The Silver Swan Page 15

  He asked her how she had come to know Dr. Kreutz. She made up a story about Mr. Plunkett sending her to Adelaide Road to deliver something that the Doctor had ordered, but it was plain from his half-suppressed smirk that he did not believe her.

  "Want to watch him, old Kreutzer," he said, getting rid of the ash on his cigarette by rolling it on the edge of the ashtray until the smoldering tip was pointed like a pencil. "They call him the Wog with the Wandering Hands, you know."

  She wondered who they were, or were they really only Leslie White? She wanted to ask him how he had got to know him, but she supposed he would only lie, as, of course, she had done herself. It was strange, but she had to admit there was something about the Doctor that would make a person wary of being completely frank in talking about him. Why was that? Anyway, there were things about Leslie White, she was sure, more and murkier things, that would make frankness seem entirely out of the question.

  They stayed in the pub for the best part of two hours-it was a good thing Billy was on the road and not waiting for her at home, to smell the whiskey on her breath. Later, she had only the haziest recollection of what they had talked about, she and Leslie. It was not the alcohol that had affected her memory-though goodness knows she was not used to drinking whiskey in the afternoon, or at any other time of day or night, for that matter-but she had felt so giddy that she had not been able to concentrate properly. She thought of the hoop she had one summer when she was a child-it was only a rusty old bicycle wheel with no tire and half the spokes broken or missing-which she used to bowl with a bit of stick along the pathway that ran all the way round the yard outside the Flats, and which, when she grew too tired to run along with it anymore, would roll off by itself for a little way, upright and really fast at first, then more slowly, until at last it began to wobble before falling over. That was just how she felt now, as if she was slowing down and wobbling, unable to control herself. It was not at the end of something that she was, though, but at the start.

  After the third drink she held up a hand and told him not to order another, that she would have to go home, and lied and said that her husband would be expecting her. She was not sure why she had mentioned her husband-was it to put this fellow in his place, because he was so cocksure of himself, or was it, as she dimly suspected, some kind of challenge to him? But what would she be challenging him to do? He was watching her, his eyes roving all over her so that she could almost feel them on her skin, like a blind man's fingertips. She saw herself lying back on Dr. Kreutz's sofa with not Dr. Kreutz but this silvery, slender-limbed man leaning over her, lifting away layer after layer of some gauzy stuff that was all that was covering her, lifting and softly lifting, pushing aside her ever more feeble protests, until she lay naked before him, naked and trembling and damp. The picture was so strong in her mind that this time she really did lose her balance briefly, and had to close her eyes for a moment and concentrate hard to keep from toppling off the stool.

  Afterwards she could not stop thinking about him. He haunted her mind, a sort of debonair, cheerful, and all too real ghost. In the shop the next morning she found herself more than once being glared at by Mr. Plunkett, having drifted off into a dream while she was in the middle of serving a customer. Her head was still buzzing from the lingering effects of those three unaccustomed whiskeys, but that was not the real cause of her inattention, and she knew it.

  She liked the neat way he did things, Leslie White: little, inconsequential things that he seemed not to notice himself doing, like sharpening the ashy tip of his cigarette that way on the side of the ashtray, or making little lattices out of spent matches, or stacking his change in separate piles on the bar, ha'pennies, pennies, threepenny bits, the edges all perfectly lined up. He could do that thing with a coin, too, rolling it over and over along the knuckles of his hand, so fast that the one coin seemed multiplied into three or four, spinning and flashing. And he dressed well. She was not sure if the shades he favored, white and off-white and metallic gray, were right for his coloring, but the cut of the things he wore was good, she could see, for she had an eye for fine tailoring. Maybe he would take her advice if she offered it. He would look grand in blue or, even better, black, a good black suit, maybe double-breasted, which would show off his slim figure, or even a three-piece, with a gold watch chain across the waistcoat. She saw herself on his arm, him all silver and jet and she in something pale and flowing… "Deirdre!" Mr. Plunkett muttered furiously, making her jump, and she had difficulty focusing on the old biddy in front of the cash register holding out her trembling shilling.

