A Fortunate Man Read Free Page B

the colour through its scrubbing and baking.
    Then, using the same much-worked arm, he took her blood pressure. It was very low. She kept her eyes shut as if the light, so soft and so precise, was pressing between them. She had still said nothing.
    He prepared a syringe for another injection. The fifty-year-old daughter was standing at the foot of the bed, waiting to be told what to do.
    He inserted the needle into a vein near the wrist. This time she didn’t flinch. After half the injection he paused, holding the syringe in the loose fold of skin as if it were the skin’s feather, and with his other hand he felt her neck to check the strength of her pulse in the artery and the degree of congestion in the jugular vein. He then completed the injection.
    The old woman opened her eyes. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said very distinctly, almost crisply.
    He listened to her chest. Her overworked brown arms, her deeply lined face, her creased strained neck were suddenly denied by the soft whiteness of her breast. The grey-haired son down in the yard with the cows, the daughter at the foot of the bed incarpet slippers and with swollen ankles, had both once clambered and fed here, and yet the soft whiteness of her breast was like a young girl’s. This she had preserved.
    Downstairs in the parlour the doctor explained the medicines he was leaving. The old woman’s wheezing was still audible through the floorboards. Three dogs lay on the carpet, heads on outstretched paws, eyes open. They scarcely stirred when the old man came in.
    He seemed dazed and sleepy. The doctor asked him how he was. ‘Not so bad,’ he said, ‘except for the screws.’
    Neither father nor daughter nor the son outside asked the doctor about the old woman. The doctor said he would be coming back that evening.
    When he came back the parlour was in darkness. This disturbed him somewhat. He called out and receiving no answer felt his way up the stairs. The stairs led straight into the first bedroom. Across it he could see the light under the door of the second room.
    The room smelt now of sickness: under the dressing-table on which stood all the family wedding photographs in leather frames and a nineteenth-century child’s mug with the Death and Burial of Cock Robin engraved upon it, there was an enamel bowl with urine in it, and spit stained a little with blood. The daughter explained that every time her mother coughed she peed a little involuntarily. The old woman was paler and a piece of damp rag was laid over her forehead. The room smouldered around her, all its comfort burnt and drenched and then burnt again.
    The doctor listened once more to her chest. She lay back exhausted. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, not as though it were an apology but simply a fact. He took her temperature and blood pressure. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you’ll sleep soon and feel rested.’
    Her husband was sitting in the dark in the next room. The doctor had walked through it without noticing him, when he had come up the stairs. Now the daughter shepherded both men down, but still without putting a light on. For a moment it seemed thatthe stairs and the parlour were part of the outbuildings, unlit, unheated, belonging to the animals now stabled for the night. It seemed that the home was reduced to the four-poster bed in the lighted room above, where the old woman, the soft whiteness of whose breast had never changed, was dying.
    When the daughter suddenly switched the light on, the doctor and the old man were dazzled. For each of them it was like finding himself on a stage. The familiar furniture was part of a stage set and both had to play roles which were utterly strange to what they thought of as their true nature. Both would have grasped any chance of reverting to the normal truth.
    The old man sat down with an overcoat across his knees. ‘She has pneumonia now,’ the doctor said, ‘and she must take