Read an Extract for Florence and Giles
‘Dr Morgan expects you in his office in ten minutes. I will come and fetch you, sir.’
I thanked her, but she stood in the doorway, holding the door handle, regarding me as though expecting something more.
‘Ten minutes, mind, sir. Dr Morgan doesn’t like to be kept waiting. He’s a real stickler for time.’
‘Very well. I’ll be ready.’
She gave me a last suspicious look, top to toe, and I could not help wondering what it was she saw. Maybe the suit did not fit me so well as I had thought; I found myself curling my fingers over the cuffs of my jacket sleeves and tugging them down, conscious they might be too short, until I realised she was now staring at this and so I desisted.
‘Thank you,’ I said, injecting what I hoped was a note of finality into it. I had played the master often enough to know how it goes, but then again I had been a servant more than once too. She turned, but with her nose in the air, and not at all with the humility of a lackey who has been dismissed, and left, closing the door behind her with a peremptory click.
I gave the room a cursory glance. A bed, with a nightstand, a closet in which to hang clothes, a battered armchair that looked as if it had been in one fight too many, a well-worn writing desk and chair, and a chest of drawers on which stood a water jug and bowl, with a mirror hanging on the wall above it. All had seen better days. Still, it was luxury compared with what I had been used to lately. I went over to the single window, raised the blind fully and looked out. Pleasant lawned grounds beneath and a distant view of the river. I looked straight down. Two floors up and a sheer drop. No way out there, should a person need to leave in a hurry.
I shook off my jacket, glad to be relieved of it for a while, realising now I was free of it that it was a tad too tight and pulled under the arms, where my shirt was soaked with sweat. I sniffed and decided I really should change it before meeting Morgan. I took out and read again the letter with his offer of employment. Then I lifted the valise from the floor, where the maid had left it, onto the bed and tried the locks again, but they would not budge. I looked around for some implement, a pair of scissors or a penknife perhaps, although why I should expect to find either in a bedroom I couldn’t have said, especially not here of all places, where it would surely be policy not to leave such things lying about. Finding nothing, I decided it was no use; my shirt would have to do.
I went over to the chest of drawers, poured some water into the bowl and splashed it over my face. It was icy cold and I held my wrists in it to cool my blood. I looked at myself in the mirror and at once easily understood the serving woman’s attitude toward me. The man staring back at me had a wild, haunted expression, a certain air of desperation. I tried to arrange my hair over my forehead with my fingers and wished it were longer, for it didn’t answer to purpose.
There was a rapping on the door. ‘One moment,’ I called out. I looked at myself again, shook my head at the hopelessness of it all and heartily wished I had never come here. Of course I could always bolt, but even that would not be straightforward. An island, for Christ’s sake, what had I been thinking of? Sanctuary, I suppose, somewhere out of the way and safe, but also – I saw now – somewhere from which it would be difficult to make a quick exit.
More rapping at the door, fast and impatient this time. ‘Coming!’ I shouted, in what I hoped was a light-hearted tone. I opened the door and found the same woman as before. She stared at me with a look that suggested surprise that I had spent so long to accomplish so little.
I found Morgan in his office, seated at his desk, which faced a large window giving onto the spacious front lawns of the hospital. I could well understand how someone might like to look up from his work at such a capital view, but it struck me as odd that a man who must have many visitors should choose to have his back to them when they entered.
I stood just inside the door, looking at that back, ill at ease. He had heard the maid introduce me; he knew I was there. It occurred to me that this might be the purpose of the desk’s position, to establish some feeling of superiority over any new arrival; the man was a psychiatrist, after all.
A good minute elapsed and I thought of clearing my throat to remind him of my presence, although I know a dramatic pause when I come across one, and to wait for my cue before speaking out of turn, so I held my position, all the while conscious of the sweat leaking from my armpits and worrying that it must eventually penetrate my jacket. I did not know if I had another. There was complete silence except for the occasional echo of a distant door banging its neglect and the leisurely scratch of the doctor’s pen as he carried on writing. I decided I would count to a hundred and then, if he still hadn’t spoken, break the silence myself.
I had reached eighty-four when he threw the pen aside, twirled around in his swivel chair and propelled himself from it in almost the same movement. ‘Ah, Dr Shepherd, I presume!’ He strode over to me, grabbed my right hand and shook it with surprising vigour for a man who I saw now was dapper, by which I mean both short in stature and fussily turned out; he had a thin, ornamental little moustache, like a dandified Frenchman,