  “All right.”

  “You don’t look all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Do you want some coffee? Or some lunch?”

  “No,” she said. “You have something. And then let’s go back to the flat.”

  •

  “Il y a une lettre recommandée pour vous, Madame,” thé concierge said. “Je l’ai mise en haut.”

  The registered letter had been slipped under the apartment door. It lay on the polished wooden floor beside a circular and a newspaper. An English stamp, and her name and address written in Kevin’s doctor’s squiggle. “This must be the one,” she said. She opened it and pulled out a money order on Barclays Bank, France, for one hundred pounds. Then found his note, written on surgery paper.

  KEVIN REDDEN, M. B., F. R. C. S.

  22 CLIFTON STREET,

  BELFAST

  Dear Shee

  Here’s the money I mentioned when you

  were in Villefranche. Am very upset

  but, understand me, it’s you I worry

  about. Please think of us. Danny

  sends hellos.

  Love

  Kevin

  She crumpled the note and stuck it in the mouth of her purse. She put the envelope with the money order on the hall table. “Tom?”

  He came out of the kitchen. “Yes.”

  “Feel like lying down?”

  He laughed and caught her at the waist, lifting her into the air.

  “I’m too big, put me down.”

  “No, you’re not.” Quickly he carried her into the bedroom and dropped her on Peg’s bed. “Oh, God,” she called, as she bounced on the mattress. “You’ll break it.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Strip!”

  She stood up on the bed, running her panty hose as she pulled them down. She took off the rest of her clothes and, naked, stood above him as he bent over, his back to her, pulling down his trousers. She waited until he was naked, then, unsteadily, crossed the soft expanse of mattress and climbed onto him, piggyback, as she had done with her father when a child. Laughing, he caught her legs, holding his hands out like stirrups, and with her arms around his neck, both of them naked, raced into the living room, then, wheeling, ran down the corridor into the kitchen, as she spurred him, her stallion, with her naked heels. “Back to bed!” she cried. “Hup, there.”

  The doorbell rang.

  He stopped, skidding, in the center of the hall. “The concierge?” she whispered.

  He turned and, still carrying her piggyback, ran into the bedroom and kicked the door shut. He let her down and they stood, listening. It was not the concierge. The hall door did not open. Instead, after an interval, the doorbell rang again. He stared at her. “Who?”

  She shrugged in puzzlement. He reached for his jeans. “Want me to open?”

  She shook her head. The doorbell rang a third time. He put on his jeans. “I’ll look through the peephole.”

  “No, they might see you do it.”

  She sat on the bed and he sat beside her. She seemed to be shivering. Again, the doorbell rang as they sat, prisoners of that sound, waiting. But t
he doorbell did not ring a fifth time. After a while she got up, put on her skirt and blouse, and, barefoot, wearing no underwear, went into the front hall. He joined her, just as she stooped to pick up the piece of paper which had been slipped under the door. It was a folded sheet of notepaper and on the back was written Miss P. Conway.

  “For Peg,” she said, but as she did, the paper opened on the fold. She saw the letterhead.

  54 DUNDRUM ROAD

  BELFAST

  3:15 p.m.

  Dear Peg,

  I am in Paris for the night, staying

  at the Angleterre Hotel. I am very

  anxious to get in touch with Sheila

  but don’t know where to reach her.

  If you can help me, will you get in

  touch with me at my hotel? In the

  meantime, I will wait for a while in

  the café on the corner, in case you

  come home soon. Best wishes,

  Owen Deane

  P.S. Have tried your office number

  but they say you are off for the

  afternoon.

  She handed him the note and watched him read it.

  “Who’s Owen Deane?”

  “My brother.”

  Chapter 12

  • She came up to the corner of the Place Saint-Michel as though she were at home and had been told there was a sniper in the next street. For a moment she wondered if he would be sitting there with Agnes, Agnes who might well force him to bring her along even on this painful journey. But when she came into the square, screened by the flow of people moving to and from the Métro entrance, she saw her brother alone, in Le Départ, down at the far end of the café, near the rue de la Huchette. He sat with a beer and a newspaper but he was not reading. Instead, he seemed interested in the antics of the guitar-playing youths and girls camped under the winged gorgons and green-slimed fountains in the center of the square.

  He had not seen her. What an obvious tourist he looked in his fly-front raincoat and narrow-brimmed green hat. How old he looked, how failed. For one guilty moment she thought: If I have to introduce him to Tom, he’s going to make me seem old. But then he pulled out his spectacles and picked up the newspaper in a studious, preoccupied way which instantly recalled his younger self. Poor Owen, he must be dreading this meeting.

  She came out from her place of concealment near the newspaper kiosk and walked past him as though she had not seen him. But he did not notice her. At the corner of the rue de la Huchette she paused and looked back. He was staring in the opposite direction. She hurried into the café, came up behind him, and, bending over, said in his ear, “Excuse me, sir. Are you a private detective?”

  He started, swiveled around, and jumped to his feet, whipping the spectacles off his nose, grabbing at her awkwardly, sweeping her into an embrace. His cheek felt unshaven although it was not. “Sheila. You scared the life out of me.”

