第18章 The Doctor Will Be Looked After

Elverston's bag came down off the table on the twenty-second of January and stayed there for six days, which was how Pippa knew. "You've not opened your bag in nine days." "I've been going out to see somebody at Bredon's." "You've been sitting in this room since the fourth reading." Pippa took his chin and turned his face to the window, which is a thing she had watched her aunt do to a difficult horse and had not expected to do to a doctor. "You've got a chest. You haven't let Tibb hear you breathe across a room since the twelfth and I've been counting." "The chest is mine and I'll attend to it." "You'll attend to it in this house and not in the room over the parlour, which is the coldest room in Fernhollow and has a window that opens." "Then move me to the other end." "No." * * * He was a very difficult man for four days. He was rude to Tibb twice and to Wilby once and to Pippa four times, and on the fifth morning, when she brought him the second bowl of broth in a week, he took it and put his fingers round the bowl and held it without drinking it for the length of a whole minute. "My mother," he said. "Your mother died in September." "In nineteen sixty-two," said Elverston. "There is no connection and I have been circling it for a week because I did not know what else to say." He drank. "She had a chest exactly like this. She went out to see a woman with a fever in a cottage past the crags in nineteen forty-nine, in January, and came back, and she was in the bed by the Friday, and she told everybody for a month that she had caught it at the surgery from a patient, which was a lie, because she would not have my father — no — because she would not have me walking up the hill asking whether he thought she ought to have gone." "Did he think she ought to have gone?" "Everyone thinks she ought to have gone. That is the difficulty with everybody." He put the bowl down. "She came up this mountain every year at the turn of the year for thirty-one years, because your great-aunt had a room in this house that was warmer than her own, and she would sit in it for a fortnight and be annoying to everybody, and in nineteen sixty-two she did not come, and I was fifteen, and it was my first winter on my own." Pippa stood in the kitchen doorway. "Is that why you don't go out after dark?" "That is why I don't go out after dark. And I would like you to stop looking at my chest." "I'm not looking at your chest. I'm looking at your eyes. You've got the fever's shine on you and you're a doctor and you know the difference between a shine and a shine and you're frightened of it, and I'd be frightened of it too." "Yes," said Elverston. "I am." * * * On the sixth day she moved him down without asking him, which took two of them, and cost him his dignity, and she considered at the time that she would be weighing that trade for a long time afterwards. "You may be angry." "I am going to be extremely angry, at length, for the rest of my life, and it will bore you senseless and you will hear every word of it," said Elverston, in the voice of a man arranging his affairs. He was very angry for eleven days. He went on being angry on and off for three weeks and then, on the eleventh of February, he came up the fourteen steps on his own, without the lamp, which was against every rule in the book, and sat down on the floor of the deep room beside the hearth-stone in his shirtsleeves. "You have lost your place," said Pippa. "You were six inches to the left." "I know exactly where I am." He put his hand flat on the stone, the way she had done. "It comes up eleven times." "Eleven." "And there's a pause before the tenth that there wasn't in January." He took his hand up. "Is that a thing?" "That's a thing I'll have to ask about." * * * Tibb fed him for nineteen days and neither of them ever once mentioned it, and he complained about every single meal to her face and ate every single one. "He'd have gone," Tibb said on the last of those days, in the yard, while she was shaking a rug. "Not this week. In February. He's got a chest like a crow's nest and he's the only doctor for nine miles and he'll sit up with a woman in a cottage past the crags on his feet rather than be in a bed." "So we're not going to tell him he can't." "No," said Tibb. "We're going to make a bed so comfortable he can't think of a reason to get out of it, and that's the whole art and it's taken me thirty years and I'd not teach it to anybody who wanted to be taught." * * * He wrote his page on the twelfth. She did not know he had done it until the fifteenth, when she was checking the book for something else and found his sentence at the top of a fresh leaf, in a doctor's writing, small and even and pressed hard. *I came up this mountain to be looked after and would not say so, and the woman who keeps this house moved me downstairs with two people and without asking me, and I am fifty-nine years old and I have not been looked after since I was seventeen.* Pippa read it four times. Then she went and found him in the parlour and told him that the rule said the register was not to be read outside the common room, and that he had written something in it that four other people would now read before they could look at him, and that he had better be certain. "I am certain," said Elverston. "That is why I wrote it in the book and not in a letter to my sister in Selborne. A letter can be burnt. A thing in a book is the same as a thing a patient says in a surgery, which is that it happened and cannot be unsaid and had better not be repeated." "And did you think about what you'd have to look like at breakfast?" "I thought about it for two days," he said. "Then I decided that if the sentence could not be said over a pot of tea then it was not a true sentence, and it was only a thing a man had written down because he was ashamed." * * * They read the register aloud each night after that, and it started because of him. It had always been read on the first night of the week, or when the Thawkeeper judged it due, and it took eleven minutes, and half the room could not hear it, and Elverston said it was a waste of a good fire and a waste of a good neck. "It's a book in a passage," he said. "Nobody looks at it." "Give me one evening where everybody looks at it." He gave her that. It was the eighth of February, and it was meant to last ten minutes, and it lasted an hour and a half, and by twenty past nine there were four people arguing about a sentence written in 1904 by a woman they had all known. * * * Amberley — Ferrenby — read his own out, all four lines, in a voice that carried. Marlowes did not get past the first word and stood up and went out and came back in and stood behind a chair and finished it standing up. Margery Otterburn read hers out twice because nobody had heard the first time and this was not a thing she was going to do once only. Idony read hers out in one breath and then sat down and put her hand over her mouth for a moment, which nobody remarked upon, which was the whole courtesy of the room. Sella read hers out very fast and very loud. Kerrith, who was ninety-one and had come up from the shop, read hers out in a voice like a bell being struck, and it was the shortest sentence in the book, and what it said was: *I have been here a long time and I am glad of it.* And Elverston read his out twice, the second time slower, and looked at nobody. Then Pippa read hers out, and the room went quiet in a different way, and she got all the way to the end of it before she had to stop, and when she had stopped nobody said anything for a while. "That's the first time I've been certain of anything since Christmas," said Wrenfield, from the settle where he had not slept three nights running. "No," said Pippa. "It's the first time I've been certain of anything at all." * * * Under the two entries for that night, in the damp grey ink, four words: *Ask her what she is afraid of.* ---