Julia Paradise Read Free Page B

for her. He had finally found her, in her present pitiful and exhausted condition, in a workingman’s tea-house; whence he had brought her here.
    The Reverend William Paradise finished his story with a kind of pitiful exhaustion of his own. He wiped his handkerchief across his flushed pink forehead. Ayres looked back at him from his armchair with a mixture of mild enquiry and contempt. ‘I might point out,’ he said quietly, ‘that cases such as these are common to the point of banality here.’
    A whimper of disbelief escaped from the clergyman. ‘Like my wife’s, you say?’
    â€˜I’ve seen hospital wards full of neurotic Englishwomen, many of them victims of their husbands’ ambitions in the colonial services. Some of them are just gin-soaked biddies in there to dry out and to have a bit of a rest.’
    The other man said in his quiet, pleading voice, ‘We are Methodists.’
    Ayres looked back at him, a hint of amusement in the shape of his mouth through his beard. He said, ‘We put it down to the East. Sooner or later the women are shipped home and I daresay that in many cases simple homesickness is as good an explanation as any.’
    â€˜And this is the category into which you are putting my wife?’
    â€˜Not at all. I simply wished to point out that I have seen quite severe cases of dementia among European women here in China and in the end the cure was as simple as a steamship ticket home.’
    â€˜Our home is here, Ayres. These are now our people. We have our mission.’
    Ayres looked at him and made no attempt to disguise his contempt. The other man saw this and went on quickly, ‘You will consent to examine her, though?’
    â€˜I’ll examine her.’ Ayres tried to smile, but the effect only added to his visitor’s disquiet. ‘As you said, no miracles. You go downstairs and have some tea and I’ll see what I can do for her. Try a piece of the strudel cake. They do serve excellent teas here.’
    Â 
    Julia Paradise was awake. She lay on his leather ottoman and looked around the strange room in which she found herself. A range of expressions formed on her face: a scowl, a frown, a brief relaxation into her former languor, then a look of utterly pathetic dejection. When she spoke—a word here and there in answer to Ayres’ questions—her voice slurred as she salivated, and now and then the saliva dribbled uncontrollably from the corner of her mouth.
    She was not a pretty woman. Her dark hair was at once short and untidy and her eyes were made unnaturally large by the thinness of her face. Her skin was pale, anaemic and unhealthy-looking. Her nervous little figure was emaciated, as though it had never filled out from girlhood, and she was apparently breastless.
    It was immediately obvious to Ayres from the jerky agitation of her movements and from her habitual relapse into a mask-like apathetic expression that she was indeed suffering from a serious nervous condition. The mask contorted from time to time without warning into spasms of tics douloureux. Her hands were particularly thin; the skin stretched tightly over the bones of her knuckles and her fingers were reddened and scaly with what looked like dermatitis. Her face was so emaciated with its dark eyes, stark cheekbones and cropped hair, that Ayres asked himself whether there might not be something organically wrong with her, whether or not she might after all be the victim of a wasting disease. He had formed the conclusion from her husband’s account that she was an hysteric; an hypothesis in which the physician who had previously examined her apparently concurred.
    Then Ayres smiled in grim recognition. He went over to his desk and slowly, methodically unpacked his surgical bag. He was not so much of a specialist that he did not have to cope with the common run of complaints among the guests staying at the hotel, the gastric upsets and diarrhoea,