Ingenious pain Andrew Miller (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Yes,' says James.

'Well, sir,' says the Physician, taking another cake, 'and what will you do with yourself should I see fit to discharge you? Speak up.'

James says: 'I shall live quietly. I shall be no man's enemy.'

'And how will you live? How shall you eat?'

James glances at the secretary. He says: 'I can read and write. I might use a pen . . .'

The Physician laughs, slaps the table, twists in his seat. Thear that, Price? He wants to be a secretary. A clerk! Tell me, is that suitable employment for a former lunatic?' To James he says: 'Where will you go?'

'I have a sister,' says James, surprising himself with his answer. In Somerset.'

You think she will be glad to see you, eh? Her mad brother? You intend to walk there?'

'Yes, sir.'

There is a long pause while the Physician eats his cake. James looks down again at the carpet. There is a particular pattern on the carpet, a blue and red arabesque, which he can barely take his eyes from. He knows that his destiny is being decided.

'Mr Price,' says the Physician, 'have the patient sign for his discharge. If he is to be a secretary he should be able to sign his own name.'

Price beckons James to his desk, opens a ledger, turns it around and offers a pen. He taps the page at the place where James must sign.

The Physician has taken up his newspaper again. He says: 'You are released. Take no strong liquor. Avoid all excitement. Women in particular. Other than a sister, of course. A sister is acceptable.'

James tries to speak but cannot. He feels exhausted, as if during the entire interview he had been holding over his head something as large and heavy as the Physician's desk. His fingertips are sweating. He knows that if he does not leave the room immediately it may still elude him, this questionable gift of freedom.

Wagner plucks his elbow, leads him out, then takes him by a private staircase to a door at the side of the hospital. There are no goodbyes to Adam, to the Collins brothers, to Asquini. Wagner

grins at him, as if it has all been a sly joke in which they were both required to play their parts. James looks round at the light, steps outside. Is this what he wants? Are not the familiar horrors of the hospital preferable to the unknown ones of the world outside? The urge to hide is very strong; to creep into the shadows, to bolt up a tree.

The door closes behind him. He flinches as he hears the turning of the key. He closes his eyes for a moment, concentrates, then walks very slowly across the formal gardens - once the woods outside of Athens. He half expects, half hopes, to hear a voice recalling him, but no one calls. He steps through a smaller gate at the side of the main gate, closes it carefully behind him and goes, faster now, almost running, towards the woman who is waiting in the white dust of the road to rescue him a second time.

SEVENTH

'Kyrie, eleison.' 'Christe, eleison! 'Kyrie, eleison.'

The words scatter like bats into the shadows of the arches. Simon Tupper breaks into a fit of coughing. George Pace in the pew behind slaps the round of the old man's back. The fit subsides.

'The Lord be with you'

''And with thy spirit!

'Let us pray!

It is the usual Easter Sunday congregation, swaying gently now upon the keels of their knees. Lady Hallam is there, of course, lovely in a gown of yellows and golds. His Lordship is in London; politics or whoring or both. Behind Lady Hallam is Dido, hair - not all of it her own - piled on to her head with pins and grease and Spanish combs. The Reverend thinks: At night she must sleep with it in a wire cage, as if it were a beast. A pretty fan she carries today; gold stars on a sky of ultramarine. Fashionable; practical too in this weather. Warm in the church today. The old ones will be asleep before long.

'Almighty God who through thine only begotten son Jesus Christ hast overcome death and opened the gates of everlasting life . . .'

301

In the balance sheet of the Reverend's fortunes there is for the moment a slight surplus upon the credit side. True, he remains obstinately constipated, and true, he rowed unpleasantly with Dido last evening over some detail of household expenses. Not their usual sparring. Things best unsaid had been spoken on both sides and the Reverend went to his bed with a heavy conscience, tossing and turning until at last he climbed into the cold of his room, found a pen, and scratched an apology, slipping it under his sister's door, noting as he did so that she had a light in her room. And true, he finds himself this Easter without his faith again, one of those occasional fallings-away that used so to trouble him but which now worry him less than the constipation. God plays hide-and-seek with him. Experience has taught him that he will find a way back, that it is better to lie still upon the surface of the waters than thrash about in a panic.

To set against these he has the following: his good-tempered cow, Ruby, has calved. Pace came in with news of it at breakfast-time, his hands still slick with the birthing of it. They had all gone out then - the Reverend, Dido, Mrs Cole and Tabitha -to the stable where the animal had been brought the day before. A glorious sight! The cow's expanse of tongue licking the calf, and the calf itself, trembling, delicately stunned by its passage into the air . . .

Then there is his garden, ignited by the season, the red earth seeping flowers, blossom crowding on to his fruit trees, petals cupping showers of rain. The previous Sunday he caught Sam dipping the point of his tongue