Fever Read Free

hands, a burning that she recognized as sexual longing. She who had never been unfaithful, who had never dreamt of such a thing, and Colin so sick.
    She passed another restless night and was at the hospital before eight. Several doctors were standing around Colin’s bed gazing silently down on him while the head nurse stood by tensely. She noticed Cecilia in the doorway and spoke in an undertone to one of the doctors.
    “Ah,” he said, turning to Cecilia.
    “I’ll stop in at noon,” the second doctor said. He and the third doctor walked out of the room past Cecilia and down the hall.
    “I’m Dr. Jameson,” the first doctor said to her. “Dr. Ransom asked me to have a look in.”
    Colin lay motionless on the bed, his eyes closed, an unnaturally red spot of colour high on each cheek. His lips too, were more vividly coloured than usual. Dr. Jameson took her arm and said, “Let’s just sit down and talk this over.” He guided her into a small office behind the nursing station, held a chair for her and sat down himself.
    “Now,” he said, “your husband is very sick. But you know that.”
    She said, “Have you found out what’s wrong with him?” He didn’t reply directly, but instead, not looking at her, began to list the different tests they had done and the result of each. He remarked on certain possibilities and dismissed them with a gesture or left them open. Cecilia tried to listen to him, but her mind wandered to Colin’s strange colouring, to the fact the head nurse was a different one, and to wondering who Dr. Jameson was and what might be his field of specialty.
    Gradually it dawned on her that Colin was worse, a good deal worse, and that was why Dr. Jameson had brought her into this room and why the nurses and aides at the station or passing down the hall had avoided looking at her as she followed him.
    She tried to get a grip on this idea, to admit, to force it to penetrate the shield of her own bewildering indifference. She repeated to herself, Colin is desperately ill, but still no shiver of fear passed down her spine. Dr. Jameson stopped talking and went away. Cecilia went back to Colin’s bedside.
    At noon he opened his eyes and spoke to her.
    “They are coming with flowers,” he said. “They want to speak to us. Be ready.”
    “Yes, Colin,” she replied, and bent to kiss him on his hot, dry forehead, but as her lips touched his skin, he turned his head fretfullyaway from her much as a cranky, feverish child might, and screwed up his face before he lapsed back into unconsciousness. Later he said, “It is very big and there is an echo like silver.”
    They were keeping the door to his room closed now and had hung a ‘No Visitors’ sign on it. Nurses moved swiftly, silently in and out of the darkened room, staring down at Colin with pursed lips before they went away again.
    “I don’t understand it,” Dr. Jameson muttered to Colin on one of his several brief visits.
    At eleven that night the head nurse came, put her arm around Cecilia’s shoulders and told her to go back to the hotel and try to sleep.
    “I know you want to be here, but you don’t want to collapse when he needs you. Is the rest of the family on its way?” Cecilia shook her head numbly, no.
    “His parents are dead,” she said, “and I don’t want our children here. If he isn’t better by morning, I’ll tell his sister to come.”
    “Go back to the hotel,” the nurse said in a kindly way, “if you are carrying this alone. I’ll call you at once if I think you should be here.”
    Cecilia obeyed and took a taxi back to the hotel. Just as she entered the lobby the doors of the elevator opened and the man she had talked with the night before stepped out as if he had arranged to meet her.
    “You look so tired,” he said to her, without any preliminaries or surprise. “Come and have a drink with me before you go to bed.”
    “I don’t think I could sleep anyway,” she said. They went together into the bar