  She held him, her arms tight about him, she had never understood it, but when they met, she and her sister and brothers, suddenly all of their wives, husbands, and children seemed members of another race, not part of the Family, that family whose allegiances antedated all others. Even with Ned, the brother she was no longer close to, her feeling was the same. It was as though they were survivors of another country, a tiny nation whose meaningless historical memories were of playing Snap in rainy, rented houses in Portrush in the summer, of being lined up two-by-two by Daddy to march to the Pool for an afternoon of swimming; of being made to compete for medals in embarrassing verse-speaking contests; of the day a maid called Annie killed a rat in the attic; of all of them keeping very quiet after supper in hopes that Kitty would forget to assemble them for the saying of the family rosary; of ice cream as a Sunday treat when one of the boys would be sent out to McCourt’s for sliders and two siphons of lemonade; and of that famous family photograph when Daddy posed them on a ladder, against a tool shed in the garden, all dressed up in their good new overcoats, school caps and tarns, four rungs of the ladder, the oldest at the top, while Kitty, cigarette dangling from her lips, raised the flash extension and Daddy, peering into his Rolleiflex, ordered everyone to smile.

  Now, the second from the top of the ladder smiled at her with new caution. “Did Peg tell you I was down here?”

  “No,” she said. “I was in the flat when you came, but I didn’t answer the door. Then I saw your note.”

  “Well,” he said and, confused, made a gesture toward his table. “Sit down, won’t you?”

  “Did you just get in?”

  “Yes, about an hour ago. Will you have a drink?”

  “A coffee, maybe.”

  “Sure you won’t have something stronger?”

  “What’s the plan? Get me drunk and shanghai me home?”

  He smiled. “At least I’ve found you. I had an awful vision of coming all this way and not finding you. Or finding you and having you hit me over the head with your purse.”

  “I might do that yet.”

  “So.” He looked around him. “Paris. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The family have all become awful stick-in-the-muds about travel. All of us going off to Donegal and Galway and the like.”

  “I know.”

  “Mind you, Eily and Jim took their kids to Spain last year. They had a great time there, apparently.”

  She made a face. “Those awful British holiday villages on the Costa del Sol. They might as well never leave home.”

  “Still, I can’t throw stones,” Dr. Deane said. “Agnes and I both love Kerry. The children do, too. It’s almost a second home to them.”

  “How are the girls?”

  “Oh, very well. Imelda passed her O Levels, just last week. Agnes and I were delighted. We went out and bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate.”

  She smiled. “And how is Agnes?” she asked.

  “She’s in grand form. Did I tell you, she’s now a golf champion. She won the Ladies’ Open at the club last month.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “Yes, and she’s working on her poetry, too. She had a poem published lately in some religious journal. The Messenger, actually. Still, it’s a start, what?”

  She looked at him. Poor old Owen. “Indeed it is,” she said. In the pause, he signaled a waiter.

  “Do you want cream in your coffee?”

  “No,” she said. “Un espress,” she told the waiter.

  “Bien, Madame.”

  “I always forget,” he said. “You’re quite at home in France.”

  “Yes. I always was at home here. I don’t feel at home at home.”

  “Do you remember the time we were here together, years ago, on our way to see Uncle Dan at The Hague?”

  “Funny,” she said, “I was thinking about that just the other day.”

  “I remember how impressed I was at the way you told the porter off in French. Using bad language, too.”

  She smiled and nodded. When would he get down to it?

  It was as though she had spoken aloud. Her brother took off his ugly hat and put it down on the chair beside him. How thin his hair is now: what is he? Eight years older than me? He put his face up to the gray sky as though he were sunbathing. “Tell me, Sheila, how are you feeling?”

  “What is it you doctors say? As well as can be expected.”

  He swiveled to look at her. There were brownish puffy sacs under his bright-blue eyes. “I saw Kevin the other night.”

  “So I gather. Who else has he told about this?”

  “Nobody,” Dr. Deane said. “Agnes knows, of course, but don’t worry, she’ll be like the grave, I promise you.”

  He saw the disbelief in her face. He could not blame her. He finished his beer.

  “What, exactly, did Kevin tell you?”

  “He said you told him you might not be coming home.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said you told him there was someone here. Another man.”
r />   “Did that surprise you, Owen?”

  “Yes, it did. Although, I suppose these things happen. People go through a period of change. They want to change their lives. Believe me, I see it all the time in my practice.”

  “You mean with women.”

  “Well, I deal with women, of course, but it happens to men, too.”

  “And why do people try to change their lives, do you suppose?”

  “Usually because they’re getting on, reaching middle age. They feel dissatisfied. They want to achieve something.”

  “So you treat it as a medical problem?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Kevin thinks it’s a medical problem.”

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Did Kevin say that to you?”

  “You and Kevin discussed me. You know it. You even told him about Ned’s breakdown. I think that was rotten of you. One thing Kitty was right about is, what happened to Ned is his business and nobody else’s.”

  “Kitty is dead,” Dr. Deane said. “So I’m not going to criticize her. But I think she was quite wrong. It would have been easier for Ned if his friends and his family had openly acknowledged what was the matter with him.”

  “Maybe so. But we agreed not to tell anyone. I never even told Kevin about it.”

  The waiter came, putting down her cup of coffee, tucking a check under the saucer. Dr. Deane pointed to his beer glass and said awkwardly, “Encore, s’il vous plaît.”

  “So,” she said. “What exactly has Ned’s breakdown got to do with this?”

  “Sheila, can I ask you a few questions?”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “How have you been? Have you had any loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, dizzy spells, trouble concentrating, irritability. Anything of that sort?”

  “No. I’m very well, thank you.”

  “You haven’t felt depressed?”

  “No.”

  “The thought of leaving your husband and child doesn’t upset you?”

  “Of course it does. But that’s not depression.”

  “All right, it’s not depression, per se. But surely you can’t feel happy about what you’re doing?”