Читать книгу Since First I Saw Your Face: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Emma Donoghue - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMY FELLOW BOARDERS AT Benson’s are mostly cure-seekers, come to Wiesbaden in search of lost health. Two consumptives, an anaemic, half a dozen digestive cases. Mr Christopher Benson himself (withered legs, wheeled around by his valet) is the gentle lord of this house of invalids.
“No, I’m perfectly well, as it happens. It’s a natural pallor,” I tell his sister-in-law (nerves), who’s just arrived from Berkshire as September begins to cool.
“How convenient for you, Miss Hall,” says Mrs Mary Benson with a tiny smile. “You could claim to be on the verge of fainting at any moment. In the middle of a dinner party, say, or an interminable tour of a gallery.”
I shake my head. “The former, perhaps, but in matters of art I’m tireless. For some years now I’ve been working on a study of the Madonna and Child motif in German painting and sculpture.”
This sister-in-law has witty eyebrows, I notice now, as they soar.
By the second day we’re Ellen and Minnie, because, as she points out, watering places are known for their delightful suspension of the rules of etiquette. Thirty-one, and not pretty by any measure: dumpy, snub-nosed, straight dark hair. But a lively conversationalist, despite her shattered health. Her clergyman husband is director of a Berkshire public school, and something of a scholar, preparing a monograph on St Cyprian, a third-century Bishop of Carthage.
Minnie reports pressure on the sides and top of her head; trouble with appetite, sleep, memory; the ground seems to rise and fall beneath her. A devouring sort of lowness. A screwed-tightness, so that her shoulders ache as if she’s bearing an invisible yoke.
Having lodged so long at the Bensons’, I thought I’d no patience left for symptoms (the perennial topic in Wiesbaden). But somehow I keep listening to Minnie Benson.
Dr Malcolm has prescribed her a complete reprieve from the whirl and clamour of modern life. Prayers by her bed at a quarter past eight; bathe; dress; breakfast; read; walk; rest; luncheon; tonics (cod liver oil, iron, quinine); sew; walk; rest; dine; a little music; to bed by ten, with a dose of chloral hydrate for sleep.
But it doesn’t sound to me as if it’s modern life that’s done the damage. Minnie’s given the headmaster six children in eleven years, and her health collapsed after the last.
“Small wonder,” I tell her. “The womb is our Waterloo.”
That makes her laugh. “Is that why you’ve never gone to war, Ellen?”
Spinsterhood has more than that to recommend it.
Over breakfast Minnie opens her children’s letters. They’re an accomplished, verbose crew, churning out a weekly magazine on their father’s sermon paper. “At our house,” she explains, “one must ask for the toast in rhyme.”
I smile, as if I find these family habits charming.
I can tell she’s touched that I’ve got the six children straight already. The elder boys, away at school: Martin, at eleven, in a fever of excitement about the Peruvian Indians; Arthur, her earnest favourite, who toils over his writing till the sweat breaks out in drops. The four youngers, at home with Minnie’s mother and their nurse: Nellie the bossy prankster; Maggie the shy one, whose stories pile catastrophe on catastrophe; little Fred, five, and (just eleven months) Hugh. Baby’s got two teeth now, and Fred’s still afraid of the tiger skins in the hall,
