The Dutch Wife (25 page)

“Not even for love?” Rowland said.

“Not even for love,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Well, that simplifies matters.” She opened the door and went back into the cabin followed by Rowland. Robbie greeted her, wagging his tail enthustically. Will watched from the bunk as she went to Herbert Froglick, squatting on the floor drinking his coffee from a battered tin mug.

“Froglick,” she said.

“Yes?” he said. He was very shy when she spoke to him.

“I’m staying here,” she said challengingly, as though she expected an argument. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not going on the ship.”

He said nothing, so she kept on.

“I’m staying here,” she said. “I can keep this place tidy. I can cook. There must be lots of other animals on this island—birds and rodents and whatnot. I’d like to find out about them too.”

Still he said nothing, so she changed tack. “Do you mind if I stay?” She said this coaxingly, gently, the way she’d approach a shy, reluctant animal.

“No,” he said, quietly for once. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”

She smiled, and her eyes softened in a way Rowland hadn’t noticed before, even for Will. Perhaps it was a phenomenon witnessed only by her animals.

Everyone was smiling. Will, on his bunk, Froglick and Eva, too. Rowland himself couldn’t help smiling at all that smiling. Looking at Eva, with her new softness, he could almost have envied Froglick.

LATER THAT DAY,
the relief ship arrived and anchored a few hundred yards off shore. Supplies were landed and a written statement about the sinking of the
Derevaun
was elicited from Eva. Then the other two castaways were ferried out to the ship. Will was helped down into a cabin but Rowland stayed on deck. As the ship got underway, Herbert Froglick and Eva Sorrentino stood on the beach, watching. She wasn’t tall, but she was a head taller than Froglick. They waved for a while then turned inland towards the cabin, accompanied by Robbie.

Rowland wondered what would become of them. It was true, he knew, that the most unlikely of unions often seemed to thrive, while the most promising in appearance often contained some hidden core-rottenness that was fatal to endurance. He watched the pair disappear behind the dunes, knowing it was very unlikely he’d ever see them again, or ever know how their story worked out. Finding out how stories worked out necessitated putting down roots, staying long enough, even a lifetime if necessary, in one place. He was already sure that his own was the only story he’d ever see to a conclusion.

– 13 –

CAMBERLOO HOSPITAL HAD SEEMED RELATIVELY SILENT,
as hospitals go, while Thomas Vanderlinden told me about the meeting of Rowland and Will, and about the sinking of the
Derevaun
and the survivors. I’d been enthralled. Now, as he picked up his oxygen mask and took some deep breaths, reality intruded in the form of all the usual hospital sounds from the corridor outside.

I was curious, though, about why Rowland had insisted on telling Rachel about Eva Sorrentino’s obvious attraction to Will Drummond. When Thomas put down his mask I asked him about that.

“I wondered about that myself,” he said. “Maybe it was because he thought she should know Will was attractive to other women. That he had other choices. She certainly listened to every word.”

At that moment, in came the sterile figure of the duty nurse, carrying a tray full of phials and needles.

“Time for medication,” she said. “The doctor’s coming in to see you after that.”

“I’m getting near the end,” Thomas said to me.

Did he mean of the story-teller or the story? I didn’t want to think about that. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t wait to find out what happens next.”

PART FOUR

W
ILL
D
RUMMOND

– 1 –

AS USUAL, THE NEXT MORNING
, I sat for an hour or two in the garden, trying to think about
The Kilted Cowpoke
. And, as usual, the sight of that gap in the hedge reminded me of another one of those occasions when Thomas and I had chatted there.

“I don’t suppose you’ve read Basilius Medicus?” he’d said, without much hope that I had. “He was one of the most prominent Spanish physicians and essayists of the mid-sixteenth century. His contention was that the body is a mirror of the mind, and that in the mind, therefore, lies the cure for all physical ailments.”

I’d tried to look alert.

“His treatise,
Exteriorum Expositio
, begins with the most obvious examples,” Thomas said. “For instance, most of us would agree that the physical phenomenon of the smile is a reflection of the mind’s having perceived the humour in something.” He looked very pointedly at me. “Or, if you yawn, it’s because your mind isn’t interested in what someone’s saying—the yawn’s a sign of boredom.”

I’d just stifled a yawn so I blinked hard and nodded.

“For Basilius,” said Thomas Vanderlinden, “that was only a starting point. He went much further. He claimed that every single physical ailment is a direct emanation of the mind of the sufferer. So, if you caught a cold, or malaria, or dysentery or any of the multitude of human illnesses that afflicted the world at that time—even bubonic plague—they were all reflections of your inner state. Conversely, he argued, through your mind you ought to be able to heal your body.”

To show I’d been listening, I said: “Many people blame bad health on mental stress.”

He paid no attention whatever to my comment but talked about the ancient theory of the Humours, whereby the four major bodily fluids could somehow be harmonized to bring health. He drew a parallel with acupuncture, which defied western understanding of the physiological processes of the body. He spoke about psychology and its great figures, Jung and even Freud, with their theories of how the Unconscious affects human behaviour in the most fundamental ways.

I tried to look interested. “What if you fall off a ladder and break your leg?” I said. “I can understand how falling off the ladder might be because your mind was elsewhere. But once you’ve broken your leg, even if you admit it was because you weren’t paying attention, how can your mind cure it?”

