out through the deluge, and saw the blurred figures of the mayor and Officer Bardelli hurrying towards his front door. Seized with rage, he found himself with his pistol in his hand, pacing. After all he had done for this dump, the dogs now turn on him! He had done nothing, nobody could pin a thing on him. He heard Frieda let them in; ear to the door, he tried to decipher words, but the damn weather drowned everything. How long must he suffer this assault from the skies? He had a wife to bury in the cold, wet ground before anyone started talking about autopsies. He locked the bedroom door, noticing with irritation how his hand was shaking. Pacing, pacing, his body restless, his mind caged in his head, in this room, this island, this life, imprisoned by the stories people told about him, by what people thought of him. Bastards, the lot of them, wanting a funeral to gawp and gossip and make a scene.
Frieda at the door, knocking, always at the door knocking, why wouldn’t anyone leave him alone?
“I’m busy.”
“But Mayor Peters . . .”
“Not now!”
Frieda retraced her steps to the sitting room where the two waited, hats in hands. “He doesn’t come out except for the bathroom,” she apologised. “Eats in there too, what little he does.”
The mayor shook his head. “Terrible thing. Just wanted to pay my respects, you know. And to tell him there’s nothing . . . to worry about.” He looked at Dorado for help.
Officer Dorado Bardelli nodded. “Tell the doctor the police van is available for the funeral Saturday. I’ll drive her myself.”
She stared at the baby Frieda carried at her shoulder, amazed by how much noise could come out of such a tiny body. Every day she had a different feeling about babies; today she was glad not to have any and reminded herself to be more careful about taking her pill. Besides, the mayor had two of his own, both grown now; he wouldn’t consider more, not in his position. She glanced at him, hoping her hair was lying straight and right, but he was looking somewhere else, always looking somewhere else.
“What’s wrong?” Clarence asked, chucking the baby on the cheek with a bent forefinger.
“The colic,” said Frieda. That was all they needed to know. It was what the doctor had diagnosed, getting John Peters to bring antispasmodics over from the hospital dispensary. “She’ll grow out of it,” is what the doctor had said. Then he’d left it up to Frieda, burying his head under pillows when it got too much.
Mayor Peters glanced at Officer Dorado again; he wanted to escape, but she wished there was something more they could do. Dorado had never heard a baby cry for its mother like this: a shuddering wailing tearing at her ears. “Well, we’d better get going,” the mayor decided, making for the door, pulling Dorado after him in his wake.
They were not the only visitors. People came in dribs and drabs throughout the next few days, bringing presents for the baby: crocheted blankets and caps and knitted jerseys, milk formula, teddies for the bed and ducks for the bath. For the doctor they brought home-brew and condolences. Whatever they might say to each other in the confines of their cottages, they knew the right thing to do. They knew that, come an emergency, a slip on a rock or a gall bladder gone bad, your life could suddenly fall into the doctor’s hands. Who knows, if he already held a grudge against you, his hands might be too full to catch you.
But whoever came to the house, the doctor would not come out of his bedroom. The presents piled high on the table in the sitting room, presents wrapped in patterned paper blurring and sagging with the tear and pluck and wet of weather, handmade and shop-bought gifts resting and sogging, but still the doctor would not come out. Not even when Nelson Peters arrived to take instruction concerning the funeral arrangements. Not until the day Frieda answered a knock at the door and there stood Sister Veronica, braced against the gale, wearing her body like a corset.
“It is time,” she said to Frieda as she whisked briskly past her, past the wailing baby and down the passage (how did she know which was the doctor’s bedroom door?). She knocked. “Doctor,” she announced firmly to the wooden barrier, “Mr Arthur Bardelli has cut his finger to the bone with his fishing knife, and that Peters child, Sasha, has a bronchospasm I cannot break. And Katerina Schoones cannot stop vomiting, her sugar is off the scale. I have done all I can, but we need you, sir. I am sorry to disturb you in this difficult time, but I fear . . .” What she wanted to say was that she feared death might come again, but that could not be said, not with his wife still above ground.
Still no answer, but she knew what would rouse him. “People might start to turn elsewhere, sir, and you know what will come of that.” Already there was a queue outside Sophia’s door in the mornings, already people’s heads were being turned.
The door opened and Doctor Orion Prosper emerged, pale and unshaven, his eyes underlined with pain. Veronica’s heart leapt to see him. I’ll save him, she thought. I will make my body a raft for him to lie on, I will bear him away to tropical shores where the wind never blows, and the water is clear and still, and the sun will thaw his heart so he can love again.
The doctor shrugged his coat on, knocked back some pills. “Let’s go,” he said to Veronica, and went out of the door as though it was his idea.
Chapter Four
A storm can set in for days around Ergo Island, but it is also possible for the weather to change six times in twenty-four hours. Later that morning, the clouds above the isle broke open above Frieda as she looked outside. The waterlogged sky divided – just like the Red Sea, she thought. It was an omen.
The doctor had come home for lunch as though nothing had ever happened, sitting at the table eating pumpkin soup and telling Frieda that the chest had opened, the finger was sewn and intact, and that the sugar levels had dropped. She nodded encouragingly, glad to see his appetite, glad to hear him whistling in the bathroom, glad to see him take a peek at his sleeping daughter.
“She looks like me as a baby,” he said, getting out his photo album to illustrate the point. Baby Orion stared with unfocused eyes out of the page, dressed in white, his floppy newborn body held up like a trophy by his proud father. His mother looked on anxiously, her hands ready to catch him if he fell. There was some difficulty between the doctor and his family on the mainland, perhaps because he had married a young pregnant island girl. There had been someone else marked for him, rumour had it, someone appropriate to his station in life. Whatever it was, in the three years he’d been here, the family had never come out to visit. Frieda tried to pick up any sign of hunger or fear in the doctor’s face as he stood looking at the photograph of his parents, who were gazing up at his tiny potential, hopes for his future life blooming in their faces; but he snapped the album closed and turned to his daughter. His hand hovered above her, as though afraid to touch her, in case this gift too might disappear. “She’ll go far,” he decided, before pulling on his coat and striding back to the hospital.
Frieda had been waiting for this, waiting and watching, for she knew what she had to do. She sent word to her daughter, Liesa, via one of the children playing in the street. They were the messengers of the island, the telephone network, the communication system; the children were often the first to know what was going on or who had gone where. Occasionally the system broke down: a child was distracted by a kitten while running a message, or some of the words were forgotten or misremembered, and what started out as “We have run out of milk” arrived as “The cow has got out again” – but then, what telephone system doesn’t have faults?
Liesa came soon enough from the co-op where she carded and spun island wool, and nodded as her mother gave her instruction. She was a young woman of few words, a bowl of a woman who could be trusted to store what needed to be stored and not allow little leaks
