“Ah, but you do mind, don’t you? How kind you are. If only I were good enough to return the favor.” He strikes the match and lights the cigarette, and when he’s taken a long draft, eyes shut in pleasure, and exhaled slowly, taking care to release the smoke in the opposite direction from Elfriede, he opens his eyes again and says, “I can’t begin to express my gratitude. First fag in nine weeks. Tell me how to make it up to you.”
“You can stop. You can take care of yourself, so you don’t relapse.”
Mr. Thorpe squints at a point a meter or so to her left. He has the kind of face that suits squinting. Crinkles his expression in a genial way. “I’ve been giving that some thought, actually.”
“I hope so.”
“I mean, my recovery has been altogether too rapid, if you know what I mean. Blessed as I am with my mother’s formidable constitution. Just the other day, they were talking about discharging me.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Well.” He turns back to her, turns the full force of himself upon her blushing cheeks. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think there can be any question. Of course you must get better.”
“But leave? Aye, there’s the rub.”
“Don’t you want to leave? To return to Vienna and your amusing life there?”
He sits there smoking, and his refusal to answer is answer enough. Just like her husband, who fell in love with her at a stroke—fell in love, at any rate, with her flaxen hair and celestial eyes, her round and childlike face, her expression of dreamy otherworldliness. Imagined she represented some kind of ideal, and was horrified to discover the reality.
“I’m not what you think,” she says.
“How do you know what I think?”
“Besides, I’m married. I’m married and I have a baby, a son, three years old.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you. Haven’t you already told me these facts? Believe me, I know them well. Except the age of your son, bless him. Three years old! He must be a sturdy little man by now.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “They won’t let me see him. I have been living here for two—two years—”
“Oh, my dear girl.”
Mr. Thorpe crushes out his half-finished cigarette on the boulder. Elfriede hides her face and doesn’t see him rise to his feet and cross the carpet of pine needles between them. When he stops at the log and sits beside her, she feels the warmth of his body underneath the wool.
“Don’t they send photographs?” he says. “Your people?”
“Herr Doktor forbids it. He says it will bring about a nervous relapse.”
“Herr Doktor?”
“Herr Doktor Hermann. My analyst. He’s well versed in the latest—the latest methods for disorders—like mine.” Elfriede struggles to keep her composure, to speak rationally through the web of fingers covering her face.
“You’ll forgive me, but Herr Doktor’s methods strike me as a trifle barbaric.”
Elfriede’s so astonished, she lifts her face away from her hands and meets Mr. Thorpe’s plain, large gaze directly. His freckles. His eyes, a startling blue. “But he’s a doctor!” she gasps.
“What does that mean? He’s got a paper of some kind, a degree in some scientific subject, which will probably prove entirely obsolete in a decade or so. Any fool would call that barbaric, to keep a mother away from her child. Not even a photograph!”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Know about what? Your breakdown, as you call it?”
“I’m unnatural,” she says. “An unnatural mother.”
“Well, what the devil does that mean? You seem natural enough to me.”
“I’m not, believe me.”
By way of reply, Mr. Thorpe fixes her with an expression so compassionate, she has to look away. But looking away is not enough. The compassion remains in the air, on her skin, seeping into her flesh, inescapable. She stares at his shoulder and her heart crashes. Fear, or attraction? Are they perhaps the same thing?
“I went mad after he was born,” she says. “An extreme form of nervous melancholy. It’s a particular malady and one of Herr Doktor Hermann’s special fields of interest.”
“This Hermann fellow—have I met him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s in the psychiatric section.”
“The loony bin, you mean?”
Elfriede refuses to laugh. Instead she examines the collar of his jacket. The woolen scarf tucked inside, protecting his neck and chest from the damp, cold air. She whispers, “You should be disgusted. You should be appalled.”
“I’m just waiting to hear the rest of the story.”
“There is no rest of the story.”
“Rubbish. Of course there is. Lots of new mothers have a spell of the blue devils after their babies are born. My cousin spent a rough few weeks, as I remember. By God, I don’t blame them. I should imagine the whole affair’s rather a shock to the system, and then you’ve got this child to take care of, this mysterious little being keeping you up all hours and so on.”
“Not like this. I couldn’t—I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t—it was like a shroud settled on me. I thought I was going mad. I should have been joyful, I should have been grateful. I had a rich, loving husband. I had a beautiful baby. Everything for me was perfect. But I felt miserable and terrified. I felt shadowed by doom. I can’t even describe how black it all was. I looked at his face, his little squashed face, and he was a stranger. I thought, I don’t love you, I don’t even know you, who are you?”
“Poor Elfriede … my poor girl … and nobody understood …”
Now Elfriede raises her head to Mr. Thorpe’s kindly, bony face. She defies his kindness. She defies this compassion of his. She defies his freckles and his pale, gingery eyebrows.
“I tried to kill myself.” (She flings the words at his long eyelashes.) “I thought I should kill myself, because I was no use to my baby at all. I was a terrible mother. I was poisoning him with my own bitter milk. I thought I should kill myself before I killed my own baby.”
Mr. Thorpe doesn’t reply. Not in words, anyway. He lifts his arms and puts them around her. Her defiance crumbles. She leans into his ribs, into his shrunken chest, and shudders out a barrage of tears into the left-hand pocket of the Norfolk jacket, the one covering his heart. A shooting jacket, designed to withstand far more serious attacks than this one, thank goodness. His thumbs move against her back. He doesn’t speak. She smells wet wool, and the particular scent she caught two weeks earlier, in the infirmary garden, soap and the salt of human skin. Mr. Thorpe’s skin. Eventually she turns her face to the side and speaks again.
“I spent a month in hospital, and then they sent me home. Everybody pretended nothing had happened, that I had caught a bad cold or something. Except they wouldn’t leave me alone with the baby. My milk had dried up. Everybody was so polite and cold.” She pauses, considers, forges on brazenly. “And my husband—Gerhard—I wouldn’t—I was afraid of having any more babies—”
“Dear me. Poor Gerhard. So they sent you here to