The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [31]
Felix was no eccentric, but it was obvious that he was far outside their narrow world, and had long ago given up trying to make contact with them. He was polite almost to deference, but it was the politeness rather of a stranger than of a respectful son.
The mother was tall and stiffly corseted, with harshly-sculpted hair and a long, wooden face. The father was slight and concave, and might have once looked a little like Felix, but his face now had lengthened and blanked out with the inward-turned expression of a bore. Like his son, he was a doctor, a moderately able surgeon, who had lost lives through slowness and lack of flair, but never through lack of caution. Theatre nurses went slowly demented while he muttered over an open abdomen, pondering whether to take something out or leave it in. Young house surgeons fretted themselves into mistakes, desperately holding clamps and artery forceps while Mr Allen peered into the cavity through his sterilized steel spectacles and thought of all the disadvantages of any procedure he might finally take.
He was as deliberate in his speech as he was in his work, weighing his words momentously, even if they were only going to add up to a casual remark.
‘How do you do?’ he asked Virginia, as seriously as if he were taking her case history. He held her hand for a long time, not from friendliness, but from an inability to let go, and then said: ‘Yes – Yes,’ and nodded, as if he had stated an opinion.
‘Felix, my boy.’ He turned slowly and patted Felix on the arm, as if he were trying to familiarize himself by feel.
‘How are you, Dad?’ Felix spoke a little louder than usual, although his father was not deaf. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Thank you.’ A pause. ‘I am well.’
‘Business good?’
Mr Allen considered this. His cautious eyes wandered round the unhomely drawing-room, where the chairs stood round the walls, in the wrong places for easy conversation. His gaze crept over the pelmet of the curtains, the straight, unrestful sofa, the little table with the glasses and the bottle of sherry and the half-bottle of gin.
When his eyes returned to Felix, he’answered: ‘Satisfactory. And you?’
‘I’ve been very busy.’ Felix did not talk quickly, but in contrast to his father, it sounded as if he were gabbling. ‘The days are as hectic as usual, and I’ve been out most nights. Up all last night, as a matter of fact. A very unusual case. I’d like to hear what you think of it.’
Virginia guessed that he always came prepared with some special case in which he might interest his father, to flatter the old man, and give them something to talk about.
Mr Allen insinuated his hands into his trouser pockets, and rocked slowly back and forth from heels to toes. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Come and sit with me, Miss Martin, if the men are going to talk surgery,’ Mrs Allen said. Virginia would have liked to hear about the unusual case, but Felix’s mother, walking as if she were at the head of a stately procession, led her over to a window, where two hard-backed chairs stood formally in a draught.
‘May I offer you a glass of sherry?’ she said regally. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer gin.’ The way in which she said ‘gin’ made Virginia answer: ‘Sherry will be fine, thank you.’ In any case, she could see nothing on the little table to go with the gin.
Mrs Allen had sat down. She rose all in one piece with a straight back, not using the arms of the chair.
‘Please don’t trouble. Let me get it,’ Virginia said.
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Allen sat down again in the same unbending movement, without looking back at the chair. ‘You may bring me a small glass too, if you will.’
Virginia went over to the table, feeling the frigid gaze on her back. She tried to pour the sherry neatly and gracefully, but a few drops spilled on the shiny surface of the table. She mopped it with her finger, and had to wipe the finger on her skirt, because