Doctor's Wife (22 page)

    He nodded, but she did not notice. “Will you be
wanting anything else?” she repeated.

    “No thanks, Mrs. Milligan. Good night, now.”

    “Don’t forget to eat up that bit of sweet.”

    “All right. Good night.”

    He heard her leave the room. In a few minutes she
would finish the dishes and go upstairs. She was living in for the
two weeks of Sheila’s holiday and they had rented a telly for her
room. Once up there she would not stir down again tonight. He
pulled a prescription pad from his pocket and looked again at the
notes he had jotted down:

                Say about how D
overheard.

                And Owen’s visit
here.

                Will go Wed.

                Want talk
now.

    He put a fork in the pie and, for Mrs. Milligan’s
sake, ate two bites of it. He made instant coffee and turned the
television sound off, listening for the housekeeper’s footsteps on
the stairs. Ghostly ballroom dancers whirled and twisted on the
screen. When he heard her go up, he put the prescription pad in his
pocket and went into the front hall where the phone sat on a monk’s
bench, under large elephant tusks, which supported a brass dinner
gong. When he was a little boy, he remembered the gong being rung
for dinner in his father’s house. And in his grandfather’s day it
had been used to summon to meals as many as fifteen people,
parents, children, and spinster relatives. Now it was never used.
He dialed France, then Peg Con-way’s number. Anger heated in him as
he let the phone ring for a full two minutes. He replaced the
receiver and put the prescription pad back in his pocket. He might
as well lock up. He went to the front door, first opening the
inside door and then the heavy outer door. It was raining. On the
rim of light around the porch lamp, he saw the shadows of the
driveway and the front gate, beyond which were the street lamps of
the Somerton Road. He locked and bolted the front door, then the
inside door. From habit, as he came back into the front hall, he
tapped the glass of the barometer on the wall. The barometer had
never worked properly. Now the needle moved to
Fair
. He
went back into the den, passing the television set and its
swirling, ghostly dancers, going through to the kitchen to lock the
back door. When he switched off the kitchen light and looked
through the glass door panel he saw that McCusker, the gardener,
had left the wheelbarrow out in the rain. In the scullery Tarzan
rose up, tail wagging, from his bed of potato sacks. He patted the
dog, shut him in again, then, returning to the front hall, went
upstairs to the first-floor landing and looked into his son’s room.
The light was on and Danny was asleep, his mouth open. Redden
turned off the light, then went into the master bedroom, where,
facing him, was the extra-large bed they had bought when they moved
into this house. The right side of the bed was his: for almost two
weeks now the left side had not been disturbed. He turned away,
abruptly, as though he had seen something that displeased him, and
went out again to the landing. From Mrs. Milligan’s room on the
third floor he heard taped laughter from the television set. He
went down the landing toward the rear of the house and entered a
doorway, groping for an unfamiliar switch. Finding it, he flooded
the small space in a harsh, unshaded light.

    This was her room: her sewing room, the room in
which she paid household bills, read sometimes, and did God knows
what else he knew nothing at all about. It was untidy: there was an
ironing board set up in the middle, a dressmaker’s dummy with a
pattern pinned on it stood in the far corner, and there was a small
Singer sewing machine on an old-fashioned tabletop, next to a
large, irregular pile of women’s magazines. Floor to ceiling, two
walls of the room were books, arranged in old, dark-painted
bookshelves she had brought from the Deane house when her mother
died. He went now to the shelves, staring at book spines, as though
he might find hidden in them some proclamation of who she really
was. Those large volumes on the bottom shelves had been her
father’s: sets of blue Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope; green and
gold volumes of the works of George Bernard Shaw. There were two
shelves of Everyman editions, faded and worn; then Penguins, and
some French books, Gide and Valéry and Anatole France: they must be
the books she used when she studied French at Queen’s. There were
small books of poetry, mostly in French—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and
other writers whose names were unfamiliar to him. And Hemingway and
Saki, and Joyce’s
Ulysses
, which he remembered dipping
into years ago as a dirty book. He wondered if she had other dirty
books hidden away somewhere on these shelves. On the top row were
schoolgirl romances and such. He pulled out an odd-looking red
clothbound book from this row, but, opening it, found it was an
atlas, with her name in schoolgirl copperplate. Sheila Mary Deane,
Jun IV, Sisters of Mercy Convent, Glenarm. N. Ireland. He put the
book back on the shelf. Always stuck into books: poetry, plays, and
novels. A lot of rot. He remembered her chatting with Brian Boland
about “modern writers.” Rubbish. As if reading some bloody novels
makes her better than me.

