A Fortunate Man Read Free Page A

the daughter ten years ago. She had a cold and cough and complained that she felt weak. Her chest X-ray was normal. He had the impression that she wanted to talk about something. She would never look at him directly but kept casting him quick anxious glances as though somehow by these to bring him closer. He questioned her but could not gain her confidence.
    A few months later she was suffering from insomnia and then asthma. All the tests for allergy proved negative. The asthma got worse. Now when he saw her, she smiled at him through her illness. Her eyes were round like a rabbit’s. She was timid of anything outside the cage of her illness. If anybody approached too near her eyes twitched like the skin round a rabbit’s nose. But her face was quite unlined. He was convincedthat her condition was the result of extreme emotional stress. Both she and her mother insisted, however, that she had no worries.
    Two years later he discovered the explanation by chance. He was out on a maternity case in the middle of the night. There were three women neighbours in attendance. Whilst waiting he had a cup of tea with them in the kitchen. One of them worked in a large mechanized dairy in the nearest railway town. The girl with asthma had once worked there too. And it turned out that the manager – who was in the Salvation Army – had had an affair with her. Evidently he had promised to marry her. Then he was overcome by remorse and religious scruples and had abandoned her. Was it even an affair – or did he only once, one evening, lead her by the hand out of the creamery up to his leather-chaired office?
    The doctor once again questioned the girl’s mother. Had her daughter been happy when she worked at that dairy? Yes, perfectly. He asked the girl if she had been happy there. She smiled in her cage and nodded her head. Then he asked her outright if the manager had ever made a pass at her. She froze – like an animal who realizes that it is impossible to bolt. Her hands stopped moving. Her head remained averted. Her breathing became inaudible. She never answered him.
    Her asthma continued and caused structural deterioration of the lungs. She now survives on steroids. Her face is moon-shaped. The expression of her large eyes is placid. But her brows and eyelids and the skin pulled tight over her cheekbones twitch at every movement and sound which might constitute a warning of the unexpected. She looks after her mother, but very seldom leaves the cottage. When she sees the doctor, she smiles at him as now she would probably smile at the soldier of the Salvation Army.
    Before, the water was deep. Then the torrent of God and theman. And afterwards the shallows, clear but constantly disturbed, endlessly irritated by their very shallowness as though by an allergy. There is a bend in the river which often reminds the doctor of his failure.

    English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world. The air is cold. The floorboards are cold. It is perhapsthis coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than amonth ago because of the very slight frost. There is a smell of toast. And on the block of butter small grains of toast from the last impatient knife. Outside, there is sunlight which is simultaneously soft and very precise. Every leaf of each tree seems separate.
    She lay in a four-poster bed: her face was ashen-coloured and her cheeks fallen in. Her eyes were tight shut in pain. She wheezed as she breathed, especially when breathing out.
    The doctor stood looking and then asked for a cupful of warm water and cotton wool. As he injected morphia into her upper arm, she flinched a little. Strange that suffering so much pain in her chest she should flinch at the pin-prick. With the warm water and cotton wool he cleaned away the little droplet of blood from her worn, large arm, the colour of stone or bread, as though it had acquired