“Yes?” said the man, who had clearly been asleep, who was not yet, perhaps, quite awake. He had on buttoned breeches, white stockings, a black coat. He looked like someone’s footman but it turned out he was the manager of the place.
Introductions, arrangements. Some confusion as to whether they were asking for one room or two.
“Two,” said Lacroix. “We need two.”
“Of course,” said the manager, moving his hands as if everything had been clear to him from the first. “Two very comfortable rooms on the second floor.” He laughed. He had an accent that was neither English nor Scottish. A German of some sort? What was he doing in Oban?
A girl was summoned, yawning so hard her jaw creaked. She led them up the stairs, a candle in either hand, flames streaming. On the second floor she nodded to a door. “Tha’s one,” she said, “and tha’s the other.” She nodded to the door opposite. She gave them their candles. Lacroix asked for some supper to be brought up.
“It will have to be bread and cheese,” said the girl. “The cook’s gone hame.”
“Very well,” said Lacroix. “And whisky. And two glasses.”
The girl nodded and at the same time shrugged. She had understood or she had not. She would do it or she wouldn’t. She left them. Lacroix and Emily went into their respective rooms. Lacroix’s looked over the back of the sleeping town. He stood at the window listening for the girl’s return but heard nothing until there was a sharp rap at his door and Emily was there to say the tray was in her room. He went through. He brought his candle with him, dripped wax on to the mantelpiece and fixed it there, where it could throw back its light from the mirror. The tray was on the table by the foot of the bed. He poured them both a generous glass of whisky, drank off his own in two mouthfuls.
“It will be day again in a few hours,” he said.
She didn’t answer or he didn’t hear her. He asked if she felt well. She nodded and smiled a weary smile.
“The manager,” he said. “What is he? A German?”
“I think that is probably Spinkey,” she said. “A Russian.”
“A Russian!”
“One who has lived here twenty years or more. Insulted the tsar’s wife. Or one of his wives. I don’t know how many they have.”
“You didn’t say you had been here before.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “But Jane has.”
“Jane? Here?”
“I cannot think there are two Russians running hotels in Oban.”
Then he understood. “With Thorpe you mean?”
She nodded.
He glanced at the bed, looked hurriedly away. He poured himself more whisky and carried his glass to the window, looked out, looking at nothing. Jane and Thorpe! Here! Perhaps in this very room! The place of union! The bower of bliss! The . . .
He could not get the word “fucking” out of his head. He was afraid he would say it—that Emily would ask some perfectly innocent question and he would say it. Fucking. Would it be funny? He was sure it would not.
“Is it raining?” she asked.
“Mmm?”
“Is it raining?”
“No,” he said.
“I thought I could hear rain.”
“No. But no stars now so perhaps it is on its way.”
They sat at the table to eat. They were too tired to eat much but wanted something. They chewed the hard bread, cut thin slices from the questionable cheese. In the lamplight their movements were feathered, smoothed in air, delayed, golden. He asked her about Spinkey. It was, he knew, a way of asking about her sister and Thorpe, but she could not tell him anything else, though she thought the girl who showed them up might be Spinkey’s daughter.
“It’s strange though, isn’t it?” he said.
“What is?”
He shook his head. He didn’t really know. Something to do with how unlikely it was, the two them being together in a room in Oban. All the things that had led to it. Her father, his. The war. Her eyes. Endless decisions and coincidences. The thought excited him briefly, felt important, then commonplace.
“Do you think,” he said, “Cornelius has found the other ear yet?”
“Or a nose?”
“A . . . ?”
“Dug up a nose.”
“Ah, a nose would be excellent. Even better than an ear.”
“He will have to stitch the poor man together again,” she said. “That will give us occupation for the winter,” said Lacroix. “I will sew on the feet, you may do the hands. Cornelius himself must have the honour of reattaching the head. When Thorpe comes you can make him a present of it.”
She laughed, then said, “So you think you might spend a winter with us, John?”
With the Russian manager’s help they secured the last two places inside the Glasgow coach. It was seven in the morning, the sky overcast. The coachman wore a cape of thick blue canvas. Only his head, hands and boots protruded, so that he appeared like an actor playing the part of the sea in a pantomime. Emily and Lacroix were the last to board. They had places opposite each other, one shoulder against the leather wall of the coach, the other against the warmth and restlessness of a stranger. The rain started before they had finished their slow climb out of the town. It washed the dust from the windows. It had the look of rain that did not intend to let up. Inside the coach people breakfasted from parcels of food in their laps. Food smells, human smells, then all indistinguishable. They spent an hour held up by cattle on the road. Some of the animals, climbing a bank, peered in through the window. One, with a purple tongue the size of a man’s handkerchief, licked the glass. Lacroix had hoped to find a newspaper in Oban but there had been nothing at the hotel, not even an old one. He studied the scenery, peeked down to fast rivers, looked at the walls of bare hills. He swayed against his neighbour, exchanged smiles with Emily, exchanged smiles with the wifely woman beside her who was, he thought, trying to decide who he might be and what he was to Emily. At least there were no military men in the coach. No one to make guesses about him in that way.