    He sat in the small old wicker chair beside the
sewing table. On the wall calendar nearby she had circled a date.
It was, he realized, the date she left for France. Below the
calendar was an old chest of drawers with framed photographs on top
of it. He got up and went to look at them: maybe they were the
clue? Of course, in pride of place was her Uncle Dan, the
ambassador, the cause of a lot of her silly notions. He picked up
the uncle’s photograph: a big fat twit of a man in a morning coat,
presenting his credentials to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands;
ambassador smiling at Queen, two fatties the pair of them. He put
the photograph down and looked to see who else she had up here on
her private altar. Her two brothers, Owen and Ned, long ago in some
seaside place. And one of her father, old Professor Deane, she a
little girl getting a piggyback ride on her daddy’s back. And that
photo I took of Danny on the stairs in his first suit of clothes,
when he was a wee boy. And where am I? I ask you.

    But then he saw, behind the other photographs, a
large framed picture of himself and Sheila in their wedding
clothes, cutting the cake at the Imperial Hotel, his hand on hers,
guiding the knife, both of them smiling at the photographer. He
peered closely at the bride’s face, oh, she was pretty, her smile a
bit silly that day, for she was a little tight on champagne,
wearing a tulle headdress which made her even taller, so that she
towered over both mothers, his and hers, who stood behind them
puffing on cigarettes, rival chieftains briefly joined. And then,
with pain, remembered how, after the wedding reception, he and she
had flown to London and on to Villefranche, where, in that hotel
room, he first saw her with all her clothes off. The same place she
was last week with some Yank, maybe in the very same bed we were in
for our honeymoon. You bitch, you dirty, bloody bitch.

    Downstairs, the phone began to ring. He hurried out,
running down to the front hall, wanting to get to it before it woke
Danny. It was not her, of course, it was the British Army at
Lisburn, calling about the case he had for surgery tomorrow
morning. He listened to the English voice and told it what he
wanted done. “Would you hold on a moment, sir?” the sergeant said,
and then the duty officer came on to apologize for ringing up so
late. He said, “Not to worry,” and hung up. If he went to Paris on
Wednesday he would miss his army surgical round. He had better
explain that to the colonel tomorrow. This army job was a terrible
grind. Well, she didn’t want me to take it, she complained about
it. I should have heeded her.

    He turned restlessly and went into the big front
drawing room, which, lately, they used only when people came. He
put on a reading lamp and drew the blinds. It was still raining. He
sat on the big sofa, that same sofa she sat on talking about books
to Brian Boland the time I taxed her with making up to other men.
She cried then. I always thought she was an innocent, that she
didn’t know men and what they were up to. Dancing in the dark and
all that. I suppose
I
was the innocent. There she was,
pretending to be shy, pretending to be a good wife, Danny’s mother,
and, all the time, what was she thinking? It was that bloody uncle
of hers that ruined her, that big fat twit of an ambassador. Spends
her whole bloody life dreaming about living in some place like
Paris, the very place where she ended up last week, on her only-oh,
and there, made to measure for her, waiting in the wings, is some
young Yank just out of Trinity, with his Ph.D. in James Joyce’s
Laundry List. That’s what Owen said: He’s just out of Trinity. Aye,
nattering away, the pair of them, about Camus and Yeats and what
have you, and she so bloody happy that she’s not with me, having to
talk about patients and the Troubles at home. Aye, Paree and the
young Yank, and the next thing you know, she’s leading him on until
he’s mad for her and thinks she’s mad for him, just the way Brian
Boland did. That’s just what happened, I’ll bet.

    He sat down at the grand piano in the drawing room,
opened the lid, and struck a note, then shut the lid again
clumsily, so that it closed with a loud slam of wood on wood. When
people find out your wife has run off with another man, they’ll be
sorry for you, or make fun of you, I don’t know which is worse.
Twenty years ago I’d have put the priest on her. But nobody heeds
the priests nowadays.