  She felt guilty, not towards Billy, of course, but-and this was very strange-because she felt as if she was betraying Dr. Kreutz. She told herself she was stupid to think this way-what had she done, after all, except go for a drink with a man, and not even at night, at that, but in the afternoon? But try as she would to make little of what had happened, even she was not convinced. For something had happened, and something more would happen, and soon, she was sure of it.

  But first there was another and altogether unexpected thing, a thing that made her see Dr. Kreutz in an entirely new, lurid light.

  3

  WHEN PHOEBE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, HER PARENTS, OR THE COUPLE WHO at the time she thought of as her parents, used to take her in July each year for a two-week stay in a house in Rosslare Strand that was lent to them by friends of Sarah's, theater people, as she recalled. This holiday by the sea was made out to be a great thing, but the truth was that none of the three of them really enjoyed it, down there in what was called the Sunny Southeast. Mal fretted at being away from his work, and Sarah had nothing to do and, although she tried not to show it, was bored most of the time. As for Phoebe herself, she did not care for the seaside. She hated showing herself half naked on the beach-she was skinny and knock-kneed, and her pale skin refused to tan no matter how long she spent in the sun-and she had no talent for making friends. Besides, she was afraid of the sea. One year, when she was nine or ten, she was walking by herself on the broad strip of thorns and tough grass that ran between the village and the beach, known for some reason as the Burrow, when she stumbled, literally stumbled, on a hare's nest with two baby hares in it. She had never seen such a thing before. It appeared that the mother hare had fashioned the nest by turning and turning herself around in the grass to form a smooth, tightly braided hollow, in which now the leverets lay coiled against one another head to tail, each a mirror image of the other, so that they looked, she thought, like an emblem on a flag, or on a coin. They were very young, for their eyes were hardly open, and they seemed not so much to breathe as throb, faintly and fast, as if they were already exhausted at the very prospect of all the desperate running they would have to do in their lives. She decided immediately, although she knew in her heart it was not true, that they had been abandoned, and that therefore it was up to her to save them. So she picked them up-how soft they were, and so hot!-and and made a pouch of her cardigan at the front and carried them home that way, and lodged them in the long grass in the corner by the rain barrel behind the house, where no one would see them. She knew, though she would not admit it, that she should not have taken them, and when she came down the next morning and they were gone she experienced a surge of panic and shameful guilt that almost made her be sick there on the spot. She tried to tell herself that the mother hare had somehow been able to follow the babies' scent and had come and taken them away again in the night, but she could not make herself believe it. She ran down to the Burrow again, to see if they might be there, but she could not even find the nest, though she searched all morning, until it was time to go home for lunch.

  She had never told anyone of the incident, and whenever she thought of it, as she did with surprising frequency, even all these years later, she was still a little ashamed; yet she recalled, too, recalled so sharply that she as good as experienced it again, the warm thrill of carrying them, these frail, helpless, yet miraculously living creatures, in the pouch of her cardigan, up S
tation Road, in the silence of the summer afternoon.

  Having Leslie White in her flat gave her something of that same thrill. She knew it was wrong, and probably dangerous, to be sheltering him. He was from a world of which she knew little, a disreputable world of sports cars and drinks in the afternoon and shady business deals, a violent world in which one was liable to be set upon in dark alleyways by silent, hard-breathing men with cudgels. He would tell her nothing of the assault other than what he had told her that first night. He insisted he did not know the three toughs or why they had attacked him. She did not believe this. From the way his eyes slid away from hers when she questioned him she saw there were things that he was hiding from her. And she was glad that he hid them. She was sure it was better not to know very much about Leslie White's doings.

