Galore - Michael Crummey [154]
—I knew goddamn well, he said. —I knew it. Have you told Eli?
—I wanted to be sure, she said.
—Perhaps we should have Dr. Newman take a look at the girl, he suggested. —Before I bothers Minnie with it.
—Come by on Sunday afternoon, she told Tryphie. —We’ll ask him then.
The doctor spent an hour at Selina’s House every week, drinking cups of barky tea he fortified with rum when he thought Hannah wasn’t watching. He was telling her the regiment was back at the front and fighting in Ypres when Tryphie stuck his head round the door. Tryphie looked from one to the other, tentative, trying to guess if there’d been any mention as yet of Esther. He sat to the table and fell into talk of the union to avoid the subject most on his mind.
—This conscription bill is the end of it, Dr. Newman predicted. —The F.P.U. is dead.
—Coaker won’t let it go so easy as that.
—He’ll keep it afloat a good while, Newman said. —But there’s no one going to take him at his word again. He’s just another politician now.
—The movement’s finished, you’re saying.
—No one will remember there even was a movement after Coaker goes.
—You sound more like Bride all the time, Hannah told him.
Newman nodded. —I have to keep her with me somehow, he said. He cast around the room, struck by the loss afresh and fighting for purchase. —I appreciate you looking out to Esther all this time, he said finally.
Hannah glanced at Tryphie. —We’ve been meaning to ask you, Dr. Newman. Have you noticed any change in her lately?
—She’s drinking a bit less, I thought.
—I mean in how she looks. Her shape.
Newman squinted across at her. —I haven’t really paid. He glanced down at the table as if trying to picture his granddaughter.
—I think before Abel left for overseas, Doctor, Hannah said. —Tryphie and me, we’re fairly certain.
Newman was still staring at the table and she thought he’d never looked more like an old man. He glanced up at Tryphie and then Hannah. —You’re sure?
—There’s no mistaking it, she said, suddenly doubting herself again.
Newman shook his head and looked directly at his stepson. —She asked me not to tell you, Tryphie. She had a procedure in Europe.
—What kind of procedure?
—I tried cleaning up the scar tissue when she came home. A butcher’s job they made of it.
Hannah turned away from the table, setting the teapot on the counter. She felt strangely disappointed to think she’d been wrong all this time.
—Perhaps I’ll go up and talk to her, Newman said.
The stairs were almost too much for him and he stood on the landing a minute to get his wind. Ambushed by an image of Bride as the cancer dismantled her one organ at a time, the veins showing through her papery skin. The false teeth in her wasted face made her look a corpse in the bed and he’d wished he was dead, watching her leave in so much torment. —I can make it stop, he told her, knowing she would never consent to such a thing. —When you’re ready.
Bride offering the slightest nod. —Now the once, she said.
It was the oddest expression he’d learned on the shore. Now the once. The present twined with the past to mean soon, a bit later, some unspecified point in the future. As if it was all the same finally, as if time was a single moment endlessly circling on itself. Bride forever absent and always with him.
Newman straightened his tie and knocked lightly at Esther’s door, letting himself in when he got no answer. She was asleep on the bed dressed only in her nightshirt and even from across the room he could see the remarkable distension of the belly. The tumor at least the size of a cabbage, he guessed.
His presence in the room woke her and Esther glanced around until she found him there.
—Hello my love, he said.
She placed both hands on her stomach. —You told me I’d never be able to get pregnant again, Dr. Newman.
He shrugged. —Medicine is an inexact science.
—I didn’t realize, she said, how much I wanted this.
Newman cleared his throat. —Sometimes that’s all it takes, wanting something