    He looked at his wristwatch, a gold-cased Longines,
a graduation present from his father. Decided, he got up, went into
the front hall, and dialed Peg Conway’s number once again. The
phone rang and rang. So she wasn’t going to answer, was she? All
right. I can keep this up all night.

    But after eight rings someone picked up the
receiver.

    “Hello?” he said.

    There was no answer. Maybe he had a wrong
number.

    “Kevin?” It was her voice.

    “Yes, it’s me.”

    “How’s Danny?”

    “What do you care?” (By God, I’m going to give it to
her this time.)

    “How is he?”

    “He’s upset. I’ve had to dose him with sleeping
pills.”

    “Oh no.”

    “Is it any wonder? Do you know what happened? On
Saturday night your brother Owen came to see me, and when we’d
finished talking we found Danny outside, listening on the
staircase. Poor bloody kid, he’s destroyed.”

    “Yes. He rang me up about it in the middle of the
night.”

    “He
what
?”

    “He rang me up here. In Paris.”

    “Danny did? How did he get the number?”

    “He said it was by the phone in the hall.”

    He caught his breath, trying to control his anger.
“Jesus, Sheila, have you any idea of what you’re doing to us?”

    She did not answer.

    “Look, I’m coming to Paris. We’ve got to settle
this.”

    “No, Kevin.”

    “I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. I have to operate
at eight, but I’ll come right after.”

    “Kevin, it’s not going to help for you to come here.
Not at all.”

    “I see. So you’re planning to run off to New York
without even bothering to say goodbye to us, is that it?”

    “Who told you I was going to New York?”

    “Your pal Peg Conway told Owen the other night. Oh
yes, and she said that this Yank is ten years younger than you are.
That’s nice, ha ha. That’s very nice. Yes, I can just see it. When
you’re fifty, this bucko will be thirty-nine. Five years younger
than I am now. And can you see me in bed with a woman of fifty? Can
you?”

    She did not speak.

    “Sheila, are you listening? Does what I’m saying
make any sense to you at all? Or is it dancing-in-the-dark time
again?”

    She did not answer.

    “All right,” he said, “let’s try to talk like
friends. I’ll tell you what. If you come to your senses and come
home now, I’ll give you my word, nothing will be said by me.
Nothing. Because I want you home. I want you for Danny’s sake. Do
you hear me, Sheila? And I want you for my own sake, too. Please,
Sheila?”

    He listened. She was still there.

    “Point number two,” he said. “If you come back now,
nobody will be any the wiser. Only Owen and I, and poor wee Danny
know about this. And Agnes knows something’s up, but not to worry,
Owen will keep her quiet, ha ha. And if you’d rather have a couple
more weeks there before you come home, that’s all right, too. Quite
all right. We miss you, but it’s all right. Do you hear me,
Sheila?”

    “Kevin, I’m very sorry about what’s happened. I
am.”

    “Wait now, I’ve not finished. There’s something
else. I thought we were happily married, but maybe I was wrong. I
was happy, but maybe you weren’t. Maybe I haven’t paid as much
attention to you as I should have. I know I shouldn’t have taken on
this army job, because that annoyed you. I’m sorry about that. But
these are bad times here, and people don’t always do the things
they should do. Now I’m going to say something I’ve not said
before. I’ve been sitting thinking about all this, do you see? And
I’ve decided that, no matter what happens in Ulster now, things
will never be any good here. Not any more. Not in our time. We’ll
be paying for this mess as long as we live. Don’t you agree?”

    She did not speak.

    “Now, do you remember, Shee, you talked about us
emigrating? That was about two years ago, wasn’t it? And I said no.
Well, I’ve changed my mind. I think we
should
emigrate.
We’ll go to Canada, or Australia, whichever you like. With my
qualifications I can get a job anywhere, and, abroad, I’ll make
twice as much money as at home, ha ha. So just tell me where you
fancy. Toronto, Sydney, or wherever, and I promise you we’ll be out
of here by next spring. Or even by Christmas, if you want it. And
don’t worry about Danny. He’ll just switch rugby for ice hockey, ha
ha. He’ll be all right. What do you say, Shee?”