  PHOEBE HAD GONE THAT NIGHT TO DR. KREUTZ, AS HE HAD ASKED HER to do. The place was not at all what she had expected-it was not a surgery, for a start. When the taxi dropped her at the address in Adelaide Road she had an immediate sense of something indefinably sinister, which was due, she felt sure, to something more than the lateness of the hour and the deserted streets. Although it was past midnight there was a ghostly glow in the sky, but whether it was the last of the day's radiance or the light of an as yet unrisen moon she could not tell. She was not often abroad at such an hour, and the world in the darkness seemed tentative and without definite shape, as if everything were in the process of being dismantled for the night. Above the trees the streetlamps shone, and giant shadows of leaves trembled on the sidewalks. On the far side of the road, near the gate of the hospital, a pair of prostitutes loitered, the tips of their cigarettes making angular weavings in the shadows, like fireflies; seeing her hesitate at the black-painted iron gate of the house they said something to each other and laughed, and one of them called out softly to her what seemed to be a question, or an invitation, the words of which she was not able to catch, which, she thought, was probably just as well.

  There was no sign of life in the basement flat, no sounds from within and no light in the window, but she had hardly taken her finger off the bell when the door suddenly swung open, as if under its own power. Dr. Kreutz had not switched on the light in the hall and at first all she saw of him was the glint of the whites of his eyes, which were like the eyes of the snake charmer in that jungle painting by the Douanier Rousseau. Kreutz must have known somehow that she was there, even before she rang the bell. When she said Leslie White's name it seemed for a moment that he would shut the door in her face, but instead he came out onto the step, pulling the door to behind him and holding it ajar with his hand. This was the strangest doctor she had ever encountered.

  "He's had-he's had an accident," she stammered. "He said to ask you to give me his medicine for him. He said you'd understand."

  He was tall and thin, and his face was darker than the night. He was wearing some kind of tunic without a collar, and when she glanced down she saw that he was barefoot. He gave off a faint odor, too, spicy and sweet.

  "An accident," he said, without emphasis. His voice was deep and unexpectedly soft and almost musical.

  "Yes." She was conscious of the two whores still watching from the other side of the road; she could feel their eyes boring into her back. "He's quite badly hurt."

  "Ah." Dr. Kreutz pondered for a moment in silence, measuring the import of what she had said. "This is most most distressing."

  Why did he not ask her what kind of an accident it had been?

  "I don't know what the medicine is," she said. "I mean, Mr. White didn't say, he just asked me to come and tell you that he needed it." She was babbling. She could not stop. "I'm not sure if there's a chemist's open at this time of night, but maybe if you give me a prescription I could get it filled somewhere, maybe over there at the hospital." She half turned, to indicate where she meant, and saw the prostitutes out of the corner of her eye, craning in curiosity. Dr. Kreutz was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  "There is no medicine," he said. "You must tell him that-no medicine, no medicine anymore."

  "But he's hurt," she said. She felt suddenly close to tears. Every word she uttered dropped like a stone into the bottomless depths of his calm and seemingly unbridgeable remoteness. "Can't you help?"

  "I am sorry, Miss," he said, "very very sorry," although he did not sound it, not at all. A moment passed, in which she could think of nothing more to say, and then he stepped back soundlessly into the dark hallway, and again there was that flash of the glistening whites of his eyes, before he shut the door.

  It was only on the way out that she saw the plaque on the railings with his name on it. "Spiritual Healing"-what was that, exactly, she wondered.

  Leslie was lying on the sofa where she had left him, dozing, his head set crookedly against the cushions. In the light from the electric lamp on the sideboard his battered face seemed more swollen than it had been before, with shiny, purplish-red bruises; it looked like something in the window of a butcher's shop. When she told him what Dr. Kreutz had said, that there would be no more medicine, he put a hand over his eyes and turned away from her, and his shoulders began to shake, and she realized that he was weeping. Whatever she had expected, it was not tears. She put out a hand to touch him but held back. Suddenly there was a gulf between them, a distance not broad but immensely, immeasurably deep. She thought again of the baby hares. It was with him as it had been with them: she was of a different species. She turned away and went into the bedroom and left him there, crying desolate tears into a corduroy-covered cushion.

