An hour later they telephoned Carlton Sumner and he came in shouting for his son and threatening to get everybody in the place fired. Hackett drew him to one side in the dayroom and spoke to him for a little while, and Sumner stared at him, and grew quiet, turning pale under his yachtsman’s tan.
Although he had not been away for much more than a couple of days, Sinclair felt almost a stranger in the flat. It was because of his hand that everything had a new and problematical aspect. Right-handed all his life, he felt now like a left-hander being forced clumsily to use his right. It was a strange sensation, very confusing. He could not get a grip on things, or no, it was not that he could not get a grip, but that he did not know quite how to come at things, what angle to approach them from. When he held the kettle under the tap in his right hand he had to turn on the tap with his left, in a series of minute calibrations, for even the tiniest effort caused the stump of his missing finger to flare and throb. He thought of his hand as an animal, a feral dog, say, slouched on its hunkers with its fangs bared, and himself frozen in front of it, fearful of giving the brute the slightest provocation. It was not so much the pain that hampered him as the fear of pain, the paralyzed anticipation of it. And if such a simple action as filling a kettle was so awkward, how was he going to use a tin opener, or a corkscrew, or a bread knife, or any of the ordinary things that life required the use of?
He would have to have help, it was as simple as that. He would have to get someone to come and assist him, or just to be there, at first, until he got the hang of things, until he got over being afraid all the time of starting up the pain again. He sat down at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled. How would he get the tea caddy open? He felt like a child, an infant. Yes: he would have to call someone.
He got her at last at the hat shop. It was where he should have called first, had he been able to think straight. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, so of course she would be at work. Two days in hospital, a mere two days of being plied with cups of tea and having his pillows plumped for him, and he had forgotten the simplest facts about life outside the ward.
Even dialing the phone was a problem; he had to put the receiver on the table and dial with his right hand and then snatch it up again when the number started to ring.
She sounded surprised to hear his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t think who else to call. I mean, you were the first person I thought of calling, when I realized I had to call someone.” He paused; the kettle was about to boil. “I feel a fool, I feel like a big baby. Can you come?”
She came, as he knew she would. “It’s all right,” she said, “I was due time off, and Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was in a good mood.” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was the owner of the hat shop. Phoebe smiled. “Though you’re lucky-she’s not in a good mood very often.” She was wearing the black dress with the white collar that was her working outfit, and a black cardigan, and patent-leather pumps. Her hair was tied with a red ribbon; it went over the crown of her head and down past her ears and was tied somehow at the back of her neck. Her face with the dark hair drawn away from it seemed made of porcelain, delicate and fine and pale.
They were shy of each other, and tried not to touch at all yet only succeeded in bumping into each other at every turn. He had given up in his attempt to make tea and now she filled the kettle with fresh water and set it to boil, and put out cups, and found the sugar bowl and the butter dish, and sliced the bread.
“Does it pain you all the time?” she asked.
“No, no. It just makes me clumsy. I thought, since there’s nothing wrong with my right hand, I wouldn’t have any problem, or not much, but everything seems to be the wrong shape and the wrong way up. It’s all in my mind; it’ll fade.”
“I could stay and make you some dinner,” she said, not looking at him. “If you’d like.”
“Yes, I’d like you to stay. Thank you.”
They were sitting at the table, and when the kettle was boiled and she got up to make the tea the sleeve of her dress brushed against his cheek.
“Phoebe,” he said. She was at the stove, busy with the teapot and the tea. She said nothing, and did not turn to meet his gaze. “Thank you for coming.”
She brought the teapot to the table, and when she put it down he took her left hand in his right. She looked at their two hands, entwined. “I thought you hadn’t-” she said. “I thought you didn’t-”
“Yes,” he said. “So did I. We were both wrong, it seems.”
He smiled up at her but she did not smile in return. He still had hold of her hand. He gave off, she noted, a very faint hospital smell. He stood up then and kissed her. She did not close her eyes. A curling wisp of steam rose from the spout of the teapot, as if the genie, the genie who would grant all wishes, were about to materialize, with his turban, and his big mustache, and his stupid, his wonderfully stupid grin.
David at last drew his face back from hers. “Phoebe-” he began, but she cut him off.
“No, David, wait,” she said. “I have something to tell you. It’s about Dannie.”
Dannie could have gone to David Sinclair; even though he was in the hospital she could have gone to him. But instead it was to Phoebe, her new friend, that in the end she came. And it was a new version of Dannie, too, that Phoebe met. For Dannie was in a state, oh, a royal state, as she said herself, with almost a laugh. It was one of the refinements of her mysterious condition-the doctors, it seemed, were baffled by her-that even when she was in the deepest distress there was a part of her that was able to stand off to the side, observing, commenting, judging, mocking. She said, “Not bad enough to feel so bad, I have to see myself feeling it, too.”
Phoebe had been returning from work, strolling thoughtfully along Baggot Street through the summer dusk, when she had spied Dannie sitting in a huddle on the steps in front of the house with her arms around her shins and her forehead resting on her knees. It was the evening of the day that she had made that painful visit to David Sinclair at the hospital. Dannie seemed in a daze, and Phoebe had to help her up, and when they were inside, in Phoebe’s room, Dannie made at once for the bed and sat down on it, with her feet flat on the floor and her hands palm upwards in her lap and her head hanging. “Dannie, please, tell me what’s the matter,” Phoebe said, but Dannie only shook her head slowly, moving it from side to side like a jerky pendulum. Phoebe knelt beside her and tried to see into her face. “Dannie, what is it? Are you ill?”
Dannie muttered something but Phoebe could not make out the words. Phoebe stood up and went to the little stove in the corner and filled the coffee percolator and set it on the heat. She did not know what else to do. Her own hands were shaking now.
When the coffee was made Dannie drank a little of it, clutching the cup tightly with both hands, her head still bent and her hair hanging down. At last she cleared her throat and spoke. “You know I’m Jewish.”
Phoebe frowned. Had she known? She could not remember, but thought it best to pretend. She went back and stood by the stove. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I know.”
“I went to a Catholic school, though. I suppose my parents wanted me to learn how to fit in.” She lifted her head, and Phoebe was shocked by the look of her, the expression in her eyes and the deep mauve shadows under them, the slack and bloodless lips. “What about you, where did you go to school?”
“I went to the nuns, too,” Phoebe said. “Loreto.”
Dannie’s features realigned themselves; it took Phoebe a moment to realize that she was smiling.
“We might have known each other. Maybe we even met at a hockey match, or some choir thing. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Yes,” Phoebe said, “it’s possible, of course. But I’m sure I would have remembered you.”
“Do you think so, really?” The look in Dannie’s eyes turned vacant. “I’d like to have known you. We could have been friends. I would have confessed to you about being a Jew and you wouldn’t have minded. Not that anyone was taken in; they all knew I was different-an outsider.” She blinked. “Have you a cigarette?”
