A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [79]
“Oh yes, quite sure. No mistaking it. I’ve diagnosed this kind of thing often enough.”
He’s quite sure. He could be mistaken. But how could he? His hands have a knowledge beyond his brain. A foetus doesn’t feel the same to those seeing hands as the thing in me. He’s diagnosed this kind of thing often enough before.
“Rachel, listen –”
Doctor Raven puts a hand on my shoulder. His face is anxious. He is anxious about me. Anxious in case I should be too concerned over the nature of the thing in me, the growth, the non-life. How can non-life be a growth? But it is. How strange. There are two kinds. One is called malignant. The other is called benign. That’s what he said. Benign.
Oh my God. I didn’t bargain for this. Not this.
“Rachel – please –”
It is Doctor Raven’s voice, but I cannot any longer see him, or else I’m seeing him through some changing and shimmering substance utterly unlike air. I looked down once through the water at the lake, and it trembled and changed, and still I could see, far below, the thousand minute creatures spinning in a finned dance, and my father said Fishes, only just spawned, and there were thousands of them, thousands. The waters are in front of my eyes.
“All right, my dear. Just sit down. I know it’s been a shock.”
“No. No, you don’t know –”
My speaking voice, and then only that other voice, wordless and terrible, the voice of some woman mourning for her children.
How long? I don’t know. What does it matter? It does not matter now that I’ve been sitting here, touchily attended to by one embarrassed nurse and one well-meaning physician who wants to help me pull myself together and yet can’t help having an eye on the clock, the waiting room still full.
“I’m sorry. I’m all right now.”
“Take your time,” he says.
“No, I’m fine, really. It was just for a minute –”
“Of course. I know. But try not to think of it too much. Not at this stage. These things are operable, you know, even if it’s what we hope it isn’t.”
“Yes. Well – thanks.”
I am outside now, walking on the streets, walking somehow along in the late afternoon sun that gilds the store windows and turns everything to a dusty brightness.
Only now do I recall the long discussions with myself. What will I do? Where will I go? The decision, finally. It cost me something, that decision, you know? Then telling Calla. I did tell her. What if I was pregnant, I said. And she said, my Lord, I’ve looked after kids before.
All that. And this at the end of it. I was always afraid that I might become a fool. Yet I could almost smile with some grotesque lightheadedness at that fool of a fear, that poor fear of fools, now that I really am one.
ELEVEN
He was right. Doctor Raven was right, dead right. And now that I’m back at home, the time in hospital seems to have been anaesthetized, bled of any shade except the pallor of dreams or drugs, the colour of sleep. I hardly noticed what they were doing to me, or who they were. As though it were all being imagined in one of those late-night spook features repeated with eerie boredom on the inner TV. As though I might be able to switch it off, finally, or turn away, and come back to life and find that the child had begun perceptibly to move.
They said I was a co-operative patient, to lie so still. How did they know? They thought I was worried about having cancer.
And of course I was, as well. There is room enough in anyone’s bonehouse for too much duplicity.
Nick, at first in there I talked to all the time, on the private telephone of silence. I thought I would ignore the walls, the hollow needles filled with oblivion, the faces, the kindly prodding eyes. I thought if the old game could be coaxed and conjured up once more, it would be a way of seeing the days through by not seeing them. So I allowed that I was in the hospital, but it was always visiting hours and you were there. Sometimes you were there because everything had been done and settled in advance. Item on City page – High School Teacher’s Wife Dies in Tinned Salmon Ptomaine Case. Or more satisfactorily,