They stopped for lunch; stopped several times for the men to stand behind trees or for the women to shelter in a cottage, the cotters making a kind of living from the coins that were offered in exchange for a private place and a pot. The horses were changed, the old horses led away steaming, their heads low. On the roof, the outside passengers clung to their places; it was better not to think about them. Inside, the water dripped through a dozen split seams, seeped in past the ill-fitting windows, came up somehow through the floor. This wetness was discussed, then not, and they sat in the near-darkness of each other’s presences, asleep, awake, dull, silent.
They arrived in Glasgow hours after they had ceased even to long for it. Lacroix found his chin against his chest, his chin damp with drool or rain, his neck so stiff he winced when he moved it. They were in the lit courtyard of an inn. The doors were opened and they spilled out on to the stone and straw. The coachman struggled out of his cape. A heroic figure! Of the outside passengers, one, a schoolboy or young apprentice, had to be lifted down and was for a time unsteady on his feet, like a fledgling flown against a window. Emily and Lacroix took rooms at the inn, each of them sharing a bed with one of their fellow travellers. Lacroix woke at dawn, half held by a man who, in conversation before sleep, had tried to explain the interior workings of a new steam pump—plug rods, steam jackets—he was selling into Scottish mills. Lacroix rolled away from him a little, slept again, waking a second time to discover his bed-mate gone and the room full of light.
Downstairs, he found Emily alone on a window seat, sipping tea and looking out at the street, or what she could guess of it through antique glass. She was wearing the blue summer coat she had borrowed from Jane. On the table was a blue bonnet, a pair of grey feathers in the ribbon, the feathers picked up on the island. He sat beside her. He was hungry, felt hollow with it, and
when the girl came he ordered himself a beefsteak.
“You don’t disapprove, I hope?”
“If you are happy to have the poor beast’s blood on your hands.”
“You forget,” he said, “that I am not yet a member of your community.”
“Did I say you were?” she asked. “And one cannot simply choose to be a member.”
“You mean you might not have me? Or Thorpe might not?”
She shrugged.
“You are welcome to your community,” he said. “I wish for no part of it.”
He did not know where this sudden disagreeableness between them had come from. He sat, scratching the tabletop with his thumbnail. Then his steak arrived, huge and smoking, on a blue-and-white Dutch plate, but he could not enjoy it properly.
He finished—made a point of finishing it all—and pushed the plate away. He saw her glance at it.
“John,” she said. “You would not fit well with the community but I do not think less of you for that. We are not a company of saints. We are not your betters or anybody else’s.”
His anger vanished. “Thank you,” he said. “And I promise I will not think less of you for being in it.” He hoped she would smile at this but she took it differently and he wished he had found something else to say. They were silent again, a little lost.
“You must tell me,” he said, after some minutes had passed and the inn’s old clock had wheezed out a long chiming, “what you wish to do today.”
This too, perhaps, was a mistake. She frowned at him. “Do? I wish to do what we came here to do. What else?”
“You want to find Rizzo today?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course!” She looked away from him, stared into her empty cup.
Whatever she had been before, whatever her mood—the laughter of the crossing, the laughter at the hotel—she was scared now, openly so. He should have known it the moment he came down and saw her. It should have been obvious to him. He felt ashamed. His meat-lust, his testiness. He put an eye to the bubbled glass of the window and looked out at the transport of shadows.
“I do not know exactly where we are,” he said.
“The Trongate,” she said.
“The what?”
“The Trongate. Or somewhere near it. The woman I shared with last night knew the city. She drew a map for me.”
“And you have it?”
“She drew it on the mirror with her finger. But the infirmary is only a short walk away. That is where we will ask for Rizzo.”
They left their bags at the inn. Yesterday’s rain, last night’s rain, lay in broad puddles whose surfaces glittered and darkened in fitful sunlight. The road was full of business, men and animals breasting the cool air, shoving through. Everywhere you looked a face looked back, absorbed you without expression. Emily and Lacroix were out of practice. The island had softened them, attuned them differently.
As the road turned and climbed it became quieter. They saw the cathedral. It was no beauty. It sat there like a man bowed under the weight of his own pack. It did not soar. Then, beyond it, they caught sight of something in a different idiom entirely, with pillars and balconies of pale, unweathered stone. On top was a dome roofed with glass, like an observatory.
“You think that’s it?” asked Lacroix.
They skirted the walls of the cathedral and came to a halt beside the gates of the new building. No question now of what it was. Under a fanlight, the double doors of the entrance stood wide. A man came out, a woman, two nuns. Then a young man with one leg, swinging himself between crutches, and another man with both hands heavily bandaged, an expression of deep perplexity on his face. Others passed on their way in. A woman, her face sunk on to the bones of her skull, her hands shaking in a palsy, and behind her, two men in top hats and good coats, doctors perhaps, or undertakers. In the gardens between the railings and the door, a person, hidden by a bush, was being comforted by a woman Lacroix thought was probably drunk.
“I doubt even in London,” he said, “we would find anywhere as impressive as this. In the way of a hospital.”