“You’ve come up with the question Basilius asked himself,” Thomas said. “Like many doctors at that time, he had to go to battlefields to find people with awful injuries so that he could try out his theories. At the Battle of Hessebellerin in 1562, he had himself appointed Surgeon General. One of the things he noticed was that the rate of healing of wounded soldiers seemed to depend exclusively on their states of mind. Those who were optimistic actually speeded up the process of healing exponentially. Those who were pessimistic, even if they were strong physically, died in very short order.”

“But the wounds themselves,” I said, “surely they were caused by the guns and arrows of the enemy, not some internal mechanism. What did he have to say about that?”

“Nothing,” said Thomas.
“He became completely opposed to all further research in the matter.”

That really woke me up. “What?” I said. “Isn’t that more or less the same kind of thing that man you spoke about the other day—Matthew of Paris—said about travelling? Isn’t it a complete cop-out? Isn’t it perverse, in fact?”

Thomas nodded. “These original—or, as you call them, perverse—types of thinkers aren’t to be dismissed lightly. Basilius became more attached to protecting the mysterious qualities of the mind than to exploring them. He came to believe mysteries are sometimes preferable to knowledge. Perhaps he was right.”

WHEN I ARRIVED
at Camberloo Hospital that afternoon with my coffee, Thomas had been resting with the oxygen mask on his face. He looked more pinched than usual. I told him I’d been sitting in the garden that morning and that he’d soon be back there himself. But I could see he had even less interest in small talk than usual. He took a few deep breaths from the mask and put it away. Then he focused his eyes again on that day when Rowland had at last met Rachel.

– 2 –

IN THE LIBRARY
of Rachel’s house, no one had interrupted Rowland as he’d talked about how he’d first met Will Drummond.

But Thomas could see his mother was getting restless. She’d listened carefully to the account of the sinking of the
Derevaun
and of the stranding on Wreck Bar and of Eva Sorrentino’s proposal. She wanted Rowland to tell her more about Will himself. “Didn’t he say anything about his life before you met him?” she said. “I was hoping you’d know something about that, too.”

“I’m coming to that,” Rowland said, smiling at her impatience. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t till we’d got to Halifax after leaving Wreck Bar that he told me anything about himself. They’d put us up in an old hotel to wait for the Inquiry into the sinking. Everything I have to tell you now happened while we were there. We had to wait a few days and we talked a lot, mainly comparing notes about what happened on the
Derevaun
. But as Will got to know me, he opened up a little more.”

“Please, please tell us what he had to say,” Rachel said.

Rowland took a sip of brandy. “He wasn’t a man for embroidering things,” he said. “He just told the plain facts, and you usually had to guess what he was thinking. One thing’s for sure, he’d had a hard life . . .”

THEY WERE IN THEIR ROOM
in the Maclaren Hotel. It was a rainy night. They’d eaten some fish and chips and were sharing a bottle of cheap whisky. Rowland had been telling Will all about his own life and the reasons for his trip to England and, now, his return to an uncertain domestic situation.

Perhaps it was the whisky, but Will was more relaxed than usual and it wasn’t hard for Rowland to coax him into talking about his own life.

He came, he said, from the Uplands region, near where Rowland first saw him on the train. He was born in a little mining village called Tarbrae, in a miners’ row house. His father had a surface job at the mine, classifying coal, because he had black lungs from too many years at the coal face. When Will was very young, he’d already be in bed when his father came home from work at night and stripped to the waist and washed himself at the kitchen sink. His wife would dry him off in front of the fire. She had a nervous condition and didn’t have much to do with anybody else except her husband and son. They didn’t talk much. Will never heard either of them so much as hum a tune, so he was surprised to hear other people whistle and sing as though music was natural to them.

When he went to Tarbrae School, Will wasn’t much of a scholar. Like all the boys there, it was taken for granted he’d be a miner when he turned thirteen. And that’s exactly what he did, along with his schoolmates.

The first time they had to go down on the mine elevator, they weren’t keen. They all knew about the one-legged men in Muirton. But they had to get in anyway. They went down so fast and slowed up so suddenly, Will thought his stomach would come out of his mouth.

They were five thousand feet underground and it was so warm they had to take off their coats.

“Now you know what Hell’s like,” the foreman said to the apprentices. The tunnel was dark, but there were oil lamps every twenty yards so they could see enough not to trip on the rail tracks that carried the coal. The men kept on their hard hats—the apprentices didn’t have any yet.

They started to walk to the coal face—the foreman said it was a mile away from the bottom of the shaft. Will thought that would be no trouble, even though the tunnel was five feet high. But even at thirteen he was five foot eight, and that meant he had to walk with his head and shoulders stooped. After about five minutes, he started to get pains in his back from the effort of bending. It got to be so bad he thought he’d be sick.

Somebody shouted: “Look out!”

Will got such a fright, he jerked his head up and smashed it against the roof of the tunnel. So did the other apprentices.

The miners had a good laugh at that. It was a trick they played every year on the apprentices before they got their helmets. By then Will was sweating and the pains all through his body were awful. Some apprentices were crying. The foreman called them cry-babies and told them they’d be fired if they didn’t keep moving.

That was the longest walk Will ever took, even if it only lasted half an hour.

THE APPRENTICES DIDN’T HAVE TO
do any work that first day. They’d only to watch what was going on and see what they’d be doing for the rest of their lives. At first they watched the proppers, the men who put up the wooden posts that held the roof up. Then there were the fanners: they carried canaries in cages and kept the tunnels clear of gases that could cause an explosion. The foreman told the apprentices how easy it was to die down there. Everybody had to rely on everybody else.

The hardest workers and the strongest were the men at the coal face. Most of the time they were on their knees, drilling holes for the dynamite, then hacking out the coal. Everybody’s wages depended on them.