Dr. North’s Wound
He continued: “My nanny was a wicked woman and would punish me for any sign of weakness or bad behaviour. She once beat be across the back with the handle of a broom for stealing apples from a neighbour’s tree. But I never cried. Not once. The power of the will, you see? Grief, pain, illness, love; I have mastery over them.”
He smiled distantly as if unaware of my presence. And presently, we arrived at a small white cottage and the doctor knocked upon its door. Frank and Pauline Allardyce were a handsome couple, he in his early 40s perhaps, she in her mid thirties. That she should want a child now I wondered at, and thought it unlikely they could conceive at their time in life, though I confess I know little of the gynaecological science.
As we waited for tea, Frank filling his pipe at the fireplace while we sat at the oak table by the small cottage window, the doctor whispered to me: “She had a child last year. Stillborn.”
Frank Allardyce was greying but had the fresh rosiness in his complexion of one who works outdoors all day long, and the ready smile of an innocent. After some initial discomfort at my presence, Frank relaxed and drew meditatively on his pipe. The discussion went back and forth about the probability of a child, about the causes of the death of the first child, of diet and so on. And then Dr. North said something very queer.
He said: “Mr Allardyce. Frank. Do you…love your wife?”
I was aghast, and saw our host first pale then a flinty look come to his eye. “Doctor. I have loved that woman since I was sixteen; and to this day she can make me feel the age I was when I first met her. I don’t know what’s behind your question, but there it is, sir.”
Just as he finished speaking I realised his wife was in the doorway, with a plate of food. She put a hand to her mouth in surprise and perhaps pleasure, but moving towards us she said playfully: “Don’t listen to that rogue doctor; it was that soft talk that let him catch me in the first place.”
We all laughed a little, and the doctor stood, touching the woman’s elbow and, leading her aside and whispering to her, turned to us and said: “Jerome, you and Frank take tea; Mrs Allardyce and I have some business to attend to.”
And that was all there was to it. Other than the doctor later explaining that he had instructed Frank Allardyce to perform the act of love before our arrival, so that he might take a swab and test the validity of the fluids. But he took more than one sample, one for the chemical tests, another for his experiments. He subjected the fluids to electrical charges, chemical compounds, microscopic examination and even made a potion with it.
Let me tell you about the potions. Dr. North kept them in stoppered phials, in wooden racks. These in turn were locked in a cabinet in the coolest place in the house, the pantry, where meat and milk was kept cool and salted fish sat in a barrel. It was my supposition that he drank these potions, a supposition confirmed one day when I stumbled upon his diary.
The doctor was suddenly called away to a man in his death-throes, a choking illness which filled his lungs with water. I noticed his desk drawer left ajar and to my shame I opened it and found the diary. Why I took the invitation of the open drawer I am not sure to this day, but part of me always suspected the doctor’s motives for his experiments and his sometimes unpredictable character might be explained by the diary.
Within the pages of closely-written script, the hand of a man meticulous and always in control, I found that, indeed he took these potions, sometimes drinking them, sometimes opening a vein and applying them to the wound. He made inhalations with them, heated them or cooled them in icy water, made gels of them to be applied to the skin, but all in vain in seemed. I thought this dangerous, for it anyone from whom he had extracted blood or tears or sweat or the moisture of procreation had a congenital illness, or was diseased, the doctor could himself grow ill, or even die.
But it was the back of the book which gave me at least part of the answer. In it was folded a letter on yellowing paper, in a loose, childlike hand, a trace of perfume retained in the weave of the paper, and a signature: Madeleine.
The letter, dated a week ago, began thus:
My darling Andrew (the doctor’s Christian name, which I never used),
It pains me to write this, but I now realise you can never love me as I have loved, and still love, you. That you are, in fact, incapable of love, though you have always shown me the greatest kindness and endearments. You have a great sorrow about you would you but recognise it. It may be that the darkness within you was there at your birth, and it breaks my heart to see it.
You are delightful company, greatly admired by everyone, and yet it as though you are not really present. You are at times, an absence, as if your mind searches vainly for feeling it cannot conjure up. But, my love, I know that you wish it more than anything else, to feel something more than your clever mind can calculate: for love is not a formula, an equation, but a gift.