“Think of the suffering in there,” she said.
“Think of what . . . ?”
The building should have had a grand vestibule—deserved one—but instead they entered a corridor—brown below, green above—that smelled of carbolic and kitchen steam. In the right-hand wall was a hatch, curiously low down. Lacroix had to bend his knees and stoop in order to poke his head through. On the other side was a room lined with shelves, record books of some description, ledgers, tall like his father’s music books. At a table in the centre of the room two men played dominoes. A third man was sleeping precariously on a narrow bench.
“Mr. Rizzo,” called Lacroix. “The surgeon, Mr. Rizzo. Can you tell me where I might find him?”
The players did not know. They had not heard of any Rizzo, and they had been at the hospital since the day it opened its doors. There was a Mr. Rice. There was a Dr. Rollo. Might it be Dr. Rollo that he wanted? They could tell him where Dr. Rollo was.
“Rizzo,” said Lacroix. “An eye surgeon.”
“What does he look like?”
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Third floor,” sang the man on the bench, who had perhaps been awake all along. “Far end of the ward . . . ”
Neither Lacroix nor Emily had been inside a hospital before. They went up a swoop of stairs to a large room lined on both sides with beds, all of them occupied. They went up more stairs to a room identical to the first, though here it seemed there were more serious cases. One man, seeing Lacroix, called out, “Doctor! For sweet Christ’s sake!” Lacroix smiled at him, made a gesture that might be mistaken for an intention to return.
Another flight, a third room with its uneasy smells, its mood of lassitude and restlessness, as if the patients had all been assigned a problem out of Euclid’s Elements they must solve before they could leave. They stopped a woman on her way between the beds. She looked at them from over the top of a bundle of used sheets in her arms.
“Rizzo?” she said. “Does he work with the unfortunates in the basement?”
“He is a surgeon,” said Emily. “An eye surgeon.”
“Does he have a beard?”
“We have never seen him.”
“Spectacles?”
“We don’t know.”
From behind her, the great swell of her hips, a boy in a nightshirt appeared. Skin like watered milk, enormous brown eyes. “I will take you to him,” he said.
They followed him to the end of the ward. There was a swelling on the side of his neck the size of a hen’s egg. It did not look angry but lay under the same milk-white skin as the rest. He led them into a corridor, past one door, past the next. At the third he stopped and knocked. After a moment the door was opened. A man stood there, broad shoulders in a dark grey coat. Late thirties, perhaps early forties. He did have a beard. It was black and well tended. In this house of sickness he shone with health.
“More patients for you, Mr. Rizzo,” said the boy.
“Thank you, Robert,” said Rizzo. “I will come and say hello to you later.”
The boy left them. They watched him go.
“He has been with us a month,” said Rizzo, once the boy was out of sight. “He is not my patient but I am trying to keep him away from my more eager colleagues. Where there can be no benefit . . . ” He tailed off. He smiled at Emily. He was noticing her eyes, was already, perhaps, some way on with his diagnosis.
“I am Emily Frend,” she said. “I am hoping you received my letter.”
“But of course. It is on my desk.” He turned to Lacroix. “And you are the brother who has come for his teeth.”
“This is Mr. Lovall,” said Emily. “He has been kind enough to accompany me. I believe his teeth are perfectly well.”
“A great
pity,” said Rizzo. “I had someone excellent in mind.”
He invited them into his room. He apologised for its smallness. There was a desk, and behind that a chair by the window, the window propped open with books. He asked Emily to sit on the chair and make herself comfortable.
“Should I stay?” said Lacroix. The question was addressed to both or either. Emily looked at Rizzo, Rizzo at Emily, then at Lacroix.
“Of course,” he said. “It is good to have the company of a friend. Miss Frend and her friend! Ach, I am sorry. You must have suffered such witticisms before. The Swiss, I fear, are not so celebrated for their humour.”
“You are Swiss?” asked Lacroix.
“From Grindelwald,” said Rizzo, “where we speak German. But my grandfather came from Turin and his grandfather from Naples. So I confuse people with an Italian name. They expect me to sing more.” He shrugged. To Emily he said, “Perhaps you would like to take off your hat?”
The room was not the kind of room given to eminent men. Its smallness, its lack of a fireplace, sconces, furniture of any standard beyond the disposable. He had other rooms, perhaps, grander, somewhere else in the city. On the walls were closely pinned charts of eyes. Eyes in faces, eyes alone, eyes in cross-section. Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3. One chart depicted an eye the size of a soup plate, a cyclop’s eye that stared back at Lacroix until it stared him down and he turned away from it towards the window.
Rizzo was leaning over Emily in the posture of a man inviting a woman to dance. She had her bonnet in her lap. He raised her chin, tilted her face to the light, then tilted it away. He asked her to look out of the window and describe what she could see. She did so. It was not what Lacroix could see or it was some poor fraction of it.
He asked her to close her eyes.
“Close them?”
“If you would be so kind.”
She closed them, her face still angled upwards, still flush with light from the window.
“You will feel me touching your eyelids,” said Rizzo. “There . . . But please, you must not forget to breathe.”
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 23