  In the days that followed, that feeling of difference and distance never quite left her. All the same she nursed him as best she could, with tenderness and diligence. She supposed this was how a real, a trained nurse-when she was little she had intended to be a nurse when she grew up-would do her work, caring and yet impersonal. In the mornings she tried to make him take breakfast, a bowl of cereal or a slice of toast with tea, but he would eat nothing. At lunchtimes she came back to check on him, and in the evenings she would run up the stairs, preparing her smile for him before she burst through the door, expecting him to be gone.

  "Why, Miss Nightingale," he would croak, "it's you."

  She could see he was suffering not just from his injuries but that there was some additional, deeper anguish. She did not know what kind of medicine it was he had hoped for from Dr. Kreutz. Nor did she ask, partly because an admonitory voice inside her told her it was better that she should not know. She thought at first he might be diabetic and that it was insulin he needed, but as the days went on it became evident that this was not the case. He suffered violent bouts of fever and would lie shaking for hours, glaring at the ceiling, with his teeth clenched and a film of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip. He had shed his soiled and torn suit and wore her-or Sarah's-silk dressing gown with the dragons and birds on it, loosely closed over his concave and palely glimmering chest. She took his things, his shirt and underclothes, and washed them in the sink in the bathroom, averting her eyes from who knew what variety of stains. She had never before been called on to do someone else's laundry.

  It was remarkable, though, how little difficulty she had adjusting to this unwonted male presence in her hitherto solitary domain. She did not stop being aware of the strangeness of him, of what he was, how different from her, yet even the difference and the strangeness she got used to. It really was as if some exquisite, half-wild, injured creature had attached itself to her and given itself into her care. She felt like one of those brocaded ladies in a tapestry with a unicorn at her feet. She could hardly remember how it had been when they were together in bed that afternoon, and what details she could recall seemed more dreamlike than real.

  She tried to get him to allow her to call a doctor, a real doctor, this time, but he made a sound that was half groan, half laugh and flapped a long, pale hand bonelessly at her. "No quacks!" he cried in a tone of exaggerated comic distress. "No quacks, for pity's sake!" He said he knew there w
as nothing broken; his ribs ached, but they were sound, he was sure of it. When she helped him to the bathroom she felt as if she were supporting a sack of sticks. Yet to her puzzlement and mild consternation, it was his very frailty, his insubstantiality, that she found most arousing. What did that mean? This was, she reminded herself, a new landscape into which she had ventured. She had never lived in close contact before with a man who was not a relative. Propinquity, that was the word, sounding as it did like the name of a reserved sin out of the catechism: she had until now not lived in propinquity with a man. She smiled to herself and made a faint, involuntary, feline sound deep in her throat. Yes, this was sin, the real thing at last, and all unexpectedly. One hot and airless night when she had lain for what seemed hours sleepless on her bed with the sheet thrown aside, she rose with the dawn's first gray glimmer and went into the living room and lay down in her damp slip beside him on the sofa, and he woke and murmured something and turned, groaning a little, and took her in his arms, and she felt the heat of his bruised flesh burning against hers, and she closed her eyes and opened her lips and heard herself cry out, as if she were the one who was in pain.

  Still she could not get him to eat properly. He subsisted mostly on Garibaldi biscuits-they reminded her of flypaper-and Gordon's gin, four bottles of which he had drunk in as many days. After the first one, which she had got in the pub at the end of the street, she had to go farther and still farther afield to buy replacements, afraid that if she went to the same pub she might be reported to the Guards as a dangerous drunkard. He had a craving for sweet things of all kinds, cake, chocolate, sugar-coated bonbons. He sent her out to buy Yorkshire Toffees and sucked away at them all day, like a schoolboy.