The Golden Hour. Beatriz Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ The wind dies to a breeze. She finds a fallen log and sits in relief. Leans her head back against a thin, hardy trunk. She loves the smell of wood and rot and moss. She closes her eyes and dreams of her baby, whose features are blurred, but whose heart she feels clamoring inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.

      Though the trees muffle the howling of the gale, the forest is not silent. The branches rustle, the wind whines between the pine needles. Certain of her own solitude, Elfriede doesn’t hear the sound of footsteps as they approach, only the voice that greets her, an instant after she senses the vibration of another human being.

      “Frau von Kleist?” a man inquires, in a slight, courteous English accent.

      TWO WEEKS HAVE PASSED SINCE Elfriede encountered the Englishman in the infirmary garden. To be precise, sixteen days and a few hours, but who’s counting? Her eyes fly open, she startles upward from the log. She beholds him, a pumpkin-headed skeleton belted into a thick Norfolk jacket, wool trousers, leather gaiters. A hunting cap covers his wide skull, his stubbly ginger hair. There should be a pipe sticking from his mouth, a shotgun nestled in the crook of his elbow to complete the picture, but mercifully no.

      “You shouldn’t be out in such weather,” she exclaims.

      “Probably not. Yet here I am. You might say the mountains called me. Do you mind awfully if I sit down? Still a bit short-winded, I’m afraid.”

      “No, of course not.”

      He doesn’t move, just stands there smiling inquisitively, and Elfriede realizes that he won’t sit until she does. A gentleman. So she drops back onto her log. Mr. Thorpe finds a boulder. Beneath the collar of his jacket, he wears a scarf of bulky wool. Elfriede drops her gaze to the ground before her, which is cushioned in old brown pine needles.

      “You shouldn’t be out,” she says again.

      “Do you know, that’s exactly what the orderly told me.”

      “You should have listened to the orderly.”

      “Oh, I’m used to this sort of weather. I spent my summers in Scotland, with my mother and her sisters. Frightful, most of the time. Of course, when it was fine, there was no lovelier place in the world. Do you mind if I smoke?”

      “Smoke?”

      He was already drawing a silver case from his jacket pocket. “You’re about to tell me I shouldn’t be smoking, either.”

      “But it’s true. You’ve had pneumonia.”

      “You’re quite right, of course. I do all sorts of things I shouldn’t do.” He lifts a match, preparing to strike, then lowers it. “I say, you don’t mind, do you? If you object to the smell, I mean.”

      “N-no.” Elfriede thinks she should probably have said yes, because tobacco smoke is possibly the last substance on earth that should fill the passages of Mr. Thorpe’s ravaged lungs at the moment, short of poisoned gas. But his pleasure, his anticipation is so obvious, she doesn’t have the heart to deny him. A pattern that will shape all the days they spend together.

      “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.”

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