I said nothing, but there it was again: unwell.
After that, Thomas talked incessantly of me seeing a doctor. He kept suggesting there was something wrong with me, that I was depressed and listless. He urged me to make an appointment with his friend, Dr Lovett. When I insisted that there had been no child to lose, for it had been too early to tell and I’d been foolish to speak of it, he told me I was in denial. I countered that I was only being scientific, to which he called me cold and unfeeling, saying it was not natural for a woman to say such things about her own child. I began to doubt myself. His obsession with finding a mechanical error with my body made me responsible for everything, so I stopped arguing; everything I said only seemed to prove his theory anyway. It dawned on me this was the most attention I’d had from Thomas in weeks. He appeared to take pleasure in talking about my insides as if they were defective, as if I was a rusty old machine that could be taken apart, assessed and reassembled, this time with younger parts.
At the end of August, when I could no longer avoid it, I did see a doctor, but I made damn sure to pick my own.
11
The wiry little clerk took too much pleasure in telling me, down the slope of his nose, that the renowned Dr Shivershev wasn’t taking on any new patients at the moment, he was already far too busy. Did I have a recommendation, he asked, in the tone of one who thought he already knew the answer. I lied, told him we were friends, that we knew each other very well from the London. This confused the poor boy, since Dr Shivershev was the type who ignored everyone, indiscriminately. So I told him I expected my friend to be outraged when he heard I’d been turned away. The young clerk lost his superior attitude in a cloud of self-doubt and suggested an appointment for the following week, on Monday the twentieth of August.
I hadn’t been hell-bent on having Dr Shivershev as my physician. I had trudged up and down Harley Street and found myself baffled by the countless names on gold plates outside every door. The more I read, the more muddled I became. I nearly gave up and resigned myself to consulting Thomas’s friend, but then I saw his name: Dr Robert V. Shivershev. How many Shivershevs in London could there be? We had no friendship; I was simply a nurse. I was sure that to him we were all interchangeable and faceless, smoothed over, like ivory pieces on a chessboard. This was not important. I only wanted to have my physician and my husband’s newfound obsession with my health in separate jars on a shelf.
*
‘You say you know him from the London?’ the elegant housekeeper asked as I followed her up the grand staircase. Old enough to be my mother, but more beautiful than I would ever be, she had a pile of dark hair arranged in an intricate weave, soft eyes and an accent I couldn’t place. She wore a lilac silk dress and was the most captivating housekeeper I had ever seen, like a misplaced duchess down on her luck.
‘I was a nurse, but then I married.’
‘Oh! How wonderful. If I were an adventurous young woman again… Well, never mind.’
She led me to his office door, put one hand on the handle, hesitated, then whispered, ‘Knowing that you, a professional woman, would have kept your ward spotlessly clean, I feel I must apologise for the state of his office. The doctor refuses to let me in, he accuses me of moving things, which I never do.’ She shook her head. ‘There I go with my overexplaining, when you must be aware of how stubborn he can be, yes?’
‘He can be a character.’ I smiled. I had no clue as to what we were both referring.
‘A good way of putting it, my dear,’ she said and opened the door.
Once inside, I understood what she meant. The drapes were in a random state – some were closed, others open, and most of them looked as if they’d been strung up in a hurry and forgotten about. It had a disorientating effect on the light, plunging some parts of the room into darkness and highlighting other areas with bright shards that illuminated the floating dust. I sneezed as soon as I entered.
The room looked as if it had been ransacked and abandoned in a great hurry, as if the doctor had been hunted down and had then fled. There was paper everywhere, weighted down with medical utensils and equipment that belonged in trays and cases, not splayed out carelessly. The air was stagnant and, shall we say, laced with the aroma of nervous patients. I doubted the windows had been opened for days. Specimen jars lined one side of the room, where they’d been pushed onto a shelf, no care taken to their arrangement, and were covered in thick dust that all but masked the oddities contained inside. Piles of books sprang up like wild mushrooms from the floor, and I had to weave my way among them to reach his desk. The building had presented itself as the perfect white-fronted townhouse faced with black ironwork; the hallway, the housekeeper and the winding staircase had conveyed a picture of elegance and conformity; but this room was like walking into a hermit’s cave.
There was a loud thump at the window to my left. It startled me. I saw the smear of ghostly grease left by a bewildered bird and thought of that little dunnock and my grandfather coming
